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Chapter 1- The Proposal
A+ in Pretend Love (Lando Norris x Reader)
Series Masterlist
Summary- The sponsor's say they'll pull out if Lando doesn't fix his ways. So, Zak stages an intervention. Y/N can't get approved for visa, no matter how hard she tries. Zak offers to help. An honest and mutually beneficial relationship is formed.
The scene is set. The MTC is almost empty to the wandering eye, but in reality, every one was sat in the huge conference hall Zak had constructed for other reason not pertaining to the one they had gathered for. "So, we're gathered here today" Zak began only to be interrupted by Oscar, "I still don't get why I'm here when this is about Lando." Zak sighed, "This is about me?" Lando asked surprised. Oscar looks at him with a raised eyebrow and then the other people at the table like in the Office. "Oscar, this is a team problem and we must deal with it as a team." Zak spoke while pinching the bridge of his nose. "Now where was I? Before I was rudely interrupted" Zak paused; "The sponsors aren't happy and want to pull away because of Lando's antics" Zak finished. "What? Why me? What about Oscar?" Lando pointed out like a child caught in trouble. "As far as I know, Oscar is extremely sponsor friendly with his long term girlfriend and polite demeanour" Zak said looking pointedly at Lando.
The table erupted in whispers, "What have I do?" Lando piped in. "The partying, the girls, the drinking. Might I continue?" Zak asked. Lando sighed, "So, what do you want me to do? Live like a monk" he asked. "No, we just need to polish up your image, make it more sponsor friendly." Zak said. "I have an idea" someone on the table suggested. "Go on" Zak prompted. "What if we say that Lando's been in a long term healthy relationship and is about to get married?" they suggested. Everyone seemed to hum in agreement. "What no? Ask me first, I'm the one involved. This is nonsense. Ask the sponsors to leave" Lando almost shouted. "Lando, you do know those sponsors are the reason you can drive in Formula One, so that we can make cars for you to race" Zak asked pointedly. Lando's shoulder's slumped, he looked at Oscar for support but he just shrugged at Lando; "Fine" Lando sighed. "So, which model is it?" he asked. "No, we need someone low- key. Out of the public eye to make this believable" someone else piped in. "But which girl will want to agree to that" someone else argued. Lando was currently a by-stander in his own life.
Finally after much deliberation, it was decided that to help Lando clear up his image; he would fake date someone who lived a normal life. And Zak would pay them to keep their mouth shut.
Y/N Y/L/N was in her last semester at University of Monaco of her Master's programme. She been living there since the start of the programme while working as a teaching assistant to gain experience towards her final goal of becoming a Professor. The university was great; culturally diverse and the job paid decently well; in her opinion. Right now, the biggest dilemma she faced was the stupid visa that for some reason wouldn't get renewed no matter how much she tried. She was sat in an almost empty cafe in the street's of Monaco, tucked away from the public. "You must understand. I'll have the job as soon as I graduate. Please extend my visa" she almost begged. "We can't Miss Y/L/N. Those are the rules. You will have to leave the country at the end of your visa" the voice replied sternly. Y/N sighed exasperated while running her hand through her hair for the hundredth time today as the call cut.
Some one else had entered the cafe during this whole ordeal, he walked up to Y/N, "Is this seat taken?" Zak asked. Y/N just nodded without looking up. "I'm sorry for eves dropping but it seems like you're having visa issues?" Zak asked. Y/N looked up, he pushed his business card forward. "I'm Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren" he introduced himself. "Y/N Y/L/N" she shook his hand. "I could help you if you'd like" he suggested. "What do you get in return?" she asked skeptically. "Well, I will have to discuss this with the person who might help you and let you know" he said. "Maybe you can forward me your CV. I can see what I can do" he spoke slowly. Y/N bit her lip before thinking, fuck it. What's the worst that could happen? and forwarded her CV to Zak. "I'll contact you as soon as possible" Zak said smiling while he walked away. "Arrange a meeting in the MTC, I have the woman for the job" Zak called his assistant.
Back at the MTC, when everyone had gathered; "So, I met this girl, around Lando's age. She is in need of help with her visa renewal" Zak said. "If she needs a visa for Monaco, wouldn't she be better off marrying Charles" Oscar interrupted. Zak sighed loudly, "Can you stop interrupting me?" he asked. "Can you stop having me attend meeting that have nothing to do with me?" Oscar retorted. "Touche" Zak relented. "So, we help her with her visa and she helps us with Lando" Zak suggested. Everyone seemed to agree unanimously. Lando was quite the whole time, he felt like he had lost any credibility since they were in trouble with the sponsors because of him. He quietly agreed to the arrangement. "Let's meet up with her. I'll arrange for a meeting. Just the three of us" he told Lando already on the phone with Y/N before Lando could even say anything.
They had decided to meet at a cafe in Monaco. The cafe was quite, with barely any customers in site. When Zak and Lando entered, they found a woman sat at one of the tables placed at the back, nursing a cup of coffee. As soon as she saw Zak, she greeted him with a smile. Lando was looking at her the whole time. Zak cleared his throat, "This is Lando Norris" he introduced Lando to her. She smiled at him, introducing herself and the three sat down when Zak began talking. "So, here's the thing, I need help" She nodded along, "If it's not money related I think I can help" she suggested. "It isn't. I need someone to help with damage control." Zak drawled. "Lando here is a Formula One driver, he drives for my team" Zak explained, watching the confusion on Y/N's face. She nodded along. "The sponsors are creating an issue, all baseless I might add. But I do want to please them and I believe, you would be of great help" Zak said. "How can I help?" she asked. "I would like it if you two would date. Maybe like a fake relationship, just for like a year or so." Zak said quickly. "I don't...this is crazy." she expressed. "I understand this is crazy, but please help me. Being with a millionaire helps" he pleaded. "He's a millionaire" Y/N asked looking at Lando now. "I might not look the part but they pay well" Lando laughed gesturing towards Zak. "This will help, they wouldn't want to cause issues for a public figure." Zak further elaborated. "Like a mutually beneficial relationship" Zak finished. "I need to think about this. All of this is too much for me" she said quickly grabbing her things to leave. Before the two men could stop her she was out of the cafe. "Told you this was a bad idea" Lando said shaking his heading, getting up to leave.
Back home, Y/N was in turmoil. She ended up googling Lando and whatever they said was true. This wasn't some MLM or cult they were trying to indoctrinate her into. And from all the news article, it seemed that Lando had bit of a reputation of partying and sleeping around. She could see why having a girlfriend would help him. She couldn't see why she could help him though. Wouldn't he do better with a model or someone famous?
A few days of her mind being plagued with thoughts of that weird meeting with Lando and Zak; the visa officer called. "Please ma'am you have to understand, I can't do anything. I can't renew your visa" he stressed. Y/N was annoyed, "Please, you can't do this" she cried. "It's out of my control" he expressed. "Please stop calling us" he warned and cut the call. Maybe, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Y/N called up Zak, "Hi, This is Y/N" she spoke slowly. "Hi, Y/N. How are you?" Zak chirped. "I'm good. I'm up for the offer. I'll date...I mean fake date Lando" she stated. "Wonderful. That's what I would've liked to hear" he gloated. "Let's meet at the same place this weekend. And please answer a few questions my assistant will email you before we meet" Zak said before cutting the call. Zak had to make a few more calls like to Lando and his assistant.
Y/N and Lando both received emails asking them questions most couples would know about each other. Y/N wasn't sure if she should fake a personality but decided against it and answered it as truly as possible.
The weekend rolled around rather quickly and the both of them were getting dressed to meet. The cafe seemed empty yet again, a strange occurrence in their eyes. The three of them greeted each other before receiving files from Zak. "These contain information about each other learn it. And this contains how you two met, fell in love and are now happily engaged" Zak said, pulling a velvet box from his pocket. He placed the box in front of Y/N which housed a beautiful ring, "It's fake, so don't worry about losing it" Zak said looking at the pair. "I think this will turn out great. Now, Y/N, Lando's home race is soon. So, two of you will make your debut then." he explained. Y/N looked at Lando, the two of their eyes locked together as Zak explained everything.
"Here's the contract and an NDA" Zak said pulling out more papers. "How long will the contract be valid for?" she asked beginning to read it. "For a year" Zak stated. "Don't you have any questions?" Y/N asked Lando. "No" he said shaking his head and proceeded to sign the contract while Y/N took her time to read through it, not wanting to be tied by anything she couldn't be able to repay. Y/N finally signed the paper after a few more minutes of going through the contract. "Welcome to the McLaren family. Don't worry about the expenses, they will be covered by us" Zak said quickly putting the contracts away. "Pleasure doing business with you" Zak remarked. "I hope we get along well" Y/N told Lando, directing her attention to him. "Hope so. My number is in my details. I'll contact you before the weekend. See you on the Thursday after this" Lando stated. "The weekend is on the Saturday or Sunday" Y/N quizzed. "Not in Formula One" Lando said, "I'll text you the details soon" he said leaving before anyone. Y/N watched both Lando and Zak leave, confused at what she had just gotten herself into.
She reached home, kicked off her shoes and plopped down on the sofa before calling her best friend. "Guess what I just did" she said as her best friend answered the call.
Tag list- @gamesetmatch-me @seonghwaexile @yootvi @hadesnumber1daughter @khaylin27 @abq654
#f1 imagine#f1 x reader#f1 fic#f1 fanfic#f1 x y/n#formula 1 imagine#f1 x you#formula 1 x reader#formula 1 fanfic#formula 1 fic#formula one fic#formula one x reader#formula one fanfiction#formula one imagine#formula one x you#formula 1 x y/n#formula 1 x you#lando norris x y/n#lando norris x reader#lando norris imagine#lando norris x you#lando norris fanfic#ln4 one shot#ln4 x reader#ln4 imagine#ln4 fic#ln4 x y/n#ln4 x you#ln4#lando norris
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My unpopular opinion is that i dont enjoy bards Lament. At all. It is objectively good, well performed with appropriate buildup. However, I am a child with an absentee father, and i have had similar thoughts to him before, and i used to have a friend that went down his path. I have seen and experienced every point of view. And what that was isnt justice. Its not calling people out, or making them realise how they have hurt him.
Its a very broken, depressed man who finally snaps and burns down the bridges with his friends. No, VM never asked for Scanlan's mum's name because that's not something they do. If you can list me 5 times where the team ask questions about peoples backstory [before Bards Lament] BEFORE it became relevant, then you have successfully proved me wrong. Anything revealed is either probed out of them as part of recon, or willfully offered as a piece of friendship.
[E.g: Keyleth talking about her aramente, Pike's history with Grog vs Percy's backstory being revealed after they get invited to dinner with the Briarwoods and Grog talking about his pack when its revealed his uncle has the vestige.]
And he never offered any of this information. There have been several times where VM have shown concern and actively asked how hes doing just for him to lie and shrug them off. They prank him while he was asleep because they think hes a fairly centred person who will enjoy an attempt to bring things back to normal and they were drunk.
And yes, they are mean to him sometimes, because they are a group of assholes. They never disguise themselves as anything else. Vax and Percy's friendship post-briarwoods for a good while is based in distrust and self loathing, respectively. Everyone has moments where they say mean shit to Grog [except Pike] because he cant understand it.
And the "without his songs hes just a guy" comment or however it was phrased was a tactical comment. Because he would be. He doesn't have any sort of weapon beyond Mythcarver which he refuses to use, and he doesn't have anything else he can use to support or fight. The same applies to Keyleth without her nature magic, it applies to Percy without his guns, it applies to Grog when people are out of range.
And no, I don't blame him for snapping when he woke up. I doubt taking a -4 to any rolls made would translate to a Happy Peachy character in-story. And all of his internalised misery finally coalesces in his tiredness. But what happens isn't good. It isn't progress. It is showing everyone a wound that has been tearing open over months, and then promptly storming out.
And his whole "I didn't want my daughter to see me like this." Isn't some Grand Show of how much he cares, it shows him as fucking selfish. My dad being weak is what drove him away, his insecurity stopping him from getting help from my family. That line of thinking is what makes him a sad, lonely man rotting in a flat after abandoning many families like my own.
That man in real life was strong, a brilliant teacher of martial arts. A true marvel to see and train with. He had a certain charisma to him, but he had his shortcomings. And when his partner got too close to them, he'd hold them tight to his chest and scurry away, only coming back for the drunk sex and eventually leaving entirely. Having enough distrust in his heart to claim any unwanted children to be illegitimate.
Now, Scanlan is nowhere near as bad as him, but there are similarities. And enough that I feel my word has weight when I say, if I were Kaylie, I would not want to travel with him. If he truly wanted to be closer to her and do good for her, he'd get better first. And to get better, you need people. Plural. You cannot depend on one person. And that person can absolutely not be your own fucking child. I'm not saying he should've stayed with vox machina, but he should've stayed with a group. A group of adults that could support him. And honestly I feel like so far from my watching of CR, his epilogue with kaylie is the most unrealistic character development possible. I know she's supposed to be rough and hardy, but I refuse to believe that girl would not be breaking under her father's bleeding desperation for validation. And I definitely refuse to believe that she could actually help him to the point he'd gladly leave her on another continent while he talked to the people he'd snapped at.
Anyway, fuck dickhead dads who don't get actual help. Especially fuck them when they start depending on their children for them to be a good person.
For those who do not know. Scanlan's departure from the party in the stream wasn't as... friendly. It was kind of an ugly break-up. It came from Sam wanting to do some unexpected twist with Scanlan's character and it led to a very emotional moment. That he did not feel validated, that he did not feel appreciated and that he was considered a joke by the group.
And it came down to one phrase from Scanlan to the group: "What is my mother's name?" and when nobody was able to answer the question. Scanlan left.
However, interesting little tid-bit that might help understand this change. which comes from one of the Q&A. which is no longer up because... uhm... a whole other Drama I am not here to explain.
And what Sam said in that Q&A is that there WAS one way in which Scanlan would have stayed.
And it was Pike. who wasn't there at the time (technically was as an NPC, but since Ashley wasn't there, it's the same thing), but which Sam said was the only person who could change his decision.
And what has Pike done the entire season? BE that person who supported Scanlan in his darkest moment, and who deflated the situation probably without meaning to. And so he is able to leave the party in much better terms.
A shame because the emotional rollercoaster that it involved will be missed, but hey, it's cool to see what Sam meant by saying Pike was the one person who could stop Scanlan walking out of the party like he did
#the legend of vox machina#tlovm spoilers#scanlan shorthalt#scanlan shorthalt negativity#bit of a vent#cr1#im in on ep69 of CR2 btw. i know VM return in C3 but pls dont spoil anymore than that
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I want to talk about a kind of troubling reaction I've been seeing to both Apology Tour and Ghostfuckers among parts of the fandom. The person is usually a reaction youtuber but sometimes someone writing on tumblr or twitter. They say something along the lines of "oh, I'm glad Blitz is being forced to confront his crimes/traumas/pain. This is the only way he will finally heal."
That's not how healing works.
I know that reaction youtubers don't always have the most developed takes because they're . . . you know . . . reacting in the moment. But I think it's still worth talking about.
I'm going set aside the people who seem to believe that Blitz needs to be punished for his crimes, and address those who genuinely think that getting a tidal wave of his own trauma in his face is what he needs to heal.
There's an attitude in contemporary culture that traumas are something people need to confront. As in, put on a brave face and dive in like a big boy. I blame capitalism, rugged individualism, and all the pieces of media that tie up a character's arc neatly by having them confront their darkest fears and insecurities. It can put a nice bow on things, but it isn't really how healing from trauma works.
Apology Tour:
Blitz gets confronted by a shit ton of people who hate him, at least some of whom are his exes, who he feels he's personally damaged. The decor and party games are all about killing and torturing him. Verosika confronts him about how much he hurt her. Oh, and then he sees the love of his life, who he's just recently pushed away, making out with another guy- proof, in his eyes, that Stolas is happier without him. And this all reflects the underlying fears he already has about who he is as a person (shown to us by Truth Seekers).
So what was the takeaway? Blitz came to the conclusion that he doesn't always want to be like this (good, but like . . . worth this much pain?). He flops on his steering wheel (relatable). He stops trying to reach out to Stolas (uh oh . . . ). He spends A MONTH spiraling in his own misery and making a mess of all aspects of his life until he's dragged out of it by a caring friend.
The party doesn't empower Blitz to change. It knocks him down and fucking traumatizes him (seriously, images of Stolas from the party show up later in his trauma reel) too much for him to be able to do actually work toward said change. I suspect that if left to his own devices, he would have kept spiraling for quite a while longer. It's one thing to want to change, and another to try to do so alone in the aftermath of a pile-on.
Ghostfuckers
After Blitz drags himself out of his hole of cheesy ice cream and despair to "play sex ghosts" (escapism, again, still knocked down by Apology Tour), infester demon Rolando picks him out as an easy target and assaults him, yes, assaults, with horrific images of his worst traumas and fears.
Not to state the obvious, but Rolando isn't interested in helping Blitz heal. He's trying to kill the guy. He wants to engulf Blitz in his trauma to the extent where he's consumed by it and loses the will to fight back. And as some excellent posts by others have pointed out already, he very likely would have succumbed if not for Millie's support.
Millie helps Blitz get through the onslaught by telling him about what makes him great and how he's improved her life and showing him love and care. And by literally beating the fucking infester out of him. Because there's someone in him who's hurting him, who's re-traumatizing him against his will. She takes him away from the reel of horrible memories.
So . . . do I think that confronting traumas can play a role in healing? Sure. But only if it's consensually (which neither of these situations are) and when the person trying to heal is ready. And most likely in small doses. No one's going and successfully confronting every horrible thing that's ever happened to them in one go.
And in my humble opinion, it's not going to work (for anyone, but especially not for Blitz) alone and without a healthy dose of kindness and compassion (both external and internal).
Blitz has a long road ahead of him toward healing, and it's going to be hard work on his part but also require love and support from the people in his life.
In a wonderful moment near the end of Ghosfuckers, Blitz and Millie work together to get Blitz's wrecked van unstuck and push it back through the portal into Hell. I love it because it's so simple and it kind of tells us everything we need to know. This sweet and salty gremlin has a lot of work ahead of him, but he doesn't have to do it alone.
#ghostfuckers#apology tour#blitz#blitzo#blitzo buckzo#millie#rolando#stolitz#verosika#my helluva meta#helluva boss
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Man, I don't even post opinions about shows and movies like The Bear, but this really pissed me off! I like Matty Matheson, and I was watching some interviews about his new book and at one point he says that Syd has no formal training... excuse!... no formal training!!! What do you mean!!!
Here's the link for who wants to see the whole thing
He implies that she only worked at UPS!? 3 seasons and that's the impression he has of her?! Did he forgot about that?:
I hope they didn't erase her story and that Matty, even though he's a nice guy, doesn't have any part in writing the show. This is the second time I've seen him talking about the characters (I think it was with Drew Barrymore that he said that the idea for the Faks to go talk to Claire at the hospital was his)... I thought this last season was pretty bad for Syd's character development (and the second one too, to be honest). I like her and I feel like there's a lot of cool stuff to know about her but they don't show it (and now with this, maybe they've even forgotten or left it aside). It seems like they don't give us a chance to get to know her and see her grow on her own, her story is always very connected to Carmy, but according to everyone on the show they won't be a couple...but they also don't know how to be friends...or business partners, they live on crumbs, few conversations and unspoken words. While he lives his life, her character is stuck in this limbo without being able to develop, without having important scenes (especially after they changed Ayo to lead actress in the 2nd season for the awards, I thought they would write scenes that would help her. It is not strange to expect more from the main characters right?! Richie had it! We know a lot about him!) I also saw an interview with Joanna Calo (Director, Writer and Producer in the show) where she said that the idea of locking Carmy in the freezer was just to give Syd a chance to shine and run the kitchen, but in the end, the way they filmed and edited, angles and everything, it seemed like it was all about Rich, and the audience understood that he was the one who saved the day, right?! like, come on! nobody saw it coming?
Anyway, just a rant because I realy like Ayo and I had hope for her character in the 2nd season and we only got hints about her life...so there was that hope for the 3rd...and nothing...and now this. It is frustrating, ngl!
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How I Scan Negatives
I've been doing film photography for 3 whole weeks so of course I am now an expert and you should toooooootally listen to me for my expert opinion on this matter.
But in seriousness, this post isn't meant to be a how-to guide, but if you can glean some useful information from it, that's really neat and I'm glad.
Part 1: The Scanner
There are a couple different ways to scan negatives. The simplest is known as camera scanning, and that just means you use some kind of backlight and take a close-up picture of a negative with a digital camera of some kind.
I've done a couple of scans like this but since it ideally relies on a macro lens, something which costs about $300 at a bare minimum, and more if you want one that's actually, yknow, good. Also, camera scanning inherently limits you to one picture at a time.
So my scanner is a flatbed Epson "Perfection" V600. I purchased this scanner because it is the least expensive flatbed scanner you can find that also does transparencies. It can scan 12 35mm negatives or two 6x9cm 120 negatives at a time. The Perfection V850 can do a full 36 exposure roll of 35mm but costs 4.33x as much.
So this thing is fine.
The first step is to cut my negatives up. This isn't as horrifying as it sounds. I have binder pages that hold 6 6-exposure strips, so a full roll of 35mm (which i will from here on out refer to with the slightly antiquated but slightly faster to type "135") takes up a single page.
Next, I mount them in the handy negative mounting frame that Epson provides, and put it in the scanner.
Now we can move on to the actual scanning.
Part 2: Scanning Software
This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most irritating part of the whole ordeal. There's lots of decent scanning software out there, but there's fewer options for really good scanning software. Most of the "automatic" stuff sucks at being automatic so I end up doing most of it manually.
The scanner comes with the inventively named "Epson Scan," which is a very competent program if you want to scan and don't care about dust and scratches on your film. That is because I have yet to figure out what combination of options actually gets it to properly remove dust and scratches. This is mandatory, because I do not have $10,000 to spend on an industrial-grade negative pressure ventilation system for my bathroom/processing lab. Dust is avoidable, but ultimately inescapable.
The ins and outs of dust and scratch removal are interesting but not interesting enough for me to do a deep dive on them. The very short version is that the scanner scans every frame twice, once with visible light and once with infrared, and overlays the information from these to get rid of dust and scratches.
So instead of using the admittedly competent pack-in software, I opted to purchase SilverFast 9 SE. I paid $49 USD for this because I could not find a cracked version of the full-featured "HDR Suite" version and, frankly, i haven't missed the additional features.
SilverFast has a wizard option (Do they still call it that?) that walks you through the various steps of scanning. I haven't used it since my first roll.
The first step is to do a "pre-scan", which just scans the whole thing at a low resolution so you can pick the frames out of the lineup.
This is my screen at this point. The first step is to draw around the individual frames. This takes about 5-10 minutes depending on how anal i'm being about framing and overscan.
Now that i've let the computer pick the frames to save time for demonstration purposes manually picked my frames its time to boost the scan resolution from a postage-stamp 300 pixels per inch to an actually-usable 3200. You'll also note that i'm scanning these as "positives" rather than negatives. The "negative" scan option adds something called "Negafix" that i cannot turn off and that tries to color-correct for the negative stock's film base color. It is monumentally bad at this unless your stock is pre-loaded in its database which, as far as I can tell, hasn't been updated since 2005. We'll deal with that later though.
Now that we have the basic setting defined we go over to the "frame" menu seen above and copy these settings to all frames. I could set them manually, but copying settings over is the one thing this software is good at doing automatically. This may have something to do with the fact that it is essentially copy-and-paste, which you may recognize as a basic feature of every computer since 1987.
Occasionally, and unpredictably, the scanning software will turn on "Unsharp Masking." The wikipedia page on this option will explain it. I will not, because my contempt for the option rivals my contempt for the Republican Party, The Catholic Church, and Portland's insistence on driving 5 below the limit on the highway. I turn it off and if I could i would find whoever invented this option and eat their dog.
Once that is turned off we get to turn on the most beautiful option that SilverFast 9 SE has to offer, iSRD. iSRD is the previously-mentioned scratch-and-dust removal.
I have found that, in this one instance, the automatic settings are completely acceptable to me. They eliminate most of the really problematic dust in high-detail areas. The hairs and dust that gets left behind is usually easy to deal with via clone stamp later.
Now that the boring stuff is out of the way we get to the tedious, yet, to me at least, fun part. Histogram adjustment!
What you're seeing here is a histogram, its a graphical representation of the brightness of an image. Our goal with this is to maximize the dynamic range of the image. All that blank space to the right of the "mountains" (and some of the "lowlands" on the left) need to be eliminated so that the file can use as much of the bandwidth they have for actual useful image file stuff. This is pretty simple. We just slide those little arrows until they bound the mountains better.
Once we do this we can check the output histogram and see how it's mapped all the image data to the full bandwidth.
This has to be done individually per-frame, since each frame is slightly different.
Now that's done we can actually scan. I use the "Batch Scan" function, which scans everything one-after-the-other. I'm not going to show the dialog windows because 1.) its boring and 2.) I don't want to reconfigure the save path the way I did for the above images. It's a privacy thing.
After we've scanned everything its time to move on to...
Part 3: Color Grading
This is the part you've never heard about before. It's the most involved, and the most important, and it's worth getting into why.
Computers are amazing at storing information, at sorting information, at rearranging and processing information, but they are fundementally incapable of the most important part of dealing with information, assigning meaning.
I'm sure a lot of folks are going to be very very angry at me for saying that, but I actually don't care, and what's more, I'm confident the computer scientists I know will agree with me.
Film is better at storing images than computers. Period, this is a physical fact. The amount of dynamic range and resolution contained in film exceeds the ability of computers to contain it completely. So scanning is always going to be about compromises. You're trying to maximize the amount of useful information you can see by eliminating as much of the un-useful information as you can. But the computer doesn't actually know what is and isn't useful, so we have to tell it.
In order to do this, we use image editing software. I know a lot of photographers who swear by Photoshop, but fuck Adobe, and I know a lot of photographers who love GIMP, but GIMP's user interface is so convoluted as to be detrimental to my purposes. So I use Paint.NET, which is Windows-only, a fact which is sure to get me hate mail from several users including one of my best friends. (Sorry, Murder*.)
Here we have an unaltered** negative. There's a bit of overscan you can see on the left side of the image, and obviously its currently in portrait orientation. Before we go any further, I'm going to fix both of these things.
I like to crop my negatives in a 3:2 ratio. This is the natural aspect ratio of 135 film, and i like that similitude. Paint.NET lets me set a fixed aspect ratio for selections, which is nice
Now that the overscan has been cropped out and the picture is rotated properly, we can invert the image to a positive, and here is where it will become apparent to you exactly why color grading is important, and why there's no such thing as an "pure scan".
Wow! That's very...blue? Well, yes, it is. Color negative film mostly has an orange base. This helps compensate for shortcomings in the dyes used, and those shortcomings are why we have to color grade. The next step I take is to open the "levels" controls, where you'll see our old friend, the histogram!
This histogram looks different, but it's the same basic concept, with the difference that this program lets me adjust red, green, and blue individually. You'll also note that the individual RGB histograms broadly look similar, just out of sync. This is because of the orange base. They won't always look that similar, and in this case it's largely because the sky was overcast that day and there's a large amount of gray in the entire image.
We're going to adjust the input histogram first. Here, our goal is to map the maximum amount of dynamic range possible to the final image. Color balance is not yet important. So we slide the little arrows up and down from the top and bottom so that as much of them fill the output histogram as possible without clipping.
What is clipping? Clipping is when the black or white levels "blow out". Some clipping is acceptable in some images. A bright, sunny day will invariably have some clipping, and if you go out of your way to avoid it the image will look weird and flat. But in a picture like this where everything is muted and gray, we want to avoid it.
Clipping, by the way, looks like this, and is why i don't let the computer automatically adjust the level balance. Some people like this look with the deep black shadows, I do not.
But, onto doing it the Proper*** way
You can see the image is looking a lot better, but it still has a notably off color cast to the image. Its kind of green. Now we can move on to adjusting the output histogram. There's two ways to deal with this. We can adjust the input red, but this will result in highlight clipping. I actually don't mind highlight clipping as much, and in this case we have several red lights in the image both on the BMW and the crossing gate, so we're going to adjust that input histogram.
Truthfully, I should have thought of this before picking this image to do a demonstration on, but at this point its too late to turn back, and like I keep saying, this isn't a "how-to" guide.
So we still have a bit of a color cast, but its (mostly) in the midtones. Now it's time to bring out our secret weapon: gray balance, also known as neutral point or gray point.
That middle slider can be adjusted for red, green, and blue independently, and that's exactly what we're going to do.
This looks, for the most part, very good. I'll probably go back and tweak the gray points in the red and green a bit more, and i often go through these steps 2-3 times, repeating with finer adjustments before finally confirming the changes.
Truthfully, I don't remember if the BMW was pure white or eggshell white, so i'm going to err on the side of "eggshell" because the rest of the image looks weirder if i adjust for that white to be "pure".
And now, Voila! A fully color-graded image.
Does it look exactly like it did IRL? No, not quite, but again, scanning is all about compromise. I'm sure someone with more experience could do a better job than me, but the point here isn't to show you how to make things perfect, it's to show how I, Ivy Michaels do this.
If you made it through this far, congratulations! I love you! I hope you found this interesting. Thanks for reading <3
*Murder is e's actual name.
** i have censored the license plate of the 25-year-old BMW in my shot out of privacy concerns. It is not my car, and i do not know the owner. The negative has not been cropped, rotated, inverted, or graded in any way. Only the license plate has been removed by select-and-stretch. *** Despite my repeated slides into "we/us" language, this is not a how-to and is not intended to be a statement of objective correctness. It is "correct" in the sense of "correct to my personal workflow"
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anyway this is obviously a wild shift in the topic of conversation, but I was talking about it in the group chat last night as a distraction and would like to continue the distraction if I am being honest, so, with the caveat that this is based off of Fandom Osmosis Observations and a few reads of reviews and I have at this time played neither of these games, some thoughts about BG3 vs. Veilguard and what I've seen. many thanks to @captainofthetidesbreath for actually knowing things about video games and answering my many questions.
also just putting this up front with all said caveats: if you disagree that is great, I am very open that this is an outside observation and I could be very wrong but I am going to block people who get hostile without warning, and make this nonrebloggable if too many people get hostile. You are always permitted to disagree but like, I don't really care about your opinion if you're not someone with whom I have a pre-existing rapport unless idk you're like, actually a BG3 or Veilguard official story writer who happens to be on Tumblr. If you're a player? You have all of your own biases and they are not mine. Save it for someone who wants to get in a fight about this; I am not that person.
Essentially, what I've seen in terms of criticism from Veilguard that isn't just rampant transphobia comes down to the following:
why am I not playing my previous character from Inquisition again
why am I limited to a fairly consistent through line for the story
But first, I'm going to talk about BG3. What's funny is I seem like a much more obvious candidate for playing BG3, as a longtime D&D player who has come around on Forgotten Realms as a setting. However, while I looked at it for a while, I eventually lost interest for a couple of reasons. One is that apparently all the characters are WAY too eager to romance you which is like, a fun fantasy for 10 minutes but would probably annoy me in the long run. Another is that everyone who watched early reviews and kept abreast with the game told me that there was a clear favorite companion (Astarion) and that many of the characters had most of their interesting flaws sanded down (eg: Wyll was apparently much cockier originally; Shadowheart even more petulant; and as these are perhaps the two characters I was most intrigued by, reducing them to something blander destroyed much of the appeal). But perhaps the most interesting one is that as a boring goodie two shoes sort of person, my thought back when I was like "yeah, perhaps I will play this" was "oh, I do not want to have a murderous urge within me."
It became very apparent, through watching people play through and post on my dash, that if you didn't specifically play as the Dark Urge, and didn't specifically resist that urge, the story didn't really cohere. I have to admit, I know the premise of BG3 very well (tadpoles), and I know a lot of shipping trends (put a pin in that), and I know some of the more obvious points within it (Astarion is a vampire, Gale and Karlach both have bombs in their chests somehow, Shadowheart bleaches her hair) but I don't really have a great sense of the ending, and I did not avoid spoilers.
It feels like BG3 is designed for people who have one of those massive spreadsheets of D&D characters they haven't had a chance to play that are meticulously kept and thoroughly realized...and don't really leave room for modifying to fit the campaign you will actually be playing in. It feels like an OC sandbox simulator unless you do actually pick the choice the writers actually wrote for (Durge), and while it's not technically playersexual...it kinda is. I mean, I am a big fan of the trend in video games towards making it possible to romance anyone because it conjures up the idea of a world of high-powered bisexuals running around, which is very enjoyable for me, but the criticism of the Mary Sue archetype originally was never "how dare you fantasize about being cool." It was "wow, the characterizations are all warped beyond recognition solely so that everyone is in love with this character, and that makes for a dull and unsatisfying story." If you're everyone's type, and it's for romance and not just sheer lust, then either everyone around you is boring and wants the same thing, or you are sort of bland and inoffensive, or else the story is bashing characters together without a good basis for a compelling romance. This is also compounded by the fact that the companions can't get together with each other if you're playing your own character and not an Origins character.
None of this is to say it's bad to like BG3 and again, I didn't play it; but it is why I ultimately said "you know, given the effort involved to play it for me, a person without a gaming system, it's not worth it."
Veilguard has specifically intrigued me for going against a lot of this. You have a lot of choices in your character build, but they're all fairly thematically consistent: you did something within your faction that was well-intentioned but upset higher-ups and so you need to step away for a while. This establishes a personality for you! We know why you're part of a faction but also something of a free agent at the moment. We know why you're here and why you might be a good candidate for the current mission.
I'm not going to go into detail for the choices because while I'm not avoiding spoilers I don't want to spoil a relatively new game for others, but a lot of choices are fairly parallel, not in an "illusion of choice" way - they have consequences - but in terms of hitting similar themes. You can only save one city and both are places you have seen and places your companions have connections to; while the exact details may differ you are telling a consistent story.
I also think the fact that the companions can romance each other in your absence is important too! They exist even when you're not there. They are not just here to woo you, and indeed, they might be a better match for each other. I've been informed this is true in Inquisition as well, and I think it's a much more rich world if you, as the player, as the person who can ultimately decide the fates of your companions, aren't the center of their personal life. I also think it prevents the ability to sand down companions to be more agreeable to you as a player if you have to make an NPC/NPC romance compelling (and I will freely admit that, in a move that is not at all like me, I was pretty well sold by a potential in-game NPC/NPC romance, which is usually not the thing that gets me into works of fiction).
I'm not the right person to speak to the Inquisitor not being a significant character because I did not play DA:I, and I get that 'well, this is a new game with a new protagonist, as there has been for every Dragon Age game' is still not necessarily an adequate explanation. Nor is "hey, maybe it's good to attract new players" even though as someone who is highly attracted as a new player that is my opinion. However, I want to go back to the point about Resist Durge being the strongest option in BG3 in terms of story by a long shot. When I was trying to learn more, I said "ok, so just like how you're Tav in BG3 and Rook in Veilguard, you're Lavellan in Inquisition, right?" and was told that you are not - that's just the elvish Inquisitor option. Obviously this is anecdotal, but the fact that one option was far and away the most popular and thematically resonant is an indication that perhaps bringing forth the Inquisitor is carrying over some of the limitations of that game, whatever they may be. The true argument is "they are trying to tell a specific story here, and it is about a different POV than the one you previously had."
And that's really my point. I know I'm not an expert here - in fact I'm usually quite hesitant to write meta about things in which I'm not highly steeped, and very critical of those people who do - but I think an outsider perspective is useful here. The thing that is drawing me to video games is a new way to experience a fictional narrative (the other game I have been meaning to play - and even own on Steam- is Disco Elysium). That's not what everyone wants! But it is what I want. And so I want to be put into a developed, thoughtful narrative, and I don't mind if my choices are restricted in order to support it, and if I am playing a person I did not entirely choose. In tech, there is a saying of "make it easy to make the right choice (and hard to make the wrong one)" and so if you need your protagonist to hit certain beats, you should make that the required protagonist.
I think a story is stronger if your choices matter but if there is something of a foregone conclusion because it gives the writers thematic throughlines. This might sound a little silly given that this blog is largely dedicated to Actual Play but the thing is, most actual play does have, if not a foregone conclusion, at least a strongly intended conclusion of "work towards uncovering this mystery and achieving this goal", though the success of said goal is not guaranteed. I would argue that when a campaign lacks that, it tends to suffer in all aspects. RPG video games almost always have a foregone conclusion, but that's its own liability. In actual play, lacking a forgone conclusion means you spin off in any direction and it's anyone's guess if it's coherent. In an RPG, having this conclusion but not supporting it through the rest of the game will make it feel contrived. I feel a lot of Veilguard criticism is focusing on small contrivances early on that really mostly matter to a highly specific subset of potential players that prevent much larger and less forgiveable contrivances later on.
Anyway. Again, I am an outsider here, and I'm not here to say that it's bad to have a more open-world, sandboxy game with a self-insert-y OC type; but I have to be honest, I'd rather explore that in a true sandbox of fanfiction or original fiction, which is significantly cheaper and in which I can actually tell the entire story I want to tell. I don't want to be given more choices if a lot of them will be profoundly unsatisfying as a narrative. I don't want to cut through the world like a hot knife through butter. I want to be affected by it, and that's very hard to do with a character whose only trait is "self-insert whom everyone wants to fuck" or "guy that already carries the baggage of years of personal headcanons and highly variable choices that are hard to account for for every single person who ever played the previous game."
#long post#i'm not tagging this for the games obviously in the hopes of preventing the people i mentioned in paragraph 2#but for now; you can reblog.
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About your meta, I guess the thing is if you believe that Word Of God is canon or not. Jac Schaeffer said that Agatha was thinking she wanted to save Billy and kiss Rio and that she never wanted to bring Nicholas back. For me it’s not canon unless I like what they say 😝 but the fun of reading meta is to see everyone’s sometimes wildly different takes and in the end of the day people can think anything they want because we all bring our preferences, our bias and even our traumas to it
I believe Agatha truly loved Rio, I believe there was considerable time in their lives that they weren’t toxic to each other in any way and I believe that aren’t done, they still have centuries to work out their issues but I know there are plenty of fans that don’t believe in any if that. who’s right, who’s wrong I don’t think anyone can know and as long as everyone is respectful it’s all good. I just hope this fandom continues to be fun for a long time cause we all need the distraction
It is what I love about shows like this. Honestly, I dont think there is a right or wrong way to look at things.
Like you say, everyone has their own bias and will project onto characters. I really enjoy it when people want to have discussions about the things I love. I really appreciate you wanting to talk about this with me.
And the fact that while you may disagree with me on some points, you are not mean about it and are challenging me to look at things from a different perspective. So, thank you.
While I find it interesting to read up on writers intent, I don't ever take it as gospel unless it is there on screen. Between now and a potential next project with these characters, the writers could have evolved their ideas or changed their own interpretation of the characters. So I try not to hold too tightly to what they say.
Instead, I like to take what I have seen on the screen. The characters have shown us who they are with word, action, and deed. Every choice they have made forms who they are. A show not tell approach if you will.
I agree with you, Rio and Agatha love each other deeply. There was a time that it was far less toxic, and there may come a time when that is true once more.
I want to see them in all of their evolutions and iterations.
I want to see Agatha, the mentor. She has never been one to pull her verbal punches, so she won't take any nonsense. Her dynamic with Billy is so good that I would like to see that explored more.
I want to see Billy explore his powers, find his brother, and grow up a little more without being hardened by the world.
I want to see Jen flourish as she reaquaints herself with her power once more. Still snarky but less brittle. If she ever sees Agatha and Teen, have her just turn around and get the fuck away from them. Because they only lead to death.
In the end, though, my opinion is just one in a sea of thousands. I will write some ridiculous fanfics to get this show out of my system. Maybe make them a bit too oc for my own liking. Hopefully, I will learn from that and get better.
I just want to have fun with things. I don't want to hurt anyone with things I post unless it is superficial emotional damage (I eat that shit up). I hope you keep having fun with it, too.
In the end, as much as it pains me to admit it, these are not real people. So why not just go buck wild with our imaginations and throw them in every conceivable scenario. It's not like it will hurt anyone, so why not.
Feel free to chat with me any time
#agatha all along#agatha all along spoilers#anon ask answered#agatha harkness#billy maximoff#jennifer kale#rio vidal#i appreciate you wanting to chat instead of just saying#no you are wrong#a no is a full stop end of conversation#there is not much i can do about that other than shrug say okay and go about my day#a have you considered is much more fun
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one of the smaller leaked details from the teraleak about plza got me thinking about what i'd like to see in terms of shiny hunting mechanics, and i ended up going down a rabbit hole and ranking the games by how much i enjoy shiny hunting in them (roughly ordered within tiers):
reasonings beneath the break, i've got a LOT of thoughts to infodump:
SM/USUM: sos chaining is my absolute favorite shiny hunting method. there's a really fun element of preparation to it that i think most other methods lack - researching your target pokemon, looking for any recoil or status move that may be an issue, figuring out how to plan around it, etc. it's a fun planning game that can easily make individual hunts much more memorable than simply “wow this one was so quick/long�� when you see your plans come to fruition. usum improved it even further with some small mechanical tweaks, plus an expanded dex to hunt through. also in usum is the ultra warp ride. the wormhole shinies are honestly so easy that their allure wears off super quick, but the actual minigame attached to them is pretty fun. that said, the real star of the uwr are the legendaries and ultra beasts, all available through soft resetting. i love soft resetting for mostly the same reasons as sos chaining: you've got one chance to catch this legendary, so you better go in with a solid game plan and make it count once you finally see those sparkles. or if you want a different sort of challenge, you can always go for one of the gift pokemon instead: poipole, type:null, and ash cap pikachu. no battle required, but no shiny charm, either, with the added clout value that their shinies haven’t been available since. alola was my gateway to shiny hunting, but even trying to account for nostalgia, i still think it has some of the most engaging hunts to this day.
XY: i feel like kalos is really overlooked nowadays when it comes to shiny hunting, but it’s one of my absolute favorites. friend safari is always one of the first things that comes to mind whenever i think about shiny hunting. it’s a really cool community-driven shiny hunting experience. i spent so much time just exchanging friend codes to find the shines i needed, and i was always able to find a thriving friend safari community all the way up through swsh’s lifespan until i finally caught every possible shiny i could from it (i wonder how they’re doing now that the 3ds servers are shut down?). this is also the best region for fossil resets - most of the fossil are readily available in large quantities, so you can stock up as much as you'd like and revive them all at once to see if any surprises pop out at you. between friend safari, fossil resets, and horde hunting, xy has a lot of good mindless shiny hunts. a lot of the time, shiny hunting is just something for me to do with my hands while i’m bored, and xy excels at that. oh yeah, there’s also pokeradar in this one, too. i could never quite figure out how to work it.
SWSH: swsh gets massive bonus points for being the only game where masuda hunting is actually fun tbh. the fact that zl can be used as a replacement for the a button means that you can just gather up eggs one-handed at the route 5 nursery, then you can use the 3d camera in the wild area to easily spin in circles to hatch them without even needing to return to a pc box every five minutes like before. as for the rest of the shiny stuff in this game… the intended shiny hunting method is laughably pointless and dynamax adventures, while a neat concept, are only fun if you actually have friends to play it with. otherwise, you’re stuck dealing with either braindead npcs or even more braindead randoms. like i said before, i love planning out big hunts, but in dynamax adventures, so much of it is out of your control that it’s just completely unfun to me (at least we got the regis and swords of justice huntable through run aways. those are some really fun hunts as a consolation prize). honestly, i’m definitely placing these games several spots higher than they probably should be, but sword is possibly my most played game ever due to the sheer amount of masuda breeding i’ve done in it, so that has to count for something.
GSC: okay i know these are a curveball compared to everything else on the list. when these games came to the 3ds virtual console, i did some rby glitching to get a shiny ditto into them and honestly? probably my second favorite game in terms of breeding after swsh. because shininess is determined by ivs in these games, a shiny ditto parent gives every child a flat 1/64 shiny rate, balanced by the fact that the oval charm and flame body don’t exist yet. what you end up with is a situation where you get eggs much more slowly, but with hunt times still comparable to modern-day masuda hunting, and i personally found something about this arrangement really satisfying. every egg has so much more build-up to it, and so despite the slower pace, it somehow still felt more consistently exciting than perhaps any other shiny hunting method. crystal has some additional shiny fun with the odd egg if you feel like doing a bit of save manipulation with it (plus obligatory shiny celebi comment).
PLA: i know this is a very niche and odd opinion to have, but pla handles loading pokemon into the overworld better than any other game with overworld pokemon. the format of having distinct separate regions that you can load and unload at will, with pokemon (even those not yet spawned) being preset at the moment of loading and persisting until being forcibly unloaded, is something that i truly hope carries forward into future entries. it creates a world that feels much more natural, and yet is also highly exploitable on a gameplay level. resetting the regions until you find an outbreak, and then traveling to that outbreak to search for shinies, is a compelling gameplay loop that implements very video game-y elements in a way that i particularly enjoy. the differentiation between mass outbreaks and massive mass outbreaks also adds a fun trade-off into the mix: do you target a specific pokemon at lower odds or do you go for a grab bag of random pokemon at higher odds? i do have one big complaint, however, and it’s gonna sound kinda insane. it is nearly impossible to actually fail a shiny in this game. they persist through saves, they don’t respawn when you run, they even give off a distinct jingle when they’re in your vicinity. if there is a shiny near you, you are gonna find it, and you are probably gonna catch it. and personally… i don’t really care for this arrangement. the risk of failure is an integral part of shiny hunting. making it too safe makes the accomplishment feel a bit more hollow to me. i wish there was a way to disable the shiny sound. i feel like if they weren’t so blatantly telegraphed and were still a bit harder to find in the first place, it would balance out the safety nets the game gives you somewhat.
LGPE: i feel like i’ve come to appreciate lgpe a lot more as time has gone on. the catch combo system is a nice simple numbers game - just keep catching the same pokemon and shiny odds go up. simple, elegant, satisfying. the big drawback is the fact that the motion controls are uuuhh. less than ideal. but it’s easy enough to build a combo back up that it doesn’t usually feel like too big of a setback if something goes wrong. also the fact that you can use the in-game trading mechanics to hunt the alola variants is pretty nifty! i should get back in and try one of those hunts sometime.
BDSP: after not being able to get into pokeradar hunting in xy or the original dp, i was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable i found it in bdsp. it has a really good sense of risk and reward as you try to map out the safest path you can, which makes it super gratifying when your skills and luck are good enough to bring your chain all the way up to 40. honestly, the fact that the shiny charm doesn’t work in this game is a complete nonissue for me, because the pokeradar doesn’t even need it. of course, this game also has the added fun of not shiny locking anything except some tie-in bonuses. you can shiny hunt any legendary from the first four generations, and you can even go for the sinnoh mythicals as well (the event to get their items is over now, but i believe it’s still possible to glitch your way to them anyway).
SV: sparkling sandwiches are probably the shiny hunting mechanic i’m most split on. once again, there’s a really good strategic element to it that i enjoy: trying to figure out where on the map you can locate your target pokemon with as little type overlap in the surrounding area as possible, and then once you’ve begun your hunt, finding the best path to spawn them in as quickly as possible. on the other hand, however, probably my biggest hot take of sv is that the sandwiches bump the shiny rate up way too high. in my first shiny hunting excursion of the game, i found five shinies in the span of two sandwiches, and as a whole, that’s been more the norm than an exception. most shiny hunts in this game are over so quickly that i don’t feel all that rewarded for accomplishing them. the process of acquiring herba mystica is a good bottleneck keeping it from spiraling entirely out of control, but it feels so distinct from the actual shiny hunting process that it doesn’t help alleviate those feelings for me.
ORAS: i don’t hate shiny hunting in oras or anything, but i don’t think it does anything exceptionally well, either. horde hunting is just as fun as it is in xy, although it’s fairly easy to exhaust the catalogue of huntable pokemon in both games. soft resetting legendaries is here, although for some of them, they require lengthy trips to the encounter point each time and you’re better off sticking with usum or even bdsp instead if you wanna hunt them. the standout is dexnav - frankly, i’ve warmed up to it a lot over the years, but i think it’s still the roughest chaining mechanic. the search function is simple to understand, and the mirage spots and hidden pokemon inject a bunch of new encounters to hunt for. that said, i think the sneaking aspect of it never feels quite right with a 3ds circle pad, and having to constantly swap between battles and sneaking means that it’s hard to stay in a groove. i don’t mind dexnav, but it’s rarely my first choice.
#i've got a nearly complete shiny living dex#and you don't get to that point without some Opinions#pokemon#shiny pokemon#shiny hunting#pokemon shiny hunting#koolmathgames.com
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Bro I hate fundamentalists and culturally-fundie parents they'll say shit like "spare the rod spoil the child am I right haha yea my parents used to have to beat my ass with a switch almost everyday but I sure did learn my lesson" but like??? no you didn't??? you were hit multiple times for something you very obviously did not, in fact, learn
Like studies about how harmful even lightly spanking children is aside, you're literally contradicting yourself?? Some even admitted they got worse as they got older cause they wanted to see how far they could push their parents before they got punished
And studies not aside, you're gonna get child raising advice from the same book that tells you to stone your wife if her hymen doesn't break on your wedding night instead of the decades of research we have now?? Just say you're a bad parent and move on my guy. Skill issue
#bro I had a coworker go 'unpopular opinion I think some kids really do need beatings' and I'm like????#unprompted???? what's going on there????#well anyways I ended up going 'yea so I plan on specializing in play therapy with autistic children so I've been learning about talking#to children and the ways their parents and environment affects them'#and they're like hmmm but beating this kid with a stick after they broke something or I upset them to the point of yelling is good actually#had a boss say it taught him and his kids respect cause they were hard-headed#and I'm like?? that's fear not respect! they fear punishment! they do not act out of respect for you!#he's a conservative christian black man tho so he's like 'But Authority!' like bro I don't even respect you what are you on about#'You don't respect police and their authority?' Nope! I fear them! I do not respect cops and every cop/cop-adjacent person I personally know#has reinforced that for me#'We'll agree to disagree' Cool! Doesn't mean you're not wrong! I could believe trees aren't real but that is in fact incorrect#then he pulled out the bible verse and I was like ah okay I forgot you like 'here's how to treat slaves' book you're so right bestie#I'm totally wrong now and so sorry for doubting you and your 2000+ year old book I don't believe in <3#They'd go 'well I turned out fine!' then say something that directly contradicts that#anyways I need christians to get their grubby little hands off the current state of Child Protection and Rights in the U.S.#So we can actually start working on helping kids without the force of christian hands suffocating them#cause homeschooling and child raising by evangelicals are so fucked up bro I'm tired of this shit#I'd only stay in my current state to help children get out of that cycle since I'm in the bible belt#ex christian#religious trauma#child abuse tw
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The way people sometimes refuse to acknowledge that writing choices that clearly go against established canon should mean something is endlessly frustrating to me. We don't have to agree on the interpretation, but these writing choices SHOULD mean something.
Otherwise, it's shitty writing.
#'the ga wouldn't even notice'#'the character doesn't seem to mind'#'you're reading too much into things'#no actually the fact that so many people think writing doesn't have to involve any stylistic or thematic choices to build meaning#and that writers just do stuff and as long as the character doesn't say anything it couldn't possibly mean anything is absurd#like y'all can pick up any classic piece of literature and think the writing just manifested on the page#and nothing is any deeper than some author saying what happened to a character like the character's just recounting real-life events#and that nothing really means anything except exactly what is said outright or some shit#but that's not how good writing works#in any form of media#and if the blatant contradictions are not being addressed then maybe the writing is shitty actually#and also even IF something wasn't intended to mean anything by the author directly doesn't mean that no meaningful connotations exist#for the audience like jesus christ y'all#i get enough of this bullshit from my students i don't need it in fandom too#let people analyze things and dig into them and spec and 'look too deeply' it's fun#and also it's okay if someone has a different interpretation than you and wants to talk about the possibilities behind that interpretation#or about other possible interpretations#it is not hurting you to see someone 'read too much into something' let people have their opinions#without trying to shut down everything you disagree with goddamn#anyway#911 discourse#fandom negativity#and actually i do think it's mostly shitty writing at this point#but that doesn't make it not mean anything that it's shitty writing actually#and it shouldn't be viewed as some awful character flaw for someone to point out why certain choices don't make sense#and to talk about what they would like to see addressed because of that
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Man, with how vague Splatoon is about its lore/plot points sometimes, I’m very wary of people who claim there is One Definitive Interpretation of this that or the other thing. Like no, just because the game uses they/them pronouns for Captain 3 doesn't mean giving them any other pronouns is misgendering. Like, unless you have something from actual canon (ie. the games themselves or dev interviews) to back it up, then I don't think it's fair to expect people to Universally Agree With You or Else. Going "This is how I see things, I really don't like it when people see it this other way" is fine but "This is how I see things, I am RIGHT and anyone who thinks otherwise is WRONG" is not. People have different opinions. You are not obligated to agree with them, but at the same time, they are not obligated to agree with you.
#splatoon#gonna ramble about the specific example that inspired this post#(no it is not they/them Capn 3 it's more... complicated than that)#anyways#there is One Specific Person on tumblr who is#Very Adamant on how to think of callie's s2 arc#like#they insist that the hypnoshades work how real world hypnosis does#(ex they just make you more susceptible to suggestion)#when like#Canonically#we dont know how they work#nintendo doesnt know how they work#and while i do think their interpretation is better then 'oH nO CaLlIe WaS bRaInWaShEd By ThE oCtArIaNs"#i do not think they are Objectively Correct#like i get having Opinions about your Comfort Characters#(god knows i certainly do)#but at some point u gotta realize u cant just brute force everyone to see them the same way you do#and thats okay!#They Are A Fictional Character#at some point u just gotta realize#ppl disagreeing w u on said Comfort Character is Not a personal offense#anyways this goes without saying but don't harass/try to ask me who i'm referring to here#bc 1) if u frequent the tag like i do u prolly know who im talking about#and 2) It Will Not Help#this is an Everyone Problem
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#personal#internets#at this rate I've unfollowed both of the kinda.. 'controvercial' blogs I've been following#since there was a good chunk of actually good takes about how bad media is now and society and braindead internet 'activists' that-#-had it too good in their western countries and NEEDED to invent the reason to bully and excile people#could honestly resonate with it despite some other posts causing genuine pain. but mostly about terribly handled media#like you know that thing when corporations do terrible ass rep to pretend that they care for minorities#or artificially fabricate online backlash against their new actors to show investors that people show interest for their product because-#-of all the clicks on their article?#like discussion of this kind sorta keeps me sober#as a person with BPD I get contaminated by opinions VERY easily and as an autist I will believe everything if it is put together 'logically#that's why I HAVE to be exposed to every possible opinion so I am forced to make out my own rather than being swayed anywhere#but at this point those blog became kinda.. bad? like they don't just have 'opinions' but they hate just to hate#but now my dashboard and recs are full of exclusively things I can fully agree with and I am scared that it will rot my brain#like.. emotions are always the same. where is the 'wait WHAT' effect? where is anger? where is self-reflection?#but ALSO I realized that 'those' blogs are no better than those western 'warriors' I despise and they become narrow-minded too in the end#they advertise themselves as 'open to debate' only to always sway debate into trying to win and not into actually discovering the truth#I cannot trust any side because they're all narrow-minded and hostile but I cannot trust people without any side because-#-they're fence-sitters without morals that side with the winner#is there a secret third thing? like is there a way to not take a side but to still HAVE ideals and opinions?#my problem is that if I am not exposed to people that trash everything I value I forget why AM I valuing [a thing] to BEGIN with#and that won't do will it
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finally found a place to read With the Light online and i'm thrilled; if you haven't read this manga i do Legitimately recommend it
#N posts stuff#like don't get it wrong it Is Not a series about being autistic it Is a series about raising an autistic kid#but also don't be put off by that because it's legitimately a series that I feel Loves autistic people with its whole being#it's kind of a teaching manga so it showcases a lot of different opinions/characters/conflicts/etc. but the Framing is very consistent#in that the manga is Extremely of the opinion that autistic people are People who deserve to be Valued and Accepted As They Are#the onus for change is never put on autistic individuals the framing is basically Universal in the 'the World needs to change#to be more accepting' -- it's a very Social Model depiction of autism that ALSO never veers too far into the#'autism isn't even Really a disability' fallacy; it's very much a 'A lot of autistic people will need constant support in a variety of ways#throughout their lives but that isn't the roadblock preventing them from having their own lives; ableism in society is the roadblock'#the first two chapters are the hardest to get through bc they take place before Sachiko has any real understanding of autism and#so she's isolated and stressed out and the ignorance makes it difficult for her to care for Hikaru properly (there's also a lot of#other characters Blaming her for what's going on which goes unchallenged at this point though that changes later); but after she#understands what autism is she's Firmly in Hikaru's corner for the rest of the series - you can skip right to ch 3 without a problem#if you're not interested in reading about that initial conflict#there's still a Lot of conflict ofc but by then the chapters have some of my favorite moments so i don't want to advocate skipping#them; like Hikaru's daycare teacher explaining how Hikaru's difficulty speaking is the same as other kids' troubles with#things like jump-roping/etc.; and then a mother who has An Issue with Hikaru's presence in her daughter's class realizing the#depth of the problematic opinion bc Her mother (who had a stroke) faces similar ableism from her peers#i'm cutting this post off b4 the tags get Too long but if you're curious but still hesitant man. send me an ask and i will Happily#write an insanely long essay about how much i love this series; i have all the books i'm not excited about the online availability#for Me i'm excited bc i've been wanting to rec this manga for like almost a full decade and i can finally give you a link instead of#saying 'well. you can find used copies sometimes' lol
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sometimes I wish you could post an opinion on a fandom blog without inviting a whole witch hunt or being accused of causing drama but alas
#I've not done anything and i won't do anything#it's just something that's annoying?? that you can't say anything without someone doing a bad faith interpretation of it#or projecting it on themselves or getting offended on behalf of a fictional character#the few times i saw someone actually say something slightly controversial all hell broke loose every time#like great that you're passionate but not everything is about you#not everything needs your opinion - especially if you can only give it like a lecture#not everything has malicious intentions#people disagreeing with you have a right to their opinions as well - as long as you respect theirs they should respect yours#the thing is - i don't think I've ever been in a fandom that didn't have to deal with like ship wars or someone doing hate campaigns#of a character or ship - i guess that's just the way it is??#but here it feels especially tiring because people don't usually disagree on ships#people are literally fighting and hating each other mainly over the same two characters!!! and their different interpretations of them#people disagree over what the right and moral way is to portray and ship those characters#and it creates so much tension because you can't associate with those people because they're doing it wrong#and are acting fucking awful about it#but those people are very exclusionary and if you don't agree with all of their points they don't want to talk to you either#you just float along hoping that you'll find some people who have a similar interpretation and will actually talk to you#it's so weird??? it's so isolating too??#and it feels like you entered a political landscape in your online fandom space#i will probably delete this and I'm not even sure my thoughts make sense#my thoughts spiralled a bit from thinking how some fan interpretations annoy me into disliking a character hahaha
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you seem to have a wide taste in books !! what are some books that you would recommend ??
Hmmm I wonder. I have the feeling I just read the same couple of books over and over, and at times only different iterations of the same story, like in that line by Borges ("the various intonations of a few metaphors").
I find recommending books without knowing anything at all about the person asking rather difficult. What I'd suggest to one may differ greatly from what I'd recommend to someone else. I'll give a list of some of my favourite books that I think are enjoyable in general:
— Thoughts by Pascal
— Cain: a mystery by Lord Byron
— The Iliad by Homer
— Crime and Punishment by Dostoievsky
— Othello by Shakespeare
— Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
— Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
— The fragments of the Presocratics
— La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, Clarín
— Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by Wittgenstein
— East of Eden by John Steinbeck
— Vita nova by Dante
— Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers by Georg Cantor
— Caligula by Albert Camus
— North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
— Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
— Some essays by Russell. I personally love Mysticism and Logic
— Metamorphoses by Ovid
Poetry is perhaps harder to recommend because at times it translates horribly, but in general I love Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rilke, Byron, Quevedo, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Horace, Catullus, Ovid, Tennyson, Maiakovsky, Garcilaso de la Vega, Oliverio Girondo, Vicente Huidobro, Emily Brontë, T. S. Eliot, Luis Cernuda and Edgar Allan Poe, to name a few.
#I talk too much#I wanted to say The tragic sense of life by Unamuno and Philosophy and Poetry by María Zambrano#but I thought maybe they'd be hard to find in translation. They're both approachable texts of philosophy beautifully written though#Unamuno's essay Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (translated as Our Lord Don Quixote in English according to Wikipedia?) is also beautiful#I adore Schopenhauer and Nietzsche but I'm not sure I'd recommend them to anyone. Probably you can't go wrong with Kierkegaard though#I know what some of these books look like (like Wittgenstein's Tractatus or Cantor's Foundations)#but I swear they're approachable without specific academic background. The last line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is one of my favourite#lines ever in the history of anything‚ philosophy or literature‚ but to be as hitting as it is you need to reach it at the end of the book#I think despite what it looks like both Cantor and especially Wittgenstein have an aesthetic intent in their writing#Wittgenstein in particular reminds me of Kierkegaard and Rilke and also of Unamuno and Zambrano. And of course Schopenhauer et al.#The Tractatus is very similar in my opinion to Huidobro's Altazor which is just amazing but I don't know how it would translate#These books I like in form and not just in content (although form is content like I think happens in Wittgenstein's Tractatus)#so when possible I'd read them in their original languages.I myself can't read German and know but very little of Russian and Ancient Greek#and a bit of Latin so I must be missing a lot of those. Nonetheless they're great in what I can get through translation#Perhaps you'd have the chance of enjoying them in full#If you can't read Russian I am actually quite specific with the translation of Crime and Punishment haha There's a concept#Razumikhin develops through the book at several points and often translators aren't consister with the word which makes the readers lose#the view of this development. And I happen to think the development works alongside the narrative of Svidrigailov#and also with what happens towards the end with Porfiry and Raskolnikov so I think it's important#In English there are several translations that maintain the coherence such as the one by Pevear and Volokhonsky#(the only one I can remember right now but I could check the rest). Garnett's translation is everywhere but that one doesn't do it#Hmmm Pedro Páramo in English takes some liberties and La Regenta isn't as funny which is what happens with Wuthering Heights#and The three musketeers in translation even when the translations are more accurate#I haven't recommended Wuthering Heights because I take you've read it but that's my favourite book#And I haven't recommended Pandora Hearts because that's a manga and you asked for books but it does some very interesting things#that I think are in line with many of the books listed here (as I said‚ I basically like the same few things retold over and over haha)#There are many books I am itching to recommend but that I can't do freely without some knowledge of the person asking#Like Steinbeck's arthurian novel or idk Gone with the wind#I hope this list is enjoyable enough. I'm not sure if I've been able to avoid being too partial#I suppose one has to bear the conditions of their existence and can't ever entirely get rid of themselves haha
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Oh not me avoiding a wildly popular piece of media that I’d probably actually like out of sheer spite.
#maybe this is my True Toxic Trait but I just get really annoyed when all I hear is 'this thing is PERFECT it's EVERYTHING it's the only#TRULY high-quality media to EVER exist it is OBJECTIVELY better than literally EVERYTHING else it's the MOST IMPORTANT thing of ALL TIME'#like...again. not that you have to issue a disclaimer for media discussion of every single one of it's flaws before you earn the right to#talk about it. but if people keep holding something up as The Best Ever No Exceptions with literally no other commentary I just kind of...#get irritated to the point where I don't want to engage with the thing#I think in this case it's really...Objectively This Is The Best. I think that's what bothers me. because there IS no objective measurement#of art. it doesn't exist!! and that's okay!!!! just be honest!!!!!!!#'but mc13 what about your relationship to cxgf' well if you go back through my episode reviews you will see that I very much#acknowledged that some things could be done better and that it is not a perfect show because perfect media ALSO doesn't exist#and I've never said that it's the ONLY '''right''' way to present the themes it explores. there are a million different ways to do that#and it is the Greatest of All Time in MY OPINION. that's not going to be true of everyone!! and you can think something is the Best™#WITHOUT PUTTING DOWN OTHER PIECES OF MEDIA /ESPECIALLY/ ONES THAT ARE NOT EVEN IN THE SAME GENRE OR HAVE THE SAME FUNCTION??????#I'm also so tired of people saying 'it's good because it's gay™' like that tells me NOTHING#and like. the ideas/themes/concepts presented in this thing (from what I can tell) ARE present in other types of media and y'all REFUSE to#engage in those other things??? like you write them off and disparage them and basically unconditionally hate the things in them but#THIS time it's okay THIS is the exception and there is just NO awareness or critical thought there at all. it's the hypocrisy for me#In the Vents
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