#anyways my point is not on the like. overall morals and ethics of the game im just focusing on the specific part where gacha games are evil

[foxpunk]

as someone who used to play genpact i can say that the gameplay is genuinely super fun and the fights are cool and there's tons of interaction with the world around you (resources, puzzles, hidden treasure, challenges, npcs) very reminiscent of something like BOTW and the plot escalates in a way that feels coherent and dramatic and the characters do in fact all have their own personalities and stories that weave together quite nicely and intricately

and i literally hate it cause its a fucking gacha game. like. you have ALL that and you made it a gacha game. evil, pure evil. one of the most fucked up thing to do to a game ever.

[rays-animorphs]

Book 10 afterthoughts

(More spoilers than usual.)

Dunno why I keep thinking I'll have something I want to say after I finish reading the book. Generally more thoughts come within an hour or so of finishing, or I'm just on to the next thing.

I've watched the Matrix movies recently, so I'm going to talk about that. Neo gets to the point where he can do anything. He can fly like Superman. He can stop bullets in mid-air. Most of the story is still taken up with fighting. Because that's the point, it's a story about cool fighting. I get that. It's fine. People like what they like. I'm about to play a game about a pandemics while we're in the middle of one, doesn't mean I want anyone I know (or anyone at all, for that matter) actually getting sick. People can like stories about fighting without it meaning anything in particular about their attitudes towards violence, their personal capacity for violence, or their political position on the hawk/dove spectrum. I personally tend to like action scenes less than most, and am more wholesale opposed to violence than most, but as far as I can tell that's just coincidence.

Anyways, if I had Neo-like superpowers, I wouldn't be using them to do gravity-defying kung fu.

I do think I would honestly prefer the morality of warfare to not come into my ridiculous goofy kids' alien invasion story. I mean, I like "is war a bad idea?" in general, and I think it works in Star Trek TOS when it comes up, because even though Starfleet is a military organization, they're not actually engaged in war for most of the series. (The original series, on TV. I realize Star Trek as a whole keeps going back to conventional good guys vs bad guys war stories.) Their mission is exploration, not fighting, so anti-war messages work. They're not being constantly contradicted by the text. But, "this is a story about fighting, because fighting is fun to read about"...that doesn't necessarily go well with discussions of the ethics of fighting. It would be like if a James Bond movie had a dialogue between Bond and whatever woman he's trying to seduce this time about internet privacy. It's messing with different levels of engaging with the topic, swirling them together. In a way that leave both levels -- the fun escapism level and the serious ideas level -- worse for the blending.

It's kind of like how Kushiel's Dart gives the protagonist an in-universe safeword, but then she keeps refraining from using it as a point of pride, like...ok, 5 points for introducing the concept, -10 points for the "real subs/masochists/whatever don't use safewords" BS. If you're going to write a non-con fantasy, you can just write the fantasy, sometimes nods to reality make it worse. I keep going back to this because I still haven't figured out what exactly my issue is, how best to phrase/understand it, and my brain is set up in a way such that it doesn't want to let go until I understand it. I do not like that the story is set up so that the Chee are basically written out of the story once Erek decides he's unwilling to kill. I do not like that the non-human Controllers are treated like faceless mooks whose deaths are categorically different from human deaths, and that this largely goes unchallenged. I don't like the overall message of "war is terrible and requires incredible sacrifice and is also good and necessary" -- I'm not thrilled with war stories in general, but I'm really not thrilled with "yes, war is horrible, and this fictional war is going to have horrors and PTSD just like real life war, and it is still necessary." In stories that straight-up glorify war, like the Narnia Chronicles and Lord of the Rings, it's fairytale-like, I can suspend disbelief and go "this is fiction, people get that fiction isn't reality", but going closer to reality (while still writing the war as absolutely necessary) draws it into this uncanny valley that is a lot more unpleasant for me that a more, you know, Redwall-like or Three Musketeers-like story would be. And I can't let go that this is a book set in America published by an American author not long before the Iraq War and using the exact same rhetoric about fighting the Yeerks that Bush used to justify the Iraq war. It's about freedom, the enemy hates our freedom, they can't be reasoned with they just hate us, they have powerful weapons, they want to destroy who we are. We're fighting for our freedom, for their freedom, for our survival. Anyways: book 10 was one of the more serious/dark ones, it was great for showing Marco's thing where this stuff really genuinely terrifies him but he does it anyways, the android thing was cool, we got alien trees which was amazing, we got a sense that the Animorphs universe is truly vast. Plus, bats. So, good story, again, me going off about the pacifism stuff doesn't mean I didn't like it, it just means I have opinions. Also, the thing where Erek is never going to forget is genuinely horrifying.

[inspector-montoya-fox]

let’s talk about the themes of the Sly games

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002):

Paris: this might not be the game’s main theme but it’s the theme that is most omnipresent. Paris is the glue that connects everything together. it immediately has such an impact on the player, even though it’s just the tutorial and the gang’s base of operations. Sly being a thief but also living in Paris just sounds so right, like it’s the way it should be. it fits. 

The Thievius Raccoonus: this is the main theme and what provides the game with its premise. it’s the book that needs to be glued back together and its importance is highlighted throughout. almost every level has a page included so we’re constantly reminded of its significance. the skills we earn by retrieving the main ancestors’ pages elevate the gameplay and force the player to respect it. other than that it’s a clever way to spotlight the ancestors and establish that Sly does come from a long line of thieves.

Family: this doesn’t need much explaining but i’ll do it anyway. we start off with Sly’s parents getting killed and him landing at an orphanage where he creates a new family for himself with Bentley and Murray. you’ve got 3 different types of family: (A) Connor and Sly’s mom getting murdered and Sly’s aim to avenge them, (B) Bentley and Murray being true brothers when Sly was left with no one (i’m tearing up), and (C) the ancestors, which are explored more in-depth through the theme of The Thievius Raccoonus. Family as a theme explores Sly’s motivations and drive, even though Connor’s role is minor, especially in comparison to his role in Sly 3

Morality: Sly 1 is rudimental in its gameplay. it was a little game with a big promise at the time it was released, hoping to serve Sony and the Playstation 2 with a worthy mascot and an even worthier title. but right off the bat the player is bombarded with a shit-ton of lore about the world Sly lives in and how he operates. we immediately find out he’s an antihero, an honourable thief who has a code of conduct. this comes into stark contrast with the game’s villains who are basically filthy crooks. thief takes down thieves and the theme of Morality is SP’s attempt to make the player distinguish between good criminal and bad criminal. Morality as a theme is spotlighted immensely in Cold Heart of Hate when Sly saves Carmelita because he truly is the good guy, but also when it’s revealed that what’s been keeping Clockwerk alive all these years is the lack of morals and the hatred. the game establishes Morality as the outlining theme of the entire series, placing Sly on a pedestal because he’s honourable. morals trump hatred, so fuck off Clockwerk (even though ‘perfection has no age’ might be one of the coolest lines in the game lol)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (2004):

Paris: this is the theme from the first game but on steroids. like make it x10. when you take the plot of Sly 2 and boil down to its core, it turns out to be a full-on race against time to save Paris. it provides both a nod to the first game and a sense of closure at the end: the game begins in Paris and ends in Paris. It’s both a setting and a catalyst, and it is absolutely brilliant in the game. you spend most of the game globetrotting, away from home but as soon as you find out ClockLa is on her way to unleash her psychotic brain waves and turn the city evil, you find yourself at the edge of your seat, caring more about Paris than anything else. it’s omnipresent and powerful and i don’t know why but i love it.

Spice: if you wanna be my lover. here’s an amazing replacement for drug trafficking as a plot device in a children’s game: spice. the spice trail is what pushes the narrative forward but also gives the gang something to face before the pieces fall into place and the larger scale of things is revealed. before ClockLa steals the show, spice is the main antagonist in the game. it brings the villains together, leads the gang from one location to another, provides some memorable missions and obstacles (Spice in the Sky and a raged, spice-infused Murray). but it’s not to say that it fades away in the long-run. Spice is actually the subtle thread that connects the episodes together but also is significant to the final master plan of hypnotising Paris.

Deception: obvious one here. Neyla pretending to be an ally is the major example. we’ve got the Contessa pretending to be loyal to Interpol, we’ve got Arpeggio seemingly being the mastermind behind everything (which he kinda was until he wasn’t), we’ve got the whole evil plot reveal on the spice, we’ve got Neyla ripping off Arpeggio on her journey to become the most well-written villain in video-game history. lots going on here. overall great theme. on a wider scale (and i’ve touched on this before in some recent posts) we’ve got SP deceiving the player into thinking the plot is all laid out at Rajan’s ball until it all turns to shit and nothing goes as expected. Appearance V Reality is a sub-theme that pops up when Bentley fights Jean Bison and Bison constantly underestimates Bentley until the turtle fucking blows his lights out. it’s not an instance of Deception per se, but it’s worth mentioning

The Past: Clockwerk’s return makes this a theme instead of a motif. before ‘saving Paris’ becomes the main objective, it’s Sly’s determination to prevent Clockwerk’s revamping that kicks off the game’s events. the events of Sly 1 play a pivotal role here as they lay the groundwork for the plot of Sly 2. it’s not just Sly 2: The Sequel. with its own set of characters and an intricate story it becomes its very own thing. but Clockwerk is the link that connects everything.

Morality: this one sneaks up on you in the game’s second half and just bites you right in the ass when you least expect it. Contessa, who until her boss-fight seems to be just another selfish spider bitch witch, manifests into this advocate for Sly’s inner demons through simple dialogue. fucking brilliant. ‘You’re an ignorant child playing dress-up in his father’s legacy’ (in my opinion, the best line in the entire series) kicks it all off. and then the theme becomes obviously present throughout. it explores the fine line that Sly walks between robin hood and scumbag thief, it shows how the villains are down-right criminals who want to benefit from their crimes, it cracks black and white into a million pieces because in a single game there are like a million layers of good and evil: Barkley at the very top as the authoritarian white, Carmelita as a sympathetic cop who tries to grasp onto her own code of ethics while occasionally running with the thieves, Sly and the gang as antiheroes, the villains as... villains, and Neyla as the embodiment of satan. it’s a scale and the game spotlights this. i had a different bullet point for Justice but i think it falls under Morality. basically, Carmelita’s story arc in Sly 2 deals with blurring her views a bit and re-defining justice

Sly 3: Honour Among Thieves (2005):

Ancestry (Cooper Vault): this is what the game is all about, or at least the premise. after stitching the cottdamn book back together by the end of the first game, Sly 2 doesn’t give any attention to the Thievius Raccoonus. in fact, Sly 2 exists on a completely different plane, using its amazing plot to elevate itself away from the lore of the first game. ancestry is rarely mentioned. flashforward to Sly 3, where SP takes us back to the mythos for a new caper involving a new reveal: the Cooper Vault. what we thought we knew about the ancestors is thrown out the window to pave the way for this mystical place where the Coopers buried their secrets and their loot. i’d like to point out that the theme of Ancestry is great and all but SP does a shitty job in spreading it throughout the game. whilst recruiting the new gang members we often forget why we’re doing so and it’s not until the last episode of the game that we get the fulfilment of the theme’s promise. it’s also worth mentioning that the theme pops up in A Cold Alliance when Tsao is comparing himself to Sly and he speaks of his ancestors but we somehow get the feeling that his ancestors were all colossal jerks like him and had absolutely 0 honour

Family: this is not the same as Ancestry. the new gang members could have very well been distant with each other if not for the adventures that made them bond. Bentley’s fascination with the Guru, Murray being the Guru’s apprentice, Bentley falling for Penelope, Penelope and Panda King helping Murray with the van, Panda King and Sly working alongside each other to kill vampire mantises and the Crusher. these are all moments that helped sell the ‘group of thieves’ aspect of the game. but Family also explores the bond of the original trio and how, even when they face their differences (Bentley and Murray living in the shadow of Sly), they can still make it through, even stronger than before. other references here might include: Panda King and Jing King, Dimitri and the Lousteau diving legacy, Dr. M and McSweeney being Conner’s “sidekicks”

Honour: this replaces the theme of Morality from the previous two games as the situations the characters face allude to honour (doing what’s right for the greater good) rather than morality (black and white, good vs evil). what i mean by that is SP making an effort to distinguish why Sly is a different thief and ultimately an antihero. this was sorta explored in the previous games by having Sly put an end to the villains’ various operations but the overall plot overshadowed those instances. Sly 3 on the other hand fully explores the theme of Honour by including the word in the title and having the gang save the day in every episode. stopping harm to the environment (polluting the Venice canals, destroying the Australian outback), helping Penelope come to terms with her inner demons by encouraging her to drop the facade of the Black Baron, saving Jing King from forced marriage, etc. the theme also ties into the theme of Redemption (below) but what i’d really like to point out is that Carmelita gets in on it as well. i can’t think of a more honourable moment than when she finally, after 3 games, puts the petty cop bullshit aside and comes to Kaine Island with her squad to save Sly from Dr. M. she makes Sly’s battle her own and doesn’t give up, showing up at the very end to save him from Dr. M’s horrific boss-fight (ugh)

Deception: although not as major as in Sly 2, i’ve said this time and time again: Flight of Fancy perfectly encapsulates the theme of Deception. Penelope dressing up as the Black Baron is not the only instance of deception. you’ve got Bentley and Penelope blowing their online avatars out of proportion, you’ve got Dimitri who was initially a villain finally turning sides, you’ve got an episode card full of sunshine and bright blue and gold fonts for a hub that’s all gloomy rainclouds. beyond Flight of Fancy, i can think of a few more instances: some Shakespearian shenanigans when Carmelita disguises herself as Jing King, or when the gang doesn’t reveal their Dead Men Tell No Tales plan to the player and we’re left thinking that Sly is going to get eaten by sharks

Redemption (Choices): speaks for itself, really. this one ties in with Honour and is a sub-theme, maybe a motif. we’ve got Murray’s desire to redeem himself for feeling guilty over Bentley’s accident. we’ve got Dimitri and the Panda King joining the gang after previously being villains in the series, and eventually redeeming themselves through helping with the heist. we’ve got Penelope redeeming herself as the Black Baron by joining the gang. i also named it Choices because these characters chose to redeem themselves. Choices are all over the game, whether its the lack of free will or the sacrifice characters make: Jing King isn’t in a position to choose whether or not she gets married during her capture, Sly sacrifices his cane at the very beginning of the game to save Bentley and then jumps in front of Dr. M’s shot to save Carmelita (!!!)

Closure: or the lack of, smh. SP’s trilogy comes to a close and therefore the theme has to exist even if the game doesn’t provide the player with mass satisfaction. Sly finally gets together with Carmelita, Bentley finally gets over his fear and self-doubt and lives the good life (with Penelope), Murray kicks off his racing career, and we get happy-ever-afters for the rest of the gang as well

[mymelancholiesblues]

Just wondering, what your head canon for Leon's family?

Oh my god, I was planning to post this huge compilation of my RE Headcanons soon (starting with what I have for Leon) when I got your ask’s notification. Are you a mind reader? Hahaha. But really, thank you for providing me with a justification to start posting them.

I would like to please invite you to sit because I have plenty – honestly PLENTY – of things to share over this specific matter (Leon’s family). And, of course, to ask you to bear with me through them.

For anyone else whose interest might be picked over this: keep in mind that these are (obviously) my headcanons for Leon’s background and family and in no way is anyone else under the obligation to accept nor fully agree with them.

I wrote them down because I think A LOT about storytelling devices, stories structures, characterization and characters studies, world-building, fiction tropes, etc. and, since I’ve been a Resident Evil fan from age eight to this day, I also tend to spend a lot of time thinking about its characters – and the overall rest of its lore. Furthermore, as a way to help me write them in fanfictions or even in meta-analysis, I’m always thinking of what would make sense within these characters narratives and to their personalities.

Anyway. Back to Leon and his family!

There’s a very solid theory in RE Fandom that Raccoon City is set in Missouri. I really take this into account when I think about RE Characters because it helps me “placing them” before Raccoon, since not all of them were originally born/living there. Leon, for example, according to canon material, only decided to apply to be a police officer in Raccoon because “he was intrigued by the bizarre murders cases in Raccoon City” going in the news. 

Because of this, *my* Leon S. Kennedy:

– Was born in small Galena/Illinois. His parents moved to Chicago/IL when he was around 8;

– So, huge fan of the Chicago Bears (and the Chicago Bulls);

– Leon was lovingly raised by a very Catholic couple, Liliana and Isaac;

– Since Kennedy and Scott are, respectively, an Irish surname and a Scottish name and Leon is not an unusual name in Polish (check out about Polish Americans in Illinois and you’ll have a more proper comprehension of my thought process) and German cultures, I think Isaac would be a man of mixed Irish and Scottish heritage, and Liliana of Polish and German heritage;

– Although, his biological parents were actually Roberto (Italo-American punk) and Abigail, Liliana’s youngest sister;

– Robby was a drunken deadbeat, while Abbie was an airhead obsessively in love. Leon was conceived when they were both very young – his mom had sixteen and his dad eighteen;

– Liliana had three daughters (ages 10, 13 and 15) by then (1977), but she and Isaac always dreamed of having a little boy. They even tried to, but the attempts led to miscarriage after miscarriage, so when Abbie gave birth to Leon, the couple was pretty much devoted to their nephew, always visiting to see him and make sure he was properly being taken care of;

– Robby took note of all that and when Leon was only barely one year old, he packed his and Abbie’s stuff and imposed that he was leaving and that she should go with him, leaving the baby behind, telling her that surely Liliana would raise him as if he were hers;

– Indeed she did, albeit feeling distraught by her sister’s complete negligence;

– Isaac adored the boy, and Leon’s three cousins always treated him as their little brother;

– Also: Liliana decided she wanted to erase Abbie’s true connection to Leon, so she got rid of all the photographies that led to those deductions, leaving only the ones that showed baby Leon alone or the ones with the rest of his relatives, but not with his biological parents. Isaac never agreed with this, though. He believed that once Leon got older, he had the right to know his origins, believing that if their love for the boy was true he’d love them back and recognise their role in his life, so there was no need to lie. Thus, he kept a photo that featured Robby resting a hand in Abbie’s shoulder while she was breast-feeding Leon;

– Isaac was very ill when Leon was nearing his eighteenth birthday, and passed away just five months prior to Leon turning nineteen (Isaac was sixty-three years old by his time of death). Leon found that hidden photo after Isaac’s death since his dad left most of his personal belongings to Leon;

– Leon never confronted his mother on it, putting together two and two and realising his biological parents haven’t thought twice before abandoning him, so he shouldn’t bother with them either as he was raised in a genuinely loving and supportive family;

– As I said, Leon has three older sisters: Lydia (born 1962), Meryl (born 1964) and Olivia (born 1967). Two nephews from Lyds’ side, and a niece from Liv’s;

– Parents personalities: I picture Leon’s dad as a mixture of both Jonathan Kent (DC Comics) and Eddard Stark (ASoIaF). A firm, caring, kind, upfront and sincere man with high moral values, strong ethics and unwavering sense of justice, who valued honesty above all else and always believed in the best of people and in helping others, true to the “love your neighbour as yourself” commandment. Liliana was the more stern parent (especially with Lydia, always wanting and expecting her to set out a good example for her siblings), so I picture her as a fierce, proud and honest woman, passionately protective and supportive of her family, that dedicated herself entirely to whatever she put her mind into (domestic activities, city projects, EVERYTHING); 

– Lydia would be the “Patricia Arquette’s character in Boyhood (2014)” kind of woman. Kind-hearted, hardworking and amazing, but guilty as charged of the serious flaw of always being romantically involved with scumbags. A Geriatric Nurse, divorced twice, mother to Kilian and Luke – both kids from her first marriage;

– By the way, Kilian is a problem-child and Lucas is the emo kid. Leon has trouble dealing with both;

– On top of it, Leon have several difficulties dealing with Lydia. Being the most distant from him in age terms, Lydia always came off as a bit distant to and unnecessarily strict with him;

– Meryl is Leon’s lesbian best buddy. Confidant, a bit arrogant, always open to give advice, prone to bluntly point out faults in her loved ones and to get angry with Lydia. She graduated in architecture and is a state employee, working as an Urban Planner. Has cleaning OCD;

– Olivia is the sister Leon was closest to since it was with her he had the “smallest” age difference. Driven, headstrong, empathetic and an introvert, she’s actually the one who inspired him to join Law Enforcement and is now a detective in Massachusetts. Liv has a long-time relationship with Peter, whom she met during her childhood in school, and they have a daughter, Harriet (any coincidence with Olivia Dunham from Fringe (2008-2013) is on purpose since Olivia would be Leon’s perfect older sister, ok);

– Leon’s sense of humour takes much after his brother-in-law’s one, Peter, considering he spent a lot of time with him as he would be a frequent guest to their house;

– He fell in love for the first time when he was in middle school in his seventh grade with an eighth grade girl, Allison, who was an exceptionally good basketball player and would kick his ass in all the practice games;

– Allie has very evident native-American heritage, skin and eye colour, hair;

– It was Allie the long-time girlfriend who broke up with him right before Raccoon. She felt he was being distant even prior to his decision to be a cop in Raccoon City. In truth, what happened was that Leon feared his future being set stone too early in his life the way things were going. His wishes to have more agency over the shaping of his own destiny started driving him further and further away from Allie as he felt she was expecting their relationship to progress over time to the building of a family etc.;

– Meryl and Olivia both loved Allie and to this day they don’t get over the fact that Leon didn’t marry her;

– Leon unwillingly distanced himself from his sisters, though, only contacting them for birthday calls and holidays alike because of all of that government recruitment stuff and classified shit and also dealing with a heavy emotional load after surviving Raccoon;

– The only reason Hunnigan found out that Leon had living relatives was that Lydia called to give Leon the news of Liliana’s death in 2010 (by seventy-two years of age) on work-time. Leon, of course, was very shaken with the news;

– While Leon only knows what Ada herself lets him about her past, family, childhood and the circumstances that put her precisely where she is now, Ada knows everything there is to know about his past, family, childhood and the circumstances that placed him precisely where he is now because she’s very competent at her job and did her homework as a spy (this will die with her, but for countless times she fantasized about him confiding all of those mundane details of his life and backstory in her);

– I’m very convinced that in one of those nights Ada visited him for some hoochie coochie after like, six to eight months without seeing or talking to him at all, Leon had to break up the news that she came in in a bad time since he already planned for a Thanksgiving dinner with his sisters. Ada accepts the challenge because she’s been REALLY missing him (horny on main). Ah, and he’s quite upset with her because of that “six to eight months with no news at all” “little” issue. So, picture that. Please.

And that is all I have for “Leon’s family” headcanons. For now. As I warned: PLENTY. Hahahahaha, sorry! Hope this can provide some entertainment and delight to you.

[transhumanitynet]

ZS2.0: The Zero State Reboot [⅔]

This is Part 2 in a 3-Part article series, which briefly examines a number of ideas related to the “ZS Reboot”, and our current transition from establishing a firm theoretical basis to developing active project groups. You can find Part 1 here.

300 Social Futurism

301 Artificial Intelligence & Means of Production

Social Futurism is of course defined by the Social Futurist Principles, which demarcate the basic worldview of all Social Futurists, but that leaves a lot of room for additional ideas and approaches to solving the world’s problems. The world’s political-economic positions have been dominated by the poles of Capitalism and Socialism over the last two hundred years, and the heart of that distinction is a difference of opinion over how society’s Means of Production should be managed. Within the Capitalist system, production resources are owned by people with money to invest (or more accurately by companies on their behalf), who pay workers a relatively minimal amount and use their own profit to re-invest in the system. That system inevitably creates a cycle of increasing inequality between workers and investor/owners, along with other problems such as exploitation of workers, and of consumers, and of the environment as a whole (often referred to in corporation-speak as “externalities”; i.e. factors external to profit). Socialist/Communist systems after Marx tend (or at least claim) to impose some form of worker ownership of the Means of Production (albeit usually channelled via some State or Party apparatus), but they have a tendency to resort to extreme violence to maintain that system, while establishing new forms of radical political-economic inequality to replace the old ones. It should be no surprise that I propose balance rather than adopting either of these systems, but the most common “Third Way” solution seen over recent decades has been a very simplistic one which has created new problems of its own. The moderate-centrist position usually called ‘Liberal Democracy’ or ‘Social Democracy’ is essentially a kind of watered-down Capitalism, in which there are State-controlled and Private sectors, and (in theory at least) political and economic safeguards against extremism which favours one too far over the other. The problem with that milquetoast compromise is twofold. The lesser problem is that this “solution” naturally does not satisfy many of the more radical Capitalists and Socialists, who don’t like ongoing state control or problems caused by private companies (respectively). They can, essentially, never be satisfied by any simple compromise. Such people can be controlled, however, as long as things go well for society as a whole. The greater problem is (ironically) that this system has more or less worked since WWII, which should be a good thing, but it has allowed time enough for even larger, civilization-threatening problems to gestate. Those problems include nuclear proliferation, new technological risks (including societal disruption), resource depletion, climate change, economic instability, & resultant civil and international tensions.

In other words, we are rapidly heading toward Singularity, in the broader sense of the term. Things will come to a head by the mid-late 21st Century, if we are visionary, hardworking and lucky… which is to say that we have a chance to reach a higher civilizational level before the convergence would destroy us. If we are unlucky, or not visionary or hardworking enough, then that means that things will come to a head anyway, but we won’t be ready, and we will be destroyed.

So what solution do I propose? The need for an effective global solution exists on two levels. On the first and most pressing level, we need a dynamic balance which uses AI to balance Public and Private sector concerns on a case-by-case basis while assessing the overall health of the system, rather than deciding these things on a one-size-fits-all ideological basis. The second level is about the “big picture”, which is to say solving the serious problems which have accumulated over decades of political-economic incompetence. Once a new AI-based paradigm has solved the fundamental problem of socio-political-economic imbalance, its next step will be to solve the array of secondary problems facing humanity. To cleanse the human corpus of accumulated detritus, opening the way for it to evolve to a higher level of existence.

302 Automation, Employment, & Social Issues

Within the Capitalist system, the key theoretical issue is ownership of the Means of Production (as discussed above), but the Capitalist status quo is of course one that people are thoroughly used to. Most people don’t think about social issues on an abstract economic level. The more pressing concern for most people (who have any concerns about the system) is unemployment, and of course technological unemployment is a matter of concern to all Social Futurists.

The key questions are (1) whether the advantages of new technologies can be made to outweigh the problems caused by societal disruption, and (2) more broadly what changes must be made to our current socio-political-economic paradigm in order to integrate a revolutionary wave of technology without causing great pain to the majority of the population. In short, right now our society is simply not ready for a massive wave of technological disruption, and yet one is on the horizon. We must become ready. For more on the Social Futurist approach to technological unemployment and related issues, see my Transhumanity.net article “Social Futurist revolution & toolkit”.

303 Principles & the Social Futurist Party

As previously mentioned, Social Futurism has been defined by the Social Futurist Principles since 1st May 12011. Although ZS was officially founded with the release of those Principles, it should be remembered both that ZS existed for years beforehand, if not in name then in the form of various small precursor groups, and that ZS is not the official vehicle of Social Futurism. That organization is the Social Futurist Party (SFP), which represents the basis of an international alliance of Social Futurist groups, all cooperating and working in parallel toward the same goals.

Principles are important not only because they give us a consistent moral/ethical centre, but also because they allow a mass movement to operate in unison without centralized control. In other words, you don’t need centralized command & control when the organization/network can act flexibly as a distributed “swarm”. There is no need for direct, rigid, or hierarchical relationships between different Social Futurist groups, because each group must work according to the same Principles if they are to be considered Social Futurist, and thus will cooperate and adapt as necessary to that end.

400 Commitment and Stakes

401 Ideals and Goals

So, having considered the question of unifying Principles and goals, now we must ask ourselves what immediate ideals and goals ZSers should be focussed on. Our long-term goal is of course to establish the Zero State, from which we have already inferred certain mid-term goals. As I’ve explained elsewhere, we are currently working on the development of a small local community in Stuttgart (where I live), with an associated online community of 8,000 people by the end of 12019. Other small communities developed simultaneously will benefit from the template we develop over the course of the coming year.

In order to reach our goal for 12018-19, we need an online community of 2,000 members by the end of 12018. As I explained in Part 1 of this series, our chosen approach is to develop a small core community of no more than a few hundred members, all focussed on the development of technological tools. Those tools will later be used to reach out, to find new recruits and establish the Zero State, both within developing ZS communities and across society more generally. I will be posting about our initiatives to develop project teams over the coming weeks.

402 Inflection Points and Serious Games

Exponential processes are characterized by an “inflection point” in their curves, which is to say a point at which the nonlinear nature of the curve becomes apparent. In the case of accelerating change, we should expect an inflection point inside the next two decades, which is to say a point at which the acceleration has become obvious to all. Up until that point people could imagine that the amount of change might be increasing, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to conclude that if it continued this trend was leading toward some kind of total convergence or paradigm shift. After the inflection point, that kind of conclusion would be inevitable. In a world of accelerating change, work to survive and thrive comes with high stakes, and the timing of goal-deadlines becomes a complex matter. The stakes are high because a society-transforming wave of change removes many (if not all) certainties, and so failure to prepare as well as possible could potentially be a lethal error. Of course, knowing how to prepare amid accelerating change is itself difficult, and plans must be updated periodically in light of changing circumstances. Furthermore, the intervals at which you must review circumstances and meet critical deadlines become shorter and shorter over time, as roughly the same amount of change is packed into shorter and shorter time-frames.

Part 3 of this article series will now begin laying out ZS’ short-term plans, in light of the ideas briefly examined in Parts 1 & 2.

ZS2.0: The Zero State Reboot [⅔] was originally published on transhumanity.net

[gascon-en-exil]

Octopath Traveler Liveblogging

Chapter 2 for Primrose, Therion, and Tressa. As everyone except Olberic is slightly underleveled I’m doing these in order of recommended levels.

Also note that since this deals with story content past the opening chapters there will be spoilers.

Primrose

...Are all of her stories going to involve prostitution in some way? Not that I think that’s necessarily a bad thing since sex work is rarely addressed in gaming - and by this point they’re not even playing coy by trying to pass them off as dancers - but it would be kind of funny if her remaining two chapters found a way to work that in somehow too.

Stillsnow is pretty and chilly and not really the sort of place one would associate with brothel work, but I guess that might be the point. We can only assume Primrose found something thicker to wear off-screen like she said she would, lest this be a rehash of Silvia in Silesse in FE4. At least resident prostitute Arianna is dressed for the weather. The church of the Holy Flame also has a presence in the town, though that largely manifests in a bizarre interlude between the chapter boss and a priest who lost his daughter (gah, pseudo-Catholic priests with legitimate children again!) to suicide and is given one of the boss’s girls as a...replacement? That’s got to be some kind of milestone for weird and tangential incest subtext.

The theme of this chapter seems to be steering Primrose’s story toward a contemplation of revenge and the satisfaction it may or may not bring, but as far as JRPG philosophizing goes it works well in context. 

As for the boss fight, it was long but not very difficult. I was grateful to have everyone with their secondary classes if only for the added damage variety, and my overleveled cleric!Olberic was indeed incredibly useful for both tanking and healing. I wished I’d brought someone who could cure status, because the boss has an annoying move that stuns characters for several turns.

Party banter highlights: Cyrus likes the idea of dancing but is bad at it, Tressa is the party’s designated little kid (even though the wiki says she’s 18 so she’s not that young), and Alfyn gets a no homo moment that’s probably more about showcasing how unworldly he is. The broader discussion of House Azelhart’s motto gets commented upon not by Ophilia but by Olberic, likely because it’s referencing faith in oneself and one’s convictions instead of any religious faith. H’annit has mementos of her deceased parents, which is notable as it indicates that she doesn’t see her master as a father figure. Fathers already feature fairly prominently in the stories of all three other female characters, so that’s good for variety.

Therion

Meanwhile the overarching theme of Therion’s chapters will be convenient eavesdropping. Also propositioning random people in taverns for information, in what we must assume is a totally heterosexual way.

I don’t recall it ever being mentioned what exactly Orlock was researching the dragonstone for, although reading spoilers online suggests that it has to do with blood magic or something like that. It doesn’t come across at all in his boss fight apart from perhaps his ability to summon a golem after his lackeys have been killed. He’s got an interesting mechanic where said lackeys can guard his weaknesses, meaning he can take damage but can’t be broken.

Oh, and Orlick and his former colleague were totally gay for each other, and all the “like a brother to me” denials in the world isn’t going to clean up that subtext. Interesting how we seem to be building up to Darius betraying Therion at some point in the past - another tale of jilted gay lovers?

Party banter highlights: First of all I have to point out that getting these conversations is an utter pain in the ass, and constantly switching out your party at every plot marker to check for one drags down the pace of the pre-dungeon segments of the chapters. Even doing that I managed to miss H’annit’s, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to go back and see them apart from YouTube...which I naturally did because there was no way I was redoing that long boss fight.

Anyway, most of the banter for this chapter centers around Therion’s profession and how the other characters react to that. Tressa doesn’t like that he chases rumors, H’annit doesn’t like that he steals, and Primrose would like him to add some more flair but he won’t because no homo (probably). Olberic surprises Therion by revealing that he actually has a mind for tactics and isn’t the dumb meatshield he first appears to be. Therion flirts with Ophilia either genuinely or to fluster her - I’m going with the second one - and on the other hand Alfyn wants to take the guy out for drinks. Given something I read recently on a sidequest involving Zeph, this is less homewrecking than it sounds; I think the overall intention is to clear the playable cast of their NPC connections and leave them free to be shipped with each other in whatever arrangement one prefers.

Tressa

This doesn’t really feel like it’s shaping up to be Tressa’s story, to be honest. Between the unidentified author of the journal she’s following and new rival merchant Ali it’s a little hard to see where Tressa herself fits in not counting her role as obligatory player surrogate. Ali is interesting, sure, but the problem is that he’s too interesting and too directly involved in the conflict of this chapter, both in how he introduces Tressa to her latest money-making scheme and then one-ups her and later in his attempted opposition to Morlock. Meh, from the sound of it he won’t be making a reappearance until her last chapter, but then there’s still the journal author hanging over her otherwise aimless travels in the name of doggedly ethical mercantilism. As to how this chapter works as a treatise on fair business practices, it...sort of does? Obviously monopolies and price gouging are bad and get personified in the form of an obese rich guy who won’t fight his own battles (like Oliver from FE9 only less delusional), but then we’re also supposed to be questioning the smooth-talking sales pitches of Ali and his father because it’s sort of lying? I have no idea, and at this point I’m more confused than anything by Tressa’s personal moral code.

Oh, and this is the third dungeon to be somebody’s house. H’annit’s first dungeon is a forest, can there maybe be another of those? Or anything else? I have nothing to say about the Omar fight, and overall I’m still finding these bosses to be fairly easy even when they hit hard. Having an overleveled tank who can also do group heals and revives is OP.

Party banter highlights: Not much this time. I know I’m biased since I don’t find Tressa all that engaging on her own, but the other characters don’t contribute all that much here either. Primrose gets a motivational speech, Ophilia might have a crush on Ali, Tressa and Therion continue to not get along (and not really in a UST way), and H’annit disapproves of Tressa’s love of money which is amusing from a gameplay mechanic perspective: a Rogue path character doesn’t care for the motives of a Noble path character. Alfyn gives her some advice on friendships re: Ali that will sound a lot gayer in hindsight if the game decides to start shipping Tressa/Ali

[sapphirestream]

So I’ve been watching Thrilling Intent and I just need to get a rant out or I’m going to stay mad at Gregor forever. I know that’s not a valid solution because he’s a lovable character most of the time and he sticks around and needs to be forgiven if I still want to continue to enjoy watching the show. I don’t really trust the formatting to give the issue space to breath and be properly addressed rather than just falling into the background due to the serialized nature, so I’m going to get out all my feelings here and hopefully get some catharsis doing so.  I WILL acknowledge that I am a bit biased, because Ashe is my favorite character so far, and she’s the one who has the most conflict with Gregor on these issues. I still think I would hold these same opinions if the positions were flipped though. The first big conflict between Ashe and Gregor was, of course, the Charoth issue. At first, I agreed with Gregor’s stance. “Cool motive, still murder” and all that. And sometimes the only option to stop the killing IS to slay the monster even if it is hungry or just being itself.  And if regular slaying would have done anything, I would have agreed that it was the right thing to do, especially since we couldn’t fully gauge Charoth’s mental state at the time and had no way to know of its childlike understanding of the world. 

HOWEVER. However. Killing Charoth would not have done anything productive, and the only way to permanently slay it was to destroy it’s literally immortal soul. Just on an ethical level, that is a step so extreme it SHOULD be a last resort, as Markus stated. Even with all the monsters and even people they have killed before, this is not a step that they had taken. It is striking it beyond all chance of redemption, even after a complete wipe of identity. Other methods should be tried before it, even if they don’t ‘punish’ the creature for its wrongdoings or are risky. Fighting it is risky anyway. You don’t slay a creature because you want to punish them, you slay them to STOP them. Ideally, in the real world you relocate them before they hurt somebody, but even if a bear or something is put down, it's because you can’t control the risk, not because the bear is inherently evil and need to be punished for its sins. The goal is to STOP the monster, not get vengeance for those lost.  It also bothers me on a practical level as well. Gregor did have a point that this could lead to future troubles if something happens to Ashe, but honestly, it was the option that mitigated the consequences the most. Especially after they had already talked him down! Kylil even said she had experience coaxing spirit folk back from their wispy state, and Charoth had an entire island to socialize with now that he wasn’t locked in the temple by a short-sighted father figure. Even before they decided to set up shop in the Nine Shrines bar, Charoth had the beginnings of a loving childhood and a budding support network to help him work through his grief. Also, if you ever wanted justice or remorse for those who died, this would be the only option. Charoth will eventually have to face what he did during these times, but if you kill him he will truly be a new person. Some of the spirit folk will surely still blame him and be scared of him, but as it is now he has the framework to deal with that guilt and would deserve it. He could come to regret what he did during this time and work through that fear and try to earn forgiveness, rather than being unfairly blamed for a previous incarnation. If he has to grow up surrounded by fear for something he no longer is responsible for, that can only breed resentment rather than healing.  Killing him would have only put the danger off into the future, and erased whatever ground they had gained. He MIGHT have been ok, if Kylil had still taken a hand in his raising and the spirit folk had a good handle on separating out previous incarnation’s misdeeds. But you would have erased whatever good work and morals his father had managed to instill in him for twenty years. And he certainly would no longer have any love for humans and would take his cue of humanity from the clearly biased (rightly so! they’ve been burned before and we can be pretty awful) spirit folk. No way would Ashe have wanted to stick around on the island after that (nor would I blame her considering her backstory), so Charoth would have grown up with no human influence at all. Which doesn’t sound too great for humanity later, does it, if later it decides to continue wrecking ships, this time on behalf of the spirit folk? They might not have the temperament to do so, but Charoth would certainly have no qualms about it if they asked him in this scenario. This would not have helped the spirit folks goodwill toward humanity either, ESPECIALLY if Gregor had killed Charoth after a peaceful solution had been reached.  And destroying him utterly? Besides it being the most morally dubious way to go, it would also have potentially the worst consequences! Charoth is a GOD. He is the line between life and death! What happens when you erase that!? Does anyone even know? BEST CASE you just get a new one forming anyway, with an entirely unknown temperament. Alternatively, everyone could be stuck on the island forever, metaphysics fucked from the missing death god. There’s no saying that death itself wouldn’t be royally fucked in the localized area, and we already saw that even just Charoth stoppering it was causing problems. That’s not even mentioning if an unfriendly death god neighbor saw that the Shrouded Isles were undefended and decided to take over! This is only an option if you care about no one and nothing on the island, because this fucks them over hard. This is NOT a good deed, nor does it save anyone but humans. The party would just be one in a long line of people who have screwed over the natives and left them the worse for wear.   Legen’s Eye is actually what prompted this rant, as I had to take a break after watching the conclusion of Wizard Highschool. I have a lot less to say about it because it’s been percolating in my mind for a lot less long, but it was HIGHLY frustrating to watch Gregor shut down all discussion and go straight for destroying it. I’m still not sure whether they should have kept the artifact, but they CERTAINLY should have had a thorough talk about it without Inian and taken more than two seconds to decide. Inian should have been excluded not because she wasn’t part of the group or whatever, but because she was *actively shutting down discussion as well* If she had been willing to sit down and actually talk through everything then I would have been fine with her participating. If they felt that strongly in their convictions, they should have trusted them to shine through and convince the others. The group honestly probably would not have been able to put it to good use, but even if they had shoved it in a corner and let no one know they had it, it would have been a better option. Even setting aside if more magic would be better for equality, you never know if humanity+ is going to face some kind of natural or supernatural disaster down the line where that artifact could make a difference. You can never un-destroy something, and that's a decision that should at least have been talked about rather than decided by one person. They talk about not having the right to make those kinds of decisions, but they made a decision not just against their own party, but humanities(+) entire future, and banked against them EVER figuring out a way to use it wisely, or even the possibility of the necessity of its use.  As an example, I once had a dnd game where the players went into a timestop for hundreds of years and emerged in a world overrun by demons. The gates of hell had busted open and there was a war between the celestial and hellish planes with humanity being the unfortunate battleground.  Do they think such things are impossible? Do they think cataclysmic events will never happen where something like Legen’s Eye could make a difference in the material plane’s survival? No, it might not be the answer to all the world’s social ills, nothing simple will be. There is no magic bullet for our own weakness and greed. But this is the kind of artifact that should have been entrusted to future generations, as an ace in the hole if nothing else.  Overall I am just extremely disappointed in Gregor’s unwillingness to talk things out and his black and white thinking. I know it comes with the territory of a Lawful Good character, and kudos to his player for a doing a good job with him, but damn is it frustrating to watch. This show is so good and so investing that I just want to reach into the screen and argue my own viewpoints with the characters, and I’m glad they cover these hard issues that other shows would skip over entirely. I really appreciate how willing they are to tackle things like this, and we wouldn’t even have had a discussion without varying viewpoints. I know Gregor’s in the hard spot of being devil’s advocate a lot of the time. (ironically it’s not Markus! Isn't he a Demon AND a ‘lawyer’?). Still. Still. I guess the counterpoint to being so invested and tackling hard moral issues is sometimes your viewers are just going to have to go rant on social media to get in their own two cents. God damn do I need a friend who watches this show. 

[getoffthesoapbox]

[R:MotM] - Hwa-Gun vs. Ga-Eun

As I was browsing through various corners of the internet where fans of this show gather, I found increasingly I had a few things I wanted to say about the apparent differences between Hwa-Gun and Ga-Eun and why Hwa-Gun seems to be attracting so much interest despite being a secondary leading lady. I thought I’d explore this bit more, and maybe it’ll be useful to anyone who is looking for a different viewpoint to supplement their enjoyment of the show. =)

I didn’t come into Ruler with any preconceived notions about who was playing the heroine or which actress was being featured. I began watching Ruler fairly late in the game and was just in it to see a new sageuk that looked pretty. This maybe colors my perspective a little differently than those who’ve followed the story from the beginning.

From the beginning, it wasn’t initially clear to me who the leading lady would be, at least not until the crown prince chose Ga-Eun. Once he chooses Ga-Eun (very soon into the story), Hwa-Gun’s position as secondary heroine became solidified.

However, the viewership seems to fall into two camps: one camp which is disenchanted with Ga-Eun as a heroine and wishes Hwa-Gun held that position, and another which feels Hwa-Gun is where she should be and that Ga-Eun is the proper heroine, even if the writing doesn’t always feature her.

I personally fall between the two camps. I’m not at all disenchanted with Ga-Eun--I think she’s a lovely character and a charming girl. But I do find myself wistfully wishing as I watch the show that the creators had been brave enough to try the Hwa-Gun character as a heroine rather than a secondary lead. Since I understand the appeal of both sides, I thought I’d attempt to explore the draw and the appeal of the Hwa-Gun character, while still acknowledging the virtues of the Ga-Eun character. 

Capturing the Viewers’ Interest

On paper, there’s absolutely no reason why Hwa-Gun should be more interesting than Ga-Eun.

On paper, Ga-Eun is a perfect leading lady--she’s kind, sweet, loyal, and compassionate. She does everything right--her only flaw is that she perhaps jumps to conclusions too quickly and doesn’t investigate events thoroughly. But who could blame her, when these events involve the very emotional and tragic loss of her father, her only remaining family, and her entire life? She’s a brave girl who is well worthy of the leading lady position and the heart and affection of the crown prince. 

Unfortunately for Ga-Eun, her very worthiness renders her...a tad too safe, a tad too boring. And this would be fine if she were paired with a secondary lady of the usual secondary quality--a catty, ambitious, scheming girl who possessively latches onto the crown prince the way the false crown prince latches onto Ga-Eun. With a secondary lady of dubious quality, it’d be easy to root for Ga-Eun.

But Hwa-Gun is not such a simple character, nor is she lacking in her own charms. What Ga-Eun has in compassion, Hwa-Gun makes up for with wit, intelligence, and cunning. She’s a woman raised within the realm of power and politics, the granddaughter of the most powerful man pulling the strings in the land. She is a selfish, spoiled girl, but she’s by no means an unloving or unkind girl. While she is not as compassionate for the poor or the needy or the downtrodden as Ga-Eun is, she does have a deep and single minded love for the people who are closest to her, and to their people. This includes more than just the prince--her father, Gon, even her grandfather--and it’s within these conflicted loyalties that Hwa-Gun makes for a compelling and interesting character, in spite of her flaws. 

Flaws Make the Woman

I think the reason we now commonly see the call for Hwa-Gun to be the heroine (and I myself sympathize with this perspective) is for two reasons:

Real, genuine flaws in a heroine are unusual (especially in asian drama) and they make the viewer sympathetic because they touch on the viewer’s own humanity.

Hwa-Gun seems to be “earning” her happy ending where as Ga-Eun seems to be “receiving” hers. Viewers naturally gravitate toward characters who are active about solving their problems, even when inaction is more than justified (human nature to prefer action). 

Significant character flaws are rare for heroines in general, which is a strike against Ga-Eun from the gate. Hwa-Gun, as a secondary lead, is allowed the freedom to not be a perfect compassionate infantilized angel. She’s a woman, with dark sides, who is not always compassionate. But who in real life is always compassionate? Who in real life always does the right thing? Very few people, and even if you think you’re one of the exceptions, the chances are you aren’t truly in touch with yourself as well as you should be.

Everyone has dark impulses, and to see a secondary leading lady being allowed not only to have those impulses, but to not be vilified for them and to be treated with narrative dignity and respect is refreshing and probably is one of the things drawing the sympathy of some viewers. 

Development with the Crown Prince

One of the other problems with Ga-Eun is that she receives the Crown Prince’s love very early in the story, and thus has not much to “do” narratively other than feel betrayed by him temporarily when she finds out he might have been the one who killed her father. Perfect couples who are meant to be are boring for a viewer, especially over a long series like Ruler. 

On the other hand, Hwa-Gun’s efforts to act by the Crown Prince’s side and to keep him safe and alive begin to come off as more sympathetic when compared to Ga-Eun being gifted the prince’s love so early on in the story. Viewers like change and the unexpected, and so having the Crown Prince shift his affection to Hwa-Gun would make for an exciting twist after the predictability of his stable relationship with Ga-Eun. 

Of course, that’s not going to happen because the writers are very clear that the Crown Prince has no romantic feelings for Hwa-Gun. There isn’t even a shred of interest from his side, which also contributes to making Hwa-Gun appear more sympathetic. While, yes, it’s unhealthy for her to work so hard for a man who doesn’t love her, we can’t help who we love and everyone has felt the pain of an unrequited or unfulfilled love that lasted many years after it began. 

Relationship Balance

Another factor viewers root for in a pairing which I think might be overlooked in the overall discourse is relationship balance. If a character has too much of X, viewers prefer a partner who has Y to balance X, rather than another character who also has too much of X.

For example, Ga-Eun shares the Crown Prince’s ideals. This ordinarily would make for a lovely match in a pairing, because sharing values is very important for long term happiness in a couple. However, the Crown Prince is so idealistic and so moral that he doesn’t know how to break rules and sometimes puts himself stupidly in danger over foolish ethical quandaries. Ga-Eun, as yet another overly idealistic person, isn’t going to be able to pull him back from his foolishness because she supports all his causes. This is all well and good if these two would go off and be farmers or merchants together, but they’re going to be King and Queen. A little bit of self-preservation would be good in at least one of these characters for them to be hypothetically successful.

This is where Hwa-Gun surfaces as a “better” choice for the Crown Prince on a practical level. Hwa-Gun’s focus is different from the Crown Prince. She places a higher value on his life than on his ideals. However, she does not dismiss his ideals, nor do her own ideals conflict with his. She is perfectly happy to work in service to his goal, so long as she can keep him safe. This makes her arguably more suited to the task of standing at his side as Queen--she will fight his enemies and destroy everything in the path to his ideal, but she also won’t support any foolishness on his part and will help come up with counter plans that will preserve his life. 

The difference is very clear in episodes 29-30. Hwa-Gun first tries to persuade the Crown Prince just to take over the Pyunsoo Group. When that fails, she comes up with a second plan using her father’s antidote. Ga-Eun, on the other hand, simply tries to convince the Crown Prince to sacrifice her and “do the right thing,” which of course he would never do. The argument against Hwa-Gun’s method is that, of course, the Crown Prince would die before submitting to Dae Mok, as the Crown Prince himself points out with the analogy of the wolf and the bloody knife. However, as we see, the Crown Prince does what Hwa-Gun wanted him to anyway because he’d never sacrifice Ga-Eun or Chun-Woo. Ultimately, Hwa-Gun’s method was the method he took, not Ga-Eun’s. This demonstrates, yet again, that Hwa-Gun understands the Crown Prince’s situation better than he does, and that she’s a better planner to be at his side than Ga-Eun.

When a viewer sees this, although she may be moved by Ga-Eun’s selflessness, ultimately it’s just noble stupidity. If the Crown Prince hadn’t been immune to the poison thanks to his childhood experience, he’d be dead thanks to his refusal to play the game Hwa-Gun’s way. What does that mean for his court with Ga-Eun at his side? Results do matter as much as the process--having a kind process which ends in failure is no better than a cruel process which ends in results. The point is to strike the right balance so that the kind process leads to good results. 

Again, this isn’t to say the writers are in any danger of choosing the Hwa-Gun route; this is only to explain why some viewers may choose to prefer Hwa-Gun as a candidate for the Crown Prince. Hwa-Gun, for all her flaws as a person and her myopic focus on the few people she holds dear, is far better positioned to maneuver the political field than a nobleman’s daughter who grew up outside the palace. Viewers notice this (I had a similar situation when I began to support Yeonhwa for So during Moon Lovers’ run), and their allegiances may shift accordingly. 

Ultimately, while I think Ga-Eun is a fine heroine and certainly fills her role adequately, Hwa-Gun’s just a more interesting character in general thanks to her conflicted loyalties and her narrative position and her action-oriented plotlines. A standard sweet girl doesn’t stand much of a chance against an unusual smart girl. Ga-Eun had an uphill battle from the get-go.

This is not to say that Ga-Eun’s actress is inferior in any way. I think the fact that Ga-Eun is still able to endear herself to so many viewers in spite of her character’s narrative weaknesses is a testament to the strength of her actress. Hwa-Gun’s actress certainly isn’t as good, and her character’s being carried more by the strength of the character than the strength of the acting. 

Long story short, sometimes perfect heroines don’t have enough edge to them to carry the viewers’ interest. Sometimes viewers just want a little more from their characters, and if a secondary lady offers that, they’ll gravitate in her direction. I myself appreciate what Hwa-Gun brings to the show, and I hope her popularity leads to a new horizon for leading ladies in k-drama land. =) It’d be nice for creators to realize that sometimes it’s okay to let the ladies have some dark sides. In the meantime, fans of Ga-Eun should rest assured--her place as leading lady will never falter. Ruler belongs to her.

[random0gener8r]

August 21, 2017 Obviously, all of my feeling come from my perspective and so have nothing to really do with him. That was what I was trying to spare him from by not communicating. Next time, I’ll communicate that. It’s clear and concise with no emotional tones or spillover. Yes, I indulged my humanity. Yes, I reveled in my story. Yes, I chose pain due to fear. And that’s okay. I let my stories envelope me. I allowed them to whisper in my mind. I chose to play the game. Because I had a question and wanted an answer. I wanted my spiritual test. It started with an innocent viewing of a half million dollar home. I swear, it was 90% for the Center for Life Exploration. You don’t understand the vision I have. Hell, I don’t. I have an overview; with the Spiritual Center being the clearest at the moment as I’ve put the most focus into envisioning it. Point – I was trying to bring vision into reality, find out the questions and answers I’d need to think and learn about, while seeing what half a million could buy, the potentiality of lots, and enjoying looking at great big beautiful and yet completely wasteful unless shared, opened, and used to the benefit of the community, I mean WWWEEEEEEEEEEE! Fun stuff. But at a level I’m not ready for. Not even close. There is no magic spell. No inherent knowledge. You have to experience it. That’s the class system – at what level of monetary creation you have been exposed to. Rich people get to skip all the steps below. That’s what’s bullshit. And I’m not saying every one of them. I don’t know any to truly hold any judgement on the matter. You don’t see them around, though, if you get what I mean. I liked the people I met at the Ventana Staycation. I had a great time. It’s too bad none reached back out to me. Anyway, you, my dear, have to experience it for yourself. Take an idea and make it happen from the ground up. That’s what you’ve never done. The novel was too lonely. I didn’t have anyone to talk with it about. So, that’s what happened. I changed, not to my great pleasure, from wanting to be alone, do everything by myself, to wanting to share the process of creation. The lack of completion to date can be viewed not as failure to finish things you start (which really, there aren’t that many, jobs not included, ‘cuz I’m batting maybe 50-50 in that arena). I thought there was something wrong with me, with my abilities, but they were simply forcing me forward, as slow as I was to catch on. Now, I’m in FUN World. Where I remember it’s just a game that I’m playing against myself, with everyone around me having their part to play. It is my choice in how I want to perceive any encounter. I do bond too quickly for most people. I can’t help it. The more you know, the more interesting it is. But that’s me. I can see how that could come off as rather needy. I don’t know. I’ve never asked. Intense. Perhaps that’s a better word. Squirrel – Dipping down into full humanity is how I play my game. I can’t stay in FUN World forever yet. Don’t know that I’d want to. It down here in the aware emotions of pain and suffering that I find my truth reaffirmed. It is where I find my signposts and tests of my beliefs, ethics and morality come into play. That is the real battle takes place – between you and yourself and how much of your ideology, morality and ethics, and beliefs are you willing to violate to get what you want, to make the world conform to your desires – which are absolutely no more important or better, right, good, or than anyone else’s . However a person derives their code, those sets of experiences and choices is their ultimate right of choice (and from the highest level the experience you or I would have chosen had we experienced/lived that person’s life. We all really are doing what we were meant to do, the pain and suffering and need to make other people and this world bend to our will to spread our perspective like a virus (what every groups of individual people is wont to do by the way). Not one perspective is better or worse. It’s all a personal preference. Personal desire to create what we want, that which makes us most comfortable (the question then, to what expense? 1 person, 10, a million, the world?) How many perspectives must you assimilate until you feel safe enough? Life isn’t supposed to be safe. Death is inevitable. Yes, none of us want to lose our loved ones. Most are terrified of what comes next. Some preferences make some social situations less applicable to their perceived well-being. Those are the foundation of a person’s core personality or being. Everyone has a “right” and a “wrong” division. Those that don’t are mentally ill. Everyone else is on a spectrum. It’s time to regroup. That’s all. And redistribute. It will be okay. We promise not to rip your heads off, drink your blood, sing songs of hatred and abuse and curse you to whatever scares you the most, which is actually having to give a shit about our perspectives. You know they exist but you just don’t care because you’re thinking on global levels – well, you fucked that up as well. You are bad at your jobs. You are fired. But that has swerved in a political direction so, let’s move on from that. This could take a minute.  Section from AUG 17 ESSAY written today (Aug 17 section) In the dream, I was hanging with a couple, noting going on; they were kind to me, I had use of all of their facilities, but I didn’t consider that beyond an off-road vehicle that I would like to try. Point – we were cool, and so I wanted to make them breakfast, but suddenly everything went crazy. They left to do what they did out of the house, and I was preparing to leave, I was anticipating packing my car, and yet, making them individualized breakfasts, I guess as going away gift – then everything went wrong. The house hated me. A mattress hated me. I tried to banish it but the overall power of the house was to strong. There was no way I could win. And it just kept taking things from me. My parents. I couldn’t reach my cat. My clothes. The breakfast. My car. I couldn’t escape in the one thing I could always count on. (BTW my tire indicator came on today, FYI, I’d been thinking about it, but today, of all days. I mean, it was due, but really!!!!!) (Aug 21) And the wall tried to suck me in to eat me. The walls, floors, streets were twisted and roiling. Trapped in my car, viewed as through the lens of a Monet painting, I don’t know, the Starry Night guy with the comet, was that Picasso? (How sad, but you know who I mean so communication completed! Yeah for me!) Unable to escape, all of my possessions eaten by the wall, a curse placed on me, and my car turned into the mirrored innards of an eight sided die, I was tossed about, all control gone flipping and flopping against the hard glass, no longer in a painting but all hard iron and glass. And I awoke. And I knew I’d failed my spiritual test. My desire to force a favorable outcome goes against my code – gifts only. And I’d tried so hard, I mean, I really put my spiritual back into it. I have expended energy like that longer than I can remember. I really crossed my code – my moral, ethical and belief/spiritual choices that define my personal and only applicable to me, set of absolute judgements of right/wrong, good/bad, acceptance/fear. All ultimate dualities. And as I was looking for a test, there ya go, I got one, and I failed, but I apologized sincerely, yet was still mad ‘cuz it was only 10% about me, a girls gotta live, and not off her parents. I thought it was reasonable. I was wrong. Unable to leave it that way, I took a nap and I was rolled out into a nice world and all was forgiven, but that was their/my higher-self dimension, not down here in the mud, so I got pissed, both meanings. I cursed them back for their miserliness. I thought death thoughts. Then I had some cannasand and talked to Paul. And he cared. And that was all I needed. Just one. The next night was a fabulous dream of flying and reality jumping and enjoying the situation which was fun. So I knew that I had passed the following test to see if I’d actually learned anything. As Paul said, “there is always another test”. I don’t like wasting my time. So I took that experience along with Paul’s creating his own Meetup group as an inspiration to do what it takes to create the reality you want through forward motion, to set a date for the first Center for Spiritual Exploration (from her on out aka CSE) meeting. I was looking forward to sharing it and inviting him to help me out by participating, when the whole camping and movie meetup and having his daughter, situation occurred. I was curious to see how much of the Four Agreements he could apply to the situation. He used the word assume, so it shows awareness of his logical state which is effected by the emotional, and it was what it was. So, I’ve been binge watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and as Paul and I are restoring communicational clarity, and Nina the neighbor in Unit 5 came over to introduce herself, Kimmy goes to church and the pastor’s name is Denise. Yes, I know that the use of my name is on the rise. So, as I’ve been having revelations and positive communications, I get a signpost/note/”hey”, a confirmation of the application of experiences with personal positive outcomes in a way that didn’t transgress my Code. It felt like a congratulatory, “you’ll get there, you’re on your ‘really cool’ path.” Not perfect, never perfect as goal, or you lose all chance of spontaneous authenticity; strive for your best each and every day, whatever that may look like that day. Lazy language allows more miscommunications. No amount of communal agreement can make you “right” when you go against Your Own Code.

[purple-possibilities]

11 Questions

So I was tagged by the lovely @mouseymightymarvellous who has been championing a new age of…old age…uh…she’s been listening to me yell at people to love themselves and then cheering me on in the background. It’s so lovely to be so supported! 😊 mouse, can I tag you in this too? I would love to hear your answers to my questions! But if you don’t want to do this again I totally understand!

Here I go!

1. What is a memory you hold that fits the description “sun-warm”? When I was in grade 12, I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety. I felt like the most worthless human being to have ever lived, that I was already a has-been at 17 and that there was no point to being alive any more. In my Writer’s Craft class, on the last day, our teacher had us tape a piece of paper to our backs. We then would write something nice on other people’s papers. A lot of them were simple things like “you’re nice” or “I think you’re smart” or “you’re funny” but someone wrote on mine:

You inspire me to do something with my life.

I recognized the handwriting as one of the guys I didn’t know very well, but had done a project with once. It is maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever thought about me, to my knowledge. And I needed it so much back then. I felt like I had no worth to anyone, but then there was someone standing in my periphery who said I was an important piece of their world. I still have the paper. When I’m upset I think about that day. I’m actually crying while I write this, but they’re the good kind of tears.

2. What is a thing that you’ve read that changed your life? (short story, novel, play, journal article, poem, autobiography, scientific theory, whatever) I feel like there have been a few, but one that comes to my head is something I learnt from a Philosophy of Ethics course I took as an elective in university. Something I struggled with a lot growing up was feeling like I didn’t deserve to be angry, because I could understand why someone acted in a mean/selfish/cruel manner. It often led me to feeling frustrated because I had no outlet for my hurt. But I learnt from that class, something that Kant teaches actually (he deals a lot with intention in morality). He said (and I’m paraphrasing a lot) that while, at first, you should forgive someone for wronging you if they didn’t intend to, if that person continues to unintentionally harm you, then they have not learnt from their mistakes and can be held as guilty for that action. It taught me that just because you understand someone, doesn’t mean they’re not accountable for their actions. We all have to watch what we do, and if we continuously hurt people unintentionally, then we need to rethink what we’re doing, as ignorance as an excuse only gets you so far.

3. What is your go-to comfort movie? Not a movie, but if there’s a documentary on penguins on tv I will watch it, and laugh and cry and just—honestly, I get so emotional about penguins. I don’t understand it. They really make me happy, though. Any kind of penguin really. 🐧 Now you all know how weird I am 😳

4. What is the food you’re most likely to crave at midnight to fill the emptiness in your soul? Chips. All-dressed ruffles or Doritos (any flavour) or sometimes (while not chips) Kraft Dinner. Why did you make me think about those now???

5. What was a time you wished you could have been braver? I was walking home and I saw this guy across the street faceplant. He was on a bike and I guess there was a hole in the road, and he flipped over his handlebars. I wanted to go help him, but I was so so shy at the time, so when I saw him getting up by himself, I just walked on by. I still feel really horrible about it. Now I make a point to stop and help people even if they just tripped a little. I might be overcompensating.

6. What’s your preferred method of travel? honestly, whatever gets me to my destination with the most convenience, as dictated by speed, available parking (if applicable), and price. So it really depends.

7. What is your favourite mythical creature? The little girl in me screamed out “MERMAIDS!” even before I finished reading the sentence. So I guess that’s the answer, even though adult me hasn’t really thought about it. Adult me needs to do some research, but I like the elemental beings. Like salamanders, sylphs, undines, and gnomes.

8. What is your favourite article of clothing you own? …do purses count? I have the best purse. It’s so fantastic I love it to bits. It’s a cross body bag, just the right size to carry everything I need without being too big. So perfect for me!

9. What is the colour you most often paint your nails? Purple. Was it obvious? Although navy blue and black are close seconds.

10. What would the monster living under your bed be like? I actually met him as a little girl. Or at least I made him up. We had an agreement that, only when the lights are off, anything that is on the floor is his, but anything on the bed is mine. He is very reasonable. We get along well. I used to let him sleep in my bed, because I figured the floor was uncomfortable, but he had to promise not to hurt me. Sometimes we would cuddle. He was very good at comforting me when I was upset. We coexisted peacefully. what does it say about me that I turned to a monster for love?

11. What magical power do you wish you had? I actually had a huge conversation about this today with a friend. I would love to be able to manipulate time, not just overall, but on certain objects or areas. Like, as an example, if there is an apple and it has gone bad, I would like to be able to turn back time surrounding only the apple itself, so that it would be ripe again.

Anywho, I have to tag 11 people in this right? Then let’s get @letliv3, @cassandrasdreamworld, @itslulu42, @padlocked-quintus, @kunoichi-ume, @thetoxicstrawberry, @ofhealinglove, @bluefurcape (even though mouse already tagged you!) @moonfox22, @melodyfromanotherworld, and @denilmo and also whoever else wants to do this! Some of you I talk to a lot, some of you I speak to out of the blue, and some of you I don’t think I’ve ever said hi to. So “HI!!!!!” Please don’t feel pressured to answer, if you want to then go for it but if not I won’t hold it in any way against you!

So, questions!

What is your earliest memory?

If someone was standing on the street giving out high fives, would you high five that person or walk on by?

Would your rather go forwards or backwards in time?

if you could go on a trip to space, and be guaranteed to survive and live out the remainder of your natural life, but you could never return to earth, would you go?

Salty or sweet?

Do you want to have children? You can say yes or no if you don’t want to go into why.

Why are you on/what made you join Tumblr?

What inspires you?

If you had to convince me to believe/follow one thing, what would it be and why would you want to?

What is something you want people to know about you?

When faced with one of those games that asks “How many candies are in this container?“ do you just guess a random number, or do the math?

Anyways, thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing your answers if you choose to participate!

[cyallowitz]

Think I’m going to have to do a day-by-day here.  A lot happened since this was the first week that my son and I didn’t have school.  In fact, Monday was the first day since late February that we had nothing more than having fun.  So, we tried to get a bunch of things in, which oddly enough didn’t include video games. I’ll just do a break down for the father/son time.

Sunday/Father’s Day

I picked my son up in time for lunch since he was at his mom’s.  Figured I would let him be there for the morning for a certain reason that I don’t think I can say here.  Pretty sure one can figure it out.  Once we got back and had lunch, it was into the inflatable pool for the little guy.  Grandpa had bought two pump water gun things that aren’t shaped like guns.  You put one end in, pull back the pump to suck in the water, and then push it back to fire it out.  Needless to say, we all got drenched because my son simply stayed in the pool and blasted away.  Of course, he hit grandpa who was resting, which meant the garden hose came into play.  After that, it was drawing using YouTube videos.  We did a few pictures every day he was with me and I plan on making a Sunday post to show them off in about 2-3 weeks.

Monday

A lot of places are either closed or I’m not comfortable taking my son there.  So, we decided that the afternoon would be cleaning all of the cars.  Then, back to do some drawing and reading.  What did we do in the morning?  It was nice out, so we went to a small park that is on the coast.  Keep in mind that I’m on Long Island, which means the coast isn’t too far away.  It was a nice 1.5 hours where we saw plenty of animals and I realized that I need a point-and-shoot camera.  Cellphone doesn’t cut it when I’m trying to take a picture of these green monk parakeets that live in the area.  They aren’t native, so it’s weird seeing them.  Story is that the original birds escaped from a crate at JFK airport in the 60’s or 70’s.  Anyway, we also saw a bunny, horseshoe crabs, green heron, large heron, and a bunch of other birds.  It was a lot of fun.

Tuesday

With the weather being iffy on Wednesday, we agreed that the afternoon would be time to enjoy the pool.  We were going to have to deflate and clean it soon too.  With no other ideas, we went to another part, which used to be a garbage dump.  It’s much bigger than the previous one and it’s a lot of uphill walking to reach the top.  There are pygmy goats that they walk up to the top to take care of the grass too.  Tried and failed to get pictures of those damn parakeets too.  Not as many animals on this trip as we would have liked and it was very hot.  So, the trudge back to the car was met with a lot of complaining.  Little guy finally cheered up when we were buying ice cream toppings afterwards and I suggested we buy ice cream for lunch.  Very good decision.

Wednesday

I was burnt out and family were swinging by to say hello.  This meant that my son and I weren’t going to go on another adventure.  Instead, we worked on this all day:

We finished it just in time for us to have dinner, make our super sundaes, and watch some cartoons before he went to his mom’s.  This beast is still waiting on the living room table for him to add more characters to the inside.

And that’s really it for the father/son stuff, which is where the fun is.  I mean, we are watching the following cartoons at various times:

Cardcaptor Sakura

Kip and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Yugioh

Naruto

Fairy Tail

My Hero Academia

One Piece

He’s loving all of it and I think he’s starting to get the idea of characters not being simply black/white mentalities.  Bakugo in ‘My Hero Academia’ really helps he see how characters, and people, can grow.  Yeah, it isn’t a traditional way to teach a kid about various morality and ethical questions, but it’s working a bit.  I think.  Mostly, my son likes spending time with me watching these.

The rest of the week wasn’t nearly as exciting.  Found out that I’m not going to be working over the summer, so I’ll be focusing more on writing and my son.  The overall schedule has been mucked up due to changes that we knew were coming.  So, my balancing act is going to be shakier than expected.  I’m already 4 chapters into War of Nytefall: Anarchy and am hoping to get through #6 by the time my son comes back.  Then, I’ll try to work a little on Do I Need to Use a Dragon? (Fantasy Writing Tips), which will be the topic of tomorrow.  I’m going to be testing out the chapter titles.  Summer typically doesn’t have a lot of blog traffic, so we’ll see what happens.  If I can’t balance the two projects then I’ll finish the first one and save the other for August.

Aside from hanging out with some friends last night in a safe and distant manner, I got nothing else to report.  I’m tired and still a little anxious about life.  There were some incidents this week that I can’t go into here.  So, the weekend is going to be all about writing and resting.  Started watching an anime called ‘Rising of the Shield Hero’, which is pretty good.  Only two episodes in and it reminds me of similar stories, but I like a few of the characters.  Not the villain though.  Really hate her and she was only in the first episode, but she made an impact.

What are the goals?

Write more War of Nytefall: Anarchy

Prepare the file for Do I Need to Use a Dragon? (Fantasy Writing Tips)

Possibly start writing the above.

Help my son with summer school when he comes back.

Buy a point-and-shoot camera.

Buy more ‘Captain Underpants’ books, but that might wait until next weekend.

July 4th fun with the son

Charge the dust bunnies rent since they aren’t going away

First Non-School Week of the Summer . . . It Was Aight Think I'm going to have to do a day-by-day here.  A lot happened since this was the first week that my son and I didn't have school. 

[oilskirt7-blog]

Strong character moments can’t save a weakly plotted episode of Jessica Jones

The good news about “A.K.A I Did Something Today” is that Jessica very much feels like herself again. She’s once again faced with an impossible, impossibly frustrating scenario, but she approaches it with intelligence, empathy, and ruthless practicality, rather than the one-note petulance that defined her in the previous episode. The bad news about “A.K.A I Did Something Today” is that this episode sends her on a pretty lackluster journey.

Perhaps it’s just the binge-review exhaustion setting in (watching and reviewing this much content this quickly is nothing if not a unique viewing experience!), but I found this episode to be a real slog to get through. Unsurprisingly, Trish didn’t wind up slitting Sallinger’s throat in the previous episode, although she did brutally beat him without her mask on, which allowed Sallinger to capture her identity on film. He uses that image as leverage against Jessica: He’ll keep Trish’s identity a secret if Jessica destroys the DNA evidence linking him to Nathan’s murder.

Though Jessica knows Trish would be willing to go to prison to take Sallinger down, she can’t stand the idea of seeing the only family she has left disappeared onto The Raft. So she agrees to Sallinger’s terms, and the episode becomes a supremely boring waiting game as we watch Jessica figure out the logistics of how to sneak into a crime lab in Queens to destroy the strands of hair found on Nathan’s body. That Jessica’s ultimate plan hinges on two highly trained people leaving crucial DNA evidence just casually lying around a lab unprotected while they evacuate a biohazard is proof that there’s just not much there there. Sure, I chuckled at watching Jessica play the world’s grossest game of “the floor is lava” after causing a sewage backup, but that’s just not enough to hang a whole episode on.

The frustrating thing about my overall reaction to “A.K.A I Did Something Today” is that on a scene-to-scene basis, this is actually one of the best written, best directed episodes of the season. There’s some absolutely fantastic character work in this episode, like the hotel room sequence in which Jessica gently takes care of a near-catatonic Trish or the scene in which Erik opens up about the horrific experience of using his powers to discover his dad’s incestuous sexual abuse and having his whole family destroyed because of it. The scene where Costa shows up at Jessica’s door to quietly break a mountain of bad news is sensitively written by Lisa Randolph and beautifully acted by Krysten Ritter and John Ventimiglia. The problem is those strong scenes are in service of a larger season-long narrative that’s starting to get actively annoying to watch.

Part of the reason I enjoyed the first four episodes of this season so much is because they showcased this same kind of meaty character work without a lackluster larger narrative to drag them down. This episode in particular made me long for a truly procedural season of Jessica Jones, one that featured these characters and these moral questions but within a framework that’s not so heavily tied to a boring Big Bad.

Jessica Jones just hasn’t sold me on the idea that Sallinger is truly an intellectual mastermind. His wins feel coincidental or accidental rather than shocking and clever. In fact, according to this episode he actively miscalculated the fact that Trish would be the one to come after him, not Jessica. That Trish wasn’t wearing her mask when she attacked and that Jessica showed up just in time to stop her from killing him are two things he very much lucked into, not intentional parts of his plan. And just what was his original plan anyway? Was he going to let Jessica straight-up murder him and then use his photo shoot for some beyond-the-grave revenge? That hardly makes him seem like a criminal mastermind who can’t be stopped.

Speaking of murder…

There comes a point in pretty much every season of these Marvel Netlix shows where I wish our non-murdery heroes would just call up Frank Castle for an assassination assist because the ethical rigmarole this season has to go through to justify keeping Sallinger alive is just preposterous. If Jessica is absolutely adamant about not letting Trish go to jail in order to catch Sallinger legally, then clearly the more ethical of their remaining options is to kill Sallinger rather than let him go free to murder countless more people over countless more years. Yet for some reason, the discussion around letting Sallinger go is framed solely around the injustice of him not paying for his past crimes, not the threat of the future damage he could inflict on society.

Also speaking of murder…

I knew an episode this wheel-spinning had to end with a big cliffhanger to kick the season back into gear, and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what it might be. Would Dorothy somehow still be alive? Would Trish find a massive clue in her mom’s apartment? No, instead the cliffhanger is that Erik murdered the random evil cop who was introduced in this episode, and Jessica is maybe going to get blamed for it. Which… okay? It feels like more of a shrug than a big reveal, but I guess anything that gets us away from Sallinger and onto something new is a good thing.

Stray observations

Kith’s son Laurent is a pretty thinly written character, but you can feel actor Michael Hsu Rosen doing everything he can to inject some quirk and personality into his portrayal, and I appreciate that.

Erik’s entire M.O. was that he blackmailed people without actually knowing their crimes, yet in this episode he has a whole detailed file on all of Officer Carl Nussbaumer’s wrongdoing.

Hogarth continues to swing from being incredibly interesting in her moments of nuanced character drama to incredibly uninteresting in her moments of one-note villainy. In other words, she’s better as an antihero than someone who’s anti-hero. In this episode, she reunites with Kith (at least on a professional levels), and discovers Trish’s secret identity on the undoctored footage Malcolm hands over as he resigns.

I’m assuming the fact that Trish hired Hogarth as her lawyer will cause some conflict of interest. Hogarth can’t take down her own client, right?

While cleaning Sallinger’s blood from underneath Trish’s fingernails, Jessica saves a bit of it on a tissue. Expect Chekov’s bloody Kleenex to pay off later down the line.

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/strong-character-moments-can-t-save-a-weakly-plotted-ep-1835533442

[deythbanger]

Bible Arguments 9

By DeYtH Banger "Many of our biological instincts are nurturing, but some are thoughtlessly violent. Reasoning may be based on untested premises or inadequate information, resulting in bad conclusions. Many laws derive from primitive tribal fears or the privilege of power and may have nothing to do with morality." - Dan Baker "Speaking about morality, good is the absence of harm. To be good is to act with the intention of minimizing harm What else is meant by morality? Morality is not a huge mystery. Ethics is simply concerned with reducing harm. (There is a difference between ethics and morality—one is theory and the other is practice—but most people informally use the two words as synonyms, so I will too. Some nonbelievers don’t even think we need the word “morality,” and they have a point, but I am using the word in the informal sense of “how should we act?”) Morality is not a code." - Dan Baker "It is not pleasing an authority figure. It is not “bringing glory” to a god, religion, tribe, or nation. It is not passing a test of virtue. It is not hoping to be told someday that “you are my good and faithful servant.” Humanistic morality is the attempt to avoid or lessen harm." - Dan Baker "I think most believers are good people. Although religious doctrine is generally irrational, divisive, and irrelevant to human values, some religions have good teachings sprinkled in with the dogma, and many well-meaning believers, to their credit, concentrate on those teachings. Surveying the smorgasbord of belief systems, we notice that they occasionally talk about peace and love. Who would argue with that? Sermons and holy books may encourage charity, mercy, and compassion, even sometimes fairness. These are wonderful ideas, but they are not unique to any religion. We might judge one religion to be better than another, but notice what we are doing. When we judge a religion, we are applying a standard outside of the religion. We are assuming a framework against which religious teachings and practices can be measured. That standard is the harm principle. If a teaching leans toward harm, we judge it as bad. If it leans away from harm, it is good, or at least better than the others. If a religious precept happens to be praiseworthy it is not because of the religion but in spite of it. Its moral worth is measured against real consequences, not orthodoxy or righteousness." - Dan Baker "Mere Morality is all about. (“Do unto others” is decidedly not a good rule for masochists, psychopaths, or people with kinky sexual preferences, religious obsessions, or simply bad taste.) Religious groups such as Buddhists, Jains, and Quakers that are known for their ideals (if not always practices) of pacifism are more moral than groups such as Christian Crusaders, Muslim suicide bombers, and Kamikaze pilots, whose dogma has led directly to violence. We can make this judgment on the basis of lessening harm, which is a principle available to all of us. So the good values that a religion might profess are not religious values. They are human values. They transcend religion, not in a supernatural sense, but in the natural sense that they are available to everyone, regardless of our particular religious heritages or choices." - Dan Baker "What day of the week you should worship, how many times you should say a certain prayer, what religious texts you should memorize, how you should dress, whether women should wear jewelry or makeup in church (or whether their bodies should be seen at all), what words you can say or pictures you can draw or songs you can sing, what books you should read or music you should listen to or movies you should watch, what foods you should eat, whether you can drink alcohol or caffeine, whether women can take positions of leadership, if and how women should submit to men, how women should control their own reproductive future, who your children are allowed to date or marry, how gays, nonconformists, heretics, or infidels should be dealt with, how a class of privileged leaders (clergy) should be treated or addressed or whether they should be allowed to marry, how much of your money or time is demanded by the religion, how many times a day you should pray, what words should be said or what direction you should face during prayer…" - Dan Baker "If religious teachings cause unnecessary harm—and they often do—they are immoral and should be denounced. If we play C. S. Lewis’s game and separate out common human morality, Mere Morality, from religion, nothing is left worth praising on ethical grounds. (We might appreciate religious art or music, for example, but this is irrelevant to morality.) Turn it around and strip each religion of its weird supernatural and ritualistic uniqueness and what is left, if anything—such as peace, love, joy, charity, and reciprocal altruism—is Mere Morality, or humanistic goodness…" - Dan Baker "Since harm is natural, not supernatural, its avoidance is a material exercise. Harm is a threat to survival. It is disease, predators, parasites, toxins, invasion, war, violence, theft, parental neglect, pollution of the environment, excessive heat, cold, lack of food, water, shelter, and adequate clothing, unsafe working conditions, accidents, drowning, natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, volcanos, winds, storms, lightning, mudslides, coastal erosion … you can add to this list, but whatever you add will be natural." - Dan Baker "Intention is crucial when determining the legality or morality of an action. If you trespass on my property and trample through my garden while fleeing from an attacker, I will not press charges. If you do it because you hate my family, then I will press charges. In the first case, I can see that my garden is minimal collateral damage in the overall assessment of harm. In the second case, it is maximal harm, in context…" - Dan Baker "People who are selfish, greedy, and egotistical may indeed be trying to minimize the harm to their own personal lives, but if they are ignoring the harm their actions cause to others, they are not acting morally. That is what morality means. That is why we have laws against theft, homicide, battery, abuse, mayhem, and perjury. Mere Morality does not mean we should completely ignore our own interests; it means we should take all harm into account. If an action results in a harm that is much greater to yourself than to another person or persons, then it is not immoral for you to protect yourself. That’s why we allow for the motive of self-defense in a trial." - Dan Baker "Harm is still harm, whether it is social or not, but your body is your body, and if you are mentally healthy, and if your action does not affect others, and if you can cover your own health expenses, then harming yourself is a health issue for you alone, not a moral issue for society. It should be none of my business what you do to yourself. (Although, if you are my friend, I may try to talk you out of it.)" - Dan Baker "…his own fingers (or some other body part, as Jesus encouraged in Matthew 19:11–125), that is certainly harmful and destructive, and may be unhealthy, but the act is only immoral if it affects other people—and it might indeed, especially if others are dependent on that person. (In my case, as a professional pianist, it would certainly affect others.) If I know in advance that that man is intending to lose a finger, and I suspect there is no good reason for it, then I am the one faced with the moral question of whether I should try to stop him. I certainly want to keep people from harming themselves, and I think most of us feel that way." - Dan Baker "Similarly, virtually all women who choose to have an abortion are making a mentally healthy and rational choice, a difficult decision for moral and health reasons. I’m not directly comparing a fetus to a finger, although most abortions occur when the fetus is smaller than the tip of your little finger. Contrary to the dogmatic opinions of the misnamed “pro-lifers,” abortion is not killing an unborn baby." - Dan Baker "In my opinion, that is immoral. Mental illness or instability are not “evil” or immoral. The consequences of the actions of mentally deficient people may indeed be harmful, but we put such people in the hospital, not in prison. It is a health issue, not a moral issue. For society, however, mental illness is indeed a moral issue because those who are entrusted with the authority to determine the fate of such individuals have to determine the course of action that results in the least amount of overall harm to society as well as to the individual involved…" - Dan Baker "Instinct and law prejudge your actions, but reason, the real-time investigator, can re-judge them, using the harm principle as the measure. All three of these tools, taken together, can make a powerful arsenal for moral decisions. For better or worse, they are all we have…" - Dan Baker "We now know that acts of charity and compassion actually boost pleasure chemicals in the brain, similar to how we feel when eating chocolate, listening to music, making love, or laughing. Why do you hold the door open for the person coming behind you? It’s partly learned common courtesy, but it’s more than that. You don’t know that person, and might not even like that person. It’s not just reciprocal altruism—“Listen, buddy, you better hold the door for me next time!”—because you would do it anyway. You would feel bad not doing it. Why? Part of it is pure instinct, part of it is chosen social cooperation, and part of it is the little chemical…" - Dan Baker "Thomas Jefferson was a deist, living just like an atheist with no religious practices, but believing there had to be some kind of starter god, or impersonal force that got everything going. The deists were the pre-Darwinian freethinkers, lacking a model for the origin of life. But Jefferson got it right about instincts, anticipating the theory of evolution by many decades. Charles Darwin famously wrote: “It has, I think, now been shewn that man and the higher animals, especially the Primates, have some few instincts in common." - Dan Baker "Frans de Waal, in his book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, gives many examples of nonhuman animals acting compassionately. Altruism is an evolved behavior that does not rely solely on having a “higher” brain that can construct formal moral philosophies." - Dan Baker

[homeschoolbase]

Speaking as someone who grew up in a homeschooling family, I'm very grateful that I did.

Speaking as someone who grew up in a homeschooling family, I'm very grateful that I did.

Someone referred me to this subreddit a few days ago, and I've been lurking here since. It's been very interesting reading all of the experiences on here, albeit many of them are more from the vantage point of the parent rather than the student. It is still very obvious that many of you are deeply invested in your children's futures, and that's something that makes me very happy. My siblings and I were all homeschooled, all eight of us actually.

We grew up in an area with a lot of other homeschoolers as well, and overall there was a strong current of self sufficiency, heritage, and simplicity that ran through our entire community. We didn't grow up with a TV or internet or a lot of modern accessories, but I think that even if we did, they would have likely remained untouched anyway, there was always a lot of ways we could entertain ourselves or pursue our interests.

Now that we're grown up, our parents are now grandparents, and we all have our own families to take care of. Homeschooling is a big part of who I am today in terms of knowledge, skills, and character. I want to extend the same sort of gift to all of my children as well, and so far, I have. My parents were motivated to homeschool us because they were disillusioned with the educational system back then and mainstream society in general.

It wasn't really particular religious, but we were raised to value our heritage, have self awareness, have self control, and behave morally. The overall method they used I'd say was largely a hybrid between classical education and unschooling. It wasn't very rigid at all, each of us advanced at our own pace. You could describe it as focusing on building a strong foundation for each child when they're young, but then after that, let them immerse themselves in what they're passionate about.

We each were taught the 6 Rs, in no particular order, each are considered vital, like an organ of the body:

Reading: Pretty self explanatory, we were each taught how to read, starting at 3-4 years of age and building up on that. Fortunately each of us quickly gained a strong passion for reading. We all were ahead of our grade level quite quickly.

wRiting: This doesn't need much explanation either. We each had to learn how to write. A lot of it was penmanship, spelling, grammar, etc. It didn't have to be perfect, but the goal was to be competent. A lot of it was intertwined with reading.

aRithmetic: You have to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, don't you? This also extended to other basic concepts in math that are useful in everyday life. Personally, I love math, and I quickly got pushed ahead to more complex topics such as Algebra, Calculus, Game theory etc.

Roots: Our family, particularly on mother's side, has a very extensive and vivid oral and material history. My maternal ancestors have kept tons of documents, photographs, artwork, journals, etc. over the centuries. My parents considered passing on our family's heritage to be very important.

Rhetoric: My dad loved to teach us this topic, The Art of Discourse. Logical fallacies, critical thinking, persuasion, and cognitive biases were among the many things we were taught to recognize and use from as early an age as possible. Socratic dialogues were a big part of this, I loved this topic just like my father does.

masteRy: This, "R" would be the most nebulous. Think of it as the self awareness and self control I mentioned earlier. We were taught to cultivate compassion, restraint, industriousness, and humility. My parents didn't have a lot of rules, rather they focused on helping us build up our moral compass so we wouldn't need rules to act ethically.

Despite how it might sound, the way we were taught was far from rigorous or demanding. We each advanced in each of the "Rs" at our own pace, as long as we were making a genuine effort to advance. This worked out very well, mom had an amazing talent for motivating children to want to succeed. It wasn't one of the 6 Rs, but we all naturally were multilingual children just by sheer exposure. In our household, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, German, and Danish were thrown around as easily as English as a part of honoring our Northwestern European heritage.

After we became competent in each of those areas, we could fully immerse ourselves in whatever interested us. My parents kept tons of books in our house on a wide variety of topics to choose from. I'm talking a lot of books, ranging from things like linguistics, literature, biographies, mathematics, history, sociology, philosophy, physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, medicine, psychology, neurology, engineering, you name it there was likely a book that was at least tangentially related to it. Both of my parents were avid readers who loved to collect all sorts of tomes, the majority of them weren't even in English.

I mentioned this a bit before, but I loved mathematics as a child. So by the time I was beginning to hit puberty I was delving into things like dynamical systems, topology, game theory, statistics, and harmonic analysis. I probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to advance at the pace I wanted to if I was in public school. However, I also really liked studying linguistics, biology, history, spirituality, and philosophy. Although really, I liked to read anything I could get my hands on. My siblings had their own interests as well and they got to dive as deeply as they wanted to as well.

One passion I clearly got from my father was his love of ancient languages and literature. He was absolutely enthralled by ancient languages and their poetry, especially Indian epics like the Mahabharata. I quickly gained an interest in Sanskrit among other things quite early as well. Later on, I'd begin to study Avestan, Pali, Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, Latin, Old Norse, etc. later on. I would continue to dabble in tons of languages over the course of my life. I'd consider it one of my hobbies that I try to spend some time everyday on.

The languages I mentioned earlier are the ones I'd be roughly on the level of a native speaker in, mainly because I began picking them up at a really young age. Fast forward 25 years later, and I'm pretty good when it comes to Romance languages, not quite as fluent as a native, but I can keep up very well. My Balto-Slavic languages are also pretty good if the conversation isn't too intense. My Semitic languages could be a lot better, it helped that I had a good foundation in Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, but in terms of speaking them naturally, I'm only so-so.

I think that this entire homeschooling experience is what really helped me to become successful later in life, moreso than if I was educated in the public school system. I could talk about this kind of thing all day, I mainly just wanted to share my experiences. I hope that it strikes a chord with some of you, or, if you're new to the topic of homeschooling, perhaps it will even inspire you. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have as well. Keep up the good work you guys.

[brentchampagne]

Ranking BB3 Houseguests -- The Season of Principles

From worst to best, I’m going to share my opinions with a small disclaimer: all my opinions are based on information from the edit and what information I can find online. Also, they’re just opinions and even though I think they’re likely right, you guys can have different ones.

I dubbed this season as such because I found a theme in the dichotomy of what’s moral and immoral and the way it’s presented throughout the season.  Most of the people on this list went down with their ethics, some went down selling out their good graces, but everyone’s choices in that concern paved the course of the game -- and it certainly impacted the outcome.

12. Lori Olson 

I mean, come on.  Lori started a fight with almost the whole house because people were rightfully upset about Gerry not washing his hands after using the bathroom.  She got Danielle to confront Gerry about it and even he wasn’t that upset.  Then, post eviction, she says she would only part with 50k of the prize money to play again.  She was out of touch and emotional, and if the house had decided to evict Amy that week instead, Lori likely wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

11. Tonya Paoni

She couldn’t drop the nice subservient housewife exterior for a second, not even during her confrontation with Amy in which she still couldn’t drop the welcoming smile.  I grew up in a community filled with women just like her.  They usually don’t have a strategic bone in their body, and Tonya certainly didn’t give me any inclination that she was any kind of savvy.

10. Josh Feinberg

Josh couldn’t stop being annoying for a minute, and a lot of houseguests hated him for it.  I thought his sympathy segment was a waste of time, especially because I got the vibe he wasn’t well-liked outside of the game either.  He strategized, but he wasn’t particularly good at putting things into terms that benefited whoever he was giving a pitch, so it seemed like he just expected people to play for him without really having the reflective capabilities to realize it.  I guess he gets some points for being a blatant scumbag in a season where everyone prized themselves on their morality, but realistically he’s no where near Lisa and Danielle levels.

Also, if it speaks for anything, I originally forgot to put him on this list.

9. Eric Ouellette

Eric sacrificed his game to have a passionate affair with Lisa, but where she eventually remembered what she was playing for, he didn’t and was evicted for it.  You have to be pretty low on the list of best gameplay if you’re in a showmance alliance and you go out fourth.  To top off his disappointing game, Eric and Lisa’s relationship clearly didn’t amount to much.

At least he was nice to look at, not much else of interest to say about him.

8. Chiara Berti

She didn’t do much but talk about sex and rub people the wrong way (pun intended).  I really go back and forth between putting Chiara lower.  In her attempt to get rid of Josh, she put her showmance on the block with him because she didn’t want him to be a vote for Josh to stay.  That’s solid logic at its core, but out of the pool of other possible nominees, there were probably other people who were shaky on sending him out, and if there really weren’t, then one vote for him to stay isn’t going to matter.  I have to think this decision played a part in cracking her relationship with Roddy, but the nuances of their romance in the edit was a bit vague anyway so I don’t know how real it was to begin with. 

She was evicted the week after her shit-show of an HoH during a petty squabble with Amy and, to her merit and for reasons in which I’m still unclear, the entire house was sobbing, so I guess her social game was pretty good.

7. Gerry Lancaster 

I have to give sympathy points to older people who don’t go out early.  I also have to give points because Gerry was not only the first ever veto winner, but also the first ever to win veto more than once.  However, he cannot be ranked higher because his game motives tended to be cryptic, weird, and a little self-important.

Also, he failed to recognize how uncomfortable he made the other houseguests.  Someone who lacks so much self-awareness generally isn’t a real contender for the win.

6. Marcellas Reynolds 

I think the general synthesis of Marcellas’ game tends to be unfair. He actually had a good read on the house and somehow maneuvered his way through the game after being the week one target.  His biggest downfall was trying to marry his game with his real life morality.  He put his closest ally Amy on the block during his second HoH, and while she didn’t go, he never seemed to grasp how dangerous that could have been for him.

Okay, people give him shit for not using the veto to save himself, but given it was the veto’s first season and the rules behind it weren’t consistent throughout the whole game, I have to give him a bit of reprieve.  It really seemed like the cast as a whole didn’t understand the gravity of the veto itself, and veto culture has definitely changed since 2002.  Of course it was a dumb move, but it was consistent with the way Marcellas had been playing, and prior to that moment no one had made the example as to why you don’t do that.

On top of this, I have to give him points for being one of the few inoffensive gay men to be cast on the show.  Isn’t that sad?

5. Roddy Mancuso

Roddy’s game took a bit of a nosedive towards the end, but his longevity in a house that seemed to be anti-showmance (and on top of that, being at odds with Danielle the whole time) speaks volumes about him.  Houseguests often talked about his persuasive capabilities being the reason for him to stay, but we saw many segments where his unending knowledge and charisma skills actually made a lot of the houseguests feel isolated.  He could have taken home the win if he used those tactics to bolster his relationships with people by talking about things they cared about, but hey, when can we ever expect a straight white guy  to talk about other people’s interests.  So while he definitely had the tools to pull off an amazing social game, he did not use them to his full advantage, and he certainly did not seem the least bit interested in using them to take out the people targeting him.

Also ??? maybe don’t tell the girl you’re on the block with that you can’t vote to keep her if she uses the veto to save you...

4. Amy Crews

It seemed like Amy was beat to the ground every week.  She annoyed most of the houseguests and drank a lot, but she stuck to her guns and handled every nomination with the utmost serenity and grace -- even when Marcellas, her closest ally, nominated her for extremely personal reasons.  Her social game was equally a mess and a masterpiece, and she made a lot of personal game moves instead of logical ones, but she fought like hell to be there and managed to stick around even as a returning houseguest -- a feat a lot of buyback winners cannot boast.

I gave her points for never allowing people to control her -- namely, her drinking habits.  Everyone’s overwhelming need to do that annoyed the ever-loving shit out of me (looking at you Marcellas).

3. Jason Guy

Jason was a very genuine guy, and he was able to use it to his advantage because genuine Jason was sweet, caring, and virtuous, so a lot of houseguests thought he wasn’t capable of scheming even when he was.  However, his disposition meant he was easily trusting.  After being pulled in different ways for much of the game, he ultimately doubled down against Roddy.  Roddy’s utter ineptitude at getting out his adversaries meant Jason stayed safe, but I have to wonder if Roddy would’ve put Jason on the block with Danielle if he had the chance.  It all worked out in the end, but I have to dock points for what I feel was a glaring mistake.  Some people argue he was the true deserving winner of bb3 -- and he would’ve been a good one -- but he did not have the backbone to make a lot of necessary moves, and I believe he may not have gone as far as he did if certain people weren’t in the game.

But aww, I can’t be too critical of him because he is so adorable (and damn boy, continue to work your angles).

2. Lisa Donahue

Lisa won.  That should be enough said, but while her game was almost perfect, she definitely dipped a bit along the way.  The showmances this season seemed to be more concerned with feeling each other up instead of being the huge threats they normally are, and so I have to dock points for her relationship with Eric -- especially since it almost did her in.  After he left, though, she buckled down and slipped between the cracks, saving face with a lot of her former allies (Chiara, Roddy) and then stabbing them in the back when she needed.

And she definitely gets points for somehow making Jason believe she was less of a threat to win the game than Amy who a) had been rubbing people the wrong way all summer and b) was already on her second chance.

1. Danielle Reyes

Surprising a grand total of no one, Danielle gets the top spot.  How could she not?  Her robbery literally changed the make up of the game itself with next season’s addition of the jury.  While the game unfolded in front of her, she gathered allies during any given fallout as if trying to build the endgame in her own image.  She made her targets known but didn’t try to strong-arm anyone else’s decisions, which seemed to reinforce people’s trust in her.  Most impressively, people recognized the influence she had in the game and how big of a threat she was, but they never put her on the block, cementing her at the top of a list of players spanning two decades.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe she would’ve won even with a sequestered jury.  She made a lot of blatant, cutthroat moves in the house that made people regret trusting her, and I don’t think just keeping her DR sessions from the other houseguests would’ve changed that.

Season Overall:

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, and I don’t know if it’s just because current seasons feel a lot more different, but the set-up was not my favorite.  It was clear production was still working out a lot of kinks with the addition of the veto, but a lot of the competitions were outright boring and lacked a lot of ingenuity (the slip and slide comp) and the veto rules were inconsistent which bothered me.  Praise be to production for casting a solid group of people because without their stellar dynamic I think this season could have been super bleak.