#apparently all of zero lessons were learned from 2016

[blackfemmejeanvaljean]

joe biden dropping was almost good news until I saw people unironically calling themselves kamala stans

y'all wanna lose lose huh

[tumbling-odyssey]

Games I played in 2020

Just felt like getting my thoughts out on all the games I played this year. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years but I always let it pass me by. Well not this year! Fuck you laziness! 

I played the first half in 2019 but finished it in 2020 so I guess I'll count it. DQ11 was my intro to Dragon Quest and what a good starting point. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is one of the best traditional JRPGs on the market. Characters, story, combat, it all clicks in just the right way to make a flawless game... until the end credits roll that is. 

I have no idea what happened with the post game but by god does it dive off a cliff. It undermines everything you worked to do in the main plot. The characters act brain dead and it shamelessly reuses events from the main game. Please pick up and play DQ11 but for the love of god just stop when the credits roll.

Doom is a game I knew I'd like. The heavy metal ascetic and soundtrack were right up my alley, but I just never found the time. With Eternal on the way though and having found it on the cheap at a pawn shop I figured there was no time like the present. Needless to say but I was right. I loved everything about this game. The thrill of combat, the screech of the guitars, and the silent take no shit attitude of Doomguy. Make no mistake though, I SUCK at this game. I played on easy but still got my ass handed to me on the regular. But I don't care, I was having way to much fun.

I flipped my shit when this game got leaked at the tail end of 2019. Zero 3 is my all time favourite game. To celebrate this getting announced I went and 100% Zero 3 as I hadn't done it on my current cart, and Zero 3 was still the first thing I played when I got this collection! I love that game to death and I’m glad to have it on modern consoles again. As I was under a bit of time crunch with other games releasing soon I only played 2 other games in the collection Zero 4 and ZX Advent. Until the DS collection those and 3 were the only Zero/ZX games I had so I have a lot of nostalgia for them. 

Zero 4 hold ups better then I remember. Not as good as 3 but a damn solid game with tweaks I honestly wish hit the series before its end. I remember having issues with the stage design and ya it’s not perfect, but it’s far from as bad as I thought. For ZXA this was the first time I beat the game on normal difficulty. For some reason the ZX games have always given me more trouble than the Zero games, so finally beating one on normal was very exciting. Maybe I can now finally go and beat ZX for the first time...

The Mystery Dungeon series rising from the depth to punch all those unexpecting in the face was a very welcome surprise. I had a lot of hype going into this one as I have very fond memories of my time with Red Rescue Team and even more with Explorers of Darkness. And the game lived up to it! The remastered music is great and crazy nostalgic, the 3D models are well used and don't feel as stiff as they do in the core series, and the QOL changes are near perfect... So why did I drop this game like a rock once I finished the main quest? 

Anyone familiar with Mystery Dungeon will know that the post game is the real meat of it. The story is short and all the really cool shit comes in after it's done. But I just couldn't bring myself to put more time in after I finished said story mode. I'm definitely chocking that up to me just not being in the mood then an issue with the game. Here's hoping we get an Explorers DX sometime soon. That will fucking hook me for all it's got.

Second verse same as the first. I loved this game and sucked at it horribly. Out of all the games I've played this year Doom Eternal is the one I want to go back to the most. I was not the hugest fan of some of the changes made and retained a stance that I liked 2016 better. First person platforming has never been a fun experience in my opinion and Eternal did little to change that. And I know this a lukewarm take at best but fuck Marauders!. They are so unfun to fight and ruin the pace. The Marauder in the last mook wave took me so long I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish the game. But the more I've seen of Eternal after my playthrough makes me think I was being far to harsh. I haven't played the DLC yet either. Mostly cuss I haven't heard great things about it. Gonna wait for the rest of it to come out to see if it's worth getting. Might just replay to whole game at that point to see if it clicks with me better.

This was my second favourite game of the year, and was going to take the top slot until a certain other game came out. Addressing the elephant in room right away, I hated the ending. But I was expecting something like that, I think we all were. I won't let the ending ruin the rest of the game though. Not gonna let 1 segment colour everything that came before it. We have to see how the later parts play out to truly see if this ending was trash or not anyway. 

It took Square over a decade but they finally got an action RPG battle system that works and feels good to play. This may be my favourite battle system in an RPG period honestly. All four characters are a blast and it only gets better the more time you spend with it. Figuring out the nuances of each character’s skills and how to combine them not only with the skills of the others but how to enhance them with the right Materia set. This makes fights thrilling and satisfying when you finally best whatever was giving you trouble. Tis was the best way to bring 7′s mechanics into the modern landscape while also fixing the BIGGEST issue the OG had. The fact every character feels the same aside from Limit Breaks. 

All this on top of graphics that just look fucking stunning, a few glitched out doors aside. Fuck I still feel blown away looking at the characters models (mostly Tifa) and see how god damn pretty everyone is. Also Tifa’s Chinese dress is gift from the Gods and I still haven’t picked my jaw up from the floor after I first saw it.

In my circle of the internet there was a lot of hype for this game. So much so that I ended up buying it to see what all the hubbub was about. I had never played a Streets of Rage game before and my only experience with beat'em ups was playing a LOT of Scott Pilgrim and last year's River City Girls. Turns out Streets of Rage plays quite a bit different and it kicked my ass! So sadly I had to switch to easy to make it through but I still had a fun time with it. 

I started playing mostly as Blaze but once Adam hit the scene oooooh fucking boy. I didn’t play anyone else. There's a deceptive amount of content in this game. You can unlock almost every character from the previous games and all of them rocking their original sprites and moves. If I had more of a connection with this series I'm sure I would have gone nuts on unlocking everything. I stopped after my one playthrough and I was happy with that. Always glad to support a long overdue franchise revival.

To properly talk about P5R I think I need to air a lot of my feelings on the original game and the importance it has to me. You see, prior to 2017 I barely played games, only sticking to specific franchises. AKA Pokemon and Mega Man/Mega Man like games. Until 2016 though I still bought a lot of games. Eating up Steam sales and deals I found at pawn shops. This lead to a Steam library and shelf filled with games I've never touched outside of maybe an hour or 2. So in 2016 when I took interest in the newly released Kirby Planet Robobot I made a deal with myself. I could get the game but I HAD to beat it.  And I did just that, gaining not just a new fav Kirby game but a new rule for game purchases. If I knew I wouldn't beat a game I was not aloud to buy it. Now what does ANY of this have to do with P5 you may ask? Well... almost everything.

 I was immediately interested in P5 when it hit the west in 2017. I loved the 20 or so hours I but into P3 years ago and really liked the P4 anime I had watched around the same time. So of course with all the hype around it I wanted to dive into the series full force with P5. But I knew myself. Putting over 100 hours into a game was beyond me and I had a weird relationship with home console games as I was predominately a handheld gamer. Add in the fact I didn't even have a PS4 and I was convinced P5 would be something I always wanted to play, but never would. So when I went to the mall with a few friends and they showed me that P5 had a PS3 version, I had a dilemma on my hands. I knew I wanted to play it and I now had a way to do so. But doing that would require me to change 2 HUGE hang ups I had with games. Would I being willing to waste 60 bucks with so much working against me? Apparently I was. I immediately started going to town on this game. Making sure I spent no less then 2 hours a day playing NO MATTER WHAT. Which may not seem like a lot but it was to me... at the time.. I also had just moved to my current house, so coming home from my still relatively new job and going straight into P5 was the first real routine I formed during this heavily transitional part of my life. 

I of course ended up loving P5 and put 200 hours into it. As such my outlook on gaming was forever changed. Console games were no longer out of reach and I knew I could handle playing monster length game. I started playing way more games then I ever did before and trying out generas I never thought I would play. P5 is the main reason for this and why I'm able to make a post like this. To actually touch on Royal though? It's unarguably the better version of the game and Atlus learned all the right lessons from P4G. The new characters are great and the added section at the end is possibly the best shit Atlus has ever written. I only wish Yoshizawa joined the party sooner so I could play as her more. 

The release of this really came out of nowhere huh? Wayforward announced it was being made mid way through 2019, then there was its weird half release on the Apple store... and then suddenly it was out! Very little fanfare for this one. Is that indicative of the games quality? Luckily no. Seven Sirens is a solid addition to the series and follows up Half Genies Hero nicely. The game goes back to Shantae's Metroidvania roots and makes a TON of improvements. 

Transformations are now instant instead of having to dance for them (don't worry dancing is still in the game) making the game feel more like Pirates Curse in its fast flow. They also added the Monster Cards which take heavy inspiration from Aria of Sorrow's Soul system. A feature I'm happy to see in any Metroidvania since Aria is one of my all time favourite games. Sadly though the game does not take the best advantage of these improvements. 

Over all the game feels kinda empty. The dungeons aren't super exciting to explore nor are they challenging in any way. And the plot is very repetitive, with each dungeon repeating the same beats. Really this game feels more like set up for a better game down the line. The mechanics are all here and Wayforward has a solid art style with the sprites from Half Genie Hero. Hopefully they capitalizes on this for Shantae 6 and we get the best game in the series.

While it may not have been the most thrilling game, Seven Sirens really put me into a Shantae mood. So much so that I went back to play the 2 games in the series I had never touched. This being the first game and Risky's Revenge. Shantae 1 really is a hidden gem in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, it's the definition of jank, but there's a lot of heart to this game. The sprites are great, the soundtrack is good, and the characters are funny... but it's still on the OG Gameboy and that's a massive hindrance for any game. I'm hard pressed to recommend this with how poorly its aged but I think it's better then it looks. 

Risky's Revenge on the other hand was a game that shocked me by how little it had to offer. I know this game went through a hellish development and what we got was far from what Wayforward planned to make, but it's hard to imagine a world where this was the technical BEST Shantae game. It's not a bad game by any stretch... just a boring one.

For the record my ranking of the games goes Pirates Curse>Half Genie Hero>Seven Sirens>Original>Risky’s Revenge

Sword and Shield are mediocre games at best. I know, real steaming hot take there. I managed to make my Sword playthrough a lot more fun by not spoiling myself on the new Pokemon designs for the first time since Gen 3. Either way, I enjoyed myself enough that I didn't mind playing more of it with these DLC campaigns. Plus I love the idea of Game Freak switching over to this method as apposed to making a third version, so I wanted to support it. 

Klara is a fucking top tier Poke Girl both in design and personality and is probably the highlight of Isle of Armour. GF actually went out of their way to give her multiple expressions to sell her toxic bitch personality and I love every minute of it. She sadly drifts into the background for the second half of the DLC’s story which hurts an already rough section even more. Not more then having to grind Kubfuu all the way to fucking level 70 though! That put a serious hamper on my motivation to finish the story but I pushed through anyway. Having to solo the tower with Kubfuu was at least a fun challenge though, as was the final fight with Mustard. Fuck the Diglett hunt though. Ain’t no one got time for that.

Crown Tundra may be my fav of the 2 though even if there isn't a character as good as Klara in it. The hunt for the legendaries was just pure adventure and I had a fucking blast doing it. The joy I felt when I figured out Registeel’s puzzle put a smile on my face unlike any Pokemon game since I was a kid. The whole Regi stuff was honestly a nice Nostalgia trip to my times with Emerald. The story around Calyrex was enjoyable, even if I still hate its design. Not revealing the horses before release was a good call to as it gave an honest surprise. Having to chase down the Galar forme Birds in the overworld is a great way to evolve the roaming legendaries idea and I hope GF sticks to this. Plus the Galar forme birds are some of the best legendary designs since Gen 5 and I love Chocodos way to fucking much. 

Here we are folks, my GotY. I love Panzer Paladin so fucking much. A combination of mechanics from Mega Man, Castlevania, and Blaster Master? Sign me the fuck up! This game is tailored made for me and I knew I had to play it once it started making the rounds on social media. I'll admit though, I was a bit worried when the the first full trailer dropped and showed the weapon mechanics. Breakable weapons that you have to sacrifice for checkpoints and power ups? I'm not sure about that.... Luckily I was being a complete moron and those mechanics are near perfect. 

I love the set up of each boss being a mythological creature from different cultures. They didn’t just pull the easy ones either. A lot of these things I learned of for the first time here. I love how Grit controls. Using the upward stab as a double jump and being able to pogo off enemies Shovel Knight style just felt great and satisfying. Flame was limited but it made her sections feel tense. She does more damage then you think she could at first glance. Also the only way to heal Grit being to use pods that only Flame could access was a cool idea. 

I am begging you Tribute Games, you have to make more Panzer Paladin games. Slap some new upgrades on Grit and expand what Flame can do and you have an even better sequel  on your hands. Also maybe not have so many 'gotcha' moments with enemy placement. That's really my only complaint about the game. Great music, great sprites, giant robots, unique premise, and a reference to Canadian legends. The ultimate self indulgent game for me.

It felt super out of left field for Curse of the Moon to be getting a sequel. The games fucking amazing but it was really just a tie in for the main Bloodstained product. Not something I expect to get a continuation. Either way I was pumped. If this was even half as good as the original then I was in for a great time. Which held true... cuss this legitimately is only half as good as Curse of the Moon. I still like the game, quite a lot actually. I mean how could I not with a fucking Corgi piloting a Death Train Mech. 

Something was just missing here that never made this click like the first game. Maybe it was the stage design, maybe the bosses, maybe the fact that it's a bit to long. I'm not sure. All I know is I couldn't bring myself to play all the modes like I did in the original. . Stopping part way in to the one where you can get the first games characters. I want to go back some day... I just don’t know when someday is.

This was an announcement I never saw coming. A Gundam Verses game coming to the west? That hasn't happened in the entire time I've been a Gundam fan. I had played a bit of Full Boost on my old roommates PS3 thanks to him having a Japanese account and I played Force on the Vita a few years ago. But to have the latest version fully translated with open servers? Holy hell that's a dream come true. 

Having the open betas every weekend leading up to launch was some much needed fun during this shit hole year. I had a lot of fun just fucking around with different suits and seeing what I could do with 'em. Absolutely trashing two Bael players as the Kapool is a memory I'll keep with me for a long time. Fucking danced on their graves. This gave me some new appreciation for suits like the Baund Doc and Hambrabi, the later becoming a lowkey fav as it was my main.

I've fallen off with the game in the last few months but I definitely want to go back. I hope to start learning the game and take parts in tourneys when cons aren’t death sentences anymore.

It felt like everything in my life was SCREAMING at me to start the Yakuza series. From 2 of my friends playing 0 recently, a youtuber I following live tweeting as he played through the WHOLE series back-to-back, and Yakuza 2 having a run at AGDQ 2020. Plus the constant pleas to play this series you get from following Little Kuriboh on Twitter. I finally broke and picked up 0 in the middle of August. Boooooooooy howdy did I not know what I was getting in to. And no I don't mean the content. I knew Yakuza was a series of wildly conflicting tones between the main story and side quests. What I mean is the length. I legit thought this was gonna be a 20-30 hour game. When i reached hour 30 of my playthrough and realized I wasn't even close to a conclusion, I think I knew I had bitten off more then I was planning. That misstep aside I ended up loving this game and want to play the rest of the series.... I just need to rest up first before I dive into Kiwami 1.

 Let's actually talk about the game for a moment here. Kiryu and Majima quickly clicked as likeable characters to me and I cared about their stories. Combat is fun and the multiple styles are all great.... though both the default styles take a while to get there. The mad rush I felt at the end was fantastic and the last bosses are a joy to fight. Only real complaint is the pacing of the side stories. I loved being able to just stumble into various different events while on route to the next plot objective. But this became less common as the game went on and side stories started getting more tucked away. Also hot take here, the host club mingame is more tedious then fun and I like Kiryu’s business stuff as I could do that in the background. I’m excited to dive into Kiwami and probably Kiwami 2 this year... Though I’m not sure when just yet.

Just gonna say it flat out, I think this is better the the 2018 game. The smaller scale helps in this style of game and Miles just naturally has a better move set then Peter. I'm not sure if they actually tightened up the combat system or if they just threw less bullshit enemies at you but fighting feels so much better in this one. Traversal is better too,  simply because they changed the button for tricks. In the original you have to hold down 2 face buttons to enter trick mode??? In hindsight that was such a bad call. 

Having both the heal and venom powers run off the same meter was a good idea. Making the choice between keeping yourself alive guaranteed or potentially ending a fight quicker/disposing of a problem enemy is super fun. The player having to make small choices like this during combat is what helps it not be brainless. I love all the different venom skills you get. While they all achieve the same thing in stunning opponents, how you achieve that goal is up to you. Do you want to just slug the bastard, throw 'em up in the air, tackle the shit out of them? The choice is yours. 

Only real big complaint is certain upgrades being NG+ locked. I know you want to encourage replays, but this is a shitty way to do it I feel. Also can we retire Rhino for the next game. Man has had 2 shitty boss fights now and I need a break. Between this and Spider-Verse, I'm honestly starting to like Miles as Spider-Man more then Peter.

I got this game more on a whim then anything. I was definitely interested when it was first announced for the west. Vanillaware's beautiful art style in a story about giant robots beating the shit out of Kaijus? Sign me the fuck uuuuuu-oh wait it's an RTS? I had never played an RTS's before, mainly due to the sheer concept stressing me out. So I let it fall to the wayside. The game started coming up again though towards the end of the year with GotY on everyone's minds.  This revived my interest, especially as what I HAD planned to be playing around that time was... well. Cyberpunk. Don't think I need to say much more. Also I had worried for nothing as the Real Time Strategy was not that Real Time. 

This game really lays on the analysis paralysis once you're out of the tutorial. Do you want to fight, do you want to do story, who's story do you want to do, what branch should you follow, how much should you play with this one character? It's very overwhelming at first. I decided to not go ham on just one character and swap around all the time. The twists in this game are equal parts exciting and infuriating. Learning something new always came with the caveat of more questions, or something you knew 'for sure' being disproven. Like when I learned 1 characters was actually 4 separate ones! Anyone that's played knows exactly what I'm talking about. 

Natsuno ended up being my fav and not just because of.... obvious reasons. BJ was cute if unfortunately named and her relationship with Mirua was my favourite in the game. Not that there was much competition except for maybe Ogata and Tomi. I ended up really liking the combat but I can see why RTS fans say it's the weakest part. It's far from complex and I had a winning strat by the third or so real fight. Aka spam turrets and have the Gen 1′s gank all the bosses.

One quick thing I want to share was how I beat the boss at the end of Area 2. The one where Inaba is singing. I had Hijiyama use the limit break skill to bum rush the boss right off the hop. I took out half its health in one hit but Hijiyama’s Sentinel was on death’s door. Only thing that saved him was sending in Amaguchi to blow up a bunch of missiles. Hijiyama took it out on his next attack but lost his Sentinel at the same time. It was a real clutch victory and crazy fucking anime. 

The best way to really describe Carrion is that it's a fantastic proof of concept. Can you make a game where you play as The Thing? Why yes, yes you can. Carrion just needed a bit more tweaking to really bring this concept home and be the A+ game I know it can be. As it is now the game is a bit empty. The level design is super samey and the lack of a map is fucking brutal at points. I know it would make no sense for a blob monster to have a map but somethings you just have to gameify for convenience. The level design must have done something right as even though I was completely lost I still moved from area to area properly. Hell by the time I actually looked up a map I had 1 more item to get and I learned I was one door away from beating the game. 

I love the idea of losing mass as you take damage and gaining more by eating people, but having abilities tied to size was a terrible idea. It just leads to tedium as I have to go and shed myself to the right size, do the puzzle, then of course I'm going to go back and rebuild myself to see if I can do the next segment at full power. Just make it so you can swap between abilities using the d-pad or something. I hope this game gets a sequel just so this sick ass concept can be fully realized.

[bountyofbeads]

How Not to Plot Secret Foreign Policy: On a Cellphone and WhatsApp https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/politics/giuliani-cellphone-hacking-russia-ukraine.html

How Not to Plot Secret Foreign Policy: On a Cellphone and WhatsApp

American officials expressed wonderment that Rudolph W. Giuliani was running his “irregular channel” of diplomacy over open cell lines and communications apps penetrated by the Russians.

By David E. Sanger | Published Nov. 18, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 19, 2019 |

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor at the center of the impeachment investigation into the conduct of Ukraine policy, makes a living selling cybersecurity advice through his companies. President Trump even named him the administration’s first informal “cybersecurity adviser.”

But inside the National Security Council, officials expressed wonderment that Mr. Giuliani was running his “irregular channel” of Ukraine diplomacy over open cell lines and communications apps in Ukraine that the Russians have deeply penetrated.

In his testimony to the House impeachment inquiry, Tim Morrison, who is leaving as the National Security Council’s head of Europe and Russia, recalled expressing astonishment to William B. Taylor Jr., who was sitting in as the chief American diplomat in Ukraine, that the leaders of the “irregular channel” seemed to have little concern about revealing their conversations to Moscow.

“He and I discussed a lack of, shall we say, OPSEC, that much of Rudy’s discussions were happening over an unclassified cellphone or, perhaps as bad, WhatsApp messages, and therefore you can only imagine who else knew about them,” Mr. Morrison testified. OPSEC is the government’s shorthand for operational security.

He added: “I remember being focused on the fact that there were text messages, the fact that Rudy was having all of these phone calls over unclassified media,” he added. “And I found that to be highly problematic and indicative of someone who didn’t really understand how national security processes are run.”

WhatsApp notes that its traffic is encrypted, meaning that even if it is intercepted in transit, it is of little use — which is why intelligence agencies, including the Russians, are working diligently to get inside phones to read the messages after they are deciphered.

But far less challenging is figuring out the message of Mr. Giuliani’s partner, Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, who held an open cellphone conversation with Mr. Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine, apparently loud enough for his table mates to overhear. And Mr. Trump’s own cellphone use has led American intelligence officials to conclude that the Chinese — with whom he is negotiating a huge trade deal, among other sensitive topics — are doubtless privy to the president’s conversations.

But Ukraine is a particularly acute case. It is the country where the Russians have so deeply compromised the communications network that in 2014 they posted on the internet conversations between a top Obama administration diplomat, Victoria Nuland, and the United States ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Geoffrey R. Pyatt. Their intent was to portray the Americans — not entirely inaccurately — as trying to manage the ouster of a corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine.

The incident made Ms. Nuland, who left the State Department soon after Mr. Trump’s election, “Patient Zero” in the Russian information-warfare campaign against the United States, before Moscow’s interference in the American presidential election.

But it also served as a warning that if you go to Ukraine, stay off communications networks that Moscow wired.

That advice would seem to apply especially to Mr. Giuliani, who speaks around the world on cybersecurity issues. Ukraine was the petri dish for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the place where he practiced the art of trying to change vote counts, initiating information warfare and, in two celebrated incidents, turning out the lights in parts of the country.

Mr. Giuliani, impeachment investigators were told, was Mr. Trump’s interlocutor with the new Ukrainian government about opening investigations into the president’s political opponents. The simultaneous suspension of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, which some have testified was on Mr. Trump’s orders, fulfilled Moscow’s deepest wish at a moment of ground war in eastern Ukraine, and a daily, grinding cyberwar in the capital.

It remains unknown why the Russians have not made any of these conversations public, assuming they possess them. But inside the intelligence agencies, the motives of Russian intelligence officers is a subject of heated speculation.

A former senior American intelligence official speculated that one explanation is that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Sondland were essentially doing the Russians’ work for them. Holding up military aid — for whatever reason — assists the Russian “gray war” in eastern Ukraine and sows doubts in Kyiv, also known as Kiev in the Russian transliteration, that the United States is wholly supportive of Ukraine, a fear that many State Department and National Security Council officials have expressed in testimony.

But Mr. Giuliani also was stoking an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Mr. Putin has engaged in, suggesting that someone besides Russia — in this telling, Ukrainian hackers who now supposedly possess a server that once belonged to the Democratic National Committee — was responsible for the hacking that ran from 2015 to 2016.

Mr. Trump raised this possibility in his July 25 phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. It was not the first time he had cast doubt on Russia’s involvement: In a call to a New York Times reporter moments after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Putin’s view that Russia is so good at cyberoperations that it would have never been caught. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked.

He expressed doubts again in 2018, in a news conference with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. That was only days after the Justice Department indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hack; the administration will not say if it now believes that indictment was flawed because there is evidence that Ukranians were responsible.

Whether or not he believes Ukraine was involved, Mr. Giuliani certainly understood the risks of talking on open lines, particularly in a country with an active cyberwar. As a former prosecutor, he knows what the United States and its adversaries can intercept. In more recent years, he has spoken around the world on cybersecurity challenges. And as the president’s lawyer, he was a clear target.

Mr. Giuliani said in a phone interview Monday that nothing he talked about on the phone or in texts was classified. “All of my conversations, I can say uniformly, were on an unclassified basis,” he said.

His findings about what happened in Ukraine were “generated from my own investigations” and had nothing to do with the United States government, he said, until he was asked to talk with Kurt D. Volker, then the special envoy for Ukraine, in a conversation that is now part of the impeachment investigation. Mr. Volker will testify in public on Tuesday.

Mr. Giuliani said that he never “conducted a shadow foreign policy, I conducted a defense of my client,” Mr. Trump. “The State Department apparatchiks are all upset that I intervened at all,” he said, adding that he was the victim of “wild accusations.”

Mr. Sondland is almost as complex a case. While he is new to diplomacy, he is the owner of a boutique set of hotels and certainly is not unaware of cybersecurity threats, since the hotel industry is a major target, as Marriott learned a year ago.

But Mr. Sondland held a conversation with Mr. Trump last summer in a busy restaurant in Kyiv, surrounded by other American officials. Testimony indicates Mr. Trump’s voice was loud enough for others at the table to hear.

But in testimony released Monday night, David Holmes, a veteran Foreign Service officer who is posted to the American Embassy in Kyiv, and who witnessed the phone call between the president and Mr. Sondland, suggested that the Russians heard it even if they were not out on the town that night.

Asked if there was a risk of the Russians listening in, Mr. Holmes said, “I believe at least two of the three, if not all three of the mobile networks are owned by Russian companies, or have significant stakes in those.

“We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored,” he said.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

Republicans Are Following Trump to Nowhere

There’s an impeachment lesson hiding in the president’s failure to produce the political results he wants.

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist |

Published Nov. 19, 2019, 6:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov 19, 2019

Americans have gone to the polls four times this month to vote in major, statewide races. In Virginia, they voted for control of the state Legislature; in Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana, they voted for control of the governor’s mansion. In each case, President Trump tied himself to the outcome.

“Governor @MattBevin has done a wonderful job for the people of Kentucky!” Trump tweeted before Election Day. “Matt has my Complete and Total Endorsement, and always has. GET OUT and VOTE on November 5th for your GREAT Governor, @MattBevin!”

Trump sent a similar message ahead of the Virginia elections. “Virginia, with all of the massive amount of defense and other work I brought to you, and with everything planned, go out and vote Republican today,” he said.

“The people of this country aren’t buying” impeachment, Trump said at a rally in Louisiana last week. “You see it because we’re going up and they’re going down.”

“You gotta give me a big win please,” he said later. “Please.”

Trump thought voters would repudiate impeachment and vindicate him. Instead, they did the opposite. Virginia Democrats won a legislative majority for the first time since 1993, flipping historically Republican districts. Kentucky Democrats beat incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin in a state Trump won by 30 points in 2016. And Louisiana Democrats re-elected Governor John Bel Edwards in a state Trump won by the more modest but still substantial margin of 20 points. Democrats in Mississippi made significant gains even as they fell short of victory — their nominee for governor, Jim Hood, lost by five-and-a-half points, a dramatic turnaround from four years ago, when Republican Phil Bryant won in a landslide.

It’s true that Democrats didn’t run on the issue of impeachment. These races were centered on more quotidian issues like health care, transportation and education. If anything, this was the second consecutive election cycle where health care made the difference. In Kentucky, the Democratic candidate, Andy Beshear — whose father, also as governor, implemented the Affordable Care Act in the state — promised to protect Medicaid and hammered Bevin on his plan for work requirements. Edwards ran for re-election on his implementation of the Medicaid expansion in Louisiana, which gave coverage to more than 400,000 state residents. Medicaid was a key issue in the Mississippi race as well, where an estimated 100,000 residents would be eligible for coverage under the expansion.

But just because no one ran on impeachment doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Voters could have shown they were tired of Democratic investigations. They could have elevated the president’s allies. Instead, voters handed Trump an unambiguous defeat. And that is much more than just a blow to the president’s immediate political fortunes.

To start, it confirms recent polling on impeachment. A new ABC News poll shows majority support for impeachment and even removal. Fifty-one percent say that “President Trump’s actions were wrong and he should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.” And an overwhelming 70 percent of Americans say that the inciting offense — Trump’s attempt to coerce Ukraine into investigating a political rival — was wrong. A similarly fresh Reuters poll has lower numbers for removal (44 percent of Americans say they want the House to impeach and the Senate to convict), but also shows that most Americans want Congress to investigate Trump if he “committed impeachable offenses during his conversation with the president of Ukraine.”

Worried about backlash and committed to restraint, House Democrats have limited their impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal. You could read these numbers and election results as vindication — proof that Democrats were right to take a narrow, focused approach to the president’s wrongdoing.

But it’s also possible that Democrats are leaving political advantage on the table — that there’s still opportunity for an even broader investigation that tackles everything from White House involvement in Ukraine and the president’s phone calls with other foreign leaders (the records of several of these, not just the one involving Ukraine, have been inappropriately placed on a classified server) to his deals with authoritarian governments in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These wouldn’t be fishing expeditions — given the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses or separate his personal interests from those of the state, there’s good reason to suspect inappropriate behavior across a range of areas — but they would mean a longer process. Democrats couldn’t wrap up impeachment before the end of the year. They would have to let it move at its own pace, even if it stretches well into 2020. (Watergate, remember, took more than two years to unfold.)

I don’t see the downside. A long inquiry keeps impeachment out of Mitch McConnell’s hands until there’s a comprehensive case against the president. Yes, there’s the chance of a late campaign acquittal, but if the past month is any prediction, Trump will have sustained a large amount of political damage over the course of a long investigation. It would keep him off-balance, especially if further investigation uncovers even more corruption. It would also allow the six Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate to campaign through the primary season instead of returning to Washington for a trial. But most important it would show a commitment to getting to the full truth of what’s been happening in the White House under the guise of making America great again.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

[prorevenge]

Yes, I understand it’s a public street; now, let’s learn the difference between legality and civility, ok?

This happened in the summer of 2016 when my wife and I moved into our new home on a tree lined, brick street. Nice neighborhood but nothing fancy. Blue collar, working men and women.

We met the neighbors, my wife made cookies and they invited us to their pool parties, we swapped foodstuffs and recipes ... It was all Ozzie and Harriet - until I put a fence up around our back yard for security firstly as anyone could come off the back alley and right up onto our porch and back door. Plus, I wanted to be able to let our two shorthair pointers out to play without having to tie them up or supervise them.

Well, our neighbors didn’t like that, and who can say why? It disturbed their visual routine, they were resistant to change, they suffer from frachtiphobia? Never did find out.

Three things changed: One, they no longer invited us to their pool parties, two, we no longer traded cookies and pies, and lastly...they began parking in front of our house.

It’s a public street and you can do as you will but my two spaces were constricted by a telephone pole that had guy wires coming down from it meaning you’d have to be careful getting into and out of your car lest you scratch the paint, or worse, clothesline yourself with metal cables.

So we had but one good spot that lined up our car door with the sidewalk perfectly...and that became their defaultparking space despite the fact that they had their spaces and a two car garage off the alley in the back.

They also started an illicit piano lessons business (better than drums, I suppose) and apparently decided to keep their front spots open for their customers.

I work odd hours and it always seemed there were a line of cars in front of both houses so I’d end up having to park frustratingly far away and with winter coming, trudging through the slush carrying groceries had zero appeal.

So I watched and waited until one fine fall day with the leaves changing from green to vermillion and brilliant gold, and a morning chill that promised of winter soon to come - it happened! Their 3-5 cars (the live-at-home, unemployed daughter maintained a rotating cast of paramours) were gone, and nobody was giving piano lessons!

I struck! I raced to my dad’s and hitched his houseboat to his beater farm truck and towed the combo back home, parking 80’+ of gloriously tacky red-neck hardware directly in front of their house, while my vehicle took up our prime spot and most of the telephone tripwire space as well.

And I left the combo there for almost two weeks, unmoving, and rusting loudly right in front of their front porch swing that they liked to perch on in the evenings.

Pressure from my wife and the impending monthly street sweeping finally led to my removing the blockade and they’ve not parked in font of our place since, nor have we spoken more than 5 words in 2 years ... and that’s fine by us.

The woman can’t bake anyhow.

(source) (story by SleepNowMyThrowaway)

[sarahmarshall3]

Lesson 1: The social, audience and growth roles within newsrooms

Not the modern journalism course timetable. Private Eye.

I’m about to meet my fourth cohort of  Interactive Journalism MA students at City University, London.

I step out of my role as head of audience growth at Vogue International for two hours a week to teach the practical element of the social media, community and multimedia management module; Adam Tinworth teaches the theoretical side.

Here are my notes from the first lesson. This covers:

What does a social media editor do?

What’s audience development?

What is a growth editor?

How have these roles changed within the past year?

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

What does a social media editor do?

News organisations started to introduce social media editors about a decade ago to gather and distribute news via social, predominantly using Facebook and Twitter. Here’s an interview from 2009 with Alex Gubbay, the first social media editor at the BBC, explaining what his role would be.

Asked in the Guardian interview if he would play a role in the distribution of news, he said: 

“Indeed, part of my work will be to extend the news and distribute them into the social networks, so that people can discuss them. We learn from the discussions that built on the stories themselves, pick up details we missed, or factor them into how we are approaching a story.”

The role was fairly similar – though needed less explaining to fellow journalists – when I joined The Wall Street Journal as a social media editor in December 2013.

I remember explaining back then that there were four areas to the role:

Engagement

Traffic

Reach / Brand awareness

Social newsgathering

Engagement

I first got interested in social media when, in 2007 and 2008, I was a broadcast journalist. The commercial radio station I worked for had fantastic community of people who would text in. This was the time that Facebook and Twitter started to gain traction and I enjoyed similar listener and engagement online. Ten years on and social provides a way for news brands to host communities of readers. This happens through commenting on site and social and Facebook groups, for example. A social media editor may respond to comments or take an action as simple as liking an Instagram post or Facebook comment, showing the reader the news brand is listening.

In 2014 I wrote how engagement is key to keeping people returning to a news site or brand.

Traffic

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and other social platforms have been an important source of traffic to news sites. News startups sprouted up as Facebook and other platforms provided millions of eyeballs to stories. And while Facebook traffic has dropped significantly over the past year (more on that later), it still provides 28% of traffic to the news publishers that use Parsely, an analytics tool.

Reach / brand awareness

A social media editor also plays a role in increasing the brand awareness of a publication. I remember hearing Buzzfeed UK editor in chief Janine Gibson speak at Hacks/Hackers in December 2015 when Buzzfeed traffic had exploded. She made the point that even though the site of course cared about on-platform engagement, it was equally as important for Buzzfeed to have brand reach, whether logo on a social card on Twitter or a native post on Facebook.

Social newsgathering

Social newsgathering has become a whole field in itself, with agencies such as Storyful and organisations like Bellingcat being the pioneering experts. But for many social media editors, their role extends to monitor trends, hot topics and news events via social.

What is audience development?

Audience development roles have developed over the past five years. As this 2014 Digiday article notes, “The New York Times’ Innovation Report pointed out the need for audience-development specialists to get Times content in front of more readers.”

This 2017 Digiday article explains the current climate – and how audience development a focus for both the newsroom and for the commercial side of the business.

“Audience development has become core to how publishers scale and make money. But now the question facing publishers is how to ensure it serves all sides of the business, whose interests often conflict.”

“Once a role that mainly focused on SEO, audience development has become more complicated because of the explosion of ways publishers can find and distribute content, from their own platforms such as newsletters and apps to external ones such as social media outlets and bots.”

“At the most fundamental level, both the business and edit sides want to reach new and existing audiences. But from there the interests can diverge. Whereas the newsroom wants to maximize the reach and impact of its journalism, the sales side is rewarded for growing ad revenue, which could lead it to prioritize certain audience segments over others. And then there is driving subscriptions and marketing other products like events and commerce.”

Blogging about an ONA conference on audience development in 2016, I offered this definition of audience development

“Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.”

I still agree with my definition from a couple of years ago and expand it to say the field involves identifying a target audience and reaching those people and keeping them engaged.

And, of course, audiences may be engaged off platform. For example, launching Vogue on Snapchat has delivered millions of new, loyal weekly readers. But our owned and operated sites get zero traffic from Snapchat. So what’s in it for the publisher? Brand reach, young audiences and revenue share from the Snap advertising.

What does an audience growth editor do?

Julia Haslanger wrote this Medium post in 2015 answering that question. She quotes Thomas McBee, Quartz’s inaugural director of growth. 

“McBee says that when there’s an obstacle to growth, it’s most often an editorial obstacle, such as a story not being framed or headlined in a way that will resonate with the audience.” 

That still holds true. As head of audience growth I spend a lot of time guiding headline changes.

Here are Haslanger’s points on the role of a growth editor:

Identifying potential new audiences

Reaching out to people who might be interested in a specific story or event.

Shaping stories — and particularly headlines — to resonate with readers

Following up with new readers to build a relationship

Pushing the organization to go beyond the regular sources for stories

Analytics. Analytics. Analytics.

Assigning and shaping stories on trending topics

Events

I manage an eight-person audience growth team and consider our function as supporting the audience growth of the network of Vogues and GQs.

I’m advertising for a maternity cover and state in the ad that the primary function of my role as "responsible for audience development strategy, guidelines and a consistent approach to headlines, content packaging and SEO and identifying editorial opportunities based on audience data.”

Audience growth, in my view, relies on a three-part strategy:

Content strategy

Distribution strategy

Community strategy

The content strategy part includes:

Shaping stories. It’s helpful to think that every digital story starts with an audience of zero and it is our job as audience growth editors to find the right audience for that story.

Thinking audience-first in how people will find stories. That might mean commissioning a story that plays into a Pinterest trend, for example.

Guiding a broad offering of stories that appeal to large numbers of people

That includes evergreen content that delivers long-tail audiences

Shepherding in-depth, quality reporting that delights and keeps readers returning

Developing series to attract loyal readers

The distribution strategy part of the role includes:

SEO, social, email newsletter, and off-platform strategies

Working with product to ensure sites and platforms are optimised for search

The community strategy part includes:

Ensuring the brands host conversations and communities to keep people engaged and connected

And all of the above are underpinned with data.

What’s changed in the past year?

As this is my fourth year of teaching and updating my slides, it’s apparent that this year the social, audience and growth roles have shifted due to the Facebook algorithm change.

The move by Facebook to prioritise friend and family posts over those from news organisations and brands was announced in January. But Facebook traffic had been dropping for several months.

Data from Chartbeat (the first chart) and Parsely (the second chart) shows Facebook traffic declined throughout the previous year.

This algorithm change particularly hit VC-funded, ad-supported news startups including Mashable, Vice and Buzzfeed. But there have been positive stories for some publishers this year. Chartbeat noted in May that mobile direct traffic started to eclipse Facebook traffic, suggesting readers were going direct to sites rather than accessing via Facebook.

And social, audience and growth roles have shifted with the algorithms. The editors’ roles still include Facebook but there’s renewed focus on the following:

Search / SEO. You will have noted the rise in Google traffic in the charts above

Email newsletters, which offer direct relationships with audiences

Diverse and distributed traffic, including Flipboard, Pinterest, Upday, for example

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

In the final part if lesson 1, I take the students through the skills that publishers are looking for by going through job ads (such as this one, this one, this one, this one and this one. 

I see my teaching role as equipping the trainee journalists with those skills so they are employable on graduating from the MA in 9 months’ time.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Supergirl s02e16 ‘Star Crossed (1)’

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, twice. Barely.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Five (41.66% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven.

Positive Content Rating:

Three? I guess.

General Episode Quality:

Nevermind, they’re back to stupid. So, so stupid.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Kara passes with Rhea when they meet. They speak again later. There’s a lot of Mon-El involved both times, but they get there eventually.

Female characters:

Kara Danvers.

Alex Danvers.

Lyra.

Rhea.

Maggie Sawyer.

Male characters:

Mon-El.

J’onn J’onzz.

Winn Schott.

Lar.

James Olsen.

Boris.

Mandrax.

OTHER NOTES:

“To make Daxom great again.” Oh, no.

Ok. That flashback. I have mentioned before, how disturbed I am to find that the original confrontation of Kara’s prejudices towards Daxom have since been shown as actual deserved disdain, and how Daxom being actually exactly as bad as she said (to a caricaturish level) undermines Kara’s supposed lesson as well as treating Krypton as holier-than-thou despite all the huge flaws in its culture that have been made so evident, creating this huge us-vs-them divide with a really clear ‘good side’ and ‘bad side’ and absolutely zero nuance, etc. The flashback to Mon-El’s departure from Daxom as it actually happened does no favours to any aspect of the narrative: Mon-El is shown as hesitant and concerned for the safety of others in defiance of the prevailing Daxomite attitude, because the show is too afraid of the audience backlash if they show him being truly callous instead of just passively allowing it, while at the same time the narrative gives no quarter for Daxom and its people as a whole despite their undeserved fates. We are supposed to see Mon-El’s guard and think him awful, but what do we expect any ‘good’ guard to do? Maybe not kill that one guy, but the rest, with the ignoring everyone else in order to focus on rescuing the person he’s pledged to protect? Even killing the Kryptonian makes sense (is not morally ok, but makes sense) in the context of being exactly the kind of targeted violence that happens in the real world when people are ‘othered’. The coding of the behaviour is so transparent it’s disgusting, and coupled with that not-even-veiled MAGA line just before? Daxom’s Republicans to Krypton’s Democrats is a pretty fucking gross parallel to draw. I am very disappointed in the show for all of this garbage.

Remember when I fucking flagged Lyra as using Winn for her own ends the second she stepped on screen? Fucking flagged it. 

This is a much better Hamilton joke right here than the one a few episodes ago, but that one a few episodes ago was still too much, and that steps on this, because, really? Two sizeable Hamilton gags with only a couple of episodes between them? You’re trying WAY too hard to be current, show. It’s embarrassing.

Uurrrgghhh, and now we’re doing the ‘oh actually Lyra had a good reason for being terrible!’ thing? This shit is so predictable and empty and I am so over it. Remember one episode ago when this show was momentarily good again?

Is Guardian fighting in a fucking glass factory or what? So many glass panes to be thrown through.

So, we pretending that Lyra’s lie and Mon-El’s lie are the same? Just ‘they lied’ is not a parallel, show. These are not comparable situations.

See, Mon-El says in his apology that ‘I was a spoiled, useless person, but I didn’t know’, and that’s a big part of what is making this whole storyline, all season long, so poor. The total lack of nuance in Daxom. The clear-cut morality of Kryptonians which, also, lacks the nuance of reality. If Mon-El was raised in that life, how much opportunity did he have for seeing the flaws in it and recognising them as such? We have no concept of his level of self-awareness, and refusing to allow people room to grow is not how you achieve progress. At the same time, Mon-El’s process of self-improvement on Earth has been so paint-by-numbers simple, it’s hard to take it seriously. If he’s found changing so easy, how entrenched were those ‘spoiled, useless’ teachings that made up his entire formative existence? Real people take years to overcome such things, not least because when it’s a commonplace feature of how you were raised, it’s hard to recognise that there’s even a problem, let alone dismantle the rationale in your own mind that has allowed you to be unthinkingly complicit. Expecting Mon-El to change like flipping a coin is unfair; blaming him for the circumstances of his birth is unfair; telling this story in the way that they have, with his self-awareness and capacity for immediate total overhaul not just of personality but of ideals apparently uninhibited and detailed with only the slightest of backslides? Utterly unrealistic. What should have been a long, hard journey of self-reflection, questioning, and honestly ugly behaviour has instead been casual comic relief and romantic faux pas, and that’s so insulting. I can’t support Mon-El as a character because I can’t support the ill-constructed narrative that made him; in basic terms, he doesn’t make enough sense. He’s too unrealistic to function.

URGH. This is such a fucking mess I am annoyed at myself for even trying to untangle it. That kinda happens when you’re trying to over-simplify your storytelling to this extent: the break from reality is too intense, and you end up with a heap of confusion that your audience can’t figure out how to engage with on a meaningful level. In university, the single most important word I learned was ‘ethnocentricity’ - the belief that your own culture/background is inherently superior to all others. On the surface level, this is plain ol’ racism - and can be many other ‘isms as well, as cultural background shapes our perceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, etc. Looking deeper, we see ethnocentricity manifest when we assume that our social or moral codes are automatically the correct ones, without pausing to question where we got those codes from, and whether or not, actually, there might be better ways to do things. I actually debated this directly, back in 2016 when two Australian men were executed in Indonesia for drug smuggling, and the debate over the morality of the death penalty was rife throughout the country. I’m not going to get into that debate again here, but as an example of ethnocentricism, it was a case in which a lot of Australians flat refused to acknowledge the possibility that just because another country has different laws which conflict with our way of doing things, doesn’t necessarily mean that the people of that country are corrupt, lesser beings with an under-developed sense of morality which we need to step in and correct. Different ways of doing things can be shocking to our sensibilities at first blush, but we have to think about why they are that way and how the backdrop of that logic informs the constructs we see, before we pass high-and-mighty judgment over others. 

Supergirl’s Daxom narrative is a perfect example of ethnocentricism at work, with zero reflection: Kara is right, Mon-El is wrong, this cultural division is all-encompassing and without exception, the end. To be clear: I’m not suggesting that there’s a way to argue for, say, slavery being ok, but what there is is nuance to how people reach such a conclusion, and if we refuse to engage with the nuance we can’t engage with cultural learning, sharing, or understanding, and that’s how you end up with blank hostility instead of working towards more positive futures. Something being ‘obviously morally correct’ is (as evidenced through the entirety of human history) not enough to change systemic issues outright; if it were, the systemic issues wouldn’t have developed in the first place. Supergirl has run into trouble here because it’s trying to be topical, addressing the divisions in current US politics, but it also doesn’t want to actually have a nuanced conversation about the subject, and so instead we get heavy-handed black-and-white morality that only alienates the two sides instead of identifying common ground and building upon it to bridge the gap. Moreover, the show cripples its ability to explore these concepts in a better, more thorough way in the future, because it refuses to commit to the shades of grey in its situation and instead builds a two-camps concept in which any dithering or olive-branching between the two looks like ideological compromise and moral degradation instead of the complicated and painful process of learning that it represents in the real world. 

The truth is that as nice as it is to sit on your moral high horse feeling pure and special while everyone else scrabbles on the muddy ground, you can’t understand the people down below and you certainly can’t help them unless you’re willing to hop down and work through the mud as well, and what use is ideological purity if you’re the only one who benefits from it? That doesn’t mean that we should all start behaving in ways that conflict with our moral compass because, hey, some people are bigots, but it does mean recognising that we are all in a process of self-improvement and if you’re not at least open to the possibility that your way of doing things isn’t the best way, you can’t progress yourself, nor does treating others with condescension help bring them to your way of thinking or at least to a middle ground from which you can proceed together. That’s all a much messier and trickier prospect than what this show wants to deal with, and yet it’s exactly the story they’ve blundered into the middle of with the ridiculous notion that they’re gonna be able to clear-cut their way out. Mon-El’s process should involve a lot of questions: not ‘this thing is correct because obviously it is’ or ‘this thing is correct because Kara says so’, but rather ‘I’m being told that my way is wrong: why? Why is it wrong? Why was I taught that it was right? In what ways has my belief in the correctness of this thing influenced my perceptions of other things? Is it possible that this thing I believe actually is right, and Kara is wrong? Why should her perspective be infallible? What are the consequences of either possibility? Does that jive with the rest of my understanding of the world? What else is altered by this change? Are these alterations also correct?’ and so on, and so on, ad nauseum. Exhausting, repetitive, and complicated, yes, but that’s the reality (not least because he’s supposed to be a literal alien from another planet, but, whatever). At first, I thought it was stupid of them to introduce Mon-El without bothering to spend time on his integration into Earth culture outside of a handful of gimmicks; now I see that it’s much worse than that. I don’t expect this whole arc to end well; I only hope that it ends quickly.

[sketch-rambles]

Balgair Maccruim - Fae

The first time I used Balgair as a character, he was an impish fae who could turn into a fox or a dog at will. I later changed the character so that he could only turn into a fox, and was, in fact, terribly afraid of dogs. But not much of his personality ever changed. He remained the same lovable, flirtatious mess with (undiagnosed) ADHD that sent him turning into a fox mid-conversation without realizing he was interrupting anything.

Also, if we’re being completely honest, he was almost definitely a furry.

Fae Audition - Bal

2016 - 05 - 15

NAME: Balgair "Bal" Maccruim

AGE: 18

FAE: Shapeshifter

SKILLS: Well, shape-shifting, first of all. He's also pretty good at picking locks, thinking on his feet, and blindly not noticing when he definitely should not be flirting with someone.

PERSONALITY: Very flirtatious and mischievous. Always up for a prank, and has a remarkable talent for getting in trouble and still not learning his lesson. Might be the stubbornness. He can be a bit oblivious when it comes to human (or Fae, whatever) interactions, but he notices every detail of a situation so he can analyze what to do.

LIKES: Dogs, Pretty people (girls, boys, other, he really doesn't have a preference), Foxes, Fluffy animals in general, Pranks

DISLIKES: Authoritative figures (I'm so sorry, this kid is gonna be a handful), Harmonica music, Hairless cats (they creep his out), Russia (?????)

BIO: Bal was apparently not born to a Scottish couple in a remote, grassy, terribly boring area, but that's what he was led to believe for years. It was a bit hard for his parents NOT to realize he was a shape-shifter, seeing as they often had a dog instead of a baby in his younger years, but thankfully for him, they didn't try to get rid of him. The couple had been trying for years to have a child, and they had no intentions of letting go of this one, human or not.

Bal was home-schooled, partially to conceal his identity, and partially became there was no school around to go to. He would probably have grown up without any friends if his abilities didn't allow him to make friends with animals. Were his parents a bit worried that his best friends was a fox? Maybe. Were they surprised in the slightest? Look, they literally named this kid “Fox.” No, they were not surprised.

He didn't get a professor to explain what was going on when it was time to go to the Academy. He already knew plenty about the Fae from old Scottish myths (although he would later learn that a lot of that information was highly misleading). He gave a tearful goodbye to his parents and Eirmseach Aon (the fox) [note: I later take to refering to the fox as Madadh-ruadh, so I don’t really know what its name was], and went off to start his life among the Fae.

Run Little Fox - Minigame 1

2016 - 05 - 18

Another Fae dancing into their lives by way of Fairy Circle would have been expected. Being whisked away by pixies in the middle of the night would have been expected. Getting lured out to sea by mermaids would have been expected.

The letter taped to the door was unexpected.

“Dè fo shealbh?” Athair muttered, peeling it off of the chipping wood. Mamaidh came up behind him, peering over his shoulder.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“It's addressed to Bal,” Athair replied, tilting his head in Balgair's direction.

Balgair wasn't paying attention. He had turned into a fox and was rather engaged with chasing a butterfly. At 15 years old, his attention span had developed to about the point it would probably stay forever.

“Cù beag!” Mamaidh called, yanking his attention away from the butterfly. "Come here!"

Balgair bounded over, changing back into a boy in midair.

“What is it, Mama?” he asked eagerly.

Athair handed his the letter. “It's for you,” he informed Bal.

Bal tore the letter open and read it quickly. It was entirely in Gaelic, which was odd, as the few pieces of mail they ever received were usually in English. Not that they usually received mail. But this was especially odd, as if someone had known what his first language was.

“It says I have to go to school,” he told his parents blankly.

“Give me that,” commanded Mamaidh.

She skimmed over the letter, then handed it to Athair, who looked it over, then looked back up Bal.

“Bal,” he began slowly, “do you know what this means?”

Bal, who was trying his hardest not to be distracted by the butterfly again, nodded.

“I have to go away,” he stated.

“Do you want to go?”

“He doesn't have a choice,” Mamaidh reminded him. Athair waved away the comment, motioning for Bal to answer.

Bal thought for a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I'll miss you,” he decided at last, realizing the implications of the letter. “And Madadh-ruadh. Will I see you again?”

Athair pulled him into a gentle hug. “Of course you will, Beag Bal.”

Mamaidh sniffed, seconds away from bursting into tears. “You'd better say goodbye to Ruadh,”she reminded him.

Ruadh flicked his head to the side, twitching his tail sadly. “You are leaving?”

Bal crouched down sadly, shuffling closer to nuzzle Ruadh's side. “I'll be back. I promise.”

“You are going to find your kind.”

“Yes.”

Ruadh paused, contemplating this. “I will miss you.”

It was hard to cry as a fox, but Bal came close. “I'll miss you, too, Ruddy.”

He'd sign the contract once he returned home. For now, it was time for one final run with his best friend before he embarked on his journey.

My name is No. My sign is No. My number is No. You need to let it go. - Minigame 2

2016 - 05 - 18

The Academy was big, and chock-full of opportunity. It only took Bal a quick glance to realize several of the students (like, a lot) took themselves way too seriously, as well as several teachers.

He classified his three years at the Academy so far (he was nearing the end of 15 when he got his letter) by teachers with which he'd had run-ins.

Year one was the year of History, Maths, and Magical Studies. Constance was pretty enough (and also creepy as all get out), but her class really wasn't enough to hold Bal's attention. In his first year at the Academy, he only got through the class by forming a schedule of horrific puns to make for every time period. Constance hated it, and also probably hated him. Then again, he gave her about zero reason to actually like him. Mr. Randall was handsome as heck (and apparently not terribly into flirting with students, as Bal had had to learn first hand), but seriously, maths. Like, the alchemy bit was cool, but the numbers all whirred around in Bal's head until suddenly he had turned into a fox and was trying to sneak out of the room. It didn't work. Magical Studies was way better. Mr. Cynrik was unreasonably cool, and when he wasn't being super strict (then again, Bal's definition of strict was a little skewed), he was actually letting Bal do things. Which usually resulted in something breaking. But whatever, repercussions hadn't been too horrible yet.

Year two was the year of Fauna and Potions, P.E., and Art. In Elwood's class, he discovered the hard way that some plants that look perfectly edible are actually poisonous, and on more than one occasion had to turn into a fox just to avoid dying. Elwood was a sweet woman, and Bal hated to bother her, but her class was right before lunch that year and he got hungry a lot. Year two was also the year he found out that Cathmore expected him to do things in human form. Well, no, he'd learned that the year prior, but year two was the year he decided to put it to the test. Several broken limbs later (it was still unclear who had broken them or how it had happened), he finally realized he should tone it down a bit. As for Blake, Bal wasn't really sure what to make of her. She creeped him out a bit, but she also let him do paw-print paintings sometimes, so that was nice.

This year so far had been the year of music and astrology. Music class would actually have been great, if somewhere along the line Bal hadn't made it a personal challenge to annoy every single teacher at least once. He spent several class periods loudly singing old Scottish drinking songs, which got his dirty looks from just about everybody. As for astronomy, well...

“Hey, baby, what's your zodiac?” Bal asked the kid next to him, the chosen victim of his flirting for that class period. The kid barely had time to scoot away, much less reply, before Mr. Kalani interrupted.

“No.” he stated firmly.

Bal blinked. “What?”

“I have heard that joke about 12 million too many times. No. I'm sick of it. We are learning astronomy. This is a serious branch of science, and I will not have it marred in this way by horrific pick-up lines.”

Bal processed this for a second. “So... what's your zodiac, Mr. Kalani?”

Wrong answer, Mr. Kalani didn't even bother answering with anything more than another “No,” and pointed out the door. They'd been through this before. It didn't even phase Bal anymore. In fact, he clawed a tally-mark onto the outside wall of the room every time he got sent out. He was up to about 15 so far. This was fun.

The one teacher he'd never had a run-in with was Nox Peregrym, the headmaster. Bal had seen him in passing, but they'd never spoken. He was mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in, like, a taco shell or something. Whatever it was, Bal was admittedly a little scared to see what would happen the first time they interacted.

Foxy? Well, I do try...

2016 - 05 - 21

Bal met Daemon before he met Cynthia.

He was 17 at the time. Honestly, the details of the first meeting were forever a bit of a blur, but Bal was left with two lasting impressions: 1) That's a kid who ain't scared of a good prank. 2) This guy is hot as heck.

Naturally, he flirted at the first chance her got. Again, details are blurry, but it was probably a poorly formulated pun using the words “vulpine,” “wolfish,” and “foxy.” Whatever it was, it somehow worked. Daemon immediately jumped right on board with a slew of flirtations and innuendos of his own.

And boy, was that guy good at fox-innuendos. Bal needed to up his game. In fact, it became a competition of sorts. Onlookers would often wonder if they were flirting or fighting, and the correct answer was probably a bit of both. Bal loved every second of it.

And then he met Cynthia. There was an obvious shift in Daemon's nature as he introduced them. Bal took one look at the warning in Daemon's eyes and decided it would be best not to flirt with Cynthia. Which was saying something, 'cause Bal was crap at reading body language.

Cynthia took one look at Bal and knew that the whole “I honestly don't care, I will piss off every authoritative figure in the universe. Bite me” attitude really wasn't much of a front at all. Plenty of people suspected Bal of secretly not being so rebellious at heart, but... yeah. Not so much. Cynthia, for her part, was pretty cool with that, from what Bal could tell.

Daemon started to ease up as Bal started chattering away about prank ideas and whatnot with Cynthia, but he was still on guard, waiting for Bal to mess up - Bal was pretty sure he'd get his throat ripped out if he did.

We Don’t Need No Education - Bal’s Moodboard

2016 - 05 - 30

Bal's relationship with Mamaidh and Athair had always been fantastic. Well, except for that phase he went through when he was 12 where every time he didn't want to walk to them (which was, like, always), he turned into a fox and peed on the floor. But other than that, he and his parents got along just great. Which was honestly a little surprising, seeing as, apparently, they weren't biologically related. But hey, family's family, right?

Bal was home-schooled before Peregrym's Academy. They didn't get great reception out by their house, nor did they even actually own a wifi router, so all his home-schooling was done via textbooks, rather than, like, K-12 or something. Mamaidh taught him science and math, and Athair taught him English and History. Both parents had finished college (just barely), but neither had gone farther than that. They taught from textbooks they had saved through the years, or that friends donated, but never bought new ones - too expensive. As a result, Bal's schooling was a bit of a mess. He knew plenty about Shakespeare's plays and Thoreau's writings, but nothing about Poe's stories or Rousseau's poetry. He knew the ancient and modern bits of Scottish history, and only the middle bit of English history (not including the bits that overlapped). He had learned bits of Calculus without actually studying Algebra II, and had taken a stab at Physics without finishing either. Overall, it was a bit of a grab-bag.

My Own Little Foxhole

05 - 31 - 2016

Bal's key was simple. Small and bronze, it looked a bit like a longer version of the key he had for his trunk of things. He kept them looped around his neck together.

Finding his room was difficult, to say the least. Now, Bal had gotten plenty used to sneaking around the academy, but the blasted room kept shifting position. (Actually, Bal thought it was super awesome, but it was also kind of inconvenient.) It wasn't until he felt the key pressing against his shirt that he realized the key knew where to go. He let it drag him along corridor after corridor until it finally stopped him in front of his room.

Before explaining the current set up of the room, it would probably be best to depict Bal's room mates.

He got along just fine with Tris. Scratch that. He particularly enjoyed alternately teasing and flirting with Tris, sometimes both at once. Because Tris was attractive and made amusing faces when annoyed. Tris, for his part, hadn't killed him yet, so Bal took that as the thumbs-up to continue their excellent relationship.

Dream was a pretty cool guy, too. He had this pair of sweet swords that Bal had been strictly instructed by everyone else in the dorm not to touch. (They didn't let him in the kitchen, either. Fiascos tended to happen when he was in the proximity of sharp objects.) Bal liked to tease Dream about the swords’ names, but he thought they were awesome, nonetheless.

He was surprisingly good friends with Lucian, seeing as the guy could literally eat him for breakfast. The friendship worked for three reasons: 1) Lucian probably wasn't going to eat him. 2) Bal was only, like, 2% survival instincts, so even if Lucian was going to eat him, it wouldn't really change Bal's attitude. 3) Lucian was a pretty cool guy.

As for Aspen, well... Aspen was the reason the dorm had the Wall of Shame. As an Earth Elemental, Aspen liked to fill the dorm up with plants. As a fox and an immature individual overall, Bal liked to mess up those plants. The Wall of Shame was a compilation of photo evidence of Bal sitting on, sitting in, uprooting, and generally messing up the plants.

The rest of the room was pretty simple. Some personalized human beds for the other guys, and a ridiculously comfy dog bed for Bal. He slept better as an animal, so the dog bed was perfect.

Fittingly, it sat right under the Wall of Shame.

[sazorak]

What I Thought Of Every Single Game I Played In 2017

2017 was a weird year for me. In terms of my personal life, it's been something of a holding pattern; I'm a year older, but I've not accomplished nearly as much as I'd liked to. I've had a lot of good times, and I've done my best, but I probably haven't made an entirely meaningful use of my lingering youth.

But on the other hand: I got to play a whole bunch of video games! 2017 was a good year for video games. It had to be a good year for something, I suppose, and if the rest of the world was going to be getting it nasty this year, video games might as well be the thing that gets its due.

This write-up is an overview of what I thought about every single game I played this year. Only games that released this year qualified for a numbered “place”, as interpreted through my own rules. Here we go!

[2015] | [2016]

19. Fire Emblem Heroes – Android – ★★ – 2017

As a latecomer to the Fire Emblem games, this did nothing for me. I don't have a great amount of affection for the characters in the abstract, three lines of dialog and a couple cut-ins of them stabbing a guy don't even qualify as “fanservice”, and the narrative that is there is just plain bad. It's admirable that they managed to reduce their permadeath-driven tactical RPG to an experience that works on phones, but I have zero interest in throwing myself into gachapon hell in the hopes of a “dream team.” Besides, the second orb I cracked open had a five-star Camilla in it, so my experience was guaranteed to be a down-hill one.

18. Pictopix – Steam – ★★ – 2017

Pictopix is a fascinating lesson that not all Picross games are alike. It's not just a matter of creating puzzles that are secretly pixelized art: there is a flow to good nonogram design that is apparently quite hard to achieve. Where I get a lot of enjoyment from the Picross E- and Picross S- titles, I didn't care for this one, despite being on a platform well suited for a picross-a-like experience. I'm not sure I can even articulate just what rubbed me wrong about it (though the shoddy controls didn't help); the puzzles just felt clunky in a way that other takes on this style of puzzle did not.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Steam – ★★ – 2016

I accidentally backed this game on Kickstarter a few years ago. I thought an artist I was a fan of was attached to this project, when they just did some contracted promotional material for the Kickstarter. It's on me for reading into that, I suppose. In any case, I backed this game, it came out last year, and I couldn't honestly be bothered to actually play it until this year.

After having finally done so: I'm not sure why people like these games? They feel like baby's first platformer; it's well-produced, but threadbare in terms of mechanical complexity. There's a vague Metroidvania-aspect to re-exploring levels you've already completed, but it lacks the simple mechanical joy that the best of those have. The characters don't really do anything for me either; I presume if you've been following these since the mid-90s you get something from their interactions, because personally I just find it kind of lame? The art is fantastic, and the game looks good in motion, but overall, it's just not for me.

17. For Honor – Steam – ★★★ – 2017

Until I started making this list, I had completely forgot that For Honor even existed. Remember this game? It's the one where you play as an assortment of medieval warriors assembled from across the globe to stab each other in 4-vs-4 3 rd person capture-the-point combat. It was OK, but the experience overall fell flat— largely because of an abundance of flaws peripheral to the core gameplay.

The basic combat and mechanics felt and worked well; the simple axis-based block-or-attack combat system enabled some truly awesome duels that really felt like you were in a melee. But while the combat worked quite well, there wasn't a whole lot going on around it to justify the overall experience. The campaign was functional, but it was clearly an afterthought, bereft of even characters. The multiplayer was fun, but severely hampered by a poor progression / unlock system, as well as bad matchmaking and server issues.

In another year, perhaps For Honor would have stood out more. If the game had received post-release support in the way Ubisoft's more Clancyesque titles, perhaps it'd have had longer legs. As is, I spent enough time with it to know that it was maybe worth coming back to once they had hammered out their online issues— something that never really happened. And then the rest of 2017 happened and put it in its proper place. Oops!

16. Picross S – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

Where Pictopix disappointed, Picross S is functional, acceptable Picross. It's far from the best Picross offering in this line (I think I had the most fun with Picross E3, and not just because of its dumb name), but it is Picross on the Nintendo Switch, which is basically all I was really wanting out of it. The loss of touch screen interactions from the 3DS release is bizarre (the Switch has a touch-screen my dudes!), but I can live with it.

15. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment – Switch – ★★★ – 2017

It's been interesting to watch Yacht Club take the baseline premise of Shovel Knight— a retro-styled platformer shouting its Mega Man inspirations via megaphone to anyone who'll listen— and alter their execution with these different DLCs. Where the original Shovel Knight was a relatively straight-forward platformer (with Ducktales-inspired down-stab action), and Plague of Shadows was something of an odd build-your-own-shooter, Specter of Torment focuses instead on aerial combo-attacks. These changes really alter the gameplay; where the others could be a bit mindless at times (particularly Plague of Shadows, which was fairly easy given the number of projectiles you could throw across the whole screen), Specter of Torment is considerably more demanding of one's attention; you have to be more deliberate with your actions relying than relying on flow to get you through.

The design of the levels doesn't feel entirely there; while they certainly have been more redesigned than Plague of Shadows' were to fit the different style of movement, it just wasn't that fun to play through. Rooms were either too easy or too frustrating, with little in the way of a middle ground. The boss fights were trivially easy (which is dire in a game aping a series that largely relied on the quality of its emblematic show-downs). The plot was… fine? It certainly was a Shovel Knight prequel alright, that's for sure. At this point, I must imagine Yacht Club and I are both on the page on wanting see them work on something else at this point. They've proven themselves to be extremely competent developers, but it's time to put Shovel Knight to rest; they've gotten about as much blood as they can out of that particular stone.

14. Mario Kart 8 DX – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017-ish

OK, seriously Nintendo— when are you going to make a new F-Zero? Don't you give me this bullshit about “Why would you want a new F-Zero when we've already done it before!” when you keep making new Mario Karts with little different beyond the platform you put it on. All Mario Kart 8 DX did was pack-in all the DLC and add a true battle mode— which is great and all, don't get me wrong. It's just a sign that your excuses suck and you need to fund a new Captain Falcon vehicle-vehicle ASAP.

13. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds – Steam – ★★★★ –– 2017

I want to like Plunkbat more than I do, but I don't. What's there that's good is great; the open-world mix of random-luck and skill-based shooting (especially with friends!) is a real hoot, particularly when one is either taking it entirely too seriously or entirely not seriously at all.

But something about the game just feels… incomplete? Despite leaving early access, it really has a lot of work that it should be still getting. The physics is jank (the vehicles annoy me to no end), there's still absolutely 0 tutorializing for new players, and the problem with persistent hacking and aimbotting has been dire as of late. There's also something to the notion that a lot of the skill in the game comes down less to polished learning of the mechanics and their interactions and more a sort of base memorization of Plunkbat Best Practices. That's not innately a bad thing, but I personally find these sorts of experiences better when they're focused more towards tactical mastery than strategic mastery. Both are important in Plunkbat, but I prefer mastering the former over the latter. The game seems to disagree. I feel like the quality of my gear should be less important than how good I am at using what I find. That is not the case. Oh well.

I'm looking forward to putting more time into this with buds in the future, but I've fallen off the wagon as far as general enthusiasm goes. Eh!

Prison Architect – Steam – ★★★★ – 2015

Prison Architect is sort of a highly-specialized, more accessible Dwarf Fortress. Much of the appeal of Dwarf Fortress is the immersive unpredictability of managing emergent personalities trying to go about their tasks, and ultimately, it's so complex that an ASCII-based rendering is the only way to handle it all. Prison Architect constrains the variability by its very nature (the things people do in a prison are typically well-regulated, and there's not a lot of agency within those bounds), resulting in an experience that is nowhere as impenetrable as Dwarf Fortress— but also nowhere as appealing.

There's just not as much going on when you get down to it; while there's certainly variability in prisoner personality and actions, there are just so fewer variables in terms of what someone can do and interact with. Plus, given your funding regimen and in-take are totally under your control, the actual form your prison takes doesn't need to vary; you're not incentivized to innovate beyond a desire to keep things interesting. You can just your layouts entirely towards efficiency and nothing else, and even then, there's no real end-game to it beyond making numbers get bigger.

Mini Metro – Android – ★★★★– 2015

Mini Metro is a slight mobile puzzle experience, but it is quite engrossing while it lasts. The pairing of simple mechanics and style works very well on the phone. You make subway lines connecting points. It looks like a subway map. It's pretty good.

Total War: Warhammer – Steam – ★★★★ – 2016

I've always been vaguely interested in the Total War games— just never enough to go out of my way to actually, y'know, play them. Warhammer Fantasy has never been my thing, but I like fantasy things in general, and the idea of applying battle tactics to lines of zombies was appealing enough for me to give this a look. Overall, it turns out I enjoy the tactical depth of Total War!

I'm not sure how I feel about the strategic-layer in the few factions I played—it's a bit micromanage-y, and any faction managing to sneak its way to the back-end of your empire becomes a real chore-- but the tactical level is very good. The interplay of artillery, cavalry, and troops-of-the-line is realistic enough to where you can apply real-world know-how and be rewarded for it. The types of troops are massively varied, both inside and outside of the factions. I was mostly drawn to this game by the monster-y factions, so those were the ones I played most.

I'm looking forward to checking out Total War: Warhammer II... eventually?

12. Sonic Mania – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Sonic is bad. If you add up the total of what Sonic has been over the last two decades and average it out over the amount of games he has had the misfortune to appear in, the average Sonic is hardly deserving of the fawning devotion he receives. Those first few mainline Sonics were good, no question—but that was over two decades ago. SEGA has never succeeded in recreating the feel of those games—even when they have ostensibly tried.

Thankfully for them (and us), there are those that can succeed. Sonic Mania, created by long-time Sonic fans and hackers, perfectly captures the feel of those first three games almost too well. It's basically Sonic 1-3+K+CD, warts and all. The Sonic CD-based stages in particular carry on Sonic CD's design of being too long and really fucking annoying, which is rather indicative of the ethos of Whitehead towards recreating the feel of the older titles. I'm very curious to see if they'll be given permission to do a Sonic Mania II, where they'll perhaps have a chance to innovate more and burn off those warts. I'm not sure if they would, but I certainly hope they do. Sonic deserves better than, well, Sonic.

Stellaris: Utopia & Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn – Steam – ★★★★– 2017

This is technically a 2017 release, but it's so miniscule an addition to the existing Stellaris that it's not worthy of a numbered ranking. Stellaris in 2017 is a lot like Stellaris in 2016, but better. The addition of end-game specializations, new government-types, and the ability to play as both hive minds and robots are extremely good, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. That's the Paradox model, I suppose; they'll continue iterating and adding onto Stellaris over the next half decade until it finally achieves some near-ideal state—or the engine buckles under all they're trying to do with it. One of the two.

My favorite Stellaris moment this year must be the creation of "The Borth Problem". The Borth are a race of space Hyper-Platypuses, whose traits were specially selected by their creator (me) to be absolutely trash. They're short-lived, xenophobic pacifists who hate being around each other almost as much as they hate being around everyone else. I force them to spawn as one of the empires in every game I play-- not because they're particularly threatening, but because watching them repeatedly balkanize every two months under the strain of their own ineptitude and malfeasance is extremely good. Occasionally some fool attempts to annex Borth planets, which is a tragedy in and of itself.

11. Tekken 7 – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

God am I terrible at fighting games. I've just never put in the time to get any good, and I'm way too prone to mashing out moves I think are cool than learning combos or hit-strings. God do I love fighting games though— and Tekken 7 is a good one. It is a Tekken game through-and-through, but the additions they've made to the cast have been good, and the limb-specific combat system continues to hold up after all these years.

To be completely honest? I've been playing mostly as Eliza—whose special strings are just Street Fighter entry strings. She's basically Ryu if he was in a bustier (and a sleepy Dracula). It's allowed me to get past the hump of learning how to pull-off her specials, though it's done little to actually get me good at stringing combos together. It's still a lot of fun though.

10. Puyo-Puyo Tetris – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

IT'S PUYO PUYO AND TETRIS, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions – PSP – ★★★★ – 2007

Coming to Final Fantasy Tactics two decades on from its initial release on the PlayStation, one can still understand the appeal. The tactical RPG system has phenomenal mechanical depth, supporting wide-ranging customization and gameplay specialization. There's lots of weird systems to learn and exploit. The setting is austere and grounded in a way that few RPGs are; the story it tells is ultimately yet another Japanese tale of man-killing-god, but the way that it's presented is more about fighting back again the abuse of systems by society, and the futility of one man trying to change the world.

At the same time, two decades have passed since Final Fantastic Tactics came out, and it honestly has not aged superbly well. The controls are bizarre, its job system is rather annoying in practice, it suffers from the usual problem games with permadeath carry where the second a character joins the party and becomes non-essential, their relevance to the story ends. The story which was apparently once so astounding seems almost quaint now; “Organized religion… may be bad!” is far from a hot take in these days, and there have since been hundreds of other games (JRPGs, even) playing in the same sandbox.

As someone introduced to the Ivalice setting of Final Fantasy through Final Fantasy XII, it's also somewhat strange looking back at this series and trying to conceive of them as some connected timeline. A lot of what I liked about Final Fantasy XII was its diverse races and their cosmopolitan associations and interactions. Tactics has even less than none of that. It goes out of its way say with a ringing finality “AND EVERYTHING NOT HUMAN OR DEMON WENT EXTINCT, THE END.” Pour one out for my Ban'gaa homies, I guess??

I had fun with Final Fantasy Tactics, but I suspect I may have had a miserable time if I didn't have a friend warning me of points-of-no-return and making sure I didn't build myself into an unwinnable state. Also: exposing me to the utterly broken arithmetic / mathematics magic system, good lord.

9. Splatoon 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

Splatoon was a good game; Splatoon 2 is that same game, on a different platform.

The additions made to Splatoon 2 are really quite minor; there's some slightly different weapons, and the campaign is denser, but all in all it's just the same good game. The only meaningful addition to Splatoon 2 is Salmon Run, Nintendo's take on the cooperative Horde mode. And you know what? Salmon Run fucking rules. My best multiplayer experiences this year were playing Salmon Run with my boys on Discord. If it were more reliably available, I'd probably have played it more!

8. What Remains of Edith Finch – Steam – ★★★★ – 2017

The latest in the Walking Simulator genre, What Remains of Edith Finch is low on the interactivity, but high on the graphical fidelity, atmosphere, and emotional heft. Sometimes that emotional heft veers into the realm to over-sentimental schmaltz (the ending engendered some real roll-eye), but it doesn't diminish the overall experience. What interactivity that is there is quite good, and it all-in-all made for a great evening experience. I like these sorts of evening-games where you can plop down for 4 hours and just have a nice, self-contained emotional experience.

7. Metroid: Samus Returns – 3DS – ★★★★ – 2017

Maaan, it's good to see Samus in a properly ass good video game again. Other M was bullshit that I wasn't down with at all; this is some proper Metroid-ass Metroid. While there's perhaps still a bit too much Metroid 2 in there (the game is remarkably linear for a “Metroidvania” and the area design is a bit one-note – befitting its Gameboy origins), Metroid: Samus Returns is a very excellent proof of concept that yes, you can make a good Metroid in 2017.

It's also proof that even if we can no longer trust the franchise to Sakamoto's hands without him ruining everything and throwing a tantrum about Prime, others are capable of doing what's necessary to ensure that Samus remains a galactic badass and not Sakamoto's weaponized nadeshiko. Uugh.

As an aside: The references back to the Prime Trilogy, as well as the REALLY WELL-HIDDEN sequel-hook, are extremely good and appreciated. I am pumped to see what Mercury Stream (or someone else!) does with Metroid moving forward. Is that sequel hook actually a Metroid Prime 4 hook? That'd be cool as hell.

6. SteamWorld Dig 2 – Switch – ★★★★ – 2017

SteamWorld Dig was a relaxing, though ultimately rather forgettable take of what would happen if you crossed Metroidvania with Mr. Driller. SteamWorld Dig 2 would be the same, if it wasn't for the fact that it's just so god damned well-polished. Everything about it from the core gameplay feel, the movement, the digging speed, the music— they're just so damn well executed. The game world is just a delight to be in.

The story and ending are disappointing (as legally required of every SteamWorld game) but that's not really the point; this is absolutely a game where it's absolutely about the journey rather than the destination. When your journey revolves around such a fundamentally satisfying gameplay loop, the greatest sin it has is ending in the first place.

HITMAN – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

HITMAN is good! IO Interactive has created the ultimate encapsulation of the Hitman formula. The game is built to encourage replay and iteration on the game's limited number of maps. This is great, because replaying missions to achieve the perfect murder is a real joy. HITMAN is a game about perfecting the art of playing it: learning the systems, the maps, and the routines of people to the point where you see the clockwork that everyone else is beholden to— so that you can slide between the cogs like a bald, sardonic time-ghost. The game is grimly hilarious and cool in equal measures. I can't wait to see what they do with Season 2.

Stardew Valley – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Stardew Valley is a celebration of the routine. While so many games are about providing novel experiences and spectacles to keep our interest, Stardew Valley enables you to a build a routine, iterating and adapting as the world twists and turns around it. It's about riding a slowly swelling wave while maintaining flow; your farm and experience gets more and more complicated as the seasons go on, but it's always at your own pace; there's no real stakes beyond a desire to prosper and discover. It's charming and addicting in equal measures.

I'm glad they stopped development on it to focus on porting it to new platforms, because I'm pretty sure they'd have honest to god killed people with it. It turns out the cup-and-ball game from that Next Generation episode is actually a game about pleasing your peepaws' ghost by growing corn and hooking up with the goth chick down the lane. You're welcome, peepaw.

Valkyria Chronicles – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2016

Man, SEGA used to make brilliant RPGs back in the day, huh? I really liked Skies of Arcadia, and this is another RPG in that vein from that era. You wouldn't think “fantasy World War II European Front through the lens of Japanese RPG developers” would work, but… it does! They manage to evoke some genuine ethos, and their depiction of the brutality and horror of war, the in-grained senselessness of inherited discriminatory beliefs, are actually pretty OK. You'd think “We're going to depict ANIME FANTASY HOLOCAUST” would be the Worst Thing Ever, but they manage to thread that line enough to make it work… mostly.

Perhaps the craziest thing about Valkyria Chronicles though is that they somehow managed to make a tactical JRPG about trench / tank warfare not only work, but work well. While it's kind of breakable in areas and has balance issues, it managed to hold my interest through the dozens of hours without getting bored. I wasn't invested enough to do much in the way of the extra / repeatable missions, but I thoroughly enjoyed the combat for what I played.

That all said, Valkyria Chronicles could have done with less anime all around. If you turned that anime dial down a good 20%, this would have been a vastly superior work— perhaps even an all-time great. Unfortunately, its tendency towards Anime-ass composition and design, and some frankly juvenile characterization means it will forever carry that stigma of “it is very anime” that prevents it from penetrating into less anime-immune audiences. Still, for those willing to give it a shot and endure some really ham-fisted anime-as-all-hell ruminations on peace, Valkyria Chronicles is a real gem.

5. Super Mario Odyssey – Switch – ★★★★★ – 2017

The single thing that has defined Mario since the halcyon ape-threatening days to his hat-tossing present has been his movement. Over the years, the movements available to “Jump Man” have become more varied and complex, but they still harken back to what set him apart in the beginning: it's all about the jump. Mario Odyssey, while ostensibly about his more obvious hat-trick, is in reality just another stage of the gradual, ever-evolving repertoire of Mario's jump. He just… jumps so damn good y'all. It feels real damn good to run around and jump on shit as Mario. The hat even makes it so he can basically jump in the air, it's ridiculous.

Mario's new ups are made even better Mario Odyssey's excellent collections of worlds for him to mark with his kicks. The sheer variety and volume of unique platforming experiences is great, and it's ultimately up to you how deep you're willing to take it. Mario is something of a casual completionist's nightmare, given just how many stars there are to find. But for those willing to take a step back, the game allows you to engage it just as much you'd want. You could work on polishing your platforming skills to where you easily master the Darker Side of the Moon, you could just play enough of the game after “beating” it to get your fill, or you could just play what's needed to get to the credits. If you're a complete mad-person, you could try even collecting all those stars. All are valid end-points, and no matter what the experience is a complete and quality one.

Some one-off thoughts:

The new enemy designs in the game are so good. A particular shout-out to the Oni Thwomp!

THERE IS A BOSS WHOSE NAME IS “Brigadier Mollosque-Lanceur III, Dauphin of Bubblaine”, FUCK

Steam Garden's God Hand surf rock theme music is so good

The entire end-game sequence leading into the post-game zone was one of the most surreal things ever

NEW DONK CITY

4. Cuphead – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

Cuphead is a magic trick. At first glance, it seems impossible, like an actual sorcerer has walked in and done something impossible. “There's no way anyone could recreate the style of Fleischer-era cartoons and make a genuinely good video game!” Like any magic trick, once you look at it long enough the magic goes away, and you see it for what it is. You see the sleight of hand, the smoke and mirrors required to resurrect a nearly century-old style and make it work in what should be a wholly incompatible medium. But the skills required to pull that trick off, and that such a small studio accomplished it, is itself a feat worthy of a wizard with a sizeable beard. It's not perfect, but it's as damn close as any person could ever expect to see, really. The game looks, sounds, and plays damn good.

It's been funny following the discourse around Cuphead's gameplay, particularly the reaction to its difficulty. It's nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be; it's got a lot in common with bullet-hell shooters like the Touhou games, to be sure, but the difficulty about those games, like Cuphead, are more about learning how to play them right than anything particular crazy about most of the challenges they put in front of you. Once you learn how to precisely move the character, you can basically relinquish yourself to the flow state and soldier through pretty much everything (within reason). Cuphead's real trick in this regard is that the types of things going on screen look so fucking cool that it can pull you out of the flow through sheer wow-factor. It's a game that is harder because it looks so good. Unreal.

3. Pyre – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

The cruel hands of mother nature have evolved Supergiant Games into the perfect predator of my species. Their approach to writing characters, stories, and music is such that whenever they release one of their games, they burrow a tendril into my brain and maneuver my zombified body into a hole so they can lay eggs in my chest cavity. I'd feel more broken up about how they play me like an acoustic guitar if they weren't so, y'know, good at playing acoustic guitars.

Ostensibly, Pyre is NBA Jam meets Oregon Trail meets a Visual Novel, but it's so much more than that. It's the archeology of uncovering the history of a world through half-heard conversations and vaguely-written reminiscences. It's the trepidation of holding the fate of friends in your hands and knowing that you can't save them all in the end, and still having to choose. It's the struggle for glorious revolution, even though the odds of a bloodless one is low. It's all these things. You plot the end of an empire with a pipe-smoking treeman in between games of mystic slamball with a mustachioed dog. Everything about how it carries itself and presents its world resonated deeply with me and held me enraptured to the very end.

2. NieR: Automata – Steam – ★★★★★ – 2017

I've spent a lot of the last year thinking about Nier: Automata. At this point, I'm not even sure what to say about it. Do I talk about the questions it raises about humanity and what we may leave behind? Do I talk about its astounding visual and audio design? Do I go on a long aside on Yoko Taro's writing and directorial style? They're all valid things to talk about, but they're also all meaningless. They're only important in how they made me feel over the course of my journey with Nier. Intrigued, lost, depressed, uplifted. Nier: Automata invoked all these emotions in me in turn.

In the end, I'm left somewhat in awe of the experience. Not because Nier is a perfect game; it's a very flawed one. But it's a game that's really made me feel and think. Yoko Taro weaves the threads of narrative, emotion, and atmosphere with the deftest of hands. So what if the loom he was forced to work with wasn't a particularly good one? Nier: Automata is one of the most complete explorations of the nature of humanity and how impossible it is to grasp. I imagine I will carry thoughts of it with me forever.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Switch – ★★★★★★ – 2017

Breath of the Wild is my favorite video game of all time. Thanks, Nintendo.

[politicaltheatre]

The Boy In The Bubble, pt.2

“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives the acclaim of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.” - General Dwight D. Eisenhower, July 12, 1945

Immune response isn’t something we tend to think of when it comes to politics and other social behavior, but, we should ask, how is it that politics and social behavior function? More precisely, what are their functions to our species as a whole?

Their primary function could be said to be to aid our survival. We have short term needs and we have long term needs. We test our environments and we learn how to adapt to them. If we fail to learn, we fail to adapt; fail to adapt and we die.

This can be taken literally - and right now it should - but it applies just as well to politics and social behavior. Relationships, be they between a government and its people or just between two friends, depend on the ability to adapt to change.

To succeed in the short term, partners can afford to be selfish and transactional; to succeed over the long term, however, each partner in the relationship must selflessly root for the other to succeed and take action on behalf of the other to make that happen.

Selflessness is key to our long term health as a society. Too much selfishness and societal cohesion breaks down. The more we feel alone, the more we truly are. That feeling is never far away. It’s in the questions we ask about the world around us.

How many times have we witnessed the horrors of this world and asked, “Why?” How many times have we gotten sick, with a virus, with allergies, with food poisoning, or with heartache, and asked, “Why?” There must be a reason for it, a purpose in it. What must we accept if there isn’t?

To protect ourselves from that answer we seek out a higher authority, anyone or anything with the power to answer those questions and, in doing so, to make us feel safe. We never do feel safe, though, not enough and never long enough.

To know that we were truly, lastingly safe would require proof, and nothing could ever last long enough for that. To cross that last, infinitely long stretch of belief, we choose faith.

This is no criticism of religion, this applies to everything. Of all the things that require faith, religion is just the most obvious example. When we hear the word, faith, religion is where our minds go. It is a thing many of us rely upon. It provides moral and ethical guidance, it provides structure, and it offers answers to unanswerable questions.

When we criticize it, we do so in part for its failings, which have been every bit a betrayal of its promise of protection in exchange for power, and in part to reassure ourselves that the other kinds authority offering us protection in exchange for power are worthy of that faith, because they, too, require our faith.

Many who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 - too many of them, really - called their choice “a leap of faith”. They had things they wanted, things that they felt were important enough to look past his failings. It was a short term transactional decision. To get what they wanted they were placing themselves in his hands and hoping for the best.

“The best” may be words they’ve heard from the man - too many times, really - but the results have been anything but. Part of this has been general incompetence, but the rest of it has been what generates and perpetuates so much incompetence, which is the bubble of craven reinforcement Trump demands from those around him.

Whatever the appeal of authoritarianism in hard times, it inevitably breeds a culture of yes men, either by design or through mere attrition. That kind of echo chamber kills whatever analogue to an immune system a government and the society it serves can have.

In a government operating without dissent or criticism, there are solutions that will work for some problems. Its goals being short term - aggressive selfishness can have no goal that isn’t - the problems that it can solve are necessarily short term. A brief crisis on a small scale, that should be a piece of cake, at least for a government that cares to acknowledge that such a problem even exists.

Of course, how many times can you jump from one short term solution to another before you arrive at something definably long term? Long term thinking is what is required to solve those problems, in no small part because long term thinking is what prevents them, or at least mitigates them.

This, again, is where the immune response of a government is dependent on its openness to criticism, on its culture of seeking preventative and mitigating solutions to problems it should know could happen.

The initial response of the Trump administration to the COVID-19 outbreak was a classic example of a political leader surrounding himself with short term-thinking yes men and attempting to deny a problem out of existence. That should worry us, and not simply because the result of operating in this kind of bubble was a slow, flat-footed response to an urgent, worsening problem.

What should worry us so much about it is that Trump has sought to emulate other “strong man”, authoritarian regimes around the world, because their responses to the outbreak have been extremely troubling.

If we’re finding that we can’t trust Trump’s reporting on the status of the outbreak in the United States - or his reporting of his own response to the outbreak - or his ability to handle the crisis in any way that isn’t driven by his own aggressive selfishness, we need to pay attention to what’s going on in those countries with authoritarian regimes.

That list includes countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, all of them formerly part of the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact, as well as countries in Africa and Asia that were once colonies and now have regimes that may only be called “democratic” with great charity. Oh, and then there are countries such as Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Pakistan, Brazil, North Korea, and, of course, Russia.

Russia’s response to the outbreak has been particularly troubling. It’s possible to discount a virus’ viability in Russia’s colder winter climate, but not when you consider that Scandinavian countries all reported hundreds of cases and dozens of deaths when Russia was still claiming a few dozen cases and zero deaths.

That Russian companies also do heavy business with both China and Iran should also raise an alarm to their apparent underreporting. Thousands of Russians likely traveled between those three countries since the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan. If the idea is to slow down the outbreak and mitigate the loss of life, knowing the size of the outbreak in cities the size of Moscow and St. Petersburg is crucial.

Then again, it’s possible the misinformation campaign currently thriving in Russia media, that the United States is responsible for COVID-19 and released it China as an act of biological warfare, will do more damage, because there will be just enough idiots around the world to take it on faith that it’s something the United States would do. Or maybe Canada.

The Chinese government has also been pushing that rumor, a clear attempt to push accountability for the outbreak away from them. This, paired with barring American news organizations, is yet another alarming development. It suggests that they see their failures as a threat to their hold on power.

The initial response from the Chinese government to the outbreak in Wuhan was telling. The now-deceased doctor who sounded the alarm was punished for doing so. That should really scare the shit out of us. It delayed the safety measures that could have contained or at least greatly slowed the spread, and there is no reason to believe this was a lesson the Chinese government has taken to heart.

Time is critical in containing something like this. Just ask the families of those who died at Chernobyl. That the lessons of that catastrophe and ones like it haven’t been learned and applied by every government is remarkable, but not especially surprising when the government in question, much like their nominally “communist” Soviet counterparts, doesn’t take criticism. People taught not to deliver bad news won’t, even when you need it most.

The response in Iran, which insisted on telling its people that nothing was wrong just weeks after it lied to them about shooting down a civilian airliner, may lead to another revolution. The higher the death toll, the worse it will be for those in power, and the death toll in Iran will be high. So little do Iranians trust their government at this point that many have become infected because they have done the opposite of what the government told them to do because it was what the government told them to do.

Governments can’t afford to lie to their citizens. At least, they can’t afford to get caught. If you, like so many in the right wing, hate government because you hate having to be accountable to other people, you’ll go ahead and lie. Getting caught only helps you because it furthers distrust of government. Its a win-win in a losing, lonely world.

If, on the other hand, you were counting on maintaining control of your people and you need the apparatus of government to do that, lying is a sure way to destroy whatever power you hold, because lies, especially lies about the health and safety of everyone, get out.

So, yes, we know that Trump has screwed up. We know that he has done so because he has chosen to surround himself with people who only tell him what he wants to hear and has punished those who have delivered bad news. We know that he has blamed others for his own mistakes. We know that he has also made decisions about what to tell Americans based on how it might serve his own, selfish, short term needs. And we know that at least one part of his initial response, to ban travel from all of western Europe except for the British Isles, was made because he has hotels there.

Okay, we don’t know that last part, but given that the outbreak had already reached England, it’s fair to guess. It was either that or reckless stupidity. Either way, it was a great example of what a compromised immune response looks like.

The many mistakes Trump and his people have been making are merely compounding that. His many lies and lack of empathy have not only crippled our government’s ability to respond but our own ability to respond to each other. That cripples our ability to earn the lessons that need to be learned to aid our survival.

He won’t change. Like the leaders he chooses to emulate, he won’t accept responsibility, either. Like them, his need to do so puts our entire species in danger.

We’re smart enough, though, as a species to overcome this. When our leaders fail us, we look elsewhere. Many will look to other, more competent, more empathic leaders or other potential leaders. Many will look to each other. This is part of adaptation. This is part of being a social organism.

We get sick and, hopefully, we get better. This is how we evolved. This is how we test and adapt to changing environments, evolving us further still. This is how we, hopefully, learn. The cultural antibodies added to our collective history will record both how we allowed ourselves to become sick, how we through our own selfishness and short term thinking, threatened our own survival. It will do so, however, because (and only if) we survived.

Our environments will continue to change. The threats will, too, learning and adapting themselves, mutating as they always have. It doesn’t stop, and neither do we. We’re still here.

“Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.” - President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April, 1953

- Daniel Ward

[latina4rmbx]

Celibacy & Me

Hello,

I want to tell you about the times, yes, it was more than once, that I was celibate. I always knew what being celibate was, but I never know the proper definition until today.  Google Dictionary defines celibacy (noun) as the sate of abstaining from marriage AND sexual relations.

Now that I know the definition, I’m wondering, was I REALLY celibate?  I had no choice but to abstain from marriage.   No one was proposing.  So if the definition includes both, which is does, there’s an AND in there, then I guess I just wasn’t fuckin’.  Maybe I should change the title to “The Times I Wasn’t Fuckin’?”  Doesn’t have the same ring to it though.

Well, well, well Wikipedia for the fuckin’ save.  Wikipedia defines celibacy as the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent OR both, usually for religious reasons.  Hey, I definitely didn’t do it for religious reasons.  Lets see what Websters is talking about.

Merriam-Webster defines celibacy as 1)  The state of not being married, 2a) abstention from sexual intercourse, 2b) abstention by vow from marriage.  I should’ve came here first.  Would’ve saved you some reading.  Sorry guys.

Please forgive me because I am BAD with dates and time frames.  However, I remember the durations of the times I was celibate because when people, usually at work, asked me how long had it been, I had a definitive response.

The first time I was celibate lasted for about a year and a half.  NOW, please understand that this was BY CHOICE.  I’m not going to say that the egg plants were flying to me, but I mean, I am a female.  I have a pretty dope personality and I have people I can call up in case of emergency.  I chose to be celibate.

I had been having sexual intercourse, ALL of the sexual intercourses, since I was 12 years old.  Prior to 12, I was doing everything but.  Yes, I know it’s young.  Yes, maybe I should be embarrassed, but honestly, I’m not.  This is my truth and my experiences have made me who I am today and people love me.

So, sexual intercourse at 12 years old.  I was a problem child to say the least.  I don’t know how I will ever apologize to my aunt for all the shit I put her through.  Thankfully, I KNOW she forgives me.  She loves me to death.  She feels it was part of my journey and she’s not going to judge me.  I appreciate her for that.  

Having sexual relations at such a young age, you don’t truly understand your body nor the hints it gives you about what you need.  I wasn’t really the type of kid to masterbate.  Which, knowing what I know now, I missed out.  As a child, I did have orgasms.  

Let me quickly explain the orgasm thing.  So when I was young, I’d say about 5 or 6, maybe a little older, I liked to play on the swings.  Not only swinging on them, but climbing the poles.  I was a huge tomboy growing up, so I had messy hair, scabby knees and scraped elbows (honestly, not much as changed, I almost wiped out today and if you know me, my hair is questionable at times).  So I used to climb the poles that held the swings together.  Sometimes I’d hold on to two poles and sort of shimmy up like a monkey.  Until I discovered the wonder of shimmying up just one pole.

Please know that my little ass (PUN intended) was scrawny and apparently I had upper body strength.  So I would wrap one leg around the pole and jump.  When I was off the ground (maybe INCHES) I would wrap my other leg around the pole and pull myself up with my hands.  Now, what this did was created friction between the pole, my clothing and my vagina (notice I’m keeping it technical to not gross out my family members).  At first nothing would happen, then all of a sudden like a burst, I’d feel my nether region throbbing.  It was the most glorious feeling to a little girl who a) never felt that before and b) had no clue what the fuck was happening, but knew it felt good.

What was my point?  Ahhhh celibacy.  Ok, so I had been “shimmying” up poles as a kid (why didn’t I become a stripper is beyond me) and having sexual intercourse since I was 12.  My vagina needed a break.

Now, she had had breaks in the past.  Being in shitty relationships where I know the guy is screwing someone else, sort of puts a damper on your love life.  You don’t want to have sex with someone you love whom is having sex with someone else (oh how things have changed, LOL).  So I had gone without sex for a time, but maybe a month, two months, maybe 3?  (If any of my ex’s are reading text or message me how long was the longest I held out on you).  None of my ex’s read, so I know they’re not reading this shit.  Not that they can’t, they don’t.

So a few years ago (more than a few years) I decided to stop having sex and see where my life takes me.  I was miserable and depressed and having sex was sort of a bandaid on those feelings.  I stopped enjoying it.  I know the biblical reason for sex is procreation.  I had 3 kids at the time.  It wasn’t fun anymore.  I was having sex just to feel a connection to something.  To top it off, the little girl shimmying up the pole was cuming more than I was.  Don’t get me wrong, sex was FUN, but it wasn’t fulfilling anymore.  I needed the fucking break.

Let me tell you, my life didn’t change one bit.   I didn’t do more.  I didn’t take advantage of the time I wasn’t having sex to pursue other interests.  NOT A DAMNED THING CHANGED.

What broke me out of my celibacy, and the stories will be similar, was someone from my past.  I’ll call him ANNOYING.  He and I are still friends on social media and I don’t know if he reads my stuff so I don’t want to put him out there.  He is the type of person that will go zero dark 30 on you (meaning he’ll ghost you) because he just doesn’t GAF.  That’s perfectly fine for me, especially since after the second time having sex, after the extended vacation, he started talking about things he knows nothing about like children.  He doesn’t have children.  

He has the right to his opinion, something I remind him of often, but...BUT he doesn’t know what it takes to raise a child since he hasn’t had one himself.  He was trying to tell me what to do with my child or what school to send him to, because he doesn’t agree with the Charter School model.  DA FUQ!?  No one, especially not I, asked for your opinion.  I tried to be as cordial as possible about it, but he says things just to get my goat, I think.

The third time he asked to have sex I straight up told him no and that I didn’t even like him as a person.  Although I’m sure I could’ve removed myself and just had sex, he was definitely NOT worth it.

I went celibate again.  This time around it lasted for a little over 3 years.  ANNOYING turned me off so bad I didn’t want to screw anymore.  I have asshole friends.  Do you know all of the “day ____ of no sex” jokes I received via text?  But I held strong.  Remember, I could’ve done it if I wanted to.  I had been offered a few times.  I said I wasn't going to drop my celibacy until I found someone worthy of it.

Guys were NOT lining up to take me out.  Lets get that straight.  Again I had been offered sex, but it was just sex.  One of the persons who propositioned me said “I don’t know how you do it.”  My response was, “I just don’t think about it.”

Now, as women, we know that the whole “I don’t think about it” is bullshit.  Your body does its own thing.  When women are ovulating they get horny.  It’s science bitch!  So, it wasn’t as easy as not thinking about it. What I did do was deprive myself.  No peen, no vibrator, no hand jobs, nothing.  If I was horny, I kept myself occupied until the feeling subsided.  

I had learned my lesson from the first time.  Have sex with someone who’s worth it.  Then, just like before, someone from my past returned.  This time, I was shocked and awed.  NOT by the dick by the persons return.  HE was someone worth giving up my celibacy for.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with him.  He ghosted me for a bit.  He has recently contacted me.  He knows he did me wrong and I didn’t deserve it.  I don’t know what he plans to do about it.  At this point in time, he missed his opportunity.  

FYI:  I gave up my celibacy August 2018.  Which means, prior to that, I hadn’t had sex since 2015.  The entirety of 2016 AND 2017 I didn’t have sex.  SHIT that sounds like such a long time.  I guess it is since I was celibate for 3 years, but quantifying it makes it seem so much longer.  Makes sense since I seem to be trying to catch up.  

My friends at work made fun of me so much.  They used to say, “Yeah, maybe he can knock those fucking cobwebs out.”  WHAAAAT?!?!?!?  It was funny.  This second time around, I did more.  I traveled more, I wrote more.  I partied more.  I took advantage of the time I wasn’t having sex to do MORE.  This was essentially the entire point.  Shelly needed a break (that’s my vagina’s name) and I needed to get in the correct headspace.

Being celibate, by choice, is not a bad thing.  Sometimes you need to get back in touch (no pun intended) with yourself.  It would be the same if it were Yoga or a class of some sort.  I just chose to not have sex.

If you choose to be celibate for a time, good for you.  As long as you don’t have friends, such as mine, who “fainted” every time I told them how long I had bee without sex, you’ll be fine.  Celibacy doesn’t mean you can’t orgasm or have sex with yourself.  It just means that you’ve finally decided to put YOUR own needs above anyone else.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

XOXO

Thanks for reading.

[sweetlifetownsville]

The Local Government Godzilla: Should The CCC Be Taking A Closer Look At The Money-Grubbing Activities Of The LGAQ?

But even if the CCC isnt bothered, you should be. The Magpie has a beak around to warn of actual or threatened raids on the ratepayers piggy banks with money-spinning schemes that really benefit no one but the LGAQ itself. Also, a look back down memory lane at solicitor Barry Taylors efforts to bring to Townsville a business urger who is now awaiting sentence next month for corruption connected to the Ipswich Council. And not unrelated, in a moment of clarity, The Magpie realises that this sorry episode was the catalyst for Taylors pathological hatred of the old bird, which continues to this day with a spiteful legal vendetta. The Pie will explain how it all fits. Some sobering statistics about the real Real Estate situation in Townsville, with some graphs the Bulletin is too coy to share with you. And for those who enjoy our now regular Trump gallery, A BONUS a few select pictorial comments on Britains Brexit fiasco. But first Even Buffoons Can Occasionally Be Funny (as The Magpie Knows) Theres been a lot of huffing, puffing and posturing about Clive Colonel Blimp Palmer during the week. First there was the hissy fit by some over Palmers text message saying if he gets back onto the parliamentary plush, he will move to ban such political texting as this.

The Magpie got one, and the old birds instant reaction? Roaring laughter. Lets give Ol Lardarse a couple of brownie points the text is one of the funniest, and surely intentional, jokes of the current election campaign. Unsurprisingly, there was instant babble about hypocrisy which came thick and fast from the pompous chatterati navel gazers, but the Pie will take his laughs where he can get them, and salutes whoever thought up this one for Palmers doomed campaign (possibly someone called S. Sokolova, who authorised the text for the UAP). In fact, doomed causes seem to be a recurring theme this week for Clive, who announced he was giving a dinner dance for a select few Towns-villains to celebrate Titanic ll the return of the legend. Sad when someone has to promise free food and booze to get them to just turn up. And the general feeling is whatever sort of guest selection process that was bubbling around behind the Palmer brow, if you didnt get an invite, then you were not considered of merit or value to Clive.

But when it became known amongst our movers and shakers who was in and who was out, it was a matter of do we laugh or cry was it a hot ticket, or a hot potato ticket, to be dropped immediately? Being favoured by Palmer is something many would like to be quiet about, but then, neither is being left out of a fabulous free food fight, ones ego can be buffeted by such neglect. Many would have loved an invite if for no other reason it have the unlikely option to RSVP sod off. But Bentley for one believes it will a unique experience, with special attire for dancers.

The highlight of the night for Clive will be when the adoring and grateful throng gather around him to sing what he will think is a fitting tribute to him, a rousing rendition of the Titanic hymn, Nearer My God To Thee. What Starts Out As A Good Idea Doesnt Always End Up That Way.

The Local Government Association of Queensland has been around since 1896, and for the most part, has been a valuable and necessary lobby group for all Queensland councils. Councils pay an annual fee to belong to the LGAQ (Townsville pays around $250K annually), membership is voluntary but all 77 Queensland councils are members. In total, they pay $35million annually in membership fees. The smaller outfits get value from matters such as insurance deals and other areas where the Associations clout can be brought to bear. But about 10 years ago, under the leadership of former Townsville council executive and now the Association CEO Greg Hallam, it was decided that there were more lucrative fields in which the Associations leverage with such a captive (albeit voluntary) membership could be used to build a significant commercial operation. Put simply, the organisation decided to become commercial entrepreneurs.

LGAQ CEO Greg Hallam And boy, did they ever. Figures for 2016 show there was a massive bump in revenues, jumping from $46m to $73m, a goodly chunk of this coming from their commercial procurement arm Local Buy (that includes the $35m membership revenue). In simple terms, Local Buy has screened and listed (for a fee) various businesses from across the state, all of whom can then by-pass the tender process and submit direct quotes for contracts to any of the 77 council members. On the face of it, this saves councils money in avoiding the costly procurement work of tendering and so on. But it also sounds like an invitation to corruption on a grand scale. The Pie has no evidence of or suggesting there is, such activity, but looking at the process, there doesnt seem to be a foolproof safeguard against some expensive jiggery-pokery if someone wanted a new spinnaker for the yacht. But does it save councils money? Local Buy is anything but since it opens up work to the whole of Queensland, often bypassing truly local businesses in the highly selective process which requires a fee for ticking the right boxes (literally, apparently). Local Buy takes a cut of the contract amount of the winning quote usually 10% but The Pie is told sometimes more. Of course, since this is all above board and known, what do the quoters do? They of course factor the 10% in and add it on to their quote, in many cases wiping out any significant savings for the council involved, as well in some instances, as denying many a rate paying, money-spending locals a job . This has caused a great deal of angst here in Townsville, whose mayor is a $32K plus a year LGAQ director, and whose sidekick (now on what seems permanent leave), Stephen The Screaming Midget Beckett, is reported to have had loud abusive outbursts with local business people who have complained about the situation. And to what end is all this? Theres a great deal of money flowing into the coffers of the Association, and they arent shy of shouting themselves lavish overseas jollies disguised as work studies. Why does a lobby group want to be so entreprenurial? Do they want to reduce council membership to zero on the user pays basis (yeah, right), or some witty cynic might suggest, as a lobby group, for a bribery pool? (Just a joke, Mr Hallam, put down the phone.) But there is a more troubling aspect to this arrangement, apart from freezing out local contractors and permanent local workers rather than special workforce brought in for a set amount of time before disappearing back wherever they came from.

If you care about strong local voice in Townsvilles affairs, it would well to be wary of a crowd called Propel Partnerships, who appear to be getting into bed with the LGAQ. Propels buzz-word blurbs try to disguise their activities by describing themselves as a shared services company and pepper their media releases with such euphemisms as fully integrated customer services; Propel Partnerships is simply a profit-driven, out-sourcing business. Current (or possibly former by now) chairman Jim Soorley, that old Labor stager from way back in Brissy, had his mate Carl Wulff, the then CEO of Liverpool Council in Sydney (now awaiting sentence in chokey for bribery in the Ipswich scandal) enter into an agreement that has ended up with the NSW Crime and Corruption Commission. This sort of thing can cost local jobs and introduce a totally remote, sometimes hostile letter-of-the-law approach to dealings with staff and with the local community in such areas as rates, payroll services (shades of Qld Health yikes!) and licensing. And not a chance of a face-to-face session of negotiation. This is an extension of the popular Big Brother move in business, a model that even further removes the public from reasonable (and reasonably expected) interaction with their council. To understand what happens in both these centralisation scenario, one need look further than the dear old Townsville Bulletin, which has been so savagely ravished by Ruperts money-hungry minions and sloppy reporting staff directed from Holt Street in Sydney, a paper which hilariously subbed in NZ, Mumbai, the Phillipines or Brisbane. Of course, one attraction for councils in this model is that it does away with the necessity of either engagement or accountability with the people who elected them or provided their jobs. This is the rapidly emerging tip of a massive iceberg, with Greg Hallam and his board deciding rather than try and fight off a competitor in an money-sinkhole business battle, instead join forces and share a cut of a captive pie. This is obvious when Hallam gave this ringing endorsement : The work of Propel Partnerships ensured that councils were ableto realise efficiencies in their operations while remaining in touch with the needs of their communities. Im confident that Propel has the right formula to bring success to any local government wanting to havethe best customer service, he said. This type of service clearly does no such thing as remaining in touch with the needs of their communities quite the opposite . Mr Hallams self-serving ideas of best customer service and that of the general public may widely differ laughably so. Saving money, especially public funds, is in most instances an admirable goal, but in this case, it is just another legalised rort of dubious value: and it is actually doubtful that the average ratepayer gets a single cents benefit therell always be reasons found not to lower ratesand charges. So be wary of this sort of further alienation of individual communities by the robotic, rorting remote control of more aspects of our lives. More Lessons To Be Learned From Post-Pisasale Ipswich Before we leave this subject, check this out.

Those figures are mind-boggling and it could easily happen here unless we are on our toes after all, before his downfall, Pisasale was lionized by Jenny Hill, who said she wanted Townsville to be more like his Ipswich. It probably is, but the CCC just hasnt found out about it. And this sort of lark dovetails nicely with the cold, callous restructure advocated in the Jenny Hill-0commissioned Nous Report. And boy, hasnt that Ipswich decision put Hallams panties in a bunch. The LGAQ chief seems somewhat spooked by the Ipswich scandal coming so close to home, and used Trumps favourite trope to discourage any close examination of local government in Queensland.

That mentioned head is of course Hallam, and it could be said, on the evidence of other corruption in councils, that the word pinhead could also apply to him. Maybe the CCC might start taking an interest in the LGAQ and all those tens of millions. Now that would be interesting. Historical Snapshot: Barry Taylor And One Of His Mates Yesteryear

On the left, the bloke that looks like his got the loser of a cat fight on his head, thats the Carl Wulff that was Jim Soorlys pal at Liverpool Council before Wulff headed north to Ipswich. And of greater interest to us here in the ville is the bloke on the right. Thats Wayne Myers, a seriously well-connected go-between linking corporate life to a number of movers and shakers in the Queensland ALP. Mr Myers has pleaded guilty to corruption in connection with the Ipswich council he has admitted he facilitated bribes to go to his co-offenders who have also pleaded guilty. He will be sentenced next month when well see just how well connected he is. But heres an interesting little bit of nostalgia Mr Myers is no stranger to Townsville, or to legal fee gouger Barry the Legal Foghorn Taylor.

Back in the early noughties, maybe 2004, Meyers rode into Townsville with the hope of siphoning a good chunk of public money into his community telco business, which was being driven out of non-performing mining minnow Rennison. It was a classic case of the Mates Economy. Myer recruited local Labor fundraiser and Mooney confrere Barry Taylor to corral a bunch of bizoids into his boardroom to hustle the dollars. Each chipped in $20k (including apparently Mrs Foghorn more on that in a minute) and then Myers went about trying to convince His Radiance Mayor Mooney that the ratepayers should (1) chip in an interest-free loan of $250k, (2) $20k of straight-up equity, and (3) commit to a long-term deal for all of the Councils telecommunications needs to the new company.

As things transpired, His Radiance, in his pre-meltdown years, had the good sense to have the matter properly researched by his then IT chief Anthony Wilson, who quickly nixed the deal offered by Myers and Taylor. Despite a lot of aww, cmon, mate, old buddy, pal entreaties, Mooney said no. In fact, The Pie was told that Mooney thought the whole thing a bad joke. The deal on the table was a dud. Myers model guaranteed fees to Rennison first and before anyone else; would have delivered sub-par service and cost outcomes to Council (Council could and did do much better); never budgeted for a repayment of the proposed loan; and didnt have a cent of interest for Council. Poor old Richard Spiderman Ferry had become the chairman of a local business he knew nothing about. He was left carrying the can, when the business model proved a failure. There is no information about what happened to any monies that may have been handed over, but you can bet Bazza put in a bill for any legals. What Myers (and Taylor, who mustve surely twigged to what Myers was up to if he hadfnt twigged, doesnt say much for his legal or business radar) tried to get away with was an arrangement where Rennison re-sold Optus Services to NQ Telco, and took a clip. Too many layers with too thin a set of margins doomed the activity from day one. Myers went on his way, and Bazza carried on his hosting of other southern white shoe brigaders and their dubious schemes, notably the disgraced fraudster Craig Gore (currently fled to Sweden in the hope of avoiding jail on multiple charges of financial fraud), who risibly said he would put in a canal estate in the duck pond in front of the casino. Considering what happed later with Port Hinchinbrook, Townsville really dodged a bullet there when that all fell flat, but no thanks to Mr Taylor. But All This Has Led To A Personal Revelation For The Pie The Magpie has never fully understood the seething animosity that has driven Taylor on a vendetta against him that continues in the courts to this day. Barry on several occasions over the years, had threatened to sue me, but was never able to say for what (he was drunk on two occasions). Of course, he was all hot air at that stage because Bazza was never brave enough in his bluster to take on News Ltd, for whom I worked at the time. When Peter Gleeson came to town, he was in Barrys pocket even before he arrived, with his wife pre-promised a cushy job with Enema Legal. I was puzzled that a boisterous boofhead like myself could attract such venom. At one stage, Taylor had Gleeson direct me to delete a quite harmless mention of him he had heard I was to include in the Magpie column (the comment simply said he had bought a multi-million dollar property in Noosa, and Barry said it could damage his reputation in Townsville his what, you laugh?) that was only time any editor interfered in any of my opinion columns for personal and not legal reasons. In that incidence, Taylor sent in a handwritten letter which Gleeson showed me (appalling writing and grammar) that strangely said that I was waging a campaign against his family. I didnt, and dont know his family, and quickly proved in the papers computer system that I had mentioned Taylor a total of 7 times in 8 years, none of them derogatory. I mentioned his wife in passing once when I wrote that she was the director of a company THAT HAD PUT $20k INTO A DUBIOUS TELCO BUSINESS WITH THE COUNCIL! Nothing illegal or even untoward was suggested, except that I didnt think it was a good idea. So there we have it. That must have been the start of it all, Baz not only being caught out in the subsequently failed telco venture, but that I had revealed he had inveigled his missus to whack up some cash as well (through a company of which she was a director, as I remember). Totally harmless, just a bit of local gossip, but somehow, Barry became as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. His bluster continued down the years, including threatening to arrange a boycott of Michels restaurant if they didnt drop their advertising on this blog. (They did drop the ads, he was a valuable albeit much disliked customer, but were happy to let me keep the couple of hundred they had paid.) And so it goes on still, he talked poor old Rabieh Krayem into suing me for alleged libel, knowing full well that I have no money or assets to pay 100th of the ludicrous $300,000 claimed. Well, Baz, hatred comes at a cost, because you didnt reckon on two highly principled and incensed lawyer friends who offered to defend me because they cannot abide bullying, especially legal bullying like trying to spuriously involve my daughter on a technicality in matters that dont even remotely concern her. That alone was a clear measure of your craven behaviour and that of the ninny Venesa Gleeson (Typos wife) as a mother herself, youd think she might have some scruples, but alas, she will use the Hitler excuse I was just following orders least the Court of Appeal has chucked out that bit of vicious nonsense. Rabieh, make sure you have it in writing that Barry is doing this for nothing for you, and that it really, as a mutual friend told me, purely Barrys show. Otherwise, those Nudgee fees for your two lads may well end in up in the Taylor bank account in Noosa. The Townsville Property Market Will Be Hunky Dory In 2019, Says The Astonisher. As the Hotels Combined teddy bear says on telly Really? Dont believe everything Mr Convincing tells you.

Since the City Economist, David Lynch, seems largely silent, heres a chart showing building approvals for 2018 (December numbers not available yet). The data is from the Councils own website.

One could do some extra work and show the comparisons for the previous year, or two for that matter, but why take work away from Lynchy. To summarise: to the 11 months, in 2017 there were 641 dwelling approvals. In 2018 there were 432. For those numerically inclined thats 209 fewer or 30.2% less in number. And gee, I thought the stadium was going to be the one catalyst that would turn the whole show around. The one catalyst claim came from none other than the muppets at Enterprise House (where Mr Lynch used to work.) And to cap things off, The Pie offers these self-explanatory charts.

However, the Astonisher persists with its cheery inanities, but raises an interesting pictorial question. One of the spangled cheer leaders of this self-serving guff is this bloke

Propertyology managing director Simon Presley A propertyologist sorely in need of a psychologist and some serious sartorial advice. Seriously, are you going to believe a bloke who decides to sit in the middle of a busy Brisbane road, with an empty chair next to him to signify that no one else is that dopey. Keep it up, Mr Presley and youll soon be joining your namesake. Captain Towns May Have Been A Blackbirder But At least we have tucked his statue away in a discreet corner, but not those right-wing race-baiters up in Cairns. They have even got Captain Cook throwing a big Nazi salute.

Finally, Not One But Two Mini-Galleries On Overseas Matters The first is the Brexit hullabaloo, which is far from over, but has been a cartoonists cornucopia. Heres four of the best.

And That Leads Us Into The Week In Trumpistan What a difference a few hundred metres makes. Because of his tantrum induced government shut-down, Trump was without catering services to entertain a visiting football team. So as a man addicted to whoppers, he called in Burger King to provide the food for the boys (he couldve just as easily gone with Maccas, asking his guests You want lies with that?)

And just down the road in DC at the very same time, there was a food line of Federal employees who havent been paid that stretched around the block of this massive federal building.

So its true what they say about America being a land of contrasts. That issue continued to dominate the visual commentary of the week, but the New Yorker knew who was needed to sort out demon Donny.

And so it goes .. Thats it for this week, Nesters, and remember that comments run throughout the week, have your say, there was a very lively thread on the council getting involved in the citys mental health work (some hilarious) and theres plenty of fodder in this weeks Nest. And The Pie is loathe to say it, but times are a bit skinny in the Nest at the moment, with a few blog bills hitting the deck since Christmas, so any help with a donation would be greatly appreciated. The how to donate button is below. http://www.townsvillemagpie.com.au/the-local-government-godzilla-should-the-ccc-be-taking-a-closer-look-at-the-money-grubbing-activities-of-the-lgaq/

[aikungfu]

Joe Biden’s decision to name California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the quest to unseat President Trump means that the next White House could be occupied not only by a Black woman — a historic milestone by any account — but also by someone who built a career in the tech industry’s front yard.

Born in Oakland, Harris served as San Francisco district attorney and later as the attorney general for California before being elected to the state’s Senate in 2016. And while the newly-named vice presidential nominee is likely to bring a deeper understanding of the tech industry to the race, her positions on how a Democratic administration should approach tech during an unprecedented moment of scrutiny isn’t exactly crystal clear.

Harris attracted considerable support from Silicon Valley executives in her bid for the Democratic nomination, outpacing other candidates in donations from employees from large tech companies early on. Notably, Harris was elected as California attorney general in 2010 and served two terms, overseeing the tech industry through a large portion of its most explosive growth — a measure that likely proves more meaningful in assessing her stance toward regulating the tech industry than the things she said along the campaign trail.

Still, those were arguably simpler times for Silicon Valley, and ones that predated current hot-button conversations around tech issues like election interference, misinformation wars and antitrust enforcement.

Playing it safe

As the primary developed and then-rival Elizabeth Warren carved out a posture critical of big tech, Harris seldom waded into thorny issues around regulating the tech industry. During an October debate, Harris avoided a question asking about concerns over second order effects if big tech companies were broken up, instead redirecting to the safer political territory of Trump’s Twitter account. Dodging meatier points about tech accountability, Harris called on Twitter to suspend the president’s account for violating its rules, calling the issue “a matter of safety and corporate accountability.”

Trump's tweets incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice. We can't crack down on Facebook but turn a blind eye to Twitter. Big tech companies must be held accountable for how they allow him to abuse their platforms. #DemDebate

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 16, 2019

Earlier this year, in response to a straightforward question asking if companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon should be broken up, Harris again dodged, though signaled that she is concerned in how those companies handle user data.

“I believe that tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised,” Harris said. Harris also expressed her concerns about user privacy in a 2018 Twitter thread.

“Millions of Americans have no idea how much data Facebook is collecting, from tracking their location and IP address, to following their activities on other websites,” she wrote.

“In the real world, this would be like someone watching what you do, where you go, for how long, and with whom you’re with every day. For most, it would feel like an invasion of privacy.”

A focus on Facebook

In other critiques of tech, Harris has mostly concentrated on Facebook, denouncing its role in spreading Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential race and expressing worries over how the company handles the data it collects.

When given the chance to press Mark Zuckerberg in person, Harris zeroed in on the company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse to its users. More recently, Harris co-authored a letter to Facebook along with Colorado Senator Michael Bennett after the audit’s largely unflattering results were published, pressing the company on election concerns.

Sen. Harris puts Zuckerberg between a rock and a hard place for not disclosing data misuse

“Although the company has shown a recent willingness to rein in disinformation with respect to COVID-19, it has not shown equal resolve to confront voter suppression and learn the lessons of the 2016 election,” the senators wrote. “We share the auditors’ concern that Facebook has failed to use the tools and resources at its disposal to more vigorously combat voter suppression and protect civil rights.”

In another letter to the company, Harris criticized Facebook’s fact-checking policies for climate-related misinformation in light of a New York Times report.

In spite of the harsh talk, Harris seems to be on fairly friendly terms with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who congratulated her on the nomination Tuesday. Back in 2013, Harris apparently contributed to the marketing effort around Sandberg’s now-ubiquitous book Lean In, sharing her own story. Harris also spoke at a cyberbullying event hosted at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in 2015 and the two were photographed on stage together.

View this post on Instagram

Today @kamalaharris became the first Black woman to be nominated for Vice President of the United States. This is a huge moment for Black women and girls all over the world – and for all of us. Our nation has a history of great women like Shirley Chisholm who have fought to lead and now, for the first time, we’ll see a Black woman on the ticket for the highest office in the land. In a world where there are still far too few Black women leaders in our companies and government, that really matters – because you can't be what you can't see. Research shows that women running for office face obstacles that men don’t. People are more likely to question their qualifications, criticize their looks, or simply dislike them. For women of color, this gender bias is compounded by racial bias. Black women candidates face double discrimination on the campaign trail, including criticisms of being “too ambitious” or “out for herself.” There’s no denying that Kamala Harris is ambitious – and that’s something we should be celebrating. Today, I am hopeful that many more Black women and girls will be inspired to run for office at every level. It’s only when everyone can compete and get a fair shot that we’ll get a government that truly represents all of us.

A post shared by Sheryl Sandberg (@sherylsandberg) on Aug 11, 2020 at 2:28pm PDT

Antitrust on the back burner?

While we have a handful of public statements from Harris about her views on tech, there’s plenty more that we don’t know. The way she positioned herself in relation to other candidates during the primary might not wholly reflect the kind of priorities she would bring to the vice presidency, and we’ll likely be learning more about those in the coming days.

Right now there are many, many crises on the table for the next administration. If regulating big tech looked like a huge campaign issue back in the pre-pandemic political landscape of 2020, conversations around police brutality and the devastating American failure to contain the coronavirus are now at the fore. Whether issues around antitrust regulation and reining in tech’s power will make it off the back burner remains to be seen, and there are plenty of national five-alarm fires to be put out in the meantime.

While her potential position as the nation’s next vice president doesn’t mean that Harris would be tasked with shaping tech policy or spearheading antitrust efforts, her deep connections to tech’s geographic hub could prove consequential in a Biden presidency and its priorities.

In spite of some question marks around her policy approaches, Harris is a known quantity for the tech industry — one who understands Silicon Valley and who, per her track record, doesn’t look keen to take on the industry’s biggest companies in spite of some recent tough talk. Whatever tech policies emerge out of a Biden/Harris campaign, the fresh vice presidential nominee is connected to tech in a more meaningful way than any other contender for the spot. That alone is something to watch.

Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3fQi2zN via A.I .Kung Fu

[bigyack-com]

What Would a Coronavirus Outbreak in the U.S. Mean for Schools?

Schools in the United States prepare for all manner of disasters and threats, whether hurricanes, mass shooters, tornadoes, influenza or head lice. But this week, a stark new order came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Get ready for the coronavirus. Around the nation, school officials and parents were flummoxed by the sudden warning that if a coronavirus epidemic hit the United States, school buildings could be shut down for long periods of time, leaving children sequestered at home. In alerting that the coronavirus will almost certainly spread in the United States, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said she had contacted her own local school superintendent this week and asked if the district was prepared. She advised parents to do the same. And she suggested that a temporary system of “internet-based teleschooling” could replace traditional schools. It was not clear how such a system would work. The obstacles to teaching remotely were evident: American children have uneven access to home computers and broadband internet. Schools have limited expertise in providing instruction online on a large scale. And parents would be forced to juggle their own work responsibilities with what could amount to “a vast unplanned experiment in mass home-schooling,” said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy at New America, a think tank. Across the country, as federal authorities announced that 60 people in the United States had been infected with the virus, mainly from travel abroad, families were grappling with the new alarm raised over the virus and how a possible outbreak could play out in their own communities. In Denver, Meg Conley’s 11-year-old daughter, Margaret, interrupted breakfast on Wednesday morning with a worried question. She told her mother that her elementary school classmates were gripped by fears about the coronavirus, and she asked when it was coming and how many people it would kill. “I had no idea,” Ms. Conley, 35, a freelance writer, said of the children’s anxieties. “Apparently it’s all the kids are talking about on the playground.” Schools are hastily making their own plans, or updating those drafted during previous scares over viruses like H1N1 and Ebola. The Washington State health department held a webinar for about 250 school superintendents on Tuesday to discuss coronavirus preparations, including plans to close schools and allow students to continue to do schoolwork at home. Updated Feb. 26, 2020 What is a coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crownlike spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick. What if I’m traveling? The C.D.C. has warned older and at-risk travelers to avoid Japan, Italy and Iran. The agency also has advised against all nonessential travel to South Korea and China. Where has the virus spread? The virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has sickened more than 80,000 people in at least 33 countries, including Italy, Iran and South Korea. How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is probably transmitted through sneezes, coughs and contaminated surfaces. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have been working with officials in China, where growth has slowed. But this week, as confirmed cases spiked on two continents, experts warned that the world was not ready for a major outbreak. Dennis Kosuth, a nurse for Chicago Public Schools, said his district’s ability to handle an outbreak could be compromised by circumstances like families who could not afford child care costs to keep sick children at home. Nursing shortages are a concern, too, he said. Mr. Kosuth said he was responsible for nursing care at four schools. Some Chicago schools also lack rooms dedicated to health needs, Mr. Kosuth said. In one school where many students and staff members became ill with an ordinary infection last semester, “Patient Zero was sitting in the main office coughing and sneezing all over the place” as the sick child waited to be picked up, he said. On a more positive note, Mr. Kosuth said that evidence from China suggested that children were more resilient to the coronavirus than adults were. In Miami-Dade County, Fla., Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of one of the nation’s largest school districts, said his system’s preparation for hurricanes put it at an advantage in preparing for the coronavirus. The district has provided laptops, tablets and smartphones for some students to take home, as well as internet connectivity for some low-income students. Teachers would be asked to assign work remotely and could even teach some high school courses live online. “I was a bit surprised that it took this long to offer national guidance specifically to school districts,” Mr. Carvalho said of the C.D.C. statement this week. Many districts have already sent home letters about the coronavirus, asking parents to keep sick children away from school and to remember basic prevention measures such as hand washing, cough covering and vaccination against the flu. They have highlighted C.D.C. advice issued early this month, calling for all travelers returning from China to “self-quarantine” for 14 days. School officials have often tried to ratchet down panic among parents, reminding families that face masks are not broadly recommended and that the overall risk of infection is low. But few districts have publicly addressed what would happen to classes in the case of widespread infection and school closings like those that have taken place in China, Italy and Bahrain. The vast majority of districts have access to broadband internet, but they do not necessarily have expertise in how to effectively organize and teach classes online when schools are shuttered. Further complicating matters, not all families have home computers and high-speed internet. While 90 percent of households with children under 18 had broadband access in 2016, according to federal data, gaps remained along the lines of income, race and education level. Less affluent families were more likely to depend on smartphones but to lack computers or tablets, which are often needed to fully participate in online learning. While school districts may not be ready for widespread remote learning, many of the larger districts have had plans for the possibility of pandemics for years, according to Chris Dorn, a school safety consultant with the nonprofit Safe Havens International. Districts without such plans will need to work with local health agencies to come up with protocols, he said. Among the questions to tackle: Should students at risk for coronavirus who show symptoms at school be transported immediately to hospitals or should they be kept on school grounds until a parent or caretaker can pick them up? In the San José Unified School District in California, Melinda Landau, who manages school nursing, said the district’s response to flu season would also help in the case of a coronavirus outbreak. It has ordered additional thermometers and hand-washing lesson kits, which allow nurses to sprinkle powder that glows when exposed to ultraviolet light, demonstrating how thoroughly students have washed their hands and how important simple personal-hygiene measures can be. The district also asks parents who call their children in sick to describe symptoms. Schools with clusters of sick students are cleaned more deeply with disinfecting products. There have been no confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the district, Ms. Landau said. Two students returned from trips to China in late January. Their parents voluntarily kept them home from school for a time to monitor their health. Going forward, the district is waiting to see how the coronavirus progresses, Ms. Landau said. She added, “We don’t quite know where to move yet.” Closing schools may not be the best option, especially since children appear to be at lower risk of infection, said Amy Acton, the director of Ohio’s health department. Beyond contingency plans for closing, she said, schools need to consider lining up substitute teachers and planning for absences of other staff members, like cafeteria workers. And Dr. Acton said schools can also play another, more traditional, role: science and health education. “Schools can be telling families what they can be doing to stay healthy, and we can teach about viruses, and what is a zoonotic disease? Why is it important to get a flu vaccine?” Dr. Acton said. “This is a teachable moment.” Jack Healy, Amy Harmon and Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting. Read the full article

[eddiejpoplar]

2018 Automobile All-Stars: The Winners

So good was the assembly of machines at our 2018 All-Stars competition that our editors at one point stood atop Mount Charleston, soaked in the introspection-inspiring views, and mumbled something about naming every car present an official All-Star, and it wasn’t the thin mountain air talking. We can’t be more clear about this: To receive an invitation to our annual shootout, culled from an initial list of dozens more, always means a car is massively impressive and already a winner worthy of recognition. This year more than ever, there are absolutely no losers in this group.

As always, our formula is simple: no price caps, no categories, and no convoluted point-scoring rules. We pride ourselves on being this industry’s most straightforward awards shootout: The vehicles that spark the most passion, inspire the biggest grins, and deliver an experience as true to their original intent as possible inevitably walk away with an All-Stars trophy.

Is it raw speed that matters most? Physics-defying handling? World-class interior appointments? Those things all count, but this isn’t just a numbers game. It’s a soul-searching quest to identify cars that stir emotions, achievable only by driving them and, more critically, feeling them, hearing them, even smelling them. Because oftentimes the most important elements to dedicated car enthusiasts aren’t apparent on a stopwatch, a dyno, or a score sheet but only through the heart.

This year was among the most difficult evaluations in the history of our event. Compelling arguments were made for far more than the eight vehicles we ultimately chose as the 2018 All-Stars, but when the votes came in, this group stood just high enough above the rest to make the top step of the podium.

2018 McLaren 720

After Every Drive You’ll Expect a Checkered Flag

“A single-seat race car for the road.” That’s the takeaway a lot of us shared after exiting this sizzling McLaren’s form-fitting driver’s seat—once we were able to catch our collective breath, that is. More than any other car in this year’s formidable All-Stars field, the 720S left everyone who drove it gobsmacked, speed-struck, and, frankly, in need of a little quiet time.

“From 100 to 160 mph, it made the Lambo and the Ford GT feel positively wheezy,” gushed our resident hot shoe, Andy Pilgrim, after lapping the Speedvegas circuit. Contributor Marc Noordeloos agreed: “I can’t remember the last time I drove a car this fast. Wow.” Let it be noted that both of those guys spend a lot of time in seriously quick machinery. Then again, such is the giddiness that erupts when you drive a vehicle that can sprint to 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds and blitz to a top end of 212 mph. (Fittingly, this track-day predator wears bodywork inspired by the beautifully menacing shape of the great white shark.)

One of the most successful Formula 1 teams of all time, McLaren has notched 12 world drivers’ championships and eight constructors’ titles since its first F1 race in 1966. The company knows a thing or three about speed. That’s evident the moment you slide behind the wheel of the 720S: That same race-bred character is evident in its every molecule, integral to its visceral, purebred purpose. The tub, the windshield surround, and much of the greenhouse are crafted in lightweight, super-rigid carbon fiber. (McLaren claims the new structure—dubbed Monocage II—cuts 40 pounds off the outgoing 650S’ monocoque.) The cockpit is a pilot-focused workspace of premium leather, deep racing buckets, and minimal controls. The view to the front, enhanced by notably thin A-pillars, is nothing short of breathtaking—like riding in the nose turret of a B-17 or, yes, in the open cockpit of a Grand Prix car.

The engine lies right behind you, and what a monumental piece of work it is. Twin turbos and 32 valves feeding 4.0 liters of V-8 displacement, all tweaked and tuned to produce 710 horsepower at a screaming 7,500 rpm. Mind you, that’s 79 horsepower more than the already volcanic Lamborghini Huracán Performante. Add such muscle to the 720S’ light touch on the scales—it weighs less than 3,200 pounds—and you have performance that leaves even veteran auto journalists laughing in disbelief.

The McLaren’s suspension redefines handling brilliance. Outfitted with Proactive Chassis Control II—which continuously monitors driving conditions and automatically adjusts chassis dynamics—plus driver-adjustable modes (including a new Comfort setting) and huge, sticky Pirelli P Zero tires, the 720S delivers both blistering responsiveness on the race circuit and supreme civility on the road. “Precise, linear electrohydraulic steering tells you exactly what the car is doing,” Noordeloos said. “Amazing and rewarding on both the track and the road.” Design editor Robert Cumberford concurred. “Suspension is superb, for handling and for comfort,” he said. The 720S is one of those exceedingly rare sporting machines that truly becomes one with its driver. You wear the car like a wet suit, and through that fine skin you feel every tickle of the road, easily sense the grip of the tires, instinctively grasp the approaching limit. The 720S is better than you are—and in turn wrings the best out of you. Few cars of such extreme capability are so reassuring to push hard.

Quibbles? Nothing significant in a car like this. “You need to be a contortionist to get in and skilled at sleight of hand to buckle the safety belts,” Cumberford grumbled. Noordeloos complained about the touchscreen, noting that many often-needed functions—normally operated by cockpit switches or buttons—are buried deep in the system. Also, the McLaren’s standard carbon-ceramic brakes are touchy and take some time to adjust to, though there’s no doubt about their staggering stopping power.

Those are trifles compared with the incomparable driving experience the 720S delivers. Social media editor Billy Rehbock summed up the McLaren’s All-Stars win best: “It’s almost unbelievable how many boxes the 720S ticks. Supercar styling, power, handling, drivability. One of the wildest cars I’ve ever driven. I wanted more the minute I got out.”

—Arthur St. Antoine

2018 McLaren 720S Specifications

PRICE $288,845/$378,215 (base/as tested) ENGIN 4.0L DOHC 32-valve twin-turbo V-8/710 hp @ 7,500 rpm, 568 lb-ft @ 5,500 TRANSMISSION  7-speed dual-clutch automatic LAYOUT 2-door, 2-passenger, mid-engine, RWD coupe EPA MILEAGE 15/22 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 178.9 x 76.0 x 47.1 in WHEELBASE 105.1 in WEIGHT 3,150 lb 0-60 MPH 2.5 sec TOP SPEED 212 mph

2017 Ford GT

Who Says Racing Doesn’t Matter?

Road racing’s popularity in the United States is a long way removed from its all-time high decades ago, and that’s a real shame in our collective opinion. It’s also a bit bizarre when you consider how many sports cars and supercars this country’s affluent purchasers snap up annually—cars that produce their astounding performance thanks to technologies and engineering lessons learned on racetracks around the globe. Regardless of whether you’re a race fan, the good news for enthusiasts is that manufacturers continue to push the motorsports envelope, leading to ever more impressive offerings for the street.

Make no mistake, Ford’s latest GT is a modern homologation special created first and foremost to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a feat it accomplished in 2016. Its competition-bred roots are apparent immediately in the road-going version—but not everyone appreciates them right away. Some of our staff even initially declared the car a bit of a disappointment, relatively speaking, on the street, as the dual-clutch gearbox isn’t as slick and smooth as some others on the market. And although the twin-turbo EcoBoost’s 647 horsepower and 550 lb-ft of torque are nothing to mock, neither do they make the GT as brain-bendingly quick as something like the McLaren 720S. Of course, that really says more about the amazing state of the performance car world when a machine capable of running from 0 to 60 mph in a tick less than three seconds is no longer automatically considered mind-blowing in the acceleration department.

The car’s carbon-fiber monocoque construction is a piece of race-proven hardware, but simultaneously the no-frills cockpit’s motorsports-influenced design and trim give you a bit of that old kit-car feeling. But we knew from our experience driving the GT last year that initial impressions don’t tell anywhere close to the full story. As Noordeloos noted while making it clear the GT didn’t blow him away on the street, “It feels like it’s dying to go to the track.”

Some of us smiled knowingly, as once the GT hit the Speedvegas road course, any lingering doubts about it disintegrated within the first lap or two. Suddenly the engine that sounded a bit agricultural at low rpms on the street began to spit and hiss all manner of turbo and induction sounds, snorting, popping, and screaming its way through corners faster than anything else on site as its monster midrange torque proved massively impressive. Previous grumbles from taller drivers about a lack of headroom disappeared as they suddenly and happily found a way to shoehorn their helmet-clad skulls into the left seat, grinning the entire time. The GT’s steering, braking, and suspension setup are all phenomenal, allowing you to attack apex curbs with an aggressive I-will-own-you style that seemingly rewards drivers more the harder they push.

On top of all the mechanical goodness, the more experienced and skilled drivers among us repeatedly mentioned the GT’s aerodynamic performance. “Without doubt it has the most downforce and generates the most lateral g’s on the track, especially when using the suspension in the ultra-low Track mode,” Pilgrim said. “It’s definitely the best-handling car in the field.” Indeed, where other cars required a throttle lift to make it through certain sections of the circuit, the GT dug in and rocketed itself off of corners with no issues. The chassis balance and grip it provided in Speedvegas’s quicker turns—none of which qualify as truly high-speed—and the corresponding confidence it inspired had several of us dreaming about running the car somewhere more wide open, like Road America or Road Atlanta or Spa-Francorchamps.

So then, the 2017 Ford GT proved itself as one of the best, most track-capable production cars of all time, which led to our stable of drivers rethinking its character on the road as well. It won’t feel familiar to drivers of Porsches and Ferraris and Lamborghinis, as its overall design philosophy is far more results-based than comfort- and luxury-oriented. In other words, exactly what Ford Performance intended from the outset. As a group, we were wholly unprepared for this car’s capabilities. It’s a zero-compromises speed master, and if you drive it, you don’t have to give two cents of a care about road racing—but you’ll understand instantly why it still matters. This is easily one of the most intriguing cars of the past decade and then some. After all, almost no one builds them like this anymore.

—Mac Morrison

2017 Ford GT Specifications

PRICE $450,000 (base) ENGINE 3.5L twin-turbo DOHC 24-valve V-6/647 hp @ 6,250 rpm, 550 lb-ft @ 5,900 rpm TRANSMISSION 7-speed dual-clutch automatic LAYOUT 2-door, 2-passenger, mid-engine, RWD coupe EPA MILEAGE 11/18 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 187.5 x 78.9 x 43.7 in (41.7 in low mode) WHEELBASE 106.7 in WEIGHT 3,354 lb 0-60 MPH 2.9 sec (est) TOP SPEED 216 mph

2017 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS

From Out of Nowhere

The amusing thing is, we didn’t plan to invite the 2017 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS to this year’s edition of All-Stars. We wanted the latest GT3 and believed we had it locked in. But a ripple in Porsche’s test-vehicle pool meant the car originally earmarked for our evaluation was sent packing back to the mother ship in Germany, leaving us empty-handed.

“But wait,” Porsche Cars North America inquired. “Would you like us to send the new GTS?” We looked at each other for a brief moment, huddled together, and reviewed this 911’s case for attending. We remembered how we laughed last year when we realized this 450-horsepower, turbocharged, rear-drive Carrera is much faster than the turb from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2FzLgRS via IFTTT

[totalconservative]

New Post has been published on Total Conservative News

New Post has been published on http://totalconservative.com/study-trumps-media-coverage-three-times-negative-obamas/

Study: Trump’s Media Coverage THREE TIMES More Negative Than Obama’s

We knew the media’s coverage of President Trump was bad, but we didn’t know it was THIS bad. If ever there was a study that proved how off-the-rails the D.C. media has gone in their efforts to try and bring this administration down, the new one from Pew Research Center is it. After looking at the facts revealed by this study, no mainstream media outlet can ever again claim to be objective. They can never again claim to be impartial referees, simply out on the field to count balls and strikes. They are partisan players in the political game, and they have left any semblance of credibility behind in an ash heap.

As part of their year-end “17 Striking Findings From 2017,” Pew highlighted the study, which showed just how right Trump supporters are when they claim the media is biased against the president.

“About six-in-ten stories on Trump’s early days in office had a negative assessment, about three times more than in early coverage for Obama and roughly twice that of Bush and Clinton,” they wrote. “Coverage of Trump’s early time in office moved further away from a focus on the policy agenda and more toward character and leadership.”

Now as bad as that sounds, it actually makes it sound better than it is. Because you read that and you assume, well, he’s getting 40% positive coverage – that’s better than it seems sometimes. But no, that’s not it. The rest of the coverage apparently falls in the “neutral” category. Indeed, Pew could only find a measly FIVE PERCENT of positive media coverage in the first two months of Trump’s presidency. FIVE PERCENT. That’s basically a rounding error away from ZERO. And that’s compounded by the fact that Obama had 42% positive coverage in his first few months in office.

We just don’t know what to say about the state of mainstream media journalism anymore. We really thought there was a chance – small but real – that they would learn their lesson after they turned out to be so disastrously mistaken about the election. Instead, the majority of news outlets were so enraged by the results of the 2016 contest that they decided to devote all of their energies into tearing down President Trump and his supporters, waging an ideological battle that gave new life to the term “fake news.”

If there was a brief opportunity for newspapers and cable news channels to win back credibility, it has since passed.

[junker-town]

The Top Whatever: Ranking college football teams after everything went all non-Alabama

The Top Whatever is a weekly ranking of only the college football teams that really need to be ranked at the moment. If you’re looking for the polls, those will be over here.

1. Alabama.

A boring, crushing, pleasantly consistent, 41-9 win over Arkansas.

Tell everyone who tried to find a different No. 1 team: welcome back. We tried to find others. How’d that work out? Did the Tide not process everyone like so much meat falling into the grinder? Did they not render almost every game a tedious scrimmage after the first 15 minutes?

Did that OTHER TEAM — maybe one you chose instead of Alabama as the nation’s best team — do something really stupid, like lose to Syracuse? On a Friday, no less? Did that OTHER TEAM go to Tempe and make a few late-night mistakes? (To be fair: Tempe is made for mistakes.) Did that OTHER TEAM, which seemed so much shinier and more interesting, score three points in a blowout at Cal? Did the diamond in the rough do something drastic, like losing to an underachieving Boise State?

They probably did. Everyone learned a few old lessons in Week 7.

Alabama remains the least entertaining and steadiest bet because of their bottomless depth chart and their ability to run the ball, pass just enough to win, and reduce whatever the opposing team is attempting to do to ashes by the second quarter.

Coming off a disappointing performance against Texas A&M, the Tide were the surest bet in the college football universe to win a blowout. This is mostly because Nick Saban undoubtedly made life for everyone around him a living hell this week, right down to his 8,827 coach-strong consultancy watching film until their eyes bled.

It’s cute to consider other teams, even if Alabama might — might — be beatable with a perfect storm. The offense remains largely one-dimensional and dependent on the run. The defense, like all defenses, can be broken down by a mobile quarterback having an insanely good game. The Tide fumbled two punts against Arkansas, something Saban mentioned in his postgame presser, because of course Saban mentioned that in his postgame presser.

They’re beatable, but they won’t do things to embarrass you. They won’t call you from jail in Syracuse, talking about how they lost a barfight with a giant orange. They won’t have a crazy story about losing your debit card in a bar in Arizona. (Those charges afterward are going to be weird.) They won’t lose to Cal. Alabama might do a lot of things in 2017, but dammit, we swear this: they won’t embarrass you by losing to Cal.

2. Georgia.

Won a rollicking, 53-28 matchup with Mizzou. That may look like a lot of points to give up to Missouri, but remember that playing the Tigers in 2017 is a lot like facing a button-masher in a fighting video game. They don’t know what they’re doing, everything good that happens is an accident, and after an initial flurry, they will collapse.

At 7-0, there are few mysteries about Georgia. They play brilliant defense. Their finesse/speed back, Sony Michel, hit poor DeMarkus Acy so hard, his feelings should have been hurt. When your speed back is doing things like that, you are in a rare, rare space as a football team.

When Georgia’s gone 7-0 before, it meant SEC titles at least, and in one modern case — the hallowed 1980 season — it meant a national championship. There is no snide joke about inevitably losing to Florida or Alabama here. I’ve been preparing my soul for the real possibility of consistently good Georgia football for several months now. For your own protection, I suggest you do the same.

3. TCU.

A 26-7 win over Kansas State. The Frogs continue to be whatever they have to be. Kansas State wanted to dominate possession, so TCU shut down the K-State run game, especially in short-yardage situations K-State has long dominated. From there, it was a matter of Kenny Hill being efficient, the Horned Frogs’ defense putting pressure on a backup quarterback, and the defense carrying the team.

And if the circumstances are reversed next week against Kansas — indulge the fantasy for a moment, okay — then TCU can probably still win, because they remain one of the few real complete teams. The offense can be efficient or explosive as needed, and the defense can apply pressure or fall back in coverage.

TCU is not the most talented team in the nation, and that might not matter at all because they are the most flexible. Flexible is hard to beat: just when you think you have one thing covered, TCU reaches an inch further than you can and creates a whole new problem just out of your reach. (Also: Kenny Hill, efficient quarterback! 2017 is stranger than we could have predicted.)

4. Miami.

A 25-24 thriller over Georgia Tech. Miami may or may not be a very good team overall, but I feel confident saying this:

The best team in the nation in the last two minutes of a game in 2017 might be Miami.

The absolute best team in the nation in the last 30 seconds of a football game is Miami.

The best receiver in the nation in the last 30 seconds of a football game is Miami’s Darrell Langham.

If you want to beat Miami, it’s probably best to have a large lead before the last two minutes of a football game. We recommend like, three touchdowns or so, just to be safe.

Also, the Canes beat a mean-ass Georgia Tech team custom-built for the letdown game Miami was supposed to have after beating Florida State. That’s no small accomplishment, especially since Miami politely handed Tech a touchdown on a failed surprise onside kick attempt.

This ended up being completely worth it since it broke commentator/perpetually terrified risk-phobe Rod Gilmore’s brain for the remainder of the game. If Rod Gilmore called the X Games, he would die screaming sometime in the second hour. “WHY WOULD YOU GO UPSIDE DOWN, EVER? WHY? IT’S TOO DANGEROUSSSSSSS—”

5. Wisconsin.

Beat Purdue, 17-9, a victory that is worth more than it used to be, via Purdue being interesting and good now. Wisconsin will probably win the West. Then, they will clean out the remainder of their schedule and step bravely into the ring in Indianapolis to take a 30-point loss from whatever monster roars in from the Big Ten East.

And that’s fine, because remember: Wisconsin will probably finish with a lovely, fat bowl junket to enjoy, and their former coach, Gary Andersen, just gave up $12 million so he could leave Corvallis, Oregon. Context is everything.

6. USF.

Defeated Cincinnati 33-3. The Department of Zero Sum Thinking would like to point out that, given the sludge remaining on the schedule, the Bulls should launch a PR campaign to pump up the reputation of the UCF Knights. UCF is the only remaining team of quality on the Bulls’ schedule, and USF needs to do everything it can to make that look like a Playoff play-in game.

We recommend targeting gullible voters and influencers with fake articles on Facebook in order to boost the reputation of the American Athletic Conference. Please click to share “TULSA BEATS BAMA 56-0” and “NAVY SINKS OHIO STATE 45-2 AT HOME” with all of your online friends. It’s worked before.

7. UCF.

Torched a hapless ECU team, 63-21. Like USF, there’s not much left on the schedule. However, whatever is left will be burned to the foundation, because UCF had 33 first downs yesterday, will probably have 30 first downs in every game moving forward, has a top-five yardage offense, and is hoarding the allotment of offensive touchdowns granted to the entire state of Florida. A terrifying team to face right now, and one that will probably blow up someone up in a major bowl game.

WISELY AVOIDED PLAYING FOOTBALL THIS WEEK

Penn State. Please remember that the Top Whatever ranks only the teams that played this week. The Nittany Lions are a Playoff-quality team at this point and can hammer that point home against a punchless Michigan squad that destroyed them in their last meeting. Will someone email me about this, failing to read all the way down or understand the concept? YOU BET THEY WILL, READER.

SOME OF THE ONE-LOSS TEAMS I’LL PROBABLY START PEPPERING IN NEXT WEEK, WHEN AND IF I FEEL LIKE IT, PRESENTED IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

Ohio State. J.T. Barrett threw five TDs in a single game against Nebraska. Yes, that’s legal now.

Oklahoma. Baker Mayfield flew off the field after a win over Texas wearing a golden cowboy hat and riding an invisible horse. This sentence is literal, and we are making nothing up.

Baker Mayfield waited patiently for possession of the golden hat…and then galloped off the field at the Cotton Bowl on an imaginary horse. http://pic.twitter.com/pz0viRbPkJ

— George Schroeder (@GeorgeSchroeder) October 15, 2017

NC State. We’re just as shocked as you are, okay?

Clemson. Injuries piling up really shouldn’t relegate them to the B-pile just yet. Also, and we say this with all sincerity: Syracuse was due to kneecap someone, and Clemson walked in at exactly the wrong moment.

Michigan State. [gestures at undefeated record in Big Ten, waves hands, shrugs, walks away from chalkboard dotted with inscrutable equations, shaking head]

Michigan. Starting to think overleveraging a team’s futures on the market based mostly on a blowout of an impotent Florida might have been a bad idea.

Notre Dame. Starting to think shorting a team’s futures on the market based mostly on a narrow loss to a really good Georgia might have been a bad idea.

USC. Sam Darnold didn’t throw an interception against Utah despite throwing the ball 50 times. Darnold threw 9 INTs for the entire 2016 season; he’s thrown nine in 2017. This is what an optimist would take away from this: Apparently Darnold just gets nine INTs in a season, can budget them however he likes, and got them all out of the way early this year. He did fumble twice and lose another off a teammate’s facemask, however.

Washington. It will be so hard to justify putting them in a Playoff, given the weakness of that schedule, and their losing in the exact, excruciating way they lost to Arizona State. Plus their rivalry game got a lot less lustrous rankings-wise, thanks to Wazzu completely befouling their bed at Cal. WASHINGTON STATE TRANSITIVELY RUINING YOUR SEASON, HUSKIES! Even their losses spite you.

Kentucky. If you got this far down in the column, congratulations on paying attention and realizing that Kentucky is 5-1, and would be 6-0, if they had decided to cover two Florida receivers. We’re probably not going to rank them just yet, but thank you for reading this far. The best easter eggs are the ones you don’t have to make up.