#at least to the constant definitions so i can know what animations can be modified and their names?? basic stuff?? please???

[claire-starsword]

modding is a beautiful art finding tutorials in the era of shit google and private discord servers is easy peasy and i know exactly what i'm doing right now

[chlorinatedpopsicle]

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02717-0

In an online survey of 1124 heterosexual British men using a modified CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 71% of men experienced some form of sexual victimization by a woman at least once during their lifetime.

If men would like male sexual victimization to be taken more seriously, maybe they should start by not responding to news about instances of male sexual victimization with jokes and/or "he's so lucky!!" comments. I'm sure you already know what I'm talking about, but here's a small example:

I don't know about you, but I never see women making “I got raped by a priest” jokes, “don't drop the soap” jokes, or “fellas, how would you react if you found her? [picture of unconscious or dead woman]” jokes, etc. I only ever see men and boys doing that, strangely enough. Until men and boys stop doing that all the fucking time, I'm gonna find it hard to sympathize with their plight.

The study examines how men may feel discouraged from speaking out about instances of sexual victimization because – as a result of male socialization and male gender expectations – they are afraid of showing any emotional weakness / vulnerability; men may see any display of emotional distress as emasculating. This is true. However, one has to ask: who are the ones who perpetuate these male gender expectations in the first place? Who are the ones pushing these ideas of masculine stoicism; the idea that men mustn't show weakness? In case you've been living under a rock, liberal women have been encouraging men to show more emotional vulnerability for decades now. Liberal women push the “men's mental health matters!!! male SA victims are valid!!!” stuff harder than anyone, even MRAs. Just as men are the ones making the rape jokes, these masculine gender expectations are taught and upheld almost entirely by men. They created the stigma all on their own.

Anyway, let's address the elephant in the room: 71% is a big number! I have to wonder, though, how many of the reported sexual victimization incidents were rape, and how many were things like unwanted sexual comments, groping, and leering. Those things are definitely distressing and even psychologically damaging, but nobody should deny that they are not on the same level as sexual assault – something experienced by a staggeringly high number of women and girls. Anyway, here it is:

As I expected, forced penetration (what I would consider rape) doesn't make up a whole lot of that percentage. If you want, you can scroll through some of the tags on my blog to see how statistics for female SA victims differ. Well, probably. Tumblr's tagging system is finicky.

I'm sorry, but I'd rather focus my concern on the things that men are doing. Like mass-scale sex trafficking and prostitution. And violent pornography. And spycam terrorism / voyeuristic porn / deepfake porn. And forced child marriage and bride kidnapping. And barring girls from going to school. And female genital mutilation. And forcing women to wear head-coverings and then brutally assaulting and arresting them if they don't comply. And constant femicides. And "honor" killings. And incestuous rape and sexual abuse at horrifying rates. And brutal domestic violence. And every war in the history of humanity (and all the violence that war entails). And committing over 90% of violent crimes. And raping the female patients in their care. And raping babies and corpses and animals like it's nobody's business. And other quirky male activities. Thanks for the ask!

[kekoma]

— hanamaki as your boyfriend.

hands belong in pockets, not in your pants unless you’re him. hope you enjoy.

hanamaki hours has now entered the chambers.

such an amazing man. would do many things for him, but you didn’t come here to know that.

you came here to see how life is like dating hiro, yeah? so let’s get into.

how you two ended up dating isn’t munch of a mystery.

makki  had s personality that attracts all kind of people without even trying so it wasn’t a surprise when he had been able to lure you in as well.

as for when he realized that he actually liked you was when mattsun had pointed out how much he spoke you to him. 

and he also picked up the fact that he started flirting with you more than before too yet it no longer had that playful feel around it— hiro was serious about wooing you over.

pretty sure he was the one to make the move on you. he isn’t someone that is shy so when he asked you if you would go to the amusement park with him— that’s when he became a bolder.

“how are you enjoying our date so far?”

“it’s actually amazing~ can we... huh? wait... our date?”

“well yeah. this is our first official date. heh i suppose this is my chance to confess to you now.”

everything went smoothly. he was quite confident that you’ll say yes since makki made time to learn everything about you and paid close attention to any and every small behavior along side gestures you revealed.

not much to really go on about so i’ll hop right into the actual stuff.

i’ve mentioned it before with issei so it’s only right i’ll mention it here too since takahiro gives off the same energy.

you two are DEFINITELY the kind of couple who jokes around about breaking up over the strangest things and it’ll be at random times too.

“my guy... who cuts your hair?”

“huh? what are you talking about cutie?”

“i can’t help but realize that your hair reminds me of an upside skate ramp. who are you paying because baby...”

“so i see you woke up and choose violence today... you know, i didn’t come to get roasted. i came here to love you y/n and this is what i get?”

“hold up! stay right there. i’m gonna go find my tech deck and do a few tricks.”

“i- yeah let’s break up. my lawyers will call yours and i’m taking the kids too. can’t believe i’m bullied right now.”

vv dramatic but it doesn’t bother you since you go along with his ways.

being serious? is considered rare within the relationship.

however, when it does occur then hiro can be deapan.

which i will take the time to discuss arguments with him briefly.

again, it’s something rare since the relationship is mainly playful and uplifting each other.

yet when you two get pretty heated, it can go two (2) ways.

a) he’ll opt for the silent treatment since he could say some really foul things that could possibly hurt you to the max and he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. may even go as far to put a little more distance between you two so he can calm down and approach you in a better manner.

b) actually voices how he feels about towards the situation at hand and will probably sound extremely venomous when doing so. his main goal when speaking is getting his point across if you dismissed it and/or made it seem like he’s in the wrong.

up to you on how you would like to view his way of approaching arguments though.

but if you want to make it up to him then give makki space for a while before apologizing. also make sure the apology is honest because HE WILL know if you’re lying and if he catches you then it’s back to square one...

with that out the way, let’s return.

DEFINITELY is an supportive boyfriend that likes helping you grow as a person and reach your goals. since you do the same for him, it’s only fair plus he likes seeing the smile on your face once something is accomplished.

although he already has you— makki will still flirt with you. it’s just more cheesier.

“damn babe. is your father a priest because i’m feeling blessed when i’m with you.”

“shut up before i eat your food.”

“ooh~ that’s hot. guess your dad isn’t one. perhaps i’m dancing with the devil because you’re hot as hell.”

“... takahiro. sir please. stop.”

“okay okay but i think you should see this.” proceeds to shove his phone in your face, the front camera on to reveal you on the screen, “this is the prettiest person i’ve ever met.”

“you’re lucky you’re cute and that i love you.”

definitely does the hand in his pants thing in your house and in his (ofc).

even if they have pockets or you call him out for it, it’s just an automatic for him so you gotta accept it.

besides that, if you’re someone that LOVES to bake or occasionally bakes— best believe he’s the first to taste it all.

extra points to you if you make cream puffs.

is most definitely the kind of boyfriend who invest in matching items. clothing, jewelry, phone case, and etc. he finds the concept cute to be honest.

if you’re lucky enough, he’ll let you buy matching hair clips (something cute like Sanrio, fruits, animals or etc.) and lets you put them in his hair.

won’t compain if it seems extremely girly/cutesy. instead makki will take a bunch of pictures and post a few on his sns about how you two are matching.

also loves to make it known he has the most divine girlfriend in the world. dude is proud to be your boyfriend so ofc he’s gonna show off.

nicknames? yeah yeah nicknames real quick.

top ones for you are 🥁🥁 babe/baby, beautiful, cutie and lover girl occasionally makes it’s way around.

something a little extra: hiro will even call you his doll sometimes but its only brought up at random times. 

moving onto pda since it’ll also be a bit brief.

in love with PDA when it comes to you. 

although he tones it down when you two are in public so of course you get the basics, but something he’ll always do is wrap his arm around you or constantly interlock his fingers with both combined hands on his thigh.

as for private, it’s not as filtered. would say he’s a bit more touchy but i must advise... don’t keep your back turned to him for long because makki will use the opportunity to either smack or grab your ass while saying “i like your cut g.”

... can’t convince me he doesn’t do that. rip y/n’s ass.

last but not least— dates!

don’t think hanamaki is picky about what kind of dates you two go on.

but most dates are chaotic in a way. will deadass text you in the middle of the night or show up to your place be like “wanna film dance vids in a parking lot? or like walk around and eat good street food.” and you just gotta go with it.

however, when they aren’t that way or involving outside then some dates consist of staying indoors. probably baking together, watching a bunch of movies, doing his makeup and etc.

overall: 10/10

best relationship with constant fun <3 we love it here.

and that’s where i end this bc makki do be breaking my brain.

© all content belongs to kekoma 2020. do not repost, modify or translate.

[galahadwilder]

Hey! I'm following you for ML stuff, but I finally figured out you were into Batman as well, took me awhile. Do you have any advice on where to start for people who want to get into it? I just want to know which Robin is which when I read fanfiction hahaha. Thank youu

So the first thing to know is that there is no single Batman comic that will explain the entire Batfamily, because there are so many of them that the Manor must be running out of bedrooms by now. The second thing is that I’m not great at figuring out a starting place—a lot of comics are sort of aggressively mediocre and I can’t exactly tell the standout ones from the bad. Anyone who has any suggestions for anon, feel free to comment with them!

(In terms of fanfic recs: read literally anything by @unpretty. They are a wizard. Their fanfic is so good it has literally won awards.)

Now, a brief introduction to every member of the Batfamily that I can currently remember—save Alfred and Batman, who I am assuming you already know.

The Robins

Dick Grayson (Robin I, Nightwing II, and Batman IV). Richard John Grayson was a former child acrobat, member of the flying Graysons, and the first child adopted by Bruce Wayne. He is a human disaster of a Hufflepuff who makes terrible life choices, leaves his Nightwing costume on the floor of his apartment where literally anyone can see it, and doesn’t know how to cook anything but cereal. Despite his terrible lack of self-sufficiency, actually gives amazing life advice and is the heart and soul of the Batclan. There are villains who are willing to kill to protect him.

Jason Todd (Robin II, The Red Hood II, Red Robin I, Batman III). Jason Todd is the ballsiest Robin, having met Batman while attempting to steal the tire from the Batmobile, and, upon being confronted by the Goddamn Batman, decided the best course of action was to attack him with a tire iron. Jason is passionate and impulsive, but also extremely studious and intelligent. Well-liked despite his abrasiveness. He is the first Robin to die in the line of duty; when he came back, he and Bruce had a falling out over not killing the Joker, and now their relationship is rather shaky. Jason uses guns and has moonlighted as a crime boss in order to better control Gotham’s criminal element from the inside, which works mostly because he has nerves of steel and the ability to spin stunningly convincing bullshit at the drop of a hat.

Carrie Kelley (Robin II.5): See “Elseworlds and Future.”

Tim Drake (Robin III, Red Robin II, Drake I, Batman Beyond II): Tim has the greatest intellect of the Batclan; however, unlike Barbara (see “Batgirls”), Tim’s wisdom score is through the bloody floor. He figured out Batman and Robin’s identities on his own, and after Jason died he walked up to Bruce and basically told him “I know who you are and I’m Robin now,” which... worked. Tim is the least physically gifted of the Robins, but he makes up for it in detective skills and tactical intelligence. He was the only Robin to still have living parents outside of the Batfamily, though they were murdered soon into his career. He dropped out of high school and was acting CEO of Wayne Enterprises for a time. He has crippling depression and is implied to be suicidal.

Stephanie Brown (Spoiler I, Robin IV, Batgirl III): see under “Batgirls.”

Damian Wayne (Robin V): Damian is the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul, and was raised—unbeknownst to his father—by his mother and grandfather to be an assassin, as well as to be the best at literally everything (for context: despite being a young teenager, he technically holds multiple unaccredited PHDs). However, this stunted his social development, so he is rude and abrasive almost constantly, though he has been getting better and his closest friends and family can see that he’s covering for a superiority/inferiority complex a mile deep. Damian has a constant need to prove himself and has taken up his father’s adoption habit, though he prefers animals. Animals are better than people.

Duke Thomas (Robin ??, The Signal): Duke Thomas was the first metahuman Bruce allowed into the Batfamily. Originally decided to take on The Riddler by himself at the age of... seven or so? Eventually joined a collective called “We Are Robin” and fought crime, unsanctioned. After his parents were driven mad by Joker Venom, Bruce took him in. He now fights crime in the daytime, unlike the rest of the Batfamily, using his nebulously-defined extrasensory abilities to augment his Batfamily training.

The Batgirls

Barbara Gordon (Batgirl I, Oracle I): while Tim may be the most intelligent member of the Batclan, Babs is the all-around smartest. Her intellect is damned high, and unlike most of the Batfamily, Barbara is actually capable of making good decisions. She just... decides not to, most of the time. Barbara is the daughter of Commissioner James Gordon and was the first Batgirl; she lost the use of her legs when Joker shot her in the spine, but refused to take a backseat in the Batclan’s war on crime and became Oracle, hacker extraordinaire who directs the activities of every single vigilante in Gotham from her clocktower lair. She has since regained the use of her legs and reclaimed the Batgirl mantle, turning Oracle into a living AI.

Helena Wayne (Batgirl I.5, Huntress I): see “Elseworlds and Future.”

Cassandra Cain/Wayne (Batgirl II, Black Bat I, Orphan I): Cassandra is the daughter of assassins Lady Shiva and David Cain, and had what is hands-down the worst childhood of the entire Batfamily (her father would shoot her in the leg, and if she flinched, he’d shoot her again). She was raised without spoken words, and as a result the language centers of her brain are more adapted for body language than words. This gives her a kind of combat clairvoyance where it’s nearly impossible for a human combatant to surprise her. After her first murder, she swore to never again take a life, and joined the Batclan to atone. I personally believe that she is Bruce’s favorite child and the true heir to the mantle of the Bat.

Stephanie Brown (Spoiler I, Robin IV, Batgirl III): the daughter of Arthur Brown, a criminal known as Cluemaster, Stephanie became a vigilante specifically to oppose her father and then just had a bunch of mission creep. She is brash, sarcastic, and reckless, but has oodles of passion and natural talent. DC editors hate her, so she ends up screwing up or getting pushed aside a lot, but she is much more competent than she appears and is extremely good at getting people to underestimate her.

Others

Kate Kane (Batwoman I): Kate Kane is Bruce’s cousin, dishonorably discharged from the military under “dont ask don’t tell,” though this has likely been retconned thanks to DC’s sliding timescale. She is actually specifically not connected to the Batfamily, being more of an auxiliary member by her own choice—as a military woman, she dislikes their methods and considers them sloppy. She uses guns, has her own rogues’ gallery unconnected to her cousin’s, and is extremely competent.

Jean-Paul Valley (Azrael I, Batman II): Jean-Paul believed himself to be an ordinary college student, but was in fact a genetically modified super-soldier created to punish the wicked through the use of magic and advanced technology. He eventually broke his conditioning thanks to Batman and joined the family, even taking over for Batman briefly after Bane broke his back. (This proved to be a terrible decision.) He fights using powered armor and enchanted medieval weaponry.

Harper Row (Bluebird I): I know very little about Harper except that she is openly bisexual and uses hilariously oversized sci-fi guns.

Claire Clover (Gotham Girl I): a metahuman with Superman-like abilities; however, the more she uses them, the faster her lifespan burns away. Last I checked, she was working with Bane for some reason to do bad things to Batman. Don’t know why. She’s odd.

Lonnie Machin (Anarky I, Moneyspider I): may or may not be the son of The Joker. Lonnie is a genius Anarchist, but not of the “bomb-throwing” variety—in fact, he detests bombers. Briefly acted as Tim’s Oracle, since, thanks to extensive neurological self-modification, he’s one of the few people in Gotham who is actually more intelligent than Tim is.

Helena Bertinelli (Huntress II, Batgirl briefly I think?): daughter of a crime family that got wiped out by a rival crime family. However, she didn’t know her family was mafia, and as a vigilante in Gotham ended up trying to operate under Batman’s rules. Wasn’t very good at that—she’s a bit too vicious and brutal, despite her attempts to rein herself in. Uses crossbows primarily.

Elseworlds & Future

Terry McGinnis (Batman Beyond I): the definitive future Batman. Thanks to Amanda Waller and superscience shenanigans, Terry is the biological son of Bruce Wayne. He wears a highly advanced batsuit that is closer to powered armor than a costume, which gives Iron Man a run for his money. Unlike Bruce’s obsessive preparedness, Terry’s skillset lies in improvisation.

Carrie Kelley (Robin II.5): the Robin of the dystopian timeline of The Dark Knight Returns. It’s been a while since I read DKR, so I don’t remember much about her.

Helena Wayne (Batgirl I.5, Huntress I): Bruce and Selina’s daughter from another dimension.

[paperanddice]

Tears of the Crocodile God Part 11

Now we get to the brass tacks of the adventure conversion: building the encounters. This will be split into two parts, covering the encounters in 5e and 13th Age in different posts.

For this part, I’ll go through and provide my version of each encounter using 5e rules and stats, with some notes on each encounter once it’s been fully put together if necessary. After a lot of playing around with the math of encounter building and similar setups, I remembered how much I don’t like 5e’s encounter builder math and went back to doing things more by feel. Some encounters will be given one version to run with, while others will have a few variations provided depending on party size. In general larger parties will probably have a bit of an easier time than smaller ones, but the trade off there is the use of the crocodile fonts. Five charges per font goes farther with a smaller group. For smaller groups it would definitely be beneficial to grant the additional benefits from the fonts, letting their more limited resources stretch further. There’s also the factor of the sacrifices, who can participate and add extra damage to the enemies, helping battles go a bit more easily.

Drowning Vaults (Monsters, Hazard)

One manticore per party member creates a reasonable threat. This is one of the most straightforward conversions, there’s nothing more to discuss on this encounter once you combine the trap and monsters.

Howling Hunt (Monsters, Hazard)

If you’re going to convert this right as written in the adventure, a reasonable setup is two tanarukk riding howler dread mounts, and 4 howlers. For larger or particularly well optimized parties consider adding another 2-4 howlers to add to the chaos and pin down vulnerable characters. Keep the shatterspell shields arranged just like they are in the original adventure, with the same number of each type. The encounter does require entirely changing the established shield equipping rules to allow a character to remove their old shield and equip the new one as a single bonus action, because without that you’ll never get anyone making use of them.

If you’d prefer to use my alternate version of this room’s encounter, listed below as Statues in Stasis, the Howling Hunt can still be used as a different kind of encounter. If the characters take too long in the Labyrinth, such as attempting to bunker down and take a long rest, have the howling hunt released into the halls and they track the party down to attack them wherever they stop to rest. Have the tanarukk come in from different directions if possible, they’ll know where the party are if they have any sacrifices with them and can easily plan their path to corner the group. Split the howlers between the two tanarukk.

Statues in Stasis (Monsters, Hazard)

For this encounter, my method was to equip the constructs with some of the more deadly shields to them, and then have the additional shields remain and let the constructs equip them if they get a moment of freedom after the first one activates. My combined setup is 2 helmed horrors and 8 animated armors, each equipped with a spellshatter shield. Equip the helmed horrors with the Fool shield and one of the Dungeon Doors, while the animated armors have two each of the Black Dragon, Carrion Crawler, and Rust Monster shields, and one each of the Mind Flayer and Umber Hulk. For larger groups you can add 2-4 more animated armors, putting them in with some of the other shields scattered around the room. A construct that has its shield activated will attempt to claim another if it can do so without provoking opportunity attacks.

Hag’s Lair (Monsters, Hazard)

Old Beshebra herself attacks alongside her filth hag son. For groups of 6+ players, add another son in. Make sure the hag waits to act when the characters have gotten into the room and try to lure them into moving so that someone has a higher chance of falling into the mud pits.

Mold King’s Crown (Monsters, Hazards)

This encounter is one of the most difficult to frame up. With the constant addition of river crocodiles, the conversion of them to death mold crocodiles, the death mold clumps, it all adds up to a quite complex battle encounter. Parties that take advantage of the death mold zombies’ weaknesses can clear them out incredibly fast, clever tactics and movement can get them in and out much quicker, good use of spells can trivialize parts of the fight, or they could get bogged down in crocodile zombies and dragged to their deaths. The setup I used for it is apparently an exceptionally deadly encounter, but both groups that went through it for me won with only moderate damage, so it’s hard to say. If you want to be on the safer side, use 2 death mold zombies, if you think your players can handle quite the challenge go with 4. No matter how many players, keep the pattern of 4 river crocodiles per round, and any that die while poisoned by the death mold become death mold crocodiles. Just make sure that the living crocodiles throw themselves into the nearest creature, attacking the zombies often and getting caught in bursts of death mold spores.

Chained Hydra (Monster)

Simply use the modified hydra for this. No matter how many players there are, the bars, the more limited space, and the hydra’s ability to duck under water and give itself loads of cover will let the combat play out fine.

Mimic’s Parlor (Monster, the brand)

Another one with high variation. I used the impersonator mimic and 8 regular mimics against 4 characters, which is another very deadly encounter, but the lower level mimics break that expected math by a little bit. For a party of 6 or more, drop at least half of regular mimics a bit and put in a cloaker instead.

I do have another note for this encounter though. It provides a very useful item for the sacrifices to get their hands on, but as written it doesn’t have a way for them to actually get their hands on it. While a few of the encounters don’t have an easy way out (Old Beshebra really hits on that), this one doesn’t have any workaround options when it feels like it should. So for my own amusement, I put together an idea for this room’s purpose in the challenges. When someone enters, the mimic is more than happy to invite them to sit down to a game. The mimic will roll a 6 sided die and add the number of garlands that the sacrifice has on them. If the total of the roll is 7 or higher, the sacrifice gets the brand and can leave. Otherwise their life is forfeit. Of course, the chairs around the table are mimics, meaning that whoever sits down gets stuck and will be devoured the moment the dice don’t give the number they want. Each person plays the game independently, so if all four sacrifices go in its 4 different 1/6 chances, encouraging them to take the garlands from each other and give the remaining member the best odds possible. And of course, anyone who enters without a garland isn’t supposed to be allowed to leave, though the impersonator will absolutely do its best to lure the intruder into sitting down and talking before killing them.

Guardian’s Run (Monster)

Another simple encounter. No matter how many party members there are, there’s only one mummified cyclops running around.

Crocodile Tears (Monsters, Hazard)

If the players set off the trap, two mummified crocodiles crawl out to confront them. There’s an interesting idea for what to do if the players successfully solve the trap though. Theoretically the mummies are still present in the passage way once it opens up normally, which could be a really intimidating sight if nothing else. This leaves you a choice; for a group that’s doing incredibly well and has plenty of resources left, you could have the mummies attack any creature that lacks a garland of lotus flowers, while a group that’s struggling a bit may just get a scare before the mummified crocodiles take up a sort of honor guard position and just sit there.

Crocodile God’s Lair (Monster, Hazards)

As with a few other locations, this encounter is the same regardless of anything else. The Crocodile God. For a very small group maybe cut the Crocodile God’s lair actions.

Nephalot’s Quarters (Monster, Hazard)

Nephalot is meant to be a fight that either ends super quickly when the party successfully ambush and wipe out the cult leader, or a deadly, overwhelming fight as unending streams of reinforcements show up. Entering the room finds Nephalot on his own, but he calls for help right away. During the first round, the door bursts open for a crocodile priest and a tanarukk to join in and try to protect him, then every round after that adds four crocodile cult acolytes to swarm the battlefield. For larger groups, if the fight lasts that long bump it to eight acolytes per round, as the goal of the fight is to kill Nephalot and any group that lets themselves get distracted from that needs an alert that this is not a fight they’re here to slog through and defeat everyone. Kill Nephalot and get the hell back out.

And that’s my 5e conversion of Tears of the Crocodile God. This is an outline, so if you want to customize some of the encounters to fit your specific group a little better you definitely should. This setup with mostly these stat blocks functioned perfectly well in both my own runs through the adventure.

[sqwarkdemon]

Let’s talk about over-saturation.

I’m one of 3 very specific animators (that I know of) that do expansion the way we do. The others being Barn-Flakes and Doom-the-Wolf (who is pretty much retired from this scene). 

We do animations in a very specific way: "Hold a button down to do gradual belly growth.” It’s a very simple, tried and true method of belly flash games and one that holds a lot of room for experimentation. You can always add to this core of “press button to expand”, you can make specific events trigger it, or you can make it so you need to complete a puzzle. 

Doom has made a large catalog of pregnancy-based flash games, with there being a character for any flash you want to play. Same with Barn-Flakes. While his animations take a long time to make the payout is always worth it wait. 

But then there’s me. I have made this into a paid platform and have retained the same “engine” I’ve modified from Doom’s code since 2017. One thing I ask myself a lot, and I’m actually asked this quite a bit, is if I’m putting out too many animations. Am I just the value-brand animator? Well, actually, yes. Yes I am. But that’s because I’m pumping 3 animations out a month. 

So the question now is: “Am I over-saturating the pregnancy animation market?”

I mean... yes and no. To understand what true over-saturation is we need to learn what it means to be over-saturated.

To be “over-saturated” is to feel overwhelmed or otherwise tired of a specific item, object, place, ect. The best way to explain this is if you’ve eaten a lot of, say, potatoes as a child and by the time you become an adult you don’t want to see another potato for as long as you live. That’s over-saturation. You can also feel over-saturation within the medium of television and film. On this topic, I could argue that Marvel media is over-saturating the film, television, and even games industry but in truth they’re not at all.

Again, to understand over-saturation, we need to consider what we feel tired of to the complete extent. I might be tired of Marvel films but my friend isn’t. I might be sick of eating potatoes but my family isn’t. So that’s over-saturation on a personal level, but when you discuss something on a larger scale with multiple persons involved the definition of “over-saturated��� becomes blurred.

To become over-saturated at a larger, multi-person level, you have to start normalizing something to the point where the medium you’re normalizing becomes a shadow of what it was before, and essentially forced down the throats of everyone involved. Take, for example, Fortnite.

Fortnite is still an incredibly popular game, and I’m not saying it’s dying or dead, but people are burnt out from it. And why are they burnt out? Well, maybe it had something to do with the art of the Fortnite dance. These dances were incredibly popular, and took players by storm. People would just do that dance and others would hop in. Videos spread and became viral, the news started reporting it, dances with adults and children spread across Twitter and Facebook, until eventually the news was hopping on the trend with news readers, CEOs, and even country leaders doing these dances. Then it became uncool, and the fun was over. That is global over-saturation.

Now this happens quite a lot and it happens in different ways. If we take The Kardashians, people became so burnt out with how they were on the news constantly. Every singe day there was something new. The constant exposure to the family lead to a nation-wide (and partially global) distaste for the Kardashians which was caused by over-saturation.

To be over-saturated is to be over-exposed to a medium, or see a medium bastardized and completely destroyed to the point where it’s a shadow of the former medium you liked.  To be over-saturated is to have had so much of the medium that you're tired of it and want it to be over.

So to answer this question: “Am I over-saturating the pregnancy animation market?”

Truthfully, no. I don’t believe I am.  At least not on a large scale. There may be individuals personally over-saturated with my content, but I don’t think there’s a large group who are collectively over-saturated with my group.

[paladin-andric]

11/11/11 Tag

Tagged by @corishadowfang! Thanks, this is a long one but I always have fun blabbing on and on!

Rules: Answer the 11 questions, make 11 of your own, then tag 11 people.

1: Do you have a favorite WIP? Tell us about it!

Blackheart for sure. It’s the only one finished (first draft), and I’ve put way, WAY more work into the lore, setting, characters and world than I have with any other project I’ve ever worked on. Not that I’ve ever completed anything else, aside from one I scrapped a while back...

I really, really fell in love with the characters. Everyone’s great, and god damn I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to meet them.

2: What’s something you’re looking forward to writing that you haven’t gotten chance to yet?

Party conflict/Suspected traitors in the midst. Not in Blackheart, but that’ll come into play in Stay the Night, a sort of slasher-horror-mystery thing set in the same world about a group of five that find themselves trapped in a mansion with a murderous cult and a highly suspicious owner.

3: Do you have a clear idea of what your OC’s look like?  Show some pictures!

Alright, I’ve actually been having an artist friend draw the cast of Blackheart and they’re turning out amazing! Keep in mind these aren’t finished yet, some things may change. Also, this is only about half the cast, we’re still working on the rest!

Knight Alexander:

Cleric Leianna:

Senci, Andric’s Son Protégé:

Tourthun, the Dragon of Havel:

Razorwing (Half finished):

Paladin Andric:

4: What animals would your OC’s be?

Huh. Never had good answers for these, but I’ll try.

Alexander - Lion (Courage)

Leianna - Honey Badger (Don’t mess with me fool)

Lexius - Bee (Diligent, hard-working)

Senci - Uhh...alligator? (Dunno, just kinda resembles an animal version of him?)

Tourthun - Do dragons count as animals??? (Komodo Dragon???)

Wurie - Wolf (He’s literally a bipedal wolf? Something about loyalty too)

Razorwing - Eagle (See above, but an eagle instead of a wolf)

Paul - King Cobra (Dangerous, keep your distance!)

Charles - ...dragon? (He’s half-dragon, half-human...maybe jaguar cause he’s a loner?)

Andric - Some breed of dog (Brave and protective of others)

5: Is there any trope that would make you put a story down immediately?

The everyone’s evil/chivalry’s dead thing. Also the no happiness or good endings sort of story. I like having hope in my stories, and constant misery and edginess without anyone standing against it just makes me groan. If no one’s redeemable or even the least bit likable why should I even bother following this group of jackasses?

6: Coffee, tea, or something else?

Coffee’s alright, but I take it light and sweet for the taste. Caramel makes it great too. Basically I like coffee when it doesn’t taste like coffee. Maybe soda or water?

7: What’s your WIP’s aesthetic?

Misty cities, ruined buildings, twilight and darkness, lone figures standing against the hordes.

8: What’s one piece of writing you’re really proud of?

This isn’t from Blackheart, but from a short story set in the same world, but in the future. Dragons call a council to discuss what to do about humanity as their power grows and the dragons’ dwindles. To do this, they use telepathy to meld all dragons’ minds so all of them know each other’s positions, stances, and can hear everyone else’s arguments in seconds.

It felt as though a hook was lodged into his brain, then began to pull violently. Then another. And another. Now, it was as if his mind was being pulled in hundreds of different directions at once.

He reeled, feeling disorientation and confusion wash over him. He felt a palpable degree of fear as well, until at last he understood.

He was not only in his own mind…but in the minds of others. Just as he was being pulled in all directions, it felt as though his mind had lodged itself in hundreds of others and pulled at them as well. With this equal force, the feeling of pulling, of vertigo and confusion faded. There was balance.

Now, he was not just at the front of the crowd…he was in the back. He was in the middle. He was left and right, up above and down below. He was everywhere and nowhere.

Patriconius at last understood. The telepathy of the elders was nothing like the standard affair. They had brought their minds together, instead of merely making them able to hear one another. The red dragon felt revulsion, fear, joy, determination, hopelessness, confidence, love, hate, anger, fearlessness and boredom. He recalled memories that were not his own, heard thoughts that did not belong to him.

In these moments, all dragons were one.

“State your cases.”

The Speaker’s voice reverberated from all directions, for as she spoke to each dragon’s mind, Patriconius’ mind, abiding in all the others, heard it each time.

9: Favorite character archetype?

A combo actually. The Tragic Hero combined with the Classical Hero. Someone who has suffered misery and heartache, sometimes to a horrifying degree, but refuses to be broken or changed, still unwavering in their morals and standing for what’s right no matter what. Something about that is just so heartwarming and inspiring, I just absolutely adore those kinds of characters. Dunno if there’s a name for that.

10: Do your OC’s have any unusual hobbies?

Charles usually loves reading, but he’s actually gotten a bit into knitting and tailoring because of Merjim, the Seemstress of the Guild of Dragonoids. She taught him how to weave and modify his own clothes! She does this for other half-dragons because of how costly it is to have clothes modified to account for dragonoids’ wings and tails!

11: How did you first come up with your WIP idea?

Just randomly started writing. Alexander and Senci came from some other unfinished story from middle school, though their characters were so massively transformed they’re nothing like what they used to be. They’re basically the same in name and profession only. I remember wanting to make an actual fantasy story, and, fresh off of being inspired by Demon’s Souls aesthetics, came up with the corrupted, ruined city. Everything else got fleshed out way later.

As for my 11 questions...

1: What’s the most important key to improving your writing, in your opinion?

2: Would your characters have the discipline and nerve to handle high risk, high stress jobs? S.W.A.T. or Air Piloting for example.

3: Do you have any scrapped stories or ideas?

4: Favorite number of characters to write in a group or scene? (Duo, Group of 4, Solo, etc.)

5: Listen to music what writing? What kinda stuff?

6: Favorite mythological creature?

7: Have any Rookie/Veteran dynamics going on?

8: Which RPG stat would each of your characters have the highest in? (Strength, Charisma, Dexterity, etc.)

9: What’s something that’s in most of your work that makes people say “Oh yeah, this is definitely by _!” ?

10: Something your characters REALLY hate/find stupid

11: Hands down, your favorite thing to gush about your own work?

Tagging @lady-redshield-writes, @oceanwriter, @urbanteeth, @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword, @homesteadhorner, @sheralynnramsey, @dragonauthor, @nightskywriter, @dreamywritingdragon, @elliewritesfantasy, @elaynab-writing

As usual, no pressure! Feel free to skip if you don’t want to do this.

[shihlun]

Chris Marker - Sans Soleil / Sunless

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. 

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi. It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the threshold below which every man is as good as any other—and knows it.

He told me about the Jetty on Fogo, in theCape Verde islands. How long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to jump? They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers. They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception—you win—Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if it was in aGodard film or a Shakespeare play, “Where should this music be?”

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was inNara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval.

8:40, Cambodia. From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: coincidence, or the sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences: “Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty. One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma—the spirit of luck—while losing candidates—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watched the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later. It took me six months for Poland.

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults—so called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy. Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done.

That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's. Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

He wrote me: curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial espionage in the eye—I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism—but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone else's.

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible, if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.

One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

He wrote me that the Japanese secret—what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things—implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.

He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.

I look to the participants. I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots had the same look on their faces.

He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands. That would be our contribution to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

Why should so small a country—and one so poor—interest the world? They did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the Portuguese. They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship, and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.

This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity, where everything began in 1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed. It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: “Now the real problems start.”

Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.

Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okada—a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra. They have a war to win. The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt, but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him: men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape—Mr. Akao is their focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo—is threatened with the death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan: “Down with the airport.” Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they “trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.” They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.

The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.

It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do. They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning—no doubt for the first time—the customs of her planet.

Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them, and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's always a boy who commands.

One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.

All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them—the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.

He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and precise as groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn—how many seasons ago was that now?

He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts—that some hipsters use for jewelry—there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.

I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off—as soon as they showed the white of their eyes—creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board, in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed—who was smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy—confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.

Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name—eta—is a taboo word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?

Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.

He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda, more irreparable—according to the newspapers—than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.

I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow. The great ancestor of the Bijagós archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead and how they move from island to island according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world. If by accident one should meet them, it is above all imperative not to recognize them.

The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau. In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he's right, he'll never see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing us back.

Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president. All those who remember the war remember him. He's the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood, and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC, which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.

I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of film-making. A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates and also to bloody defeats on the ground.

Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war, and not only in terms of military conquests. He knew his people, he had studied them for a long time, and he wanted every liberated region to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.

The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters. The social democracies fill the People's Stores. May the extreme left forgive history but if the guerrillas are like fish in water it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities—he knew the traps. He wrote: “It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side.”

And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980. But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he has just decorated, major Nino, will have taken power. The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy. We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others.

And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.

In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.”

That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.

That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face.

I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.

I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film's locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak—he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles hadn't changed.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it's a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair, the spiral of time.

The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born... and here I died.”

He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.

The painted horse at San Juan Bautista, his eye that looked like Madeline's: Hitchcock had invented nothing, it was all there. He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission as Madeline had run towards her death. Or was it hers?

  From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other way around?

In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.

That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest: a song cycle by Mussorgsky. They are still sung in the fortieth century. Their meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.

Of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I've even given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.

On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?

I learned that—as in the Bijagós—it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted. Each community has its priestess—the noro—who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.

The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.

The noro communicates with the gods of the sea, of rain, of the earth, of fire. Everyone bows down before the sister deity who is the reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and sister. Even after her death, the sister retains her spiritual predominance.

At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.

On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for. So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.

One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: “I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”

Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal, which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with the painted tombs, it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.

He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no longer exists. You don't want to believe the images that crop up.

Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This name—Island of France—sounds strangely on the island of Sal. My memory superimposes two towers: the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc, and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal, probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.

A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt. Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal. Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal. They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.

I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight; they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before. Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood: today was the first day of the lunar new year, and for the first time in sixty years the sign of the dog met the sign of water.

Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.

Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp to camp—like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.

At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come, and according to another turns them into truths.

But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw, or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for them; all you see are the girls.

The fifteenth of January is coming of age day: an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag, home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?

And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments—all the accessories of the celebration—and by burning them, make a celebration.

This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality—like the dolls at Ueno. The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things. Daruma—the one eyed spirit—reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast; laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a singular one—although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service—it was to chase away the moles.

And that's where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in. I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms length, at zooms length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second, the city of Heimaey spread out below us. And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island's volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.

So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, “Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.”

And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the 'zone.'

He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.

Will there be a last letter?

Comparative Cinema > No 3 (2013)

[em-exceeds-change-zearu]

I have a question, because I trust your expert opinion on these matters.... What do you think of yugioh sevens?

sorry it took so long for me to answer you, anon! i was puzzling over how to answer this for a long time, because i really wanted to give my honest opinion but i had a Lot to say and not all of it positive. also i’m in the middle of moving out of my apartment with the husband and that’s really busy lol.

so. hm. okay. given that I’ve only seen the first episode so far (I watched it when it first came out and haven’t gotten the chance to see the other two), I can’t say my opinion will be super informed! however, I can give my initial first impressions based on what I saw from the first time I watched it! the impressions will be under the cut, but let’s just say that my opinions are. Mixed. again, my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt, because i’ve only seen episode one and I really expect the show to show it’s true colors by mid-season, but this is just a really quick first impression after mulling over my initial impressions for a few days. 

I think overall, my impressions of the first episode is that I can see the potential, but the execution is somewhat shoddy. It honestly doesn’t feel like the producers used the extra six months or so from ending VRAINS early to their best advantage here, but there’s an...effort? I can at least see why people are charmed by the show so far. I’ll break it down piece by piece to show what initial problems I had with it that prevented me from enjoying it fully. It’s still a very charming show, and I plan on giving it a chance, but I feel like the show itself is still finding its footing. And that’s to be expected, most ygo spinoffs are just Like That when they start, but it’s definitely one of the weaker starts to a series i’ve seen. I’ll break it down by its aspects to show what I both like and dislike about it!

Setting - Okay, so I’m actually rather charmed by the setting itself. It feels like it’s a direct callout to how the ygo meta has gotten in real life - there are a few decks that stand out over the rest and sometimes tournaments can come down to being between one type of deck and its counter. Yuga wanting to make his own type of dueling because he feels like the world around him is getting stale is incredibly charming, and the rules he’s come up with absolutely feel like something an elementary schooler would come up with (I used to make fun of pendulum summoning being the same type of thing, but this is just straight up reminding me of the days when pokemon trading cards were super popular and none of us little brats knew the rules so we made up our own as we went along). Yuga’s a little kid who dreams about giant dueling robots and wants dueling to have the mystery and fun and pizzaz it used to, and who doesn’t? I support this baby boy and his dueling robot dreams. 

The world around him is established to be pretty restrictive and somewhat eerie as well - the school is largely managed by robots that regulate things down to the smallest level (I don’t think there’s even any adults around, which ???), and even the smallest innovations Yuga does to help make life more efficient, like adding a carrier to his bike to carry his bookbag, are rejected as out of line. There’s actually a nice level of show and don’t tell here and there, like showing how the robots scan each student while greeting them happily at the door, or how duel disks are automatically shut down and locked during school hours. One particularly chilling moment is watching robots clamp down on students trying to trade cards informally in the schoolyard, calmly and cheerily informing them that such trading is prohibited and must be done in a sanctioned G-Corp trading location. What seals the deal is that the student’s don’t express annoyance and anger at this, merely accepting such a restrictive rule as a mildly inconvenient part of life - which shows how such an indoctrinative lifestyle has already affected their manner of thinking. I feel like the first episode would have benefited more from being stretched out into two episodes instead of trying to cram a duel inside the end of the first episode, because the crammed nature of it all meant these moments are very few and far between, lost in how quickly the episode rushes through these plot points.

Characters - Okay, overall the dynamics of our main cast look like they can be really cute. We have our rebellious protagonist that wants to shake up everything and have fun, our uptight class president that wants to enforce the rules but gets swept up in the chaos protag-kun brings, the rival character that thinks protag-kun could change the world around him and looks at him with respect and also might possibly be a chuuni dumbass, and the token female character who’s Totally Not Interested In This Dueling Thing, No Way, Really. But honestly, in the first episode a lot of this characterization is lost in...screaming, actually. They’re very. Loud. Particularly our president, who honestly looks like he’s got multiple facets to his character (he briefly expresses admiration for yuga’s modified bike and its convenience before immediately reverting to screaming about rules, eventually does come around to helping yuga out because he doesn’t want to get Insta-Banned for being near him, etc), but we lose so much of it because, again, he spends 95% of the time screaming. we also get a lot of forced humor and gonk-y reactions that seem kind of exaggerated, partially because said reactions tend to be Spelled Out for us as opposed to just letting us see it happen, but this is lack of how the characters are themselves and more about how they’re being handled so far. which i’ll explain more when i get to talking about storyboarding.

music - it’s...okay? the OP is growing on me and is actually pretty cute, but I’m not getting anything that stands out. the BGM hasn’t really had any pieces that really get my attention so far, but maybe we’ll see something better in the future? i don’t know

storyboarding - okay. I’m not going to be talking about the animation because i’m not harping on the style (although it does admittedly look woefully generic and not very YGO at all) given that they’ve moved to a completely different (and cheaper?) movie studio. i’m not going to talk about the shoddy cgi or the stilted animation or anything like that. i’m specifically talking about the storyboarding itself, how scenes are being framed and arranged, and how the main story is being told. and this key part is where SEVENS entirely falls apart. 

the problem is that the story is going by entirely too fast and is craming all sorts of things into its timeslot. the characters react loudly and obnoxiously to every little thing, with exaggerated pratfalls and gonkfaces as opposed to...actual reactions. it’s understandable from yuga and possibly even the high strung class president, but when even characters that are established to be a little more mellow minded (see, rook and romin) end up acting like that, it kind of contradicts what little we know about them. Not that it’s bad for them to act like that, but it has more impact if we see this after we have established characters for them (although if rook is actually established to be a chuuni dumbass later, i would immediately forgive them for that instance specifically, because that’s adorable). it honestly comes off as the animereaction equivalent of Johnny Test - all the exaggerated sound effects and janky reactions to compensate for the lack of animation or storytelling. it’s kind of upsetting to look at.

speaking of establishing character. It’s honestly done rather poorly for a first episode, which is a problem. I need to have a reason to be invested in these characters, and when you rush through their introductions it leaves me wanting. for example, my previously mentioned example of our class president clearly showing interest in yuga’s inventions but having it completely smothered in his need to appeal to authority and his high strung anxiety is a good point! but we get so little of it that it’s very much lost in his constant screaming and yelling - so seeing him portrayed as part of yuga’s friend group from day one is a bit jarring. another more telling example is rook immediately showing interest in yuga because this kid really keeps trying to modify his duel disk. okay cool. why. why should we care about this. we haven’t seen any instance of him before this, and when he’s introduced he talks about this Secret Hidden Backdoor Legend That’s Totally Prominent!!!! except we don’t see any hints in the series leading up to it, it literally comes out of nowhere. there’s no mystery or mystique in this, we haven’t seen rook try challenging this on his own, he’s just immediately dropping the wham ball of OH YEAH I ALREADY BANNED MYSELF, OOPS. speaking of: why is it bad that they get banned?? what happens? obviously you get locked out of your duel disk but then what? clearly, it should affect these kids’ standing in society somehow because the extreme control over said disks and card management means something, but we see rook attending school like nothing is wrong. nobody notices him, he’s not established as a troublemaker or a wanted figure by the nearby robots, he’s just...there. so there’s no emotional impact to seeing that yuga is one strike away from being banned, or that rook was already Banned (you’d think him getting banned at such a young age would cause Problems, but See it’s Fine, So). also yuga reminiscing about how he’d forgotten what he wanted to do with his new style of rush dueling and how he wanted to bring fun back into it falls really flat because, again, we can’t really see why it’s important for him to do this. him spelling it out for us suddenly when he’s close to losing a duel lacks the emotional impact because we haven’t seen how it affects him specifically. we can see little things - he’s already tried so many times, he keeps printing out little robot designs, he’s somewhat annoyed with being locked out of his disk during school or harranged for every little thing he does, but we haven’t had enough time to see why this is so important to him or why he does what he does. 

again, a large majority of these problems would be solved if they handled this the way zexal and vrains handled it - having most of the worldbuilding be in episode 1 and introducing the main duel mechanic in episode 2 with a full on duel that was started at the end of episode 1. maybe show some standard dueling as a contrast and use those show-not-tell instances from the setting to show how restrictive or repetitive it is (maybe yuga and co hanging out at one of those G-Corp Mandated Trading Stations after school and watching/playing some duels? yuga trying to show off rush dueling in there and getting kicked out?), then introduce rush dueling as a thing in episode 2 when he’s introduced to the Secret Backdoor Trial by Rook after seeing hints/rumors/etc about Mystery Programmer Man Who Did This For Some Reason. but rushing it through like this, especially when introducing a Whole New Dueling Format AND a new type of card, isn’t ideal. but trying to cram things together like this makes the weakness in storyboarding really stand out, and it taints an otherwise good story. not that the story in itself is bad, but it’s not presented particularly well.

it could be like how vrains clearly improved in storyboarding after episode 14 or so, after the initial rush was over with, so i’m willing to give sevens another chance on this. but this isn’t a very strong way to introduce us to the characters or the world they want to show us. 

overall: charming ideas, shoddy execution, will be looking to see if they improve on this. i’m willing to give it a chance, though, because yuga is a darling boy that deserves it. also the class president. i may not remember his name but i also stan him.

[biointernet]

What is Consciousness?

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

Konstantin Korotkov, PhD, Prof.

St. Petersburg University of Informational Technologies, Mechanics and Optics St. Petersburg, Russia “I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd “I Myself am Heav'n and Hel” Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) First step in science is to give a definition. People often argue for hours about certain topics, defending different positions, but in reality, they are talking about different things: everyone keepS in mind his or her own understanding of the topic. So let us start with definitions of what we understand by the term “Consciousness”. The history of attempts to build a rigorous, not intuitive definition of consciousness is rooted in the distant past. Moreover, all these attempts are inevitably based on an a priori division of the whole of nature into conscious and unconscious: the definition should only formally draw this border exactly where expected. Depending on this, the authors of the concept make statements about the adequacy of the specific wording. Definitions based on this division, are subjective and, biased, most often in favor of Homo sapiens. With this approach, avoiding logical tautology is not possible in principle. Furthermore: being the foundation for experiments, such an approach to the definition of consciousness inevitably leads to incorrect results. Thus, in the well-known experiment the experimenter removes the bell from the entrance to the wasp nest, and the wasp completes a new one. Further, he makes a hole in the tube bend before the bell, and the wasp builds both the tube, and the bell. “Aha!” says the experimenter, “Now you see, the wasp has no reason!” But if aliens, as an experiment, make a hole in somebody’s shirt over and over again, the person will first try to patch them, then he will buy new shirt, but eventually he will throw them out of the window, swearing and pounding his feet. “Aha!” the alien will say, “Now you see, Man has no reason!” The reason here is that we assume a priori which behavior is reasonable and which is not. Experimenting not on ants and wasps, but on a man working on an assembly line, you would find just as strong evidence that he is no more than a biorobot. The Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet entertainment industry and a TV program guide can provide us with even more impressive indication of the total lack of human reason. In our studies we use the following definition: Consciousness is a property (ability) of natural objects to form abstract representations of the outside material world, suitable for use in purposeful activity through sensory perception.

In more simple form: Consciousness is the ability of a subject to react to environmental information and change its behavior in accordance with this information. From this point of view, every living organism possesses consciousness: all animals, large and small above ground and under, in the air and in water; plants; microorganisms and every cell of our body. At the same time, inanimate subjects do not possess consciousness: stone may be warmed by the sun, but it will not move or change its color to avoid overheating. But how about robots – in accordance with this definition some of them possess consciousness? From our point of view, robots replicate elements of the consciousness of their creators. Living beings are able to modify their features in case of rapid changes in circumstance even at the cost of death of part of the population. Of course, to some extent: out of millions of years during the kingdom of dinosaurs only crocodiles were able to survive. Robots may behave in accordance with a program, designed by engineers, and their ability to modify is quite limited. At least, within the limits of known technologies. All discussions above are related to the first, basic levels of consciousness. Next level of consciousness is the ability of a subject to predict future events, remember past events, plan and modify its behavior to meet future situations in accordance with their experiences. This level is characteristic of for higher animals and humans. All owners of cats and dogs know that their pets may be very smart when it comes to not only their favorite food, but often to their relationships with their masters. Interesting examples were presented in the book by Rupert Sheldrake “Dogs That Know Their Owners are Coming Home” (1999). Seven experiments demonstrated that dogs were able to predict their masters’ return and were waiting near by the door. We know many stories about conscious behavior of dolphins and elephants, not to mention monkeys and crows. All mentally healthy people have this level of consciousness, albeit to different extents. Children possess this level at the age of two-three years. Next level of consciousness is the ability to generate new ideas, exchange these ideas with others, transmit them to next generations and manifest them in objective reality. Only humans possess this ability. Ants build their huts in the same way for millennia, as do bees, birds and many other animals. We cannot explain how they achieved this ability, who taught them, but they never changed the structure of their constructions. Very rarely do they introduce new elements acquired by random trials. For humans, creativity is the basis of the development of civilization. Artists, poets, architects, scientists, and many other creative people have advanced our civilization, and the whole of today’s modern world is created only through the constant generation of new ideas. Some people generate new ideas, others turn them into reality. Many smart people reach this level of consciousness in their work, which allows them to take everyday decisions, based on knowledge, experience and intuition. All successful business people, politicians, teachers, engineers, builders and many other professionals have to generate and use new ideas in their everyday practice. It is so common, that people often do not pay attention to this process. Only in this way can humankind develop and create new steps in our civilization. A high level of consciousness is the ability to generate ideas, which are not based on the existing level of social development and knowledge and which transforms society, moving it to the next level of civilization. Presumably, they do it by connecting to the Universal Informational Field and receiving direct information from the Higher Planes of Consciousness. We can name particular people in known to us history, who was able to reach this level. First of all, these are Great Spiritual Teachers, like Moses, Zarathustra, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. They were able to give people new understanding of their lives; formulate spiritual laws, which govern millions of people for thousands of years. In different words, in different languages they were speaking about the same things – about human life, human soul and the role of humans in the Universe. Now we understand, that all religions give the same message, they all have the same spiritual content, same deep meaning. Great Teachers were able to present people complicated spiritual ideas in simple, understandable words. In A short time their teachings have been accepted by millions of people, because they allowed every individual to reach new levels of spiritual development. Moreover, all these teachings have existed for thousands of years, they do not die and they transform in accordance with the development of society. We do not need to mix Spiritual Teachings with human institutions; Religious organizations are social structures, organized by particular people in specific socio- historical periods. They were initially designed to help people in their everyday needs, to help them survive harsh conditions, explain spiritual ideas in understandable words, but soon they were transformed into social institutions and have been used in the Power Games of Rulers. We know how many crimes have been conducted under the name of God, millions of people have been tortured and killed by religious fanatics, in religious wars, and this process is not over yet. All we discussed above is related to individual consciousness, but we, humans, also possess a Collective Consciousness. We are the only creatures on Earth, which have both individual and collective consciousness. This is our powerful tool for development, for the creation of Civilization. We join our individual minds as neurons in the brain, thousand times increasing group intellectual power. Formation of civilization became possible only when people started living in big groups, when they formed first cities, generating extra products, which allowed more and more people not to be involved in the everyday struggle for survival. Combining their brains, their abilities, people were able to make the next steps in civilizational development. We’ll discuss this topic in the following chapters. Of course, our definitions are only some of the possible way to discuss consciousness. You may find many different approaches in modern science. Our aim was to give definitions, which we may use in our research, developing experiments, which may help us to understand some enigmas of human existence.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? The more we perceive the world around us, the more it startles us by its complexity. The boundaries of our knowledge are continuously moving aside, making the process of cognition in the ongoing race, beyond the horizon. On this way, many obvious and universally accepted theses periodically become paradoxical and ambiguous; many representations die or radically change. The true way of all science goes through crises and paradigm shifts to new crises. This path is endless, convoluted and tortuous, but there is no other way. A direct mechanical transfer of representations from the ant-hill to human society is impossible; however, the study of these “parallel worlds” can give the same long- anticipated push for a new round of scientific development predicted by many scientists of the planet. Consciousness is the ideal category, the basic imperative along with Matter and Information. In modern science we do not have – either in medicine or in biology - the notion of consciousness; we only take the first steps in understanding this concept. Obviously, even just a transition to micro or macro-world is accompanied by changes in ideas about what consciousness is, as it is difficult to talk about any expected behavior. From a bird's eye view, people’s behavior on the streets of a city, observed in time lapse is strangely reminiscent of an anthill or a beehive. A worker on an assembly line, at first glance, behaves in the same way as an ant. However, this is only a superficial similarity. The assembly line for a worker is only one of his numerous functions: he can also be the caring father of a family, an angler, a collector, a reader of novels, a spectator, or a member of a political party. When conditions change, the worker can respond irrespective OF to his work program, and even in spite of it. The worker can go on strike and demand change in his conditions. We know nothing about the strikes of ants. Therefore, it is beneficial to replace the worker with a robot, whose behavior is fully consistent with the ant psychology. It is noteworthy that the rigid structure of a collective, being surprisingly stable for ants and having ensured their survival for hundreds of millions of years with all the changes in the environment, turned to be totally unsustainable for the human society; even being forcibly established and guarded, it spontaneously disintegrates in an historically short term. We may see in history that any Empire exist about 1000 years, and then disintegrates, being replaced by a new Empire. We observe this pattern throughout all human history, regardless of nation or continent. Some social formations exist for much shorter periods, just seconds from an historical perspective. The socialist system existed for 70 years, and quietly broke up without any pressure from outside. It is obvious that with the suppression of the Individual Conscience in the name of the Collective in human society, the fundamental laws of life of the noosphere, the laws of the stability of a complexly organized system are violated. The Communist model of the structure of a society is perfect for protozoa and insects; however, all attempts to introduce it for people, - beings with a more complex organization,- are not viable. We did not mention such notions as “unconsciousness”, “subconscipusness” and “superconsciousness”, obligatory in modern psychology. You may find thousands of books discussing these topics. We presume that readers understand their meaning. The reason is these are descriptions of brain functioning, interrelations between different parts of the brain, in particular, left and right hemispheres, in the processing of received information. It is well known that we take in much more information, than we are aware of. The brain processes all the information and presents to our attention only a small part of it. This process depends on a person, the situation at the time and the importance of the information. Intuitive people may process much more information from the environment compared with less intuitive ones. In our definitions, this is related to activity at different levels of consciousness. I would say, they describe inner mechanisms of informational processing, while in our definitions we are focused on the outcome of this process. In addition, it makes us look differently at the definition of the concept of “consciousness”. This notion is a key in the area of sciences related to man. The basic concepts of any scientific theory are primary, i.e., are not defined in terms of other previously introduced concepts, but are introduced intuitively. They define the whole future course of possible arguments; a good example is to recall how different is the geometry of Euclid and Lobachevsky- Riemann, with different primary definitions. These arguments inevitably lead us to a contradiction: an intuitive introduction of a term suggests that its meaning is equally understood by all who use the relevant theory. The concept of consciousness is complex enough already to demand that it expresses itself (I cannot but recall the famous theorem of Gödel's incompleteness of formal systems, which establishes the impossibility of judging the properties of a system by means of the system). At the same time in everyday life, we define the concept clearly enough. We say: “a conscious man” about the individual who understands the nature of his actions and their possible consequences. From this perspective, neither a drunkard, nor a criminal can be called conscious people. Their behavior is contrary to the moral standards of society. Thus, we see that the term “conscious” has a moral and ethical connotation and refers to people who understand and control their behavior in society. At the same time: “an unconscious behavior” s the state when a person acts without controlling his actions and does not understand their consequences. A whole range of states can be between these two extreme situations. One popular option is when a person is aware of all that happened, but acts in a completely unexpected way, both to him and to others. For example, spouses during a family quarrel can say things to each other, for which they will be very embarrassed. In a crowd of fans a man can cry, fight and smash benches, although in real life he is quite a peaceful citizen. Another extreme is the phenomenon of “out of body experience” when a patient being on the operating table under general anesthesia, watches everything that is going on though detached from the event. Thus, to avoid all these difficulties, in modern science it is customary to speak of a “normal” awakened consciousness and various deviations from this state. Thus, the “normal” consciousness is the individual's ability to perceive events and respond in accordance with the level of socio-cultural environment. Hence, is consciousness associated with the level of social development? Yes, of course. For the man of XIII the appearance of a living dragon would be perceived as something natural, though with fear. We can assume that in those times dragons were common wild animals, like wolves or bears. These dragons crawled in those times, and now they preserved only on the island of Komodo. For a modern man the appearance of a dragon will be perceived as a hallucination, or as part of Disneyland. In this context, the above definitions of “consciousness” should not be viewed as an attempt to constructively identify this philosophical category, but as a way to agree on the meaning embedded in the concept. It can be understood as the coordination of intuitive ideas, a sort of “check of the clocks”. To introduce consciousness into scientific framework we need to develop a theory of its operation, which would be able to explain different levels of consciousness and predict some new phenomena, such as distant healing, mediums and out-of-body experiences. Now the most promising seems to be theories based on quantum electrodynamics. We need to accept consciousness as a system effect, depending not on the particular part of the body, even one as powerful as the brain, but on the system as a whole. We may attribute some level of consciousness to every cell of the body or to the particular organ, but to achieve high level of consciousness we need coordinated activity of all the cells, all the organs. Quantum electrodynamics operates with the notion of a system, consisting of many elements, that is why it may be applied to the construction of the theory of consciousness. You may find many papers, published on this topic, and, without being a mathematician, it is absolutely impossible to understand their importance and meaning. Interested readers may refer to the works of Mari Jibu, Kunio Yasue, Emilio Del Giudice, Giuseppe Vitiello and some other prominent theoreticians. Good luck and I praise you if you will be able to understand their content. We may only believe that at some stage they will be able to construct a self-consistent theory of consciousness. I will let you know when it will happen... PDF: WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? Read the full article

[arkus-rhapsode]

My favorite Spriggans

Now this is going to be divided into 3 category: Personality, Magic, and Fights. So enjoy.

Personality

Larcade: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, all of Larcade’s speech and afflictions are on point. He goes along with his enlightenment motif well and he’s never made to look like joke in terms of personality. Plus his contradiction is a little more controlled than Zeref’s and it makes sense for his character.

August: His very loyal persona is something common in anime but he’s always shown to be competent and is actually going along with the the plan an not taking pointless detours.

God Serena: The man hams it up like crazy but you know when your heralded as the number 1 wizard saint I’m sure it’ll go to your head. Plus his personality is the most logical way to exploit him to win. (Too bad that was never used and Acnologia just up and murdered him)

Wahl Icht: He can modify his personality but his main persona of giggling maniac is still fun. He’s never made to be incompetent thanks to it, in fact, wahl is actually rather clever.

Invel: Actually cares about the mission and seems to show that he he loyal to his emperor. But the cold calculating villain is seen a lot in a ton of villain groups but then again he was effective and not incompetent.

Bradman: Another pretty generic attitude aside from his shakespearean tongue but again he wasn’t incompetent.

Neinhart: The “poetic hearted villain” is another thing done before (and plus I thought Rustyrose did it better) but again his personality didn’t lead to anything stupid due to it.

Dimaria: Her teasing personality was okay but then we get into the pointless waste of time with her stripping people. I guess It’s because she’s so confident in her god soul but unlike Serena she seems more petty than full of herself.

Ajeel: Another generic villain personality but this one was just annoying unlike Invel, Neinhart and Bradman’s generic personas

Jacob: It’s actually nice to see there be a prude rather than perv yet it still lead to as much stupidity as a villain with a perv personality.

Irene: Okay the actual witch personality was okay but then with her constant meandering and her gift wrapping victory like crazy and being a long drawn out pain in the butt, kinda sucks.

Brandish: Chirst, PICK A DAMN SIDE! She is more contradictive than Zeref.

Magic

Brandish: Her Command T is so cool. It really is a power that belongs to someone who was as hyped up as a Spriggan

Wahl: His Weakness was just awesome. From the puppets strong enough to handle the thunder god tribe, to the rail gun, to missile lock on, it’s over the top but so cool.

God Serena: Yes, we’ve seen Dragon slaying magic before but never 8 at a time. It was so cool seeing combined dragon slaying magic again however I was SO ticked that we never learned the other 4 lacrima he had.

Invel: His “pure ice” magic was a great idea. Just freezing stuff was is an interesting concept. The ice Slave was another great idea, I just wish he came up with better ways to use it. Like maybe take control of soldiers and use them like a tactician should.

Neinhart: It’s pretty standard to have that character that brings back the dead but it was different enough from keyes’s. It was thanks to this we got to see Ur vs Gray and Lyon which is soething that needed to happen in my opinion

Ajeel: Another basic but at least it was used in a way that portrayed standard power but on a this level and scale

Larcade: Love the concept of the magic the way it looks, however, the way it looks detracts from the level of it.

Irene: Another power I like in theory but it needs a lot more definition to it.

Bradman: Okay yeah it’s just a chimera of curses we’ve seen before but it looked soooo cool. I wish he did some cool combos with these curses like Serena did with his magic.

August: Pretty much all magic we’ve seen before but unlike bradman there isn’t really enough cool imagery to go with it.

Dimaria:I'm okay with time stopping powers. I’m okay with God soul. But there needed to be more limitation on it.

Jacob: I’m okay with a basic power like Transparency but he didn’t use it in any cool ways and again looked like an idiot.

Fights

Wahl: His fight with Laxus was great really interesting twists and was so over the top yet so played straight I loved it.

Bradman: His fight with Gajeel was so intense. And people complain about the gajevy in it well you know what it was nice to see Gajeel come full circle and get dragonforce.

Ajeel: Was beaten in a pretty nice way of combining Bisca and Erza together. He also forced Erza to actually beat him in a way that Erza should beat villains with HER ARMOR!

Brandish: It was so cool to see Lucy fight for Natsu and Lucy using all these star dresses and it got me so pumped but god damn that ending of Dimaria coming in just sucked.

God Serena: He was fighting in such a cool way and I wished we saw the other 4 saints put up more of a fight but Acnologia showed up and while him getting beaten by Acnologia made sense, it still robbed us of so much more we could do with God Serena.

August: He’s made to look as competent as he was hyped up as and while it was short it was still really badass.

Laracade: He was beat in a way that made total sense, however, with all the portrayal of his magic it made the action really clunky.

Invel: Actually minus the Gray and Juvia crap the fight actually made a lot of sense. With Gray using his molding magic to take advantage of Invel’s unusual ice and use it against him. Like Gray did against Doriate and used the molding magic to control demon ice. And in the beginning with Invel mocking ice-make would’ve been great irony. Too bad the fight last 4 god damn pages.

Neinhart: Y’know I want to make a post about how neinhart losing actually made sense both times given both his magic and personality.

Dimaria: It was a giant deus ex machina but it was nice to get damn sacrifice in this war

Jacob: Hated the fight but the way he was beat with Lucy using Gemini was really cool (kinda a reverse of Lucy vs Brandish)

Irene: Just a mess

[petsupplyandmore]

Itch Aid Choices For Your Canine

Taking care of your pup could be a actually taxing, doubtlessly costly and undoubtedly continuous job. Regardless that it could look like canine are largely self-sufficient and don’t want an particularly great amount of care, there are literally all kinds of issues that you could do to verify your good friend lives a cheerful and wholesome life. Probably the most widespread sources of discomfort and unhappiness amongst canine, irrespective of how nicely taken care of they’re, is itchiness.

It’s necessary to notice at this level that seeing your canine itch just a few occasions isn’t essentially trigger for alarm. Wholesome, comfy canine itch as a part of their every day routine. They itch in the identical approach you and I would if there’s something caught of their hairs which is tickling the pores and skin they usually itch as a part of their common upkeep, in the identical area as after they lick and rub themselves. So, don’t panic once you see some itching, simply preserve your eye out.

If itching is persisting in an annoying, near-constant sense, that’s when you could begin interested by intervening. Intervening together with your canine’s itchiness means just a few issues, all of which often contain a prognosis of kinds. So, with out additional delay, listed here are some steps and concepts you’ll be able to put into motion to assist to alleviate your canine’s itching and scratching.

Acknowledge That It Might Be For A Entire Vary Of Causes

That is in all probability a very powerful of all of the steps. You don’t wish to attain instantly for an answer earlier than you actually know what the issue is. And, frustratingly, canine itching can imply an entire load of issues, all with a variety of potential implications. It’s attainable and definitely widespread sufficient that your canine has fleas. This might result in its personal resolution. Possibly it’s an issue together with your pup’s coat. Is it too oily? When did you final have tub time? Is it too dry? Has the climate modified not too long ago? Maybe it’s allergic reactions; canine are allergic to an infinite vary of issues, in the identical approach, people are, and plenty of of them are discovered within the fields that canine run and play in. They could even have gotten bitten by one thing or have developed some kind of rash.

An examination of the world by which they’re focusing their itching will possible reveal the entire story to you. However it’s important that you just carry out this step since you’ll waste time and put your canine via extra discomfort if you happen to leap to your personal conclusions in regards to the state of affairs. In the event you can’t work out what’s occurring by yourself, then you definitely may begin interested by taking your canine to the vet, only for some skilled steering.

Assault Of The Fleas

Fleas are tremendous excessive up on the listing of attainable explanations for itchiness in your canine. “It’s under no circumstances a sign of any kind of neglect or particular dirtiness, so there’s no have to be frightened about that. Fleas are extraordinarily resilient and really crafty, with a outstanding capacity o leap from host to host so your canine could have even caught them from a fellow canine down within the park”, suggests Maria Wilson, life-style blogger at StateOfWriting and BoomEssays. The vital factor is figuring out and addressing. Fleas are not any enjoyable for a canine, who will scratch endlessly with no approach of eradicating them. You’ll must get actual medicine concerned whether it is fleas that you end up waring with. Regular some kind of localized ointment or a every day pill will likely be prescribed to rid your poor canine of its undesirable friends. Simply just be sure you verify that it’s fleas earlier than going forward with the therapy.

Bathe Usually

An entire load of the potential causes of itchiness in your canine may be handled, relieved or lowered within the likeliness that they seem by bathing your canine recurrently. Bathtub time may be troublesome, to say the least, and requires you to have a superb little tub station if you happen to don’t wish to share the household tub together with your canine good friend. Moreover, it requires some endurance as canine could be a handful within the tub. Simply ensure you’re not in your Sunday greatest. An appropriate bathing schedule will cease issues like oiliness of their coat, dry pores and skin and might even assist shield in opposition to fleas and different unfriendly invaders.

Nevertheless, a fast warning. There’s such a factor as bathing your canine an excessive amount of. “In the event you put your canine within the tub each day, you’re truly doing your self and your canine no favors. Canines aren’t like people, they received’t develop odors from not washing in the identical approach. And, actually, on prime of that you may be denying your canine some actually beneficial oils that retains their coat wholesome”, says Lucy Hale, a pet author at UkWritings and EssayRoo. However, basically, it’s at all times a good suggestion to implement common washes. It’s best to discover that it actually helps your canine to cease itching.

Watch Out For Modifications To Weight loss program

Allergic reactions are a quite common reason for itchiness. Usually these will likely be environmental allergic reactions since your canine is extraordinarily more likely to be brushing its physique and legs alongside bushes and grass because it runs round within the park. This type of contact may cause localized allergic reactions in a short time. Nevertheless, if you happen to haven’t modified their strolling routines and there isn’t an apparent different offender, that doesn’t imply that allergic reactions ought to be dominated out for positive. Allergic reactions can simply stem from meals.

It’s necessary that you just monitor what your canine eats as carefully as you’ll be able to. It may be a problem since canine will incessantly eat something that they discover of their travels. Nevertheless, noticing a change in weight loss plan will permit you to simply determine the reason for an entire vary of issues, from abdomen points to itchiness. Meals allergic reactions may be exhausting to identify however may simply trigger itchiness. Moreover, sure meals don’t give your canine the precise oils and fat to take care of a wholesome coat which might additionally result in an excessive amount of itchiness. General, it’s necessary to observe weight loss plan and to consult with it if you happen to can’t discover different explanations to your canine’s itchiness.

Bites, Stings, and Ticks

In the identical approach that fleas may be harassing to your canine and inflicting actual itch issues, there are different animals which may doubtlessly have triggered issues that at the moment are making your canine itch. Ticks are like fleas however may cause extra severe points if left unmonitored. These parasites will trigger itching in your canine, however ticks can burrow very deeply. Ticks connect themselves to people and canine, significantly after strolling via fields or tall grass. In the event you’ve taken your canine for a stroll via fields and discover them itching one spot, that’s a very good indication that one thing has clung on.

Different attainable causes of itchiness could embrace bites from ants, spiders and different bugs. There’ll often be redness and swelling wherever the affected space. It ought to be pretty easy so that you can determine in case your canine has been affected by any such points. The most effective resolution for these is often within the type of lotions and ointments to assist relieve itching. If it’s a giant and apparent tick, then it is best to be capable to take it out with tweezers. Nevertheless, some ticks, any which have burrowed will have to be eliminated by a vet.  Utilizing exact devices, a sterile surroundings, and good lighting, to ensure you get that taken care of professionally.

Pores and skin Infections

Whereas inspecting your canine’s pores and skin examine for any kind of infection-like mark. It perhaps be possible they’ve some kind of pores and skin an infection. Once more, that is an space by which you need to search skilled recommendation. Probably the most widespread infections, an an infection which people can even get, is a yeast an infection. All such issues will have to be handled through prescribed medicine, from a vet. This may eliminate the basis an infection moderately than merely coping with the consequences of the an infection. You may lookup photos of widespread an infection rashes to offer your self a greater thought of what to search for.

Conclusion

It’s by no means a pleasant factor to see your canine in discomfort. It may be a really complicated factor taking care of them after they aren’t in a position to bodily describe what is occurring. By now, it is best to be capable to discover out what is occurring to your canine once you see it itching. Be vigilant and by no means be afraid to go to an expert to get some concrete recommendation.

Writer Bio:

Chloe Bennet is a life-style blogger at Australianhelp and Huge Assignments companies. She is a proud proprietor of an awesome dane named Chip. Additionally, Chloe teaches tutorial writing at Eliteassignmenthelp.com.

from Pet Supply and More http://petsupplyandmore.com/index.php/2019/04/12/itch-aid-choices-for-your-canine/

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A Red Pill: Most animal abuse is socially and legally accepted (But it’s not because people are evil)

According to uslegal.com “Acts of violence or neglect perpetrated against animals are considered animal cruelty” (US Legal 2016). And yet what is killing an animal in a slaughterhouse, could anyone suggest killing an animal is a non-violent act? And what is keeping animals locked inside in factory farm sheds for most of their lives, is that not neglectful? Of course, in reality these are examples of violence and neglect and few would argue otherwise and that is exactly why the same page as quoted above from US Legal’s website goes on to add that “Many animal cruelty laws specifically exclude accepted animal husbandry practices” (ibid). This is of course because it is necessary to make the livestock industry an exception to animal cruelty laws in order for it to work in a way sufficient to meet the demand for animal products in the modern era and especially in industrial nations where demand is highest. In order to meet this demand, a blatant disregard for the principle of what it is that defines animal cruelty must be largely and in some cases entirely embraced.

The fact animal cruelty laws and the principle that it is defined as violence or neglect inflicted on animals are negated in the cases of livestock farming and indeed that this is the norm throughout the entire world, we find ourselves in a situation where putting two and two together, it becomes abundantly clear that most of society and indeed the legal system itself is approving of and protecting animal abuse and therefore animal abusers. Stop and think about that for a moment; Considering that most animal products are the result of the inherently cruel practice of factory farming and that all animal products are the byproduct of violence and the killing of an animal who didn’t want to die (after all survival we agree is the most basic instinct of all animal life), ordinary, good, decent people are giving money to animal abusers and animal killers, every single day. Indeed for all animal abuse covered in the media in various forms (mostly concerning dogs), society expresses outrage at the abusers. Of course many of these cases are cases of more extreme and abhorrent violence, such as the beating of a dog. However, abuse is still abuse and even if that abuse is neglect and poor living conditions or even if the killing of an animal is relatively painless (which is definitely not always true – consider that more and more pigs are being put in to what are basically gas chambers across the western world), the sheer scale makes a lifetime of purchasing animal products responsible for far more animal suffering than the very people we despise who kick and beat dogs or cats. In essence, the vast majority of animal cruelty in the world results from the livestock industries and yet as society gives money to pay for this cruelty, society verbally attacks animal abusers of dogs and talks of how they love animals.

As children, we have a natural affinity for all animals and we more or less maintain this for dogs and cats, yet society wrongly teaches us to have minimal to no empathy for pigs, cows and chickens. We are taught that they are there for us, as a means to an end. We have objectified and de-personalized them almost entirely and a thought related to that point occurred to me recently, that the three animals’ people in the west refer to the most as a way to make fun of others while referencing animals are indeed pigs, cows and chickens. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It seems a reflection of the initial point I made regarding the objectification of these animals. It’s also clear that people have quite negative perspectives of these animals; maybe they’re ugly or disgusting or dirty or stupid and so forth. Of course some of these perceptions are just that, merely our perspective resulting from biological and cultural biases. To a pig, a pig is not ugly but because they are not so cute to most of us, we disregard their suffering. The idea of pigs, cows or chickens being stupid couldn’t be further from the truth. Pigs are the fifth most intelligent animal on the planet, noticeably smarter than dogs and are one of the few animals capable of passing the mirror-test. Cows and chickens alike can recognize faces, have strong attributes of emotional intelligence and can form specific bonds with other individuals, including humans. The reason I believe that society often perceive these animals in particular as stupid or disgusting and the reason I think they are referenced to the most out of all animals in making fun of other humans using such a reference is because people need to see pigs, cows and chickens in this light. They need to in order to feel okay about how they’re being treated. Just as society will mock vegans, society also appears to have a desire to de-personalize and objectify farm animals. Shoot the messenger and de-value the victims and then forget the truth; All in all, this is a coping mechanism for society to continue to pay for what is blatant animal abuse.

However, the cruelty of the livestock industry doesn’t end with killing or factory farm conditions; male calves are separated from their mothers by the dairy industry, often to be sold off and fattened for veal slaughter, many animals have been genetically modified to either grow too fast (chickens) that they often lead painful lives filled with risks including that of having broken bones which collapse under their own weight or egg-laying hens, bred to produce an excessive number of eggs than they would in nature in order to help meet consumer demand and as mentioned above, the growing prevalence of ‘co2 stunning’ of pigs, which is painful and extremely inhumane and yet more efficient, despite industry claims of it being humane or at least more humane. All in all, these industries are filled with abuse. Almost all animals farmed in the modern era fit the US Legal’s definition of animal abuse and similar definitions given elsewhere and yet most people pay for it and effectively give money to animal abusers, all around the globe, every single day. It’s been so normalized and people have been subject to such immense and immersive social conditioning alongside the constant stream of advertisements and pro-animal products sentiments persisting in governments and in educational information that it’s incredibly difficult to recognize this at first and yet undeniably, it is true. And who really benefits? These industries are killing animals, they’re killing the planet and they’re killing people. It’s the cliché; Corporations and those at the top are the ones who fundamentally benefit. This is why such animal abuse can exist without society being filled with evil people; society has been conditioned to see animals as objects and to associate animal products with being objects, making the real animal behind the product seem unreal and disconnected. It seems to some extent, people don’t fully ‘believe’ that factory farming and slaughterhouses exists. That may sound absurd but what is the psychological state of belief and how directly linked is it to being given the facts? If a society is conditioned so heavily to see animal products as simply something presented to us in stores and restaurants, this can shape our realities, to the point that even though people know consciously that animals are used to make their food, this conditioning makes such a reality, a little hazy and a dream-like breakaway from actual reality is feasible. Hence why a red-pill is needed. Images of factory farming are associated more with being something we come across on the internet or in a documentary than with something happening in our reality. It is my belief that if most people walked in to a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, people would feel very different. We are pushing our world to the brink of environmental catastrophe, we are creating the 6th mass extinction in the history of the Earth, we are enslaving, tormenting and killing 10s of billions of animals every year, we are damaging our own health and we are failing to recognize how these industries are filled with animal abuse, the very thing we as a society consider to be among the things we stand against the most. How is it that society can consider itself to love animals and to hate animal abuse and yet pay for so much, immense, large-scale animal abuse and far more in total amounts of suffering than is entailed in the underground dog fighting world or in any other illegal activities involving animal abuse?

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Parasites and Other Creeps that Violate Your Body

David Bruce Conn, M.S., Ph.D.

While many important human infections are caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other infectious agents, the next several chapters will deal with the extremely complex pathogens known by scientific convention as parasites.  If we are to understand parasitic diseases, we must start by understanding a bit about parasites and parasitism in general.  Beyond that, we must develop a basic understanding about the nature of disease, and how a diseased person differs from a healthy person.

Let’s start by saying that we humans are not in any way separate from any other part of the vast, dynamic, and astonishingly varied natural world.  Humans may appear, both as individuals and as a global gene pool, to be discrete entities. But the truth is that all of life on earth is in a constant state of flux, with energy and matter constantly changing form at a rapid rate.  The substance of carbon atoms that made up some part of a cell membrane of a lettuce leaf yesterday, along with the energy stored in the covalent bonds that link those carbon atoms, are today the substance and energy that are part of your body.  The same matter, the same energy, yesterday a lettuce leaf, today a human, tomorrow a bacterium that lives in an infected cut on the human’s hand. Your digestive enzymes dismantled the material in the lettuce so that the anabolic synthetic processes inside your cells could re-organize that material into the stuff of humanity. The next day, the bacterium’s digestive secretions dismantled the material in your skin cell so that the synthetic processes inside its single-celled body could reorganize that same material into the stuff of bacterial life. Soon, the bacterium will be eaten by something else. And on, and on, and on, and on. Even photosynthetic plants rely on carbon dioxide and other materials recycled from other living things to build their own bodies. Matter and energy, never created anew, never destroyed; just constantly, tirelessly, endlessly changing form.

As soon as we grasp this basic tenet of thermodynamics, we can begin to understand parasitism. Put simply, every living thing is constantly busy consuming and rearranging other living things. Each species uses its own unique body form and physiological processes to accomplish this consumption and rearrangement. Many, in fact most, of these millions of species on our planet, accomplish this by establishing intimate long-term living relationships with other species on which they feed, actually residing on or within the species that serves as their food source. This is the nature of infection. This is a biological phenomenon known as symbiosis, which literally means “living together”.  Both the food and the feeder may be referred to as symbionts, but in many cases the food species is typically called the host, while the smaller feeder is called the symbiont.  If it lives inside its food species it is an endosymbiont; if on the outside it is an ectosymbiont.

But not all symbiotic associations are the same in terms of their impact on the two species involved, or in terms of the relative benefit or harm to symbiont and host.  If all symbionts were reasonably harmless to us when we play the role of host, we probably would not spend a lot of time thinking about it. A harmless ameba living in your intestine and feasting on bits of the pizza you just digested probably would go unnoticed, or would be regarded as a simple curiosity, banished to the mostly unread pages of biology textbooks.  But if that ameba has the ability and propensity to switch from pizza to human flesh, digesting ulcers as it eats its way into your intestinal lining, we would all sit up and take notice.

As it turns out, both types of ameba live in humans.  The harmless kind is referred to as a commensal or commensalist; the flesh-eating, ulcer-producing, harmful kind is referred to as a parasite. In both cases, the human is the host. The two relationships are referred to, respectively, as commensalism and parasitism.

Less commonly, there may be situations in which both species derive benefit from the relationship.  In other words, the relationship is mutually beneficial; thus, we refer to it as mutualism.  Among other species, however, mutualism is critical to the survival of both partners. An example of this is hypermastigid flagellate protists that live in the intestine of termites, and provide the only means by which the termite can digest the wood that it eats.  Without the flagellates, the termite would starve to death on a full stomach. Similarly, the coral animals that build the great reefs in tropical oceans could not survive without zooxanthellae, symbiotic algae that live within the coral’s tissues and manufacture carbohydrates that provide energy nutrients for the coral. Mutualism is not commonly recognized in humans, though it is often argued that some bacteria living in our intestine (i.e., enteric) actually benefit us by aiding in the processing of certain nutrients. Because such cases typically do not involve disease, I will not say much more about them in this treatise.

Before we close this matter, however, we must recognize that the nature of symbiotic relationships is not static.  A symbiont may be basically commensalistic, simply living inside the host without causing harm, but becoming harmful when certain conditions change. Thus, the enigmatic organism, Pneumocystis jirovecii, may live in the respiratory tract of healthy humans, going undetected because it causes no damage. But when that human becomes infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and develops AIDS, Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the symbiont becomes a deadly pathogen, often killing the human whose immune system is no longer able to keep the symbiont under control. Thus, the commensal becomes a parasite because the host’s immune status changes.  Similarly, there are many parasites that are harmless or only mildly irritating as long as the host is well nourished, but can become seriously pathogenic to malnourished hosts.  This is an important point since the same regions of the world where malnutrition is rampant are often the very parts of the world where parasites species are most common.

So, now we can construct a concise definition for a parasite: an organism that lives on or in another organism of a different species, maintaining a long-term intimate relationship with that host species, and ultimately causing harm to the host. This sounds pretty good, but unfortunately, scientists have a propensity for filling seemingly simple definitions with words that must be qualified.

The first qualification that is demanded here is the one about a parasite and host being different species. If anyone ever tells you that a human fetus living inside the womb of her mother is a parasite, that person is misinforming you. The special placental bond between the human mother and child (or other placental mammals), is a fundamental part of the reproductive strategy for that species.

The second qualification is what we mean by “long-term” relationships. Some parasites are known to reside inside their host for many years – even decades. Others may live in the host for only a few days.  The longevity of the relationship has nothing to do with time per se since, as we all know, there is tremendous variation in the longevity of different species, from hours to hundreds of years.  By “long-term”, we mean that the parasite must fulfill and complete a critical part of its life cycle in intimate association with the host.  Thus, a louse that lives on your head, feeds on your tissue fluids, mates and lays eggs on your hair shafts, ultimately staying for generations on your scalp, is a true parasite. Because it lives externally, it is an ectoparasite.  Similarly, a tapeworm that resides in your intestine, grows from juvenile to sexually reproducing adult, draws nourishment from what you have eaten, and produces young that disperse to the outside only to colonize a new host, is a true parasite. Because it lives internally, it is an endoparasite.

On the other hand, a mosquito does feed on your blood, but it doesn’t live on you. You are not her host, but just a convenient source of fresh blood.  The neighbor’s dog, or even the mouse in your garden might have sufficed for the blood meal that the mosquito seeks.  You are nothing more than prey for a predatory mosquito.  But because this predator takes only a small bit of its prey rather than wolfing down the whole thing, it is often referred to as a micropredator.  But sometimes the distinction between ectoparasite and micropredator is difficult to discern, such as in the case of ticks, which spend long times on their host, or prey, while feeding.

Unfortuately, even after adding these qualifications, nothing in the natural world is quite that simple and clear cut.  We’ll stick with the basic definition above, but it will be necessary to add further modifying language when we discuss any of the myriad versions of parasites, hosts, or host-parasite relationships.

Most organisms that meet all the criteria for a parasite have no choice but to live a parasitic existence.  These are known as obligate parasites, and they cannot fulfill all their necessities for survival and reproduction unless they can live at least part of their lives in association with the host.  For obligate parasites, some stages in the life cycle may be free living, but this free-living phase is typically only a period of dispersal or transmission to another host.  However, if an organism can live its entire life, possibly even generation after generation, without a host, but can also survive within a host given the opportunity, we refer to it as a facultative parasite.

Facultative parasites may also be referred to as opportunistic, since they are essentially free-living organisms that only become parasitic when the opportunity arises.  However, the concept of opportunism may also be applied to obligate parasites that require a host, but typically occur in small numbers, reaching much higher infection levels when opportunities arise.  Such an opportunity might be the suppression of the host’s immunity, as occurs in a person with AIDS, or who is under immunosuppressive therapy for cancer.

Before going further, however, there is one more point that must be made regarding the nature of parasites, or at least the scientific history and traditions related to the study of parasites. Scientific disciplines do not always follow nature’s pattern, but rather the whims of human culture and scholarly traditions. This writing is actually about the field of parasitology – which literally means the scientific study of parasites.  But parasitology as a defined field is not really about all parasitic organisms, but only the more advanced or sophisticated organisms that use humans and other animals as hosts.  Thus, the field of parasitology eliminates a vast number of parasitic relationships simply by ignoring those organisms that use plants as hosts.  Some scientists who study the roundworm parasites of plants also study related roundworm parasites of animals, but only the latter would be publishable in the scientific journals that are devoted to the field of parasitology. Research on the roundworms that use plants as hosts are more likely to be the subject of journals in plant pathology (the study of plant diseases), or nematology (the study of roundworms or nematodes).  Likewise, parasitologists do not concern themselves with the many organisms that are parasites of algae and fungi.  They just focus on parasites of animals.

If that weren’t restrictive enough, parasitology as a discipline also ignores many types of parasites of animals.  For example, there are many parasitic bacteria that use animals as hosts; but parasitology does not concern itself with bacteria.  Bacterial parasites are more typically studied by bacteriologists, or microbiologists.  Why this distinction?  It relates, again, to the history and traditions of scientific fields, which ultimately are the reflection of those human communities or societies that have found common cause in the study of like organisms.  Bacteria are very simple organisms.  As prokaryotes (meaning early or before nucleus), they have very simple naked DNA, quite unlike the eukaryotes (meaning true nucleus), which are organisms with exceedingly complex DNA packaged into sophisticated nucleosomes, which are then packaged further as chromosomes and further organized into complex nuclei. In other words, prokaryotes like bacteria are genetically simple, while eukaryotes are genetically advanced. Humans and other animals are eukaryotic, and the field of parasitology concerns itself only with parasites that are also eukaryotic.  In a way this makes sense, because parasites that are eukaryotic are genetically as sophisticated as their eukaryotic hosts, and thus must be understood and controlled by much more sophisticated approaches than prokaryotes.  It is little surprise, then, that bacterial (prokaryotic) infectious diseases generally have been controlled more easily that parasitic (eukaryotic) infectious diseases.  Nevertheless, parasitic bacteria, fungi (which are also eukaryotic), and even tiny viruses and prions can cause serious diseases that have proven difficult to control.  We will cover more about all of these, but with emphasis on the parasitic eukaryotes, including single-celled protists, helminths (or worms), and arthropods such as lice.

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Further Reading (click on reference to link to full text):

Chomicz, L., D.B. Conn, J.P. Szaflik, and B. Szostakowska. 2016.  Newly Emerging Parasitic Threats for Human Health: National and International Trends. BioMed Research International – Parasitology, Special Issue. Hindawi Publishing Corporation, London, United Kingdom. 73 pp.

Conn, D.B. 2002. Parasite collections at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Parasitology. Monduzzi Editore, Bologna, Italy. pp. 585-589.

Conn, D.B. 2006. The John H. Sandground Helminthological Collection at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative  Zoology. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Parasitology. Medimond/Monduzzi Editore, Bologna, Italy. pp. 299-305.

Garin, Y.J.F., M.-T. Galán-Puchades, A. Moulignier, G. Robert, F. Héran, M. Polivka, P.D. Olson, F. Lorenzo, F. Derouin, and D.B. Conn. 2005. Case report: human brain abscess due to a tetra-acetabulate plerocercoid metacestode (Cyclophyllidea). American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 72: 513-517.

Prof. Dr. David Bruce Conn is a biomedical scientist who has conducted research, taught university students, and advised governments and industries about parasitic and other infectious diseases, invasive species, and environmental health for 40 years.  He is Associate of Invertebrate Zoology responsible for the parasite research collections at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Gund Professor of Biology in the Berry College One Health Center. (Disclaimer: Dr. Conn is a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State on issues of health and foreign policy, but the contents of this post are his own views and do not officially represent any unit of the U.S. federal government).

Copyright © 2017 by David Bruce Conn.  Free use and distribution permitted with attribution.