#but youre really short and adults arent short...So It doesnt make sense ''

[grumpyghostdoodles]

Continuation of the Kris meeting the Dreemurrs doodles that I did!

Chara was so used to Frisk/Asriel vibes of "I just met you but I love you, and trust you with my life", that they got a bit of whiplash when dealing with Kris.

Dont worry, Kris did end up warming up to Chara! It just took a little while.

[startwithbrooklyn]

THE GREAT ND REWATCH OF 2021 / SEPTEMBER 30, 2019 // larkspur lane/the whisper box

this post is a double whammy cause they have 2 eps happen in the same day if u can believe it (thats how awful judging timelines in this show is!!)

-"hi josh..." LMAOOOOOOO

-BESS just breaking in lmaooo how many god damn times does bess just shit the bed in this show

-LOVE her frowny face at nancys closet ("my expectations are low" lmfaoooo but this would totally be me)

-"bet she meant it metaphorically" okayyy but then why did lucy say that at all? i feel like theres defo more to this story, combined with josh's cagey behavior (part of which is to get nancy to stop looking into shit d/t him and karen but still)

-"they dont accept visitors unless they're family" .....🙂

-ace "youre really good at that" to bess i fuckin love this friendship with all my heart (also love their talk at the claw mirroring nick & nancys talk in the last ep)

-also PINK AND ORANGE BESS ARE U BLIND (also 1) why tf would nancy own this and 2) where would she wear it??)

-okay wtf is vampire dip

-"boss??" see this is what i meant yesterday about nancy ruining everything for nick/george

-god DAMN she sucks at dealing with this news lmaooo that emotional competency babey + love george literally agrees to help bc she feels bad (AND nicks immediate look of "you just reprimanded me for helping her last ep and i know why youre doing this rn" lmaoooo)

-LOVE george noticing nick "shout out to jean valjean" lmaooo once again nancy would never have noticed/commented on something like that

-"get the hell out of here" was this foreshadowing for an epic dad joke for these two eps? "how do you make holy water? you boil the hell out of it" 😂😂😂😂

-so what i dont get about the whole haunting is the ball + kids' laughter but its all the emphasis on "mr roper" the adult? wtf like what kind of entity is this

-"how did you ever have a solo career??" 😂

-okay amaya's hair is gorgeous here (also "you feel like a snack" ....👀) *ahhh so the reason bess feels so off balance is bc its like a top vs a top scenario

-has anyone who's ever been to prison confirmed this is what it looks like?

-love how ace is the only employee there when they all leave so he had to fucking close the place when he goes

-why does she take the whole file? time constraints? it'd be smarter to take pics + replace it (better sleuthing) but this place is clearly not well run anyway 😂

-so this is a pretty decent cover she invents but theres no way she would get away with it so easily for a real guard

-love how ace recognizes ryan's car (+ is able to find it by driving around)

-"my father wouldnt do anything like that" LMFAOOOOOO SIS WHY ARE U DEFENDING HIM ironically, ace is actually the best person suited to engage w ryan here d/t the car accident + connection with laura being ryans SIL. its a unique set up

-i am fascinated by the concept of priests + holy water being so effective here combined with mcginnis' beliefs and basically nondenominational ghosts/seances etc after that. the show is very clearly big on diversity but definitely steers clear from too much WASP stuff yk? wonder if other stuff from christianity works against the ghosts/demons like taking refuge in a church "holy ground" or using silver etc

-"did this start after the night of sept 10?" *this is where you get the time line for the seance if you didnt know

-this is so fucking funny when u realize that patient sal talks to is actually a ghost so sal really is psycho i guess 😂

-bitchsplain/tall jar of mayonnaise 🙏🏻😌 2gether 4ever

-how did ace get this van? also heart attack when he yells at carson (but then grins at him like a goofball lmaooo)

-"for nancys sake and yours" damn she owes ace big time for all this shit

-"what do we do for 7 minutes?" ...ummm play 7 minutes in heaven lmaooo 👀🥵

-was not expecting ace to look this sexy holding an axe but okay (*ah, its his short sleeve shirt showing his arms. usually hes a sleeves guy)

-"desperate for attention" nancy (from gomber) vs "bc she's starved for attention" patrice --> lucy (and candace also...) we know nancys detective work makes her seem like an attention seeker, but what was lucy doing to make them all think that? she was trying to hide her relationship with ryan, not expose it. unless they just mean the rumors about her?

-so is patrice hiding lucy's "truth" talking about lucy being a whore or lucy being a ghost? what is lucy's secret? did patrice guess she was pregnant or did patrice's somehow garbled mind remember tiffany trying to show patrice the video with lucy on it?

-wonder what captain thom thinks of this stand off w ace lmaooo

-"like you do?" top v top shenanigans

-how awko for carson to talk to karen again like this

-"oh no" ACE 😂

-love how amaya says "be a human" like shes kind of admitting people in rich circles typically arent (^this is an interesting focus in s2 when bess's rich family rejects her, thus making her human again, but nancy embraces her rich fam and experiences subsequent moral struggle which is predicted with the wraith)

-wonder what ryan thinks he could get from the marvins (which he cant get now lmaooo)

-this damn whisper box. so many questions. who named it the whisper box? why are the ropers' old possessions still there? who decided to build a mental hospital on top of it? and patrice! she "hid lucy's secrets" hannah gruen thinks tiffany tried to show patrice video w lucy on it, which patrice then specifically says she hid in the thin mans book. so patrice knows of the thin man? can she see him? does she know he was a ghost/supernatural? she must have a supernatural sense to know about him (unless sal told or some shit) so then when tiffany shows up w/ lucy being supernatural in it patrice hides it to protect her? is this why she is "crazy" kinda like victoria? supernatural elements or ability to sense ghosts makes her unstable? this is why lucy being a ghost/nursery rhyme that she repeats makes patrice worse/"stroke"? how did patrice even get into the whisper box to put the key in the bible and get out without getting trapped? also, her dementia --> lucidity is really fucking off, some people mildly switch like that but usually with dementia they cant even register new shit anymore

-...so did bess take the ride? 👀

-interesting how celia says "your father will be disappointed" but nothing of her own opinion. wonder how much celia truly puts up with to keep everett calm and nonhomicidal

-like george asking nick follow up questions that nancy never really would have asked

🥞🥞🥞(ep13)🥞🥞🥞

-is this bitch just eating a plain pancake with her bare hand?

-"extra case load and excessive volunteering" ugh. nancy's family here are like, gross in how "good" of people they are // unrealistic, trying to paint carson in the best light/ no way ryan could ever compare (but the reality is theyre not that good of people for lying about nancy) **and shes arrogant to think shes better than everyone else ie the only one who truly lives virtuously, thinks she can do no wrong sometimes even tho using sex to cope, breaking and entering, etc is not morally "good" stuff she still thinks she is the only one who doesnt lie and plays fair (like in the pilot she lists everyone else as a suspect but herself- obviously we know she isnt guilty but no one else does. (i mean in theory we really dont, what if nancy was an unreliable narrator and was actually guilty, that would be a hella cool show)its reactions like that where she cant understand why others like the chief suspect her

-ooooh ironic that in the Good Place carson readily agrees to pay her for helping with cases as opposed to s2 in reality

-nick's house has "problems" so why does he need a lawyer? as opposed to an interior designer, plumber, or realtor?

-in the Good Place nick and george realize they are not going to work out after one date. does this failure in the Good Place predict failure in reality, or merely an easier way of figuring out the truth? does this mean that the "opposite" of the Good Place is reality, or only an opinion of what is better? (nancy says "you all like me" as her opinion of them liking her is skewed; does this then only reflect nancys version for what is the "perfect life"?)

-why is bess a hippie??? and love how george curls her hair and wears pink lipstick here

-if this dream is so realistic then why is the one thing it cant conjure smoke? like how random

-love the locket being a key realization bc with things like jewelry you dont notice the weight of them until theyre gone

-"you all like me" in her perfect life nancy means they "like" her objectively/regardless of circumstance even though liking her is still an objective choice (like they "like" her because of other reasons instead of her working at the claw? (like how you make friends with coworkers/people at school every day but after you leave the job/graduate you never speak to them again) and her "thanks for showing up!" as if theyre not doing exactly that in reality 😐like where is she getting this shit? she sort of acknowledges in earlier eps she is hard to like/that she puts mysteries before friends, but also pushing them away to avoid danger like the previous ep "why do u show up" etc

-is it just me or does the inside of nicks "house" look like the drews'?

-nick has a dick scar lmaooooo (or more likely was hit in the balls or smth)

-love how nick + george match their anger in confronting sal 100% on the same level

-so when did ace go back to work after having such a busy day earlier?? lmaooo

-damn father shane is a creep (casting defo hired him for his voice) and how tf did he just poof + escape? and what did he request???

-love bess's white hair bow here 😌+ her jacket, whole outfit on point as usual

-like how bess is right that nancy has to find her way out but thats kind of a nonstarter for a room full of panicked people wanting to help

-in the Good Place theres no bad blood between drews + hudsons bc nancy is really theirs

-"the only one who has the key is you" in the Good Place nancy has the key (smaller picture, to finding out what happened to lucy but bigger picture, post-reveal) but ryan has the clues nancy needs- following the Good Place's mirroring, this just means that in reality ryan will either be completely useless or an active hindrance (but you KNOW this is a dream bc in what universe would ryan remember clues like that 😂)

-so in a perfect universe ryan acknowledges his family's "criminal empire" as opposed to reality where he only makes under cover jabs about disengaging with being an "entitled corrupt legacy criminal" ie finding the bonny scot relics but does nothing about them, etc

-"strippers" 😂

-okay what is nancys obsession w her beanie?? bc her mom made it? "wear beanies do crimes?" idk

-making the call: nancy -unable to make up for lost time/both her mothers had to find out/suffer alone / in the Good Place nancy was able to be with kate while she called, and in reality she had carson; somethig about seeing the mother looking to the daughter for strength in the Good Place instead of the reverse (which is what reality sounded like, kate being strong for nancy through the illness despite the struggle)

-concept: nancy & nick "let's wait out the storm"

-"i believe that you believe it" nick in the Good Place + owen in reality both trust nancy when she says she's seen things (owen's is the teeth) but nick in reality (and not really knowing details) doesnt think much of their "moment" bc it wasnt real (so she had to leave the Good Place to save carson- but if she had known then he wasnt her real dad, would she have stayed to be w nick?)

-stranger - suede james 💙👌🏻

-"really anxious as a kid" v telling bc of her desire to know everything to remain in control of situations like she always does now

-"the medicine or the metaphysics?"/"you cannot beat supernatural with science"

-i love nancy playing with her pinky while saying goodbye 🥺

-"always seek out the truth even if it hurts" this is straight irony bc kate never told nancy anything. like does that include the truth about nancys parentage? they taught her to seek out the truth, but who taught her that the truth is the only thing to live by? ie things dont count anymore like carson and kate straight up raising her is tossed out bc she finds out its not "the truth" like all that work/stress to protect carson + she just drops him? with kate maybe shes just upset thst she spent all that time mourning for someone who lied. and would she do the same to ryan if needed? probably

-bess and ace head tilt 💙

-like how for all the time she spent there nancy only has a subconscious memory of blue curtains

-YESSSSS i LOVEthese beautiful overhead shots of hannah's hands. so out of character for the show lmao but so gorgeous

-i feel like future eps/grand future will be nancy going through the lock boxes to help people who asked hannah for help

-the video is officially dated Aug 22, 2019

-soooooo in the first ep nancy breaks into the hudsons house and finds tiffanys secret drawer w the nail polish and finds the amulet with a note that says "for your protection HG" yet on this video tiffany says she talked to a medium who gave her the amulet sooooo am i just confused? HG is hannah gruen obvi so is the address for the medium what hannah gave her? or was the address on the amulet which nancy dissolved in salt water to see? so how would tiffany know where to go? its chicken and the egg which came first hannah or the medium?

and lastly:

i close these two eps with a thought that everything in this show is sealed in death. all the lies, the imagery, the fake constructs people put up to get by all crumple the second someone dies- all the secrets come clean just like these doors have been unsealed.

[baebeyza]

I've finished watching TFA and I got 5 episodes into TFP, but I'm not so sure if I'm into it. Do you think I should keep watching TFP or try something else, and if so which continuity would you recommend? I was thinking of doing either the G1 cartoon or G1 IDW, but I'm sort of warming up to other stuff like Cyberverse and I could use comments/opinions from someone who's watched more

Oh well dear, depends on what you didn’t like or missed in those first 5 episodes!

For me TFP was my first transformer show and it was good enough for me to go full into the whole franchise and I would recommend it for newcomers.

For newcomers it has a small cast to get invested in, has a good grasp on the general conflict of most transformers shows and a good story to follow. I at least never felt like I needed things explained to me or that it’s something you get more off if you already know the franchise.

But there is always a difference between “this show is objectively good” and “I enjoyed it”. I do think that Prime is pretty well written, not perfect, but still awesome with great moments. Also the animation is EPIC, with some of the best fight scenes I’ve seen in years!

But there are other TF shows I enjoyed more, despite not exactly thinking they are better written. TFA for example! That show I enjoyed more because it was more fun and the characters had better dynamics and development. But the general plot wasn’t as intriguing as TFP in my eyes.

What I personally didn’t like about it (TFP) were:

1. The human characters arent really all that great. They get better and are important, but they can be annoying, especially Miko. (though she develops more than the other two)

2. The heroes lack good character interactions, they mostly feel like people stuck in a group project without much friendship behind

3. There are sub-plots I didn’t care much for (like the human villains)

So I dunno if you should watch the rest - remember that the first 5 episodes were it’s own little plot, and that with episode 6 the real one starts. Maybe that will be more to your liking! 

Personal enjoyment really depends on you and what you like too see though.

I for one like great character interaction, intense moments but also fun. Fun as in funny but also lighthearted, non-serious moments.

TFP does have good character writing and good character interactions with the villains at least. Not as much fun as TFA, but there are still some hilarious moments and characters. And the serious moments are actually really great! This show did have me on the edge on a lot of occasions, there is a lot of good escalations and “oh shit” moments.

But if you like really great character writing with great character interactions and dynamics, watch Beast Wars! It has some of the best character writing I’ve seen and also a really great plot! It takes a while to fully get into the meat and most of season 1 is built-up to that, but once it starts its a truly epic ride!

Beast Wars also has a good balance between fun and serious. If a show is just serious it gets tiring, but if it’s just fun and lighthearted it gets a little boring. Beast Wars has some truly intense moments that make me feel like crying thinking about them, but also a lot of funny scenes, mostly through character interactions, but also slapstick comedy.

The one contra people always bring up is the “bad” animation. And YES it’s bad for todays standards because we are used to seeing better, but just because it’s outdated doesnt mean it’s not good! Like give it a chance people, once you get used to it it’s not as bad. It won an award for outstanding animation back when it aired!

G1 is my favourite show though! Not because it’s actually good, quite the opposite - it’s silly and stupid, it makes no sense and it’s completely shameless in that regard and that way it is just a fun ride!

With no overarching plot each episodes has it’s own plot and drama and while most episodes follow the same format (for season 1&2 at least) it barely gets boring! The creativity of the show writers knows no bounds ~

G1 also made me love a lot of characters! Some I learnt of only from that show and some I already knew but didn’t care for before. (Like Hot Rod for example)

G1 also has great dialogue and interactions as well :D

Headmasters is a japanese show that continues after G1 season 3 (and ignores the american season 4) and personally I really liked it! Unlike G1, Headmasters has a plot and a really good plot that made you come back for more. I still had my issues with it, but those were mostly because of the changes they made from the G1 cartoon. Still recommending it though! Especially if you feel like you need something a little more sophisticated after G1 :D I mean it has death scenes, character depth and development and redemption! (PS: the hong kong english dub of it is shit, but people like it as a “so bad it’s good” kind of comedy. would still watch the japanese version first)

Robots in Disguise 2001 is also a show for newcomers, given that it’s the first one to have it’s own continuity after G1. Though know that this one is more for really young kids. There isnt much escalation or truly serious moments, it’s more fun and lighthearted. So as an adult I found it a little boring, but it’s still good if you like lighthearted stuff! And most of the characters were really cute! It has a lot of brothers too, so as a person with lots of siblings I enjoyed that aspect :D (PS: I watched the original japanese version here)

Beast Wars II (you don’t need to have watched Beast Wars for this) is similiar to RiD01, as in really lighthearted with little escalation and depth. It’s a little jarring though, the heroes are really bland and the plot doesn’t really start until halfway through the show. The first half being about introducing various character groups that end up being important in the end, but most of these episodes aren’t really entertaining, especially when you don’t care about those characters like I did. I’d say the best thing about this show are the decepticons with a really sweet Galvatron as the leader and his idiot little brother Megastorm (who can be read as a version of Megatron) and a Starscream whose a little shit like always but also has a friend he cares about!

If that’s enough for you, go for it xD

Oh and Optimus has a son here - the best and only character arc the heroes have to offer. Found it pretty cute in the end ~

Cyberverse was a “meh” from me though, mostly because it feels like fanfiction. Fanfiction doesn’t need to explain to you who the characters are, it is able to assume that beforehand. And Cyberverse does that, it assumes that you already know the characters and world. And like that it doesn’t really try to write things with depth, it feels all shallow. To me at least, I am aware other people love it.

It just didn’t vibe with me because I want the media I consume to shake me and make me feel things, I wanna be at the edge of my seat, I wanna be anxious about what’s gonna happen next!

That is a thing Prime Wars was able to deliver - the third season, Return of the Primes, at least. 

Though the Prime Wars Trilogy isn’t popular and has many flaws in storytelling, voice acting and animation (+ other things that have to do with expectation, which I don’t really consider flaws of the show itself), but I cannot help it, I still enjoyed it a lot ~ Also the whole thing is pretty short - 28 episodes, 8 of them 5-6 minutes long and the other 10 minutes. It doesn’t take long to finish it all. 

The only shows I truly didn’t enjoy are Robots in Disguise 2015 and Beast Machines - RiD15 is the sequel to TFP and mate if you already don’t vibe with TFP, just skip this one. I didn’t like it much because:

- The decepticons are all badly written, either completely forgettable, not given enough screentime or just kinda having their potential ignored. 

- The heroes never really develop - it’s a show with a lesson in every episode that get’s forgotten in the next. So you have the characters learning the same lessons all the time and I hate shit like that

There are decent episodes sure, and some really sweet characters, but overall it’s just not really good

And the last show I watched is Beast Machines, the sequel to Beast Wars with most of the same cast and some new characters.

And this is a show were I say that it had a good plot with good structure and conflict, but I didn’t enjoy it!

And I do try to divorce it from Beast Wars, but even then the flaws are still there. The biggest complaint I have is that the heroes are never in good terms with each other, almost every episodes has some of them being angry and fighting and that’s TIRING! NO FUN ALLOWED IN THIS SHOW! There is only one character who enjoys being in the show and he dies screaming.

The plot is also really philosophical and not really for kids that way. As an adult I did try to enjoy it, but the show has some flaws in it’s good vs evil conflict.

That would be it with the shows I watched!

As for IDW, I’m not really far with that so I cannot talk much. 

Hope it helped ~ But I would recommend that you give them all a shot, at least for a few episodes. I cannot claim to always be objective, even if I try my best at it

And yeah, my no. recommendation is Beast Wars, it’s really good!

[defensematrix]

Ooooo!!!! You don't have to like justify it or anything but as someone on the spectrum I love ppls take on Hanzo being autistic

ok! so first of all i want to say i headcanon hanzo as being raised female until he was around 14 years old, and theres a disparity in how autistic children who arent cisgender boys are treated/whether or not theyre diagnosed, which is why i hc that even at 38 years old, hanzo still hasnt really figured it out for himself (also being introspective is Scary when you have so much trauma to deal with)

being undiagnosed is a very frustrating experience, especially when youre under pressure to be the Best Son and also the future leader of an entire yakuza clan. i feel like hanzo grew up angry and irritable because he just wasnt getting the help or attention he needed, and even as an adult his needs arent really being met, which is why he can be like. Angery. yknow?

which isnt to say that i only think that hanzos an asshole cause hes neurodivergent fjkdljfl im just saying that like, sensory overload and stuff like that personally makes me angry as hell. anger is one way that anxiety and distress is expressed in a person and i think for hanzo, being angry and loud and mean was the safest way for him to express this distress, because the alternative is being Vulnerable, and its likely he was rewarded for being aggressive when he was young too 

so like, with all of that out of the way, i guess i could start listing some specific examples of things hanzo does that makes me go “same hat!” or fit in the criteria for asd in some way

(bear in mind that a lot of these are definitely Reaches but when we know so little about the ovw cast as a whole we can really think whatever we want lol)

hanzo saying “i sense a kindred spirit” to symmetra is really one of the  biggest things tbh. symm is canonically autistic and hanzo says this in response to her saying that order and discipline are the most important things in life

he seems to like doing things the same way/sticking to a rigid schedule. an example of this is him going through with his mourning ritual in the dragons short even after learning that genji is still alive. the way that he places the incense and feather is very careful and speaks to him liking things to be a Certain Way

also: “we drink when the job is done” is said Very firmly in junkensteins revenge

his interaction with mccree implies that he doesnt like hard liquors like whiskey and prefers “sophisticated” tastes. being picky about food, especially things with a high sensory experience like drinking alcohol, is very common in asd

also him eating an entire cake (or two) by himself isnt necessarily an autism thing but its something i would do too lmao so im putting it on the list

he is like.. socially awkward in a way where he doesnt really think hes being awkward fjkldf i dont know how to explain it but just listen to his heroes of the storm interactions. he can be very loud and abrasive and says whatever the hell he wants and i love it tbh. his hots voicelines are golden

i dont know how to explain this without it seeming like im saying that autistic people are rude jklgfg i think that HANZO is rude and that the asd makes him have like no filter for what he wants to say

also relating to hots, having poor volume control/difficulty modulating voice is another aspect of asd (i personally am on the other side of that and have trouble raising my voice even when i try really hard gfjklfgd)

he likes pokemon and pokemon is autistic culture

a lot of his voicelines are references to japanese culture and memes that, in 2070, would classify as “old as fuck” and implies that hanzo has a particular interest in vintage manga and movies, and you could definitely argue that this is a hyperfixation/SI of his

theres probably some stuff im forgetting but this is the gist of it and WOW this came out embarrassingly long

[northernbubble]

Thoughts on E2

No one fucking called Dany on her talking about the murder of the Mad King while sitting on the seat of House Stark....the seat that belonged to Rickard Stark, that would have belonged to Brandon Stark..... brutally murdered by said Mad King but okay fine whatever.

Tyrion deserves better than this, public ridicule not the best way to go.

As much as I wish the Dany and Sansa were having legitimate girl time, I am convinced we just saw season 2 and 3 Sansa make a return with some extra special charm skills added to the mix that she learned from Margery. I'm sorry but the whole "I should have said thank you" comment was in the same tone that she spoke to Joffrey!

Sandor Clegane died in season 4. I guess literally nothing that happened before Septon Ray matters to his story line anymore, even though those were the scenes that made people like the Hound to begin with. Arya hardly even matters? His new best friend is Beric fucking Dondarion? He hasnt even shared a scene with Sansa or Tyrion? That being said, he is 100% surviving episode 3 because I'm now entirely convinced he is only here for Clegane Bowl. RIP Sansan, atleast you're canon to Martin.

Gendry is absolutely dying in the next episode because as much as I have been gunning for them to get together.... they had 2 short conversations before banging and before that the last time they had seen eachother she was 9. So like. They didnt build the sexual tension at all, and I wish we had the whole season to watch their new adult relationship blossom before jumping the gun like that, but since we didnt I'm guessing it's cause they had to bang before he died.

Please dont ship Theonsa. Can there be one emotional familial relationship on this show that you guys dont scream romance over. They need eachother for emotional support and he has spoken several times about how his family was the Starks. He wants to go home to his family. I.E. Ned, Robb, Bran, and his sweet little sister Sansa whom can give him comfort and her in return.

Hell yes for brienne the knight, but high key wish she got a title. Like the knight of flowers or the sword of morning. Maybe something to do with oathkeeping.

I really didnt like the awkward inserting of modern views of racial/xenophobic tension between Missenei and the Northerners. Not saying it couldn't exist for real in the north, but I really think that to truly discuss xenophobia and a dislike of people who look different than you, the conversation needs to happen when these new people arent coming in the form of a foreign occupying army. Like, we all know they are fighting on the same side against the Night King, but we also know for a fact that the North doesnt want Dany as queen and is hella freaked out by her army and dragons being so close. So like.... the children are probably gonna be uncomfortable around all these foreign people with strange accents and strange clothes, who have weapons they've never seen before and serve a woman their parents dont like who has dragons and is related to the mad king who 20 years ago killed their liege lord.... not saying the north are perfect and above racism, but I dont feel like the situation they are presenting is the one that gives an honest discussion about race or xenophobia. Like we arent talking about immigrants, which I think legitimately would not be well welcomed in the north given Ned's commentary about Syrio, but in these scenes we are talking about a foreign army which makes perfect sense to freak kids out. Idk, it just seemed sloppily inserted

Jon being like, "I know this is a lot to take in, but I'm your nephew. I think we committed incest. Actually, I know we committed incest but I wanted to soften the blow a little. I want to die."

Dany, "did you say you're the heir?"

Jon, "do you have ears? we cOmMItTed INcEsT!"

[allison54butt-blog]

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[loyalbreed]

      Cent has decided to back away for the time being; because he feels that it is effecting people he has come to appreciate. That he doesnt know how to return such kindness that was given to him in full. And much like the beginning when the catfish thing first happened, he is overwhelmed and doesnt know where to begin to reach out to people. Again like the beginning, the only people who spoke to him about it wanting an answer. Were the people directly effected by it? Myself included, versus people who just kept using it against him?          The Catfish thing was resolved and ended well between many people who were effected actually. The person who owns the blog that is being linked about him is scrambling to delete it since it was kept by her and a lot of others. To make sure it was out there that what had done, did happen. And that it wasn't over looked either; the fact Cent asked to keep that blog up. Should be important notion alone over who he is as a person. It was not to be brought up negatively again and used as a tool to populate someones obsession and anger over him. Since it seems to continue to happen by the same people staring a new issue every so often when he has people comfortably having fun with him. Which makes me upset because it seems that if a community is happy; unhappiness needs to happen.

        I do not like long posts--and honestly this didnt stay short. But I want say how upset I am this happens again. Considering I was one of the close to him when Cent Catfished; its really stupid to see people who had nothing to do with him at the time. Bring this up as if they were really the ones effected most directly from it? Further you are bringing up bad feelings that many people have already come to let sit on their chest and deal with ultimately.        To further delve into my own sense of okay this post is about me, even though this isnt. I need you all to know how Call Out Culture is ineffective and Bad. From my stand point with my experience I want to leave you with a short burst of information about myself and how we handle it along with DCF, a separate government branch, DDS, and her therapists.         My sister is severely mentally disabled. For the rest of our lives we will be taking care of her. She cannot wash herself. She thinks that Star Scream from Transformers is real and often comes to talk to her. I told her once she couldnt date a toaster as a joke, and she threw the toaster at me screaming about it. She really thinks star scream is attractive, and often details herself with obsessions with Aliens and outer space. She thinks God is evil-- because God made her this way. And cant understand why that is a sad thing to say. She just gets frustrated; frustrated is her essence of living. And acting out on it is how she is derived of.          To continue, she has pushed me down stairs. Abused me. Told me to die. Tried killing me several times. Has emotionally abused my little brother to the point we have a separate staff of people in and out of our house for him.           This is nearly every day for me; every day it is. Is kayla alright? did she do something? Did she hurt someone? did she hurt herself? no? Good good. Today was a good day.          How is this relevant toward this situation and pertaining toward things going on; the thing is rather then take my sister out of the house considering how constant this is. The government stresses on keeping her in the home and helping us all as a whole keep together. When a break is needed; and it can be afforded. She goes into Respite Program where she leaves for a week or so. She is actually going to one soon, and is very excited because they are going to go out a lot!            To reiterate the government keeps disabled individuals who may be a threat to the family within the home. With emergency issues and things that need happen--and yes when she says she wants to kill you she means it. As someone she has tried to I can say that much alright.           To make a point; People who are an issue you do not merely remove them and or kick them out. Indeed themes need be addressed and if their are serious manners of which Pedophila is being actually done then we and you. Need to contact police enforcement. They will take you seriously; it is a serious endeavor. You can involve Tumblr Staff as well, there are channels to pull with if there is something volatile that need be addressed. I implore you to. Yet often times it seems when posts are made, the latter is true.              To highlight the issues where, Cent condones or romanticizes these things that are being said. If you read these rules it is not the case. He states that he will participate in these things but does not want just anyone asking him. Nor does he want anyone shipping with the character as he doesnt understand why it is you would? It is weird to think that from these text alone you would take context otherwise-- Especially knowing before this post was presented. Cent talked about how on his Bel blog he doesnt want to make people feel like his Bel is pushing on them or making them uncomfortable. And that he would never participate in noncon. Or that on King Arthur; he does not do any of these themes what so ever. That these themes are only present on the villainous character he does not even participate in roleplaying anymore.              To round this over; it is getting upsetting seeing how this is effecting one another when the general idea is ‘ i just want to be happy and want people to talk/do things with.’ Rather then ‘ i want nothing to do with this person. ‘ So many people are stressed out and want to talk to cent. Reach out to Cent. But are constantly being told otherwise; its sad and im happy to know that people exist out there that know in actuality how dealing with problems work. Versus adhering the idea that you need kick someone out.                    I fear those people. Because i fear letting my sister do something around someone and someone not understanding and condoning her for it when they only have a minuscule of the story. Seeing as people cant even understand someone who makes sense how would you understand someone like my sister? Its cool you can say now ‘ oh But no we arent talking about that. ‘ Yet the only reason why you can feel this way is because you know the story behind my sister, many of you dont know anything about Cent save for interacting with him and that he makes you laugh.          So Im going to Tell you one thing about Cent that for me now that you know my story makes me happy to share.           Seeing that Cent came out from such a bad place, being such a bad person, doing such horrible things but choosing to do better made me believe in others again. It made me believe that even if my sister does all the things she does. There is always a spot and place for her to truly come about and make a better decision too. True, Cent is a more able bodied man and isnt disabled like my sister. But its just the fact that he does and he could and he can. That makes me believe anyone can.           It makes me feel like no matter who you were in the past; you can always chose to be better then that. And no matter how many times or who wants to believe who you are in the past dictates who you are in the future. Wont ever mean as much; That anyone despite the things they have done can always chose to be a better person then what they had been. And cent really does solidify that fact. As someone who knew him from the time as a cat fished. That got catfished by him. Literally back stabbed by him. Only to come down and talk again as friends.                   I feel like I get to say that not anyone else, and Im really glad to be able to say that lmao. He is my closet friend and will always remain to be.             I don’t mind if you feel you do not want to talk to me or think I romanticize his issues as someone who has gone through so much. So much and more, you would not begin to understand. I feel you are more then welcome to believe that but I know there are people who talk to him and know what he does and feels the same. And are comfortable with the rounded world they have created with friends.              And I really ( SHOUNEN VOICE ) I really just believe in people--people change. And Cent makes me realize that this is possible. And you cant just remove people out of your life thinking they wont. And because I know better and because I am an adult with my head well on my shoulders. I can make that decision, i understand if you cannot yet or are afraid or uncertain. I implore you to keep yourself safe just know that some of us feel chill. and we are all alright btw!! So dont feel like we are being attacked or manipulated by cent. 

But I insist you stop thinking that trying to get rid of someone is going to solve an issue. People continue living and breathing every day regardless of what you think or want to happen? No one is ignoring the issues or ignoring the fact that stuff happened if you are scared or uncertain as well about them feel free to add me and we can always group convo and you can let your feelings bare. Or anyone really? just be mindful and fair?

This isnt going to make Cent come back i really just feel like. I want these feelings to be known and that if you are ever called out personally I will gladly give you a chance of your own. I can only hope to god, that he would give that chance to my sister one day if something happened. And to anyone and everyone, as well as  teach other people that everyone deserves that much.

[mllemaenad]

Personally... I feel that WEaWH tries to remove itself from TME because it realizes that TME is fucking irredeemable garbage, and tries to make its WLW representation less appalling. So I'm entirely willing to overlook continuity errors for the sake of one relationship between women in the entire series that can go well.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I’m not going to argue with you on the merits of The Masked Empire, as you’re entitled to like or dislike any media you choose, but I don’t think Bioware is trying to distance itself from the novel. I also don’t think their motive is positive representation, or that they’re seriously suggesting a happy ending. However, even if they were I would call the choice to reunite Celene and Briala without any serious examination of the issues that drove them apart … disquieting.

1) On distancing themselves from the novel.

To begin with the obvious, several of the Dragon Age novels provide not only context for the quests in Inquisition, but also promotional material maintaining audience interest between games.

It’s hardly an accident that Asunder is a prequel to In Hushed Whispers/Champions of the Just, The Masked Empire is a prequel to Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts (as well as giving you a roundabout introduction to Solas) and Last Flight provides you with some context on why Weisshaupt is just no help at all during Here Lies the Abyss.

They do kind of want you to buy all their stuff. And if you started with Inquisition and liked what you saw, they want you to run back and buy all the earlier stuff for context. Video game tie-in novels aren’t generally considered high art, so they’d need serious reasons to want to reject the novel as part of their canon. Just in case, I checked The Masked Empire’s Amazon page, and it’s currently got 4.4 stars – so it doesn’t look like something they’d be particularly desperate to ignore. They’d rather you bought it and gave them money.

To move more to the specific, the game references the novel constantly. In addition to devoting a whole main quest to resolving its plot, it also includes cameos from Mihris, Michel and Imshael, which really serve no other purpose than to provide a bit of closure to the people who read the novel and wondered what became of them. This is actually more than it provides for, say, the characters of Asunder: Rhys and Evangeline appear only in a war table mission, Adrian doesn’t appear at all – and who knows where Shale has wandered off to.

It also references the murder of Briala’s parents directly:

Cole: She’s still behind the curtains in the reading room, watching the blood pool on the floor.

Briala pulled the red velvet curtain aside. Her hands shook as she did. There was a pool of red on the floor of the reading room, staining the rich Nevarran carpet. It had spread almost to the curtain.

At the other end of the pool were Briala’s parents.

– The Masked Empire

If they really wanted to distance themselves from The Masked Empire, they wouldn’t put that in there. If they wanted to say that that this didn’t happen, they’d have retconned the story – or at the very least not mentioned it.

In fact, the choice of words is particularly distressing. Cole senses pain. When he says Briala is ‘still behind the curtains’ he’s emphasising that the trauma and anguish are still very much with her, making a reconciliation, particularly a reconciliation that utterly fails to address a thing that they have confirmed happened, even stranger.

 I would say that one motive for their choice to reconcile the two characters is simplicity. I like parts of Inquisition, but honestly it’s over ambitious. They set up a series of continent-wide catastrophes, each one intensely political: the mage rebellion, the Orlesian civil war, the collapse of the Chantry.

Each one probably requires its own game for a satisfactory solution. I realise they were probably going for something similar to the galaxy-wide political collapse in Mass Effect 3, but the Dragon Age games are at a serious disadvantage because they lack continuity of characters.

Mass Effect 3 had its own problems, of course, but for example – I think most people have fun curing the genophage for the krogan. But what they remember is Mordin Solus and ‘There’s a reaper in my way, Wrex!’ When it worked it was able to build on characters who were present across the series.

Inquisition is faced with trying to find resolutions for groups of people that have no direct connection to each other, and whom the protagonist has never seen before (even if they player has). This is hardly the only time their attempt to fix everything in a single quest ends up making no sense.

2) On positive representation

I’m afraid I don’t think what we get in Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts is especially positive. I think it’s … kind of infantilising, really, and has a whiff of sexism about it. I mean – again, I’m not asking you to like The Masked Empire. But this:

“It would have been a locked suite in the palace for a few years, nothing more!” Celene kept her voice low, aware that Michel and Felassan had stopped planning and were looking their way. “It would have changed nothing for us.”

“Your hair still stinks of the smoke from the people you burned,” Briala said. “That is a change.”

The dead leaves crackled under Celene’s feet as she stepped forward. “How many wars can our empire survive in such a short time? I wanted my legacy to be the university, the beauty and culture that made us the envy of the world. Instead I may be known as the empress under whom Orlais fell. You have the luxury of mourning Halamshiral’s elves and holding my heart hostage. Sitting on my throne, I see every city in the empire. If I must burn one to save the rest, I will weep, but I will light the torch.”

Briala swallowed. “You’re not weeping, as far as I can tell. Nor are you sitting on your throne. She stepped away, her movements fast and jerky. “With your permission, Your Radiance, I shall go indulge myself in my luxury.”

– The Masked Empire

… is at least an argument between adults, with the details of what they believe laid out. Celene honestly believes that the empire and her legacy are worth 'a few thousand elven lives’: she believes that maintaining the strength of Orlais is worth thousands of lives in sacrifice, as is the vision she has for the country’s future. Briala is facing up to the fact that this is the bargain she’s made: stay with Celene and she might see an elven scholar graduate from the university – but she’ll likely also see elves burn every time there’s a crisis, because elves are the most expendable people in the empire.

Briala wavers throughout the novel, obviously, because there is genuine feeling between herself and Celene. But the discovery that this has all happened before, that this is not the first time Celene has shed elven blood to impress her rivals and gain power, and that her own parents were among the victims, brings her to a decision.

You don’t have to like it, but these women are serious about what they want and believe.

But in Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts we get stuff like this:

Sera: Elves-elves-elves, but it’s really a pissing match with an old lover. Don’t know the rest but that explains a lot.

It’s hardly coincidental that they chose Sera to say this. Sera the commoner, who despises the nobility. Sera the Red Jenny, with contacts in every corner of Thedas. True, Sera’s background has led her to reject a lot of elven culture, but her biggest objection is usually to ‘moping’ about the past. This:

Briala thought for a moment. “Celene and Gaspard saw an army, but that would be fighting their fight. With the paths, I could get food to alienages where elves would otherwise starve. They would let me move ahead of an oncoming army and warn the target, or move behind them and attack their supply lines.”

– The Masked Empire

… sounds more like the practical stuff she favours: she’s said getting revenge would be a preferable option, and this is getting food to the poor, terrorising the nobility and giving little people a shot at being part of something bigger. But now we can’t take it seriously, because Sera has reduced it to a lovers’ tiff.

That isn’t meant as a criticism of Sera, to be clear. They do this when they want a mouthpiece. This is the equivalent of having Cole approve of Cullen.

And as for it going well, this is their epilogue slide:

Where once war raged, there is now a shaky peace. Orlais is resurgent, the empress a patron of arts and culture.

Many attribute this recovery to her lady love, though others wonder how long their reunion will truly last.

– Epilogue (Inquisition)

I mean – maybe they’ll forget about this. They have been known to forget their epilogue slides. But it doesn’t read as though the intent was to write a strong and loving partnership. Rather it looks as though they are selling the relationship as tempestuous.

That’s one place where I am very uncomfortable. This is the revolt of an oppressed people, and the politics an empire. And there’s a sense that they’re saying ‘Oh, those women and their emotions! Today they love each other; tomorrow they’ll hate each other; the day after they’ll probably love each other again. You never know, with women.’

I appreciate that Bioware is fairly progressive, for a game company: the character choices, the romance options, the NPCs – they are trying to represent a variety of races, genders and sexualities. But it doesn’t mean they never fuck up. I mean, there’s a bit in Mark of the Assassin where Isabela tells Hawke that Gamlen has been sexually harassing her and two responses blame her (You find something inappropriate?/Break him. And wear pants.).

Given that they are already struggling to resolve a massive plotline in a ridiculous amount of time, I’m not surprised they fell back on this. It’s narrative shorthand, and that can be handy for desperate situations. But it’s still sexist shorthand, and I very much wish they hadn’t done it.

3) Removing The Masked Empire from the equation doesn’t solve the problem

I mean, it makes some of the bigger issues like Briala’s dead parents a little easier to miss, sure, but it doesn’t make the problems go away.

I appreciate that representation is important. I do. But romantic relationships between women are not the only representation issue at stake, here. There’s no single source for the elven people, of course, but it’s easy enough to see that Bioware has borrowed from the experiences of Jewish, Romani and aboriginal peoples living under empires and/or colonialism.

And have we ever established that it is shit to be an elf. The city elf origin story in Origins is an abduction/rape/murder combo. The Dalish clans in Origins and DA2 can be slaughtered. It’s terrifyingly easy to kill off clan Lavellan in war table missions, and even though this is the protagonist’s family the game doesn’t make a thing of it. There’s a whole side quest in DA2 about a serial killer who targets elves, and who keeps getting away with it because no one gives a shit. We are up to our eyeballs in codex entries on the treatment of elves.

And here we have Briala, the leader of a rebellion in Orlais – one of the nations best known for oppressing the fuck out of the elves and trying to destroy their culture.

Even without The Masked Empire this is:

a) providing only the most minimal description of the nature of her rebellion and what she hopes to achieve.

b)allowing her to be dismissed as primarily involved in a lovers’ tiff.

c) pairing her with a woman the game actually says massacred the Halamshiral elves.

d) using the massacre as evidence against her because she was sleeping with Celene, rather than as evidence against the woman who actually committed it.

That’s … all pretty shitty, even at the simplest level. The game doesn’t address any of this. It doesn’t even force the characters to discuss what happened before throwing them back together. It spends as much time tsking at Briala for destabilising Orlais as it does Celene and Gaspard. It loves the idea that they’re all as bad as each other – which allows the player to justify just about any ending.

And this is a thing they do repeatedly: they tsk at the mage rebellion as well. They seem to be very good at describing the sufferings of the elves, the mages, the casteless dwarves … but don’t approve of them actually doing anything about their oppression. At least not anything more forceful than writing a stern letter of complaint (for those lucky literate characters!) to the local lord or revered mother.

And so minimising the problems of Celene and Briala’s relationship, and waving a locket around (which, even out of context, does not seem like a forceful enough declaration of love to startle Briala) does … not strike me as very respectful of peoples who have suffered under empires, and who have had to fight tooth and nail for every sliver of justice.

It’s not that I want to exclude a healthy, positive romance between two women in order to have Awesome Revolutionary Briala. I just don’t understand why we couldn’t have both.

Couldn’t Briala show up with a new girlfriend? Do it properly: give her a codex entry and make her active and important in the quest. Show the two of them both being affectionate and working together for the cause. Make sure that at least some of the possible quest endings leave them alive, together and continuing to better the lot of the elves.

I can understand that you may not like The Masked Empire and may want to exclude it from your personal headcanon. That’s absolutely fine, obviously. But I do not believe that was Bioware’s intent in writing the the Briala-and-Celene reconciliation, and I still have serious issues with it.

[dullanyan]

ok so honest review of pokemon swsh (spoilers!)

so this isnt as in-depth as i could make it but! here we go

the bad things:

first off, i think we need to stop the whole ‘rival picking the one thats weak to your starter’ trend thats been in the last 2 games. like at least have some initiative and get the one whos stronger... though i suppose it makes a Little sense just because he has a wooloo with him as well, but still... 

and i mean, yeah leon uses the one that isnt picked but also i dont get to battle him throughout the game like i do hop.

and speaking of the champion, the league (elite four but not?) was honestly kinda... :/

like there was no reason to heal my pokemon in between each battle. i stocked up on full restores as i normally do but it was totally useless.

and with the plot, it was like... things were hinted at but for the most part theyre just like “let the adults handle this sweetie go battle some trainers uwu!!” and then at the end of the game it was like “ok actually heres all of the plot and conflict right now”

the plot, enemies, etc just felt very rushed. team yell was very lackluster, and... rose’s whole group or whatever, i cant remember what theyre even called right now. i get that it was supposed to be a plot twist but they had no presence in the story except for with eternatus.

also with rose, it kinda left me confused on what he was doing/why he did it like that. i get for the dynamax pokemon and all... but im still very confused on it all?

on to other things now, the online connectivity is just... abysmal. why dont they let you select from your friends list for trades, invites, etc??? putting in a code and hoping someone else didnt put the same one in so you can trade with another person? really? 

my friends and i have a huge problem with raids, we try to join each others and have to cancel + retry just so it shows up on their system. 

its all so needlessly difficult, and makes it really hard to play with your friends.

one more complaint about raids; the npcs need to have better pokemon/sense of type matchups. npcs you fight against are better than this! but hey, i guess lets have npcs that have pokemon that have no attack moves, using types that are very disadvantaged against the raid boss, and then heal every other turn so that you can have 4 pokemon faint and make that raid boss win against you for the 5th time.

its a lot easier with actual people playing, but also if no one joins you despite you having open invites 6 different times, its nearly impossible!

and not having gts is pain... its so hard to get version exclusive pokemon unless you have friends to help you out! (which luckily i do, but still.)

finally, the lack of postgame.... like there’s that whole mission with hop about swordward and shieldbert. but thats it, you know? aside from the battle tower, which isnt much. there’s no new areas to explore in the postgame and its really disheartening. 

---

the good things:

pokemon camp! ive always wanted for all 6 of my team members to interact... the closest we’ve gotten is hgss (taking a picture with all 6 pokemon) and the games in pokemon amie (where up to 3 pokemon play together)

the AI and interactions are so cute... and how the longer theyre in the party together/happiness levels (?) the more they become friends! i feel like a majority of the effort went into this feature; it shows very strongly. pokemon playing, talking, fighting, racing and sleeping, all of the individual animations needed for that, etc. it has a ton of effort put into it and i really like that. 

making curry is also a lot of fun! ive missed doing things like that (poffins and pokeblocks...) so its a very nice thing. the variety in ingredients and flavor from berries is a nice touch, especially the amount being fed to your lead pokemon (the baby spoonful for cutiefly killed me instantly and i love it so much)

and also people online can join in your camp, i think thats really cool!!

the graphics in general are very pretty. its so smooth compared to sun and moon! obviously they arent top quality but that doesnt really matter, it has a nice look to it. 

the wild area is especially fun! plenty of places to explore, a wide variety of pokemon that change based on the weather, how some of them chase you or run away from you, or are even just a little curious about you. and compared to lgpe, i really appreciate that pokemon only disappear if you move far enough away from them. chasing after things in lgpe only to have them disappear the instant you walk up to them was stressful.... 

and that the other pokemon in the overworld dont disappear after each battle you get into! that makes it nicer when you accidentally trip on the 7th zigzagoon that runs in front of you, that you wont lose whatever it was you were after.

and it might just be me, but im really glad a shiny pokemon wont appear as such on the overworld. lgpe makes it super depressing if you see one and dont get to it in time, you know? 

and raid battles, i know i complain about them a lot but im glad that for the most part, aside from certain 5 stars, you can solo them! much better than pokemon go, which you can solo up to a 2 star raid (3 star as well but every time i try i end up running out of time, the time limit is annoying and dumb.)

---

suggestions:

DIFFICULTY SETTINGS. AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. 

i think bw2 had something like that, but it was only after you beat the game you could do ng+. which like... why? i dont want to delete my progress, i want to control how difficult it is before i start. 

i think a simple easy/medium/hard scale would work. 

more clothing options... all of it is very... modern. if leon can wear a cape, i think i should be able to as well. also why were hair accessories removed? 

but i want to dress like a victorian asshole vampire or something. hoodies and shorts are nice but i want more variety!

a friends list feature for online.. so you can select or invite your friends DIRECTLY for trades, battles or raids. 

and my final suggestion that, i REALLY REALLY hope happens, dlc features.

like, oh hey you can get this pokemon not native to the galar region in raid battles now! 

more wild areas to explore, definitely not as big as our existing one but at least something else! with pokemon outside of the 400 already in the game available.

(they better be free dlc, though...)

and as for paid dlc... Kalos region. its like, right there. just let me cross the sea in the south east. its RIGHT there, a whole other region to explore, please, i am BEGGING you. 

if splatoon can have the octo expansion, then pokemon should have the kalos expansion... 

[writingguide003-blog]

Forget Dystopias, These Sci-Fi Writers Opt For Optimism Instead

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/forget-dystopias-these-sci-fi-writers-opt-for-optimism-instead/

Forget Dystopias, These Sci-Fi Writers Opt For Optimism Instead

Its hot, and youre walking. Shuffling, actually. Youve spanned a seemingly endless chalk-dry plane, and youre thirsty, run-down, exhausted. You think about your flaking, parched lips and aching muscles, and about how your arduous journey will be worth it if you ever reach your destination. An immigrant, youre searching for a new place to live, because the place you call home has become barely livable. Youre thinking about the hot dirt sweat-caked on your skin when youre interrupted by an even greater pain — your tooth, recently implanted with a geo-location chip, is practically vibrating. This means youre close.

So begins Madeleine Ashbys short story, By the Time We Get to Arizona, published last year in Hieroglyph, a collection of science-fiction stories meant to inspire readers about the possibilities the future holds, rather than invoke fear about impending societal doom. Solutions to climate change catastrophes abound in the series; so do suggestions for jumping forward in our approach to space exploration technologies. Ashbys story — a spinoff of her Masters thesis on making border security more humane — explores a world where guns and guards are replaced by sensors and facial recognition technology.

Conceived of by Neal Stephenson — a celebrated writer whose most recent novel ventures a guess at what post-Earth diplomacy might look like — Hieroglyph showcases a growing crew of writers who, by commission or by choice, present sunnier alternatives to the now-prevalent, Hunger Games-fueled dystopia trend. These arent the stifling factions of Divergent or the heart-pounding twists and turns of The Maze Runner; they arent the bleak worlds crafted by Margaret Atwood or even the fable-like, anti-technology morals embedded in movies like Wall-E. Although many of the stories in Hieroglyph highlight societal problems, they have technological solutions to those problems embedded within them.

The anthology, along with the few others like it, was divisive in the science-fiction community. One camp, headed up by Stephenson, holds the belief that scientists and engineers could use a positive push from the writers whose job it is to imagine what the future will look like. Writers, Stephenson asserts, have a responsibility not only to confront social problems, but to provide potential solutions, too. So, a socially disheveled community like The Hunger Games Panem might feature a technology that allows citizens to communicate with each other, and fight back. Because these writers are using their fiction to provide solutions to contemporary problems, many necessarily couch their stories in grim scenarios the characters must escape from. Sexism, racism and classism are addressed, if subtly.

This doesnt sit well with the other school of readers and writers, who lament the days when an interstellar story was a joyride, whizzing quickly past social justice issues towards thrilling plot twists. One particularly rabid breed of decriers are the writers who make up a group called the Sad Puppies, who banded together during The Hugo Awards to stack the vote against minority and women writers. The problem, they claim, is that the science-fiction community has prioritized social justice and diversity, ignoring superior prose and more inventive stories as a result. Science-fiction, they say, is about fun. Its about escaping the problems of the real world through otherworldly scenarios — including dystopias — in which a central hero implausibly conquers evil alone, rather than with the aid of collective thinking and the useful technologies that arise from it.

The future of science-fiction — which, if George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxleys Brave New World are indicators, runs parallel with the future of science and technology on our own planet — probably lies somewhere on the vast, auroral spectrum between these two approaches. So, its worth examining both, and the groups of writers propelling them.

***

Now is not a time for realism, Margaret Atwood said in a recent interview with NPR, succinctly summarizing why so many literary writers flock to fantasy, to dystopia, to amplifying the threat of impending problems — environmental and political — that arent yet a reality.

Though the genre has seen a spike in popularity within teen-centric reading communities, its seeped into the realm of grown-up storytelling more than ever. Which isnt to say its unfamiliar territory for writers of adult literary fiction. In fact, dystopian stories began, arguably, with a weird, little book written by Mary Shelley in 1826 thats since become a beloved classic: The Last Man. The story centers on a plague-addled Europe, where a man named Lionel struggles to survive alongside various extant communities. Theres a false messiah, political turmoil, and all the other makings of a present-day dystopia. Though Shelleys book wasnt recognized until the 1960s, others like it by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells surfaced shortly thereafter, spawning a sub-genre of writing that asks timeless questions about human nature, and how it responds to dire, life-threatening scenarios.

But today, with a few notable exceptions (Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins), popular dystopian stories have lost a bit of their original complexity. They tend to be thinly cloistered morality lessons, better suited for young readers. Rather than highlighting the nuances of human interactions, they tend to generalize, and draw hard lines between good and evil.

Why are more and more adult literary writers, and adult literary fiction readers, opting into the rather nihilistic and juvenile genre? Its a quandary posed again and again by columnists, providing more questions than answers — perhaps because the answer is hazy. It could be that the genre distracts readers from present realities, or provides a puzzle-like, limited scenario for a protagonist to work through, so different from the more fractured plot of real life. Or, it could be that our present realities seem increasingly fantastical, due to the quick proliferation of disastrous events filling our Twitter feeds alongside our friends quotidian musings.

Madeline Ashby believes its the latter.

There are elements of dystopia in everybodys lives, she said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Remember the Christmas protests in Ferguson? Theres this image of riot police under this big electrified, Seasons Greetings banner. If you search for Ferguson plus Seasons plus Greetings, youll find the picture. I found it, and I tweeted in all caps, WHY DO SO MANY KIDS LOVE DYSTOPIA? HM, I WONDER.

Ashby cites her own dystopia-like governmental interactions as inspiration for many of her sci-fi stories, including By the Time We Got to Arizona. In 2006, she immigrated to Canada, and says the process, for her, was dehumanizing.

My immigration took over a year, she said, adding that she feels fortunate — for other people immigrating to Canada, two years is the average wait-time.

During that process youre essentially a number and a sheet of paper. You feel it every time they ask you progressively more invasive questions, Ashby added, sharing an anecdote about how immigration questions reduce complex romantic relationships to statistics-based judgement calls. [Theyd ask] things like, Can you describe to us the number and monetary value of gifts exchanged between the two of you. And then you start to think, oh, OK, the quality of my relationship is already interpreted through capital. I have a monetary value.

In her short story, Ashby acknowledges these issues, but also offers solutions to the problem. She notes that by working change-inspiring technologies into her plots, she’s at the very least offering readers a sense of hope. 

Dystopia is very useful in grappling with the world as it exists, Ashby said. Its a really stylized, formalized way of talking about things that are already happening in practice. But utopia, or more optimistic stories, can also be useful, because you can imagine a future that you actually want.

Ashbys fiction is informed by her other, more technical approach to writing. After studying Strategic Foresight and Innovation at the Ontario College of Art and Design, she started getting gigs drafting potential future scenarios for organizations such as Intel Labs and Nesta. Envisioning the future on behalf of corporations and research labs isnt exactly an established career path — actually, it sounds a little like something out of a sci-fi novel. But Ashby isnt the only writer who moonlights as a narrative scenario practitioner. Theres a host of organizations dedicated to allowing sci-fi writers to draft potential outcomes for specific companies or entire industries. Sci Futures, a sort of think tank dedicated to providing these services to clients such as Crayola, Ford, and Lowes, has a pithy tagline encapsulating their mission: “Where sci-fi gets real. A comparable organization, 2020 Media Futures, describes its mission as, an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020.

So, the research interests are vast. Of her work with Intel Labs and beyond, Ashby said, They often tell me, we want the future of intelligent systems, or the future of warfare in smart cities, the future of a world without antibiotics, the future of programmable matter, or the Internet of things.

Because Ashby spends considerable time dreaming up innovative solutions to social problems, she cant help but imbue her stories with similar gizmos and features. Her stories dont always involve positive situations for her characters, but they do often incorporate technologies that could solve said characters problems.

This is the central tenet of techno-optimism, the breed of science-fiction writing thats working to counter the rough terrain of dystopia, barren and desolate as it is; thirsty, it sometimes seems, for a solution thats bigger than a big-hearted narrator.

Writer and anthology editor Kathryn Cramer was a reluctant adopter of the genre. When aforementioned writer Stephenson, author of Seveneves, approached her to edit a collection of stories united under the banner of positive change, she worried the stories themselves would suffer from lack of plot, and lack of diversity. But, as she commissioned works of techno-optimism, she realized the genre promotes diverse voices rather than suppressing them. Her fears were quelled.

When we contemplate dark scenarios or disasters for the future, it is perhaps an ethically and morally good thing to do to figure out what the solutions might be, especially technological solutions, Cramer said in an interview with HuffPost. If we look at the 20th century, there are a whole lot of things that changed our lives in good ways, and solved a lot of problems, ranging from vaccines and refrigerated food transportation to frozen food. Some of them are sexy, like space travel, but a lot of them are things that improved everybodys lives in ways we might notve expected. Preservatives, things like that.

Cramers altruistic outlook hints at her thoughts on what a book can, and should, accomplish. While she believes writers have a responsibility to push innovation in a positive direction, some readers and writers think that mindset interferes with the quality of a story. So addressing societal problems, be it via extended, post-apocalyptic metaphors, or via similarly bleak settings peppered with hope, doesnt sit well with all sci-fi readers. Most notably, there are those — cue the Sad Puppies — who are nostalgic for the days of so-called Golden Age sci-fi: Star Trek-like space-travel adventures that offer a means of briefly escaping the restrictions of the real world. Nimble writing and world-building is supposedly the aim for such stories; political opinions, solutions-oriented and otherwise, are actively eschewed.

But the Puppies agenda — which resulted in No Award being given at the Hugo Awards this year in categories for which only white men were nominated — extends beyond particular tastes in writing styles. Claiming science-fiction has opted for affirmative action-guided decisions rather than supporting story-centric writing, they lobbied to place white, male writers — including themselves — on the award ballots.

Ashby spoke passionately against the Puppies movement: Thats part of their battle cry: Why do we have to think about social issues in our science fiction? Why do we have to think about other genders, or sexualities, or economic circumstances? Why cant it just be fun like it used to be? Well, yeah, Im sure it was really fun when you werent thinking about it. Everythings a lot more fun when youre not thinking about it.

Thinking about it, according to Ashby, involves confronting the dire state of life for some social groups. It involves constructing a narrative that encourages the reader to consider the lives of others, rather than just getting lost in his own fantasy world, in which he alone is the hero and the solution. It involves hope not in the form of a triumphant narrator, but in the technologies we can create when we do something really miraculous: work together.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

[jiminspromise-remade]

okay so...Basically i have this group of friends, we’ve known each other since high school freshman year. We moved to the same city after graduation but we all go to different unis. In the group there’s this guy, S. Before uni started, we used to hang out all day, everyday. Me and him especially, we got even closer than we were in hs bc we helped each other with the whole moving away thing, and we talked about deep stuff and shit. Me and the others, say C and B, we supported him through so much.

2 When S came out as gay in senior year, me and C used to get into huge fights because our other friends were really homophobic. As for B, who is a straight guy, he still remained friends with S even though he had a crush on him. And considering how homophobia is ingrained in our culture, finding a guy who not only would accept you as gay but also not get weirded out by you having a crush on him is almost impossible. But now, as soon as S started making friends in his uni, he started to

3 progressively blow us off more and more. Now don’t get me wrong, uni is keeping all of us busy, and we don’t have the same schedule, but me and C/B make an effort to see each other at least on the weekends, and during the week we call each other. Like no matter how busy you are you can make time to call at least once a week to ask your best friend how they’re doing. But S doesn’t. Not only does he not call, but he started to blow us off every time we’d ask him to hang out. Two weekends he said

4 (i think lmao) he said he’d call us to hang out later that day (after WE called first), and he didn’t. The next weekend we invited him again and he blew off saying he had to study (mind you, we were studying. It’s not like we’re a bad influence, when we have a lot of work to do we just go study together in a coffee shop all day even tho we don’t study the same thing, and we told him that and he said no). After that we decided not to call him anymore and see how long it would take for him to

5 do so. Two weeks passed, nothing. But we see on snap that he’s constantly hanging out with his uni friends, like from morning till he leaves the club the next day at 5 AM. You can see people you just met 4/5 times a week but in a MONTH you didn’t have time to call your best friends ONCE ?. I’m so disappointed because you know, we’re in a new country and literally all the stable got ripped out of my life and i thought i could have someone to count on. I’m not saying he should stay alone in uni

6 or anything but like… divide your time ? Idk what to do cause i’m going to his house to give him some things back but he’s acting like nothing happened. Idk if i should confront him or just act cold ? I’m scared to confront him because after that… there’s nothing else to say like it’s the end of the friendship you know ? Like if he realised his mistake by himself and came and apologised okay but if i tell him…. Anyways take care of yourself don’t stress too much (easier said than done but

don’t neglect yourself) and thanks for listening idk but cause you’re like a year older than me and you always give such great advice i always wanna come to you when i have smth going on but yeah i wish you all the luck on your midterm💕💕 (and sorry for the hella long ask)

its under a read more bc ive got…….. some things to say

what your friend is doing is just…… not right lol. i also have a similar experience with… friends not dividing their time so i know how you feel :// its unfair for him to be meeting with others most of the time and cant even spend a few minutes to reply to you?? that doesnt sound like someone you can really count on anymore tbh. if he fluctuates like that throughout his friend groups, hes not gonna have anyone left. if he thinks “ill just go to the group i find… better” then realistically…. he rly isnt gonna have any close friends left?? if he treats people like that then everythings just gonna be short term and for what?? some attention and fun??

imo i think you should confront him about it. he deserves to know what hes been doing and how hes been making things difficult for you. its unfair that hes acting like he didnt do anything that has affected you greatly like this. he should know what his mistakes are so that he can fix himself. help him realize that wht hes doing isnt healthy and that its not going to benefit anyone in the end. like yeah uni can be lonely, but long lasting friends that you cant see that much bc youre so busy >>>>>>>>>>>>> short term friends you can see more often but have a shallow connection to. 

people say that the end of high school is when you realize who your real friends are and thats true, but you will still be going through that process in uni. its all about dividing your time and COMMUNICATING. i know it sounds like its common sense but!!! communicating!! with people!!! is so important!!!! let them know how you feel!! dont beat around the bush!!! if something they did hurt your feelings, let them know so that it doesnt happen again!!! apologize to each other for the right reasons!!! we’re in uni, we’re all growing to become adults/we already are young adults, its time to act mature about things u know?? we arent 15 anymore. we should be constantly be learning and growing and if someone cant handle “oh what you did rly hurt me” and they take it personally and think theyve dont nothing wrong?? that is Not growth and thats not a friend you can work with. know each others faults and know your own faults. friends fight and thats just how it is but if you cant fight for ur friendship then like. whats the point

idk what your friends problem is, but if he has something to say then he should say it. idk why he thinks its okay to be treating people he should be considering as his best friends like that. hiding things from others rly isnt gonna do him any good. if he doesnt want to hang out with you guys anymore, so be it. as much as it hurts to lose such a close friend, if he doesnt want to put effort into it even after if you let him know what he’s doing, let him be. let him realize himself that he should have set his priorities striaght and treated you better. 

[trendingnewsb]

Is the world really better than ever?

The long read: The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good and only our pessimism is holding us back

By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense was one of profound pessimism tempered, perhaps, by cynical humour, on the principle that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, one may as well try to enjoy the ride. Naturally, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump loomed largest for many. But you didnt need to be a remainer or a critic of Trumps to feel depressed by the carnage in Syria; by the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean; by North Korean missile tests, the spread of the zika virus, or terror attacks in Nice, Belgium, Florida, Pakistan and elsewhere nor by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, lurking behind everything else. (And all thats before even considering the string of deaths of beloved celebrities that seemed like a calculated attempt, on 2016s part, to rub salt in the wound: in the space of a few months, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael, to name only a handful, were all gone.) And few of the headlines so far in 2017 Grenfell tower, the Manchester and London attacks, Brexit chaos, and 24/7 Trump provide any reason to take a sunnier view.

Yet one group of increasingly prominent commentators has seemed uniquely immune to the gloom. In December, in an article headlined Never forget that we live in the best of times, the Times columnist Philip Collins provided an end-of-year summary of reasons to be cheerful: during 2016, he noted, the proportion of the worlds population living in extreme poverty had fallen below 10% for the first time; global carbon emissions from fossil fuels had failed to rise for the third year running; the death penalty had been ruled illegal in more than half of all countries and giant pandas had been removed from the endangered species list.

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof declared that by many measures, 2016 was the best year in the history of humanity, with falling global inequality, child mortality roughly half what it had been as recently as 1990, and 300,000 more people gaining access to electricity each day. Throughout 2016 and into 2017, alongside Collins at the Times, the author and former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley the title of whose book The Rational Optimist makes his inclinations plain kept up his weekly output of ebullient columns celebrating the promise of artificial intelligence, free trade and fracking. By the time the professional contrarian Brendan ONeill delivered his own version of the argument, in the Spectator (Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever) the viewpoint was becoming sufficiently well-entrenched that ONeill seemed in danger of forfeiting his contrarianism.

The loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation have occasionally been labelled the New Optimists, a name intended to evoke the rebellious scepticism of the New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And from their perspective, our prevailing mood of despair is irrational, and frankly a bit self-indulgent. They argue that it says more about us than it does about how things really are illustrating a certain tendency toward collective self-flagellation, and an unwillingness to believe in the power of human ingenuity. And that it is best explained as the result of various psychological biases that served a purpose on the prehistoric savannah but now, in a media-saturated era, constantly mislead us.

Once upon a time, it was of great survival value to be worried about everything that could go wrong, says Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and self-declared New Optimist whose book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future was published just before Trump won the presidency last year. This is what makes bad news especially compelling: in our evolutionary past, it was a very good thing that your attention could be easily seized by negative information, since it might well indicate an imminent risk to your own survival. (The cave-dweller who always assumed there was a lion behind the next rock would usually be wrong but hed be much more likely to survive and reproduce than one who always assumed the opposite.) But that was all before newspapers, television and the internet: in these hyper-connected times, our addiction to bad news just leads us to vacuum up depressing or enraging stories from across the globe, whether they threaten us or not, and therefore to conclude that things are much worse than they are.

Really good news, on the other hand, can be a lot harder to spot partly because it tends to occur gradually. Max Roser, an Oxford economist who spreads the New Optimist gospel via his Twitter feed, pointed out recently that a newspaper could legitimately have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last 25 years. But none would have done so, because predictable daily events, by definition, arent newsworthy. And youll rarely see a headline about a bad event that failed to occur. But surely any judicious assessment of our situation ought to take into account all the wars, pandemics and natural disasters that might hypothetically have happened but didnt?

I used to be a pessimist myself, says Norberg, an urbane 43-year-old raised in Stockholm who is now a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC. I used to long for the good old days. But then I started reading history, and asking myself, well, where would I have been in those good old days, in my ancestors northern Sweden? I probably wouldnt have been anywhere. Life expectancy was too short. They mixed tree bark in the bread, to make it last longer!

In his book, Norberg canters through 10 of the most important basic indicators of human flourishing food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the state of the environment, literacy, freedom, equality and the conditions of childhood. And he takes special pleasure in squelching the fantasies of anyone inclined to wish they had been born a couple of centuries back: it wasnt so long ago, he observes, that dogs gnawed at the abandoned corpses of plague victims in the streets of European cities. As recently as 1882, only 2% of homes in New York had running water; in 1900, worldwide life expectancy was a paltry 31, thanks both to early adult death and rampant child mortality. Today, by contrast, its 71 and those extra decades involve far less suffering, too. If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter, Norberg writes at one point, in his own variation on the New Optimists favourite refrain, almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of [extreme] poverty currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day.

These barrages of upbeat statistics seem intended to have the effect of demolishing the usual intractable political disagreements about the state of the planet. The New Optimists invite us to forget our partisan biases and tribal loyalties; to dispense with our cherished theories about what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it, and breathe, instead, the refreshing air of objective fact. The data doesnt lie. Just look at the numbers!

But numbers, it turns out, can be as political as anything else.

The New Optimists are certainly right on the nostalgia front: nobody in their right mind should wish to have lived in a previous century. In a 2015 survey for YouGov, 65% of British people (and 81% of the French) said they thought the world was getting worse but judged according to numerous sensible metrics, theyre simply wrong. People are indeed rising out of extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate; child mortality really has plummeted; standards of literacy, sanitation and life expectancy have never been higher. The average European or American enjoys luxuries medieval potentates literally couldnt have imagined. The essential finding of Steven Pinkers 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, a key reference text for the New Optimists, seems also to have been largely accepted: that we are living in historys most peaceful era, with violence of all kinds from deaths in war to schoolyard bullying in steep decline.

But the New Optimists arent primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if youre a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didnt need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists that whatever weve been doing these past decades, its clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things arent as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon. Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis, Ridley wrote after the financial crisis of 2007-8, because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

If all this were really true, it would suggest that an overwhelming proportion of the energy we dedicate to debating the state of humanity all the political outrage, the warnings of imminent disaster, the exasperated op-ed columns, all our anxiety and guilt about the misery afflicting people all over the world is wasted. Or, worse, it might be counterproductive, insofar as a belief that things are irredeemably awful seems like a bad way to motivate people to make things better, and thus in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here are the facts, wrote the American economist Julian Simon, whose vocal opposition to the gloomy predictions of environmentalists and population experts in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for todays New Optimists. On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before. Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole. All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.

Those are the facts. So why arent we all New Optimists now?

Optimists have been telling doom-mongersto cheer up since at least 1710, when the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz concluded that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, on the grounds that God, being perfect and merciful, would hardly have created one of the more mediocre ones instead. But the most recent outbreak of positivity may be best understood as a reaction to the pessimism triggered by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For one thing, those attacks were a textbook example of the kind of high-visibility bad news that activates our cognitive biases, convincing us that the world is becoming lethally dangerous when really it isnt: in reality, a slightly higher number of Americans were killed while riding motorcycles in 2001 than died in the World Trade Center and on the hijacked planes.

But the New Optimism is also a rejoinder to the kind of introspection that gained pace in the west after 9/11, and subsequently the Iraq war the feeling that, whether or not the new global insecurity was all our fault, it certainly demanded self-criticism and reflection, rather than simply a more strident assertion of the merits of our worldview. (The whole world hates us, and we deserve it, is how the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner derisively characterises this attitude.) On the contrary, the optimists insist, the data demonstrates that the global dominance of western power and ideas over the last two centuries has seen a transformative improvement in almost everyones quality of life. Matt Ridley likes to quote a predecessor of the contemporary optimists, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

The despondent self-criticism that frustrates the New Optimists is fuelled in part at least the way they see it by a kind of optical illusion in the way we think about progress. As Steven Pinker observes, whenever youre busy judging governments or economic systems for falling short of standards of decency, its all too easy to lose sight of how those standards themselves have altered over time. We are scandalised by reports of prisoners being tortured by the CIA but only thanks to the historically recent emergence of a general consensus that torture is beyond the pale. (In medieval England, it was a relatively unremarkable feature of the criminal justice system.) We can be appalled by the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean only because we start from the position that unknown strangers from distant lands are worthy of moral consideration a notion that would probably have struck most of us as absurd had we been born in 1700. Yet the stronger this kind of consensus grows, the more unconscionable each violation of it will seem. And so, ironically enough, the outrage you feel when you read the headlines is actually evidence that this is a magnificent time to be alive. (A recent addition to the New Optimist bookshelf, The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer, binds this argument directly to the optimists faith in science: it is scientific progress, he argues, that is destined to make us ever more ethical.)

The nagging suspicion that this argument is somehow based on a sleight of hand it would seem to permit any outrage to be reinterpreted as evidence of our betterment may lead you to another objection: even if its true that everything really is so much better than ever, why assume things will continue to improve? Improvements in sanitation and life expectancy cant prevent rising sea levels destroying your country. And its dangerous, more generally, to predict future results by past performance: view things on a sufficiently long timescale, and it becomes impossible to tell whether the progress the New Optimists celebrate is evidence of historys steady upward trajectory, or just a blip.

Almost every advance Norberg champions in his book Progress, for example, took place in the last 200 years a fact that the optimists take as evidence of the unstoppable potency of modern civilisation, but which might just as easily be taken as evidence of how rare such periods of progress are. Humans have been around for 200,000 years; extrapolating from a 200-year stretch seems unwise. We risk making the mistake of the 19th-century British historian Henry Buckle, who confidently declared, in his book History of Civilization in England, that war would soon be a thing of the past. That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history, he wrote. It was 1857; Buckle seemed confident that the recently concluded Crimean war would be one of the last.

But the real concern here is not that the steady progress of the last two centuries will gradually swing into reverse, plunging us back to the conditions of the past; its that the world we have created the very engine of all that progress is so complex, volatile and unpredictable that catastrophe might befall us at any moment. Steven Pinker may be absolutely correct that fewer and fewer people are resorting to violence to settle their disagreements, but (as he would concede) it only takes a single angry narcissist in possession of the nuclear codes to spark a global disaster. Digital technology has unquestionably helped fuel a worldwide surge in economic growth, but if cyberterrorists use it to bring down the planets financial infrastructure next month, that growth might rather swiftly become moot.

The point is that if something does go seriously wrong in our societies, its really hard to see where it stops, says David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, who takes a less sanguine view of the future, and who has debated New Optimists such as Ridley and Norberg. The thought that, say, the next financial crisis, in a world as interconnected and algorithmically driven as our world, could simply spiral out of control that is not an irrational thought. Which makes it quite hard to be blithely optimistic. When you live in a world where everything seems to be getting better, yet it could all collapse tomorrow, its perfectly rational to be freaked out.

Runciman raises a related and equally troubling thought about modern politics, in his book The Confidence Trap. Democracy seems to be doing well: the New Optimists note that there are now about 120 democracies among the worlds 193 countries, up from just 40 in 1972. But what if its the very strength of democracy and our complacency about its capacity to withstand almost anything that augurs its eventual collapse? Could it be that our real problem is not an excess of pessimism, as the New Optimists maintain, but a dangerous degree of overconfidence?

According to this argument, the people who voted for Trump and Brexit didnt really do so because they had concluded their system was broken, and needed to be replaced. On the contrary: they voted as they did precisely because they had grown too confident that the essential security provided by government would always be there for them, whatever incendiary choice they made at the ballot-box. People voted for Trump because they didnt believe him, Runciman has written. They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump. The problem with this pattern delivering electoral shocks because youre confident the system can withstand them is that theres no reason to assume it can continue indefinitely: at some point, the damage may not be repairable. The New Optimists describe a world in which human agency doesnt seem to matter, because there are these evolved forces that are moving us in the right direction, Runciman says. But human agency does still matter human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing.

The optimists arent unaware of such risks but it is a reliable feature of the optimistic mindset that one can usually find an upbeat interpretation of the same seemingly scary facts. Youre asking, Am I the man who falls out of a skyscraper, and as he passes the second storey, says, So far, so good? Matt Ridley says. And the answer is, well, actually, in the past, people have foreseen catastrophe just around the corner and been wrong about it so often that this a relevant fact to take into account. History does seem to bear Ridley out. Then again, of course it does: if a civilisation-ending catastrophe had in fact occurred, you presumably wouldnt be reading this now. People who predict imminent catastrophes are usually wrong. On the other hand, they need only be right once.

If there is a single momentthat signalled the birth of the New Optimism, it was fittingly, somehow a TED talk, delivered in 2006 by the Swedish statistician and self-styled edutainer Hans Rosling, who died earlier this year. Entitled The best stats youve ever seen, Roslings talk summarised the results of an ingenious study he had conducted among Swedish university students. Presenting them with pairs of countries Russia and Malaysia, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and so on he asked them to guess which scored better on various measures of health, such as child mortality rates. The students reliably got it wrong, basing their answers on the assumption that countries closer to their own, both geographically and ethnically, must be better off.

But in fact Rosling had picked the pairs to prove a point: Russia had twice Malaysias child mortality, and Turkey twice that of Sri Lanka. Part of the defeatist mindset of the modern west, the way Rosling saw it, was the deeply ingrained assumption that we are living through times that are as good as theyre ever going to be and that the future we are bequeathing, to future generations and especially to the world beyond Europe and north America, can only be a disheartening one. Rosling enjoyed observing that if you had run this experiment on chimpanzees by labelling a banana with the name of each country and inviting them to pick one, they would have performed better than the students, since they would be right half the time, thanks to chance. Well-educated European humans, by contrast, get things far wronger than chance. We are not merely ignorant of the facts; we are actively convinced of depressing facts that arent true.

Its exhilarating to watch The best stats youve ever seen today partly because of Roslings nerdy, high-energy stage performance, but also because it seems to shine the bracing light of objective fact on questions usually mired in angry partisanship. Far more than when he delivered the talk, we live now in the Age of the Take, in which a seemingly infinite supply of blog posts, opinion columns, books and TV talking heads compete to tell us how to feel about the news. Most of this opinionising focuses less on stacking up hard facts in favour of an argument than it does on declaring what attitude you ought to adopt: the typical take invites you to conclude, say, that Donald Trump is a fascist, or that he isnt, or that BBC presenters are overpaid, or that your yoga practice is an instance of cultural appropriation. (This shouldnt really come as a surprise: the internet economy is fuelled by attention, and its far easier to seize someones attention with emotionally charged argument than mere information plus you dont have to pay for the expensive reporting required to ferret out the facts.) The New Optimists promise something different: a way to feel about the state of the world based on the way it really is.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

But after steeping yourself in their work, you begin to wonder if all their upbeat factoids really do speak for themselves. For a start, why assume that the correct comparison to be making is the one between the world as it was, say, 200 years ago, and the world as it is today? You might argue that comparing the present with the past is stacking the deck. Of course things are better than they were. But theyre surely nowhere near as good as they ought to be. To pick some obvious examples, humanity indisputably has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty, end famines, or radically reduce human damage to the climate. But weve done none of these, and the fact that things arent as terrible as they were in 1800 is arguably beside the point.

Ironically, given their reliance on cognitive biases to explain our predilection for negativity, the New Optimists may be in the grip of one themselves: the anchoring bias, which describes our tendency to rely too heavily on certain pieces of information when making judgments. If you start from the fact that plague victims once languished in the streets of European cities, its natural to conclude that life these days is wonderful. But if you start from the position that we could have eliminated famines, or reversed global warming, the fact that such problems persist may provoke a different kind of judgment.

The argument that we should be feeling happier than we are because life on the planet as a whole is getting better, on average, also misunderstands a fundamental truth about how happiness works: our judgments of the world result from making specific comparisons that feel relevant to us, not on adopting what David Runciman refers to as the view from outer space. If people in your small American town are far less economically secure than they were in living memory, or if youre a young British person facing the prospect that you might never own a home, its not particularly consoling to be told that more and more Chinese people are entering the middle classes. At book readings in the US midwest, Ridley recalls, audience members frequently questioned his optimism on the grounds that their own lives didnt seem to be on an upward trajectory. Theyd say, You keep saying the worlds getting better, but it doesnt feel like that round here. And I would say, Yes, but this isnt the whole world! Are you not even a little bit cheered by the fact that really poor Africans are getting a bit less poor? There is a sense in which this is a fair point. But theres another sense in which its a completely irrelevant one.

At its heart, the New Optimism is an ideological argument: broadly speaking, its proponents are advocates for the power of free markets, and they intend their sunny picture of humanitys recent past and imminent future to vindicate their politics. This is a perfectly legitimate political argument to make but its still a political argument, not a straightforward, neutral reliance on objective facts. The claim that we are living in a golden age, and that our dominant mood of pessimism is unwarranted, is not an antidote to the Age of the Take, but a Take like any other and it makes just as much sense to adopt the opposite view. What I dislike, Runciman says, is this assumption that if you push back against their argument, what youre saying is that all these things are not worth valuing For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile.

Johan Norberg, who launched his book Progress two months before the US presidential election, watched the results come in on a foggy morning in Stockholm, at a party organised by the American embassy. As Trumps victory became a certainty, the atmosphere turned from one of rumbling alarm to horrified disbelief. We were all Swedes in the media, politics, business and so on I think it would have been hard to find a single person there who had hoped for a Trump win so pretty soon the mood was going downhill dramatically, Norberg recalled. And whats more, they didnt have any alcohol, which didnt help, because everyone was saying: We need something strong here! But they had it more set up like a breakfast thing. He smiled. I think Americans dont really understand Swedes.

The populist surges of the last two years in the US and Britain powering the rise of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the unpredicted levels of support for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn pose a complicated problem for the New Optimists. On the one hand, its easy enough to characterise such anger directed toward political establishments as a mistake, based on a failure to perceive how well things are going; or as a legitimate reaction to real, but localised and temporary bumps in the road, which neednt constitute any larger argument for pessimism. On the other hand, it is a curious view of the world that sees such political waves solely as responses, mistaken or otherwise, to the real situation. They are part of that real situation. Even if you think that Trump supporters, say, were wholly in error to perceive their situation negatively, the perception itself was real enough and they really did elect Trump, with all his potential for destabilisation. (The New Optimists, says David Runciman, think of politics as nothing more than an annoyance, because in their view the things that drive progress are not political. But the things that drive failure are political.) There is a point at which it stops being so relevant whether widespread pessimism and anxiety can be justified or not, and becomes more relevant simply that it is widespread.

Norberg is no Trump supporter, and the election result might have seemed like a setback to an author promoting a book painting humanitys immediate future as entirely rosy. In it, he does warn that progress isnt inevitable: There is a real risk of a nativist backlash, he writes. When we dont see the progress we have made, we begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain. But it is in the nature of the New Optimism that negative developments can be alchemised into reasons to be cheerful, and by the time we spoke, Norberg had an upbeat spin on the election, too.

I think it might be that in a couple of years time, well think it was a great thing that Trump won, he says. Because if hed lost, and Hillary had won, shed have been the most hated president of modern times, and then Trump and Bannon would have used that to build an alt-right media empire, create an avalanche of hatred, and then there might have been a more disciplined candidate the next time round a real fascist, rather than someone impersonating Trump may prove to have been the incompetent, self-absorbed person who ruins the populist brand in the United States. This sort of counterfactual argument suffers from not being falsifiable, and in any case, its a long way from a position of straightforward positivity about the direction in which the world is moving. But perhaps it is the one genuinely indisputable truth on which the New Optimists and the more pessimistically minded can agree: that whatever happens, things could always, in principle, have been worse.

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[isaacathom]

welsh names are really pretty so im thiiiiinnnking that Rhia’s original name should be Seren! i like how that sounds. i mean its an issue because Serena derives from what i assume is a common base. ok, it doesnt actually, which is neat, but its like.... a confusion. also DAMMIT they didnt provide a pronunciation for seren, you tits.

but i like it. its short, its simple, and its not super heavy handed ‘look at this SYMBOLISM’ like. it means star. wow. read into it whatttteeever you like. maybe its a reference to how she was a rising star pokemon battler. maybe its because she was the star of her parents lives. fucked if i know. i dont even KNOW what happened to her parents. like..... Rhia doesn’t think about it and if you ever asked about family, she’d just tell you about Doc and his family. even after you know who she is - an orphan who you probably actually knew as a kid because she frequented the pokemon lab near your home for a few years - she wont tell you anything. she has nothing to tell! she was evidently old enough to know what was happening to look after herself in a rudimentary fashion. but she doesnt think about it.

like... to hazard a guess, though its really not relevant to her story, id say her parents died. as opposed to tossing her out or something. like. ooh, maybe she IS a foreigner. and her parents moved to [Victoria] and passed away when Seren was somewhat young (talking like 8) and noone knew. no news got out. her international family had no real idea. they knew seren existed, and they knew where the family lived, but the parents werent exactly Social Butterflies and contact had already basically dropped off. so the family had no reason to think anything had happened until a few years later. and as Seren had never really met her international family, when she was finally presented to them, she felt nothing. if she DID see them, anyway. cause like, her parents die, and Seren’s out on the street, tottering off to the shops to buy chips and stuff, and the neighbours help her out by walking her and cooking dinner for her, in EXPECTATION that the international family will arrive. and yet, nothing. radio silence.

so like. what. ok this is cute and all but how does this lead to her being on the streets. i dont think that works. she cant be 8. ok, so shes roughly 15, maybe 14 when Elliot meets her at the Pokemon Lab. maybe make it recent. like, her parents died when she was 13. shes an only child, used to looking after herself when her parents were busy with work, so while it hurts because she did love them, shes Fine. she doesnt know her international family. she doesnt know their names or how to contact them. so her parents die, and she just. keeps going. ofc, a 13 year old girl cant pay the fucking bills, so she talks to some neighbours and talks to the police and probably gets an adult to sell the house for her. i mean thats pretty wild there. this is the issue. that doesnt make sense. cause if her parents died, her family would be notified..... unless Seren left. that’d be.... interesting. like, her parents died, and the international family is called, and theyre all like ‘we’ll take you back to [not unova thats for sure]’ and Seren goes ‘????? no?????????’ and its really complicated and theres a large argument about it. Seren doesnt love the broader family, she doesnt know, them, and her childish logic is that she doesnt NEED them. so she storms off, everyone naively assumes shell cool off in a few minutes and return, but she leaves the building, walks home, unlocks the door, fills a big backpack with a stock of food, toys, and money from her parents drawers, writes a note, and heads out.

how that resolves, im unsure. i imagine she actually spends a few weeks on the streets at this point. concerned neighbours listen to her angrily rant about how she doesnt want to stay with the rest of the family, they keep her stocked whenever they see her, and they dont rat her out. they keep an eye on her, and tell her to come to them if she needs help, and if anything gets rough theyll call the authorities.

they eventually find her anyway after she attempts to quietly come to school and do work and gets pulled out by the principal.

she continues to refuse to stay with the family though. maybe the family eventually gives up. this little twerp isnt worth it for them. afterall, THEY barely know her either, and all shes done this whole time is be incredibly difficult. a few of them think she acting this way out of grief. nope. she passed that point. shes basically just being regular. she doesnt like them.

so eventually Seren is taken by the city as an orphan. theyre chill about it though. due to her older age compared to the other kids, shes able to come and go a little easier. sometimes ducks down to the shops and buys some of the other kids some candy. gets permission to go visit the pokemon lab after convincing them that getting a pokemon would make the kids happier and would make it easier for her in the long run. the city wont GIVE her one, though. they wont sign it. but seren visits the small town anyway, and starts volunteering at the lab to help wash, feed, and play with the pokemon. the city is ok with it. shes escorted most days. usually someone from the lab comes and picks her up for a ‘day trip’. the cities fine. again, pretty chill, this IS the pokemon world.

hence, she becomes a pokemon lab staple, until the time that Elliot visits during the day and meets her in the pokemon enclosure, babbling happily about minute details shes learnt and which pokemon like which food. they hit it off really well.

thats about when Seren’s story really begins, for her. like..... she loved her parents, and she respects them a lot. a few years after she became Rhia, she started visiting their grave on occasion. she holds great fondness for them. but they arent relevant to her anymore. she didnt know them very well due to their business.

so the minute details of her life prior to volunteering at the pokemon lab dont really matter to her. she might give you vague details, but it makes her kind of uncomfortable and its easier for everybody to just let her live as though th doc and his family are actually her family. they are, anyway. Rhia Stanton is legally their family, and is emotionally a huge part of it, regardless.

this works, though. enough, anyway. it never comes up. its more important for me to understand

[trendingnewsb]

Is the world really better than ever?

The long read: The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good and only our pessimism is holding us back

By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense was one of profound pessimism tempered, perhaps, by cynical humour, on the principle that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, one may as well try to enjoy the ride. Naturally, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump loomed largest for many. But you didnt need to be a remainer or a critic of Trumps to feel depressed by the carnage in Syria; by the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean; by North Korean missile tests, the spread of the zika virus, or terror attacks in Nice, Belgium, Florida, Pakistan and elsewhere nor by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, lurking behind everything else. (And all thats before even considering the string of deaths of beloved celebrities that seemed like a calculated attempt, on 2016s part, to rub salt in the wound: in the space of a few months, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael, to name only a handful, were all gone.) And few of the headlines so far in 2017 Grenfell tower, the Manchester and London attacks, Brexit chaos, and 24/7 Trump provide any reason to take a sunnier view.

Yet one group of increasingly prominent commentators has seemed uniquely immune to the gloom. In December, in an article headlined Never forget that we live in the best of times, the Times columnist Philip Collins provided an end-of-year summary of reasons to be cheerful: during 2016, he noted, the proportion of the worlds population living in extreme poverty had fallen below 10% for the first time; global carbon emissions from fossil fuels had failed to rise for the third year running; the death penalty had been ruled illegal in more than half of all countries and giant pandas had been removed from the endangered species list.

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof declared that by many measures, 2016 was the best year in the history of humanity, with falling global inequality, child mortality roughly half what it had been as recently as 1990, and 300,000 more people gaining access to electricity each day. Throughout 2016 and into 2017, alongside Collins at the Times, the author and former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley the title of whose book The Rational Optimist makes his inclinations plain kept up his weekly output of ebullient columns celebrating the promise of artificial intelligence, free trade and fracking. By the time the professional contrarian Brendan ONeill delivered his own version of the argument, in the Spectator (Nothing better sums up the aloofness of the chattering class than their blathering about 2016 being the worst year ever) the viewpoint was becoming sufficiently well-entrenched that ONeill seemed in danger of forfeiting his contrarianism.

The loose but growing collection of pundits, academics and thinktank operatives who endorse this stubbornly cheerful, handbasket-free account of our situation have occasionally been labelled the New Optimists, a name intended to evoke the rebellious scepticism of the New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And from their perspective, our prevailing mood of despair is irrational, and frankly a bit self-indulgent. They argue that it says more about us than it does about how things really are illustrating a certain tendency toward collective self-flagellation, and an unwillingness to believe in the power of human ingenuity. And that it is best explained as the result of various psychological biases that served a purpose on the prehistoric savannah but now, in a media-saturated era, constantly mislead us.

Once upon a time, it was of great survival value to be worried about everything that could go wrong, says Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian and self-declared New Optimist whose book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future was published just before Trump won the presidency last year. This is what makes bad news especially compelling: in our evolutionary past, it was a very good thing that your attention could be easily seized by negative information, since it might well indicate an imminent risk to your own survival. (The cave-dweller who always assumed there was a lion behind the next rock would usually be wrong but hed be much more likely to survive and reproduce than one who always assumed the opposite.) But that was all before newspapers, television and the internet: in these hyper-connected times, our addiction to bad news just leads us to vacuum up depressing or enraging stories from across the globe, whether they threaten us or not, and therefore to conclude that things are much worse than they are.

Really good news, on the other hand, can be a lot harder to spot partly because it tends to occur gradually. Max Roser, an Oxford economist who spreads the New Optimist gospel via his Twitter feed, pointed out recently that a newspaper could legitimately have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last 25 years. But none would have done so, because predictable daily events, by definition, arent newsworthy. And youll rarely see a headline about a bad event that failed to occur. But surely any judicious assessment of our situation ought to take into account all the wars, pandemics and natural disasters that might hypothetically have happened but didnt?

I used to be a pessimist myself, says Norberg, an urbane 43-year-old raised in Stockholm who is now a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC. I used to long for the good old days. But then I started reading history, and asking myself, well, where would I have been in those good old days, in my ancestors northern Sweden? I probably wouldnt have been anywhere. Life expectancy was too short. They mixed tree bark in the bread, to make it last longer!

In his book, Norberg canters through 10 of the most important basic indicators of human flourishing food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the state of the environment, literacy, freedom, equality and the conditions of childhood. And he takes special pleasure in squelching the fantasies of anyone inclined to wish they had been born a couple of centuries back: it wasnt so long ago, he observes, that dogs gnawed at the abandoned corpses of plague victims in the streets of European cities. As recently as 1882, only 2% of homes in New York had running water; in 1900, worldwide life expectancy was a paltry 31, thanks both to early adult death and rampant child mortality. Today, by contrast, its 71 and those extra decades involve far less suffering, too. If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter, Norberg writes at one point, in his own variation on the New Optimists favourite refrain, almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of [extreme] poverty currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day.

These barrages of upbeat statistics seem intended to have the effect of demolishing the usual intractable political disagreements about the state of the planet. The New Optimists invite us to forget our partisan biases and tribal loyalties; to dispense with our cherished theories about what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it, and breathe, instead, the refreshing air of objective fact. The data doesnt lie. Just look at the numbers!

But numbers, it turns out, can be as political as anything else.

The New Optimists are certainly right on the nostalgia front: nobody in their right mind should wish to have lived in a previous century. In a 2015 survey for YouGov, 65% of British people (and 81% of the French) said they thought the world was getting worse but judged according to numerous sensible metrics, theyre simply wrong. People are indeed rising out of extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate; child mortality really has plummeted; standards of literacy, sanitation and life expectancy have never been higher. The average European or American enjoys luxuries medieval potentates literally couldnt have imagined. The essential finding of Steven Pinkers 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, a key reference text for the New Optimists, seems also to have been largely accepted: that we are living in historys most peaceful era, with violence of all kinds from deaths in war to schoolyard bullying in steep decline.

But the New Optimists arent primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if youre a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didnt need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists that whatever weve been doing these past decades, its clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things arent as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon. Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis, Ridley wrote after the financial crisis of 2007-8, because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

If all this were really true, it would suggest that an overwhelming proportion of the energy we dedicate to debating the state of humanity all the political outrage, the warnings of imminent disaster, the exasperated op-ed columns, all our anxiety and guilt about the misery afflicting people all over the world is wasted. Or, worse, it might be counterproductive, insofar as a belief that things are irredeemably awful seems like a bad way to motivate people to make things better, and thus in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here are the facts, wrote the American economist Julian Simon, whose vocal opposition to the gloomy predictions of environmentalists and population experts in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for todays New Optimists. On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before. Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole. All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.

Those are the facts. So why arent we all New Optimists now?

Optimists have been telling doom-mongersto cheer up since at least 1710, when the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz concluded that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, on the grounds that God, being perfect and merciful, would hardly have created one of the more mediocre ones instead. But the most recent outbreak of positivity may be best understood as a reaction to the pessimism triggered by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For one thing, those attacks were a textbook example of the kind of high-visibility bad news that activates our cognitive biases, convincing us that the world is becoming lethally dangerous when really it isnt: in reality, a slightly higher number of Americans were killed while riding motorcycles in 2001 than died in the World Trade Center and on the hijacked planes.

But the New Optimism is also a rejoinder to the kind of introspection that gained pace in the west after 9/11, and subsequently the Iraq war the feeling that, whether or not the new global insecurity was all our fault, it certainly demanded self-criticism and reflection, rather than simply a more strident assertion of the merits of our worldview. (The whole world hates us, and we deserve it, is how the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner derisively characterises this attitude.) On the contrary, the optimists insist, the data demonstrates that the global dominance of western power and ideas over the last two centuries has seen a transformative improvement in almost everyones quality of life. Matt Ridley likes to quote a predecessor of the contemporary optimists, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

The despondent self-criticism that frustrates the New Optimists is fuelled in part at least the way they see it by a kind of optical illusion in the way we think about progress. As Steven Pinker observes, whenever youre busy judging governments or economic systems for falling short of standards of decency, its all too easy to lose sight of how those standards themselves have altered over time. We are scandalised by reports of prisoners being tortured by the CIA but only thanks to the historically recent emergence of a general consensus that torture is beyond the pale. (In medieval England, it was a relatively unremarkable feature of the criminal justice system.) We can be appalled by the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean only because we start from the position that unknown strangers from distant lands are worthy of moral consideration a notion that would probably have struck most of us as absurd had we been born in 1700. Yet the stronger this kind of consensus grows, the more unconscionable each violation of it will seem. And so, ironically enough, the outrage you feel when you read the headlines is actually evidence that this is a magnificent time to be alive. (A recent addition to the New Optimist bookshelf, The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer, binds this argument directly to the optimists faith in science: it is scientific progress, he argues, that is destined to make us ever more ethical.)

The nagging suspicion that this argument is somehow based on a sleight of hand it would seem to permit any outrage to be reinterpreted as evidence of our betterment may lead you to another objection: even if its true that everything really is so much better than ever, why assume things will continue to improve? Improvements in sanitation and life expectancy cant prevent rising sea levels destroying your country. And its dangerous, more generally, to predict future results by past performance: view things on a sufficiently long timescale, and it becomes impossible to tell whether the progress the New Optimists celebrate is evidence of historys steady upward trajectory, or just a blip.

Almost every advance Norberg champions in his book Progress, for example, took place in the last 200 years a fact that the optimists take as evidence of the unstoppable potency of modern civilisation, but which might just as easily be taken as evidence of how rare such periods of progress are. Humans have been around for 200,000 years; extrapolating from a 200-year stretch seems unwise. We risk making the mistake of the 19th-century British historian Henry Buckle, who confidently declared, in his book History of Civilization in England, that war would soon be a thing of the past. That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history, he wrote. It was 1857; Buckle seemed confident that the recently concluded Crimean war would be one of the last.

But the real concern here is not that the steady progress of the last two centuries will gradually swing into reverse, plunging us back to the conditions of the past; its that the world we have created the very engine of all that progress is so complex, volatile and unpredictable that catastrophe might befall us at any moment. Steven Pinker may be absolutely correct that fewer and fewer people are resorting to violence to settle their disagreements, but (as he would concede) it only takes a single angry narcissist in possession of the nuclear codes to spark a global disaster. Digital technology has unquestionably helped fuel a worldwide surge in economic growth, but if cyberterrorists use it to bring down the planets financial infrastructure next month, that growth might rather swiftly become moot.

The point is that if something does go seriously wrong in our societies, its really hard to see where it stops, says David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, who takes a less sanguine view of the future, and who has debated New Optimists such as Ridley and Norberg. The thought that, say, the next financial crisis, in a world as interconnected and algorithmically driven as our world, could simply spiral out of control that is not an irrational thought. Which makes it quite hard to be blithely optimistic. When you live in a world where everything seems to be getting better, yet it could all collapse tomorrow, its perfectly rational to be freaked out.

Runciman raises a related and equally troubling thought about modern politics, in his book The Confidence Trap. Democracy seems to be doing well: the New Optimists note that there are now about 120 democracies among the worlds 193 countries, up from just 40 in 1972. But what if its the very strength of democracy and our complacency about its capacity to withstand almost anything that augurs its eventual collapse? Could it be that our real problem is not an excess of pessimism, as the New Optimists maintain, but a dangerous degree of overconfidence?

According to this argument, the people who voted for Trump and Brexit didnt really do so because they had concluded their system was broken, and needed to be replaced. On the contrary: they voted as they did precisely because they had grown too confident that the essential security provided by government would always be there for them, whatever incendiary choice they made at the ballot-box. People voted for Trump because they didnt believe him, Runciman has written. They wanted Trump to shake up a system that they also expected to shield them from the recklessness of a man like Trump. The problem with this pattern delivering electoral shocks because youre confident the system can withstand them is that theres no reason to assume it can continue indefinitely: at some point, the damage may not be repairable. The New Optimists describe a world in which human agency doesnt seem to matter, because there are these evolved forces that are moving us in the right direction, Runciman says. But human agency does still matter human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing.

The optimists arent unaware of such risks but it is a reliable feature of the optimistic mindset that one can usually find an upbeat interpretation of the same seemingly scary facts. Youre asking, Am I the man who falls out of a skyscraper, and as he passes the second storey, says, So far, so good? Matt Ridley says. And the answer is, well, actually, in the past, people have foreseen catastrophe just around the corner and been wrong about it so often that this a relevant fact to take into account. History does seem to bear Ridley out. Then again, of course it does: if a civilisation-ending catastrophe had in fact occurred, you presumably wouldnt be reading this now. People who predict imminent catastrophes are usually wrong. On the other hand, they need only be right once.

If there is a single momentthat signalled the birth of the New Optimism, it was fittingly, somehow a TED talk, delivered in 2006 by the Swedish statistician and self-styled edutainer Hans Rosling, who died earlier this year. Entitled The best stats youve ever seen, Roslings talk summarised the results of an ingenious study he had conducted among Swedish university students. Presenting them with pairs of countries Russia and Malaysia, Turkey and Sri Lanka, and so on he asked them to guess which scored better on various measures of health, such as child mortality rates. The students reliably got it wrong, basing their answers on the assumption that countries closer to their own, both geographically and ethnically, must be better off.

But in fact Rosling had picked the pairs to prove a point: Russia had twice Malaysias child mortality, and Turkey twice that of Sri Lanka. Part of the defeatist mindset of the modern west, the way Rosling saw it, was the deeply ingrained assumption that we are living through times that are as good as theyre ever going to be and that the future we are bequeathing, to future generations and especially to the world beyond Europe and north America, can only be a disheartening one. Rosling enjoyed observing that if you had run this experiment on chimpanzees by labelling a banana with the name of each country and inviting them to pick one, they would have performed better than the students, since they would be right half the time, thanks to chance. Well-educated European humans, by contrast, get things far wronger than chance. We are not merely ignorant of the facts; we are actively convinced of depressing facts that arent true.

Its exhilarating to watch The best stats youve ever seen today partly because of Roslings nerdy, high-energy stage performance, but also because it seems to shine the bracing light of objective fact on questions usually mired in angry partisanship. Far more than when he delivered the talk, we live now in the Age of the Take, in which a seemingly infinite supply of blog posts, opinion columns, books and TV talking heads compete to tell us how to feel about the news. Most of this opinionising focuses less on stacking up hard facts in favour of an argument than it does on declaring what attitude you ought to adopt: the typical take invites you to conclude, say, that Donald Trump is a fascist, or that he isnt, or that BBC presenters are overpaid, or that your yoga practice is an instance of cultural appropriation. (This shouldnt really come as a surprise: the internet economy is fuelled by attention, and its far easier to seize someones attention with emotionally charged argument than mere information plus you dont have to pay for the expensive reporting required to ferret out the facts.) The New Optimists promise something different: a way to feel about the state of the world based on the way it really is.

Illustration by Pete Gamlen

But after steeping yourself in their work, you begin to wonder if all their upbeat factoids really do speak for themselves. For a start, why assume that the correct comparison to be making is the one between the world as it was, say, 200 years ago, and the world as it is today? You might argue that comparing the present with the past is stacking the deck. Of course things are better than they were. But theyre surely nowhere near as good as they ought to be. To pick some obvious examples, humanity indisputably has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty, end famines, or radically reduce human damage to the climate. But weve done none of these, and the fact that things arent as terrible as they were in 1800 is arguably beside the point.

Ironically, given their reliance on cognitive biases to explain our predilection for negativity, the New Optimists may be in the grip of one themselves: the anchoring bias, which describes our tendency to rely too heavily on certain pieces of information when making judgments. If you start from the fact that plague victims once languished in the streets of European cities, its natural to conclude that life these days is wonderful. But if you start from the position that we could have eliminated famines, or reversed global warming, the fact that such problems persist may provoke a different kind of judgment.

The argument that we should be feeling happier than we are because life on the planet as a whole is getting better, on average, also misunderstands a fundamental truth about how happiness works: our judgments of the world result from making specific comparisons that feel relevant to us, not on adopting what David Runciman refers to as the view from outer space. If people in your small American town are far less economically secure than they were in living memory, or if youre a young British person facing the prospect that you might never own a home, its not particularly consoling to be told that more and more Chinese people are entering the middle classes. At book readings in the US midwest, Ridley recalls, audience members frequently questioned his optimism on the grounds that their own lives didnt seem to be on an upward trajectory. Theyd say, You keep saying the worlds getting better, but it doesnt feel like that round here. And I would say, Yes, but this isnt the whole world! Are you not even a little bit cheered by the fact that really poor Africans are getting a bit less poor? There is a sense in which this is a fair point. But theres another sense in which its a completely irrelevant one.

At its heart, the New Optimism is an ideological argument: broadly speaking, its proponents are advocates for the power of free markets, and they intend their sunny picture of humanitys recent past and imminent future to vindicate their politics. This is a perfectly legitimate political argument to make but its still a political argument, not a straightforward, neutral reliance on objective facts. The claim that we are living in a golden age, and that our dominant mood of pessimism is unwarranted, is not an antidote to the Age of the Take, but a Take like any other and it makes just as much sense to adopt the opposite view. What I dislike, Runciman says, is this assumption that if you push back against their argument, what youre saying is that all these things are not worth valuing For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile.

Johan Norberg, who launched his book Progress two months before the US presidential election, watched the results come in on a foggy morning in Stockholm, at a party organised by the American embassy. As Trumps victory became a certainty, the atmosphere turned from one of rumbling alarm to horrified disbelief. We were all Swedes in the media, politics, business and so on I think it would have been hard to find a single person there who had hoped for a Trump win so pretty soon the mood was going downhill dramatically, Norberg recalled. And whats more, they didnt have any alcohol, which didnt help, because everyone was saying: We need something strong here! But they had it more set up like a breakfast thing. He smiled. I think Americans dont really understand Swedes.

The populist surges of the last two years in the US and Britain powering the rise of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the unpredicted levels of support for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn pose a complicated problem for the New Optimists. On the one hand, its easy enough to characterise such anger directed toward political establishments as a mistake, based on a failure to perceive how well things are going; or as a legitimate reaction to real, but localised and temporary bumps in the road, which neednt constitute any larger argument for pessimism. On the other hand, it is a curious view of the world that sees such political waves solely as responses, mistaken or otherwise, to the real situation. They are part of that real situation. Even if you think that Trump supporters, say, were wholly in error to perceive their situation negatively, the perception itself was real enough and they really did elect Trump, with all his potential for destabilisation. (The New Optimists, says David Runciman, think of politics as nothing more than an annoyance, because in their view the things that drive progress are not political. But the things that drive failure are political.) There is a point at which it stops being so relevant whether widespread pessimism and anxiety can be justified or not, and becomes more relevant simply that it is widespread.

Norberg is no Trump supporter, and the election result might have seemed like a setback to an author promoting a book painting humanitys immediate future as entirely rosy. In it, he does warn that progress isnt inevitable: There is a real risk of a nativist backlash, he writes. When we dont see the progress we have made, we begin to search for scapegoats for the problems that remain. But it is in the nature of the New Optimism that negative developments can be alchemised into reasons to be cheerful, and by the time we spoke, Norberg had an upbeat spin on the election, too.

I think it might be that in a couple of years time, well think it was a great thing that Trump won, he says. Because if hed lost, and Hillary had won, shed have been the most hated president of modern times, and then Trump and Bannon would have used that to build an alt-right media empire, create an avalanche of hatred, and then there might have been a more disciplined candidate the next time round a real fascist, rather than someone impersonating Trump may prove to have been the incompetent, self-absorbed person who ruins the populist brand in the United States. This sort of counterfactual argument suffers from not being falsifiable, and in any case, its a long way from a position of straightforward positivity about the direction in which the world is moving. But perhaps it is the one genuinely indisputable truth on which the New Optimists and the more pessimistically minded can agree: that whatever happens, things could always, in principle, have been worse.

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