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rebeccalouisaferguson · 2 months ago

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‘It was so hard to pretend not to know how to swim’

Stars Rebecca Ferguson, Steve Zahn, Common and Tim Robbins on the second season of Apple TV+’s Silo, shooting water sequences and leadership

It’s unique to join a show after it’s already been established, and I thought it was an exceptional show

It’s hard for Rebecca Ferguson not to have a deep connection with nature. She grew up in Stockholm and then moved to the south of Sweden to a remote fishing village, where she got to explore drastic changes in environments and fully embrace her love for the ocean.

So you can imagine why the 41-year-old Golden Globe-nominated Swedish actress — also a trained scuba diver — initially struggled to shoot the underwater sequences as the gruff mechanical engineer Juliette Nichols in season two of Silo, who is awkward in that element, afraid of water and can’t swim until she is forced to confront her fears.

“I was born in Stockholm and we have lots of lakes and an archipelago,” says Ferguson, who is also an executive producer on the series. “I’ve always loved the sensation of swimming and had that feeling that if I could have any superpower — mine was always flying — and I think swimming is similar. The movement is so unregulated, it’s so different from walking. I love the way it feels when you go underneath and you can’t hear anyone.

“It was so hard to pretend not to know how to swim,” says Ferguson, who also stars in three of the Mission: Impossible films: Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning Part One.

“There’s a natural move, how your hands touch the water and how you paddle, how you move your feet. To be able to look clumsy, it feels silly and it’s also very hard to get into your head how you would move. To get into that mindset, I thought of animals and dogs and what we did when we were young.”

The 10-episode Apple TV+ post-apocalyptic science fiction series, created by Canadian television screenwriter Graham Yost, 65, and adapted from Hugh Howey’s popular New York Times bestselling book Silo trilogy, including Wool, Shift and Dust, is about a dystopian society where 10,000 people are living underground in mysterious circumstances.

The inhabitants of the silo do not know why they are there or who built the place in which they live and work. But they will face fatal consequences if they try to leave and find out.

In season one, Juliette (Ferguson) seeks answers about a loved one’s murder, and defies the authoritarian leadership of the silo. She was framed by the mayor Bernard Holland, played by Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning American actor Tim Robbins, 66, star of Mystic River, and Robert Sims, played by Academy Award, Emmy and Grammywinning American rapper and actor Common, 52, who stars in Selma and John Wick: Chapter 2, for violating the cardinal rule: If you say you want to go outside to “clean,” there’s no taking it back.

But when she survives and discovers a man named Solo in a deserted silo 17, played by series newcomer Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated American actor Steve Zahn, 56, who appears to be the structure’s only survivor, a rebellion breaks out and Juliette realises she must find a way back to her home.

It’s led by Juliette’s former colleagues from the mechanical sector, Knox, played by American actor Shane McRae, 47, who stars in Gossip Girl, and Shirley Campbell, played by British actress Remmie Milner, 35, who stars in A Christmas Carol, and organised by the reclusive engineering genius Martha Walker, played by Olivier Award-winning British actress Harriet Walter, 74, who stars in Killing Eve, Succession and Downton Abbey.

“What I love the most about Juliette [Ferguson], is that she doesn’t feel like a superhero. She’s just tough. She’s just going to keep going until she can’t go anymore, and she’s going to solve that problem even if it kills her. We see more of her humanity in this season, and that’s fun to write,” says Yost.

For Zahn, who also stars in The White Lotus and joined the cast of Silo in the second season, the beauty of relationships and trust was something he also experienced off-screen too.

“It’s unique to join a show after it’s already been established, and I thought it was an exceptional show. I was excited to be a part of it but very nervous about it too because Solo is a broad character. You want to be good, believable and interesting,” says Zahn.

“But for some reason, I think due to the writing and Rebecca [Ferguson], it was easier than I thought. People were cool, it was a great environment to work in, and that’s why the head of the snake is always really important, and that was Graham Yost and Rebecca Ferguson.

“Now if those guys don’t show up, and they don’t know their stuff, or they’re angry, testy or whatever, that’s what you get from the show. But Graham [Yost] is good at creating a cool family of really awesome human beings.”

Season two of Silo comes to Apple TV+ on, November 15

#rebecca ferguson #steve zahn #graham yost #interview #silo season 2 #silo interview #silo spoilers #silo apple tv #tv

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jounosparticles · 1 year ago

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what r ur thoughts on the guild

i like the guild a lot actually!! i’ll give a brief opinion on the members!

francis: i didn’t like him during the guild arc but anything after that has been great. the fitzgerald rising chapter/episode really made me love him

(maybe it’s just me being a bit of a capcom nerd but was this an ace attorney reference? the positioning and font makes me think it’s a tribute to phoenix wright)

mark: i just like him. his design is cool and his ability is sick!!

john: i actually can’t wait to see him again. i really really hope they touch on his reformed guild bit soon. him vs fitzgerald maybe to form the group? his ability is great and i love his "new" design. the more i think about him the more i like him. cool guy.

nathaniel: i love his design and his ability is cool but he annoys me a lot as a character sorry </3

poe: LOVE HIM!!! he used to be a top 5 character for me but i still adore him. he’s silly and i love his design and karl is awesome. really fun ability as well

louisa: i kinda feel bad for her. let’s get my girl some confidence please. she’s a cutie though

lovecraft: i think he’s neat. id like to know more about him. i seen a theory that said he was a cthulhu-type that can turn into a human, but stormbringer i believe states that only humans can develop abilities, so wtf is lovecraft? maybe he was some sort of creation? idk

lucy: LOVE HER!!! her design is so cute and her personality is great. i’m so glad she’s part of the main cast. the canadian rep for me

james: i wouldn’t even blame you if you didn’t know who this guy was. certified background character. he has like maybe two lines maximum. he may be the first bsd character that has zero fans. i’ll be his first fan. hi james from bsd. ur alright. he was given a name so hopefully he at least makes some sort of reappearance. update: nevermind i looked him up and he’s the guy the mafia killed after the whole anne’s room thing. i thought it was some random guy. he’s so nothing i forgot he died. sorry man

herman: he’s kind of handsome. a nobal man but i have nothing more to say. idk exactly what his ability is though (except that it’s a whale) so more clarification on that would be nice

margaret: yeah honestly nothing to say. she seems nice from now francis spoke of her. and her and nathanial are a funny duo but on their own i don’t really care much about either tbh

one thing that has annoyed me a lot lately is this picture of the guild from the anime:

characters in order from left to right: ??, herman, james, margaret, nathaniel, francis, louisa, john, lucy, mark, lovecraft , ??

my issue with that photo is that neither of the "??" characters look like poe. the one sitting on the far left kind of looks like another version of francis, but why would he be there twice? and where’s poe? and who’s the other guy on the far right? he kind of looks like atsushi but i don’t see why he would be there.

sorry that photo bothers me a ton, i’d like to know who the ?? people are.

anyways overall i like the guild a lot. i hope francis’s new guild and john’s reformed guild combat. i hope we get to see the characters more!

#i would say this post is longer than expected but it being longer than expected is expected at this point #man now i need to do a dive into steinbeck because he’s kinda interesting. i’d have to do some rereading and research first though #bsd #bungou stray dogs #bsd the guild #the guild bsd #asks

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talenlee · 9 months ago

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Game Pile: The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

Watch this video on YouTube

This is a rebuild and expansion of my article on The Beginner’s Guide from back in 2018, with a newly developed thesis about authenticity and access to artists.

And below is the script I worked from!

The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden’s follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.

The game is narrated by Wreden and takes the user through a number of incomplete and abstract game creations made by a developer named Coda. Wreden challenges the player to try to come to understand the type of person Coda is from exploring these spaces in a first-person perspective. Wreden has stated the game is open to interpretation: some have seen the game as general commentary on the nature of the relationship between game developers and players, while others have taken it as an allegory to Wreden’s own personal struggles with success resulting from The Stanley Parable. When the game sold, a reviewer – at least one, but I can’t find records of more than that – made a bit of a stir by suggesting that the fiction presented in the game is true, and that therefore, the game was built out of stolen material, and gamers buying it could hypothetically, get it refunded if they felt that were in any kind of moral quandrary.

This is, as best I understand it, the ‘story’ of The Beginner’s Guide, the entity in media, the confluence of reporting and reactions to a game. And now, in that same disjointed way of The Beginner’s Guide, I want to tell you about s1m0ne.

S1M0NE, stylised however you wanna, is a 2002 Al Pacino movie about a dude who creates a virtual actress. That’s not even how the movie goes in full, it’s way more involved than that and it includes bestiality, and it has this nasty kind of undercurrent about the fundamentally exploitable nature of women in media spaces. It’s an interesting film.

I didn’t say good.

Anyway, the thing is S1M0NE’s central premise is the virtual actress, Simone. In-movie, she doesn’t exist. To reinforce this, she isn’t credited as having an actress. The movie does do an extensive cgi sequence, showing Simone being constructed digitally, but it was… let’s say it’s very 2002, and leave it at that. Anyway, a bunch of people including representatives from the Screen Actors Guild believed it and they started a fuss about it. I think. It’s hard to find sources about it now, but I remember a fuss.

I mean it stands to reason, if you’re a union you want to oppose things that hurt the interest of your members, and that’s a perfectly valid concern to be worried about around about now with things like deep learning technology allowing us to transplant faces and details across multiple media works and the complex relationship between motion capture and voice actor and fully integrated action – like, if you weren’t aware, motion captured faces are not a 1:1 acting thing, they’re a structure for animators to work from. Gollum is not ‘Andy Serkis is amazing,’ they’re Andy Serkis and the fifty people doing all the rest of the work are amazing, and yes, Andy’s ability to disappear into the role and do the physical acting element is impressive. That’s a real conversation.

But it’s not the conversation they were having in 2002.

There were some people, in late 2002, who genuinely thought that an Al Pacino movie with Winona Ryder and a budget of $10 Million had successfully replicated the human form with complete authenticity, and that the much cheaper and easier tack of using an actor wasn’t more likely. Then they thought it’d involve, y’know, pig-doinking.

Simone was played by a Canadian actress, and the movie otherwise glanced over its very interesting questions of identity and artificiality and technology to instead tell a story about a dude who was very, very anxious about his inability to control women. The real story of the movie, then, is less about what the movie wanted to talk about and much more about the fact some people couldn’t tell where the movie was fiction and where it was fact. The boundary of the diegesis confused people, and there were some critics who were genuinely unsure of how confident they could be about dismissing the fears of people who thought the end of actors had come.

This comparison is because, yeah, it’s kinda stupid that videogame criticism was duped into believing that maybe an author stole all their work and then recorded themselves having a nervous breakdown then edited that nervous breakdown and cleaned up the audio and packaged it up and sold it on Steam without at any point considering that the art was stolen, it’s not like videogames are unique in this regard. We have a history of people not knowing the boundary between art and real and sometimes, when people play with that, especially in areas of new technology, people make mistakes. But also, like, yeah, we are now living in a time when the idea of ‘someone tried to sell entirely stolen assets on steam for $15’ isn’t even a joke or punchline, it might just be a fact of a thing that happens regularly.

As a game experience, The Beginner’s Guide is fine. I like it as a game because it needs the medium of games to make sense, complete with the idea of incomplete games and the way games are made not from a coherent single point but a sort of constantly exploding set of interconnected steps. Like, you couldn’t make this as a book because this isn’t how a book would look when you’re exploring its dismantled bits. The Beginner’s Guide, if it were a book about books and making books, would look like collected pieces of paper in different hands, with a sort of formalising hand over it all.

Funnily enough it’d look a bit like the book of Genesis.

(There’s a long reach of an academic poke)

It’s a perfectly interesting work about imposter syndrome and emotional boundaries and creative processes and a lot of other things you can see in your own inkblots. It’s an artistic piece that tells you a narrative in a really blunt way, but it uses its framing to create a blurred diegesis. It uses real world markers to confuse you about the actuality of its narrative, or it did at the time.

There’s a forking challenge here; on the one hand, I want to berate videogames, as a culture, for being so woefully ill-equipped to deal with meta art as to be convinced that the narrative presented in The Beginner’s Guide was actually real and have at least one actual journalist be so unsure of the reality of the presented narrative as to hedge their bets and mention seemingly unironically that refunds for this game were an option. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re drowning in meta-aware fiction and a cultural discourse that can treat this kind of thing seriously. Since the Stanley Parable and then Beginner’s Guide, the most recent big ‘oh everyone talks about it’ meta-game in my space has been Undertale, and I hate that.

Since the Beginner’s Guide’s original appearance, things have moved on a bit, and particularly, the word ‘parasocial’ has fallen to the common voice. People with platforms use the term to describe the behaviour of people who don’t have platforms, and the people without platforms follow their word, and now ‘parasocial’ has a sort of loose use around it, the idea that it’s pretty much just anything that annoys you about other people on the internet, especially if they’re talking about media. Then we got ‘plagiarism,’ which is, I understand, ‘mostly vibes.’

I want to compare Davey Wreden to Fred Gallagher, the author of Megatokyo. Megatokyo if you’re not familiar with it, is a webcomic that started in August 2000 and has never officially stopped updating since. It’s updated twice this year, which puts it ahead of the same time last year. What Megatokyo is about is not important here, what is is that Megatokyo was enormously succesful, incredibly popular, and has never once had an update schedule its authors were happy with.

I wrote a lot about Megatokyo last year and I still think that article is worth restructuring and presenting in some kind of long form read way. In the end my conclusion about it is that I don’t think ill of Fred Gallagher as a creative, as much as I think that he got to suffer a unique kind of problem that only capitalism can cause, where you can be too successful to handle your own success. That is, both Wreden and Gallagher made something that led to people having assumptions and expectations that don’t make any sense, because the value of what they created was associated with capital, which is to say, money, and rent, and food.

There’s this idea we’re all circling around right now on a platform that is probably by now mostly procedurally generated – not just the stuff made in the past few years by tools like Chatgpt and the midjourney thumbnails and all, but rather that the algorithm of youtube made a lot of people make media in a way that shaved the non-formulaic parts off it, until there was nothing but hash tag con tent. The stuff you like is a small egg floating on a vast and turbulent sea of piss. It’s now that people care a lot about a kind of authenticity from work which separates it from what I’m going to call Generative Media, and which other people are going to insist on calling ‘AI.’

The conversation around generative art is a real struggle sometimes because it feels like sometimes when people are talking about ‘ai art bros’ they’re dealing with a small pool of obnoxious people, and sometimes I can even tell the specific dickhead they mean. It’s Shad, it’s Shad, so often they mean Shad, and yeah sure, Shad sucks. But the conversation around generative media is so often structured in these really weird ways that seems to imply low-quality images don’t exist until generative media gets involved. That nobody cranks out bullshit, or that art is a transferrable property of a human agent, or that in the great days of the internet, nobody’s using pictures they didn’t draw to illustrate articles they wrote. In this very video I’m using gameplay footage from a game I don’t own, and the reason you’re not seeing the footage from S1m0ne to reinforce that point is because a robot would get mad at me and block the video if I did.

I’m even in defensive crouch saying this stuff here. Look: I think generative media tools have applications, particularly in zero-value situations. Nobody in the world is having their pocket picked if I copy art of Rin Matsuoka and use that for my D&D character. Similarly, someone with less image editing skill than mine using generative media to generate pictures of things they weren’t going to pay for in the first place are not hurting anyone unless you believe in a literal cosmic value of these things. In that case, you’re basically just like the generative media people who are functionally, praying to chat gpt. If you’re rapid prototyping, if you’re making a game and need temporary assets to give yourself tools to build around, if you need a powerpoint presentation for class, all of this stuff represents no lost value. This is a perfect place to put generative media. I’m sure purists will disagree, and I just do not care. But there’s my stance: Generative media is an interesting toy that should be used as such, and if it can replace your job, your job probably sucks and you should be doing something cooler and better that people value more. That’s a problem with jobs, and how we give people money to feed themselves, not the software that generates anime tiddy on demand.

Now, here is where things get tangled up.

It seems to me that generative media is being attacked right now by people I generally like and agree with on most things, because of very high concept, seemingly contradictory positions. People who dislike copyright law busting it out to attack midjourney, and people who hate Disney praying for them to fight Google. Ideas about the inherent nobility of art and stick figure illustrations being better than generative media on websites dedicated to sharing unsourced artworks of definitely not stick figures. People don’t have reasons that make a lot of sense for why these things should not be tolerated, but they are very real about their emotional hatred of them. Which, you know, given the people who defend generative media, makes sense, a lot of those people suck and are incredibly obnoxious. Particularly it seems a lot of them are the losers of the NFT wave who are trying to get in ground level as ‘prompt engineers’ as if the ecosystem they’re entering will value them at all.

One of the most sterling arguments against generative media, and one I personally like, is the idea that these tools represent potential precarity for artists who are already struggling to pay for things like, again, rent and food. Potential, in that, largely commission-based artistic survival under capitalism seems to be a bit of a dice roll as it is. My solution to this is not to shame people who weren’t going to pay for art for failing to be able to support a commission economy they weren’t partaking in in the first place, though, it’s things like massive overhauls of income inequality and universal basic income, but also I can understand how my idea is hard and yelling at strangers in hyperbolic language is really easy.

The pressure that created the Beginner’s Guide is also the pressure that meant someone talking about an artistic work of anxiety media couched it in terms of fucking refunds so people didn’t feel they’d ethically mis-stepped by buying fiction about exploitation, a thing that nobody otherwise does, and it’s the same pressure that means ‘someone is making cheap bad art with an exploitative method’ is a threat to the livelihood of a small number of people who have managed to make an extremely precarious living doing art in the first place. As if money is why artists make art, as if we aren’t all struggling in exploitative systems, as if the existence of bland corporate art pumped out in huge troves to pad resume drawers isn’t

Since these past few years, writing academically, a habit I’ve gotten into is always trying to attribute where I get ideas for. Sentences that are referring to someone else’s idea, with the little note of ‘hey, this is that person, at this date.’ It’s a thing that can create the habit of also starting sentences with ‘Wreden says this’ or ‘Gallagher’s work shows this,’ which creates in casual conversation an impression of a very specific kind of authorial access. Certainly here on Youtube, I don’t want to give you the impression because I’m pointing to their work that I can tell you what they think or feel. The idea that I can connect to these authors through a particularly big brained reading of their work is similar to how Christians think they can read god’s mind because they read the book of Daniel, and like, Fred Gallagher exists.

I don’t know what Davey Wreden was thinking about the Beginner’s Guide when he made it. Even if I asked him now, I won’t get an answer, I’ll get the answer of what he remembers of what he was thinking, which may be the same thing but can’t necessarily. I can try, and that’s a way to get at this authenticity, but it’s not a way to guarantee it.

The Beginner’s Guide is still an interesting game to me, because the conversation around it, and around ownership of work, and of unsourced material and exploiting artists hasn’t changed that much but all the people engaging in it have gotten new things to have to try and fit into their models. We are no closer to Coda.

Those opening paragraphs of this article are from from wikipedia.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Game Pile #Games

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honey-minded-hivemind · 1 year ago

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Okay, I've had the idea to do this for a while:

A List of Which Characters Are Yandere (Platonic or Otherwise) For Another Character Besides the Reader

(Seriously though, has this thought occurred to anyone else? Some of these characters can act rather... intense, especially in the fandom's head, heart, and other canons... Now, I will specifiy which relationships are platonic, which are romantic, and which are up to your interpretation. With all that said, let's start:)

Charles Xavier/Professor Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr/Magnus/Magneto: platonic or romantic, both parties are yandere for the other (these two can go either way. Really. They have a long-lasting friendship, despite being on opposing teams, they have both gone to rescue the other, and both do not want to kill the other. On the romantic side, well, they have the chemistry, they aren't related, and their relationship is either a really durable friendship or a really long-winded marriage, divorce, then eventual remarriage... They've lasted a lot longer than most complicated relationships, possibly because they tend to help each other (and sometimes their team) every other week... Both interpretations work, and both seem to make valid sense, so...choose whichever relationship between the two you prefer)

Jean Grey/Marvel Girl/Phoenix and Scott Summers/Cyclops: romantic, both parties are yandere for the other (have you seen these two?! Both are powerful in their own right, both are rather formidable to deal with, and they both have chemistry (at least in the Animated Series and Evolution, if not strongly elsewhere). Not to mention, if someone threatens one of them, the other is not hesitant to thrash the enemy who would do such a thing to their love. They are intense, too. They love each other, they would die for each other, and I'm certain they've killed for each other... Nothing stands a chance against them, singularly or together... Heaven help whomever screws with them or their relationship... it will not be pretty, and they'll have a woman with the power of a space god/entity who's legendary, and the near unshakeable and steady leader of the X-Men team after them... best to maybe just avoid those two, no matter what...)

Anne-Marie/Rogue and Remy LeBeau/Gambit: romantic, both parties are yandere for the other (these two are the Southern lovebirds... yes, their relationship takes a while, and they both have had past lovers, but when they get together, they stick together in a way that is sweet (if not kinda scary, at times). Lady who can take your essence and powers, with guy who can charge things with energy to make them explode = cute and charming Southern couple with a dark streak... Don't mess with their significant other, or you'll either have a powerful lady with a near-deadly touch and attitude after you, or an angry Cajun who was part of a thieves guild... does either option sound like a good person to miff off? They like each other, they make their relationship work, they have chemistry, and they're both interested and willing to be together, for better or worse. There is not a moutain high enough, a valley low enough, or a river wide enough to keep them from getting to each other. And if there is, it doesn't stand a chance... )

Victor Creed/Sabretooth and Logan Howlett/Wolverine: platonic, Victor is the yandere for Logan (okay, yes, I know, part of the fandom ships them and all that; my interpretation is their relationship is platonic. I also headcanon and heart canon those two as brothers, possibly half-brothers, maybe adopted, point is, they are brothers. They've known each other for a long, long time, and both have some memory issues, Logan moreso than Victor... imagine these two as kids, or as teens, or as a teen with a kid, surviving the Canadian wilds, with only each other as their confidant, their family, their friend... then they end up in every major conflict over the years, somehow end up in the Weapon X Program, then Logan loses his memories and makes a run for it... all of that is now essentially gone. Forgotten. Null. And Victor is p*ssed. He may have signed up willingly, he may have talked his brother into it, but they did this to them? Dared to wipe away his brother, his runt? Then lose him!? He gets angry, he kills a few of the people responsible, and then he sets himself on the track to find Logan, to hunt him down and try to recover/heal/remake what they had... Logan fights it; he doesn't remember a thing, and he thinks Victor was crazy from all the times they've met after escaping from the labs... Cue the weirdest (and craziest/creepiest) amnesia and brotherly love story in my platonic yan Marvel aus...)

I think I covered the ones off the top of my head, but, yeah. These are some headcanons I have for these characters. And, if the two parties share a bby... well, looks like that bby has two very powerful platonic yans, and is also never leaving their platonic yans. After all the crazy sh*t they dealt with, and have to deal with, especially if they have to protect a partner/other obsession... uh, no, their younger bby is not leaving them, is not running off, and is never going to be left alone for long.... They've already lost too much... They aren't going to risk losing them...

#honeycomb thoughts #platonic yandere marvel #yandere platonic marvel #platonic yandere marvel x reader #platonic yandere xmen #yandere x-men #platonic yandere #platonic yandere x reader #Platonic Yandere Marvel AU Headcanons by honeycomb thoughts

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itsjustelian · 2 years ago

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Every single time Francis shows up in the anime and manga, my first and only reaction is, "Look, everyone, it's my American boi!" As if he's the only American in the show.

I just think none of the other Guild members exude AMERICA energy (Lucy is Canadian, so she doesn't count at all). Like, no one is looking at Poe and thinking, "Yep, that's an American." He's just our skrunkly little emo boy (with a crush on Ranpo) who could also kill you.

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #bungo stray dogs #bsd fitzgerald #bsd francis #bsd poe #I think its the money #his sheer love for capitalism is what makes him American #also as a Canadian i love Lucy but GOD is Anne of Green Gables garbage

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fyodior · 5 months ago

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i would like to speak to ❄️ anon (if they do not mind) and recommend sk8 first. I LOVE WINDBREAKER BUT SK8 IS JUST SO CUTE AND FUN AND IT HAS GREAT CHARACTERS AND A GOOD STORY. if ur like me and prefer story and the people and stuff over action id also recommend sk8 first. i am very biased towards sk8 despite loving both. both are short tho so it wont take long to watch them. i just really like sk8 (im also slightly biased bc canadian character and im from canada so i just find it extra fun to see like. humour about that. im not even that devoted to my country, i just dont often see canadian characters in media that isnt canadian unless theyre for the butt of the joke)

also miss flora, if ur reading this, i know how you said you wonder what state the guild is from but i always wonder what province/territory (and sometimes city) langa is from. like i dont think hed be from ontario, especially not toronto. i dont think hed be from a major city like vancouver. he seems to have enjoyed living in canada too much to have lived in quebec (ik ur americans so for context, quebec is the very french province. they generally hate all of canada and pretty much all of canada hate them too. except 18yr olds bc the legal drinking age there is a year younger so they have to put up w 18yr olds visiting just to get drunk.) i honestly think hed be from farther north, lots more places for him to ski. i think its be really funny if he was from one of the territories or like. alberta.

- 💄

yes thats a very good comparison of the two!!! they are both only 12 eps (if i remember wbk correctly) so not long watches at all but it just depends on if you’re preferring story or action.

and honestly i completely forgot langa was canadian LMFAO thats such a good character trait for him 😭 also i love when animes hand us a very obviously japanese native level fluent VA and are like. they’re from canada. suspension of disbelief is key

interesting take tho!! you’re right i know nothing about canada but i like your thought process!! itd be kinda sexy tho if he was from qbc and could speak french too……..

#voices in my head #💄 anon

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cindylouwho-2 · 1 year ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES AND STUDIES, MID-AUGUST 2023

Welcome to my latest roundup of ecommerce and other online news for small and micro businesses, including Etsy sellers. Usually August is a slow news month, but there is still a fair amount going on.

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With the continuing demise of Twitter being a concern, here is a list of places you can find me, and here is where I am posting news:

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I hope to get the next report out before Labour Day, but of course I cannot predict what will happen between now and then. Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see more reporting on!

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Repeating this from the last update since it so important: Etsy’s latest policy changes brought in the ability to opt out of the binding arbitration clause, but existing members only have until August 23rd to do so. The Indie Sellers Guild has some thoughts on this. If you are opting out, remember this must be done for each account (buyer or seller), and make sure to include the following information in your email to [email protected]:

your name

the email address for your account

your username

your shop name (if applicable)

Expect a vague email response that does not verify that you are opted out, because this is Etsy and why would they be clear?

If you have anything with images of children in your Etsy shop (including art and figurines), please carefully read Etsy’s new policy on such imagery, as it appears many current photos and other visual depictions will not be allowed as of September 8. I started a thread in the Etsy forum for discussion.

Amazon changed the deposit rules for UK and EU sellers who started on the site before 2016, implementing the “7 days after delivery date” deposit release that newer sellers also face. The UK’s small business commissioner and the minister for small business were not amused, and that led to some money being released early, but with a warning that the new delayed deposits would resume in January 2024.

ETSY NEWS

Etsy has changed the criteria for payment reserves for the time being, but we don’t know much about how, other than the fact most have been reduced to 30% from the original 75%. We still don’t know how they have made “... adjustments for issues that are beyond sellers’ control” such as a lack of cheap tracking, or if they are truly providing better communications to sellers just put on reserve, other than this Seller Handbook article from August 4. That article does admit that most current reserves are about shipping. I do know that we aren’t seeing many new reserves mentioned publicly, so it appears they have changed something.

A few sellers from the UK have been able to opt out of Etsy’s Offsite Ads, but Etsy is now pushing back and rejecting requests. Reminder that most of the EU and also Switzerland can now opt out.

The Make an Offer tool now lets you choose which listings you will accept offers on, as well as other improvements. (It's still only available to shops that sell in USD, and not all buyers can see it yet.)

To accompany the release of Etsy’s new baby registry, Etsy reported on recent baby and nursery trends. Farm animals are apparently in, as are flowers.

The holiday season trends report is also out; it covers Canadian Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve. “277% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “wooden christmas tree decor” - With sustainability in mind, many buyers are opting for ornaments made of solid hardwood over plastic.” And apparently maxi skirts are back?

The second quarter 2023 report showed stagnation in sales but more new sellers, plus Etsy focussing on telling sellers to discount items. You can read my coverage here. Some analysts are starting to sour on Etsy: “They feel a little bit like Pinterest to me where they have something great but they're not finding the opportunity on it.”

Smiley faces are one of the latest takedown targets - not by Etsy bots, but by the actual rights owner.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

If you are using internal links on your website for SEO reasons, beware that the anchor text is also important.

An analysis of the biggest winners in Google search results for the United States in the first half of 2023 shows Mercari had a huge leap in search visibility so far this year.

Bing is not gaining much on Google’s market share, despite having a jump on AI search.

Brave Search now includes both video and image searching.

If you missed a lot of Google developments in July, Search Engine Roundtable has you covered.

[Advanced content] An Ahrefs study found that ⅔ of websites using hreflang have at least one problem.

SOCIAL MEDIA - All Aspects, By Site

General

Since most social media platforms don’t want people leaving their site, they tend to give lower ranking to posts with links in them. You can get around this issue by focussing on zero-click marketing. [text and video] There’s a followup video with transcript on the 4 ways you can promote content through social media as well.

Another what and when to post on social media, this one covering Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, based on what brand accounts did in 2022. [I’m thinking the Twitter data may not be as relevant today.]

Several US states have passed laws requiring parental permission for anyone under 18 to join social media, or are in the process of doing so.

One of the downsides of Bluesky is that it counts any link URLs as part of your character limit, but you can get around that if you aren’t also adding a photo.

Facebook (includes relevant general news from Meta)

Daily active users on Threads have dropped over 80% from their peak. The site is still developing, however, and desktop access plus searching is coming soon.

Instagram

Instagram is adding more tools that use artificial intelligence.

Photos carousels now support music.

TikTok

TikTok will be offering fulfilment services in the UK, to be followed by the US. “The example merchants are influencers and beauty brands to start with.”

Users in the EU will be able to remove online tracking from their TikTok “For You” algorithm in the near future, possibly by August 28.There will also be advertising changes.

Twitter

The Twitter algorithm is changing, and now prioritizes replies, plus it is pushing video. “X is also penalizing mentions of the term ‘Threads’ as well as links to the Meta competitor.” [Yes, I am still calling it Twitter, but you can call it X if you want.]

Tweetdeck is now a paid service only. The ability to organize different lists and even work with multiple different accounts made it an essential for doing a lot of work on Twitter.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS (minus social media)

Amazon

Amazon will be charging additional fees for sellers who use Prime but don’t ship through Amazon, starting October 1.

Amazon added hundreds of new product attributes that need to be added to relevant new listings starting on August 16.

Looks like there will be another Amazon Prime Day in several countries this year.

Amazon’s second quarter was strong, with a lot of growth in ads.

Investors are suing Amazon over several issues, including lying to them.

eBay

eBay is finally agreeing to negotiate with the union of its recent acquisition, TCGPlayer, after the larger company failed to reverse the vote to unionize.

Poshmark

Poshmark’s app will soon include an image search, called “Posh Lens”, although only some have the beta test at the moment.

All Other Marketplaces

Depop’s new seller protection policy for US and UK sellers kicks in on September 3, and requires sellers to purchase shipping labels on the site.

Wish is laying off over ¼ of its staff, including up to 40% of its employees in the United States.

Shipping

The port labour disruption in British Columbia is officially over.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (NOT SOCIAL MEDIA OR ECOMMERCE SITES

If you aren’t using the free Google Shopping ads for your website yet, here are some tips on optimizing your products. Note that “Google may also assess your landing page speed and experience to rank your products”; many think that is only for organic results.

Google ended “similar audiences” from all ads on August 1. “Campaigns using similar audiences will automatically get opted into optimised targeting and audience expansion moving forward. Marketers who would rather avoid this can go to the audiences tab in the Google Ads settings page and manually turn off the campaigns instead.”

STATS, DATA, TRACKING

Still not paying much attention to Google Analytics 4? Here’s more info on why and how it is different from Universal Analytics.

And that's it for this edition! Please let me know if there are other topics I should be covering.

#EtsySellerNews #seo #ecommerce #etsy #social media #microbusiness #cindylouwho2 #marketplaces

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muchalucha-art · 2 years ago

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Is it true that there were studios in both the U.S. and Canada involved in Mucha Lucha's production? I ask, given that the cast involves a mix of both American and Canadian actors.

WB Animation in Sherman Oaks, CA was the main team. However the majority of the animation was outsourced to Korea and yes, a studio named Bardel in Canada.

However this had no bearing on the decision to cast Canadian actors in secondary roles. US actors were part of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and because of this their usage and pay scale was strictly defined. Canadian actors were not subject to this, and there was more leeway regarding usage and more room for pay negotiation. At the time ML! was WB's lowest budgeted show, so the producers made use of this.

In season 3 with a slightly improved budget, Dee Bradley Baker was added to the US cast as the fourth (SAG) actor.

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wind-rider · 4 months ago

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Op this is great but how could you fail to mention that the Canadian Animation Guild not only ‘posted about it’ but made their own fanart

Never before have I been so proud of my country

Does tumblr know about the animation union yaoi yet

#this is a work of art #the power of gay people compels you or something #hurrah for animator unions I hope it goes well!!

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theramblingsofallen · 9 months ago

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The Questionable Writing of Bungo Stray Dogs

*Spoilers for the anime/manga, 600 words.

**I apologize for any grammar and spelling mistakes.

Bungo Stray Dogs is a fan-fiction anime/manga series centered on famous dead authors with supernatural abilities based on their famous works. A series where Edgar Allen Poe traps other characters inside his books, and the only way to escape is to solve the mystery in his stories. Where F. Scott Fitzgerald is a rich snob who gets powerful, the higher his income. It's one of my favorite pieces of media. It contains fun, yet complex characters, wonderful music, and funny moments. Bungo affected me since it inspired me to reread novels and fall in love with literature. However, despite my love for Bungo, it has me scratching my head.

~As I mentioned in my previous post, anime/manga has a problem writing female characters, and Bungo is an example. One of my biggest gripes about Bungo is the underutilization of their characters, especially their female characters. For example, one of my favorite characters is the sassy and sweet Lucy Montgomery. Based on the famous Canadian author, Lucy worked with the North American organization, The Guild...Lucy has a tragic backstory that aligns with our main character, Atsushi Nakajima. Both were raised in corrupt orphanages where their caretakers abused them, both are drowned in self loathing and insecurities, and both seek a sense of belonging. It’s quite disappointing she is not a part of the story. Then there is Naomi, the sister of Jun'ichirō and member of the Armed Detective Agency. That is her whole character and has awkward fan service moments with her brother. Yikes. Gin Akutagawa is Akutagawa's sister and a member of the Port Mafia. That is about it. Thankfully, there are no fan service moments with her brother. Then there is Elise…we shall not speak about her. The only female characters from the show we are focusing on are Yosano and Teruko. However, with the conclusion of the Vampire Infection Outbreak Arc, it's safe to assume that we won't see Teruko or even the Hunting Dogs for quite a while. This leaves Yosano to carry the show on her shoulders as the remaining female character. Again, this is not a complaint aimed only towards Bungo since the underutilization of female characters is a problem across all media. However, as a woman who enjoys this series, it's irritating to see how little the female characters appear. When they become relevant, the male characters steal the spotlight. I hope the writers include more screen time for the female cast since all of them are unique characters, and I enjoy all of them.

This sounds nitpicky, but I am bored with these fakeouts. Remember when season five was airing and Dazai got shot, and we all assumed that he died? I certainly do. Only in the next episode, it was all part of his plan to "die" to trick Fyodor. These kinds of fakeouts plague Bungo. It's only more irritating since I'm left wondering if Fyodor and Jōno are still alive. The creators overuse it and waste everyone’s time involved in the creation. This includes the viewers. Not to mention, I think it is a cheap way to create tension and hype for more content. Chances that your favorite character is dead is low. At least that’s what I like to think concerning Fyodor and Jōno.

In conclusion, despite my complaints, I still love Bungo. I look forward to seeing more content from this franchise. I wish the best for everyone working on this franchise from the animators, writers, and the mangaka. I highly recommend reading these famous novels and giving these authors a chance. My favorite authors are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Osamu Dazai, and Edgar Allen Poe. Most importantly, where is Jōno? And is Fyodor still alive? There is no genuine point to this post. I like to ramble.

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #ramblings #anime #manga #my ramblings

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everygame · 1 year ago

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A Christmas Adventure (Apple II) Developed/Published by: Chartscan Data, Inc. Released: 12/1983 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Couldn’t get Rudolph to drink his bloody milk.

Well, it’s been two years since I thought I’d “have a look at the earliest Christmas games” and I managed to play… one of them. And then last year I was sick for most of December so I didn’t really play anything other than tapping miserably at Marvel Snap. But I’m back, baby!

First up, I owe almost all understanding of this game to Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild who has written an insanely detailed post on it which I highly recommend reading, but I’ll summarise some of the findings here.

A Christmas Adventure is generally considered online to be the second Christmas-themed video game ever released commercially, following the somewhat bizarre Santa’s Sleigh Ride, but I’ve since discovered that there’s several ZX Spectrum games with a 1983 date (including one, potentially lost media, called A Christmas Adventure as well???) so there’s probably more out there for like… the Dragon 32 and shit. But let’s talk about this one anyway. What makes it more interesting than just potentially being the second Christmas-themed video game ever is that it isn’t just, as you might expect, a Christmas cash-in, but an attempt by a French Canadian fellow named Frank Winstan to make video games that acted as greeting cards. Mind how for a while personalised children’s books were all the rage, and you got this crappy book where a jpeg of your child’s face was awkwardly stuck on the main character? Like that basically, with the idea that they’d start with this Christmas “card” and then do… well probably Easter, and then branch out to like… “Happy 43rd Birthday: the adventure” or “Sorry Your Grandma is Dead: the adventure” I guess!

Unfortunately (or not) due to time pressures they never quite managed to get the company off the ground, with this selling poorly its first Christmas, although Winstan would continue to work on it through 1986(!) updating and improving it. As far as I know, I’m playing a version from the same era ion Pranevich did, which seems to be a later version than the one you can watch on Youtube.

Anyway. A Christmas Adventure is an early graphical text adventure; originally released in 1983, it would be contemporary with the very end of Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventure line before they’d go on to make the more sophisticated King’s Quest, and surprisingly, very few other examples, making this… sorta cutting edge?

What does feel cutting edge actually is the opening cinematic, which you have to flip the disk to see, which includes an animation where you fly to Santa’s Ice Palace. Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures have insanely terrible art (well, apart from Dark Crystal I’d say, which has a near stained-glass window approach) so getting something that generally looks like it’s had a bit of effort put in is rather nice.

Telling that classic story, “Santa’s been kidnapped and only YOU can save him” after the intro you’re dropped in his house and have to wander about picking things up and using them to save him. I very quickly hit the issue that has stopped me bothering to play any of Sierra’s early output: the parser is terrible. Doing literally anything is a nightmare, and I will fully admit I had to use Pranevich’s article to walk me through the game, and he had to hex edit it just to understand how to solve it!

It’s confusing, because this is a commercial concept based on greetings cards. Now, I imagine nowadays you can probably get “escape room” greeting cards where you have to like, solve a fucking cypher or whatever to see something that says “We’re getting divorced” (and if there isn’t, I should get on that) but in general, if you’re giving someone a gift like that you want them to… enjoy it? I really assumed that this would be very simple. You know, for kids. I mean you’re saving SANTA. Not Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) which would of course be for cool adults only.

I suppose I’ve said it before, but maybe people in 1983 were made of sterner stuff; less likely to give up. I guess some puzzles in this are easy, like dressing up like Santa to fool his safe, or the disk that tells you the password right on it (Santa’s Jewish???) But then like… there’s a time machine. And there’s just so much wrestling with the parser to get anything done. Typing “HELP” gives you a list of words that the parser understands which is, 100%, a lie, because almost all the words don’t work.

Ultimately, it’s the reason I couldn’t finish this. In his article, Pranevich was able to feed Rudolph, but despite having stuck the “was’bask+mlk” in the fireplace I could not feed him. I went through every possible thing I could imagine, really tried to get Martin Luther King out of that was’bask, but I’m starting to believe the archive.org version of this is just bugged. It is what it is, and I watched the ending on youtube (and for good measure used the HELP to see the message as well.)

Feels a bit harsh to say this isn’t good despite the fact it it is, er… not good, just because it’s an interesting attempt at something that just seems to have come at the wrong time and with some rather wrong-headed ideas about how challenging it has to be. Also: it didn’t make me feel christmassy at all!

Will I ever play it again? I have a save. If anyone can tell me what to type to get Rudolph to eat I’m making that bastard eat.

Final Thought: It’s worth noting that you can really feel the developers–at least Frank Winstan?--cared about this project because it’s full of little touches. I love that Santa has a poster of Bob and Doug McKenzie’s backdrop up (as Canadian a reference as you’re going to get) and there’s non-sequiturs like Pac-Man showing up for a hot minute.

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#video games #gaming #games #txt #text #review #christmas #a christmas adventure #1983 #apple ii

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