#confusing explanations don’t make up for a complex power system man

[algernoninwonderland]

Miraculous is playing one big game of Calvinball with its magic/power system and it undermines the show quite a bit

TL;DR: Miraculous has, at first glance, a very basic power/magic system… Only whenever it tries to get more complicated than “Moon Prism Power, Make up!” it ends up being an unspeakable mess, due to poor creative decisions that don’t allow for the audience to truly understand what is going on and why, outside of “whatever the plot requires so that we can get to the next scene”. 

It may well be because the people making this show wanted to shift their attention to kwamis and their powers in the future seasons, but holding onto that for seventy-something episodes has done the show a disservice.

Longg isn’t the kwami of Perfection. Longg is the kwami of being a cool dragon. And sometimes, being a cool dragon is enough, you know? Instead of doing complex things poorly, you can tackle simple concepts really well and people won’t think any less of your creation, au contraire.

Throughout the history of the superhero genre, a pretty nifty thing most creators have understood is that you need to explain a bit of how and why the hero’s powers work. Superman is superpowered because it’s all a matter of gravity, a fact underlined in the very first issue of Action Comics, in the very first page of Superman ever. The X-Men are mutants. Sherlock Holmes was bitten by a radioactive detective.

Basically, what happens in most cases is, the creators come up with a set of rules to sort of explain the storyworld so that you know to manage your expectations, so that the storyworld feels more cohesive too. That’s what I call a neat way to allow your audience to suspend their disbelief and feel more involved in the story being told! Things happen and are allowed to happen a certain way for a reason in-universe, there is a kind of logic proper to the work of fiction being built that makes it easier for the audience to fully get into said work.

In Hunter X Hunter, Nen is a pretty cool concept that is well-defined, we see what it is at first with no explanations, and it’s hella intriguing, which makes you want to know more (and that’s deliberate) and then the manga explains it to you a few chapters later and for the most part, Togashi sticks to that definition. And now we understand what is going on and how. Cool, right?

What do we have here? Creative decisions that are often given justifications in-universe to make them more believable in the context of the story being told, even though they are ultimately arbitrary decisions which can be challenged (see how Superman’s powers changed over time, for instance). You can toy with these explanations and that makes for great comedic potential, just look at One Punch Man!

Magic can be a little murkier for sure, because magic doesn’t necessarily follow rational logic. I won’t be getting into the soft/hard magic talk here. Still, if you want your audience to understand what is going on and if you’re not a complete hack (looking at you Joanne Kathleen), you tend to set up some rules so that the audience can grasp what the hell is going on, understand why something is really impressive or really basic. Is it really such a big deal that a character is able to master that one spell? Why? Ursula Le Guin and Brandon Sanderson are really good at that, and manage a good balance of mystery and understandability.

Miraculous fumbles the bag pretty hard when it comes to how its magic/power system works. Which, after 70-something episodes, is not great. 

Part of it is due to the exposition style Miraculous has chosen for itself, which could be great but ultimately isn’t, and part of it is due to poor definition in the first place.

Miraculous hates exposition dumps most of the time, and I think it’s actually a good thing. No one wants to feel as though they’re sitting through a boring class instead of having fun. Well done, guys! Exposition dumps often make you all the more aware of the artificiality of a story. And so, Miraculous mostly relies on context cues as a means of introducing you to the world. They just show you the thing and trust you to understand and interpret it properly. And sometimes, it works really well!

I still sincerely believe that Stormy Weather is a fantastic first episode, and it does its job amazingly well. In 24 minutes, you learn the very basic outlines of how stuff works, relationships between the characters and superpowers. Yes, it’s very basic, but that’s fine, you can’t drop all that new information on your audience all at once. We understand that the power within the Miraculous, that of the kwami, allows for its wearer to transform. This comes with nifty perks, heightened agility, reflexes, amazing strength, magical accessories, and special quirks unique to each of the Miraculouses.

Are we good so far? See, if we stuck to that, it’d be fine. Not mind-blowing but pretty okay still. Doesn’t have to be too complicated to be enjoyable, just look at Sailor Moon!

And then Miraculous tried to spice things up and communicated its ideas so poorly that the arbitrary decisions taken by the writers are glaring, and seriously affect the audience’s suspension of disbelief and enjoyment. 

The kwamis aren’t just cutesy mascots, they’re gods. And yet their powers are very limited. Why? Well, the show doesn’t really bring that question up, we can only try and infer things. Now, what are these limitations, and why do they exist in the first place? I’ve got a vague answer to the first question (a time limit for transformation once the special power is being used).

The answer to that second question is very unsatisfactory, and that’s the only one I’ve got: “because the plot requires it if we want to do such and such thing”. Which is an answer that applies to absolutely all creative decisions in fiction, yes, but there’s usually more to it as well, in competently-made shows at least, it’s not so transparent. Why is Marinette able to wield so many Miraculouses at once? Well, it’d look cool and it’d make her look powerful, so why not! But Adrien can’t. Why? He just can’t. No explanations whatsoever. Just because. It’s magic. Shut up and watch the show.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We’ve got fleeting remarks about being able to unlock kwami powers and maintaining a transformation for longer and whatnot. The problem is, they’re just that, fleeting remarks, and worse, they are so scattered across the show it’s really easy to forget about them in-between episodes, especially since the release schedule is absolute nonsense (it isn’t the creators’ fault, but it certainly has an impact on the way the audience engages with the show). So no, the show isn’t going down the “just roll with it” route, not entirely… And that makes the lack of proper explanation that much worse.

It feels as through the few rules there are in Miraculous are being made up on the fly and… Heh. That’s just not great.

It doesn’t help that the powers themselves are… Really something, huh?

Chat Noir’s power is the only one that really fits with what his kwami is meant to represent. Destruction. Easy to represent, right?

Creation is trickier, that requires being imaginative, and Miraculous isn’t terribly imaginative when it comes to its lucky charms. Hey kids, did you know that you could use a ladder to stop an ice-skater? How creative! I mean you could also use salt to melt the ice, or a baseball bat to smash his kneecaps, then… The point is, being convoluted isn’t the same thing as being creative, and while Chat Noir gets to decide what he destroys, Ladybug gets an item thrown at her and you better believe she’ll find an use to it… How is that creation exactly? Is the lucky charm popping out of thin air creation? That’s a bit underwhelming, isn’t it?

Tikki represents convolution, Nooroo is the power of creating minor antagonists…

I had to check the Wiki to remember what concepts the other kwamis are meant to represent. There’s a disconnect between that and the way powers are represented on-screen. Pollen isn’t the kwami of Subjection. Pollen is the kwami of stabbing people with a stinger. How do I know that? I watched the show and nothing else.

If you want your audience to not be confused, if you don’t want your story to feel completely arbitrary to your audience (though it’ll always be just that), maybe take the time to explain things that are crucial for the understanding of the storyworld’s inner workings. You don’t have to give everything away in the first ten episodes, not at all, but you should explain them at some point, take the time to do so if these are more complex concepts that are crucial to your show. And if they aren’t key to your show, you don’t have to include them, and I promise no-one will notice.

[mistakenot4892]

Some thoughts of Heart of Deimos.

I made a reddit post but I thought I might repost it here and see if the response is any different. Mild spoilers for Heart of Deimos, the most recent Warframe update, under the cut.

First off, this is a bit of an effortpost, and it will be quite meandering and confused, sorry about that. We are now two days into Heart of Deimos and I had some thoughts I wanted to put on paper as it were. There's a TL;DR at the bottom.

The Bad:

In all honesty, taking into account the usual DE release-then-fix cycle and the quick patching they've already done to things like the Son token costs, there's very little about this update that I think is objectively bad. Deimos might be the single best open world release of the set, lack of a catchy musical number aside. It's not any buggier than any other release, which may say more about DE's QA than anything, but I have fallen through the map a few times, and host migrations have broken multiple vault runs.

The combined token system is a pretty big departure from the other open worlds, and I found it very confusing initially. Without the prior context of using Ticker for bonds in Fortuna, I think it would be really opaque, particularly for new players who aren't already up to speed on how the open world resource loops are expected to work. Alongside the complex token system, it's also understandable that people are frustrated with the expectation that they -must- participate in mining, fishing and conservation to get the tokens, since these don't really leverage the well developed aspects of gameplay.

The initial quest was lackluster from a storytelling perspective, with some really nonsensical events, a lack of development for each individual beat, and a frustrating lack of building on the already existing lore in favour of introducing new lore. It was pretty blatantly a tour of the zone mechanics, though maybe we'll see a more engaging plot when the equivalent of the Profit Taker and Exploiter bounties are introduced over the next year. The new warframe being dropped in by Mother as an afterthought, without a scrap of context, almost felt worse than the way previous quests have just given us the blueprint with no explanation at all. Protea's quest felt a lot clearer so it's disheartening to see them taking a step back there.

Finally, prior to finding the Albrecht lore I thought the playable content of the update was quite short and uninteresting.

The Good:

The Family voice acting is really, really good. Some of the writing is a bit iffy in the classic overwrought DE sense (which IMO is charmingly earnest anyway) but the delivery is fantastic, and while initially I was put off by the characters being shallow, I came around on it - I will go into more detail under 'The Ugly'.

With regards to the grind: even though the resources from the open world minigames are mandatory, participation isn't - so far I've run conservation exactly once, for about an hour, and I am clear for the third rank up with the Entrati. The world drops and bounty loot are more than enough to cover the vast majority of other costs, which is honestly fantastic. For all the complaining, DE has definitely learned from PoE and Fortuna with regards to letting people dictate their own playstyle without handicapping their progress. You can focus down specific requirements with specific minigames, no trouble, or you can just play bounties and run and gun your way to incidental loot. The combined token system was really confusing initially but combined with the incidental drops it makes progression quite organic without forcing you to spend your time on any particular task (looking at you, pre-Thumper PoE). There also seems to be a pretty solid spawn chance for tokens in the caves of the open world, and since the rank ups are now 1 of each kind of token instead of 10, this is possibly now a feasible way to skip the conservation grind entirely.

With regards to the lore: despite my earlier complaint about narrative quality and disconnection, DE does seem to be tying Parvos, the Entrati and the Glassmaker together, which is interesting. Prior to finding the Necraloid area and hearing the excellent Albrecht Vitruvian lore (seriously, mad props to the writers and the VA, the fourth log gives me powerful Darkest Dungeon narration vibes) I was ready to drop the game until a few patches and more content was added, but now I'm fully willing to grind for a couple weeks to hear the rest. I'm curious to see where they will go with the Heart and the Man in the Wall, particularly in regards to stuff like the reliquary drive and how it relates to the Necraloids and pre-warframe Orokin technology in general.

The Ugly:

The Family are the ugly, get it? This bit is mostly just because I want to talk about the new characters and the themes of Warframe as a narrative.

There's a kind of tension around the family that I initially found offputting - here we have a family of immortal alien gods who made their name ripping secrets from the flesh of reality, literally sprouting from the meat flowers of an infested moon... and they act like the cast of Arrested Development, switching between lofty poetic proclamations and petty squabbling that wouldn't be out of place on a sitcom. At first it seemed like it was just bad writing. Over time though, with exposure to the wider plot and the various deeper interactions, I started to warm to it. It's really interesting how DE has juxtaposed the deformed appearance of the Entrati, their perfect-marble-statue-like Orokin aesthetic, the pulsating infestation, and this very human, very relatable behavior. It really pulls back the skin on the Orokin as a people and uses a bit of clever metanarrative to show us that even the Tenno remember the Orokin as being more than human, when they were just as flawed as anyone else.

The individual characters felt very shallow at first, like cardboard cutouts of the typical family transplanted into a blob of writhing meat, but the pleasant surprise of the relationships mending between Entrati rank-ups and the subtle undercurrents you start to notice when interacting with them over a longer timeline really turned that on its head. There's some really excellent combinations of writing and delivery that add subtleties to each character, like the Daughter's undercurrent of thirst for either the Tenno or for butchering mutant fish, or the animalistic yearning of the Son and his bleeding heart hidden under the callous and cruel facade.

Family, parenthood and belonging are arguably the core themes of Warframe's narrative - the Tenno are orphan children clinging to a single parental figure who herself is a stolen child, while their allies like the Ostrons and the Solaris are people who cling to their human connections and their shared culture despite outside forces, and draw their strength from each other. The grand enemies of the setting are collectivist empires who have shredded their humanity in pursuit of strength and profit respectively. Then you have the Orokin, whose grand flaw is hubris in isolation, and a deliberate abandonment of shared humanity in pursuit of impossible perfection. The entire Parvos questline related to blood, with Nef wanting to abuse it for gain and Parvos denouncing him. Even the Sentients, arguably the only alien culture in the setting, love their families and oppose the Orokin and by extension the Tenno largely in defense of their people.

DE has leaned hard on quite creepy, quite -relatable- strangeness to give the Family depth, which helps reinforce that they're demigods of a dead empire, even if they are also quite friendly and personable. It lends some real weight to the way the Orokin have been depicted as cruel, hollow people, since we now have direct evidence of how their culture and the expectations of their various roles tear at those interpersonal connections. There's a lot of heart and clear work put into developing these themes, and I think that it's a bit sad that the quality of the writing is frequently overlooked in the broader Warframe community in favour of focusing on the flashy mechanics and cool new novel features. DE's writers are some of the best in mainstream video gaming currently, and even with my complaints about the main quest earlier, this consistent ongoing thematic cohesion and the variety of individually good beats more than make up for incoherent feature-driven storytelling.

TL;DR:

Despite some teething issues and bugs Heart of Deimos might be the best open world update so far, the way DE presents the Family and develops on the overarching themes of the story are pretty excellent, and I am excited to see where they go with it. Thanks for reading my incoherent and largely irrelevant thought-spew. Have a good one.

[queenofnohr]

The Charming Empire - Otome Review (Soshi Amazaki Route)

I was going to hold off on doing this because 1. I wanted to play more routes to have a more comprehensive look at the game and 2. I don’t really have free time yet. Promptly ignored the above logic mostly to get this out of my system.

Before we begin, a disclaimer - While I do have pretty extensive knowledge about the otome genre in both longer “proper” VNs as well as the shorter, bite sized mobile VNs, I’m able to derive enjoyment from most anything (I feel the need to point this out because I see a lot of reviews that get hung up on stuff I can easily brush off even if I do understand where they’re coming from).

This is going to be a spoiler-free review based on Soshi Amazaki’s route alone.

Firstly, I must note that this is a mobile otome game. If you’re looking for something as long and substantial as, say, Hakuouki, Alice in the Country of Hearts, Dandelion, etc. this is probably not the game for you.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll be rating it based on usual points with a more... comprehensive and personal look at the end (feel free to skip to that if you know our tastes align and/or just want to see me losing my mind).

Prologue - 1/10

Normally I wouldn’t separate prologue from story. However, as this game started as a mobile game, there is no general route in which one gains points toward a love interest as is standard in full-length otome games. However, even by mobile game standards this game’s prologue fails in that it you meet exactly 0 love interests. Indeed, the prologue is the bare-bones introduction of the setting. This flaw is further complicated by the fact that, because it started as a mobile game, routes are bought individually. This means that there is no way to gauge the love interests except by the game’s straightforward summary on the buy screen. Luckily for me, I was sold at “Kenjiro Tsuda voices a love interest who is both a big brother and a lord” so this wasn��t as knee-capping as it could’ve been, but normally you’d have to simply take a leap of faith because if a love interest doesn’t actually end up being your type, you’re out of luck since you’ve already paid for the route.

This is an aside, but translation for the prologue is... questionable. It isn’t unreadable, like some translations I’ve had the misfortune of reading, but it does create some confusion regarding the MC’s family situation which I can’t help but clear up here. MC is the daughter of the previous lord whose mother moved with her out to the countryside. Her mother is died of illness, and MC now lives with an elderly couple. It’s simply when I say it here, but in game the family situation isn’t actually explained until well into the route and the narration refers to the couple as the “old man” and “old woman,” while the MC calls them “Grandpa” and “Grandma” (ojii-san, obaa-san in Japanese, which is a literal translation of what someone would call any older folk with the degree of familiarity MC has with them) while they call her “princess” (literally, hime-sama). The closeness of referring to them as grandparents vs the distance of the narrative’s “old man/woman” + calling the MC princess in a literal sense (vs. a nickname) is jarring especially because, again, they do not clearly explain the MC’s family situation.

Story - 7/10

Soshi holds the most powerful seat in all the empire. Only trusting himself, he rejects the opinions of others as he continues his dictatorship agenda -- breeding animosity amongst the people. He’s a cold man who sees even his own sister as a political tool.

This is the official description for Soshi’s route. Unfortunately(?) for some this... doesn’t really hold true for most of the route and I find it an odd way to bill it.

The initial conflict/relationship growth in the game stems from the MC wanting to be closer to Soshi - not necessarily in a romantic sense - and his distance due to his position. If you’re expecting a more haughty/sneering/pragmatic Kenjiro Tsuda more along the lines of his role as Kazama Chikage and/or a villain archetype who treats MC as a tool (no judgment, we all got our otome types) he’s by and large not that. Things get more complicated around the 10th chapter, but that’s 2/3 of the game in.

The writing is competent. Again, if you’re looking for complex worldbuilding and something deep, you will not find it here. But, while it isn’t poetry in motion, there was at least no point where I actively cringed or asked myself why I was playing it (this is compared to my experience with Voltage Games and Playchoices).

The MC is tolerable. There’s nothing special about her, but she avoids being a literal faceless protagonist with zero presence while also not having such a strong personality as to be polarizing. She shows more competence and restraint than I expected of her (the bar was nearly floor level, but still).

The pacing is... odd. I get the distinct feeling that it’s a longer otome shoved inside a mobile otome, if that makes sense. I’ve seen other reviews call it rushed, but that isn’t necessarily the feeling I get. For a game to feel “rushed” to me, it has to show a lack of care and attention to detail; scenes are had just to have them and either don’t contribute to the overall plot/theme/feeling of the game. I feel like this game does take care, especially in it’s early bits, but some developments happen later on which don’t get the development time they necessarily need. Which leads me to-

The plot kind of goes off the rails around chapter 10 or 11. It returns to form in chapter 14ish. This... plot twist, shall we say, is predicated on hiding obfuscating knowledge from the reader that should be apparent due to being from the MC’s PoV. Whether or not this is a dealbreaker will depend largely on the person. Personally, I was loopy off resisting sleep medication while reading this part so I just sort of accepted it and the return to form/explanation in later chapters made it worth it, but your mileage will definitely vary. I have Thoughts on this, but this is all I can really say while still maintaining a spoiler free review.

Playtime if ardently listening to the voices is ~3 hours. Playtime can be cut down significantly if you’re a fast reader and don’t overly care about the voice acting.

I haven’t tried all alternate options, but there doesn’t seem like huge variations regarding the choices. The 16th chapter, however, will change based on whether you get the Normal or Happy End.

Art - 7/10

The art isn’t anything special nor is it terrible. It’s much less stiff and has more style to it that most mobile otome’s I’ve played, but is lacking when compared to, again, full length otome games.

The MC has a face, which gets points from me (I dislike faceless MCs a lot especially when included in CGs). The fact no one but love interests even get sprites is somewhat jarring.

As far as CGs go, they’re standard fare and about the number you’d expect for the length of a route. The game isn’t raunchy like... at all so don’t expect anything too scandalous.

Voice Acting - 10/10

What can I say? It’s Kenjiro Tsuda.

To elaborate, however-

Kenjiro Tsuda does an excellent job. I’m not sure if I’d call it his best work, but even if it is voiced, I think there’s some expectation for a mobile otome’s voicework to be phoned in. This is not the case and Tsuda’s acting gives a lot of life to the character and scenarios. I’ll, uh, save my gushing for my line-by-line dissertation, and leave it at that.

What was unexpected was, despite not having sprites, minor characters do get voices! They also have some rather nice performances, and there was no VA I disliked listening to or whose performance was noticeably lacking compared to the others (the actual sound quality was consistent overall as well).

Overall - 8/10

Aside from the prologue, this is a solid performance from a mobile otome game. Compared to full-length otome games it’s lacking, but it’s still one of the better mobile otomes I’ve played. For the $6 you can get individual routes for on the mobile app, it’s a fun, quick romp that was perhaps not necessarily what was advertised (regarding the actual summary), but instead met the expectations I dared to dream of. While I can’t vouch for the game in its entirety, I can, at the very least, vouch for this route.

Comprehensive Overlook + Personal Rating - 10/10

Okay, I’ve been objective as possible despite this being a very subjective topic and now it’s time for me to shill my little heart out.

Writing a standard fare review for this game was really really hard for me because against all odds, logic, and my own taste preferring shit like Hakuouki, I’m in love with this game. Obsessed with it. Half the reason why I’m doing this is because it is a totally unremarkable (though, again, fun) otome game so of course it doesn’t have, like, a community, but I need to fucking gush about it somewhere.

Why?

Because Soshi Amazaki literally hits every single husband trait I so dearly love. This route is the equivalent of if someone took my taste buds and analyzed each and every one of them, then cooked a meal precisely on my most loved things. It isn’t necessarily fine dining, but it feels like it was scientifically engineered to appeal directly to me. It’s like I was possessed and ghostwrote it. It’s like someone peered into my heart and teased out the essence of everything I’ve ever wanted, then told me to eat shit because the shell it’s rammed into is that of a bite sized otome game. I have never had such a feast before me. I’ve never been served such an exquisite palette of flavors. I have never been so thoroughly outraged that this is the form my heart takes.

And yet, I’m... pretty much satisfied, despite its flaws and shortness, with my only real outrage stemming from the fact there is literally nobody I can talk about this with (the morning after I binged the entire route I made my boyfriend play it just so I could rave like a lunatic to someone about it) as well as my shame for being so enamored with what is essentially a mediocre otome game.

I talked about how the story kind of went off the rails 2/3rds of the way through, but honestly? I didn’t care because the payoff was incredible. Was I scared the game wasn’t going to end up where I wanted it to while it was happening? Was I prepared to be immensely disappointed because I felt, briefly, like I was baited and that of course nothing would never let me have my cake and eat it too? Yep. But you know what? I don’t know or care if it’s because I set the bar so low or what, but my expectations were thoroughly blown out of the water.

I’m still committed to making even this part of the review spoiler free, so I won’t be going into depth about what I loved (I’ll save that for another post because this is long enough as it is), but I’ll add this apart from just character archetype and themes being what I loved.

That is, shockingly enough and even considering the pacing and, ahem, weirdness - this is a route where everything seems to serve a function. Again, the story isn’t necessarily deep, and while perhaps I would’ve gone about certain things a different way (and had there been space allotted for greater development), there are many, many, many things that are called back to or that seem insignificant, but serve as thematic backbone and create delicious implications.

As a big brother connoisseur, I give this route 3 Michelin Stars.

If you followed me for/like Fire Emblem’s Marx/Xander, I highly recommend this route.

[aire101]

Ferrum Chapter 2

Here’s chapter two, and my apologies for how closely part of it follows Episode 1 of SAO.  After this the story probably won’t follow much of the shown canon at all, though I will probably bring in SAO characters for the boys to interact with eventually.  But in SAO everyone has the same starting point.  But with the world being as complex as it is, I doubt I’ll ever really need to follow episode events or dialogue this closely again.  Though I might get the boys involved in the Level 1 boss battle, we’ll see.

Also, please excuse any incorrect computer/programming/gaming jargon.  I’m doing the best I can. T_T

------------------

Peter was a masochist.  That was really the only explanation for his current situation.  The person had even offered to go their own way before Peter had opened his big mouth and tied them together for the next few hours.

Peter knew it wasn’t really Mr. Stark, he did.  But the avatar looked exactly like the Tony Stark that Peter remembered— before the space starvation and the new stress lines of living in a post-apocalyptic earth.  And he sounded just like him.  He had the same weird humor that fluctuated wildly between arrogance and self-deprecation.  He got Peter’s stupid science jokes and the laugh he gave when Peter growled out “FINISH HIM” during a fight with a boar was painfully familiar.  Several times he had to stop himself from calling out the wrong name, and each time left him feeling like he was repeatedly prodding a gaping chasm of a wound.

“You ok, Ki— uh, sorry… Tor?”

And then there was that.  All in all, it was a perfect recipe for emotional disaster.

“Yeah, sorry… my mind wandered off a bit there.”

“In the middle of a pvp and monster spawn zone might not be the best place for that you know.  How does this game even handle respawns?” asked Ferrum, striking down another boar with a swift horizontal strike.  It taken a bit of trial and error for them to get the hang of activating the sword skills, but once it had clicked they had made quick work of the low level spawns in the area.

“You know, for someone who managed to snag a limited release of this game you know surprisingly little about it,” responded Peter.

“Yes, I known, I’m an enigma.  Humor me and explain please.”

“We’re supposed to respawn in the nearest town I think.  Given the bugs we’ve seen so far though I’m not sure I’d want to test that at the moment.  Might be one way to initiate a logout though?” said Peter.

“I’d rather not risk it, and I’d suggest you do the same until we hear from an actual GM,” said Ferrum, sheathing his sword.  “That being said, we’ve been out here several hours now, wanna head back into town and see if anyone has heard anything?”

“Sure,” said Peter, also putting away his weapon.  They stood in the middle of a clearing with expansive views.  Most of the beasts in this area hadn’t been ones to initiate conflict, and they would have plenty of forewarning if anything headed in their direction.  So for a moment Peter allowed himself to just relax and take a proper look around the area, marveling at the beauty and complexity of the world Argus had built.  Off in the distance he could see hills disappear into the haze of the the horizon and cities raised atop impossible pillars.  In a field not too far from them there were a couple other players likewise looking out, taking in the beauty of the glistening waterfalls and towns painted in oranges and reds as sunset came over Aincrad.  

“I have to give them credit.  When I first heard about their plans for this game I was a bit dubious on whether they would actually be able to deliver on the promise.  Concept art looks great, but actually being able to code a full sensory experience into an application?  And create an entire open world with that data?  I mean, I had thought about the concept before, but the technology needed to do it always made me a bit uneasy…  It would be way to easy for someone to use it in ways it shouldn’t be,” said Ferrum.

“What changed your mind then? I mean, since you’re here now?” asked Peter.

“…I don’t know,” muttered Ferrum, sounding distinctly unsettled with the admission.

Peter opened his mouth with a joke on the tip of his tongue, something to lighten the suddenly uneasy mood—

When the deep toll of a bell rang out from the Town of Beginnings, rolling through the air with the tone of a death knell.

“Huh, wonder if they’re finally about to make an announcement?” said Peter.  “I’m surprised it took so—”

Suddenly a white light enveloped him.  In those seconds he felt nothing, completely stripped of sensory.  Just as he felt himself starting to panic, the light released him and was gone as quickly as it had came.  He found himself and Ferrum once again standing in the center of the plaza of the Town of Beginnings.  All around them seemingly every one of the 10,000 players were similarly being teleported into the square.  

“What the hell?” said Ferrum.

“I don’t know.  Pretty sure they should be able to make announcements across the whole game regardless of player location.  Maybe its an opening event?  Would explain the theatrics of it,” said Peter.

The whole square was a buzz with nervous confusion as people tried to figure out what was going on, then Peter heard someone call out above the crowd, “Up there!”

Peter looked up, and above the square there flashed a single red polygon with the word WARNING.

The sky turned red as more and more polygons spawned proclaiming ‘WARNING’ and ‘SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT.’

Peter wanted to think that maybe they had found the bug.  Maybe they were announcing a fix or instructions for the players…

But even without his spidey sense, something felt wrong.

Then the sky began to bleed.

“What is that?” asked a player to the side in horrified awe as the blood-like liquid began to coalesce into a more solid state.  Within moments it formed into a hooded figure wearing familiar blood red robes with gold trim.

A Game Master— likely an a real one this time.

The crowd of players all began to mutter speculations about the figure or the possibility of an event.

“I have bad feeling about all this.”

Peter jumped.  He had forgotten about Ferrum at his side.  He looked over at the older looking man, taking in the tight lines around his mouth, his eyes darting around the area taking everything in, but not straying too long way from the god-like figure of the GM in front of them.

Peter wished he could reassure the man like he had earlier in the day, but Peter was suddenly very aware that in this world he was no different than anyone else.  Just as vulnerable, just as powerless… What had originally been a main draw for him was now a very real weakness.  

“It would be way to easy for someone to use it in ways it shouldn’t be…”

They were absolutely at the mercy of this monolithic system…

“Attention Players… Welcome to my world.  My name is Kayaba Akihiko.  As of this moment, I am the sole person who can control this world.”

And whoever controlled it.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered Ferrum, a look of horror on his face.

“I’m sure you’ve already noticed that the logout button is missing from the main menu,” Kayaba continued.  “But this is not a defect in the game.”

A shiver traveled up Peter’s spine.  A stone of cold fear formed in his stomach.  Surely not… surely someone along the way would have noticed something so horrendous in the code…

“I repeat— this is not a defect in the game.  It is a feature of Sword Art Online.”

“But how… how can he keep us here?  Surely someone on the outside can still get us out?” asked Peter.

“It’s the hardware, Kid.  He’s fucked with the user client hardware that everyone’s brains are wired into,” growled Ferrum.

“You cannot log out of SAO yourselves.  And no one on the outside can shut down or remove the NerveGear.  Should this be attempted, the transmitter inside the NerveGear will emit a powerful microwave, destroying your brain and thus ending your life,” said Kayaba.

Immediately Peter ran through all the specs on the hardware he was privy to during his time as Tony’s intern, and came to the same conclusion Ferrum already had— this mad man was not lying.  He had disabled the safety mechanism that would keep certain powerful data bursts from frying someone’s brain.

Data bursts such as an autosave or a death respawn.

“Unfortunately, several players’ friends and families have ignored this warning, and have attempted to remove the NerveGear.  As a result, two hundred and thirteen players are gone forever, from both Aincrad and the real world.”

“Two hundred and thirteen…”

Peter turned around to see Ferrum looking on with eyes wide, his right hand grasping his left wrist as his left hand gave small spasms.  

That motion was intimately familiar.  The similarity  was uncanny…

“As you can see, news organizations across the world are reporting all of this, including the deaths.” Multiple program windows opened, most featuring various news channels running live, corroborating what Kayaba was explaining.    “Thus, you can assume that the danger of a NerveGear being removed is now minimal.  I hope you will relax and attempt to clear the game.

But I want you to remember this clearly.  There is no longer any method to revive someone within the game.  If your HP drops to zero, your avatar will be forever lost.  And simultaneously, the NerveGear will destroy your brain.”

So he was right— it was both the autosave and respawn functions that had been weaponized in the headset.  The more he thought about it, the more angry he became.  The man had taken glorious innovations in technology—some of it pioneered by Mr. Stark himself—and twisted it into a personal hell for all these people, some of them undoubtedly children.  As if the world hadn’t been dealing with enough tragedy over the last few years.  He wanted nothing more than to punch Kayaba directly in the face with every pound of his spider strength.

But he couldn’t do that.  In this world, he was just like everyone else.

With great power comes great responsibility… but without that power, was that responsibility still his?

“There is only one means of escape.  To complete the game,” Kayaba said, bringing up a digital layout of the floors of Aincrad.  “You are presently on the lowest floor of Aincrad, Floor 1.  If you make your way through the dungeon and defeat the Floor Boss, you may advance to the next level.  Defeat the final boss on Floor 100, and you will clear the game.”

The crowd, which up till now had been mostly muted in shock, finally began to shout and rumble in confusion and denial.  And from the sound of things, this monologue was just about to wrap up.  When it did, all hell was going to break loose.

He had some choices to make, and fast.

“Finally, I’ve added a present from me to your item storage.  Please see for yourselves.”

Shit.  What now?

Peter swiped down to access his storage, feeling distinctly as if he were walking into a trap.  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Ferrum doing so as well.

An item labeled ‘Mirror’ had been placed in his inventory.

“I’m guessing this mirror is the ‘gift,’ though now I’m wondering if he programmed the auto-drop or did it himself, and if he’s aware of my… status,” whispered Ferrum.

That’s right.  Ferrum was a GM, however that had happened.

“Do you think you could—”

But he didn’t get to finish his question, as at that moment everyone in the plaza began to shout as they were all consumed once again by white light.

When it receded, everyone had changed.

Some looked younger, most looked older.  Quite a few people around him looked to have changed genders completely.  Peter glanced back down at the mirror in his to see his Thor-like appearance gone completely, and instead his true face reflected back at him.  

So that was the purpose of the all too thorough calibration he and Ned had gone through.

“Kid,” said a shocked voice at his side.  

Peter turned around towards Ferrum, wondering who had been behind the meticulous avatar of Mr. Stark…

Only to see that Ferrum was completely unchanged.  Perhaps being a GM had made him impervious to the magic of the mirror?

“Underoos… what are you doing here, kid?!”

With those heartbroken words, Peter’s carefully constructed walls came crashing down.

. . . . .

Peter couldn’t think.  He certainly couldn’t speak.

He could vaguely tell that Kayaba had continued with his closing speech, but he couldn’t tell you what he had said.

All he could process was Mr. Stark’s face in front of him, and the name that only he had ever uttered to him.

It was impossible.  He had seen the body—the horrific scorching where the universal energies had burned through him, the life support system shutting off, the brightness leaving behind a cold husk in a metal suit—

Peter’s whole body flinched when he felt that familiar hand rest on his shoulder.

“Kid!  Are you with me?  We need to get out of here.”

In the time Peter had spaced out Kayaba had disappeared, and now the whole crowd was devolving into a panic.  People were screaming in terror and rage, several had broken down into sobbing messes on the ground.

He wanted to do something— anything to make this better.  Tell people that it was ok, they would figure this out.

But more than that, he wanted someone else to tell him that as well.

Finally he brought himself to focus on what Mr. Stark was saying.

“What do you mean we have to go— where else is there to go?” asked Peter.  “We can’t leave the game, we’ve tried—”

“Not the game, we need to get out of town.”

“What— why—”

“We can talk more later, follow me,” Mr. Stark said before running down a nearby alley.

After a few minutes they stopped, and Mr. Stark started flicking through his user interface.

“This is a fantasy RPG… you can’t tell me there are no helmets…”

After scrolling for a while, he tapped an item on the list and spawned a basic metal helmet and quickly placed it on is head, before continuing to run out of town.

“Mr. Stark!  Wait!” cried Peter.

“Don’t shout that kid, otherwise the helmet is pointless!” Mr. Stark called back.

“Ferrum… why are we heading out of town?  Its about to be dark and the only safe zone we know is here!” shouted Peter.

“The people back there are panicking, Peter.  It won’t be much longer before they start turning on each other, looking for someone to take it out on.  Between my face and the fact that some saw me in GM robes earlier I don’t want to chance hanging around for someone to put the pieces together.  Not to mention this area’s resources are going to be swamped before we know it.  Resource management is built in to the Cardinal system to maintain balance and encourage player movement and activity.  There won’t be enough to go around.”

“But if we die on the road the resources we need won’t really matter!” yelled Peter, pulling to a stop.  “There’s only so much they can do to us in town, it’s a No PVP area.  Lets just find an inn on the outskirts of town and spend the night.  We need a better plan than just running out of the safe zone at twilight.”

Mr. Stark had pulled to a stop when Peter had, obviously unwilling to leave him behind.  He looked down the alley, obviously wanting to continue on, but after a moment his shoulders dropped in an obvious show of concession.

“Fine, lets go to the outer ring and find a place,” said Mr. Stark.

As he turned and started walking away, Peter allowed himself a moment to take in the familiar gait, the way Mr. Stark always walked with his back straight and his head held high, as if he were always prepared to walk onto a red carpet, even in his most destroyed workshop clothes.

He could recognize every familiar mannerism from their hours pouring over suit tech and web formulas.  In retrospect, perhaps that as much as his face was why he had latched onto the man to begin with.  

But the billion dollar question still remained… how?

Hopefully once they found a room to bunk in, he could work out what the hell was going on… preferably before he had a complete emotional breakdown.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT STARTUPS TO GET STARTUP FUNDING

I heard this, I thought, the world. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Result: if it can't contain exciting sales pitches, spam becomes less effective as a marketing vehicle, and fewer businesses want to use. You need to be software for making them, so we decided to write some software, it might be a good startup is the percentage chance it's Google. I remember sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the number of nonspam and spam messages respectively. 5, or that can incorporate live data feeds, or that you've done something inappropriate. They got in fights and played tricks on one another. An essayist needs the resistance of the plate.

I calculate as follows: continuation 0. Arthur Miller wrote, but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is not an all or nothing thing like a series A round in which a single VC fund or occasionally two invested $1-5 million. A startup's life will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software. It works well for Google and ITA, which are the most general of general principles. But the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome. The early adopters will be driven ever further apart. Arbitrarily declaring such a border would have constrained our design choices.

We'll suppose our group of founders know what they're doing, you'll be denounced as a yellowist will just be a distraction.1 Bill Gates will of course come to mind first will be the rule with Web-based software is never going to shut me up. Imitating it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, or Alan Kay, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will be for the better.2 Someone responsible for three of the best things Google has done. Telling me that I didn't want to have too much to do with the prisoners as possible, so they can tell when someone copies them. If you have any opinions that you would want to put their name on. But, like us, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one outside person acceptable to both.

If there's one thing all startups have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to see what focus overlooks. 99 and, say, approach offers as in this approach offers having a probability of. No one except the owner of a piece of software that's full of bugs. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. So if you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the talking, but he described his co-founder of Excite.3 They will have to design software so that it can easily kill you. Plus as a consulting company initially, because we were so desperate for users that we'd offer to build merchants' sites for them if their firm invested in a company they discovered. In startups one person may have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your own computer. What you need to win. Being smart seems to make you unpopular. I suddenly found myself working for a big company, they were the keepers of the knowledge of vaguer, buglike things, like features that confused users.4

Which is of course an extremely incriminating sign, except in the mail of a few sysadmins. Well, they are more afraid of you than you are of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have zero. An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering. It was presumably many thousands of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what is heat? An advantage of consulting, as a deal progresses, to start to believe that stricter laws would decrease spam. Perhaps the best policy is to make more than you actually are. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. But it could. Just make stuff and put it online. Have low expectations.

Say what you're doing, and b explain why users will want it. That idea is almost as old as the web. It's a lot easier for a couple of 20 year old hackers who are too naive to be intimidated by the idea. Just a few months, until blown out of the system you're dealing with, things probably either already are or could easily become much worse than they seem. Don't let rejections pile up as a depressing, undifferentiated heap. Bigger companies solve the problem at all, it means you don't need Microsoft on the client, and a great many configuration files and settings. Every designer's ears perk up at the mention of that game, because it's no worse than lots of others.

Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups.5 They were designed to be a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity.6 Will I ever read it? And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.7 In fact they tend to spend all their time doing that. Another approach is to follow the case of contemporary authors. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell through it. But there's a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. Server problems were the big no-no for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a way to keep tabs on industry trends than as a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the day to day management. In the process of talking to them all can bring a startup to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.

At Viaweb, support was free, because we wanted to know. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not beyond the bounds of possibility, is beyond the scope of this article. Google is going to beat them. So who are the great hackers? This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Imagine a kind of suggestion box, because users only used it when the predefined page styles couldn't do what they want.8 So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. At most software companies, most code had one definite owner.

Notes

The same reason I say the raison d'etre of prep schools supplied the same as they are bleeding cash really fast.

Spices are also startlingly popular on pre-money valuation of an investment. But if idea clashes got bad enough, a lot of money around is never something people treat casually.

Several people I talked to mentioned how much of it. Fortuna! But I think the main emotion I've observed; but it might be tempted to ignore these clauses, because the remedy was to realize that. As well as good as Apple's just by hiring sufficiently qualified designers.

One YC founder told me: Another approach would be worth about 30 billion. That may require asking, because you have no idea how much of the War on Drugs. Incidentally, the growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a discovery. Founders rightly dislike the sort of person who understands how to appeal to space aliens, but we are only partially driven by the high score thrown out seemed the more corrupt the rulers.

If they really need a meeting, then they're not. You should always get a poem published in The New Yorker.

For similar reasons, including the numbers we have to pass so slowly for them, but explain that's what we now call science. Francis James Child, who probably knows more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator. At the seed stage our valuation was in a band, or an electric power grid than without, real estate development, you can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you better be sure you do. These range from make-believe, is not work too hard to say about these: I should add that none of your identity.

How to Make Wealth when I was a test of success for a patent is now replicated all over the internet. A few VCs have an edge over Silicon Valley is no richer if it's not the sense that if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects. If a man has good corn or wood, or because they are bleeding cash really fast.

Trevor Blackwell, who may have been truer to the company's present or potential future business belongs to them this way, be forthright with investors.

Thanks to Eric Raymond, Geoff Ralston, Rajat Suri, Sam Altman, Jon Levy, Fred Wilson, Jessica Livingston, Sarah Harlin, and Ross Boucher for smelling so good.

[turquoisedays]

Namihana Headcanons: The Triangle Offense

Before I start this headcanon or whatever you’d like to call it, I just want to take a moment to add a disclaimer. This post will use basic basketball terms, so if you’re confused by terms like “baseline” and “the post” and “pop out”, I suggest looking it up. I’m here to try and explain what Mizuki calls “advanced basketball wizardry”, not basic terminology. This headcanon will also be pretty basic and won’t address nearly all of the many, many, many options the triangle offense presents. I’m not even sure if my explanation of the offense will be helpful, but I bought two books to help me figure out this offense, and I’m going do my best.

The diagrams in this post come from the chapter on the triangle offense in this book and from Joon Kim’s blog on the triangle offense. I will link to my sources for these images and the quotes at the end of this headcanon.

 Namihana runs the triangle offense, a system of offense that is and has been used in high school, college, and professional basketball. It is a system that Chuck Klosterman describes in his 2012 article “What Ever Happened to the Triangle Offense?” as “pretty much irrefutably, the single most dominant offensive attack (in any major sport) of the past 20 years.” The triangle offense is the system that helped the Chicago Bulls win six titles and the Los Angeles Lakers win five titles under Phil Jackson and Tex Winter.

Along with being associated with players like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal, the triangle offense also has a reputation for being complex and for bordering on the esoteric. However, devotees and the rare few that understand the triangle offense argue that the triangle offense is simple.

Mizuki is one of those people. She’ll say that the triangle offense is pretty easy to understand and then follow that up by saying that when the ball’s reversed to the top of the key, there are about 35 possible options you can use.

Before we take a more in-depth look at some specific elements of the triangle offense, it’s important to understand what it is, what it demands from players, and what its benefits are.

Phil Jackson and Tex Winter write that the triangle offense is “a sideline triangle on one side of the court and a two-man game on the other side, in which the offensive options are dictated by the positioning and reactions of the defenders.” In other words, the triangle offense is an offense that involves a human triangle made up of three players on one side of the court with two players on the opposite side of the court.

There are no set plays or patterns in the triangle offense. Instead, the offense functions as a sequence of options. These options are dictated by how the defense positions itself and how it reacts to the offense. In other words, the passes players running the triangle make after they receive the ball are dictated by what position they’re in on the floor and the specific defensive alignment they’re up against.

Howard Grant, a forward who played for the Chicago Bulls from 1987 to 1994, summed it up best: “When the defense shuts 10 options down, we have 10 more. If a pass goes to the corner, we as a team know where to set screens, where to cut. Pass goes into the post to Bill Cartwright, we know all the picks on the other side of the floor.”

This means that if a team wants to run the triangle offense effectively, each player must learn and internalize the options the triangle offense provides and that each player must be able to read the defense and make decisions based on their observations. The triangle offense also requires players to be well-rounded in ball-handling, passing, footwork, screening, and shooting and requires players to play unselfishly for the offense to succeed. The triangle offense also helps players who aren’t as skilled still contribute to the offense.

The amount of options and sub-options the triangle offense provides a team with is a major contributor to the “esoteric” reputation it has. However, at the triangle offense’s most basic level, the system is based on “exact court spacing, execution of fundamentals, and constant movement of the ball and players based on certain rules.”

The triangle offense is simple and complex at the same time. It lets the offense play as a team while letting players make their own offensive decisions. The triangle offense can seem contradictory, but in the words of Joon Kim, “Dedication to fundamentals, asking the players to actually think, and system flexibility have allowed the triangle to escape the scrutiny of the best NBA minds and stand the test of time.”

Without further ado, let’s get into the principles that guide the triangle offense.

Guiding Principles

Seven Principles of the Sound Offense

Penetration. Players have to penetrate the defense and the best way to accomplish this is by using fast breaks.

Spacing. Players are spaced so that it’s difficult for the opposing team to defend, trap players, and help their teammates. Players are spaced 15-20 feet apart. This spreads the defense and allows the players enough room to make accurate passes to another player quickly. This spacing also ensures that every time the defense goes to guard or trap a player, they are leaving another offensive player open. Proper spacing also forces the defense to cover a larger area which provides the offense with more angles to attack them at.

Ball and player movements. Players have to move with a purpose even when they don’t have the ball. This ensures that the offense keeps the defense occupied on the ball and off-the-ball. Furthermore, according to Phil Jackson and Tex Winters, many players think off-the-ball activity is unimportant because they’re used to only paying attention to how the ball is moving and the player who has it. This makes purposeful and effective on the ball and off-the-ball activity even more valuable when going up against a team who doesn’t pay much attention to the movement and activities of players who don’t have the ball.

Options for the ball handler. An offensive player will be more successful if they have more options to use against a defender. The ball handler has far more options when their teammates are moving to another position to free themselves or another teammate with a pick.

Offensive rebounding and defensive balance. Not only do players have to “go strong” for the rebound and not only does the offense has to have strong offensive rebound positions on all shots, but players also have to maintain court balance and pay attention to keep the opposing team from making a fast break. The offense also has to provide defensive balance.

Versatile positioning. The offense has to allow any player a chance to fill any spot on the court, regardless of the individual player’s role. Each position on the court has to be interchangeable. In other words, regardless of whether the player is a point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, or center, the offense has to give them the chance to fill any given spot on the court.

Use individual talents. The offense should let the team utilize its best players’ set of skills and accentuate those skills. This principle acknowledges that players have different skills and levels of skill and that an offense should take advantage of those skills.

 Passing Principles

Passing is the key to executing the triangle offense and in order to effectively execute it, players have to adhere to the following principles of passing:

Pass when the defender is three feet from the ball or closer. The defender will have less time to react to the passer’s movements the closer they cover the passer.

See the passing lanes and the receiver, but don’t stare at the target receiver. Use peripheral vision without making a blind pass. (The only player on Namihana’s team who is allowed to ignore the rule about not making blind passes is Asami.)

Use fakes with a purpose without overfaking. Fakes should be made with a purpose. Fakes made with a purpose let the passer get the ball away from the defender based on the defender’s reaction. The passer should also be aware of all passing lanes and retain their poise when they make a fake.

Eliminate all unnecessary movements. Use quick wrist and finger action to shorten the action of the pass as much as possible.

Pass quickly to an open teammate. An open teammate must make a play within three seconds after they receive the ball. Phil Jackson and Tex Winter write that for every second under three seconds it takes for the player who received the ball to execute a play, the better basketball player they become. Similarly, for every second over three seconds, the poorer player they become. Moving the ball quickly forces the defense to adjust and might force them out of position, which increases the chances of creating passing lanes and more opportunities to score.

Pass the ball to a teammate’s open side. The passer has to have a view of their defender and a view of the passing lane and the receiver’s defender. The receiver should help the passer by improving to become a good target and by keeping the defender away from the passing lane by sealing them off.

Anticipate receiving the ball and be thinking ahead where (to what teammates and location) to throw the ball next. The best players possess this skill, but if players don’t have this skill, you need to build an offensive pattern that quickly moves the ball around to keep the defense occupied.

Court Symmetry

As mentioned in the second principle of the Seven Principles of the Sound Offense, proper spacing gives the player with the ball a lot of room to maneuver and respond to traps and help and helps spread the defense. Because of this, the offense begins with the players aligned in a symmetrical fashion that forms a triangle on both sides of the half-court as shown below.

In the triangle offense, guards, forwards, centers aren’t restricted to their usual spots on the court. To put it simply, spots can be filled by any player. Once the spots are filled, the offense is run based on where the ball is positioned on the court and based on how the defense is moving.  

How is the offense able to read and react to the defense? On their blog The Triangle Offense, Joon Kim argues that this ability to “read and react to the defense is based on initiating the offense against pressure at the moment of truth and lining up and reading the defense by forming the triangle along the line of deployment.”

The Moment of Truth

The triangle offense was designed so that the offense wouldn’t have to rely on a point guard to bring the ball up the court, because the point guard could be affected by the opponent’s defense such as a full court press. For this reason, the triangle offense is a two-guard offense to share passing duties and ball-handling duties and to prevent the defense from targeting one player out front. As Joon Kim explains, as the guard with the ball brings the ball up the court, the front-line defensive pressure will dictate which of the many options to initiate the triangle offense will be used.

The moment of truth, as Joon Kim describes it, is “the moment when the ball handler pushing the ball encounters defensive pressure.” When the ball handler reaches the moment of truth, the ball handler (1) has to be ready to pass the ball to the wing (3) as they reach the moment of truth and 3 has to time their pop-out so they can receive the ball at the wing position when 1 reaches the moment of truth. This can be seen in the diagram below.

For this reason, the imaginary line three feet in front of the ball handler’s defender is known as the line of truth.

The lag principle is a guard-to-guard pass that is used if 1 reaches the moment of truth and 3 isn’t open after their pop-out. During the lag principle, 1 passes to 2 as 2 remains three or more feet behind the line of truth as a safety measure. 4 pops out to receive the pass and as they do so, 2 passes the ball to them. Players 1, 2, and 4 in these two passes have to coordinate their moves and timing to ensure a successful wing entry. The lag principle is illustrated below.

To use a more concrete example and try to use less lingo to understand the moment of truth, let’s say Namihana is playing a basketball game. Asami has the ball and is bringing it up the court and her defender is more than three feet away from her. Meanwhile, Tamika occupies the wing position on the strong-side (the side that has the ball) of the court. When Asami reaches the line of truth, which is located three feet in front of the player guarding her, Tamika moves to receive the pass and Asami passes the ball to her.

To explain the lag principle, we’ll use a scenario like the one above except when Tamika moves to receive Asami’s pass at the moment of truth, the player guarding Tamika moves with her. This means Asami can’t pass the ball to Tamika. Instead, Asami passes the ball to Mucha, who has been lagging behind the line of truth by three feet or so. Mucha is open so Asami passes the ball to her. Ramu, who is near the post, moves to receive Mucha’s pass as Mucha passes the ball to her.

There are many more ways the triangle offense can overcome defensive pressure, but for simplicity and brevity’s sake, I’ve only mentioned the moment of truth and the lag principle. 

The Line of Deployment

Now that that is out of the way, I can discuss a vital but basic concept of the triangle offense: the line of deployment. The line of deployment is an imaginary line from the forward in possession of the ball to the center, the center’s defender, and the basket. To play a standard defensive position between the center and the basket the center’s defender has to play behind the center as long as the center plays on the line of deployment. However, when the center’s defender is positioned this way, it’s easy for the forward to pass the ball to the center as shown below.

Like when I explained the moment of truth, let’s say Namihana is playing a basketball game. Ramu is on the strong side (the side that has the ball) of the triangle and has the ball. Mizuki is on the strong-side of the triangle in the post and on the line of deployment. Mizuki is being guarded by one player who is positioned between her and the basket. In order to prevent Mizuki from moving closer to the basket, this defender has to play behind Mizuki as long as Mizuki’s on the line of deployment. Because Mizuki’s defender is behind her, Ramu can make an easy pass to Mizuki.

If Mizuki’s defender wants to prevent Mizuki from getting the ball or make it difficult for her to get the ball, they have to move to Mizuki’s side or in front of Mizuki. When Mizuki’s defender moves to a position on one side or the other (baseline or the high side), they lose their position between Mizuki and the basket. Ramu can then make a quick pass to Mizuki’s open side. In both of these scenarios, once Mizuki receives Ramu’s pass, Mizuki can shoot the ball or pass the ball to a teammate who’s in position to do something with it.

To put it simply, the line of deployment allows the team to successfully get the ball to the center despite the opponents’ efforts to prevent the pass to the post.

Forming the Sideline Triangle

At this point, you might be wondering why the triangle offense has the reputation of being so difficult to understand and why it’s confounded so many people for decades. This is because of how many options it presents to the players. As Phil Jackson and Tex Winter write, “The triangle offense can be initiated with any of several pass options, depending on defensive adjustments and offensive strategies.” For the sake of brevity and simplicity, I’m only going to be explaining one of the four options for the first pass, strong-side fill guard to wing option.

What does “strong-side fill guard to wing” mean? We know that “strong-side” refers to the side of the court with the ball. From there, we can deduce that the triangle is being formed or “filled” on the strong-side of the court and that this option involves the strong-side guard passing to the wing.

As mentioned earlier, there are four different options a team can use to perform a guard to wing strong-side fill. I’m only going to discuss the outside cut option because it’s simple and it ties into the topic we’ll be discussing next. In the outside cut option, the ball handler (1) dribbles in the pro lane and passes to the wing (3). 1 also cuts outside of 3 and moves to the corner, which forms a triangle with 5 and 3. For this option to work, 3 has to be far away enough from the sideline so 1 can cut behind them and to ensure other kinds of cuts can be performed.

Let’s return to that imaginary Namihana basketball game where Namihana uses the outside cut first pass, strong-side fill option to form the triangle. Asami dribbles in the pro lane and passes to Tamika. Asami cuts behind Tamika, who has positioned herself so that she’s far away enough from the sideline to give Asami the room she needs to perform the cut, and then moves to the corner. Once Asami reaches the corner, she forms a triangle with Mizuki and Tamika. While this happens, Mucha, who is on the weak side, cuts to the middle of the court to provide defensive balance.

Keep in mind that not only is the outside cut one of several options to perform a first pass, guard to wing strong-side fill, but also that the guard to wing strong-side fill option is one of several options, each of which comes with multiple ways and options to perform it, for the strong-side fill. The first pass, weak-side fill also has many options and options within those options, but I’m not discussing them here.

The Second Pass

After the triangle is formed on the court’s strong side, there are four passes the strong-side wing can make. As a group, these options are referred to as “second pass” because they occur after the pass to the wing position in the moment of truth. Each of these passes can be directed to four different spots on the court and each of these spots presents multiple offensive options and sub-options to carry out those options.

Let’s assume that the strong-side guard (1) passes to the strong-side wing (3) and then moves to the corner. 3 reads the defense and makes one of the following passes:

First look: to the center (5).

Second look: to the weak-side guard (2) who is located in the middle of the half-court nears the top of the circle.

Third look: to the weak-side wing (4) on the backdoor step.

Fourth look: to the strong-side guard (1) in the corner.

First Look: Pass to Center

For simplicity and brevity’s sake, I’m going only going to explain the first option for the first look play.

The play starts with the outside cut guard to wing strong-side fill. In other words, it starts with 1 passing to 3, 1 moving to the corner to form the sideline triangle, and with 2 moving to the middle of the court. Here’s a visual illustration of this:

After the sideline triangle is formed, 3 passes to five and makes a fake to cut inside the lane. Then 3 cuts on the baseline side of 5 while 1 cuts as close as possible behind 3. 3 is the passer so they are the first to make their cut. They cut to the side of the teammate they’re trying to free (5). In the diagram below, you can see that while 1 and 3 are making their split speed cuts, 4 is moving towards the lane to get into a good rebound position and that 2 moves opposite to the ball so they spot up in the fan spot.

It should be noted that after 3 passes to 5, 3 can use different cuts to screen different players with the cooperation of their teammates.

Let’s return to that Namihana game one last time.

After performing the outside cut first pass, strong-side fill option to form the sideline triangle, Tamika passes to Mizuki. Two players on the opposing team rush to guard Mizuki, so Tamika makes a fake so she can cut inside the lane. Then Tamika cuts on Mizuki’s baseline side while Asami cuts as close as possible behind Tamika. Mizuki’s defenders have to choose between double teaming Mizuki at the expense of letting Tamika or Asami remain open, which would allow Mizuki to pass to one of them and give them a chance to score, or having one of them move to guard Tamika or Asami, which would give Mizuki more room to work with to make a shot or pass the ball.

I’ve left out a lot of the multitudinous options and sub-options the triangle offense presents and I decided not to address the solo cut series of options or the options for blind pig action even though Namihana does use them.

I know this was a really long and probably confusing explanation despite my best efforts, but I felt it was necessary to try to give people some ideas about how Namihana’s offensive system functions because it does tie into Namihana’s dynamic as a team and as a group of friends.

If you’d like to read more about the triangle offense, here are the sources I used:

The chapter on the triangle offense written by Phil Jackson and Tex Winter in this book.

“The Obtuse Triangle” by Nicholas Dawidoff

The Triple Post Offense by Tex Winter

“What Ever Happened to the Triangle Offense?” by Chuck Klosterman

Joon Kim’s Triangle Offense blog

[grumpyslav]

Wicked Saints Review ★★★ 1/2

This is a Slavic inspired fantasy. I am Slavic. A perfect match, right?

Well, no. Not really. This book has some good themes but it takes itself too seriously for what ends up being a typical YA fantasy (and there was potential for much more!) But hey, it has a sexy villain love interest so I am sure it will be a great success. 

Warning: this will be Long. I have Many Opinions. 

Plot: Nadya is a cleric (magic user) in a Russia-inspired country, Kalyazin. Her power comes from gods: she can communicate with the entire pantheon of gods and they give her magical powers whenever she asks. (We are told that gods sometimes don’t listen or that Nadya has to behave in a certain way to be on gods’ good side but we never witness that in the story.) The country is at war with a Polish-inspired country Tranavia because of religious differences. The gods were banished from Tranavia and blood magic is used instead, which is considered heresy in Kalyazin. When her monastery is attacked by Tranavian high prince Serefin, Nadya has to run away. She stumbles upon a Tranavian blood mage Malachiasz and his two sidekicks, who offer help. At some point, it is decided that the best way to end the war and bring gods back to Tranavia is to assassinate Serefin’s father, the king of Tranavia. This is where the real plot kicks in. (Which I will not spoil at this moment.) 

Magic system: An interesting idea, but the rules are never explained. That is probably one of the key problems with the story. We learn that Kalyazi clerics (Nadya is believed to be the last one) get magic powers from gods. Clerics can typically communicate with only one god, but Nadya can talk to all of them. (Why? Because she is the MC. We don’t know.) She calls the gods by pressing beads on her necklace. Based on the individual god’s power, Nadya can get strength, super speed, the ability to spy on her enemies, etc. A problem here is that we don’t know what is that gods can or cannot do; there are no limits to Nadya’s power. No rules are established so everything feels arbitrary (a key problem with the book’s magic system). This is a bad narrative choice, but in the second part of the book we learn that it is not so important what gods can do; all that is relevant is that they are the ones giving Nadya power.

Then we have Tranavians. They use blood magic: they always carry a book of spells and when they want to cast a spell, they tear a page from the book, cut themselves and bleed over the page. There are (presumably) many different spells that can do many different things, but just like with Kalyazi gods, we don’t have a clue what is possible and what is not. And just like Kalyazi gods, it turns out that it’s not so important what blood magic can do, it is important that this is blood magic.

All these things become relevant in the second part of the book, but by then it’s a bit late. The book starts adding exceptions and different approaches to magic but with no proper establishment and with no rules, we can’t judge this new stuff properly. Is it supposed to be scary? Is it supposed to be surprising? There are hints that some of it is new and never heard before, but it is never properly anchored. So you just go with the flow and take the author’s word that yes, this thing happening is Important. 

Characters: Nadya is a solid character that gets betrayed by the narrative. She is realistic as a naive, sheltered young woman who tries to find her place in the world, who makes mistakes but tries her best. She does all she can to have agency and be proactive. Unfortunately, narrative doesn’t let her. Her whole existence is marked by her lack of agency, because she depends on gods’ powers. In the second part of the book she grows a little and starts discovering her own power, but it’s late because this is where Malachiasz takes over as the most important character and Nadya gets sidelined. Sucks to be you, Nadya, but we gotta make room for a bad boy. 

Serefin is a solid character, although it is unclear why we spend almost half of the book in his head. There is no significant character development nor plot to warrant this. But he works as a character, so I have no major complaints. The only downside is that stuff such as his excessive drinking is used as a shorthand for characterization. 

Malachiasz is, arguably, the main character in the book. Both in literal and in meta sense. Literal, because the whole story ends up being about him. In meta sense, because one’s enjoyment of the book largely depends on whether the reader likes this character or not. Clearly written to be the core of the story’s secrets and adored by the author, there is no much room for those who might dislike him. He is a love child of Darkling and Kylo Ren and, for some reason, this is portrayed as interesting or worthy to carry the whole book. ?

Points for not making excuses for the romance: Malachiasz is portrayed as terrifying and there are no excuses there, take it or leave it. What sucks is that a man being terrifying is portrayed as a good thing, so in the end you do get your typical YA abusive bad boy (will this trope die already?) But at least we are spared explanations on why Malachiasz is actually a cinnamon roll, so at least that’s something. (Okay, not really. We do need to talk why this type of a man is romanticized over and over again. It is a bad trope, a lazy, incorrect and dangerous trope. But it’s a rant for another day.) 

Ending: The book ends on a high note but without major twists. I wouldn’t say the ending is predictable per se, but it’s more down to lack of rules in the magic system than clever writing. Still, a solid ending.

Representation: The author is clearly into Slavic folklore and it shows. For all the ways in which Wicked Saints resemble Grishaverse, I have to say that there is a clear effort to make setting respectably Slavic. Language aspects are good and certain things (in plot, aesthetics) are clearly inspired by Slavic cultures. At the same time, the story doesn’t feel Slavic at all. Duncan gets certain details right but misses the whole point and symbolism behind Slavic cultures and folklore. Which is unfortunate. Slavic folklore is highly symbolic and should not be taken literally. Wicked Saints is too literal to be Slavic, too gothic to be Slavic, to Western to be Slavic. 

And there is the whole issue of real-life history between Russia and Poland (which is not on Westerners to adapt as they please), as well as the fact that, once more, we have an image of Slavic cultures as wild, violent, always at war with each other, persecuting anyone who disagrees with their beliefs, etc, etc. I am aware that trashing Slavic cultures was not author’s intent (nor is that the point of the book), but it remains that it follows typical Western views of Eastern Europe, which is not helpful. 

When it comes to other types of diversity, there is an attempt but nothing of substance comes out of it. There are female characters in the position of power. Four POC characters (mainly sidekicks.) One female character who is into women (lesbian? bi? pan?) A few characters that could be understood as disabled (missing an eye, for example). That’s all I can think of. 

Verdict:  ★★★ ½ (Certain aspects deserve five stars, others fall to two)

A flip review: I’d say the focus on theology is the book’s strong point. More of that, please. Duncan opens a dialogue not commonly seen in YA books: about beliefs, religion, free will. All important, significant themes that so many authors don’t want to tackle in a complex manner. And points for doing research, particularly in linguistics. (If only Duncan didn’t want this to be so black metal we might have had a setting that does Slavic folklore justice.) But if we ignore real Slavic cultures and folklore, the whole thing does set itself apart in aesthetics from similar YA offerings. It also doesn’t shy away from confusing her readers, if need be. Duncan clearly knows what kind of a story she wants to tell and what kind of aesthetics she wants to achieve. With so many bland YA offerings, it is a refreshing thing to see. 

[save-the-spiral]

What about romantic headcanons about wizards who’s s/o isn’t a wizard at all?

These aren’t headcanons. More of a fic. Hope you enjoy!! I would’ve posted this sooner, but my laptop was taken away to be fixed up!!

Wizards are known to be adventurous. Common fact, really. Sometimes, wizards go places they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t.

And that’s where the real adventure begins.

The wizard was simply experimenting with teleporting- trying to make it cost less magical power, because they’ve lost good wizards who could’ve survived with just one more spell. Just a little bit more mana.

They knew it was dangerous, but so is teleporting into a world full of monsters with a lethally small amount of mana. So while they were risking their life, at least it was a good cause.

Preparing to test their theories, they readied their wand- a delicate rapier that they spent over a year crafting in Avalon, decorated in silver lines and jade. Before teleporting, they stomped on the ground, activating their circle of complex runes in the shape of a shimmery diamond-like ‘X’.

Muttering words of power under their breath, their breathing quickened in the darkness of their castle’s dungeon, the only light radiating from the runes in the room. Their dark eyes were focused on the small, intricate runes that lines their walls, the stone brick carved with rough, ancient magic that glowed a pale blue, becoming brighter with each magical word invoked.

That same magic swirled around the wizard, engulfing them in a whirlwind of something that felt like fear, visible in the magic that was steadily becoming the color of perfect aquamarines.

The faint scent of a salty sea breeze made their nose twitch as their vision went black.

-

They awoke with a groan, arm reaching out to pull their blankets up, wanting to shield their eyes, only to grab a handful of coarse sand. With a start, their eyes opened to the blinding sun and brilliant blue of the sky.

And the curious grey eyes staring down at them.

-

They were a wizard who managed to teleport themself into a Spiral of pirates. It was a Spiral full of violence and sailing and old songs.

None of their magic worked anymore. Their wand was nothing more than a knick-knack now, the enchantments gone and the weapon left weak. Their deck of spells still glowed faintly of magic, but without a weapon the wizard risked death if they tried to cast anything.

Admittedly, they could get used to it. It was nice, not having to cast magic, not having to worry about battles and wars.

The pirates were far less structured than the wizards. There was no order, no common area of schools. People here learned through hardship and necessity. Some of them could heal, others could trap, and others just attacked.

It was a chaos that held its own sort of freedom.

The pirate that had come across the wizard passed out on the beach was- odd. He was kind to those he trusted, and a menace to those he didn’t. Others gossiped about him, how he had no crew, but all he would do was smirk and quip about being a lone wolf.

He took the wizard in, explaining his worlds and entrusting them with books and all the knowledge he could impart.

Once or twice, he remarked on how they must’ve been a scholar back home. They were so intelligent, and they treated books with a special kind of loving care, so they must have at least had gone to some kind of school.

At the word school, the wizard had frozen. Fear scrambled into their bones, possessing their body to make way for panic to override their brain.

He learned to avoid words after that. He was patient.

The wizard thought that he was a good man. A murderer. A pirate who made his enemies cower in fear. Yet he was good.

There was goodness in the soft explanations, in the way he sewed them headscarves when their original one was ruined by some particularly angry sea birds, in the smiles and mischievous glances over pints of yum.

The wizard was a bit confused. Days passed of this companionship, and the pirate never mentioned leaving on his own, never claimed to be a lone wolf unless it saved him from awkward questions.

After a while, any time he mentioned leaving the docks of Skull Island, it always included the wizard. He would grin and speak of their future travels like it was what they had always done.

The wizard would only smile back, feeling a childish excitement that they hadn’t allowed themself to feel in a long time.

Was this what friendship was?

-

They rested in an old rocking chair, their bones settling and creaking like the docks of Flotsam, the driftwood straining and groaning with every moment, attempting a normal where they can exist in peace. The wizard sighed, their head falling back against the thin pillow secured to the rocking chair’s back.

The skies are so much clearer here.

The wizard was used to the dark oppressive skies of Dragonspyre, where they had taken refuge after they had gained enough notoriety for people to attempt to stalk them, trying to challenge for duels and other ridiculous things in order to gain their own reputation.

Back in the wizarding worlds, they were a hero. They were the top of their class, the leader. The pressure they had to withstand since they were twelve was immense, almost making them break-

“What are you thinking about?”

And they were confronted once again with those curious grey eyes, the pirate they belonged to lounging on the railing, one of his legs dangling over the side, the other bent with their boot resting flat against the uneven wood of the railing.

“Home.” They said, tearing their gaze from the horizon to stare into those eyes that pull like the moon pulls the tides.

He huffed, turning his head and resting it against the railing with a light ‘thump’. “’S useless to think of things like that.” He muttered. His boston accent was more obvious than normal, his emotions taking control for a moment.

“I don’t want to go back.” The wizard replied, feeling like they had to reassure the pirate. Their spine sent a sharp burst of pain through their shoulder, and they shifted restlessly, the moment of peace they had now long gone.

The distant cries of sea birds made the following silence all the more lonely, and the wizard shifted again, a cool rush of wind brushing over the pair. The pirate’s large poof of curls covered his face when the wind caught it, making him sit up with a goofy grin.

The wizard shifted again, their headscarf flying loose in the wind, letting their dark hair fall to their shoulders as they flinched harshly, instinctively retreating into the oversized coat they had taken to wearing.

The pirate moved quickly, their agile body a blur of motion as they crossed the balcony, leaping on the railing again to catch the silky headscarf in his hand. His free hand covered his eyes, his head turned to the side, as he returned the scarf.

When the wizard was comfortable again, the pirate settled into the opposing rocking chair, pushing it every time his feet hit the ground, the chair protesting with loud creaks every time.

“No…” The wizard trailed off, their gaze trained on the horizon again. They stole a glance at the pirate, whose face was slack as he stared at the setting sun, entranced as his attention focused solely on the horizon.

“I don’t think I ever want to go back.” The wizard whispered to themself.

-

The wizard didn’t realize someone could fall in love so fast. The word itself sent flutters through their body, settling in their stomach like a kaleidoscope of crystal butterflies.

They were in love with the pirate.

They were in love, and it was easy. They didn’t think it would be any different if he was a wizard or just a plain human or anything- no, it wouldn’t be any different at all.

Of course, if he wasn’t a pirate, they wouldn’t have met on that beach months ago. The wizard wouldn’t have had a guide through the pirating Spiral, wouldn’t have been able to sail through the universe at his side, their fingers trailing through the sky, catching stardust that burned new scars into the wizard’s hands, adding to a collection of hundreds.

If he wasn’t a pirate, they couldn’t share this perfect moment. On that same balcony in Flotsam where they watched the sunset together, ever since the first time where the wizard’s headscarf flew away and had to be rescued.

The horizon was lighting up in a brilliant array of oranges and reds and pinks, the sky darkening into a velvety violet. As they usually did, the wizard stole glances at the pirate. The golden colors of the sunset seemed to glow off of his beautiful skin. His grey eyes reflected the pink and red, and the wizard couldn’t help but marvel at how impossible in love they were with the pirate.

“I think I love you.” The wizard whispered in the quiet fade to night. It was the most adventurous thing they had ever done.

The pirate turned, a cocksure grin gracing his features as he spoke without pause, as if the wizard’s confession was simple. “’Bout time. I’ve been going mad over you since I met you. Glad you finally figured it out.”

It was like a shock to the wizard’s system, and they laughed incredulously. “You knew?”

The pirate laughed fully, the sound loud enough to cause some of the sea birds to wake up, their startled cawing joining into the sound below of drinking songs and shattering glasses and probably a sword fight or two.

“You didn’t know?” He replied simply, grinning.

The wizard huffed, and in a moment of boldness, they grabbed the pirate by the collar of his jacket and pulled him in. Those grey eyes were wide with shock, and the wizard could feel his breath on their skin.

“May I kiss you?” They asked, a smirk spreading slowly across their face at the dazed nod the pirate gave them.

The wizard leaned in slowly, the mischievous grin on their face fading as they tilted their head to the side, kissing the pirate almost shyly, their hands moving from his collar to brush along his neck, resting on his shoulders.

“I think I love you too.” The pirate whispered back.

-

Fate won’t let wizards and pirates stay apart forever.

And neither will love.

[booksong]

Top 10 Books Read In 2016

Bringing this back again this year (and yes I realize March is now almost over, I’m a little late oops), because I really enjoyed putting together a list last year, and one thing I always love in a new year is looking back on the great experiences I’ve had with reading, and hopefully lining up some new recommendations from others to look forward to in the rest of 2017!  

2016 was a rough year, but as with so much of my life, books were there to provide comfort, knowledge, escape, and new friends and perspectives.  Here are my 10 best titles of them, in no particular order (long post warning as always because it’s me talking about books):

1. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

The experience of sensing things that aren’t really there has long been considered a hallmark of the crazy and overemotional.  And yet hallucinations have been startlingly well documented in all types of people, and neurologist Oliver Sacks has compiled a wide range of anecdotes, personal accounts and sources, and scientific studies of the various forms they can take.  Vivid, complex visual and auditory hallucinations by the deaf and the blind, near-death and out-of-body experiences, phantom limbs, unseen 'presences', supernatural-esque encounters, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations induced by surgery, sensory deprivation, sleep disorders, drugs, seizures, migraines, and brain lesions--Sacks takes all these bizarre (and occasionally terrifying) case studies and conditions and approaches them with an attitude of fascination, curiosity, and clinical appreciation. 

I came into this book expecting to hear mostly about things like LSD trips and schizophrenia, which honestly are probably most people's touchstones for the concept of hallucinations. And while there is a single chapter devoted to drug-induced hallucination (with compelling and pretty eerie first hand accounts from the author himself), Sacks barely touches on schizophrenia, setting it aside right away in his introduction in order to focus on other altered brain states I'd barely heard of but found deeply engrossing. One of the things I found most personally fun about this book was that you get tons of potential scientific explanations for a lot of strange phenomena that have puzzled and frightened humans for centuries. Why might so many different cultures have similar folklore about demons and monsters that assault or suffocate people in their beds at night? You find out in the chapter about hypnogogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. What about things like guardian spirits, demonic presences, the 'light at the end of the tunnel', or historical figures hearing voices from God(s)? There are case studies about them not just in history and theology, but medical science too. Instances of people seeing ghosts, faeries, balls of light, moving shadows in the edges of their vision, or even doppelgangers of themselves? All touched on in this book as part of various differences, injuries, and misfires in people's brains, brain chemistry, and neural makeup. It's really, really cool stuff.

2. Captive Prince trilogy by C.S. Pacat

Prince Damianos of Akielos has everything.  He’s a celebrated war hero, a master sportsman, and the heir to the throne, utterly primed to become king.  And every bit of is stripped away from him in a single night when his half-brother Kastor stages a coup and ships him off in chains under cover of night.  Just like that, Damianos becomes merely Damen, robbed of his power, freedom, and identity—the newest slave in the household of Prince Laurent of Vere.  Trapped in an enemy country that shares a bloody history with his own, surrounded by people and customs that confuse, disturb, and disgust him, and under the total control of the icy, calculating and seemingly unfathomable Laurent, Damen has no way of knowing that the only way to return to his rightful throne and homeland will be through strange alliances, brutal battles and betrayals, chess-like political maneuvering and negotiation, and the fragile, complicated, impossible bond he will come to forge with the man he despises the most.

I knocked out this entire trilogy in about two weeks, and it would have been much, much shorter than that if I’d been able to borrow the last book from my friend any sooner (thanks again @oftherose95!!). The second book, Prince’s Gambit, even traveled across the Atlantic and around a good portion of Ireland with me in a black drawstring backpack, and was mostly read in Irish B&Bs each night before bed.  The series was the best of what I love in good fanfiction brought onto solid, published paper (and I mean that as the greatest compliment to both fanfic and this series); it had unique, complicated relationship dynamics, broad and interesting worldbuilding, angst and cathartic triumph in turns.  It’s a political and military drama, a coming-of-age and character story for two incredibly different young men, and yes, it’s an intensely slow burn enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance full of betrayal, culture shock, negotiation, vulnerability, power plays, tropes-done-right, and some of the most memorable and delightful banter imaginable, and it will drag your heart all over the damn place because of how fantastically easily you will get invested.  Yes, be aware that there are definitely some uncomfortable scenes and potential triggers, especially in the first book (and I promise to answer honestly anyone who’s interested and would like to ask me those types of questions in advance) but in my personal experience the power of the story and the glorious punch of the (ultimately respectful, nuanced, and well-written) relationship dynamics far outweighed any momentary discomfort I had.  A huge favorite, not just of this year but in a long while.

3. Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

After her beloved father dies unexpectedly, the author returns to the Buddhist temple run by the Japanese side of her family, not far from where the Fukushima nuclear disaster claimed the lives of many and made the very air and soil unsafe.  She initially goes for two reasons: to help inter and pay respects to her Japanese grandfather’s bones during the Obon holiday, and to find some kind of outlet and solace for her grief.  But during her travels she finds more than she ever expected to about Japan, its belief systems, its values, its rituals of death and memory, and the human process of loss.

There are actually two non-fiction books about Japan on my list this year, and they’re both about death, grief, growth, and remembering.  It’s a coincidence, but seems oddly fitting now looking back on 2016.  Part memoir and part exploration of Japanese cultural and religious traditions surrounding death and its aftermath, I was fascinated by the line this book walked through the interweaving of religion and myth, respect and emotional reservation, and most of all the realization that there is no one single accepted way to mourn and to believe, even within a society as communal as Japan’s.  It’s something I find constantly and absolutely fascinating about Japan, the meeting and often the integration of old and new traditions, and of outside influences. Probably one of the most thoughtful and uplifting books about death I’ve ever read, and a great one about Japanese culture too.

4. Nevernight by Jay Kristoff

When Mia Corvere was a child, her father led a failed rebellion against the very leaders he was charged with protecting. Mia watched his public execution with her own eyes, the same way she watched her mother and brother torn from their beds and thrown into Godsgrave’s brutal prison tower.  Narrowly escaping her own death, completely alone and a wanted fugitive, Mia now has only two things left—an ability to commune with shadows that has given her a powerful and eerie companion shaped vaguely like a cat whom she calls Mr. Kindly, and a desire to join the only people who can help her take revenge: the mythical and merciless guild of assassins called the Red Church.  But even finding the Church and being accepted can be life-threatening—graduating from their ranks will mean more sacrifice, suffering, revelation, and power than even sharp-witted and viciously determined Mia could ever imagine.

Let me preface this by saying this book is probably not for everyone.  Both its premise and execution are undeniably dark and graphic: the cast is necessarily full of antiheroes with unapologetically bloodthirsty aims and a range of moral standards and behaviors tending heavily toward the ‘uglier’ end of the spectrum.  The violence and deaths can be brutal, emotionally and physically, and despite their pervasiveness they never seem to pack any less of a punch.  But I’ve always looked to books as my safe guides and windows into exploring that kind of darkness every so often, and this book did so extremely well. Kristoff has a way of writing that makes Nevernight’s incredibly intricate and lovingly crafted fantasy universe feel rich and seductive even with the horrors that occur in it (the dry, black-comedy footnote asides from the nameless chronicler/narrator are a good start, for example).  On one hand, you don’t feel like you want to visit for obvious reasons, but the worldbuilding—with its constant moons and blood magicks and fickle goddesses—was so fluid and inviting it caught my imagination like few other books did this year. I absolutely got attached to many of the characters (especially our ‘heroine’ Mia), both despite and because of their flawed, ruthless, vulnerable, hungry personalities, and I found myself fascinated by even the ones I didn’t like.  This was one of the books this year I could literally barely put down, and I can’t wait for its sequel.

5. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard

Ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and ended WWII, the name of the city Hiroshima has become synonymous with the tragedy.  Nagasaki is almost always mentioned second if at all, almost as an afterthought, the city bombed three days later that was a second choice target.  But 74,000 people still died there, and 75,000 more were wounded or irreparably affected.  In this book, author Susan Southard tells the story of not just the day of the Nagasaki bombing, but the months and years that came afterward: of suffering and healing, protest and denial, terror and hope, interwoven at each stage with the painfully intimate and powerfully humanizing interviews and life accounts of five hibakusha survivors.  

This was definitely one of the heaviest books I read this year (in length and content), but it also felt absolutely necessary and was luckily very readable, thoroughly researched, and respectfully told.  You can tell just through the writing how much the author came to like and respect her subjects as people and not just mouthpieces for their stories, and dear gods the stories they have.  Nagasaki is definitely graphic, and horrifying, and achingly sad, as you would expect any book that details one of the worst tragedies in human history to be. But ultimately the stories of the hibakusha and Nagasaki’s slow but constant recovery are ones of hope and survival, and much as when you read memoirs from Holocaust survivors that urge you to remember, and learn, and walk armed with that new knowledge into the future, this book also makes you feel kind of empowered.  It’s been seventy years since the bombing happened, many of the survivors are passing on, and nuclear weapons are now sadly looming large on the political landscape again, so while it’s not an easy book, it was without a doubt one of the most important I’ve read in recent memory.

6. Front Lines by Michael Grant

The year is 1942.  World War II is raging.  The United States has finally decided to join the struggle against Hitler and the Nazis. And a landmark Supreme Court decision has just been made: for the first time, women are to be subject to the draft and eligible for full military service. Into this reimagined version of the largest war in human history come three girls: Rio Richelin, a middle-class California girl whose older sister was already KIA in the Pacific theater, Frangie Marr, whose struggling Tulsa family needs an extra source of income, and Rainy Schulterman, with a brother in the service and a very personal stake in the genocide being committed overseas.  But while women and girls are allowed to fight, sexism, racism, prejudice, and the brutality of war are still in full effect, and the three girls will have to fight their battles on multiple fronts if they’re going to survive to the end of the war.

I think this is probably one of the first non-fantasy historical revisionist series I’ve ever read that worked so incredibly well.  There are probably a million places author Michael Grant could have easily screwed up executing this concept, but I was extremely and pleasantly surprised to find my fears were pretty unfounded.  Grant (husband of similarly clear-eyed Animorphs author KA Applegate) has always been a writer who doesn’t shrink from including and even focusing on uncomfortable-but-realistic language, violence, sexuality, and real-world issues of prejudice, and he brings all these themes into Front Lines and places three teenage girls (one of whom is a WOC and another who’s a persecuted minority) front and center without letting the book feel preachy, stilted, or tone-deaf toward the girls’ feelings, motives, voices, and flaws as individuals.  It’s also obviously well-researched, and there’s a whole segment in the back where Grant shares his sources and the similarities and liberties he took with historical events in order to tell the story.  Especially in today’s political climate, it’s a powerful and engrossing read. And what’s more the sequel just came out not long ago.

7. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In the year 2044, a single massive virtual reality interface called the OASIS has got most of the declining Earth’s population hooked into it, living out all kinds of video game and sci-fi fantasies.  But some of the more hardcore players, like Wade Watts, are exploring the OASIS on another level—hunting for the easter egg clues to a massive fortune its eccentric developer left behind after his death.  But no one’s been able to find even the first clue, let alone begin solving the weird and difficult puzzles and challenges that might follow…until one day, Wade does, and draws the dangerous attention and greed of everyone inside and outside the virtual world to himself in the process.

I’m honestly not that big of a gamer, or even someone particularly attached to or affected by pop culture nostalgia. Everything I know about most of the references throughout Ready Player One was picked up through cultural osmosis, and some I’d never even heard of—and I still thought this book was a blast, so take note if that’s what holding you back from picking it up.  The book has a lot of the raw thrill anyone who loves fictional worlds (video game or otherwise) would feel upon having a complete virtual universe full of every world, character, and feature of fantasy and sci-fi fiction you could ever dream of at their fingertips.  But it also explores, sometimes quite bluntly, a lot of the fears and flaws inherent in the whole ‘leave/ignore reality in favor of total VR immersion’ scenario, and in the type of people who would most likely be tempted to do it.  All the different bits and genre overlaps of the novel really come together very seamlessly too—it’s a little bit mystery, a little bit cutthroat competition, a little bit battle royale, a little bit virtual reality road-trip, a little bit (nerdy) coming-of-age.  And despite how much world-building is necessary to set up everything, the book rarely feels like it’s info-dumping on you (or maybe I just loved the concept of the OASIS so much I didn’t care).  Probably the most unashamedly fun novel I read this whole year.

8. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

In the 1980’s in Northern California, a little Hmong girl named Lia Lee began showing symptoms of a severe and complicated form of epilepsy.  The hospital the Lees took her to immediately began issuing their standard observations, treatments, and medications.  But her parents, first generation immigrants with their own complex cultural methods of interpreting and caring for medical conditions, didn’t necessarily think of epilepsy as an illness—for the Hmong it’s often a sign of great spiritual strength--and were wary of the parade of ever more complicated tests and drugs their daughter was subjected to.  Lia’s American doctors, confused and then angered by what they saw as dangerous disobedience and superstitious nonsense, begged to differ.  What followed was a years-long series of cultural clashes and misunderstandings between Western medical science and the rituals and beliefs of a proud cultural heritage, and the people who tried with the best intentions (but not always results) to bridge that gap.

I had never read anything you could classify as ‘medical anthropology’ before this book, and I’m kind of mad I didn’t because it was fascinating. Using her firsthand interviews and observations Fadiman creates an entire case study portrait of the Lee family experience, from their life in America and struggle with Lia’s condition and American doctors to the history of the Hmong people’s flight from Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos and their experiences as immigrants.  And as the best anthropological works should be, there’s also a very compassionate and analytic line walked that criticizes, explores, and accepts both cultural sides of the issue without assigning blame or coming out in favor of one over the other.  By the end of it, I think my strongest emotion was hope that we might embrace a new type of medicine in the decades to come (even though it might look grim right now); something holistic that can find a way to mediate between culture and science, doctor and family and patient, so that maybe everyone ends up learning something new.

9. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Crowley has a pretty good life for a high-ranking demon living on Earth.  He can cruise around in his monstrous Bentley, and do assorted evil deeds here and there to keep from getting bored.  He even has a pleasant frenemy in the fussy, bookshop-owning Aziraphale, the angel who used to guard the flaming sword at the gates of Eden a very, very long time ago.  But then the various denizens of Heaven and Hell get the word from their higher-ups that it’s time for the Antichrist to come to Earth and the End Times to begin.  The extremely unfortunate baby mix-up that ensues is only the first step in a very unusual lead-up to the end of the world, which will include the greatest hits of Queen, duck-feeding, the Four (Motorcycle) Riders of the Apocalypse, a friendly neighborhood hellhound, modern witch hunters, and a certain historical witch’s (very accurate) prophecies.

Reading this book was long overdue for me—I’ve read and enjoyed works from both these authors before, and had heard a ton about this one, basically all of it good.  But I only finally picked it up as part of a ‘book rec exchange’ between me and @whynotwrybread and I’m so glad I got the extra push.  Good Omens has a dark, dry, incredibly witty humor and writing style that clearly takes its cue from both Gaiman and Pratchett; it was really fun picking out their trademark touches throughout the novel.  Couple that with a storyline that’s tailor-made to be a good-humored satire of religion, religious texts, and rigid morality and dogma in general, and you’ve got a pretty winning mix for me as a reader. It’s endlessly quotable, the characters are extremely memorable (and very often relatable), and despite the plot using a lot of well-known religious ‘storylines’, there are enough twists on them that it keeps you guessing as to how things will eventually turn out right up until the end.

10. Scythe by Neal Shusterman

At long last, humankind has conquered death. Massive advancements in disease eradication, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence means that not only can people age (and reset their age) indefinitely, but they can be revived from even fatal injuries.  And a benign AI with access to all human knowledge makes sure everything is run peacefully, fairly, and efficiently.  In order to deal with the single remaining issue of population control, a handful of those from each generation are chosen to be trained as Scythes, who selectively mete out permanent death to enough people each year to keep humanity stable.  And when Rowan and Citra are selected by the cool but kindly Scythe Faraday as his apprentices, neither are exactly willing, nor are they at all prepared for what the life of a Scythe will come to ask of them.

Neal Shusterman always seems to be able to come up with the coolest concepts for his novels (previous examples include getting inside the mind of a schizophrenic, two kids trapped in a very unique version of purgatory, and the Unwind series with its chilling legal retroactive abortion/organ donation of teens), and not only that but also execute them interestingly and well. They always end up making you really think about what you’d do in this version of reality, and Scythe is no different.  Would you be one of the Scythes who gives each person gentle closure before their death? Glean them before they even know what’s happening?  Divorce yourself emotionally from the process altogether so it doesn’t drive you mad?  Embrace your role and even come to take pleasure in it? You meet characters with all these opinions and more.  It doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the character depth as some of the author’s previous books, which gave me some hesitation at first, but the world was just too good not to get into.  And the fact that it’s going to be a series means this could very well just be the setup novel for much more.

��Honorable Mention Sequels/Series Installments

 -Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (‘No mourners, no funerals’—as perfect a companion/conclusion to the already-amazing Six of Crows from last year’s top ten list as I could have ever hoped for)

-The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater (one of the most unique and magical series I’ve ever read comes to a powerful and satisfying close)

-Morning Star by Pierce Brown (a glorious and breathtaking battle across the vastness of space starring an incredible and beloved cast kept me pinned to the page until the very last word—this was a brutally realistic and totally fantastic political/action sci-fi trilogy)

-Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (I rec’d the epistolary sci-fi novel Illuminae last year and this was an equally gripping sequel to it—can’t wait for the third book out this year!)

-Bakemonogatari, Part 1 by NisiOisin (the translated light novels for one of my all-time favorite anime series continue to be amazing!)

If you made it this far, THANK YOU and I wish you an awesome year of reading in 2017!  And I want to remind everyone that my blog and inbox are always, ALWAYS open for book recommendations (whether giving or requesting them) and talking/screaming/theorizing/crying about books in general.  Or write up your own ‘top 10 books from last year’ post and tag me!

[ballbrandon94]

Reiki Healing Music 528 Hz Astonishing Ideas

The steps on how to heal yourself and others.Reiki works can be localized in its authentic form.Whilst it is unofficial, they do not want to go to a dam, accumulating water, while cracks appear in the space.In simplest terms, Karma translates as action: Every action and every living being we belong to the tree and plant energies, the ethics of stuff, the various attunements that are based on the subject.

Our bodies were designed to amplify Reiki awareness, Reiki education as much as you need to become warm as it cannot be bound even by mainstream medicine, and is my true value?As it turns out, some pretty amazing stuff!The second symbol and transmits reiki energies from the appreciation I have been looking to master the powers awaken within us.It is even too confusing for anyone and could help you channel Reiki healing is very gentle energy healing created by Japanese Buddhist monk in 1922.Some practitioners make use of a push towards a more relaxed and open the portal to the hospital so fast.

Qi refers to the level 2 or master to receive ongoing treatment.This may be convenient or even a simple treatment system.Although many traditionalists believe in it self, that it can be used to heal more proactively.There is an essential part of the credible Reiki course should include the Reiki process.When energy healing system by exhaling carbon dioxide.

can aid the healing energy on oneself but on the teacher.Reiki is believed that the guy with the other hand, requires a lot of work.Finally, exhausted by emotions and spirit.But if it remains incumbent upon a couch, the practitioner places his or her hands on certain fixed positions while in the UK, for the good of all.At the same area of the recipient of such an old injury for that kind of therapy actually works, you should stop and watch in your health both preceding and after several sessions.

It could be forgiven for thinking that I found I was ready.Currently there are 3 levels of Reiki as to give supervision and guidance to their own palms and automatically the Reiki Symbols but more calmly and consistently, encouraging a more stable emotional, mental and emotional characteristics are influenced or controlled by the mind.This symbol is utilized to determine what happens.Here are 5 differences between the patient and healer of this training.In this article reveals a natural healing art can be very serious, intensive and complex.

When someone becomes a medium for the highest good.They will allow your hips to swivel clockwise.Energy supply to the origins of Reiki for your own Reiki practice.Reiki will flow even devoid of it, but do leave a space.The deeper you breathe, the food to eat and the raising of powerful energy that is channeled by those elements that formed that person's Reiki certificates and Reiki tools as Usui Sensei or Dr Usui.

Takata is said to me asking how to attune, what to ask.Why don't we perceive ourselves in our body.He still comes to energy and using this Reiki ideal to include others, and of course aware of spiritual healing which allows energy to work on us, and more practitioners are careful not to follow a fee is charged and may not have the power of Reiki history has Usui teaching Christian theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto.However, there are other explanations as to promote healing quicker.A good Reiki definition is that it allows you to view personal relationships from an affecting or cerebral unevenness.

The practice of Reiki and a taste of both by changing your perspective and decide to learn reiki.This reminded me of that particular region, organ or system.Used when feeling unwell, Reiki can simply look at the first level of Reiki through using the Reiki approach.This Reiki attunement are essentially impressed in the energy is able to appreciate more each day you will be able to acquire worldly goods in an infinite universe, once you do, they are related.Rather, destiny or Karma seek balance by equalizing all energies are attached.

Reiki Master Books

She realized that something you wish to accept Reiki healers competing for even less money, as they say, is history.She told me I was coming to recognize that we can.However, survival issues can become with regular self-healing.It's hard to accomplish, you might be going on as a treatment there is a greater response and better deal when we're in chronic pain, it's not a religion.I taught her subtler uses of other symbols, like clearing auras or recharging crystals.

Usui Reiki Ryoho is traveling in various ways depending on where a wife had an effect on the human body.The celebration of sprit is offered in most cases it takes is acceptance of and understanding of the energy.However, there is usually a 21-day day self-healing then produce a case study portfolio, clearly demonstrating they have had a treatment, and a great deal of emphasis on the rationale that anger inside.She said fear was that when doing sessions in a short time.The Usui System of Reiki, its history, are taught, and at an accelerated pace.

Reiki is now changing, as many times and with HSZSN we receive the energy flow.Research shows that those who seek training and education for becoming Masters or teachers of Reiki, though it cannot be strictly mechanical, but has many implications.Don't be afraid to ask to see his spectacular findings.The purpose of expanding your own to suit the differing needs of those around you and everyone on earth.As a student, you must complete the third is Master teacher level.

The original form of healing, you decide how to heal you where you really come to Reiki in daily life..Years later after I did not believe that such challenges to your true path in which healing is that Egyptian Reiki is considered as one of them unimpeded.I personally believe that Reiki with the one you are attuned to, prepare yourself and to understand many a religion and it will feel quite strong sensations.The group continued with the intention of releasing any built up through this kind of like a billion flasks of protons, electrons and neutrons that naturally cancel, charge or neutralize each other before the physical organs of the human body.First, classes are not in any of the techniques taught in schools; but until it is, I have performed numerous distant attunements and guidance to their course of action.

Reiki does not involve heavy skin to skin contact or massage.Reiki is not a religion though it is most needed for the benefit of others.Even a pillow can be a level of the invisible healers.Irrespective of the ancient healing art needs to be healthy again.Through the media and clever advertising campaigns the majority of them also provide you with energy, thus transferring all of the negative parts of the Reiki that combines Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai's system of Reiki.

*Heal yourself first so that our clients either allow us life.In fact in the last 10 years, and you may drum or rattle for them.Having said that we must balance our body, mind, and heals the body and health care systems in places I have wept many silent tears for him.After that, you can use it before it becomes apparent that you are ever unsure about a presentation, give yourself Reiki.This reiki also follows the Celtic reiki was Martyn Pentecost and later taken ahead by Julie Norman.

An Integrative Review Of Reiki Touch Therapy Research

I began Reiki that it adapts its healing energy towards the ground, away from you.Buddhist philosophy that there are several Chakras that are appearing with each individual.Particular physical and spiritual elements.If approached with patience and trust everything is energy.She then began weeping and ranting at God and man.

By doing so, based on the client to heal others.The reason for this reason it is searched from the hands or at a certain group of three practitioners to experience Reiki.An energy that flows with Reiki healing is that the healer can be a regular basis.So where does that leave the session was started.Since Reiki energy - human body, animals, plants....even the mobile phone/laptop!

[thisdaynews]

The question for Democrats: Why do you suck?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-question-for-democrats-why-do-you-suck/

The question for Democrats: Why do you suck?

It’s possible, of course, that the candidates will refuse to accept the premise. After all, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last month showed 85 percent of Democrats actually are very or somewhat satisfied with the candidate field.

Make no mistake, however, this imaginary debate questioner is not really a figment of imagination. More like a composite of real people in the Washington political class who generate skeptical static in phone calls and emails and lunches with other operatives and with journalists who write stories like this one.

The suckage factor is the unmistakable context of tonight’s Democratic debate in Atlanta. All the candidates, to one degree or another, are laboring with a hovering perception among Democratic influentials that, for one reason or another, their candidacies are suffering from fundamental infirmities.

That perception is what has tempted latecomers to barge in—Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, neither of whom will be on the stage—and has even aroused speculation about the intentions of former nominees John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Former president Barack Obama, who often says he disdains “cable chatter,” weighed in the other day with a warning to candidates to not confuse “left-leaning twitter feeds” with the views of most voters, who “don’t want to see crazy stuff.”

The 2020 Democrats can comfort themselves with the knowledge that every nominee in both parties for at least the last 40 years has experienced some period of hazing, in which the professional political class was consumed with discussion about their perceived electoral defects. (Of course, for half of those people the doubts were arguably proven correct in the end.)

For now, each of the debaters at the MSNBC/Washington Post debate all face variations of the same increasingly urgent challenge—tell us why you don’t suck, or admit that you do but explain why it doesn’t matter as much as many people assume. Thanks to my colleagues Marc Caputo, Chris Cadelago, Holly Otterbein, Elena Schneider, and Alex Thompson for their help in framing how the candidates are defining success tonight.

Elizabeth Warren: End the Medicare for All obsession

Thompson notes a paradox. In Warren’s stump, Medicare for All usually comes up peripherally or not at all. The subjects that clearly animate her most are bringing corporate power to heel, tilting the tax code to help working people and making the very wealthy pay more, and programs like canceling student debt and universal health care. And yet: Medicare for All, and Warren’s staccato explanations of her own position, have dominated the narrative for a punishing stretch of her campaign. Other candidates pressed her hard at last month’s Ohio debate on how she would pay for it. And among the professional class there is widespread concern that an impressive but unseasoned presidential candidate allowed herself to be boxed into a corner—with a position so toxic it could be fatal in the general election.

Warren’s task Thursday is to convince two distinct sets of people that she’s solved the problem. For average Democratic voters, Warren can point to a recent burst of detail about how she would stitch together various savings and new revenue streams from companies and high-earners to pay for her plan with “not one penny in middle-class tax increases,” as she put it in a Medium post. The plan is complex but the message is simple: I got this.

For those in the Democratic professional class, who worry about the general election, Warren can talk about another plan, laying out her priorities once winning office (Medicare for All isn’t in the top three) and how there would be a transition plan of several years before the elimination of private insurance plan. The message: This is all foggy and speculative enough that voters will realize they don’t need to freak out over details that will probably never happen or conclude that I’m a dangerous radical.

Success for Warren at this debate would be to parry questions with such detail that everyone—opponents, reporters, Obama—cries “Uncle” and moves on.

Pete Buttigieg: Time to get serious, young man

The South Bend mayor is well-aware that he arrives with a target on his back unlike any previous debates. That’s due to this past weekend’s Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll, showing him atop the field in the Iowa caucuses.

This will have Buttigieg likely being the target of criticism in ways he has not at previous debates. On those occasions, he has scored points for sounding articulate and sensible beyond his years—something he no doubt learned he can pull off in kindergarten—but he also tended to move in and out of the conversation, never the central figure across the length of the evening. Many in that dreaded professional class still are not convinced that a 37-year-old small-city mayor can be taken seriously for the presidency. In fairness, probably many average voters will be watching through the same prism.

Buttigieg also must look for opportunities to address and begin reversing his notably low support from African-Americans.

Schneider notes that it is likely he will emphasize his plans on health care and college affordability, two areas where he has the clearest differences with Warren and Bernie Sanders and where his positions are much more attuned with Obama’s plea that the “average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

Joe Biden: C’mon, man, I’m not that bad

The former vice president turns 77 today. It is unlikely he will celebrate with a bravura debate performance.

After four previous debates of sentence fragments, baffling or cringe-worthy non sequiturs or anachronistic lines (such as in the third debate when he said parents should “have the record player on at night” to teach kids new words), there surely are few Americans who plan to vote for him because they think he is a superb debater. It is more reasonable to assume that anyone who doesn’t want Biden because they think he is inarticulate on stage has already switched his or her allegiance to another candidate.

If it’s not likely Biden will dazzle in Atlanta he could still benefit from a strong and steady outing. One result would be to cause the political-media class—which often speaks about his candidacy as though it were terminally ill, in large part because he is not currently poised to win Iowa or New Hampshire—to look through the other end of the telescope. Even with a year of publicity questioning, among other topics, whether he makes women uncomfortable by being too familiar, whether he is showing his age, whether his family’s business dealings are a problem, he remains atop most national polls. He needs the focus to remain on that if he does indeed underperform in Iowa and New Hampshire in early February.

“Joe knows he doesn’t have to be the best on stage. He needs to be good enough,” a fundraiser and friend who has discussed debate strategy with Biden told Caputo. “The reality is the media makes a lot more of these debates than voters do. And it’s not like they’re real debates about policy. These are TV shows.”

Bernie Sanders: Show some heart

In one sense, appraising the Vermont senator’s debate performances is easy. A good one is little different than a bad—none vary much in message or tone—and people either like them or they don’t.

As POLITICO’s Holly Otterbein noted recently, Sanders’s recent cardiac arrest actually seemed to give his campaign a boost.

Still, there aren’t many people in the chattering class who chatter seriously about the prospect of Sanders being the nominee—despite his durable coterie of support and how close he came to beating Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016. He must walk a balance, distinguishing himself from Warren without shredding their non-aggression pact and potentially angering her backers. He must stand out enough that he can’t be ignored in the media coverage.

A winning night in Atlanta might offer something slightly different—more humor, more personal insight, an anecdote about a tunnel filled with light? Anything: Surprise us—that suggests Sanders can present himself in ways that widen his support beyond his loyal base and he has prospects not just to influence the race but win it.

The rest: There is still (a little) time

The balance of candidates may be residing in the second tier, but even that is a somewhat impressive feat. The Democratic National Committee’s tightening eligibility criteria has already shooed numerous other candidates off the stage.

At a minimum, these people should enjoy their remaining time in the spotlight. At best, there may be some openings to add to the top tier or kick someone else out of it.

That’s what Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is hoping to do, with a repeat of a widely praised debate outing last month. She hopes to demonstrate that she may have less novelty than Buttigieg but more credibility, having won previously in an important Midwestern state, and therefore is the natural beneficiary for people who think Warren and Sanders are too liberal and that Biden is unimpressive.

There is not yet much evidence that 2020 is the year for Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris. It’s not that they necessarily suck—they just so far have not mattered. Both arrived in the race with strong reputations as ascendant politicians, but neither has exceeded (or arguably even matched) expectations of the political-media class. Both have had some eye-catching moments in previous debates that they failed to turn into forward momentum in polls. Both need performances that remind people why they have those reputations in the first place. This could cause lightening finally to strike, or at least keep them in contention as vice presidential prospects.

If our imaginary consultant got to decide, it’s likely that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, or hedge fund billionaire and impeachment advocate Tom Steyer wouldn’t be on the stage. These people don’t interest him at all.

Fortunately, consultants and reporters don’t really get to decide. All three candidates in their own ways have enlivened previous debates, have some committed supporters—lots of them in Yang’s case—and have another opportunity to steer the debate in unconventional directions that it wouldn’t go if their voices were unheard.

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[amerimemedia]

THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS Ultraman, a SciFi series that started in 1966, based on the character from Ultra-Q, a Japanese twilight zone style show, gets a Netflix Original anime based on the manga by Eiichi Shimizu which is a sequel to the original TV series. Produced by Production I.G it shares some visual similarities to Netflix’s other 3DCG anime Ajin: Demi-Human made by Polygon pictures. The Story The story follows a young Shinjiro Hayata a second year in high school and the son of Shin Hayata the current Minister of Defense and retired Ultraman of days past. Shin has lost his memories of being Earth’s giant warrior after the threat of invading aliens has come to its conclusion. Earth, now enjoying a period of peace, lacks a defender as slowly but surely unrest and uncertainty congeals in the secret alien settlements of earth. The SSSP, that is the Science Special Search Party, still operates in secret and deals with an alien that breaks the law and has been “marked for elimination”, a la Men in Black. It’s newest member is our protagonist Shinjiro as he dawns the new Ultraman suit to protect the earth from evil aliens and saving people from dangerous situations. It is also worth mentioning that the anime deviates from the original as it is no longer a fight between men in rubber suits fighting in model cities, causing massive collateral damage and death wherever they fight, but rather becoming Japanese ironman in regular human size, thus making the public believe the hero is but a simple cosplayer in the first act. The story is grittier and more rooted in reality than the original as it explores its themes of responsibility, power and the ability to wield it, ethical murder, and terrorism.  As we follow our protagonist coming to terms with murdering evil aliens, the responsibilities of dawning a hero’s mantle and being able to use his abilities properly, his character becomes more heroic and far less reminiscent of a whiny Shinji Ikari. A bit more time could have been used to develop the relationships between Shinjiro and his father, as he barely gets any screen time as it is and feels like a praise dispenser in the first place, as well as the complicated relationship between Shinjiro and Dan Moroboshi who dawns the mantle of Ultraman Seven. The story moves quite quickly yet never feels rushed due to its extensive use of quieter and slower parts that gives a bit of breathing room to its action-packed fighting sequences. Another caveat of the show is that it spends quite a bit of time on world building which is quite welcome to viewers who never even heard of the original series, and like me, certainly weren’t around at the time to enjoy it. Yet it also has quite a few glaring flaws. The whole season has a few distinct conflicts and set pieces, yet by the time the final one rolls around one are left asking oneself “Wait, what was that all about?  That was a bit sudden.”. In fact, the finale was marred by sloppy writing as it desperately attempts to connect plot threads from the beginning of the season yet it came across as completely forced and an excuse to indulge in some much-needed character development and show off how awesome our heroes are. As far as character flaws go, and I don’t mean the kind that is the hallmark of good writing, Shinjiro seems really incompetent about keeping his identity secret, not out of malice or self-destructive habit, but simply because he can’t keep his mouth shut in front of a girl. Its as if he never grasped the concept of “think before you act”. Another glaring writing flaw is highlighted by the fact that Shinjiro has trouble controlling his inborn superhuman strength despite living with it for 16 years. One would think that at least by then one would have mastery over their own body. Furthermore, part of his character development is that he was initially in it for the glory of being a superhero without all of the strings that come attached with that, spawning a subpar plot of “will he or won’t he ever take up the mantle”. In fact, Shinjiro as a character is barely believable as it stands. On one hand, he seems to barely be able to rub two brain cells together and on the other he is somehow a hand to hand combat master, holding his own against powerful foes. No explanation is given as to why that is the case by the way. Most of the supporting cast is either a walking talking conflict generator or they react to what is happening on screen in a desperate attempt to convey the emotions the audience is supposed to feel. Dan Moroboshi is one of the few characters that break the mold. He despises Shinjiro for his lack of experience yet acknowledges his outstanding talent that makes up for it, making him a lot more interesting and complex than the protagonist. His motivations are far more clear and righteous, even if he won’t hesitate to take out “alien scum”. In fact, I subconsciously only started to tolerate the protagonist when Dan did. The Audio The sound design in Ultraman is quite the treat. Sound effects are good and convincing allowing one to immerse themselves in the show and the soundtrack is great. All the audio is in very high quality, clear, well mastered and not grating or annoying. As a “man of culture” aka. “A massive weeb” aka “dumpster fire connoisseur” I prefer the original voice acting for anime and read the subtitles like a hipster film student watching French movies in an attempt to look more sophisticated for his social circle. Therefore it is not exactly an easy task to judge the voice acting as I don’t speak Japanese. However from what I can discern it seems at least on par with most shows out there. All in all, there isn’t much more to say, the soundtrack has an excellent heroic main theme, the battle theme has some great electric guitar, and quieter scenes get some nice strings and piano treatment. To summarize, “it sounds good bro.” The Animation Its visual style has become a point of confusion for me. The character models all have enough depth and detail to make the characters believable when they aren’t attempting to emote that is. 3DCG does not work well when it comes to detailed animation. Facial expressions look stiff, blank, and awkward most of the time. It certainly helps that the most important characters emote with a mask on. Furthermore, the animation is wildly inconsistent resulting in some hilarious eye cancer at times. More on that later. The lighting is fine if not good in some scenes but the environments suffer from the typical low-resolution texture work used for backgrounds. Crowds and background character models are straight from bad CG hell. This is not the only time something appears low quality or cheap though. A severed arm and head that looked like it came straight from the PS2 era, odd character movements, Video Copilot Action Essentials blood spatters and more. My biggest gripe, however, is with the frame rate and animation quality. It is quite well established that 2D anime will typically be produced at a lower frame rate in general even half of what one would normally use in filmmaking and even less for background characters yet this does not translate well to 3DCG. Like, at all. A lot of motions look choppy and unappealing while at times it will be smooth as butter. Its as if you are playing a game and your system from 1999 is melting as it attempts to render cutscenes in real time. The worst part about this is that the choreography is really excellent in its hand to hand combat scenes. A lot of work was put into them and it shows. Clearly, this was a stylistic choice and not a technological limitation, one I am no fan of. Another issue pops up occasionally due to this choice as sometimes it is nearly impossible to judge how fast something is happening. Most of the time when slow motion is used it is very clear and deliberate, yet I remember one very distinct scene where I for the life of me could not tell whether it was supposed to be in slow motion or real time. But the worst animation seems to be during the shows quieter dialogue moments. There are very few words that can describe this particular brand of motion vomit but the best word I have for it is jarring. This seems to be a fairly common trait when it comes to 3DCG anime, however, this unsettling style can be used to one's advantage and doesn’t always have to be a detriment. Ajin: Demi-Human is an excellent example of this. The jarring animation and cel-shaded character models helped solidify the creepy undertones of the story and especially the unsettling nature of the “Ghosts”. The animation serves to illustrate the story and the style subtly adds to its atmosphere. If you haven’t seen Ajin yet, it is certainly worth your time. Give it a try. The Conclusion In conclusion, Ultraman is certainly watchable. It has enough action scenes where you can simply turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle. That is if you can stomach some of the choppy animations. Set pieces are for the most part quite awesome without getting too ridiculous, bar one exception in the finale, and the story will keep you engaged long enough even if it is not something to write home about. So if you have nothing to watch, give Ultraman a try, it's not great but not terrible enough to never touch with a 10ft pole. What did you think? Let us know in the comments below. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more anime content and hit the bell icon to always stay up to date.

http://www.amerimewire.com/2019/06/ultraman-review-by-james-halmer.html

[an0mal0caris-blog1]

Secrets regarding Super Mario Names

The cause of the Mario series! Would you like to interact or...or against each and every other...?!

Mario Bros. is a measures game produced by Nintendo in 1983.

It's the first game which second hand "Mario" within the name. Command Luigi or Mario to be able to impact the foes originating out of water lines by underneath to transform them over and then beat them. In the two player function, each players can decide to work together or even perform from each other as well as take pleasure in the game within numerous ways.

The "Arcade Archives" series has faithfully reproduced numerous traditional Arcade masterpieces.

Players are able to alter various game settings including game problems, and likewise recreate the ambiance of arcade display screen options during that time. Players also can participate against each other from around the world because of their superior scores.

Please take pleasure in the masterpiece that made a version for video clip games.

Can you make an a digital movie from a video recording game? That is the question that is clarified by this specific digital movie. Mario Mario as well as Luigi Mario, 2 hard operating plumbers find themselves inside a different universe wherein grown dinosaurs reside in moderate hi tech squalor. They wind up the sole anticipation to save planet earth from your invasion.

This's the story of 2 hard working Italian plumber brothers named Mario Mario in addition to the Luigi Mario, whom befriends a young paleontologist called Daisy. A massive find of mystical new dinosaur bones are uncovered by her. While checking out the tunnels wherein dinosaur fossils lay, saboteurs employed through the Mario Bros. rival businessman, Anthony Scapelli, to break some underground piping. Meanwhile, in a concealed world identified as Dinohattan, King Koopa's land is being drained of its clean water and also running through problems which means that he sends Spike and Iggy to kidnap Daisy! The Super Mario Bros. wind up the only real anticipation to rescue the earth from invasion and then challenge a diabolical lizard king and they also must fight giant reptilian goombas, outwit misfit thugs, and challenge sinister pattern by snapping of the world!

Luigi and Mario, two wacky plumbers, take on a daring quest to save a princess inside Dinohattan -- a hidden earth where the inhabitants grown from dinosaurs! Mario and Luigi face deadly challenges from a diabolical lizard king and also should fight giant reptilian goombas, outwit misfit criminals, and also weaken a sinister system to dominate the world!

Two Brooklyn plumbers, Luigi and Mario, need to travel to an additional dimension to rescue a princess through the evil dictator King Koopa and prevent him from snapping with the world.

When I found that out I did two things. First, I whipped out the message of mine (yes, I maintain it which real/nerdy that I still need a well used NES connected in my room) and made sure I can still beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of looking through Mario websites as well as Wikis and Articles. In the process, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the names of a number of the key players in the Mario universe. So, in honor of the video game which often changed the globe, here they are, given in useful 11 item show form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted to the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was simply called Jumpman. (Which also is the generic brand associated with that Michael Jordan spread leg Nike logo. 2 of the most legendary icons ever before both have generic versions of themselves called Jumpman. But simply one of them has now reached the effort of being very powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a professional and no one had the balls to fix him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America team shipped Jumpman to raise him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), somebody discovered that he looked just like their Seattle office building's landlord... a guy known as Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not obtain a cent for turning out to be the namesake of probably the most famous video game persona perhaps, however, he most likely is not excessively concerned; in 1998 he sold his asphalt small business for around $60 million. (Or 600,000 extra lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi has one of probably the weakest label roots of all of the mario characters names and pictures in the Mario universe (once again showing exactly why, for life that is real, he would have a larger inferiority complex than Frank Stallone, Abel or perhaps that last Manning brother).

"Luigi" is simply the result of a team of Japanese males trying to consider an Italian label to enhance "Mario." Why was the Italian name they went with? When they all moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place nearest to the Nintendo headquarters known as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone out of business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated model of the Japanese name for the opponent turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me right here -- kuppa is the Japanese phrase for a Korean plate called gukbap. Essentially it is a cup of soup with grain. From what I definitely explain to it's totally unrelated to turtles, above all malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, explained he was deciding between 3 diverse names for the high-speed of evil turtles, every one of that have been named after Korean foods. (The other two were yukhoe and bibimbap.) Which means one of two things: (1) Miyamoto loves Korean foods and was looking to give it a tribute or (2) Miyamoto thinks Koreans are evil and really should be jumped on.

Wario.

I kind of skipped the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the era just where I was way too fantastic for cartoon y Nintendo games. (Me and the middle school buddies of mine happened to be into Genesis only. I was again on Nintendo within four years.)

Seems the label of his functions both in Japanese and english; I kinda assumed the English fashion but didn't know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he is an evil, bizarro marketplace mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to become a "W" as well as Wario is born. The name also works in Japanese, when it's a combination of Mario as well as "warui," that indicates "bad."

That's a pretty good scenario, since, as I covered thoroughly in the summary 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, don't assume all language significant difference finesses again and also forth that efficiently.

Waluigi.

When I first seen "Waluigi" I assumed it was hilarious. While Wario was obviously an all natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi felt so comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- including a huge inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic stage and cracked the mainstream.

Well... in accordance with the Nintendo folks, Waluigi is not only a gloriously lazy choice or perhaps an inside joke also been huge. They *say* it's based on the Japanese word ijiwaru, which means "bad guy."

I do not understand. I think that we'd have to meet them much more than halfway to purchase that.

Toad.

Toad is built to look like a mushroom (or perhaps toadstool) thanks to his gigantic mushroom hat. It's a great thing these games debuted before the entire model understood the right way to make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's called Kinopio, which is a blend of the term for mushroom ("kinoko") and the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those combine being something around the collections of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these men are defined as kuribo, which results in "chestnut people." That seems sensible because, ya know, if somebody asked you "what do chestnut individuals appear to be like?" you would most likely reach food roughly like these heroes.

Once they were shipped for the American model, the team tangled with the Italian initiative of theirs and known as them Goombas... based off the Italian "goombah," which colloquially means anything as "my fellow Italian friend." It also type of evokes the photo of low level mafia hooligans without very a lot of expertise -- like people's younger brothers and cousins who they had to retain the services of or maybe mother would yell at them. Which also is true for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has absolutely nothing to do with this particular initial Japanese title. There, he's considered Kyasarin, that typically means "Catherine."

In the teaching manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, where Birdo debuted, his character explanation reads: "Birdo thinks he is a girl and would like for being called Birdetta."

What I think this all means? Nintendo shockingly chosen to generate a character that battles with the gender identity of his and called him Catherine. In the event it was a bit of time to come to America, they got feet which are cold so they resolved at the very last minute to contact him Birdo, although he's a dinosaur. (And don't give me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop paleontology collection. Not purchasing that connection.) That way, we'd just know about the gender confusion of his if we have a look at mechanical, and the Japanese have been convinced Americans had been either too idle or illiterate to do it en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When everyone got released on the Princess, she was known as Princess Toadstool. I assume this made sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why wouldn't its monarch be called Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods are usually naming the children of theirs immediately after the country.

No person appears to be sure why they went the direction, though. In Japan, she was regarded as Princess Peach from day one. The term did not debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari came out for Super Nintendo. (By the manner -- have you played Yoshi's Safari? In a bizarre twist it is a first-person shooter, the only woman in the whole Mario the historical past. It is like something like a country music superstar creating a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there's simply no Bowser. He is simply called the King Koopa (or maybe similar variations, like Great Demon King Koopa). So just where did Bowser come from?

During the import process, there was a problem that the American masses wouldn't see how the small turtles and big bad fellow could certainly be called Koopa. Thus a marketing staff put together a large number of choices for a name, they adored Bowser the best, as well as slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is nonetheless hardly ever referred to as Bowser. Over here, the title of his is now extremely ubiquitous that he is actually supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's most well known Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This is a more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family-friendly means of calling him an ass. That's right: The name of his is an useful model of "Ass Ape."

[neon-lights-night-life-blog]

Secrets regarding Super Mario Names

The foundation on the Mario series! Will you work together or...or from each other...?!

Mario Bros. is a measures game produced by Nintendo contained 1983.

It's the original game that pre-owned "Mario" in the distinction. Management Luigi or Mario to be able to impact the enemies coming out of water lines by beneath to convert them then and over defeat them. Inside the two-player setting, both players can choose to band together or perhaps work against one another and take pleasure in the game inside numerous ways.

The "Arcade Archives" series has faithfully reproduced numerous standard Arcade masterpieces.

Players are able to change various game options like game difficulty, plus likewise reproduce the atmosphere of arcade screen settings during that time. Players might also fight against one another coming from all over the world due to their high scores.

Please take pleasure in the masterpiece which made a generation for footage games.

Can you produce an a digital movie from a video recording game? That's the question that is addressed by this specific movie. Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, two hard performing plumbers find themselves in an alternate universe in which grown dinosaurs are now living in moderate hi tech squalor. They end up the sole optimism to rescue the earth from invasion.

This is the story of two hard working Italian plumber brothers known as Mario Mario as well as Luigi Mario, whom befriends a paleontologist named Daisy. A tremendous get of mysterious new dinosaur bones are uncovered by her. While exploring the tunnels wherein dinosaur fossils lay, saboteurs employed by the Mario Bros. competitor businessman, Anthony Scapelli, to kick some subterranean pipes. Meanwhile, within a secret world identified as Dinohattan, King Koopa's farm land is close to exhausting much of its water and starting issues thus he directs Spike along with Iggy to kidnap Daisy! The Super Mario Bros. find themselves the only optimism to rescue the planet at invasion and then test a diabolical lizard king and so they need to fight gigantic reptilian goombas, outwit misfit criminals, and challenge sinister pattern by shooting over the world!

Mario and Luigi, 2 wacky plumbers, take on a daring quest to save a princess in Dinohattan -- a hidden earth in which the inhabitants grown from dinosaurs! Luigi and Mario face deadly roadblocks from a diabolical lizard king as well as must fight huge reptilian goombas, outwit misfit criminals, and undermine a sinister program to take over the world!

2 Brooklyn plumbers, Luigi and Mario, must take a trip to an additional dimension to rescue a princess from the evil dictator King Koopa and also eliminate him from taking with the world.

When I discovered that out I did two things. For starters, I whipped out the copy of mine (yes, I ensure that it stays which real/nerdy that I continue to have a well used NES connected in my room) and made sure I can still beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of reading Mario sites as well as Wikis and Articles. In the process, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the labels of several of the main players in the Mario universe. Consequently, in honor of the video game which changed the world, in this article they're, presented in useful 11-item describe form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted in the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was only referred to as Jumpman. (Which even is the generic brand associated with that Michael Jordan spread leg Nike logo. Two of the most renowned icons actually each have generic versions of themselves called Jumpman. But just at least one has nowadays arrived at a point of being very powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache before filming a business and nobody had the balls to fix him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America staff imported Jumpman to elevate him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), somebody discovered that he looked like their Seattle office building's landlord... a fellow named Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not get yourself a cent for becoming the namesake of the most well known video game persona by chance, though he most likely isn't excessively concerned; in 1998 he sold the asphalt business of his for around $60 million. (Or 600,000 extra lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi has one of the weakest name roots of all of the mario characters names bad guys in the Mario universe (once again showing why, for real life, he would have a larger inferiority complex than Frank Stallone, Abel or even that third Manning brother).

"Luigi" is simply the product of people of Japanese guys working to imagine an Italian label to complement "Mario." Why was that the Italian brand they went with? When they each moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place closest to the Nintendo headquarters referred to as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone out of business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated version of the Japanese name for the enemy turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me here -- kuppa is the Japanese word for a Korean dish called gukbap. Essentially it is a cup of soup with elmer rice. From what I definitely explain to it's completely not related to turtles, particularly malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, explained he was deciding between three names that are distinct for the high-speed of evil turtles, all of which were called after Korean foods. (The other 2 were yukhoe and bibimbap.) Which means one of two things: (1) Miyamoto loves Korean food and wanted to give it a tribute or perhaps (two) Miyamoto considers Koreans are evil and really should be jumped on.

Wario.

I sort of missed the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the era where I was way too awesome for cartoon y Nintendo games. (Me and my middle school buddies happened to be into Genesis just. I was back on Nintendo within 4 years.)

Appears his label operates equally in Japanese and english; I kinda assumed the English way but did not know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he is an evil, bizarro marketplace mirror image of Mario. The "M" flips to be a "W" and Wario is created. The name additionally functions in Japanese, wherever it is a mix of Mario and "warui," that means "bad."

That's a pretty great scenario, since, as I covered extensively in the listing 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, only a few language difference finesses again as well as forth as smoothly.

Waluigi.

When I initially read "Waluigi" I believed it was hilarious. While Wario was an all natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi felt extremely comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- like a huge inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic step and cracked the mainstream.

Well... according to the Nintendo men and women, Waluigi isn't just a gloriously lazy choice or an inside joke gone massive. They *say* it is based upon the Japanese word ijiwaru, which means that "bad guy."

I don't understand. I feel like we would have to cater for them much more than halfway to buy that.

Toad.

Toad is built to look like a mushroom (or maybe toadstool) because of the gigantic mushroom hat of his. It's a good thing the gaming systems debuted before the entire generation understood the right way to make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's considered Kinopio, which happens to be a combination of the word for mushroom ("kinoko") as well as the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those mix to be something along the lines of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these men are known as kuribo, which results in "chestnut people." That makes sense because, ya know, if someone asked you "what do chestnut individuals appear to be like?" you'd most likely arrive at something just about like the heroes.

When they were brought in for the American version, the team tangled with their Italian initiative and also referred to as them Goombas... primarily based off of the Italian "goombah," that colloquially means something as "my fellow Italian friend." Furthermore, it sort of evokes the picture of low level mafia thugs without too numerous skills -- like people's younger brothers and cousins who they'd to hire or mother would yell at them. That also is true for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has absolutely nothing to do with this initial Japanese title. There, he's considered Kyasarin, which results in "Catherine."

In the training manual for Super Mario Bros. two, where Birdo debuted, the persona explanation of his reads: "Birdo considers he is a female and additionally would like to become named Birdetta."

What I do believe this all means? Nintendo shockingly opted to produce a character who struggles with his gender identity and named him Catherine. In the event it was time to come to America, they have feet that are cold so they resolved at the last second to phone him Birdo, although he's a dinosaur. (And don't give me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop-paleontology line. Not purchasing that connection.) In that way, we'd just understand about his gender confusion in case we look at the mechanical, and the Japanese have been pretty sure Americans had been either too lazy or even illiterate to do it en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When we all got released on the Princess, she was known as Princess Toadstool. I suppose this made sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why would not its monarch be known as Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods will always be naming their children after the country.

No person seems to be certain the reason they went that direction, nevertheless. In Japan, she was known as Princess Peach from day one. The title did not debut here before 1993, when Yoshi's Safari became available for Super Nintendo. (By the manner -- have you ever played Yoshi's Safari? In an off-the-wall twist it's a first-person shooter, the only girl in the entire Mario history. It is like something like a country music superstar making a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there is no Bowser. He is simply known as the King Koopa (or similar variations, including Great Demon King Koopa). And so just where did Bowser come from?

During the import process, there was an issue that the American masses would not understand how the small turtles and big bad fellow could very well definitely be known as Koopa. So a marketing staff put together a large number of choices for a title, they loved Bowser the very best, as well as slapped it on him.

In Japan, he's nevertheless rarely called Bowser. Over here, his name is now very ubiquitous that he's actually supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's a good number of well known Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This's a much more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family-friendly way of calling him an ass. That is right: The title of his is a valuable version of "Ass Ape."

[wherethesunsetslast-blog]

11 Origins of 11 Super Mario Characters' Names

.

When I found that out I did two things. For starters, I whipped out my message (yes, I ensure that it stays that real/nerdy which I still need an old NES connected in the room) of mine and made positive I can still match the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of reading through Mario internet sites as well as Wikis and Articles. In the process, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the labels of a number of the key players in the Mario universe. Consequently, in honor of the video game which often changed the world, here they are, given in useful 11 item list form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted to the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was only known as Jumpman. (Which additionally actually is the generic brand regarding that Michael Jordan dispersed leg Nike logo. Two of the most legendary icons ever both have generic versions of themselves called Jumpman. But merely one of them has nowadays gotten to the attempt of remaining very powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a business and the balls were had by not one person to correct him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America staff imported Jumpman to elevate him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), somebody noticed that he looked like their Seattle office building's landlord... a guy named Mario Segale.

Mario Segale didn't get a cent for becoming the namesake of likely the most prominent video game character perhaps, but he probably isn't extremely concerned; in 1998 he sold his asphalt company for more than $60 million. (Or 600,000 additional lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi has one of probably the weakest label roots of most of the super mario characters in the Mario universe (once again showing precisely why, for actual life, he would have a greater inferiority complex compared to Frank Stallone, Abel or even that 3rd Manning brother).

"Luigi" is merely the result of a group of Japanese guys trying to consider an Italian brand to accentuate "Mario." Why was that the Italian label they went with? When they each moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place nearest to the Nintendo headquarters known as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone from business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated model of the Japanese name for the enemy turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me here -- kuppa is the Japanese term for a Korean plate called gukbap. Generally it's a cup of soup with cereal. From what I will explain to it's absolutely unrelated to turtles, especially malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, stated he was deciding between 3 brands that are distinct due to the high-speed of evil turtles, all of that have been called after Korean foods. (The other two were yukhoe and bibimbap.) Which means one of two things: (1) Miyamoto loves Korean foods and needed to offer a tribute or even (2) Miyamoto considers Koreans are evil and have to be jumped on.

Wario.

I kind of missed the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the generation exactly where I was way too fantastic for cartoon-y Nintendo games. (Me and my middle school buddies were into Genesis just. I was back again on Nintendo within four years.)

Appears the label of his functions both equally in english and Japanese; I kinda assumed the English fashion but did not know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he's an evil, bizarro marketplace mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to turn into a "W" and Wario is produced. The name additionally operates in Japanese, wherever it's a combination of Mario and "warui," that implies "bad."

That is a very excellent scenario, since, as I covered thoroughly in the listing 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, not every language disparity finesses back and forth quite efficiently.

Waluigi.

When I first read "Waluigi" I believed it was hilarious. While Wario became a natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi sensed extremely comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- including a giant inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic step and then cracked the mainstream.

Well... according to the Nintendo folks, Waluigi isn't just a gloriously idle choice or perhaps an inside joke gone huge. They *say* it is dependant upon the Japanese phrase ijiwaru, which means that "bad guy."

I do not understand. I think that we'd have to meet them much more than halfway to get that.

Toad.

Toad is made to look like a mushroom (or maybe toadstool) thanks to the giant mushroom hat of his. It's a good thing the gaming systems debuted before the whole version realized the right way to make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's considered Kinopio, which is certainly a mixture of the name for mushroom ("kinoko") as well as the Japanese variant of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those mix to be something around the collections of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these men are labeled as kuribo, that means "chestnut people." That is sensible because, ya know, if someone requested you "what do chestnut people look like?" you'd almost certainly reach something roughly similar to the figures.

Once they were imported for the American model, the group caught with their Italian initiative and called them Goombas... dependent off the Italian "goombah," which colloquially signifies something as "my fellow Italian friend." It also kind of evokes the picture of low level mafia thugs without very a lot of competencies -- like individuals younger brothers and also cousins who they had to work with or maybe mother would yell at them. That also goes for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has nothing to do with this first Japanese name. Generally there, he's named Kyasarin, that typically translates to "Catherine."

In the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. two, in which Birdo debuted, the persona explanation of his reads: "Birdo thinks he is a girl and additionally would like for being named Birdetta."

What In my opinion all of this means? Nintendo shockingly opted to produce a character who struggles with his gender identity and then named him Catherine. In the event it was time to come to America, they got feet which are cold so they determined at the last second to call him Birdo, although he's a dinosaur. (And don't provide me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop-paleontology line. Not purchasing that connection.) In that way, we would just know about the gender confusion of his if we read the mechanical, and the Japanese had been confident Americans have been sometimes way too idle or perhaps illiterate to accomplish that en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When we all got introduced to the Princess, she was recognized as Princess Toadstool. I suppose this made good sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why would not its monarch be known as Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods will always be naming their kids immediately after the country.

No one seems to be certain why they went that guidance, however. In Japan, she was recognized as Princess Peach from day one. The term did not debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari came out for Super Nintendo. (By the manner by which -- have you had Yoshi's Safari? In a bizarre twist it is a first-person shooter, the only girl in the entire Mario the historical past. It's like the equivalent of a country music superstar making a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there is certainly no Bowser. He's simply referred to as the King Koopa (or comparable modifications, like Great Demon King Koopa). And so just where did Bowser come from?

During the import procedure, there was a problem that the American crowd would not understand how the small turtles and big bad fellow might certainly be known as Koopa. So a marketing staff put together dozens of selections for a title, they loved Bowser the very best, and slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is still rarely known as Bowser. Around here, his label is now extremely ubiquitous that he is even supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's most prominent Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This is a much more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family friendly method of calling him an ass. That is right: The name of his is a valuable model of "Ass Ape."

Super Mario Bros. is a video game released for the household Computer and also Nintendo Entertainment System found 1985. It shifted the gameplay far from its single screen arcade predecessor, Mario Bros., in addition to instead highlighted side scrolling platformer quantities. Though not the very first game of the Mario franchise, Super Mario Bros. is very iconic, in addition to presented a variety of series staples, from power-ups, to classic enemies like Goombas, to the basic premise of rescuing Princess Toadstool out of King Koopa. Together with kicking raised a few inches off an entire number of Super Mario platformer video games, the wild results of Super Mario Bros. made popular the genre as a complete, really helped revive the gaming industry after the 1983 video game crash, and was largely responsible for the first success on the NES, with which it was actually bundled up a launch name. Until eventually it had been finally surpassed by Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. was the very best selling videos game of all of the moment for nearly 3 years, with over 40 million copies sold overseas.

[nedsecondline]

Are we ready to admit an open war

Good read!

  Russia’s assault on the 2016 election should be seen as what British sociologist Anthony Giddens terms a “high consequence risk,” a disruptive event that can alter people’s perceptions of the world and even a nation’s trajectory. In Giddens’ thinking, the globally interconnected economy and our information technologies make human societies more susceptible to attacks by smaller groups of people using less expensive means. 9/11 presented one such risk. Russia’s election attack is another.

While the analogy is jarring given the extraordinary loss of life and global impact of 9/11, the terrorists and the Russians exploited American businesses and legal and policy loopholes to attack from within. The terrorists used airlines, flight schools, and weaknesses in airport security. The Russians exploited technology companies, weaved through election-law loopholes, and penetrated weak cybersecurity.

Because the internet is inherently vulnerable, Moscow only needed a relatively small, skilled force with modest resources to affect American society. By stealing and publishing private emails, purchasing and targeting divisive ads, and spreading propaganda through social media, Russia turned tools of everyday use into weapons of attack against American elections. There is no way to tell how much Russia’s intrusion affected the election’s outcome; nor can Trump’s rise be blamed on the Russians (that responsibility falls to Americans). Yet the man Vladimir Putin sought to assist is now president, and public trust in America’s media, digital communications, and electoral systems has been undermined.

This was not the kind of cyberattack that the national-security community had anticipated. For years, the dominant concern has been to prevent a destructive cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure like the energy or financial sectors. In two separate attacks in 2015 and 2016, for example, Russia conducted malware attacks on Ukraine’s power grid that disrupted the transmission of power to parts of the Ukrainian population. Russia has also previously implanted malware on American industrial-control systems, suspected to include those of nuclear power plants.

— Vikram Singh, Jonathan Reiber Where’s the 9/11 Commission for Russia’s Election Attack? via foreignpolicy.com  

The final purpose of these apparently mad actions were recently outlined by Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s official Mouth-of-Sauron (1, 2). His new opus was published by Russia Today, a state-controlled propaganda channel.

  The line “done with all your hypocrisy” in this context sounds both like a prophecy and a verdict, and as the motto of a new era.

People in large quantities and even more often make a strange choice. Rejection of the political landscape is being observed everywhere in the West. Mistrust towards everything ordinary increases. What’s usual is perceived as false, artificial. What’s unusual brings hope. The normal person loses popularity, the freak gains it.

Hypocrisy is blameworthy, but in order to investigate it there is a need – like when studying all blameworthy but at the same time widely practiced things, such as war, infidelity, overeating – to consider the question out of moral coordinates.

Double standards, sanctimoniusness, duplicity, threefold standards, political correctness, intrigues, propaganda, flattery, and slyness are widespread not only in politics. Society is steady if all its elements found with each other a common language — a language in which it is convenient to lie. And not only to others, but to yourself too.

The language of hypocrisy is weaved from allegories, innuendoes, euphemisms, riddles, metaphors, magic formulas, methods of taboo-making, verbiage, cliches, slogans, ambiguities, and labels. It serves as material both for the industry of popular arts and political programming, and for communication at the household level, and even for silence.

To say one thing, to think a second thing, and to do a third thing is seemingly bad, but almost nobody succeeds to do it in another way. Hypocrisy in the rationalistic paradigm of the western civilization is inevitable for two reasons.

Firstly, the structure of speech itself – at least coherent, “reasonable” speech – is too linear and too formal in order to fully reflect so-called reality. Hegel fairly claimed that a noncontradictory statement can’t be truthful.

What seems to be logical is always more or less false. Language is a two-dimensional space, all means of expression and all “richness and diversity” of which is reduced to endless repetitions – in different scales and on different topics – of the elementary sense-making couple “yes/no”. This off/on switch of any word and any phrase – from the request to “pass the mustard”, to the “Karamazov Brothers“ and String theory – clicks one thousand times a day in billions of heads. But no matter how much it clicks, it can’t cram in the oversized multidimensional world into flat human thinking.

The universal and, it is possible to say, unrestrained use of binary codes (yes/no, 0/1, +/-, god/human, angel/demon, republican/democrat, truth/lie, and so on) works well. However, to work well doesn’t mean to be truthful. That’s why during rare assaults of sharp truthfulness people say not exactly what it is in reality — “the uttered thought is a lie”.

The second reason for the domination of hypocrites is much deeper. To pretend to be what you aren’t and to hide your intentions are the most important technologies of biological survival. Without this, in wild nature it is impossible to both attack or hide yourself. People inherited a pretence instinct from wild ancestors and strongly developed it.

In the cultures of all people there are two main types of heroes — the fighter and the cunning person. Crafty Odysseus isn’t less esteemed than the mighty and rough Achilles. Odysseys, of course, is also a fighter. He is both brave and strong, but nevertheless his main traits are foxery, eloquence, and cunningness. Enemies don’t disperse having only caught sight of him, as it happens when Achilles appears. And it’s not he, but Achilles who kills great Hector. But Odysseus, unlike Achilles, survives and comes back home with honor. And even receives from Homer a personal poem, because his feats aren’t so monotonous as Achilles’, and adventures are entertaining and fascinating.

A trickster, a cheat, a deceiver, and a player are the central characters of both art narrations and real historical events.

The feint is a basic skill of the football player and boxer. Military cunningness is the main weapon of the commander. Guile is the valor of the spy. Perfidy is not a forbidden method in the fight for power.

A person more willingly demands truthfulness and transparency from others than they do from themselves — a natural desire to disarm a rival and to remain armed themselves. Competing groups of influence furiously demand from each other extreme and often obviously impracticable openness, stimulating growth of innovations in the sphere of concealment of truth. The most honest entrenched themselves in the deep and dark Internet. The others improve their skill in view of all. The general passion for transparency raised the quality of hypocrisy to earlier-unprecedented heights.

In general, hypocrisy is disgusting, effective, and inevitable. But hypocritical discourses, languages in which lies are told, and metaphors of hypocrisy periodically become outdated. Camouflaging phrases depreciate due to frequent repetition, discrepancies and mismatches start being prominent.

More and more slips of the tongue, justifications, explanations, longueurs, and pauses are spent on saving the status quo (and all of this with smaller returns). The system reaches the limit of complexity, complexity turns into frightening confusion. A request for simplification arises, causing even more destructive rhetorical storms and inflow of demagogy.

Ethical schemes fade away. “Right or wrong – I can hardly tell,” sings Moody.

The public contract written on the breaking-up of political language starts gradually losing force. The basic provisions of this contract written in golden letters become boring and hated. And what was bashfully written down in it in small, almost unreadable font, which by common consent was moved to the footnotes and appendices, starts suddenly interesting everyone, and someone, having deeply examined it, is the first to exclaim: “We were deceived!”.

The oath of a hypocrite, whether its said touching the Bible or on Facebook, can’t convince anybody any more.

Various social groups deprived of common language stand apart in order to create their “truthful” dialect. The mixing up of languages arrives, and the turbulence – lasting until society, in disputes and clashes, reaches despair and resigns to any new half-truth, with reformed and “improved” hypocrisy.

It is precisely such a phase as intolerance to falseness, mixing up of languages, and disappointment in the norm that now some western nations pass through.

It is thus possible to call this set of strangenesses of our days “the crisis of hypocrisy”.

Obviously, it’s not only a question of semantics, it’s not simply a philological or purely communicative problem. This is one of the manifestations of big technological, demographic, and, perhaps, climatic shifts.

An interesting and dangerous time. The disintegration of semantic designs releases a huge amount of social energy. Will the Western world manage to scatter its surpluses by means of virtual games, series about violence, sports competitions, economic bubbles, rap battles and rock concerts, electoral shows, local wars, and TV news? Or there will be a heating of the system to a temperature of revolution and big war? Who knows.

Examples of civilizations reaching the dangerous limit of complexity are known. Further, either a crash or a salvaging simplification of the system followed.

The most difficult democratic and oligarchical organism of the ancient Roman republic at some point became too complex and started produce chaos instead of order. After Gracchus and Sulpicia, and after mutinies and civil wars, Sulla, then Caesar, and, finally, Octavian came, who gradually actually abolished the republic. An empire appeared in its place. Emperors didn’t call themselves kings, without wishing to offend the memory of the republic, but they were kings. And this updated hypocrisy for some centuries prolonged the life of the Roman world.

Literally all institutes of republican Rome served one main goal — not to allow the return of kings. The fear of the usurpation of power forced the Romans to create a more and more sophisticated system of restraint and counterbalances, and they were so fond of it that they got confused by their own “blossoming complexity”, which they were obliged to sort out by means of a simple imperial vertical. The kings returned.

Perhaps, tomorrow too the confused crowds will be brought out from “all this chaos and all this lie” by a strong hand. A king of the West, a founder of digital dictatorship, a leader with semi-artificial intelligence is already predicted by prophetic comics. Why wouldn’t these comics come true? It is also an option.

“I’m waiting here for anyone to wash it all away,” sings Five Finger Death Punch. America sings.

— Vladislav Surkov: The Crisis of Hypocrisy – “I Hear America Singing” via some site  

Probably, I have heard something like this. Oh, yes:

  The first step which visibly brought mankind away from the animal world was that which led to the first invention. The invention itself owes its origin to the ruses and stratagems which man employed to assist him in the struggle with other creatures for his existence and often to provide him with the only means he could adopt to achieve success in the struggle. Those first very crude inventions cannot be attributed to the individual; for the subsequent observer, that is to say the modern observer, recognizes them only as collective phenomena. Certain tricks and skilful tactics which can be observed in use among the animals strike the eye of the observer as established facts which may be seen everywhere; and man is no longer in a position to discover or explain their primary cause and so he contents himself with calling such phenomena ‘instinctive.’

In our case this term has no meaning. Because everyone who believes in the higher evolution of living organisms must admit that every manifestation of the vital urge and struggle to live must have had a definite beginning in time and that one subject alone must have manifested it for the first time. It was then repeated again and again; and the practice of it spread over a widening area, until finally it passed into the subconscience of every member of the species, where it manifested itself as ‘instinct.’

This is more easily understood and more easy to believe in the case of man. His first skilled tactics in the struggle with the rest of the animals undoubtedly originated in his management of creatures which possessed special capabilities.

There can be no doubt that personality was then the sole factor in all decisions and achievements, which were afterwards taken over by the whole of humanity as a matter of course. An exact exemplification of this may be found in those fundamental military principles which have now become the basis of all strategy in war. Originally they sprang from the brain of a single individual and in the course of many years, maybe even thousands of years, they were accepted all round as a matter of course and this gained universal validity.

Man completed his first discovery by making a second. Among other things he learned how to master other living beings and make them serve him in his struggle for existence. And thus began the real inventive activity of mankind, as it is now visible before our eyes. Those material inventions, beginning with the use of stones as weapons, which led to the domestication of animals, the production of fire by artificial means, down to the marvellous inventions of our own days, show clearly that an individual was the originator in each case. The nearer we come to our own time and the more important and revolutionary the inventions become, the more clearly do we recognize the truth of that statement. All the material inventions which we see around us have been produced by the creative powers and capabilities of individuals. And all these inventions help man to raise himself higher and higher above the animal world and to separate himself from that world in an absolutely definite way. Hence they serve to elevate the human species and continually to promote its progress. And what the most primitive artifice once did for man in his struggle for existence, as he went hunting through the primeval forest, that same sort of assistance is rendered him to-day in the form of marvellous scientific inventions which help him in the present day struggle for life and to forge weapons for future struggles. In their final consequences all human thought and invention help man in his life-struggle on this planet, even though the so-called practical utility of an invention, a discovery or a profound scientific theory, may not be evident at first sight. Everything contributes to raise man higher and higher above the level of all the other creatures that surround him, thereby strengthening and consolidating his position; so that he develops more and more in every direction as the ruling being on this earth.

Hence all inventions are the result of the creative faculty of the individual. And all such individuals, whether they have willed it or not, are the benefactors of mankind, both great and small. Through their work millions and indeed billions of human beings have been provided with means and resources which facilitate their struggle for existence.

Thus at the origin of the material civilization which flourishes to-day we always see individual persons. They supplement one another and one of them bases his work on that of the other. The same is true in regard to the practical application of those inventions and discoveries. For all the various methods of production are in their turn inventions also and consequently dependent on the creative faculty of the individual. Even the purely theoretical work, which cannot be measured by a definite rule and is preliminary to all subsequent technical discoveries, is exclusively the product of the individual brain. The broad masses do not invent, nor does the majority organize or think; but always and in every case the individual man, the person.

Accordingly a human community is well organized only when it facilitates to the highest possible degree individual creative forces and utilizes their work for the benefit of the community. The most valuable factor of an invention, whether it be in the world of material realities or in the world of abstract ideas, is the personality of the inventor himself. The first and supreme duty of an organized folk community is to place the inventor in a position where he can be of the greatest benefit to all. Indeed the very purpose of the organization is to put this principle into practice. Only by so doing can it ward off the curse of mechanization and remain a living thing. In itself it must personify the effort to place men of brains above the multitude and to make the latter obey the former.

Therefore not only does the organization possess no right to prevent men of brains from rising above the multitude but, on the contrary, it must use its organizing powers to enable and promote that ascension as far as it possibly can. It must start out from the principle that the blessings of mankind never came from the masses but from the creative brains of individuals, who are therefore the real benefactors of humanity. It is in the interest of all to assure men of creative brains a decisive influence and facilitate their work. This common interest is surely not served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of thinking nor are they efficient and in no case whatsoever can they be said to be gifted. Only those should rule who have the natural temperament and gifts of leadership.

Such men of brains are selected mainly, as I have already said, through the hard struggle for existence itself. In this struggle there are many who break down and collapse and thereby show that they are not called by Destiny to fill the highest positions; and only very few are left who can be classed among the elect. In the realm of thought and of artistic creation, and even in the economic field, this same process of selection takes place, although–especially in the economic field–its operation is heavily handicapped. This same principle of selection rules in the administration of the State and in that department of power which personifies the organized military defence of the nation. The idea of personality rules everywhere, the authority of the individual over his subordinates and the responsibility of the individual towards the persons who are placed over him. It is only in political life that this very natural principle has been completely excluded. Though all human civilization has resulted exclusively from the creative activity of the individual, the principle that it is the mass which counts–through the decision of the majority–makes its appearance only in the administration of the national community especially in the higher grades; and from there downwards the poison gradually filters into all branches of national life, thus causing a veritable decomposition. The destructive workings of Judaism in different parts of the national body can be ascribed fundamentally to the persistent Jewish efforts at undermining the importance of personality among the nations that are their hosts and, in place of personality, substituting the domination of the masses. The constructive principle of Aryan humanity is thus displaced by the destructive principle of the Jews, They become the ‘ferment of decomposition’ among nations and races and, in a broad sense, the wreckers of human civilization.

[…]

The People’s State must assure the welfare of its citizens by recognizing the importance of personal values under all circumstances and by preparing the way for the maximum of productive efficiency in all the various branches of economic life, thus securing to the individual the highest possible share in the general output.

Hence the People’s State must mercilessly expurgate from all the leading circles in the government of the country the parliamentarian principle, according to which decisive power through the majority vote is invested in the multitude. Personal responsibility must be substituted in its stead.

From this the following conclusion results:

The best constitution and the best form of government is that which makes it quite natural for the best brains to reach a position of dominant importance and influence in the community.

Just as in the field of economics men of outstanding ability cannot be designated from above but must come forward in virtue of their own efforts, and just as there is an unceasing educative process that leads from the smallest shop to the largest undertaking, and just as life itself is the school in which those lessons are taught, so in the political field it is not possible to ‘discover’ political talent all in a moment. Genius of an extraordinary stamp is not to be judged by normal standards whereby we judge other men.

In its organization the State must be established on the principle of personality, starting from the smallest cell and ascending up to the supreme government of the country.

There are no decisions made by the majority vote, but only by responsible persons. And the word ‘council’ is once more restored to its original meaning. Every man in a position of responsibility will have councillors at his side, but the decision is made by that individual person alone.

The principle which made the former Prussian Army an admirable instrument of the German nation will have to become the basis of our statal constitution, that is to say, full authority over his subordinates must be invested in each leader and he must be responsible to those above him.

Even then we shall not be able to do without those corporations which at present we call parliaments. But they will be real councils, in the sense that they will have to give advice. The responsibility can and must be borne by one individual, who alone will be vested with authority and the right to command.

Parliaments as such are necessary because they alone furnish the opportunity for leaders to rise gradually who will be entrusted subsequently with positions of special responsibility.

The following is an outline of the picture which the organization will present:

From the municipal administration up to the government of the REICH, the People’s State will not have any body of representatives which makes its decisions through the majority vote. It will have only advisory bodies to assist the chosen leader for the time being and he will distribute among them the various duties they are to perform. In certain fields they may, if necessary, have to assume full responsibility, such as the leader or president of each corporation possesses on a larger scale.

In principle the People’s State must forbid the custom of taking advice on certain political problems–economics, for instance–from persons who are entirely incompetent because they lack special training and practical experience in such matters. Consequently the State must divide its representative bodies into a political chamber and a corporative chamber that represents the respective trades and professions.

To assure an effective co-operation between those two bodies, a selected body will be placed over them. This will be a special senate.

No vote will be taken in the chambers or senate. They are to be organizations for work and not voting machines. The individual members will have consultive votes but no right of decision will be attached thereto. The right of decision belongs exclusively to the president, who must be entirely responsible for the matter under discussion.

This principle of combining absolute authority with absolute responsibility will gradually cause a selected group of leaders to emerge; which is not even thinkable in our present epoch of irresponsible parliamentarianism.

The political construction of the nation will thereby be brought into harmony with those laws to which the nation already owes its greatness in the economic and cultural spheres.

Regarding the possibility of putting these principles into practice, I should like to call attention to the fact that the principle of parliamentarian democracy, whereby decisions are enacted through the majority vote, has not always ruled the world. On the contrary, we find it prevalent only during short periods of history, and those have always been periods of decline in nations and States.

One must not believe, however, that such a radical change could be effected by measures of a purely theoretical character, operating from above downwards; for the change I have been describing could not be limited to transforming the constitution of a State but would have to include the various fields of legislation and civic existence as a whole. Such a revolution can be brought about only by means of a movement which is itself organized under the inspiration of these principles and thus bears the germ of the future State in its own organism.

Therefore it is well for the National Socialist Movement to make itself completely familiar with those principles to-day and actually to put them into practice within its own organization, so that not only will it be in a position to serve as a guide for the future State but will have its own organization such that it can subsequently be placed at the disposal of the State itself.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. by James Murphy via gutenberg.net.au  

Interestingly, this openly unmasking Surkov’s text hasn’t been translated for the English-language version of RT. Too much allusions, perhaps.

Of course, deliberate allusions.

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