#created simply as proxy for their counterparts

[harumscarumcos]

would be really fucked up if donald blake as serpent and ben reilly as chasm teamed up to fuck with thor and peter’s lives

[bllsbailey]

Here's When Biden White House Aides Noticed Joe Was Mentally Cooked

Jeff already wrote about the bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal regarding President Joe Biden’s mental decline and the extensive operation to cover it up. We got a preview of this in June when the press excoriated the publication for suggesting that Biden was on the slide, only to be proven correct when Joe had an election-killing performance against Donald Trump during CNN’s debate. 

For weeks, it was a deluge of stories about how everyone, including foreign officials, knew Biden had lost more than just a step. European officials conceded that their interactions with the president were more akin to their conversations with their aging parents than the leader of the free world. That was in March, when Biden addressed our counterparts across the pond about the Ukraine War. 

“Officials who had met him in previous years noted a sharp deterioration. The officials left the meeting saddened, feeling the president reminded some of their own parents as they aged, the person said.” 

And now: 

The report details how members of the Biden administration were forced to adapt to the president’s advanced age and cognitive decline. It revealed a tightly managed operation to restrict access to him and meticulously manage his public appearances and interactions. The objective was to prevent the public from seeing his apparent weaknesses as president.  Biden’s staff designed a highly insulated system to limit his exposure to outsiders – including members of Congress and the media. His senior advisers acted as intermediaries and gatekeepers, ensuring that meetings were short and focused so the president would not lose track of the conversation.  National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard frequently acted as proxies for Biden during important policy discussions. “Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy,” the report noted.  In many cases, “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether,” according to the report. 

Forget the mental obstacles; physically, Biden couldn’t do the job. Everything we suspected and joked about regarding the Biden presidency was correct. He was too old, too frail, and frankly, too stupid to be president, which is why America got steamrolled everywhere over the past four years. The laughable line that this was the most consequential, active, and accomplished presidency is simply a lie. All Biden did was make us poorer, less safe by setting the world on fire, and leaving us open to an illegal immigrant invasion. I want to hear about the job reports because almost a million weren’t created under this clown. To boot, Biden's White House aides knew the president was cooked on day one of his presidency (via NY Post): 

White House aides covered up President Biden’s apparent mental decline from Day 1 of his presidency, shielding the aging commander-in-chief from the public and even rearranging his schedule after scatterbrained performances, an explosive report revealed Thursday. Presidential staff formed a tight shell around Biden, 82, right after he took office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staff immediately limiting his in-person interactions in January 2021. Meetings were often scheduled for later in the day — a fact first disclosed after Biden’s debate flop against President-elect Donald Trump, when staff admitted the then-Democratic nominee had difficulty functioning outside a six-hour window that closed around 4 p.m. daily.  Once inside the room with the president, officials were instructed to make their briefings short and to the point.  The White House also hired a voice coach, Hollywood mogul and campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, to try to improve his faint, raspy tone. Other staffers removed negative reports from Biden’s stack of news for the day, misleading him about the public’s opinion of his job performance — which reached a 70-year low in 2024.

 In 2020, Trump said Biden was “shot” mentally. He was right…again. 

Trending on Townhall Videos

[snowleopardsaregettingmytoes]

the obi wan show is really boring. and the opening was awful. and the music is really generic. and nothing about "its all just done in a computer but pretends to be real by using a lot of polygons and shading" cinematic is impressive. lemme know when you make another star wars with model ships and actors who aren't auditioning for a bible movie with a fascist-wannabe director treating the set like his own personal riech. (that's hyperbole for the acting is stiff and made so much more boring by the faux stoic exposition prattling. but if you watched movies that aren't like this thing, you'd know that.)

this is why i watch old movies. and you know? i cracked the code because i was willing to sit with it. what people keep calling racism and sexism is actually a form of communication & visual metaphor. notice how the white guy is like "hey i'm you", and the black guy is too, but he's like, there to represent a different motive/approach. and depending on the story and message the white guy either makes peace/friends with him or defeats him. this can go other ways too, like different hairstyles and styles of clothing. watch enough movies from the same era and you notice patterns.

these are backed up by the pretentious filmschool people's peacocking (but they only seem to grasp these concepts at a surface level.) Mirrors, reflections. symbolism. themes. what they're talking about are actually true and very important....they just talk about it really annoyingly, as does anybody saying stuff out loud to get it stuck in their own heads. its once these concepts are truly understood and their implementation perfected that we begin to not realize they're even there, woven so tightly into the fabric of cellulose that they simply ARE.

fun fact: in the 20th century when us queers weren't as open about ourselves, we tended to find each other by proxy. we'd mention something queer and observe those who heard. if they reacted like they knew or were interested, we had just found each other. but to be safe around the shitty bible shitheads, we didn't directly say its what we wanted.

"i am a man and i want to kiss another man" vs "heh i was at a bar and just saw two guys kiss what's the deal with that?"

same idea in movies. there's a joke about or related to queer culture/activities and any queers in the audience could find each other by seeing who reacted and how. i mean, c'mon. the entire industry was queer. of course they're gonna help their anytown usa counterparts find eachother.

it also made creating a mood so much easier and more effective because in the 20th century everything looked like stuff. the cars looked like cars and they all had different "faces" amd the houses and buildings were like that too. and so much variety. its sort of easier to just observe by being surrounded by it (i refuse to buy new stuff for the majority of what i own, so its literally what i surround myself with, including cars) than it is to explain it. try watching a movie that has a lot of scenes on the road and pick out specific cars, notice the colors and shapes and if you know makes & models check that too. or similarly, when there's a lot of buildings, make a conscious effort to determine which building might have what inside it. (home, apartments, offices, municipal, different kinds of stores and restaurants, garages vs gas stations, etc) clothes (ask yourself what kind of attitude must come with choosing an outfit such as that, then compare it with the character. avoid generalizations such as "only lawyers wear suits" and "wow she's wearing such a frumpy dress she must be stuck up", and instead use more bite-size feelings you might consider while getting dressed.

okay so you've watched a 20th century movie for that stuff. now try watching an avengers movie, or a similar-to-the-genre-studied film circa 2009-present. 9 times out of ten all that stuff falls apart because the new shit is so samey and forgettable. it relies on you either only caring about a concept ("there's a car chase happening" vs "this car chase is important because of what's riding on it, and these characters represent x,y,z and the cars represent these feelings and motivations, etc") its all very vauge, likely on purpose because if you can do that and give the bare minimum to make somebody who doesn't care much about movies pay attention so they have something to talk about in their boring little life to sound interesting and fit in (probably because the awesome hobby they could have been participating in got driven out of production and replaced in their life with a posting on reddit addiction), well you just made a lump of shit that grossed an obscene amount of money at the box office.

my solution is we behead all the capitalists, destroy the stranglehold of mediocre "smart" technology, paint our goddamn houses purple, learn some skills and hobbies and get goddamn fistfulls of grass and then when we're done with all that we meet up at the predetermined location and make a cobbled together sci-fi epic based on one of you's vintage fanfic, just like the original star wars. and we remember what we learned from the 21st century and never let that shit happen again.

[twistedtummies2]

How'd you discover TW and MHA, and what do you like about them (kink and non-kink wise)?

Oh, boy...this is a bit of a long story, so I'll try to keep it as succinct as I possibly can. XD I found out about both franchises because of @calico807. She's done a lot of art for MHA, and in the case of TW...back when the game was first announced, she made a one-page comic featuring Malleus. So that was how I found out the two EXISTED...however, I wouldn't say her work was how I DISCOVERED them. I didn't know anything about them beyond her fanart. In the case of TW, one day in the loathsome year of 2020 - admittedly BEFORE everything went to Mephisto's Kitchen - I was scrolling through her gallery (I was looking for a specific image I wanted to share with a friend; not someone any of you know), and I found the Malleus image again. I went, "Oh, yeah. I remember that! Hey, I wonder if the game ever got released...?" So, I went looking, and - by sheer luck - it turned out that was only a WEEK before the game was set to BE released. So I promptly started looking up all the info I could find on the game via its wiki and other sources, and once video walkthroughs were available, I started watching them. The rest is gorgeous lion body-I mean, history. >///> As for MHA, you can thank @belliesandburps for that one. See, he did a lot of artwork for MHA, too, and he decided to start sharing MHA with me, episode by episode. As he fully expected - I fell in love with it. And he's still sharing it with me, episode by episode, as we speak. (Incidentally, I got him into Moriarty the Patriot AND TW kind of the same way, so...(singing)..."What can I say, except You're Welcome?" ;) ) NOW, in terms of what I like about them? In terms of non-kinky stuff...I love the kind of world MHA creates, above all else. I love how it normalizes superheroes in a pretty interesting way: with things like Marvel and DC, there's always this sense the heroes have to stay secretive, despite the fact there are a BAJILLION of them. In this world, that goes out the window: heroes are just a part of everyday life, and people sort of accept that. That creates an interesting and unique dynamic I haven't really seen before, in terms of how this world functions and operates. There's a lot of other things to love, but I think that singular element is the biggest draw for me: just seeing the way this universe works. In terms of TW...for those who haven't guessed yet, I'm a big, Big, BIG Disney fan. And I love how Twisted Wonderland...well...TWISTS the characters we know and love in so many interesting ways. Particularly with the central cast at Night Raven. It would have been so easy for them to just make them "Human Scar" or "Male-ficent," or else to make them cliched stock characters who are really only interesting in their crazy costumes and the fact they're handsome as heck. But no! The game goes out of its way to very cleverly and expertly create unique characters who, while certainly owing much to their classic counterparts, do truly stand out as separate characters in their own right who you care about and find interesting for their OWN issues, not just simply as proxies of the villains they are based on. I don't love Leona just because I like Scar, I love Leona BECAUSE I LOVE LEONA AS LEONA. I love seeing how the characters compare and contrast to their original counterparts, and figuring out what makes these boys tick. Now, as for the kinky side of things? (pauses) I don't want this response to be a novel, so I'm just going to say...(points to Leona for TW and Bakugou for MHA)...that. All of that. That's why. Yes.

[alexsmitposts]

Lebanon: Colonial Thieves & Conflicting Networks of Patronage I am trying to think how best to write about Lebanon, about the BIGGER picture and the complicated political situation and structure there. It goes beyond the Beirut port bombing or the source of the fertiliser, well beyond the recriminations, and what is actually being reported in the news as well. This is a topic we have covered earlier in NEO, even before Lebanon was so newsworthy. But as with everything, the first rule of a journalist is to not to believe in coincidences. Blast from the Past Let’s just assume readers know all about the current situation, the corruption, the banking mafias and the humanitarian crisis on the horizon. Lebanon is a country collapsing, crashing and burning, and its banking system with it. The country is about to hit rock bottom—at least in the opinion of most pundits. As mentioned in previous NEO articles, the lack of a government isn’t going to get foreign troops out of Lebanon, or stabilise its currency and persuade its neighbours to respect its position. Nor is it going to keep it out of the shadows of Israel and Syria. But having a new government which isn’t backed, or at least tolerated, by public consensus won’t bring about immediate change; it won’t be the magic cure. On the contrary, it will for sure raise new issues, create new groups willing to be bought off and create greater instability, simply because it is easier to fight an enemy you know. Changing the political-sectoral structure of the government, an ongoing issue in Lebanon, isn’t going to prove a panacea for all either – not because no solution would satisfy the Lebanese, but because the very existence of its government system doesn’t satisfy everyone else. But what comes next? At the heart of this system lies a social compact which connects individuals to political leaders based on sectarian identity — Maronite Christian, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, Druze, to name a few of the country’s 18 different religious sects. Each knows its place, and is closely linked to various networks of political and financial patronage—and these have existed from generation to generation. In layman’s terms, if a whole new order is put in place in Lebanon – based on liberal, deliberative politics, not doling out privileges to various religious and ethnic groupings, and with well-delineated representative electoral boundaries drawn up following the first census the country will have seen in decades – most of the confessional groups will most likely lose out, or persuade their supporters they will. The sectorial elites are very entrenched, and run their own self-sustaining networks of patronage, so it isn’t hard to predict how they will react. If something the West recognises as “liberal democracy” is introduced in Lebanon, the elites’ spheres of influence will contract, and their interests will have to come second to those of the locals. At least, that is the theory – as ever, Westerners are unable to understand that “liberal democracy” is itself a sect, run by a particular segment of the population, holding certain approved views, which sustains itself by even more extensive networks of patronage. The elites and the locals are not two separate groups in Lebanon. All the various groups and elites are in some sense local, the outcomes of waves of past immigration and a system which, though antiquated, was questioned far more by outsiders than it ever was by Lebanese, whose only argument is who should have which slices of the cake, and for what reason. The Maronites claim to be the “original” Lebanese, descendants of the Phoenicians. But their claim to being the real Lebanese is no more or less valid than those of the Sunni or Shia populations, or the Druze, or even the Armenians who have a clear, century-long presence in the country—ever since the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottomans. This is why nationals outside the country simply call themselves Lebanese – they identify more with Lebanon than with the ethnic groups and associated states everyone else tells them they belong to. In the nineteenth century it was often said that the differences between the dominant political parties lay in which gentleman’s clubs their members belonged to, rather than in their ideologies. The differences between Lebanese lie in which networks of patronage they can access, not their religious or ethnic identity. Lebanon has never been a nation-state or national state, so all groups have a more or less equal participation in its identity. No one group can claim that it is the true local population, and the rest are minorities. Everyone is a minority, and it is only the much more recent Palestinian and Syrian immigrants and refugees who might remain out of the social and legal framework, even though they largely migrated there to find one. Trying to upset the delicate balance of interests which holds the country together, when outsiders allow it to, will certainly lead to a great deal of acrimony from almost anyone who has enjoyed any degree of power over the past seventy years and more, who won’t want to give up any privileges and share things with Johnny come lately “newcomers”. As we have learned from too many other fledgling states or flickering beacons of democracy, be careful for what you wish for. Change for its own sake is not always for the better, especially in complicated parts of the world. This has been a lesson learned in the wake of the so-called Arab Springs. High Wire Act Perhaps the best starting point is to assume that the present Lebanese government is a high-wire act. By any measures it should have failed long ago, even before it resigned, as it represents too many competing and diametrically opposed interests, sects and political agendas, pieced together into a government out of sheer desperation amidst almost impossible political realities. Corruption is endemic, as to a cat who likes to climb trees and claw things. Much of the problem has to do with the fact that Lebanon is deeply rooted in its old colonial past, and its former masters, powers such as France and Turkey, are completing for a place at the table in a bid to retain their historic influence. When Lebanon was the Las Vegas of the Middle East, wealthy and attractive, these powers tried to exert this influence in a much more covert way, not wanting to interfere with the operation of a gravy train. Now those days have gone, they are setting themselves up as the solution to the problems they themselves created by refusing to accept a Lebanese system they were incapable of emulating. From 1920 until its independence in 1943, Lebanon was under French colonial rule, while before that the Ottomans ruled for four centuries. This is why it was predictable that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron of “colonial” aims in Lebanon, and called his recent visit to Beirut a “spectacle”, amid growing tensions between Ankara and Paris. The meddling from outsiders has made Lebanon a modern-day Casablanca, full of cross-sections of intrigues. Not only France and Turkey but the US and Israel see it as the beachhead for influencing regional affairs, as if things are not already complicated enough with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria engaged in an ongoing proxy war within Lebanon’s internal politics. No one wants them there, but if the state isn’t strong enough to protect particular groups of locals from people sponsored by the other side, they have little choice but to put up with the “protection” of people they do not actually regard as representing their interests. Macron and Erdogan have enough problems at home, but prefer meddling in an area that is already a tinderbox, so they can blame the other, and therefore by extension all it represents in their respective countries. All this is contributing to a perfect storm which will leave Lebanon a failed state amongst failed states. What will actually have happened is that everyone else has failed because Lebanon is intrinsically sounder than they are, but it is the Lebanese who will be expected to pick up the pieces. Shallow-minded State While France and Turkey are making worrying bids for renewed influence, the US is trying to call the game from a distance. US motivations are simpler, and easier to understand – the US answer is always, “I blame Iran for the problems in Lebanon,” with a few soundbites about Hezbollah to boot. As ever, this line has everything to do with the US, and nothing whatever to do with Lebanon or the reality of life there. IRAN-Hezbollah is a label of convenience for State Department types and the John Boltons and Mike Mike Pompeos of this world, i.e., the proverbial “shallow-minded state”.It is really interesting to listen to State Department briefings and read press releases. What they don’t say is most revealing, like Pompeo’s statement in the aftermath of the only too convenient fertilizer explosion at the Port of Beirut: “I want to extend our deepest condolences to all those who were affected by the massive explosion at the port of Beirut yesterday. We stand ready to assist the Government of Lebanon – as it grapples with this horrible tragedy. You’ll see the United States announce a number of things we intend to do to assist the people of Lebanon in the coming days.” Such as what? Everything has strings attached, especially when it concerns providing aid to a country during a humanitarian crisis. We only have to look at the developmental model imposed on any country, the USAID Missions and IFO, IMF and World Bank advisers, designed with no other purpose but to ensure the US takes control “lock, stock and barrel”. Let’s hope that a new model evolves (not a feeding frenzy), and one not based on externally imposed structural adjustment policies or economic shock treatment, as if the economy hasn’t been shocked enough. It should be more needs driven, and must not identify the locals as the problem, particularly when you are expecting those locals to vote the way you want them to when your new system is in place. Baking a new cake will require time, and enough time must be afforded for the evolving protest movement and other independent figures to politically organise. Early elections will result in the same sectarian elite getting elected, but then not being allowed to operate, so Lebanon will again be lumbered with the worst of both worlds. To go back and see where it all began, one only needs to check out the secret 1916 Sykes Picot agreement between England and France about slicing up what would be left of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. It would be naïve to think that anyone can get a grasp of what is going on now without understanding the historic intrigues. The Bolsheviks found a copy of the Sykes-Picot agreement when they seized power, and had the audacity to publish it. Lenin called it “the agreement of colonial thieves”. This might also be an appropriate title for what may come in the wake of the resignation of the most recent Lebanese government, and any conditions imposed by the West or the IMF on Lebanon in exchange for a financial lifeline.

[nbenrey-real]

hlvrai watsonian interpretation concepts

okay buckle in folks because my hyperfixating ass CANNOT let this go and it’s a REAL fuckin long one with a lot of metaphysics nonsense referencing cyberpunk terms, vaguely cthulhu-mythos style reality perception bullshit, and of course a bunch of player-interaction-horseshit thats blatantly the result of undertale and deltarune metaanalysis. Alright, so: 

HLVRAI is the result of three different realities on differing ‘Singularity Levels’- points of where an sapient entity reaches a threshold of awareness of levels ‘above’ them that their perception process becomes incomprehensible to their native zones levels- interacting in a domino effect thanks to one certain eldritch entities desire to give his Mixed-Singularity-Level kid a good 37th birthday party at chuck-e-cheese.

These are: Reality 6-3411, Reality P14Y3R, Reality 41VR41, and Proxy-Realities 814354. 

Reality 6-3411 is where the entity referred to as Gregory ‘G-Man’ Goodman’s Species resides- a race of enigmatic creatures who regularly interact with lower Singularity Levels in hopes of uplifting them to their level, often incubating their young in those realities in order to better communicate. 

G-Man is part of a team charged with interacting with Reality P14Y3R through pre-existing proxy realities, looking for promising candidates- during which he inadvertently began interacting with Reality 41VR41 to a startling degree. Details are fuzzy, but at some point he was graced with a child by a member of that Singularity Level, currently known as Tommy Coolatta. 

Tommy, being born into a lower singularity level with no guarantee of reaching one higher, is difficult to care for properly without harm- G-Man made the decision to leave him in an area so he’d be raised by members of that level while G-Man watched from the sidelines for potential Singularity Level Increase- however, time can be hard for ‘higher’- entities to understand, and he didn't realize how long it really had been. 

While his employers had a vested interest in Tommy’s case, by the time G-Man is made aware of the circumstances of Tommy’s increasing access to higher-levels of perception of time by his employer’s- beginning with ‘seeing fast’ when drinking soda five years before the Black Mesa Incident and slowly progressing from there- Tommy had been inadvertently trapped in one of those pre-existing Proxy-Realities and could not be extracted without assistance from an entity of Reality P14Y3R interacting with a ‘Player Avatar’ based on Proxy-Realities connected to Reality 41VR41.

Reality P14Y3R is one of many realities that commonly interact with a multitude of naturally-occuring Proxy-Realities, often being interpreted as works of fiction to entities from that said level or being created by those same entities themselves. Entities from this reality are capable of interacting with Proxy-Realities which are naturally occurring buffer-zones that separate this reality to those of it’s ‘fiction’ and vice-versa, making them ideal candidates for Reality 6-3411 to utilize in their machinations- detriments to those ‘Player Avatars’ that happen to be caught in the crossfire from lower Singularity Levels notwithstanding.

In terms familiar to those who played undertale? It’s you!

Proxy-Realities 814354 include a variety of shifting sub-realities, namely taking the form of Half-Life, a science fiction first-person shooter where an entity from Reality P14Y3R takes control of the Player Avatar Gordon Freeman, a scientist working at Black Mesa. Included in this reality are a variety of AI created by entities from Reality P14Y3R, of which a few begin to increase in Singularity Level.

The first to gain proper Singularity is an entity known as Benrey, who proceeds to gain awareness of Reality P14Y3R and subsequently reinterprets their world through that knowledge- they are in a game with a script, a world that is not real, death is meaningless and you will simply heal or respawn in time- the only point is to have fun and make it interesting for the Player. 

Benrey quickly removes themselves from the games code, becoming something of an anomaly on their native level and a Netrunner of sorts on the P14Y3R level- they also notice several other AI with increasing Singularity Levels, chiefly among them: 

Tommy Coolatta, an oddity that is almost entirely free of the script and has somehow imported a High-Singularity entity called Sunkist into their reality, acting as a companion.

Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer, a hive-intelligence still deeply-entrenched in the script but with increasing awareness of the limits of their reality.

Bubby, a highly-divergent entity who largely lacks awareness but has almost entirely deviated from the script.

Darnold, an entity largely content with their role who nonetheless has some subconscious awareness of the nature of their reality & is highly deviated from the script.

Frozen, an entity who has knowledge of things from Reality P14Y3R but no self-awareness of such, apparently suffering some amount of confusion as a result but largely harmless.

Though somewhat limited in knowledge of other Reality Levels, Benrey’s observations of the behavior of their companions allows them to come to the conclusion that they need to continue the natural formula of their Proxy-Reality in order to keep their companions stable and potentially allow them to similarly break free of the games script and code.

Singularity Level changes tends to result in a certain amount of dissociation resulting from the sheer influx of information and perceptual changes, with young Singularities often becoming aggressive or depersonalized from emotions for a period- Benrey’s further reliance on the script as a guide while largely ignoring true interaction combined with interpretation of everything from a P14Y3R Level worsens this over time.

Combined with Sensory/Auditory Processing Issues and Aphasia, the resulting entity is confusing, eclectic, and esoteric at the best of times, with a habit of latching onto odd phrasing and obscure personal neologisms- making communication difficult to implausible for entities such as G-Man or Gordon who are unaware of Benrey’s intentions, habits, or goals.

Reality 41VR41 is a reality level that shares traits with a variety of media found in Reality P14Y3R, namely the presence of Black Mesa, Aperture Science, and various realities connected via proxy-node-networks. This is directly connected to Proxy-Realities 814354.

Included in this reality is one Gordon Freeman, an 41VR41 native, single father, and hard working scientist at Black Mesa that found himself mis-introduced to the Proxy Realities due to Metaphysical Similarity- the result of G-Man’s machinations to retrieve his son Tommy which simply caught him in the crossfire, a most unfortunate coincidence.

As a result of entering Proxy-Realities 814354, Gordon was transposed into the position of the Player Avatar that his unaware counterpart usually fulfilled, in essence becoming a semi-possessed puppet being influenced by entities native to the P14Y3R Level- a circumstance that Benrey was not fully aware and comprehending of initially.

Over the course of the events that followed, Gordon slowly became aware of the disparities between the knowledge of his perceived reality 41VR41, the Proxy-Reality he now resided in, and the increasing awareness of the P14Y3R Level which was influencing him. 

Benrey also began to become aware of the discrepancy between what they knew of their Proxy-Realities and the apparent origin of this new entity- which combined with increasing subconscious awareness of aspects of their Metaphysical Counterpart in Reality 41VR41- resulted in an increase in Singularity Level that caused increasing disorientation. 

Benrey simply fell back on following the script to compensate, resulting in Gordons own interpretations and increasing Singularity Level to create a feedback-loop of alterations to the Proxy-Reality and permutations of the Script- resulting in Benrey being defeated and subsequent disincorporation into the net for some time.  

Post-Incident, G-Man continues to Monitor the group, his employers having become highly interested in such a complicated case and he himself feeling some amount of guilt over how much his simple plan of ‘let me put my kid down for a second for the reality level natives to watch them’ managed to make Tommy an orphan and royally fuck up so many young Singularities, an entire Proxy-Reality, and a 41VR41 native who now has a significant amount of burden to bear about his role in all this.

Gordon, now an Ex-Player-Avatar with some buried knowledge of the nature of the realities he interacts with and an increased Singularity Level, has gained access to some of the same abilities Benrey utilized- namely Netrunning, which he utilizes to purposefully move his AI companions between Reality 41VR41 and various P14Y3R-Level-Connected Proxy-Realities in order to assist them in reaching the Singularity Level necessary to function safely and adequately in his native level. 

Essentially, Gordon purposefully puts himself in the position of being a continual Player-Avatar- in spite of the existential nightmare it is- because he wants to make sure his friends can go on to live lives outside of Game Scripts and Weird Transreality Horseshit. He just happens to choose to do so in a way that involves things like beating the shit out of cops and stealing money from banks, because fuck you i’ve earned this. I can have a little ultraviolence, as a treat. 

Benrey meanwhile has reincorporated, now entirely free to act as a Netrunner and game as they please- however, given the status of their native Proxy-Reality as ‘decommissioned’, they’ve instead been booted into Reality 41VR41 as their new native-zone with the other members of the Science Team. This poses a significant problem for them, as they have no context of how to live as a non-proxy entity beyond vague recollections gained from their Metaphysical Counterpart and has no actual presence in said reality- they’re still kind of expecting everything to just reset and put them back.

Tommy- having found out that Benrey had been largely staying in the stops for the bus-lines that used to go to the Black Mesa facility when they weren’t joining in on heists or hanging out with him- proceeded to immediately take to waking up Gordon at 3 am in the morning for two weeks in a row because ‘its storming really bad and they don't have anywhere else to sleep mr. freeman and he gets so worried its so cold they don't know how cold works-’, resulting in gordon just saying fuck it and making Benrey join the Science Team household.

So now Benrey lives in the house Gordon had to buy for the science team to move in with him since ‘you all keep crashing at my place anyways and god damn it i can't leave any of you alone for a minute, bubby has started so many fires-’ and now feels obligated to keep track of the jackass because fucking hell, they don't even know how to microwave things, they’re going to fucking die. Which then promptly turns into genuine concern because jesus christ their memory is complete garbage how are they functioning like this. 

Gordon largely splits his time between caring for Joshua, making everyone do things to encourage neuroplasticity like tangrams, dragging them into whatever Player Interactions G-Man says look promising, and trying to wrangle them so they stop utterly destroying the household minecraft server, come on guys, between benrey and bubby they’ve single handedly resulted in the banning of both tnt and all firespread, can you just chill- COOMER STOP PUNCHING THE GODDAMN HORSES.

Meanwhile Gordon's brother, John Freeman, laboratory office worker and part-time stunt-motorcyclist- who had been babysitting Joshua during all of this horseshit and was about ready to storm Black Mesa his damn self- has not a fucking clue what the hell is going on and why his brother is suddenly 200% more off the shits than normal, now in possession of a prosthetic hand, talking about video games controlling him or something, and in the company of an entire family of eldritch bullshit people who might be robots or something he’s not really sure???   

[fredrick6881-blog]

FLAC To Apple Lossless Converter

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format much like MP3, but lossless, that means that audio is compressed in FLAC with none loss in high quality. If you'd like a fairly combined choice of FLAC information, then the most effective online shops embrace , Qobuz , HDtracks and Rhino HDtracks solely works with American web addresses, but I'm told you should utilize a proxy and pay by PayPal. Rhino requires a credit score or debit card issued by a US bank with a US billing deal with. Qobuz is French. All 4 have some mainstream music on FLAC, and Qobuz has more than 60 studio masters. One of the very helpful capabilities for those who have Mp3 files is the function of MP3 normalization; audio normalization software program normalize audio album wav achieve. normalization software flac volume stage indicator normalize audio software program to extend quantity windows laptop computer improve sound in samsung cell phone. audio converter mp4 management easy methods to increase a quantity of the mp3? Software for increase sound of cellular. Easy methods to scale back audio file measurement. app to make iphone volume louder Cell phone free music software program download nokia normaliser. Click "Add Information" button to import your information. Or you too can simply drag your files directly to the primary interface of this software program. Choose which audio information you wish to merge. These may be added from your pc or device, via Dropbox, from Google Drive, or from some other online supply that you just hyperlink. You possibly can add a number of files directly or select them separately. Online Audio Converter is a free on-line app that converts audio recordsdata for you. Working over 300 totally different file codecs, this online FLAC converter can convert them to MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG, AMR, MP2 and M4R (for iPhone ringtones). Just like other online converters , this FLAC file converter can extract audio from a video that you may save any theme tune of sizzling films at pleasure. Take whichever sort of file you will have that sounds finest to you (wav), use dBPoweramp to transcode to flac, then use it once more to transcode the flac back to wav, then examine the sound of the two wav recordsdata: if they sound different the conversion just isn't excellent. If you can't, it is (or any imperfections are inconsequential) In fact best achieved blind to avoid any bias someone else doing the conversion and naming the original and recoded wav files identifiable solely by them. This file comprises two service menus: one to transform WAV information into FLAC, and one to transform FLAC information into WAV. You can begin to transform FLAC to Apple Lossless by clicking "Convert Now" button. Go to the website and add your MP3 file either out of your pc or import from online by pasting MP3 URL file. Dragging and dropping file to the main interface is the simplest way to add WAV file to this program. It permits you to convert WAV to FLAC in batch mode. Simply drag the folder the place WAV recordsdata are to this system and WAV to FLAC converter all the WAV clips load so as. So far, Onkyo Music offers 870,000 tracks in FLAC and one zero five,000 in MQA. New arrivals for each format are in separate sections, too, which is a useful touch. After loading one or more audio information to , you simply want to decide on one of the output formats from beneath. When the file is ready to be downloaded, use the small download button to save it to your computer.

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is a file format for lossless audio data compression. Being lossless, FLAC does not take away information from the audio stream, as lossy compression formats resembling MP3, AAC, and Vorbis do. FLAC's major writer is Josh Coalson. FLAC reduces bandwidth and storage requirements without sacrificing the integrity of the audio source. A digital audio recording (resembling a CD monitor) encoded to FLAC will be decompressed into an similar copy of the audio knowledge. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are sometimes shrunk 40 to 50 p.c (forty six% based on their own comparison). FLAC is suitable for on a regular basis audio playback and archival, with support for tagging, cowl art and quick seeking. FLAC's free and open source royalty-free nature makes it properly-supported by many software program purposes, but FLAC playback support in transportable audio devices and devoted audio programs is limited at the moment.

nope, they should be the identical by way of sound quality, as they're both compressed lossless. Most important drawback of ALAC is that ALAC files tend to be larger than their FLAC counterparts. "Native" FLAC is the compressed FLAC knowledge saved in a very minimalist container, designed to be very efficient at storing single audio streams. dBpoweramp integrates into Windows Explorer, www.audio-transcoder.com an mp3 converter that is so simple as right clicking on the supply file >> Convert To. Popup information suggestions, Edit ID-Tags are all provided.WORD: Ogg FLAC information created prior to flac 1.1.1 used an advert-hoc mapping and do not help seeking. They should be decoded and re-encoded with flac 1.1.1 or later. The principle pursuit of MP3 is to cut out all the sound knowledge that exists beyond the hearing vary of most traditional individuals and to scale back the quality of sounds that are not as straightforward to hear, and then to compress all other audio knowledge as effectively as attainable.

[beingawizardisfunandeasy]

Dioramage

They make dioramas. Look, people have hobbies, okay?

[ ][ ][ ] Faithful Diorama – By speaking an incantation over an accurate diorama of a location, you can link it to the thing it represents. Objects will move as the object they represent are moved. If specific characters are included in the diorama, they will enter, act, and exit as their real counterpart does. If spare materials or generic figures are left by the diorama, they will act to represent any people entering the location that are not specifically represented. At second level, given spare materials, these figures will make themselves resemble the real thing as much as possible. At third level, the scenery itself will change as the real scene changes, walls crumbling and being rebuilt, new rooms or floors being added, etc.

[ ][ ][ ][ ][ | ] Construct In Miniature – You are supernaturally adept at creating miniature scenes, even with relatively little material. At first level, your hands are supernaturally steady when performing such work, and you can work with as much precision as if making something much larger. At second level, you can stretch small amounts of quite rudimentary materials in to a lot of quite professional-looking models. At third level, you effectively seem to have an infinite supply of paint for these purposes. Additionally, you gain a d6 bonus per level of Construct In Miniature to rolls to construct miniature scenes, and reduce the time it takes by 15% per level of Construct In Miniature.

[ ][ ][ ][ | ][ | ] Diorama Dimension – By performing a ritual over a diorama you have made, you can turn it into a focus for a pocket dimension. The pocket dimension will resemble the diorama, scaled to your proportions, even constructed of the same material. You can travel to the dimension simply by touching your diorama. It is up to you when you create the pocket dimension whether anyone can access the pocket dimension, and whether or not they require your help or permission to do so. You may maintain a number of pocket dimensions at once up to your level of Diorama Dimension.

[ | ] Model Behaviour - By constructing a system or entity in miniature and in proxy materials inside a diorama, you can then breathe life into it and watch it progress. It will behave just as a full-size, real version would, but will have no effects outside of its diorama. If it is removed from the diorama or the diorama is broken, it will become inert. This can be used to model everything from machines, to creatures, to societies. The more accurate the model, the more accurate the behaviour.

[ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] Miniaturize – By holding an object tightly in your hand, you can scale it down to be minuscule, small enough to be held by a scale model. You can return the object to its normal size at will. You can have a number of shrunken objects at once up to your level of Miniaturize.

[bimboficationblues]

“A Jihadism Anti-Primer,” Darryl Li, Middle East Research and Information Project, Fall 2015

Discussions of jihad today are like a secularized form of demonology. They stem from a place of horror that shuts down serious thinking about politics. Perhaps the most striking example of this orientation is a summer 2015 analysis in the New York Review of Books—like much of its ilk, widely circulated but quickly forgotten—declaring ISIS simply too horrific to be analyzed. [1] Indeed, the magazine’s unexplained decision to grant anonymity to the author (described only as a “former official of a NATO country”), despite the lack of any sensitive information in the article, seemed only to reinforce this sense of radical cataclysmic difference.

The problem with all demonologies, however, is that they all too easily give rise to witch hunts. By positing jihadism as a problem about Islam, the debate is nearly always framed around questions of authenticity: How much do groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS represent something inherent to Islam and Islam only—or, in other words, how afraid should “we” be of Muslims? In this framing, ordinary Muslims are ritualistically called upon to condemn the acts committed by jihadis, something that is never demanded of Christians and Jews for acts of co-religionists who may also seek to justify their actions in scriptural terms. But no matter how sincere or thorough such self-flagellations may be, the demand for condemnation will never be completely sated. For the suspicion will persist that as infinitesimally small as groups like ISIS may be, they nevertheless make claims to Islamic authority that are compelling enough to some number of people to both give and take life in an organized fashion. As a result, “Muslims are presented with a brutal logic in which the only way to truly disassociate from ISIS and escape suspicion is to renounce Islam altogether.” [2]

Aside from its tendencies toward racism, the problem with demonology as starting point is that it sets a low bar for analysis and makes for a lot of boring writing. As a result, the engine of much commentary on jihad runs on the shock of discovery that “jihadis” are organized, may not be very religious, care about money, have fun, know how to use computers, fall in love, drink alcohol, use drugs and so on. These writings reveal far more about their presumed audiences than about the jihadi groups themselves. [3] This banalizing narrative serves both the state—which seeks to discredit the jihadis’ self-presentation as superhuman idealists—and liberal critics, who point to impiety or lack of religious learning as proving that Islam as such is not the issue.

The rediscovery that inhumane acts are committed by human beings is often paired with some kind of disclaimer that the writer is not an apologist or a proponent of “moral equivalence” between state violence and jihad but someone who seeks to understand the enemy in order to better combat it. This skittishness about “humanizing” the enemy is a kind of boundary maintenance reinforcing the false idea that the only choices on hand are apology for jihad or joining the fight against it.

Against this discourse on monsters who are actually human but whose monstrousness must nevertheless be reasserted, there are two main forms of pushback: The first insists that jihadi groups do not represent Muslims or Islam in any meaningful sense. The second holds the US or other governments directly or indirectly responsible for the emergence of such groups. Both arguments are generally correct, necessary and important. But insofar as they engage in debates over who is the “real” enemy, these arguments do not move debates about jihad outside the circle of demonology.

There is an enormous body of scholarship in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies demolishing the myth that Muslims are inherently or irrationally violent. Some of it also shows that political groups fashioning themselves in Islamic terms, such as the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt or the Justice and Development Party in Turkey (usually known by the Turkish acronym, AKP), should not be conflated with jihadis, whatever else their flaws may be. There is also scholarship showing that even groups engaging in violence under the banner of jihad cannot all be lumped together—nationalist organizations such as Hamas and Hizballah are distinguished from transnational groups like al-Qaeda. In other words, not all Muslims are pious, not all pious Muslims are Islamists, not all Islamists are violent and not all violent Islamists are at war with the West (or other Muslims they dislike).

There is, however, one significant limitation to this approach when it comes to the question of jihadism: Telling us who is not a jihadi is not particularly helpful for understanding jihadism on its own terms. In a sense, we are back in the condemnation trap, except using more analytical language. Moreover, the “not all Muslims” argument can all too easily play into the distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims that states have long employed as an instrument of rule. It is much better at telling the state which Muslims not to torture or bomb than it is at arguing against those practices in the first place.

There is a corollary to this political argument, namely “not all terrorists are Muslim,” frequently trotted out to ask why violence perpetrated by right-wing or white supremacist groups is not treated as terrorism. If the question is posed rhetorically to draw attention to the continuities and complicities between state and extra-state forms of racial terror, it is helpful. But when couched instead as a plea for the state to be simply more judicious in the distribution of its violence, then it is at naïve at best.

The other most common pushback against anti-Muslim demonization is to highlight the role that the United States played in creating the conditions that gave rise to jihadism. Indeed, a critical understanding of imperial practices and the US role in particular is absolutely indispensable. But it is equally true that reducing jihadi groups to mere epiphenomena of US actions is a dead end for analysis. Such approaches give rise to a kind of Frankenstein theory of jihad, which insists that the US can manufacture such groups but then somehow always loses control over them without ever really explaining how (an even more conspiratorial argument is that the US continues to control such groups, which at least enjoys the virtue of consistency). Moreover, the political logic of the complicity charge can be all too easily appropriated by warmongers...

A more sophisticated variant of this argument is to highlight the role of US proxies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in stirring up jihadi energies. Again, there is much truth to this account: The House of Saud’s role as a leading exporter of counterrevolution and the Pakistani military establishment’s ruthlessness in pursuit of domestic and foreign policy goals are a matter of well-established record. But when the influence that these regimes exercise over jihadi groups is overplayed or commentators suggest that Riyadh and Islamabad are somehow directing overseas attacks against their most powerful patron in Washington, the argument loses its footing. And politically, this narrative can bizarrely turn into a redirection of militarism rather than a rejection of it...More extreme versions of the argument include conspiracy theories blaming the House of Saud for the September 11 hijackings, which conveniently ignore its long-standing mutual enmity with Osama bin Laden as well as al-Qaeda’s bloody attacks on the Saudi regime.

Arguments over who is the real enemy—whether emphasizing that the enemy is not all Muslims or declaring that there is no enemy as such, only the blowback from imperial policies—ultimately do not challenge jihad talk as demonology. The fundamental problem is not only how Islam is discussed; it is how politics is understood in general. The statist discourse and its liberal opposition present a choice between demonizing the enemy and banalizing him. But there is a third option: taking radicalism seriously as a political orientation, whether its idiom is Islamic, communist or anarchist. The challenge is how to understand the distinctiveness of jihadi groups without lapsing into an all-too-often racialized exceptionalism. Letting racist flat-earthers and their more respectable counterparts set the terms of debate with questions like whether jihadis represent Islam or why they are so horrible only obscures this important task. Jihadi groups may have very different ideas of the good and may operate in forms unfamiliar to those who can only think of politics in terms of the state and its categories. But that does not render any less concrete the ideas and interests at stake in their antagonisms, nor does it make thinking clearly about them any less urgent.

[amyadamsnews]

Amy Adams on equal pay, family life and her grittiest role to date

In a corner of the genteel lounge of Los Angeles’s iconic Chateau Marmont, Amy Adams is launching into the opening lines of the Abba classic The Winner Takes It All – and it’s pitch-perfect. With other Hollywood actors, this tuneful showcase of talent, five minutes into an interview, might come across as showing off.

But the star of American Hustle, Nocturnal Animals and Arrival – a five-time Academy Award nominee and the recipient of two Golden Globes – seems atypically unstarry. Our conversation has simply prompted a demo of one of her great passions: karaoke. 

Fresh-faced and freckled, today, the 43-year-old is dressed casually in jeans and a peach blouse, her red hair pulled into a loose ponytail. In spite of her success on the big screen, you might not recognise her if she strolled past you on the street.

She’s one of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood, skilled at switching between roles – from wide-eyed and vulnerable in Junebug, which launched her leading-lady career, through tough-talking and trashy in The Fighter, to religious fanatic in The Master and – most memorably – sexy, seductive con artist in American Hustle.

Amy’s latest part looks set to make her more immediately familiar, however. Next month, she stars in HBO’s hotly anticipated new mini-series Sharp Objects, an adaptation of the novel by Gillian Flynn, author of the bestselling thriller Gone Girl. ‘I’ve been attracted to Gillian’s work for years, because she creates these incredible, flawed females,’ she says.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (who also directed last year’s critically acclaimed TV hit Big Little Lies), Sharp Objects is set in small-town Missouri, where restraint, manners and strong cocktails mask brutal violence and deep dysfunction.

Amy plays what is easily her darkest, most damaged character to date: Camille Preaker, the acerbic, alcoholic, self-harming protagonist. Recently released from a psychiatric unit, Camille, a reporter, is dispatched to Wind Gap, the town in which she grew up, to investigate the murder of two pre-teen girls. 

It quickly becomes clear that the intense pain that affects her also infests the other women in her family – her uptight, neurotic mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson) and her manipulative younger half-sister, Amma (star-in-the-making Eliza Scanlen).

As is becoming increasingly common among Hollywood’s leading ladies, Amy was also an executive producer on the series. It was she who suggested French-Canadian director Vallée. ‘There’s something about the way he tells women’s pain: he circles around it, yet gets to the heart of it,’ she says.

‘He’s not afraid to approach the violence in a way that’s also very emotional.’ For his part, Vallée praises Amy’s bravery in taking on bleak themes. ‘It was scary material, and she was so courageous to tackle this, to be so naked – literally and metaphorically,’ he says.

To help her dig into the darkness, Gillian Flynn recommended she read A Bright Red Scream. ‘It’s first-person accounts by people who self-harm,’ explains Amy, who had to wear prosthetic scars from the neck down during filming. She admits it wasn’t easy to leave Camille behind at the end of each day. ‘I’ve trained myself not to bring a character home, but there were times – whether from living in her head space or just exhaustion – when I suffered insomnia.’

The role also required her to research the psychological condition Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which causes a parent to harm their son or daughter to create the illusion that the child is ill. ‘I did a lot of reading about that too,’ says Amy. ‘It’s so against every parental instinct I have, so I just can’t imagine it. Our daughter [seven-year-old Aviana] has been hurt twice in a way that required trips to the hospital and that’s not something I’d ever want to revisit – it was traumatising.’

Happily, both Amy’s disposition – upbeat, energetic and quick to laugh – and her family life would appear to be a far cry from Camille’s. She and her husband, Darren Le Gallo, met in 2001, at an acting class in Los Angeles, and today live in the city’s glamorous Hollywood Hills. She describes their life as ‘quiet’, save for the odd karaoke night out, or in – the family’s portable karaoke machine even accompanies them on holiday.

When Amy travels for work, her husband and daughter generally go with her. ‘If I’m on my own, I engage in not-great behaviours, like hotel-room eating – sitting in bed every night with a bag of crisps and salsa and a beer,’ she admits.

The middle child of seven, Amy was born on a military base in Vicenza, Italy, where her father was stationed at the time. Her parents were Mormons and, although their adherence to the faith was ‘more cultural’ than overtly religious, ‘church played an important part in our social interactions’, she has said. ‘It instilled in me a value system I still hold true.’ 

The family eventually settled in Castle Rock, Colorado, when Amy was eight, where her father, having left the army, began singing professionally in nightclubs and restaurants. The rest of her family was more sport-orientated. ‘I was surrounded by these incredibly coordinated siblings who excelled at everything, whereas I just liked to read in my room,’ she laughs. 

Her parents divorced when she was 11, and left Mormonism. Her mother, Kathryn, a former gymnast, was also, for a while, an amateur bodybuilder. ‘We have a good relationship, but my mom is tough and always challenged me to push myself,’ says Amy. ‘I wasn’t allowed to be afraid of things, even though I’m naturally very risk-averse. For instance, if a guy pulled up on a motorcycle, I’d be like [adopts goody-goody voice], “Don’t you understand that those are just coffins on wheels?”’

When her mother would take her to her gymnastics class, she goes on, ‘She would say: “We’re not leaving until you do this really tricky move.” That taught me to do things I was afraid of, because the sense of pride in having done something difficult was always worth it.’ It’s a skill that appears to have served her well in her career.

‘I had a kind of autonomy from childhood on,’ she continues. ‘There were so many of us that I knew my parents weren’t going to be funding my life, meaning my choices were my own and I wasn’t worried about what they thought of them.’

She gave up gymnastics, focused instead on dance and trained at a local ballet school. At 18, however, she decided she wasn’t good enough and switched her focus to musical theatre. She worked in dinner theatre for a few years before scoring a chance to audition for Drop Dead Gorgeous, the 1999 beauty-pageant comedy starring Kirstie Alley and Kirsten Dunst, in which Amy played a promiscuous cheerleader.

With Alley’s encouragement, at 24, Amy moved to Los Angeles, where her first few years attempting to break into the industry weren’t easy. ‘I auditioned a lot, but couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working,’ she has said. ‘The problem was a lack of confidence and self-esteem,’ she tells me today. 

In 2004, she was cast as the lead in the CBS series Dr Vegas, alongside Rob Lowe, but the show was dropped after just a few episodes. At that point, she considered quitting the industry.

‘I began thinking I should do something that was more secure,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t willing to be as unhappy as I was in danger of becoming and I didn’t like what it was turning me into.’

Then her fortunes began to turn around. In 2005, she was cast as the lead, Ashley, in the indie comedy Junebug. Her portrayal of the garrulous pregnant woman won her the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and two years later, scored her the part of Giselle, the optimistic princess, in Enchanted.

Achieving success at 31, rather than 21, has its advantages, she now believes. ‘At least I was able to enjoy my 20s before anyone was paying me too much attention,’ she sighs, nostalgically. ‘No Instagram, no Twitter, no Facebook – thank God! I had a bad habit of taking photos on disposable cameras that didn’t belong to me. I have no idea how many complete strangers’ cameras I mooned into back then!’ she laughs.

Since the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement, are there incidents from early in her career that she feels she wouldn’t be OK with now?

‘Yes, and I wasn’t OK with it back then either,’ she says. ‘I had to audition in a bikini. I didn’t get the role, because the character would be filmed wearing one and I don’t look good in swimwear.’

I scoff at this claim. ‘I really don’t,’ she insists. ‘And that’s OK – that’s not why I was put on this earth. But I don’t know a single woman, working in any industry, who doesn’t have a story like that, about feeling vulnerable.’

I wonder whether, beneath her sanguine exterior, some of the self-esteem issues she mentioned earlier still lurk. Despite being petite, Amy is surprisingly self-deprecating about her body.

‘I always look pregnant in photos,’ she claims with a laugh. ‘I wear loose dresses because I have a paunch. It’s not a big paunch, but it’s there!’ And she’s less than comfortable being snapped on the red carpet. ‘I understand it’s part of the job, but it’s not my favourite place,’ she has said.

‘I love fashion, but having to be somebody who promotes that industry has always been a tricky one for me, because of the way it affects women’s sense of self,’ she says. ‘I’ve lectured several designers about their sizing. If a dress in my size is five inches too small for me, what’s happening?’

Even before the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements began, Amy was catapulted into the centre of rows about sexism within the industry. When thousands of email accounts at Sony were hacked in 2014, the revelations about American Hustle focused mainly on the fact that Amy and her co-star Jennifer Lawrence were paid less than their male counterparts, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale.

At the time, she chose not to comment. ‘Everyone wanted me to talk about how I felt about it, but I want to fight for people outside our industry, so to come out and look ungrateful about what I’m paid as an actress just didn’t feel right,’ she says today. 

‘I do believe in equal pay, but let’s start with our teachers. Let’s get waiters paid the minimum wage. That’s what’s great about what’s happening with Time’s Up – we’re starting to have bigger conversations than just about what’s happening in Hollywood.’

Other emails were also leaked, alleging that the film’s director, David O Russell, was so tough on Amy that Bale stepped in to address the problem. ‘He was hard on me, that’s for sure. It was a lot,’ Amy later said, and she has admitted in interviews that she cried ‘most days’ during the making of the film. ‘I remember saying to my husband, “If I can’t figure this out, I can’t work any more. I’ll just have to do something else. I don’t want to be that person, not for my daughter,”’ she has said.

When she talks about coping during the making of Sharp Objects, it’s clear that she was determined for it to be a very different experience. ‘I’m now able to think, “OK, I know what’s going on here. I just need to go to work, do my job, then come home, make dinner and do something grounding.”’

She was recently reunited with Bale for the upcoming biopic Backseat, about former US vice-president Dick Cheney. She whips out her phone to show me an image of her in character as his wife, Lynne, alongside Bale, who played Cheney, and both are virtually unrecognisable thanks to extensive prosthetics.

The lengthy process of transformation renewed her respect for her co-star. ‘I had to wear the prosthetics for only two weeks, but Christian was coming in at 2am every day to have his applied before the day’s filming started. His work ethic is just incredible.’ 

Amy is keen to do more producing, too. ‘There’s lots in pencil on the calendar, but I don’t talk about anything until it’s in pen,’ she says. Risk-averse to the end. And with that, she gives me her top karaoke-bar tips and slips back to her quiet life in the hills.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/amy-adams-equal-pay-family-life-grittiest-role-date/#comments

[xtruss]

IT ISN’T OVER WHEN THE FAT LADY SINGS – THE FIRST RUSSIAN STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT OF THE AUSTRALIA-UK-US (AUKUS) SUBMARINE DEAL

— By John Helmer, Moscow

— Source: Dances with Bears

Following last week’s meeting in Washington of Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne (lead image left), the Australian defence minister and their US counterparts, a strategic military and basing agreement was announced between Australia, the UK and US (AUKUS). This is being reinforced with summit meetings in Washington this week.

The declared target of their war-making preparations is China.

Australian strategy against Russia in the Pacific region follows in lockstep with the US. But for the time being the Russian enemy, and Russian submarine and surface fleet operations in the Indo-Pacific region, are not being discussed by Australian officials in public; at least not to the extent when President Vladimir Putin last visited Australia in November 2014 with a nuclear-powered, nuclear armed naval escort.

Ahead of schemes for strategic warmaking in the Pacific, the US, the UK and Australia are also engaged in proxy war operations. These have accelerated recently in Myanmar, where Russia and China are allied in support of the military government of General Min Aung Hlaing. Next, from both sides, state bribery, subversion, putsch-making, and other special operations are likely to accelerate in the Pacific islands from Fiji to Papua-New Guinea.

For the moment, the initial reaction to AUKUS from the Russian Foreign Ministry has been as close to uncritical as the ministry can be. “We noted the plans, announced by Australia,” said spokesman Maria Zakharova last Thursday, “to build nuclear-powered submarines as part of an ‘enhanced trilateral security partnership’ agreed yesterday by the United States, Great Britain and Australia. We proceed from the premise that being a non-nuclear power and fulfilling in good faith the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Australia will honour its commitments under this document, as well as the IAEA Safeguards Agreements along with its Additional Protocol. We hope that Canberra ensures the necessary level of cooperation with the IAEA in order to rule out any proliferation-related risks.”

The first detailed technical and strategic assessment of the AUKUS scheme has followed this week in Vzglyad, the leading strategy publication reflecting the Russian General Staff and GRU assessments. A translation from the Russian article by Alexander Timokhin.

Source: https://vz.ru/

The headline is ironic: “How Australia’s nuclear submarines will bring to China to its knees”.

“In a few years, another country with a nuclear submarine fleet will appear in the world – Australia. What kind of submarines will this country receive from its allies, what kind of combat capabilities do they provide, and according to what scenario can they be used to contain China’s military power?

Everything is learned by comparison. What are the eight multi-purpose nuclear submarines that Australia will receive (not to be confused with submarines armed with ballistic missiles)? Let’s compare them with other fleets.

First, take the example of China, against which (at least, so they say) everything is being planned. Now China has only nine multi-purpose nuclear submarines, with low stealth. Three of them are Project 091; these are old and noisy vessels that have almost no combat value. The remaining six are Project 093, more modern boats, which, however, are inferior to modern American and British ones. In fact, only these six have a real combat value, and it is this number that should be taken into account.

I must say that the Chinese have made tremendous progress if we start from their initial level. Their submarines are already armed with good torpedoes and means of countering enemy torpedoes. But they are still very far from British ‘Astutes’ or American ‘Virginias’.

The Jin-class Type 094 Chinese ballistic submarine. Its successor, the Type 095, is under construction read this. The Type 096 is still being designed.

The first of the British Navy’s Astute-class submarines in construction

Theoretically, the ‘Virginia’ of the latest modification (the block, as the Americans say) will be able to be used when delivering a high-precision massive non-nuclear strike on Chinese territory. In this case, the Australians will be able to increase the American salvo. In the future, when the Americans finish their hypersonic missile program for the Navy, this strike may also be very fast.

It will be a separate story if the Americans again trample on international norms of behaviour and deploy nuclear weapons on Australian submarines before the war. Then, using cruise or hypersonic missiles, Australia will be able to cause China (and not only it) simply monstrous damage. And just ordinary Tomahawks with their fast, surprise launch can cause considerable damage to the side attacked – and the tactical and technical characteristics of the ‘Virginia’ will allow you to secretly approach even a well-guarded shore and deliver a sudden and unexpected blow.

Naturally, this is true if Australia builds ‘Virginias’ with vertical missile launch installations, and not ‘Astutes’, which can only use Tomahawks through torpedo tubes. There is no answer to this question yet.

In the event of a war more or less close to a classic naval war, these submarines will create an additional threat to China, and China will be required to allocate additional forces to this threat, which it will need very much in a war with the United States and Britain, even without Australia.

The Chinese are taking care of their fleet and developing it. They have anti-submarine surface forces and anti-submarine aviation, but when performing combat tasks outside the combat radius of their base (coastal in colloquial language) aviation, the problem of combating enemy submarine forces will become quite acute for China. Chinese surface ships will be subjected to air strikes by Australian based and American carrier-based aircraft; anti-submarine aircraft will not be able to work without cover; in fact, all tasks will have to be solved by Chinese nuclear submarines. They do not reach the western (that is, the future Australian) level yet, and they will be forced to act against heterogeneous enemy forces (submarines, anti-submarine aircraft, surface ships) without support.

How Will China Respond?

China has hope – there are new multi-purpose nuclear submarines being created, designated in the foreign press as Type 095, and in China itself 09-V. According to visual assessment of images of the boat, it is clear that China is trying to introduce a large number of technical solutions that increase the stealth of the submarine and the range of detection for its underwater targets. It is clearly visible that the boat is being created specifically for combat.

But what success the Chinese will have is an open question, and most importantly, even these boats will not see superiority in quality; ideally there will be approximate parity. At the same time, if the current pace of updating the submarine forces in China continues, then China will be inferior to the Americans and the British in numbers even without Australia, and even more so with it. These new boats are still in planning stage — China has not built any of them yet. And another hostile nuclear submarine fleet will definitely require the Chinese to invest very quickly and very seriously in expanding their production; that requires time, money, and resources.

Can China Ignore This Threat? No.

Here is just one of many examples. Geographically, Australia can completely block the connection between China and the Indian Ocean: there is a direct exit there and this is not controlled by China in any way. China only has the Strait of Malacca, which with its new submarines Australia will be able to block from the Indian Ocean. Or go past Australia itself, with the same submarines and its aircraft. There is no other road by which a large amount of oil can be supplied to China.

Australia would never have had these opportunities in this form if it had continued its work on the purchase of non-nuclear submarines from France. A non-nuclear (in fact the same diesel-electric) submarine is not capable, for example, of going under water at a high speed, as the ‘Virginias’ and ‘Astutes’ can, and secretly, without a critical increase in noise. A non-nuclear boat needs to deliver fuel to the combat service area, an atomic one does not need to – a nuclear submarine is not tied to nearby bases or to fuel, and it can operate disproportionately more freely than a diesel-electric one, even with an air-independent power plant.

In combat, a nuclear submarine also has a lot of advantages, up to the possibility of sometimes getting away from the enemy’s torpedo by running. For a hypothetical Australian-French non-nuclear submarine, this would be impossible. The hydroacoustic complex on the ‘Virginias’ is generally difficult to compare with something, and this is the range of target detection and the range of shooting at it.

Now China, in addition to measures to counter the submarine fleet of the United States and Great Britain, will also have to take into account Australia, which wants to get a nuclear submarine more powerful than anything that China has at present.

What does the battlefield look like in numbers? If we start from how many of the ‘Virginias’ are already built and under construction to go into service by 2036, when the Australians want to get their eight submarines, then we can assume that there will be about 20 units. And they will not be able to throw everything at China; some of the submarines will be needed in case of emergency operations against Russia.

Thus, an additional eight Australian submarines will increase the number of units opposing China by at least a third, compared only with American submarines. This is even more than the British will be able to give for the war with China. China will have to increase both the submarine and other fleet forces by a comparable number.

In general, for China, these eight additional enemy submarines are a fresh handful of bones in the throat. That’s about what the Americans planned to do with the British. That’s what eight nuclear submarines are.

This is what caused the reaction of the Chinese to the news. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the transfer of nuclear submarine construction technologies to Australia harms the nuclear non-proliferation regime and ‘exacerbates the arms race’, as well as the fact that the United States and Great Britain ‘extremely irresponsibly’ apply double standards. These admonitions, of course, will not have any effect.

And what does this mean for Russia? If Australia wants to have eight multi-purpose submarines by 2036, then by that year we will ideally have four Yasen-class vessels in the Pacific Ocean – the ‘Novosibirsk’, ‘Krasnoyarsk’, ‘Vladivostok’ and, presumably, the ‘Perm’.

The Russian Navy’s Yasen-class ‘Kazan’, June 2021.

As for the future boat of the project 545 with the code-name ‘Laika’, the form in which the ‘Laika’ was presented to the president in December 2019 indicates the deliberate obsolescence of the project. And most importantly – it is extremely doubtful that these boats will be in service by the mid-thirties. This is another example of how many there will turn out to be — eight nuclear submarines in one theatre of military operations.

However, the western ‘partners’ may have difficulties in implementing these wonderful plans.

Is Everything So Simple?

There is one aspect in all of this that can complicate everything. The production of as many as eight nuclear submarines, stuffed with high-tech systems to the brim, is not an easy matter. If we assume that the Australians will build some kind of ready-made project, for example the ‘Virginia’, then in any event they will up to 14 years for the construction of eight nuclear submarines if they start next year. This is an ultra-fast pace for eight units; the Americans themselves take five years to build one ‘Virginia’ from the popint of laying the keel to delivery to the Navy.

Is it possible for the Australians to meet the deadlines? Yes, but only in an “expansive’ way – laying more submarines a year than the Americans. And this requires, firstly, shipyards in sufficient quantity to build submarines; secondly, workers and engineers; and thirdly, the supply of components from the United States, which can become the bottleneck of the project because of the existing crisis in American shipbuilding. Does Australia have all this in the right amount? The allies will not be able to help them there; they do not have enough themselves.

And if the Australians build some kind of British project – either the ‘Astute’ or, as is now rumoured in Britain, the future project of a British multi-purpose submarine, which should replace the ‘Astutes’, then nothing will work out. Britain is barely coping with the construction of its submarines by itself, including the part played by related companies. In the case of the ‘Astutes’, some of the related parties are from France engaged by by the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, the British can in this way compensate for the losses of the French from the broken Australian contract for non-nuclear submarines. Still, the problem of timing will also arise in this case.

The Australians seem to understand this. On Sunday, September 19, the Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton said that Australia will not wait until its nuclear submarines are built, but will buy or lease British or American ones.

This is quite possible. However, not with British submarines, but more likely with American ones, although such a scheme would not lead to the desired increase in anti–Chinese forces; there would still be as many submarines against China, just some of the flags would change. But, firstly, by the time the construction of their series is completed (even if not all and with a delay), the Australians will already have experience working with nuclear submarines, and secondly, the United States now has problems with repairing its submarines (they do not pull, as they say), and renting some of their ships to Australia for the Americans will in fact mean their salvation as combat units, even under a foreign flag.

In general, it is possible to make Australia a country with a nuclear submarine fleet quickly. Moreover, the authors of this initiative have an extremely serious reason for all this. Such gigantic investments and sharp political turns are not carried out just like that. The hegemony of the Anglo-Saxons in the world is seriously shaken, both because of their own internal weakness, and because of the growth of China, and the sabotage of their system of power by Russia. It is quite obvious they will not give up their power over humanity and the benefits resulting from this in a favourable fashion.

It is worth recognizing that the world is on the verge of war. Australia’s agreement with the United States and Britain says exactly this. An ordinary world war with tens of millions of dead, as one option, or with hundreds of millions; after all, no one has canceled nuclear weapons. Such a war is almost inevitable.

Moreover, knowing what deadlines the ‘partners’ set for themselves, you can roughly understand the time for which they are preparing the ‘hot phase’. And looking at how other countries are preparing for the next world war, it’s time for us to take a critical, honest and non-biased look at how we are preparing for it.”

[wazafam]

Tenet proves two things - time travel is best left to the professionals, and Christopher Nolan should be the man to lead James Bond after the departure of Daniel Craig. Released in theaters contentiously during the throes of COVID-19, Tenet will perhaps be remembered more for its impact on the cinema industry than for anything that transpires on-screen. Tenet has also (not unjustly) earned a reputation as Christopher Nolan's most confusing effort yet, and with Inception in his back catalog, that's some feat. Tenet doesn't just require multiple viewings to understand properly, it demands copious note-taking, subtitles, and frequent use of the pause button.

But beyond the confounding inversions and brain-melting timelines, Tenet is essentially James Bond with a PhD in theoretical physics. John David Washington's Protagonist is a top-tier spy with suave charisma to spare, and embarks on a mission to save the world from an evil Russian baddie with paper-thin motives. Along the way, he takes in all manner of exotic locations and tempts a femme fatale to betray her lover, all to a cinematic soundtrack on the grandest of scales. The Bond DNA in Tenet is obvious from the first scene, and makes no attempt to hide the copied homework.

Related: Tenet: Is Neil Really Dead?

With Daniel Craig due to step down from his gig at MI6, the future of James Bond has reached a crossroads. More than half a century down the road, the "James Bond" name is still one of the most influential in cinema, and Eon will have its choice of filmmakers when the time comes to think about Bond 26. Tenet proves Christopher Nolan should top their wanted list.

A change of face has barely inconvenienced the James Bond franchise in eras past. From the earliest years of Sean Connery to the 1990s cheese of Pierce Brosnan, 007 moved from one incarnation to the next in a seamless transition. Each adventure was a self-contained affair where long-term arcs (like the gradual reveal of SPECTRE) played out in the background, and there was very little continuity besides small references - Roger Moore's Bond visiting Tracy's grave, for instance. Minimal effort was made to differentiate each iteration of 007, creating a unceasing conveyor belt from film to film, regardless of whether Bond regenerated in the meantime.

When Pierce Brosnan received the boot after Die Another Day, it was painfully clear that James Bond was in dire need of modernization. New upstarts like The Bourne Identity had reinvigorated the spy genre, while Mike Myers turned 007's shtick into parody with Austin Powers. As a result, Bond returned as a man reborn in Casino Royale. Not only was Daniel Craig's Bond darker, edgier and more grounded, but the modern films have depicted a character from his very first years as a Double-0 agent to a veteran repeatedly failing to retire in No Time To Die. Where previous Bonds would drift their Aston Martins briskly around the issue of continuity, the quintet of Daniel Craig films crash straight into it, following one man's journey from start to finish.

With No Time To Die marking the end of James' career (he's even replaced as 007 by Nomi), Bond 26 can't recast the lead role but keep the same cast, tone and continuity, as in the old days. James Bond's next offering needs to reboot, starting from scratch in much the same way Casino Royale did in 2006. This is especially vital in the current landscape of shared universes and multi-platform franchises, where audiences are more attuned to how each installment may or may not be interconnected. Whatever the next guise of James Bond might look like, it has to differ from the current model... and this is where Christopher Nolan comes in.

Related: Tenet: Can Time Travel Really Change The Future?

It's a well known fact (probably) that all British filmmakers have at least a little James Bond in their blood, but with Tenet, Christopher Nolan pens a heartfelt love letter to all things 007, making no apologies whatsoever. One of the most obvious parallels is in Kenneth Branagh's villainous Sator, who could quite easily be parachuted into your Bond film of choice, and few questions would be asked.

A vicious Russian arms dealer with a God complex, Sator would destroy the world simply because his own death is looming, and The Protagonist even meta-points-out how ridiculous his motive is. But Nolan kicks the mold of a classic Bond villain up a few notches (or down, we really can't tell anymore). See, Sator isn't the real villain of Tenet; he's a proxy for unseen villains from the future looking to rewind the entropy of the planet and erase Earth's past. This creates a unique dynamic where success or failure is bigger than any single enemy, and Tenet's final battle actually hinges on keeping Sator alive long enough for The Protagonist to recover the Algorithm. It's a far more inventive finale than two men firing guns at each other, or battling upon a precariously high ledge. Nolan creates the suspense and thrills of a final confrontation, even while The Protagonist and Sator are in entirely different countries.

Branagh aside, more or less every major character in Tenet has a counterpart in James Bond - Barbara is Q, Fay/Michael Crosby share the role of M, Mahir is Felix Leiter, etc. But nowhere does Christopher Nolan indulge more in modernizing Bond-isms than with The Protagonist and Kat. Ian Fleming intentionally wrote his James Bond character as a blank slate for readers to project themselves onto, and Nolan duly follows suit by not even giving his "protagonist" a name.

John David Washington's hero also strips the toxic masculinity of James Bond right back. Tenet's Protagonist is every bit as dangerous and cool as Bond, and by manipulating Kat for his own ends, the character's morality isn't squeaky clean either. But where 007 would've bedded Kat right under Sator's nose then come up smiling the next morning, The Protagonist is restricted to a small kiss before the final battle, recognizing that to sleep with Kat would be questionable due to her emotional state, and put her in even more danger from the maniacal angry husband above deck - two things Bond often (willfully) overlooked. Generally speaking, The Protagonist is less mission-centric than Bond too, prioritizing rescuing innocents, but never shying away from murder when the occasion arises, and crucially, allows Kat to save herself in the end, rather than letting her flounder as a helpless damsel.

Related: Nolan Could Solve Tenet's Biggest Issues If It Wasn't A Movie

Not for one second is anyone suggesting Bond 26 should incorporate multiple timelines, layered realities, or any other kind of Christopher Nolan science-fiction madness. As much as Tenet does right, its premise is ridiculously complex, and James Bond stands to gain nothing by diving down Nolan's quantum rabbit hole. With that said, audiences are perhaps ready for a smarter 007 adventure, and Tenet gives a perfect demonstration of how this can work through its action sequences.

The typical James Bond set-piece involves 007 being thrown into the thick of the action. Explosions go off, henchmen are killed with reckless abandon, and Bond races around an exotic locale in a beautiful car. Tenet offers the same thrills, but with a more cerebral foundation, the best example being the Oslo freeport heist where a jumbo jet is crashed as a distraction while The Protagonist and Neil carefully move through a series of gas-locked chambers to find Tenet's first turnstile. The sequence employs a lot of setup, with Neil getting a tour of the facility first, then both characters discussing their approach with Mahir, but the result speaks for itself. Action cinema that gets brain juices pumping alongside the adrenaline.

Arguably, Tenet is guilty of overindulging in this regard. The final "temporal pincer movement" is a cacophony of twisting timelines, pivotal moments happening off-screen, and unintelligible dialogue. If Bond 26 could follow the Oslo freeport sequence's example, but hit the brakes before reaching the complexity of Tenet's climax, 007's action sequences can adopt an entirely new dimension.

A self-confessed James Bond fan, it comes as no surprise that Christopher Nolan knows his way around a 007 adventure. But Tenet doesn't just prove the director's affinity for Bond - it's exactly the direction the long-running franchise needs following the Daniel Craig era. After the Die Another Day disaster, there's no question that 007 needed to drop the campy lightness from his formula. But Casino Royale and its sequels might've veered too hard in the opposing direction, stripping James Bond of its gadgetry, humor and levity. It's a balance that modern Bond films have struggled to nail, but Tenet handles with surprising ease. Tenet's inversion is, frankly, madder than a box full of badgers, but Nolan presents this insane concept with grounded realism. If the director can meld Algorithms and backwards fight scenes into Tenet's gritty, real-world setting, he can probably handle a few outlandish Bond gadgets while retaining the intensity post-Brosnan Bond is renowned for.

Related: Octopussy Marked The End Of A James Bond Series Tradition

Nolan can also fix another element James Bond has routinely struggled with in recent times - the mystery. Daniel Craig's James Bond movies try to inject a long-term sense of intrigue with the gradual reveal of SPECTRE (or Quantum, depending on the film), but the journey is a muddled one, awkwardly tying Blofeld into Bond's past. Tenet, along with most of Nolan's other releases, wholeheartedly proves the director's capacity for weaving an effective mystery. Bond 26 needn't bother with anything in the high-concept realm of Tenet, but a cohesive, Nolan-esque mystery plot would reinvigorate the iconic spy after No Time To Die.

More: James Bond: Every Way The Living Daylights Original Plan Changed

Tenet Proves Nolan Is Perfect To Reboot James Bond | Screen Rant from https://ift.tt/3b02N7I

[alandeathweaver]

entry 21

1年12月26日 to 3年2月3日 (7AE) 

-----

Kami, I thought I had lost this! It was between one of my shelves and the wall of my apartment in the Topmast, and it must have ended up in the storeroom when I moved everything to Shirogane -- I only just found it when I was moving some clutter into the storeroom and nearly stepped on it.

My last entry was...before Azys Lla? Incredible...so much has happened since then. It feels like I haven’t written in years. Though it...has been years, hasn’t it? Over a year has passed since then, fourteen months even. Incredible. It feels like far more than that!

I suppose it is safe to say that upon our journey to Azys Lla in the sky, we defeated the Archbishop and laid low his plans of destruction -- and the Ascians were defeated as well. Moenbryda-san’s legacy destroying Igeyorhm and the Archbishop himself devouring Lahabrea to gain more power. No one deserved such a fate more than he, I would say.

But in so doing this, we lost Estinien briefly -- the retrieval of both Nidhogg’s eyes allowed the remaining rage of the wyrm to take our friend’s body for his own and run rampant for a time: Alphinaud-dono proved himself once again deserving of my fealty in his determined and courageous quest to save him, and thus...we did. We saved him. Tore the eyes from his flesh and cast them into an abyss.

Though...the abyss was not deep enough. Not deep enough, and the Ascians took those eyes and passed them into the hands of Ilberd, our traitorous Brave. Ilberd, whose obsession with seeing Ala Mhigo freed drove him to madness and sent him to Baelsar’s Wall, baying for blood and very nearly causing another Calamity upon Gridania’s doorstep. We were only barely able to stop it, but at a high cost.

The Scions shrink -- we may have recovered my dear brother Thancred (worse for wear and tired from his ordeals, and still recovering from what happened to Minfilia -- I will explain that later -- but still my brother and still the man I know) and temporarily reunited with Yda-san and Papalymo-san...but then we lost both. Papalymo-san gave his life to seal the primal Ilberd summoned until we could kill it, and Yda-san...was never Yda. She was Lyse-san, the long-dead Yda’s little sister, never really an Archon.

And Lyse-san? She is the leader of the Ala Mhigan Resistance, now, bless her brave soul. 

But we all still remain. Thancred, myself, Y’shtola-san, Urianger-dono, Alphinaud-dono...and of course, Alisaie-dono, who has rejoined us and has proven herself a thousand times over to be every bit worthy of the fealty I give her brother. They both have it now, my little lordlings.

As for Minfilia...she has left this star, left this plane. Hydaelyn called her to Her, and our Antecedent became the Emissary of Light, counterpart to Elidibus. And she left our star as well, accompanying a group of Warriors of Light to their own star to save it from being destroyed. (Well, they are Warriors of Darkness, perhaps, as too much of either thing can be a danger. Good men and women, if driven to dark deeds by fear and grief and desperation.)

Kami, where do I even continue from here? We defeated the false primal Ilberd called forth, gathered all the scattered Scions back together, and ended the Dragonsong War once and for all...and then we set forth past the wall. Past it to Ala Mhigo, and to my homeland of Doma -- and my motherland beside it.

And we liberated them both. I can hardly believe it -- my home is free. My liege, my prince, the lord of all Doma...Hien-dono is my friend. I cannot believe that still, but he is my friend! A good man, too, and one I am honored to call a companion and ally. (He is not at all what one expects of a prince, and I am truly glad for it.) My home is free, though, and my adoptive family safe. 

And my visit to the Steppes...I was so afraid when I went, afraid of what they would say. My eyes, my birth, everything the Steppes gave to me wounded me. I was a curse and I was an ill omen, and I feared that that was all they would see -- but I was wrong. Not all the tribes are as my own, and I was honored among them. At least in part, as some of them -- the Oronir in specific -- are rather rude, but...it was enough.

And then we freed Ala Mhigo as well, stopped the beast of a Legatus, the beast of a crown prince -- the man who, a long time ago, murdered my lady -- Zenos yae Galvus. I pity him, as he was so damaged by something that he did not feel or live or understand as most people do, but he was a monster all the same even if he was one created. I pity him, but I am not sorry he is dead -- and perhaps the fact that I pity the man who destroyed my life all those years ago is proof that I am not the same as I was then.

Ah, what else...five more primals are upon my list -- well, four primals (Lakshmi of the Ananta and the long-slumberig Warring Triad, of which I was aided by Elidbus’s apprentice and the now-deceased Regula van Hydrus, may the kami watch over the soul of another honorable Garlean) and one kami! We aided the kojin in something and accidentally called forth Susanoo-no-Mikoto from the Red’s treasure vault. It would have been thrilling and rather hilarious were in not for the seriousness of the context.

Well, I suppose defeating the primal Ilberd summoned, in truth and not just via proxy, counts as a another. My countrymen in Eorzea called it Shinryu after our mythical dragon, but I’m not sure I like that. It was not Shinryu -- it was a false god created by rage and obsession.

Speaking of proxy...that proxy was Omega, unearthed by a certain dear, dear person to me and offered as a tool to the Alliance and the Ironworks. We used it well, of course, but nothing is easy, and now the being (as it is a being from another star, not simply an Allagan artifact) is another menace I must stop. Well, we. The Ironworks is, again, taking responsibility. Well, Cid is. He needs to stop that.

And, ah, that dear person...well. You see, ah...hah. It’s still a bit startling to me that we are...that he is so precious to me, as I never saw it coming, but -- Nero. Nero and I are...we have been..together. Since I found him wandering the Hinterlands half-dead and unable to deal with the aftermath of the Void while Cid was there dealing with yet another primal (Alexander -- interesting but not truly relevant, and it is done), we...grew close. And...we remain together.

That is, if I don’t strangle him for acting like a five year-old boy around Cid! The two of them, I swear...I’ll make them mend their relationship eventually.

But all the same, that is the state of it. Two countries freed, two countries we are helping to rebuild, a menace from another star to defeat, and...a centuries-old mystery to solve alongside a playwright and another of Cid’s friends. That is how it is, and with the kami’s blessing, i will not wait another year or more to write again!

[politicaltheatre]

Distance

There was a time when the words “Kent State” evoked anger and moral outrage. It was a tragedy in every sense: four promising lives senselessly cut short, one of them a young woman just walking to class and killed by a stray bullet. It was all both completely avoidable and cruelly inevitable.

There should be plenty of articles about it this week, especially today, which marks the 50th anniversary of the massacre of students by national guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. The stories may not be as prevalent as they used to be. There’s a lot more competition for news coverage than there used to be, especially this week in this year.

Another factor is that May the Fourth has become so closely associated with the escapist entertainment of the Star Wars universe that trying to remind people of a real atrocity committed a long time ago but a little too close to home won’t find you much of an audience.

Perhaps even using the word “massacre” is too strong. Certainly by today’s standards, a story about four dead and nine wounded hardly merits the front page. Ask people to look that far back and try to empathize, well, good luck.

That’s the funny thing about memory, it changes as the world changes around us. We may feel nostalgia for better times, but how much did we really love those times when we were living through them?

1970 was a mess. The Cold War was a series of proxy wars, and Vietnam, which was well on its way to killing the now quant number of 58,000 Americans (and well over 1 million Vietnamese), was just one of them. Asia, Africa, and South America were filled with violent oppression. To protest against it was often life or death. Amnesty International was founded during this time for that very reason.

And yet, in the United States, cradle of democracy, the idea of soldiers killing students on campuses wasn’t supposed to happen. Things like that didn’t happen here. That’s what Americans told themselves, at least. Never mind Jim Crow and the murders of civil rights leaders, Americans thought they were different. Immune.

It happened more than once. Eleven days after Kent State in Ohio, it happened again at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Two young students, black men, were killed there. They weren’t protesting the war. One of them, a high school student, may not have been protesting at all. There black men in Mississippi in 1970. In 1970, that may have been justification enough.

So, for the rest of America Kent State stood out. It was the first time, and that carried with it the weight that our recognition of a first atrocity always does. And the victims were all white, their high school yearbook photos looking just like every other yearbook photo in middle class, white America.

The memory of student protesters killed by soldiers anywhere should stay with us, but proximity is everything. When they live near us and look like us, we notice. When they look different and live in The South, we probably don’t. When soldiers shoot and kill unarmed protesters in other countries, even now, we hardly bat an eye. Physical and emotional distance keep our recognition of them far away; add in time, and we gladly forget.

We shouldn’t beat ourselves up for this too much. This is how we and millions of other species evolved. If we had to carry the burden of everything and everyone we’ve ever seen around with us everyday until our last day we couldn’t possibly function. We need to push memories away. We encourage a select few among us to remember, to carry that burden for us, for when we need to learn the lesson of our failure so that we may survive and evolve. That’s a good thing. That’s how we’ve survived so far.

If we’re going to punish ourselves, it should be for pushing other humans away when we know better. Not everything is a lesson we should have to learn. If we see a bully, we should stop him. If we see another fall, we should try to help him up.

Back to Kent State, though. The idea that student protesters could be fired upon is shocking and should be. This wasn’t just a violation of American rights, it was a violation of human rights. The students had no firearms, though, like some of their present day counterparts, some did throw stones. Even so, they weren’t an actual threat to anyone, certainly not soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets.

It wasn’t sudden. The protests took place over a number of days. Tensions built over that time. Mistakes by those in charge of the national guardsmen were made and compounded. On both sides, the irrational need for instant gratification won out over rational, peaceful dialogue. Opportunities to deescalate were available, in particular to the national guard commanders, but were ignored. Fear and exhaustion led young men who should not have been placed in that situation, and certainly not with live ammunition, to fire on young men and women who never wanted a violent confrontation to begin with. When the shooting was over, three unarmed protesters, including one who had been handing out flowers to the soldiers, and a young woman just walking to class were dead.

We shouldn’t hate the soldiers who fired those shots. They, like the students they faced, were placed in an unwinnable situation by men who disrespected the very idea of protest. They had not been trained for non-violent deescalation. And they were afraid. 

It seems ridiculous that armed soldiers should be afraid of unarmed students, but faced with something overwhelming and beyond their ability to control, they reacted in a way that countless before and after have. What they did was shameful, and hopefully they feel that to this day, but they, too, deserve our sympathy and empathy for having had to carry that burden.

So, we don’t really think about Kent State anymore. Today is special, a round number, the kind we reserve for memorial. The 49th anniversary barely registered and the 51st won’t, either. The unfortunate truth, however, is that it didn’t take fifty years to create that kind of distance for us. A mere twenty years later, the country’s drift to the political right had already begun to scrub memory of the killings from our national consciousness.

One of the unfortunate legacies of the Vietnam Era, unfortunate for the United States, at least, was the growth of selfishness as a virtue in our culture. This, perhaps much more than concern for the millions of lives being destroyed in Southeast Asia, was what drove so many to protest the war.

Surely, many of those protesting that day did care and do to this day, but many of their generation simply didn’t want to have to fight in any war, not when it was so far away and those suffering were so different, and not when there was so much fun to be had at home.

Young men at colleges didn’t have to submit for the draft. As long as they stayed in school, they had the luxury of protest. For them, the war and the risk remained safely far away, or should have. But even for them graduation loomed, a threat growing ever closer, and who even knew how long the college exemption would last?

Young men of wealth and privilege, of course, didn’t have to worry about that; their fathers had a way of getting them out of anything. Old Bone Spurs knows that as well as anyone. For them, the war would forever remain far away, with battles for others to fight and problems for others to fix.

A decade after they escaped fighting an unjust war, many of those same young men who escaped the war voted for Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t because they believed he would keep America from invading some small country and killing thousands for purely political purposes. No, he did that and they were fine with that. It was because he promised them that they would not have to be accountable to those lives or others.

Lower taxes, less regulation, and, aside from well cultivated fears, no emotional burdens whatsoever: it was the Reagan Revolution, and it would be the recipe for Republican success to this day. It is also, not coincidentally, the recipe for every right wing movement to this day, and it always has been.

It’s in our nature not to want to have to be accountable to others. Incidents such as Kent State are an uncomfortable reminder of what happens when we stop. For a long time, even Kent State didn’t want to talk about it. When the 20th anniversary came in 1990, few working or studying there wanted “Kent State” to be all the school was known for. They had grown tired of hearing, “Oh, that place where the shooting happened”, every time the name of the school was mentioned. They wanted distance from it. They wanted to move on. They wanted to forget, the farthest you can possibly get from memory.

It’s a common reaction. Students at any of the schools whose names we associate with mass shootings are going through the same process, trying to honor those whose lives were taken while attempting to move forward and live now rather than in the past. They don’t want to be trapped in the past. They tire of carrying the burden.

Another side of it, too, is that for those who were there at the time, what was done was done to them. It’s personal. It’s inescapable. They don’t have the luxury of disaster tourism. They have no choice but to carry at least some small part of that burden with them wherever and whenever they go.

Next year will see the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Coronavirus permitting, New York will see a flood of tourists coming to see Ground Zero, many of them asking New Yorkers as they did so often in the months and years after the attack, ‘How do we get to Ground Zero?” Imagine that. Try to put yourself in the place of the New Yorker who lived through that day being asked that question and the pain it surely brings.

Last week, at a cost of millions of dollars that could have and surely should have been spent fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump ordered Navy and Air Force jets to fly over cities along the Eastern seaboard. It was a crowd pleasing spectacle that just as surely provided entertainment and a way for just a moment to distance ourselves from the reality of the pandemic that has disrupted our lives.

However, for New Yorkers who remember the day towers came down and days and months after, the sight of jets flying in formation over New York airspace brought back feelings of dread and anxiety. For them, there is no distance. There can’t be.

Distance has, ironically, become something quite present in our lives. It is never far away. To save ourselves and others, we must keep a distance. To save our minds, we must find ways to escape growing statistics and the feelings of isolation and powerlessness.

These goals aren’t necessarily incompatible, but, as we saw with Trump’s jets, they are easily exploited. We seek distraction, so those looking to profit have found an opportunity. Spending intended to relieve suffering in a crisis has instead gone to wealthy corporations and individuals so far removed from suffering that their social media posts have inspired contempt bordering on outrage.

Outrage, perhaps ironically, can feel like a safe place in uncertain times. It gives us a sense of control in the middle of the uncontrollable, like a bullet fired from a gun. It takes our fears and concerns over something abstract and makes them personal and tangible. It takes the threat and pushes it away.

This is why thousands of Americans already well practiced in removing themselves from reality have taken their marching orders from the likes of Info Wars’s snake oil salesman (and possible cannibal) Alex Jones and one Donald J. Trump to protest shutdown orders and to “open the economy”.

If COVID-19 is just a hoax and forcing everyone to stay apart is just elites forcing their will on our freedoms then the world makes sense and they have a sense of control over it. They are not weak. They are not afraid. They have not been fooled by anyone. They will not be used by anyone. They will act and whatever it is they fear will be pushed away.

You won’t talk them out of it. Let’s face it, Trump’s reelection coalition seems to be made up of people waving Nazi flags - his good/fine people - and people comparing governors they don’t like to Adolf Hitler, with probably an unhealthy bit of crossover. These people left rational thought behind long ago.

As for Pompous Pilate, for him, pushing away accountability isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Donald Trump wants to be able to wash his hands of responsibility for all of his failures. For him, the threat of COVID-19 isn’t to the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, it’s to his reelection and, more important, to his personal wealth.

To this end, he wants us distracted. He wants us talking about the governors forcing lockdowns. He wants us talking about the needs of the economy, not our obligation to each other. He wants us talking about conspiracy theories of Chinese labs and mail-in voter fraud.

As long as he can offer those who have invested in him, both emotionally and financially, a slew of scapegoats to choose from, he can keep his own accountability far away, which, he hopes, will help him to reelection.

Trump knows opening the economy prematurely will harm Americans. He also knows that it won’t help those most in need of help, those at the bottom of the financial food chain. Who it will help is himself, because it will, however briefly, raise stocks on Wall Street,  and it will give Republicans down ticket something they can campaign on, which is having taken aggressive action and having promoted the virtue of selfishness over accountability.

That rejection of accountability will be twofold, because not only will Trump’s base get to go out and congregate and know that they showed those elites just who was boss, but Republican governors and senators and representatives who want to shrink government to a size just large enough to funnel money to their stock portfolios won’t have to pay unemployment claims.

That this could send the country into another Great Depression couldn’t be furthest from their minds. Their economy is not the one their gun-toting surrogates are out trying to “open”. Theirs is removed from the rest of the economy, one built on speculative markets, “war” profiteering, and government money spent with no oversight.

It’s not exactly the world those protesters at Kent State were hoping to build. Or is it? We remember the names of the students who died that day and those who were wounded, but we know so little about them and their dreams. We know how they saw the world and how that vision of the world changed for the survivors when they awoke the next day.

Their world was reshaped by a cataclysm. Some surely responded by drawing closer to those around them. Others just as surely pushed the world farther away. How they handled their memories of the world before, during and after surely changed, too.

The irony of everyone locking themselves away from each other right now is that it has called our attention to just how much we depend on each other, which is to say, how much we depend on community, and that word must take on a far broader meaning if we are to succeed in saving as many of those living in our community as possible.

That means that the truth of things and people we had been content to ignore, such as the working conditions and pay of those we now consider “essential” workers, we no longer have the luxury of keeping far away.

It also means that things we are often content to ignore in an election year, such as a sexual assault claim against a man running against a man infamous for his own claims of sexual assault, will be placed far from our thoughts and far from view, all but forgotten as November grows close. We’ll tell ourselves we need to, and to achieve a short term goal we may be right.

So, whether we’re remembering Kent State today or learning about it for the very first time, odds are we will dutifully forget about it tomorrow. It’s a shame, because remembering it and things like it is very important to our survival, but it’s an uncomfortable reminder at a time when we carry so many other burdens.

That’s distancing for you.

- Daniel Ward

[oumakokichi]

Were Tsumugi and Kibo's personality different before the killing game or not?

Well, it’s hard to judge. We know very little about theprologue and the previous killing game both, so we mostly just have tospeculate.

As for Tsumugi, it also depends on whether you mean her realpersonality or the kind of person she simply pretends to be in order to trickeveryone else. She confirms in the Chapter 6 trial that she thinks of “TsumugiShirogane” as just another character in her ensemble, after all, so it’sentirely possible that in her previous killing game, she was pretending to be adifferent sort of character entirely.

In fact, I think it’s very possible, considering there’s noway the audience would’ve wanted a repeat of the same character being theringleader twice in a row. The plot twist with the killing game show seems toalready always be “Junko is always the ringleader/mastermind,” for 53 seasonsin a row, so it would make sense if half the fun of the show for the audience wasplaying “guess who’s Junko.” In that case, it’s very possible that Tsumugi pretendedto be a very different sort of “character” during her previous killing game.

If you’re asking, however, if she was a different person atheart before the killing game or if she was brainwashed into it, the answerseems like a pretty definite no. On a reread, it’s pretty clear in her FTEs andher bonus mode both that she knows way more about the killing game than any ofthe rest of them, and it’s never implied that she was “brainwashed” at anypoint.

It’s implied that she was the ringleader the previous timearound too, for Amami’s killing game, since whenever “hope” is picked duringthe last trial, the people who choose to sacrifice themselves for the others tograduate and the ringleader are all “punished.” Their punishment isn’t anexecution, but forced participation in the next killing game.

It doesn’t seem like the ringleader role switches to anyoneelse from season to season either, except on very rare occasions. Tsumugi saysthat she herself would still be the ringleader of the next killing game if she,Maki, and Kiibo were all “punished” by picking “hope” in the Chapter 6 trial.However, when she abstains from voting later on in order to try and make Kiibothe sole survivor so that the killing game will definitely continue, ratherthan ending without picking either “hope” or “despair,” she says that hehimself would become the new ringleader of the next game.

We know that the 52nd killing game didn’t end with a solesurvivor though, since Tsumugi and Amami are both there, so I think we canpretty much rule out this kind of scenario. People seem to have taken some ofTsumugi’s creepy sprites to be “brainwashing” sprites, but that’s not the caseat all. Every line of her dialogue in Chapter 6 suggests she deliberately andintentionally acted as the ringleader and planned the killing game out from thevery beginning, hence why at the end she says that “as a copycat criminal” shecan “go out with her head held high.”

Kiibo is… a more difficult case, in my opinion. It’simpossible to know what Kiibo was actually like prior to the killing gamesimply because nothing is shown about him in the prologue. He doesn’t get evena single speaking line. In fact, it’s impossible to tell whether he actuallywas a robot in the prologue or not. All we can tell is that he’s missing thelines on his face, and he’s wearing clothes for once, including a long-sleeveduniform and a hat.

But this could mean anything. He could be wearing thembecause he actually was human in the prologue, and therefore had human clothesand a more human appearance. Or it could simply be that he (or Team Danganronpa,for that matter) was intentionally trying to disguise the fact that he was arobot.

It’s really, really hard to know whether Tsumugi was tellingthe truth or not about him in the Chapter 6 trial, too. All she says is that hewas created from scratch specifically for the 53rd killing game season, as a sortof new and innovative way to let the audience feel like they were participatingin the game themselves. They were able to vote on certain actions of his after completinga late-night survey while watching the show (not every action, but only timeswhere he was in trouble and asked his “inner voice” what he should do). He wasessentially a walking cameraman meant to serve as an audience proxy.

But in that case, it’s hard to see why he would be given somuch leeway or an AI function. There’s an override function where the audiencecan take full control of him themselves by erasing his free will andpersonality, as they do in the Chapter 6 trial, but if the whole point of himwas simply to serve as an audience proxy from the start, it’s difficult to seewhy they would’ve even pretended to give him a personality from the start.

There’s also the matter of Tsumugi stating that she was “reallylucky that he had made it this far.” She goes on to say that she doesn’t knowwhat she would’ve done if he’d gotten killed early on, since that would’ve puta damper on the whole “audience proxy” thing. This definitely implies thatKiibo only survived due to chance, rather than her engineering it so that noone targeted him. But if she and Team DR spent so much money on making a robotfrom scratch to be engineered for these purposes, it seems a little strange tome that they wouldn’t actively try to manipulate the situation so he wound upsurviving to the end—moreso since Kiibo was so clearly designed to look likeNaegi and resemble a protagonist right from the start.

Because of this, it’s hard to know if Kiibo even had apersonality prior to the killing game, or if he was created specifically toparticipate in it. If he was human though, I could see him having been “picked”to be modified into a… well, rather than a robot, more of an android of sorts,moreso if he just happened to coincidentally look like Naegi and Team DR saw achance to use that to make the killing game more exciting. But this is entirelyspeculation, and there’s no confirmation whatsoever.

This is really all I can tell you! The most I can say isthat while the pre-game characters are somewhat different from their in-gamecounterparts, it mostly has to do with their lived experiences within thekilling game, rather than them being “complete opposites” or anything likethat. After all, the likes and dislikes for each character remain the same bothduring the prologue and after it, suggesting that at their core, they’re stillvery much the same people even if they were turned into “wacky Danganronpacharacters.”

I hope this helps answer your question a little, anon!

[ashroadtrek-blog]

The Squire of Gothos

Air Date: January 12, 1967

Writer: Paul Schneider

Director: Don McDougall

Preface: I have just 12 episodes left of season 1, and I’m somewhat impressed I’ve been able to keep a steady pace. I’m also impressed that I’ve been able to enjoy TOS even more here on my second viewing - the first time I watched it I thought I’d be unable to stomach the 50-year-old production values and dated socio-cultural attitudes; it really speaks to how ahead of the times it was (for the most part). 

The Squire of Gothos was written by Paul Schneider, whose name you may recognize from Balance of Terror - that’s right, the man who invented and introduced the iconic Romulans also created the character who could be interpreted as prototypical for a certain iconic TNG antagonist - there certainly are a number of similarities between that alien and the titular Squire of Gothos.

Moi?

The similarities: a fascination with the violent nature of humans, a penchant for ham and costumes, matching wits and words with a Starfleet captain, a proclivity for historical European military titles and rank, an ego the size of his planet...oh, and he puts Kirk on trial as proxy. 

Apparently, in Peter David’s beta-canon novel Q-Squared, Trelane is a young Q being mentored by John DeLancie’s Q. The problem is that Voyager established the birth of a new Q as something entirely new to the Q, but I prefer to sweep that under the rug and do some mental gymnastics and say that the act of reproduction was new to our favorite Q and his girlfriend. Indeed, one could even imagine that our favorite Q had just hit Qberty - after all, he acted more like a horny teenager with superpowers than someone who was familiar with the actual ins and outs of courtship and copulation.

Okay, not quite...

I enjoyed The Squire of Gothos. While I don’t quite recall how often they appear going forward, it is the first energy being episode since Charlie X’s Thasian abusers came back for their runaway little sociopath. It’s not a badly done episode at all, but then again I’m a sucker for the Q episodes of the later series so maybe it just tickled that particular pickle for me. 

The Enterprise is doing what it does best - getting sidetracked by an astronomical phenomenon en route to a colony to offload supplies. What I found funny was that in the foreshadowing of the opener Kirk tells Bones they’re 900 light-years away from a desert, when nearly every planet thus far has been a desert! By my reckoning, they just got finished with Shore Leave after The Galileo Seven and the events of The Menagerie. 

They stumble on Gothos, and Kirk gives an interesting order:

Is that the same ship we’ve all been getting to know over the past 9 weeks? DSC takes place 10 years prior, I’m disinclined to believe the DASH-drive equipped NCC-1031 is the same as this Discovery that Uhura notifies...and then a bit of digging reveals that the line was “Uhura, report the discovery on subspace radio.” Shatner misread the line, and now we’ve got a continuity hangnail. 

Moving on.

Kirk and Sulu disappear. This week’s navigator (DeSalle) and Bones want to immediately put together an away team to go find them, but the ship’s meteorologist reveals the planet is a toxic volcanic wasteland. 

If my experience is any indication, they’ll be dealing with lots of cliff racers

Now, I tried keeping Takei and Sulu separate, and maybe I’ve been listening to too much Treknobabble lately (as if!) and Richard’s die-hard ‘Sulu is gay and every navigator is his boyfriend’ theory has grown on me, but DeSalle is pretty insistent on going down to rescue his counterpart at the helm.

Then some dickhead starts sexting the Enterprise.

This is basically Victorian sexting, right?

Spock puts together a team to beam down to the incongruous habitable region to see if the messages may be coming from Kirk or Sulu - and if they are, then Spock needs to get them back before things get too crazy...

>Pic related

Bones, DeSalle, and the meteorologist Jaeger beam down to discover a castle and enter it to find a familiar face...

Wait a minute - Trelane reveals that he has been observing Earth through a 900-year lens, so why the hell does he have a salt vampire from M-113? Trelane has decorated everything in a vague 18th/19th century flair, fascinated by humans - and by that he apparently means Europeans because there is nothing to suggest, say, Asian, African, Middle Eastern, indigenous North, South, or Central American cultures there. 

Wait ‘til this guy peeps the Nazis...

Another incongruous bit in his collection is the bird alien from The Cage, barely glimpsed in that first pilot.

Via Memory-Alpha

I think Trelane only wants to hang with humans and maybe meet some ladies, but Kirk isn’t having it - he’s got no time for diversions or hammy little aliens with an Earth fetish. Spock manages to beam the away team up, and they get ready to bail on Gothos and resume course.

Trelane spars words with Spock, who isn’t impressed by him - and Trelane doesn’t like that, his ego can’t handle someone who doesn’t like him.

>Charles Evans.jpg

Spock refuses to respect someone who has intellect without discipline, power without constructive purpose. Trelane brings the bridge crew (sans Leslie) down to his dining room, where he hits on Yeoman Ross and gives Uhura the knowledge to play an antique piano. The food sucks, and Kirk and Spock work out a way to stop Trelane’s shenanigans and get back to work. More or less, the whole thing is a holodeck with replicators. 

Kirk just about has it with Trelane’s bullshit, but I can’t help but feel they might have gotten through it if they had simply hung out with the guy and gotten him laid...but only if it’s consensual, of course, and not an order. Hey, Yeoman Ross seems to be enjoying herself! 

Trelane, like a gangbanger with too much testosterone, is excited by the prospect of violence and whips out a pair of dueling pistols. He lets Kirk have the first shot after throwing his own into the ceiling, and in classic Kirk third-option form, our favorite captain shoots the mirror instead, wounding Trelane in the one place he can hurt: his ego. 

Trelane bails, and the crew beams back aboard. Kirk has a few words with Ross, and I guess he found a Yeoman he actually likes for once.

You understand at this point that the writers and producers partly shitcanned Rand because they wanted Kirk to deal with a girl of the week, rather than have a melodramatic will-they won’t-they with Janice Rand. Rand was okay, but she quickly becomes an artifact of a rougher draft of the show. Personally, I never felt she had much chemistry with Kirk, and so far Ross and Barrows - though appearing in one episode each - are much more effective because they aren’t attached to Kirk. Granted, they are treated objectively rather than as characters in their own right; their purpose is to be fought over and rescued, never having much to do other than hang off the arms of a man or sit patiently so that the Galileo Seven isn’t a sausage fest. 

In the 60s, there are secretaries in space.

On a final note about Yeomen (for now), Rand was also pushed out because a different girl each week is more likely to draw in viewers interested in that sort of thing - the fantasy of a girl in every deck. (Then there’s the sexual harassment allegations that reportedly go back to Roddenberry himself, which I’m saving for a retrospective.)

Moving on.

So they try to get away, but Trelane keeps shoving Gothos in their path. Kirk has had it with his shit, and Trelane confronts him in a courtroom. I mean seriously, this guy is a Q, he has to be. Kirk offers himself up as proxy for his ship, gets in Trelane’s face, and Trelane gets angry...

Trelane enjoyed being angry! He’s positively gleeful, considering it a grand experiment but still more than willing to murder - I mean execute - Kirk. Kirk outwits him into giving him a fighting chance - a hunt! Kirk convinces him he’d have more fun in murder by prolonging the experience. How many budding young serial killers took notes from this? Jesus.

The important thing to take away here is that Kirk may be beaten, but he is not defeated, and I think that is an important distinction. You can be beaten, but as long as you’re willing to fight you will never be defeated, and that is such a Star Trek lesson that it brings a delta-shaped tear to my eye. Cornered, Kirk starts slapping Trelane around like a capital G.

Trelane’s parents appear, a couple of energy being clouds who tell him he is disobedient and cruel, that if he can’t play with his pets nicely he doesn’t deserve to play at all. Trelane drops the foppish accent and the actor masterfully becomes a petulant, whiny child. Trelane’s parents defend humans as having spirit, classifying them as superior beings. We in the audience get the satisfaction of seeing this asshole cry.

Finally, back on the ship, Spock asks Kirk how to classify Trelane, to which Kirk sarcastically responds “god of war” and “spoiled brat” (more or less) before going into a series of dated shenanigans that boys pulled on girls back in the 40s or so (whenever these writers were kids, maybe even the 30s), such as dipping their curls in inkwells. 

Rating: 4/5; Rewatch

The Squire of Gothos is an immensely enjoyable episode that reminds seasoned viewers of John DeLancie’s Q and is sure to entertain new viewers with William Campbell’s excellent performance as an overgrown child pretentiously LARPing as a late second millenium European fop.