#even just trading one product for a Slightly less evil one is something

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs “Human Repellent”

While you are reading this one, I want you to be thinking and come up with another marketable idea that aliens can use to repel humans like in the story :)

Also  a few people have asked me lately if its ok to make suggestions or prompts, and I just want to remind you all that that is very much welcome to please do so. 

They landed at Revelation Colony two weeks after the prison riot ended. If this had been an old sci-fi movie, than this would have been exactly the place for your titular hero to make a shady business deal with an underground alien mob boss, but in doing so manage to insult him inciting a chase across space itself. However, Revelation didn’t exactly follow the tropes of old film. Sure, it was the center for the black market in this quadrant of the galaxy, but instead of organs or artifacts of power, it mostly dealt in undeclared souvenirs like snow-globes and commemorative bobble heads.

The criminal presence was so laughable that, despite being the hub of black market trade, it was most known by tourists for its low prices, great market deals, and as a major staging area for UNSC and GA interests.

This was their main purpose for being here: speaking with superiors, allowing the crew a break, and perhaps finding someone who might be able to help them with Conn. Ever since the prison riot, and the defeat of the Gibb scientist the starborn hadn’t moved to so much as scratch an itch.

According to Krill, the starborn was stuck in a state of unresponsive catatonia with brain waves similar to that of a coma patient. Commander Vir couldn’t help but feel responsible for the whole thing. In fact, Conn’s current state was in direct relation to the rescue attempt by the starborn to save the Commander from losing more limbs. 

They had discussed the incident multiple times since it had happened, but could make no real sense of what had happened. The commander was under the impression the starborn had overloaded himself, and the Gibb with some kind of memory flood or something similar. He could only vaguely remember the feelings that had come upon him when the starborn had touched him, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Sunny had suggested that the starborn had used Vir’s own memories and emotions to short circuit the Gibb, but also ended up catching some of the backlash himself.

Commander Vir wasn’t quite sure about that for he didn’t feel that his memories or his emotions were strong enough to do something like that. He personally thought it was some last ditch defense that the starbor itself could employ, but who knew.

IN the aftermath of everything, the Gibb scientist had been locked back up as catatonic as Conn, Noctus had managed to escape, but according to corporal Ramirez, he wouldn’t be gong very far, or at least not going where he wanted. 

As the Tesraki was escaping, Ramirez had managed to partially destroy the warp converter leaving the Tesraki flying blind even if he managed to survive.

So, after all of that, they had returned to somewhere with human influence to rest, relax, and debrief. The admiral had been as  pleased with the outcome as he could be, and had eventually conceded to give the crew a well-deserved break. Commander Vir, however hadn't been so lucky, and was ordered to do the admiral a favor before he got his rest.

So that is why he was here, walking down the dark, crowded streets, surrounded on all sides by colorful neon booths containing wares from all over the galaxy. Hundreds of faces stared at him as he passed hawking their wares with raised voices and pleading beckoning motions.

Behind him Sunny walked with her head high examining the crowd for any perceived threats. it  hadn’t been a question that he was going to bring her with him, for by this point, it had been openly established that she was his partner when it came to the smaller operations. Not only did they work well together as a team , but they very much enjoyed the other’s company.

“Remind me why we’re here again.” The question sounded more jenuine than it did annoyed, otherwise she seemed relatively happy to be off the ship, and out and about. He also had a feeling she was relieved he hadn’t been reduced to a catatonic mess like the other two, and may have been slightly worried, keeping watch on him to make sure he didn’t collapse drooling.

“I guess the GA has caught wind of a new issue cropping up in some of the marginal alien markets. Apparently, there is a high market demand for products that can repel, or incapacitate a human.”

Sunny blinked in surprise as they cut past a colorful rack of hats, and down onto another less-crowded side street.

“Why would they be doing that?” she wondered almost managing to look baffled.

“Well, it’s only to be expected, with the influx of humans in the galaxy they are bound to run into the worst of us.” It was true, in fact, humanity brought with it what might be considered the best and worst of the galaxy. Where there were men like Commander Vir, there had to be his equal and opposite in all ways. Luckily the GA understood the nature of humans, the best and the worst mentality, an entire species of ride or die types who could come out the best of the best or evil beyond comparison.

Of course, before this understanding was met, there had been some massive PR nightmares which came with the first inter-species murder, assault, robbery etc etc, but eventually things had straightened out, but aliens were no less frightened of humans than they had originally been.

“So are we here to confiscate their things?” Sunny wondered 

“No, no of course not, even on earth we make weapons to repel other people. We are just afraid of us as the rest of the galaxy pepper-spray, tasers, knives, guns,, your own keys. We have been in the business of protecting ourselves from humans long before you guys thought of it. No, the issue here is whether the objects are legal and use reasonable force.” Though when it came to humans, reasonable force usually meant lethal force for any other species, “Ah, here we are.”

The commander stopped in front of a shop, whose door was covered by a beaded curtain strung through with neon orange lights. The effect was gaudy and blinding, but he shook the light from his eyes and pushed inside. Sunny followed after.

Their presence, and entrance, into the small store immediately halted everything in its tracks. The Tesraki proprietor had frozen mid way through his sales pitch to a rather shiftly looking pair of Gibb. A few of the other customers squealed and hid behind the stands.

It was clear that a human and a Drev weren't exactly what they hoped to see this morning, perhaps the last thing they wanted to see. Commander Vir tipped the brim of his uniform hat and tugged at the collar of his suit jacket where- on stood his wings, the insignia of the GA and the UNSC, “Morning. I’m Commander Vir of the UNSC affiliated with the GA and this is my weapons lieutenant Sunny Lumnusdaughter.”

The tesraki eyed them suspiciously as they stepped further into the shop. Despite being a human, Everyone knew the name Vir, and Sunny to an extent, so they didn’t cut and run.

“What do you want!” The tesraki demanded, “I have my sales license, and my customers have every right to protect themselves from brutes like you.”

The commander simply smiled, “Of course, I don’t deny that right, The GA just wants to make sure that it is being done within the constraints of the law.” He crossed his arms over his chest, “So please, go on with your demonstration, and pretend we aren’t here.” 

Hesitantly, the Tesraki went back to his pitch eyeballing the human the entire time as he went. “Yes this little beauty right here is made BY humans FOR humans and can apply a force of about 50,000 volts of electrical current directly into the body. This causes the muscles to seize up immediately and the human will be grounded. Downside is the human can immediately get back up after the shock is discontinued, so while it  won’t stop one, it will be a serious deterrent.” The Tesraki eyed the Commander, “Of course, the best way for ou to test if my products are legit and ethical….”

The commander frowned, “You just want a demonstration to help sell your product.”

The Tesraki shrugged it’s furry shoulders, “You can hardly go back to your superiors and say that you know for sure this is ethical if you haven’t tested it.”

There was a moment of pause and the commander sighed eventually looking at Sunny, “If he kills me, rip his limbs off.”

That dampened the Tesraki’s smug look, but the commander was already unbuttoning his uniform jacket which he pulled off and hung on a hook on the wall removing his cap as well leaving him only in a white long sleeve- button up shirt and the uniform slacks. Sunny didn’t much like this idea, but glowered at the Tesraki to let him know she meant business.

The human stood legs slightly bent hands out to his side. Sunny stood behind him.

“Watch closely.” the Tesraki began before stepping forward and jamming the contacts against the human’s stomach. There was a sharp snapping sound which repeated violently as the human immediately seized up only managing to bite a curse through his locked jaw before falling backwards. Sunny caught him as the human twitched and jerked  violently. She almost worried he was having another seizure before the Tesraki pulled back, and the human immediately regained his body groaning only to slowly regain his feet.

“Ow that hurts like a bitch.” He cursed rubbing his stomach where the contacts had made.

The spectacle had drawn a rather interested crowd, and the Tesraki was looking very smug, “See quite effective.” he looked towards the commander, “Do you want another?”

“Hell no, what kind of question is that.”

The Tesraki ignored him and turned back to his crowd, “See, a fantastic deterrent.”

“Now lets see, this little spray bottle here is another human invention for humans and contains  the poison capsaicin in concentrated doses. Now, while some humans enjoy small doses of this poison on their food they do not enjoy it sprayed in their eyes. It will result in a burning sensation, and an overreaction of the mucous membranes.” 

The commander backed away his hands raised, “Wow, uh I am not demonstrating that. I would like to be able to see for the next few hours thanks.”

“See even the mention of it causes them to back away in fear.” The Tesraki said dramatically 

Commander Vir rolled his eyes as the rest of the crowd oohed and aahed. 

“Humans, you may have heard have more senses than any creature in the galaxy…. Accept maybe for the Drev.” He glanced at Sunny, “So what if I told you that I could make the human run from this room without lifting more than a finger.” 

Around the room the crowd shifted in disbelieving anticipation 

“The one sense they have that the rest of us do not, can be used against them. You see that weird protrusion in the center of its face.” The commander frowned, “That is a nose and it can be used to detect particles in the air. Everything sheds particles of itself, and if there are enough of them, a human can sense it. I would very much recommend this little device for those who come from the Iota quadrant, and are known to smell irresistibly delectable to humans. You see, when this pin is pulled particles are released into the air. When a human breaths them in they bind to chemical protein sights in the nose, and I am told that the smell is quite revolting.”

The commander looked a bit skeptical one eyebrow raised, but the tesraki reached down and smugly pulled the pin. The reaction was ALMOST immediate. For the first second he just stood there and then the man’s eyes widened a hand shot up over his face, and he gagged violently. It seemed as if he tried to adjust himself to the smell, but then gagged again and turned to race towards the door knocking over a stand as he went doubling over a few more times leaving Sunny sure he was going to vomit. He vanished out the door after a couple of seconds, and the crowd clapped politely. The Tesraki returned the pin smugly.

Sunny sniffed at the air. She could just catch a whiff of something, but having been born on a planet dominated by volcanoes, it hadn’t been prudent to make her susceptible to bad smells, as sulfur was common. It was more useful to be able to detect sweet and sour smells.

“Scientists believe that this reaction exists as a primitive way to keep the creature from ingesting anything poisonous. The human nose cannot tell the difference between a smell inside the mouth and a smell outside the mouth. If the nose detects a dangerous level of certain types of chemicals that could be poisonous, it demands that the human move immediately. It can even cause an involuntary holding of the breath and a regurgitation of the last meal i.e those horrible noises it was making as it left.”

It took awhile for the commander to return, and when he did, he was mad. He marched up hand over his mouth and nose and grabbed the Tesraki by the arm. His voice was somewhat muffled by his hand when he said, “That smelled like a HUMAN corpse, so explain yourself.”

The tesraki calmly brushed him off, “Calm down, Commander, its a simple chemical compound that mimics the bacterial breakdown of your human flesh. No humans were harmed in the making of this weapon. Though you have to admit, it is quite clever.”

“Quite disgusting.” The man commented, but backed away

The Tesraki continued unfazed, “Now this one is a might bit more expensive, and takes a bit longer to operate. See first you used this to scan the human, and then you press one of these three buttons. Or you can press them all at the same time see.” There was a sharp clicking noise, and three small drones launched themselves at the Commander,’s face. The man tried to duck, but the three little pieces connected themselves together and latched onto his head and neck. The bulk of the device was locked around his neck, but a few legs of the contraption gripped themselves over his face.

“What the hell.” He muttered

“Then you press this button.” The machine whirred, and the human shrieked in pain falling immediately to his knees as his head was forced back and to the side. Sunny snarled, and the Tesraki let go of the button.

The man fell to his knees, and the device detached.

“Pressure points, areas of inherent weakness and high concentration of nerve endings on the human body. If pressed they cause severe pain. Humans have more of these points on the body but TW-17, GV-26 and LI-18 are sufficient. The last one can even cause nausea and unconsciousness if worked hard enough.”  

Commander Vir rubbed his neck, “AND they can be lethal.” The tesraki frowned, but the huan held up a hand, “Which is why that device requires testing, authentication, and review from the electronics board. If it is going to e used, it has to be a NON-lethal measure with a short burst duration. We don’t want anyone getting funny ideas that they can enslave humanity.” He glowered at the tesraki 

Later, when they walked from the store, Commander Vir was looking more the worse for ware. Sunny watched him in pity, “Why do you always insist on hurting yourself?”

The commander rubbed the back of his head, “Do you think I do this for fun?”

“Sometimes I wonder.” 

“I am allergic to pain.”

She laughed, leaned over, and picked the human up. He yelped in surprise than looked at her, “Really.”

“You look tired.” And this is how I show my appreciation.” 

“Ah yes, by bridal carrying me through the city.” He gripped halfheartedly 

“I can do fireman or sack of potatoes, but I hear this one is more comfortable.” She said beginning her walk through the city

Commander Vir only argued for the sake of politeness before dropping it, besides, he didn’t really mind. He was exhausted, and besides he actually kind of enjoyed the attention.

Don’t forget to comment with your idea for repelling humans, if you have one. 

[botslayer]

Top Ten games of the 2010′s

This trend seems to be doing the rounds at the moment and seeing as I’ve been gaming for about as long as I can remember, It just feels right. So, let’s get into it. But first, worth saying: These aren't really in any specific order, it's just the games I've personally had the most fun with overall, but it's pretty hard to decide what the hard numbers on things you enjoy for different reasons are if that makes any sense. 10. The 2010's weren't exactly the best time for anyone, I think. For me they were a slog of finding myself and learning things I wish I didn't. Amid all those things I wanted some levity. The world needs something and stupid. We got a lot of it ion 2013 but I feel like we could have used it scattered around a bit more. In that spirit, allow me to show you one hell of a pick me up:

Saints Row 4

Saints Row 4 does not give a fuck. It is aggressively demonstrating that the entire time you play. It doesn't care in the slightest what you think or why, It just wants to show you cool, if juvenile, and interesting, if weird shit. It's the finer points of Ratchet and Clank's arsenal, SR3's humor, And superpowers that genuinely put Prototype and Infamous in a blender and tell you to go ape shit with them. The soundtrack isn't top shelf, it's the roof of the building the shelf is in. Saints Row Two had a better story overall but SR Four's was just plain fun and a solid enough story to still be invested.

The DLC was just as irreverent and madcap, Featuring everything from an evil Santa Clause to evil Gimps on Game of thrones chairs made of dildos Or Tropey-ass costumes and weapon reskins that I'd be genuinely surprised the game dev didn't get sued over. It has earned its place in my top 10 and I will die by that decision.

9.

2016 saw the advent of a new genre. They blended TF2 and MOBAs, and we got hero shooters in their first AAA forms, Overwatch and Battleborn. But neither of these games is on this list, much as I liked them. Partly because the whole time, I kept thinking of one simple question: "Why do I keep thinking of...?"

Anarchy Reigns

Anarchy Reigns is my favorite Platinum game. Full Stop. The Story mode is interesting and has genuinely good character moments, the characters themselves are completely mental, ranging from a mercenary with a bionic cat leg that secretly has a gun built into it to a giant cyborg bull-man with a jet-powered hammer. The soundtrack is mostly angry hip-hop, making every song a banger and fittingly speedy for things like random bombing runs from jet fighters that come from absolutely nowhere.

There are giant monsters, cars with mounted flame throwers, giant robots, and the online is still pretty sweet because even when abandoned, loading it up with bots still rules. I regularly have more fun with this than I ever did with Overwatch, and I don't care how insane that sounds.

8.

Some games want to make you feel something and fail. Some games make you feel some things accidentally, for example, a desperate need to laugh. This game made me feel like a human blender. Like a Chthonic god of mangled flesh and raw destructive power. Nyarlathotep ain't got nothing on me. I speak, of course, of...

[Prototype] 2

There's no end to the absolute destruction you feel like you're causing in this game. It feels more fluid than the first, the main character is a pinch more relatable, and all the body horror, superpowers, zombie hordes, and big old monsters make for some of the most memorable and fun moments and fights in gaming. The DLC is also pretty solid, adding new fun side challenges, and new powers and weapons that elevate you from "Flesh god" to "Screw physics, I made them" Omnipotent. Best god/monster simulation of all time.

7.

Sometimes some games are at an honest tie in your mind. Be it that you like them for essentially the same reasons, or for completely different reasons, but the overall total joy or entertainment they bring is roughly equivalent. Here, we have a case of the former:

Furi/Cuphead

Both games have a tight focus on giving players a unique, boss-centric challenge, both have interesting, somewhat minimal narratives, and both are absolute eye candy.

Furi has a more "Samurai Jack" Quality to me. A complete badass on a relatively simple quest with a somewhat minimalistic art style learning some things as he goes.

Cuphead on the other hand, nails that rubber hose animation style, and the fun levity of such animations while still making the player's ability to interact with the world damn impactful and fun.

They share a spot in my soul, games I love everything about but will never be able to finish. Hats off to both dev teams.

6.

Now here we have another tie. Mostly because the games are so close together, they need to be evaluated more or less as one product IMO, not enough changed for me to consider them separate games, fortunately, that is the furthest thing from an insult it can be in this situation. I present to you, my next pick(s).

Costume Quest 1/2

Now, This might seem pretty random considering my other picks, but honestly, I love Halloween, I love creative madness, I love subversion, I love good characters, and I love cool action, these games have all these things by the bucketload.

The first game is a wild ride through Halloween in multiple very lively locations and the second, slightly confusing as it is, is pretty awesome for the things it introduces, including time travel. Other elements, like the battle stamps, the truly epic forms of everything in the fights, The ability to customize your costumes, etc. they blur together in a pretty big way, but again, there's not a thing wrong with that when both games rock like crystal candy. 

5.

Now, if you hadn't noticed, all of the games on this list have had some hard action at their core, and while I don't HATE calmer games, a lot of the time, so many are kinda dull to me in that with the exception of easter eggs of some sort, most farming sims, for example, just have you doing normal farm stuff with very few twists, may as well start a real farm in that case. My most chill entry is a game that tosses that to one side, asks you to grab a suck cannon, and start harvesting gelatinous monster poop.

Slime Rancher

While you don't spend a lot of time actually interacting with other characters, they just talk at you, the story of the game is pretty effective, the player character of Beatrix has left Earth for a simpler life of Slime Ranching, which entails the raising of alien crops, delightfully derpy and colorful chickens, and going all around in an attempt to farm new breeds of slime for their genetic material to sell off or trade-in for the creation of gadgets while being surrounded by a cast of interesting characters. It's all very wholesome family fun.

The game looks great, has great ideas, and is genuinely the best farming game I have ever played. @ me all you want.

4.

The 80's are almost fetishized nowadays. Given all the property reboots, games that go for the vibe and aesthetic of the time, etc. It almost seems as though the eighties vibe train ain't gonna stop rolling any time soon. But we owe it to ourselves to remember the first big swipe of madcap neon-colored actiony B-movie bullshit and how mind-meltingly epic it was. Ladies, Gents, and whatever else, I present:

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Blood Dragon's story is relatively simple, you play Sargent Rex "Power" Colt (A name said in full so many times I thought his last name was "Powercolt" for the longest time), a former "Omega force" cyborg. Rex and his friend "Spider" were sent into a secret island base to investigate the supposed defection and treachery of their old commander, Ike Sloan. It turns out he has gone rogue and taken an army of "Mark 5" Omegaforce cyber-soldiers with him. What follows is a long story of betrayal, science fiction of the highest nonsensical level, comedy, and brilliantly cathartic action.

The collectibles range from data on animals, to research notes from a scientist, to literal VHS cassette tapes that have full descriptions of movies that I would legitimately watch if I could. "You may now kill the brides" is not a real film and I am angry for every day that that is true. Anyway, play Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, I dunno if it's on PS4 but it's one game I'd buy a new/old console for.

3.

A lot of superhero games NEED to railroad you. Your goals MUST be to save the lives of the people and help the weak and all that. But one dev asked the simple question: "What if it didn't?" "What if the player chose how to use their power? What if the player could be as evil or as good as they damn well pleased?" One game gave you the powers of thunder and lightning and asked what you'd do with it. It's sequel asked you the same, but against more... interesting forces.

InFamous 2

InFamous 2 is a game about making choices, just like the first one, also just like the first one, it can have an effect on gameplay. That effect went from "What does this particular power do in this allignment?" To "Which new set of NEW powers would you like?" The forces of the last game went from “Three flavors of gun-toting whackos” To “Possibly an allegory for the Klan, Swamp monsters, and Ice-powered super soldiers.”

This was, and still is, the best game in the whole series, The powers felt distinct from anything else and still do, the story is solid as a rock, and the enemy types were still varied enough to be interesting, I miss the Reapers from the first game, but that's about it. Everything else was a massive step up. If you have something that can run it, play it.

2.

Action is something I think we can all appreciate on some level. We can understand when it does or does not work, we can understand when we do or do not like how it feels when we are the ones partaking in it. EX: Any schlep can tell you when the weapons in your game lack impact, or when your character moves too slow for the game to be fun. The following game is something I can't say anything of the sort about. And it's kind of like Wolfenstein, when you have enemies this bad, who the hell cares how many you kill?

Doom 2016

Y'all are lying if you say you didn't expect this one. It's DOOM 2016. This game is made of hate and fuck. AND I LOVE IT. You move so fast, you may as well be half cheetah and half sports car. You slaughter the dregs of hell by the dozens and even the biggest, baddest things this game throws at you can be beaten with the starting pistol if you have the stones for it. It looks amazing graphically, the demons all look appropriately threatening, and even the Multiplayer is a great deal of fun in my book.

Something worth noting: The story presented by default is pretty barebones, but that's where supplementary material fills in the gaps, the difference between supplementary material in most games and supplementary material here is the material is till IN THE GAME. You're free to ignore most of the plot as it happens around you, and even interesting tidbits of the lore like how certain demons function. Not only are these things missable collectibles, prompting continued play to find them, they are also pretty interesting reads. So yeah, just about everything you could want in a sequel/remake, builds the on lore and gameplay very organically. 

1.

And here we are, the last game I'd put in this category. An entire decade, and here, we end on the last game that left such an impact I'd put it in my top ten. But first, let's talk about expectations and delivery: When you say a game is coming out, there are certain expectations you have for gameplay, EX: I say "Ratchet and Clank" and you expect a TPS with platforming elements and crazy guns. I say "Gears of War" and people expect something to do with lumbering about in big armor, dismembering things with a chainsaw gun and otherwise shooting them to paste. We might also expect changes to things, better graphics, innovations in grenade variety, something as that franchise goes on.

After the last game in this series was released, there were tons of people who felt let down and disappointed by it. Then they released the still somewhat disappointing special edition of it. They were both still fun, but neither really felt like the full next step in the series. After a failed reboot, they returned to the original story and the lot of us rejoiced. And when it finally came out? It was a step up in most, if not, all regards, to its predecessors. You know what this last one is. Please, give a warm round of applause to:

Devil May Cry 5

A game that was not only a return to form, but a major escalation in gameplay for one character, and a new style of gameplay all together by way of yet another new character. It didn’t exactly hurt that the story kicked ten kinds of ass and that the game looked spectacular in both the design of everything and the actual graphical fidelity.DMC 5 is, like DOOM, Like InFamous 2, Like [PROTOTYPE] 2, everything you want in a good sequel. It built very well on already solid foundations and it was generally just a fun, slightly goofy, massively stylish, and ultra badass ride. I recommend this, and all these games, to anyone.Good night everyone, have a great 2020. And the rest of the decade, for that matter. 

[moistwithgender]

Monthly Media Roundup (June-July 2019)

Well, I neglected doing a post last month, and now another has passed. I haven’t done too much, about three games each month and not anything else media-wise, so let’s get it all done right now!

Little Nightmares (PC/Steam): 

These types of spooky “cinematic platformers”, like LIMBO and INSIDE, never really scare me or fill me with dread. Part of this may be that due to the trappings of cinematic platformers. Checkpoints are very fair, and nothing is too difficult because priority is on delivering the story. Little side challenges exist, like trying to light all the candles or break all the porcelain dolls in the short 3-hour run of the game, but these are also pretty reasonable, even if you’re in a chase sequence. I’m reminded of a youtuber I briefly followed who talked about how horror games aren’t scary anymore, and somewhat unintentionally delivered the point that as you become accustomed to the limits of a medium, and therefore are less likely to be surprised by it, you’re also much less likely to be scared by it. It’s a somewhat unfortunate and inevitable trade-off to becoming more invested in a hobby. When I was a kid, all games held infinite possibility, and so an NPC in Harvest Moon telling me that wild dogs came out at night led me to think that night time held the possibility of ENEMIES in a game without combat. What the NPC meant was that you should build fences. As an adult who has spent my life playing games, I can tell you that a game is almost never going to put you in a situation without the means to deal with it. If there’s going to be combat, you’re going to know how combat works before an ambush. If there’s an escape sequence, you’re going to be in an area that facilitates your escape (often a narrow space that leads you in a direction while also making it as harrowing as possible). Games are theme park rides, and while learning that can make seemingly difficult games more manageable and enjoyable, it also gradually disillusions you. Thankfully, there are always new things to learn if you keep an open mind.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS): 

2019 has been about thoroughly enjoying the games that I considered overrated in my young adulthood. I joked on twitter that 70% of my personality was disliking Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time, and honestly, it might as well have been. I earned a lot of undeserved respect in college through arrogantly spouting hot takes about “objectively good art”, and a lot of people reasonably assumed this must mean I know exactly what I’m talking about. The way I process art and media is much looser and more personal than it used to be, partially due to burning out and becoming too exhausted to deal with other arrogant people. I think a lot about how tiring I had to be for other people to talk to. Watching Tim Rogers bleed his personal trauma into his video series on the subtleties of FF7’s japanese script was the most instrumental in turning me back toward the game. When Square Enix revealed gameplay footage of the remake at E3 this year, I was hooting and hollering with the longtime fans.

But, this is about Zelda, not Final Fantasy. I had already played through OoT, as hurriedly as possible, just to say I had done it. It was the better part of a decade ago, at the urging of a then-girlfriend who had nostalgia for it. Frustrations with the Water Temple in the original version are valid despite it being largely well designed, due to some minor shortsighted-ness that blows up into nagging issues, but I think I had put myself in the headspace to dislike it from the get-go. Similarly, I didn’t want to do any collecting in the game as a whole. I had convinced myself that there was no joy to be found in collecting in games (a take bereft of nuance). When the point of Zelda games is to inspire the player to explore every nook and cranny in search of rewards, going in as a player and stubbornly trying to avoid any of that ensures that you’ll miss the point of the whole experience. I’m not sure what it was that made me want to go back. It might be that I wanted to prove my younger, cockier self wrong, and pave over my old evaluations with more nuance. 

It certainly worked out that way, as several previous opinions changed entirely. Ruto used to be annoying to me, but was now one of my favorite characters. Doing all the little minigames felt rewarding in itself, and in turn I was unexpectedly rewarded with important items (they really did bet everything on the entire world they’d made). The Water Temple, now tweaked for a bit more convenience in the 3DS version, was extremely interesting. The side quest to acquire the Biggoron Sword was easily doable, whereas I had grown up assuming it impossible. And the story which had never appealed to me (because I wouldn’t let it) now felt relatable in a way I hadn’t expected. Link intends to do good, but through unfortunate circumstances and honest mistakes becomes unable to take part in the world, and it spirals downward for years as he remains trapped in a room, aging but inactive. Something about that mirrors my own experiences with depression. Sure, Link, can travel back to his younger self at any time, but there’s still a powerlessness in the inability to affect the seven year gap. You can flash back, but you can’t change what you’ve lost.

Banjo-Kazooie (N64): 

You know, as a kid I probably would have just accepted that Grunty was evil, but as an adult it’s hard not to see her as a product of her environment. Obsessed with asking her cauldron who the objectively prettiest in the world is, she seeks out and kidnaps the younger girl given the title in an attempt to steal her youth. Every character in the game describes Grunty as ugly, rather than evil, and even her own sister shows up in every area to tell you how gross she is and how terrible her lifestyle is. I ended up sympathizing with her more than anyone else. I’ve only played half an hour of Banjo-Tooie, but it was a relief in multiple ways to see her pivot to straight up murder after rising from the dead.

Despite playing Donkey Kong Country multiple times growing up, I’d never really grown to love Rare’s in-house aesthetic of big-eyed cartoony animals. It might be hypocritical, but Smash Ultimate’s reveals for both King K. Rool and Banjo (and) Kazooie made me see the charm in these characters. Something about how Smash canonizes characters as essential pieces of game history always causes me to drop any negative pretense and adopt them as favorites. It’s a little intellectually hypocritical, but I can’t help liking what I like. After the trailer for B-K in Smash, I immediately started up the original game in Retroarch. Thankfully the core I used was advanced enough to play the game without issues (the same cannot be said for Tooie), as other alternatives were expensive or hard to get a hold of. While the slightly-mean humor and talking animate objects took a bit of getting used to, I get it now. I get the children’s show aesthetic they were aiming for, and I appreciate the feel of the physics and control of the interspecies friendship of the protagonists working in tandem with each other, even if the game is at times quite difficult.

Dragon Quest I, II, & III (SNES): 

Yes, I did play through three JRPGs in a row! And yes, you might notice that the hero of Dragon Quest XI (and VIII, and IV, and III) was also announced for Smash Ultimate. They recently released, as of this writing! A lot of what I’ve been playing has been influenced by outside forces, whether it be Nintendo news or friends, but I’m not bothered at all when otherwise I might not have the energy to play anything. The games I’ve been playing are also ones I’ve intended to play for a while, so the excuses have been convenient for me. Though, actually, this decision had less to do with the Smash announcement and more to do with the upcoming re-release of DQXI, which seems to be related to the original three games, known as The Erdrick Trilogy. I had heard that you can play XI on its own, but that there is an extra layer of appreciation to be had if you’ve played the original trilogy. Me being me, I naturally queued them up. I chose the older fan translations of the SNES remakes, and though I did finish them, I can tell you that they have their fair share of bugs (DQII even has a game breaking glitch I had to finagle through using save states across multiple versions, phew). Besides that, those old translations lack the modern localizations of the games, so if they namedrop something in XI, there’s a chance it’ll go over my head. Oops! If you want to play these games, the best versions are currently on mobile phones.

Around a decade ago I was in early college, with no friends except for those still in high school or at another university. I was very lonely and nervous. I started playing Dragon Quest V purely by chance, and it served as the perfect salve for that loneliness, with its lonely child protagonist traveling around the world accumulating found family. It’s one of the more poignant and cathartic JRPGs I’ve ever played, and for the next decade I would actually be bothered that the rest of the games didn’t live up to the catharsis of DQV.

In revisiting the roots of the series, and playing it through to see how it develops from title to title, it finally clicked with me, and continues to click with me, as I keep learning more about the series. Rather than comparing every entry to DQV, I should have been comparing them in order. This might sound obvious, but it really did make a world of difference to see that V’s narrative is placed on top of the foundation the previous games set, rather than a singular case of lightning in a bottle. And the games have always featured loneliness, but in differing contexts, and to different degrees. The hero of DQI is almost entirely alone through the full game. In DQII, the princess comes from lonely circumstances, and one of the princes comes down with a sickness that leaves him temporarily unable to help his friends. In DQIII you can make as many team members as you want, but you grow up with an absent father, and your own good deeds receive bittersweet resolution. They are all games built on simple settings and followed through with empathy. The series is at times disarmingly heavy, which is part of what makes the games as memorable as they are. You’re never quite as prepared for Dragon Quest as you think you are.

As of this writing I’m currently half-way through a replay of Dragon Quest IV, and I’m enjoying it a lot more. I’m looking forward to replaying V. I have no idea what VI will be like. I’ve heard it’s a lower point in the series, but that’s what I heard about II as well, and I ended up loving it, so who knows. Dragon Quest is good.

---

Well, I managed to catch up. I didn’t get into the finer details of the DQ playthroughs, but DQIII is honestly so good I don’t want to spoil it for anyone (you should play these games). Maybe in August I’ll actually get back to watching and reading things. Maybe I’ll try to keep these things to a single paragraph per item, to make it more manageable to read. Let me know what you think, if you think.

[idkwhoiamanymorebutwtf]

Ok ko and souls

Souls. They're a thing. Basically like glorbs except purple. We've only ever seen them once in the short Enid's Bad Day. Yknow, the one where Enid stole and ate the souls of everyone in the bodega? Yeah, that one. That sparked a theory in me. What if souls are the main source of people's powers? I mean...we don't really have any explaination for the powers all heros and villains posess, but think about it. When Enid stole everyone's souls, why didn't they try and stop her? Use their power moves? I know at least half the people in there were around Enid's level! What if it's becauss without their souls they didn't have the ability to?

Now, the description of souls as "purple glorbs" becomes more relevant when you consider this theory. Souls give power. But what else does? What powers machines such as the sentient boxmore bots or the op, world bending hack pack? What caused Fink's turbo transformation and allowed the Point Prep students to power up? Glorbs? And though Glorbs are a teal color, the energy associated with them is often purple.

So what if Souls and Glorbs are the same thing? They're similar enough. I believe that as time goes on, though, they become less and less stable. Bright purple in-the-body souls grant sentience, keep a hero strong, and is the source of their power. Now, once the soul is gone from the body, a person clearly keeps their sentience. But not their powers. As the soul gets weaker it turns a more blue color. These glorbs can grant sentience still, and are the kind kept in the Boxmore robots. And I believe they're the reason Tko is both as strong as he is, and as much of an actual person as he is. Up until the episode You're In Control, Tko is seen as two things, depending on who you are. Some uncontrollable, almost inhumane ball of rage who wants nothing more than to see people hurt, or an extension of the negative emotions of Ko. Just Ko's emo phase. At the end of You're In Control, though, Tko does something out of character for either of those descriptions. He gives in. He makes a trade with Ko. If he was just a malicious ball of rage, he wouldn't yield to Ko's demands, and if he were just an extension of Ko, then he wouldn't have any demands of his own outside of something Ko may feel. And I don't think Ko wanted that punching bag. After that, Tko became more of a person with his own thoughts and feelings and opinions. And what happened in that episode? You may not remember this. But Tko swallowed some glorbs.

I think that Glorbs/souls, being part of the body, works like anything else produced by the body. For example, think of it like white blood cells. If you have a healthy amount of them, then upping the production or adding more will have negative side affects. Elodie, Sparko, and Fink all had one healthy soul in their bodies, and so when they got an extra one, it caused them physical side affects. The crash we see when the power high glorbs cause wears off, such as how Sparko ended up on the ground, clearly disoriented, or how Fink collapsed in Venomous's arms after her power high. Meanwhile if you're in need of power or sentience, the glorbs will react positively. Like a blood transfusion. Ko swallowed the glorbs and it gave Tko conciousness. The robots have sentience and power because they're powered by glorbs, aka souls.

I think, as I said before, that souls get weaker with time. I believe that when a soul is completely faded of it's energy, the physical body finally deteriorates. And I think that when a persons soul is completely gone they turn into gloops. Gloops are similar to the gem shards in steven universe. Always looking for the missing pieces of themselves and destroying anything in it's path to get to it. I also believe that's why the only instance of a gloop causing physical harm to someone in a way that isn't just consuming whatevers nearby, is in the episode Do You Have Any More In The Back?. Because if you recall, a gloop shot some sort of shock at Enid when she tried to touch it. She has the power to steal and eat souls. It would have seen that as a threat. How couldn't it?!?

And I've always wondered why Shadowy Figure wanted Ko instead of Enid or even Rad. Rad would have been dumb enough to help Shadowy Figure get access to those glorbs, and Enid certainly would of had the initiative to go down to the tree and the power to break the seal on the room. They'd both cause damage more effectively too if they went on a Tko style rampage.

Now, at first I thought maybe it was because of Enid's power over souls. If she figured out his plan, she could effectively and easily keep them from him. But he wouldn't know that. I mean...the only reason he knows so much about Ko is because he's most likely actually Laser Blast.

But then I realised. He needed a Tko style rampage in order for his whole plan to work. And he wouldn't be able to do quite that in Rad or Enid. Because Tko had always been inside of Ko. And that's not normal. There was a little piece of corrupt energy inside of Ko all along. And it doesn't make sense why. I mean...Ko just being special for the sake of it doesn't cut it in my eyes, idk about you.

What if it has to do with those weird orb thingys from that unknown villain? What if they can take souls? I believe that this orb takes the souls of whoever touches it, corrupts the soul, and spits it back out in pieces. So if you were nearby, it could potentially make you more powerful or morw evil. And who waa in that room?

Laser Blast, who I theorize faked his own death and stole a ton of the orb things? Foxtail, whose clearly a villain? Carol, who goes into the woods and becomes some feral creature occasionally? And of course, since Carol was pregnant, there's Ko, who had an evil, unordinarily powerfull alter ego inside of him all along.

And maybe that's why Shadowy Figure looks so different from Laser blast. The orb got him. He has no power anymore and as the power from his soul fades his body is changing as well. He needs glorbs, aka souls, and he needs them now.

So the big question is; who's this big mystery villain that caused all of this? I'll be trying to figure that out. I'll be skimming though things that happen in the future, aka looking at that big war Red action was part of. I'll be looking at Boxman and Professor Venomous because as much as I don't think they actually have anything to do with Shadowy Figure or Point or any of that, they have something to do with glorbs as well, and so their info can be usefull. I'll be paying attention to why Gar and Carol were attacked by that "destroy point" one eyed rock thing recently, because maybe they did something slightly beforehand that'll give us some insight. I'll be thinking about why Gar built his store where he did, of course. Idk, let me know if you make any connections or find anything wrong with my theory. I'd fucking love to hear feedback, no lie.

[throughtheglassdarkly]

Missing Pieces, part 5

Welcome back. When last you were here, Yova was being a gentleman and Day became a damsel in distress. Onward.

So of course the first thing you’re probably wondering is “How did Day get nabbed by the Knights of the Widow’s Walk?” I didn’t end up learning the whole story until much later, so this is all secondhand, but here’s the story as it was related to me. Rewinding to a few days before all this happened, Day had a pretty weird feeling that something was off. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but he confirmed it when he was out buying a six pack at his corner bodega and he saw a blue Subaru sitting out front. There wasn’t anybody in the car, but he was almost certain he’d seen that same car parked outside another stop he’d made a few days earlier.

Checking out the car, Day saw it had New York State plates and a large dent on the driver’s side door near the bottom, which was how he figured it was the same car. He also spotted a person wearing a puffy jacket and knit cap near the end of the block, leaning up against a street lamp and looking in his direction. He started heading after that figure, but when the dude saw him, he darted off. Day followed, but when he got around the corner, he saw that the figure had vanished into thin air. He did, however, see a paper fluttering in the wind with part of a red wax seal on it. Sound familiar?

Day took the paper back to his office and kept working on some of the paperwork for his PI license. None of us had heard from him much in a couple of days; he’d kept telling us he was really busy. Nothing much happened to him the rest of the day, but when he woke up the next morning, his window was open. He’d definitely remembered shutting it the night before, so he was super freaked out, grabbed his gun, and started going through the apartment. He didn’t see anyone, but did clearly see that a lot of his things were looked through: papers were askew, books and newspapers ruffled through, drawers slightly ajar. He told me later that he considered calling one of us, but then decided against it. After a minute, he saw something that got his attention: a picture that was taken of him while he was out with the rest of us. It was a picture from behind, mostly of him and Bella.

Day desperately needed to cool off, so he walked back to the bodega he was at the day before for a breakfast sandwich. As the cashier was ringing him up, he told Day, “Oh, speak of the devil. Someone was just asking about you.” Day looked around quickly but didn’t see anybody, so he asked, “Who?” “Oh, some tall guy came through, said he saw you come in the other day and said he’d seen you around a few places, asked if you were a regular here,” the kid said. “What’d he look like?” Day asked. “Uh, tall, kind of pale – no, pale’s not right-”

At this point, Day lost all pretense of patience, so he reached across the counter, grabbed the kid by the scruff of the neck and dragged him over the counter, saying, “I’m not asking you to describe a Mr. Potato Head, I’m asking you to describe him! What. Did. He. Look. Like?!” The kid was practically in tears and stammered out a description and Day let him go. The kid rang Day out as fast as he could, told him the guy was heading in the direction of Broadway, then ducked behind the counter to wet himself in privacy.

Day started stalking toward Broadway, eating his sandwich and steaming. He was looking around everywhere, trying to figure out where this tall guy in a knit hat and Mets jacket (that’s how you know he’s evil) might be hiding. He ended up passing a big collection of trash bins near one of the side streets and was so distracted looking down the nearby alley that he didn’t even see the guy come up behind him. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to look. The guy was tall, ashen, with a pig-like nose and one hand in his jacket pocket.

The dude told Day, “If you don’t want to see what I have in this pocket, and trust me, you don’t, we’re going to take a walk.” Day snapped back, “If your face is any indication, I don’t want to see anything you got under those clothes.” He steered day into the alley and told him they were going somewhere Day wouldn’t be a problem. “Somehow I don’t think you mean Tahiti,” Day said. “I could put a sign on it that says Tahiti if you’d like,” the man retorted. “Don’t do me any favors, bitch,” Day said. As he was saying this, he heard a burst of air come from his side and felt something really sharp hit his upper arm. He looked down and saw a dart and then his vision began to swim. The last thing he saw before passing out was the guy pulling a pair of handcuffs out of his jacket, wearing a thick leather glove as he did so.

So that takes care of one bit of backstory. But before I get into how we rescued Day, I think it’s only fair to share with you what happened on Yova’s date, which I also had to learn about secondhand. She’d scouted the bistro out a few days in advance and was already there when Marigold came running up, completely out of breath and apologizing for missing her bus. Now, Yova says she spotted the three of us, but decided to let it slide so as to not make a scene (personally, I think she’s saving face, but we’ll give this to her, we’ll give it to her).

After getting their drink orders in (Marigold, it turns out, is a Pepsi girl), they started having small talk, with Marigold super excited about what we learned about the Shepherd of Lonely Roads. She was talking a mile a minute about research and how thrilling it was, with Yova being Cool Hand Luke, letting her run her yap. After Marigold finished pumping Yova for information about the Shepherd, Yova turned the conversation back to Marigold, asking how long she’d been in the Autumn Court (two years), how she felt about the Court (she was the newest recruit prior to me and didn’t really care to get involved with the running of the Court) and the current relations of the Courts (she gave an analogy that Summer and Winter built the house, but Autumn and Spring were the ones keeping the walls up and safe). It was around this time that Yova noticed we were gone.

After they ate their meals, Yova suggested they grab some coffee at a nearby coffeeshop and take a walk around the neighborhood, which Marigold was entirely up for. Yova paid the bill and offered Marigold an arm, escorting her out of the restaurant. The line at the coffeeshop was a bit lengthy, but it allowed them more chances to be schmoopy with each other. Yova learned that once Marigold started talking, she could talk for a very, very long time.

So that’ll get you caught up to where my last chapter ended. As soon as Pam, Bella, and I finished staring in horror at the picture of Day and I got my senses back, I grabbed the photo and started entering the coordinates into Google Maps. What popped up was an old auto parts store a few towns over from Albany (a suburb of a suburb) that was closed permanently. The building, however, was still standing. I told Bella and Pam this and Bella grimly said there wasn’t much difference in her being there instead of Day. I think she was envisioning that she’d have to offer herself up in exchange for Day. I told her, “Look, after what we went through in Arcadia, I don’t want any of us being stuck somewhere again and forced to do anything. I don’t – I can’t let that happen. We’re going to get him out of there without having to trade anybody.”

Pam suggested at this point that we go get Yova. Her date had been over for hours now, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t busy. We looked up her schedule on her website and saw that she was doing accompanist work for a local high school production of My Fair Lady. We all grabbed our bags, I gave Paisley a couple crickets, and we made our way over. When we got in the auditorium just before intermission, I saw Yova with the tightest smile I’ve ever seen on her face. I couldn’t blame her: all the kids sounded like they’d been taking accent classes from Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

At intermission, she came to join us and was clearly about to start a soliloquy, but I handed her the photo of Day to cut that off at the pass. As soon as she saw it, she got a look of pure murder on her face. She excused herself to talk with the production manager and inform him that a family emergency had come up and we all left the school. Yova was about to light up a cigarette when Pam cleared her throat and pointed to the “No Tobacco Products Within 250 Feet of School Grounds” sign. Yova, clearly bested by the full force of the Parent-Teacher Association, slunk away in shame.

When we got back to her crappy pickup and all piled in, we explained the situation. She said that we would need to speak with someone from the Summer Court, since one of their pledged courtiers was missing. We hotfooted it back over to my apartment and Yova reluctantly took out her phone to call Dania Sprint. Dania was the Runnerswift who was giving her dirty looks at the B&B, the one in desperate need of an “Oh, honey.” Unfortunately, she’s more or less the secretary of the Summer Court, so if anything needed to be relayed, she was the one to relay it.

Yova called Dania and explained the situation to her. Dania was about as sympathetic as a rabid musk ox and put her on hold. I put Paisley on Yova’s lap to get her to quell her murderous rage. After a few minutes of teeth-gritting hold, Yova finally got Cahir the Unyielding on the line. For once, he was all business as Yova explained the situation to him. He asked her for the address of where Day was being held and promised to send in some backup in case things went south. He told us that the recruits were only going to come in if things went really bad: he wasn’t going to risk any of their lives. He did tell us, “I don’t care what you have to do to get him out, just get him out.” He also insisted that if we learned anything else, we should call back and he would personally be the one manning the phone. After this conversation ended, I retrieved Paisley, Yova got her brass knuckles, and we all headed out.

While we were doing this, Day was finishing up a thoroughly miserable 48 hours as his body worked to purge itself of whatever drug had been pumped into him. His wrists were burning with a worse pain than anything he’d ever felt before and he couldn’t stay asleep. He was groggy and in pain, but at least he was awake. He realized he was in a small broom closet with a light flickering overhead. He tried kicking the door a few times and the same ashen-skinned man opened it, smoking a cigarette and looking like he’d rather be anywhere other than where he was.

“Oh, thank God, I’ve been calling the front desk for hours. This room simply won’t do,” he snarked. “Suck it up, my God, you’re so loud!” the pig-nosed guy griped. He told Day that he expected his friends to show up and do something stupid, but that he’d be able to go before too long. Day scoffed that we didn’t think he’s our friend (that one actually hurt when he told me it later). He asked for a cigarette and the other guy shrugged, put it in his mouth, and lit it. As soon as he did, Day took a puff and shot it out at the guy’s eye, nailing his eyelid. The guy freaked out, slammed the door, and stomped off.

Around this time, the rest of us pulled up in front of the auto parts store. It was a run-down area and we were feeling dangerously isolated. Bella was really quiet the whole time over and I wanted to check in with her and make sure she was doing all right. She shrugged in response and Yova told Bella that we weren’t going to let anybody take her. Bella was blaming herself, saying that she should have checked in with Day earlier than she did. It took most of us to get her to pull herself out of her funk, telling her that we all could have checked in with Day, but that he’d been super busy and none of us thought it was strange we didn’t hear from him for a couple of days. Bella squared her shoulders and grabbed a rock from the parking lot, getting ready to let it fly.

Yova decided to activate a contract that would prevent violence from taking place. And in entirely Yova style, she launched into Lady Hotspur’s speech from Henry IV. Day couldn’t hear any of that from inside, but he did hear his captor saying, “Hey, looks like you have friends after all, asshole!” Yova was about halfway through her monologue when the door cracked open and the ashen man leaned against the doorframe, saying, “So, uh, you certainly know how to make an entrance. Not sure I get the Shakespeare, but��” and he shrugged. Yova asked him to return Day and he said, “You want your friend back, you’re gonna have to come inside and talk terms.” They started bickering about where they were going to discuss the details and eventually came to a compromise of us standing outside and him standing inside. At this point, Day managed to kick the door open and we were able to see him from outside.

Yova introduced herself and asked the ashen man’s name, which turned out to be Hutch. She asked why his group was convinced Bella was a loyalist and Hutch said he couldn’t say, as it wasn’t his call, but that he knew some of his superiors had been cracking down as of late on fae elements in the area. They’d grabbed a few fetches and got some information, which is when the order to grab Bella went out. Yova tried to sweet-talk him and ask him about how they could come to an accord. He didn’t seem inclined to do any such thing, saying that if he let Day go and things went south, it would be his ass on the line. Bella got angry and asked him if he wanted to see the cut string on her neck. “I made sure I got myself cut before I even left out of that place, so whoever your little fetch is, they’re giving you wrong information and it’s putting innocent people at risk of getting hurt because of that,” she told him.

Hutch looked down at Bella’s neck and he saw the frayed thread. He got a – maybe guilty? – look on his face after that and said he understood what she was saying. He steadied himself and said, “I’m sorry if someone made the wrong call, but I still have to report back. So here’s what I think we can do, is if you guys can actually bring me the person responsible, if you guys can find who actually might be – I mean, if anybody in this freehold is loyal to those fuckwads back in Arcadia, if you can bring them to me, I’ll consider that as good a proof of innocence as anything. Even better if you can find out who’s trying to put the blame on you guys specifically.”

Bella preempted Pam in asking for his manager’s number. He told us there was a drop box where we could leave a message with any comments or complaints. I think he actually was serious.

Eventually, we managed to convince Hutch that turning Day over to us was in his best interest, since Day was the best investigator that we had. He went over and told Day that he was going to let him loose and that Day was going to have to walk over to us right away. As soon as the iron manacles were off, Day said he felt almost euphoric, like he wanted to cry from relief. As he left, he faked a punch at Hutch before he rejoined us outside. Hutch gave us one other clue before he slammed the door, saying that there was a beer garden in Schenectady where they learned some stuff. It was as good a place to start as any, so we decided that should be our next stop the following day.

Yova pulled out a cigarette and lit one for Day as well. He was looking grouchy and told us that we could let him have it for getting grabbed. Bella just glomped onto him and hugged him tightly, muttering something about being glad he was okay. He was completely taken aback by that and seemed to think we were just going to let him sit there. Bella said that she needed somebody to go to Hooters with and eat chicken wings (Yova and I both turned a little green at that, but for different reasons) and Yova said she needed Day to help her get stuff upstairs (so that’s her secret…). Day looked maybe a little uncomfortable at all the attention and said that he wasn’t used to having people care about him. “Well, you’re family now,” Pam said, and he looked sheepish.

Yova called Cahir and told him about the success of our mission. He was impressed and said, “You know, Miss Yova, I know you haven’t pledged loyalty to any particular Court yet, but given your extensive… talents, I think there would be quite a good place for you in Summer.” Yova surprised us all when she told him that she had been considering this very thing and unofficially pledged her loyalty to Summer over the phone. Cahir asked to talk to Day, asked if Day was okay, and told him it was good to have him back.

Now at this point, I actually wasn’t around. When Yova made her phone call, I slipped away and made my way down to the nearby 7-Eleven, in search of something in particular. When I got inside, I saw that the clerk who was working the graveyard shift was hiiiiiigh out of her mind. She looked at me and said, “Hey… you like donuts?” “I do like donuts!” I told her. “Great. We got some Krispy Kremes, here you go,” she said, handing me a couple boxes from behind the counter. I promised to tell her manager that she deserved a raise and she resumed watching a daddy long legs build a web on the wall. I got back to the group, donuts in tow, and made sure Day got the custard ones. I remembered him saying in Arcadia that they were his favorite.

And then Pam suggested we all get something to eat, so we made our way to Denny’s.

That’s a pretty good spot to stop it for here, so when next we get back, I’ll take you through our adventure at the beer garden and what we learned there. Until then, may all your high school drama students actually get in the ballpark of being on key.

[tyrranux64]

Terry’s Favorite Playstation Games

I hate Sony. I have not made this secret, from much of my art to a good helping of Youtube comments reacting to blind praise, most who know me more than the usual internet passerby are acquainted enough with my hatred of the company and brand. 

And it is not a biased band wagon kind of hate either, no this took time to fester into a most blackened bloom. Interactions with the biased rank and file, learning of the less than favorable business practices Sony has employed, the constant in your face propaganda from even third party publishers made against its two direct competitors, but most of all and most important my own experience with their premiere game system. No joke, the PS3 was effectively the worst console I have ever had the “pleasure” of owning, both with the initial 600 dollar 40 gig grill and the used slightly slimmer replacement I had to get just to keep my own sanity. I blacklisted the PS4 for a reason and even now I look at what the fourth generation of the console has to offer and feel assured my choice was correct.

Again my hatred of Sony is not pure bias fanboy raging, it is the culmination of less than favorable experiences and acquired knowledge that has forever soured my perceptions of the brand. And to further stress this point? I’ll go ahead and give you the Playstation Exclusives I absolutely loved in no particular order. Heavy emphasis on “exclusive”, all the titles listed will be ones you absolutely need a Sony console to play, no multi-platform titles, no games that were once exclusive then ported to other systems. Sony only.

And don’t expect Shadow of the Colossus on this list, of all the excellent titles one can point to that is the lowest of hanging fruit. Everyone loves that one, everyone, even its critics and detractors. My reasons for liking it are the same as everyone else’s...

____________________________________

INFAMOUS & INFAMOUS 2; Honestly I couldn’t decide which I liked more since both offer the same consistently excellent design and experience, I guess the second one for being more polished and having more interesting settings but trading one over the other is heresy. And honestly if I didn’t hate Sony so much I’d be all over the third one (though after seeing the story on Youtube I gotta say, Fetch is a complete unlikable asshole).

Ultimately this is a 3D platformer, one that more than belongs in the same breath as the likes of Super Mario Anything and Banjo Kazooie. Despite its otherwise “serious, realistic and edgy” tone and design this is the kind of delightful platforming romp that’ll satisfy even old school players pinning for the bygone era of platformers being the dominant genre in gaming. And it just makes the circumstances of its creation more fascinating. How Sucker Punch followed suit with Naughty Dog going from cartoony mascot games to so-called serious realistic games, yet unlike Naughty Dog puts out a product that still feels like a spiritual successor to their previous work.

Naturally the biggest negative is the morality system. Bad enough it is so arbitrary and safety helmet in its design that it tells you which choices are good and evil but said choices are so cartoonishly extreme on both spectrum that any sense of ambiguity and nuance are lost. But on the flip side, it does present one of the most fun bits of obsessive compulsive gameplay features I’ve ever experienced....

The Pulse Heal. Damn was this so much fun. The sheer rush of not only going to help someone but actually having the capacity to do so, the kind of humanity enriching wish fulfillment I didn’t get enough of. And I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I described it as a “obsessive compulsive” gameplay feature, I lost count of the number of times I slammed the breaks on what I was doing every time I saw some helpless citizen in desperate need of a jolt. It was nuts man, a game that lets you play as a superhero and actually let you feel like one....one helpless citizen at a time.... ______________________________________

GOD OF WAR III; But then there’s this fucking game that makes me feel like a complete villain, go figure. Then again that has been the real beauty of this franchise especially after the first game, there are no real heroes, no real champions of justice. There are only villains. What separates Kratos from all the other villains is that he was ultimately the culmination of their selfish and petty machinations to satisfy their own ends, he is the necessary evil meant to liberate the world from the cruelty of Olympus.....unfortunately, it entailed nearly destroying the world and sending it into a state of anarchy thereby making things worse. Oops.

Well either way the games are still just good ol’ hack n’ slash shenanigans. Technically I should give the nod to GoW 2 for having the more satisfying journey involving the Sisters of Fate....but it ends with a complete blue balling of an ending. Pretty arrogant to have such an ending when you’re not even sure you’re getting a sequel....well it did but still....

Plus the third one lets you actually fight more than one Olympian, hell it actually lets you fight Hercules, the proverbial OG Superman himself. AND HE’S VOICED BY KEVIN SORBO. But what really cements it is the overall combat which feels more satisfying. Not only are some of the core moves fantastic (especially the grab moves) but all the available weapons are chained weapons. It’s the kind of sameness and consistency that actually works to the game’s benefit, complimenting the gameplay and Kratos’ overall design as a range based fighter. Also nice how all the button prompts are regulated to the side of the screen to correspond to the button placement, a nice touch to mitigate any disorientation of the chaos on screen. __________________________________

CRASH BANDICOOT: WARPED; Yes yes I know the N’Sane Trilogy is now gonna be multi-platform (thank Primus) but as many who have played it will verify it’s such an extensive HD remake that it doesn’t quality as being the same game. And sadly I don’t see the original ported to any other system.

Not much that needs to be said here, when it comes to the original trilogy everyone has their first favorite. I might have played the first one once or twice but never haven owned the first PS (fun fact I actually wanted it over the N64 but my mom was convinced to get the later) it would be this one that I ended up playing the most and ultimately beat first during one particular visit to my out of state cousins. _______________________________________

RATCHET & CLANK FUTURE: A CRACK IN TIME; I never got into R&C during my initial PS2 era days, it wasn’t until a decade or so later that I played all three of the original trilogy and the future trilogy. And I played them all in chronological order, so to go from the utter lackluster flop of a plot that was Tools of Destruction to this one was an easy step up.

I’m not gonna argue this game’s quality against the original trilogy, after much retrospect and hearing other opinions there is just no contest as far as story, setting and personality. The original trilogy wins. But as far as the future trilogy? Yeah, this is easily the best one, the other two are just boring.

Crack in Time just had the best story overall and an overall journey that didn’t feel like my time was being wasted. Plus this was one of those games that gave me incentive to actually seek out the optional side objectives. Gameplay balance is an issue as things can skew a bit too easy but I was having too much fun overall to mind. Plus any game that gives me something like the Constructo Pistol and Shotgun easily gets the nod. ___________________________________

LITTLEBIGPLANET 2; There is some part of me that still loves this game....but these days it is more of a tragic love story of love lost. Ultimately my creativity and ambition overgrew my actual ability and the limitations forced on me with both the allotted level space and materials (I mean good lord have you tried to make levels with a lot of gold and complex shapes? The game just flat out tells you to fuck off). Perhaps what really soured the experience was trying to do exactly what the devs did with the story mode they made, but I realize now it was as impressive as it was because they had no arbitrary thermometer limiting what they could put in.....bastards....

These days I more respect this game for what it was made to do and what others were able to do with it. But as far as what I was able to do? Yeah, it’s too heartbreaking to think about..... __________________________________

JAK II; Remember not even a few paragraphs ago I said I never played Ratchet & Clank until recently? This is why. Because in an industry where brand new games cost up to a few tens short of a full Benjamin, well, choices have to be made.

And yeah I was easily drawn to the first game with it being a more direct 3D platformer, easily the kind of game I’d get into after my time with the N64. And then the second game came along and added guns and an edgy dark hero super mode.....without compromising the gameplay the series was established on. And for as edgy as it was now being with the story it never felt ridiculous or out of place, one of the few times I’ve even see it work out really.

Also it was a laugh riot to play what was extensively Crash Bandicoot meets Grand Theft Auto. __________________________________

KINGDOM HEARTS; I have already chronicled my thoughts on this franchise several times before so I won’t bore you with too many details. Bottom line I feel the first one is the only good one simply because it had a nice fun story that felt like both a parody and love letter to Japanese RPGs without a hint of Kojima grade arrogance or self indulgence, unlike later entries >:/

And not once did this ever feel like a mere commercial for the Disney films represented, each world was an adventure all its own and the interactions with your favorite Disney characters actually felt like characters interacting, instead of just actors in a studio voicing their lines. So ultimately I’m able to tolerate the rather archaic gameplay because the story is still a treat to enjoy.

But more relevant to this list, this was the game that got me to get a PS2 in the first place. I was rather content going only with Nintendo but then I played this game while at another cousin’s house and was immediately entranced. And really it was at this point I was kinda tired of missing out on third party games that were PS exclusive for reasons that sounded as arbitrary excuses back then as they do now. 

I still can’t fathom how many games of the PS2′s third party library wouldn’t have worked just as fine on the Gamecube, thereby increasing the available consumer base and resulting in more sales. And if KH3 really is slated for release on Xbox One, why the hell are none of the HD compilations of past games also released on the console as a courtesy to those who might be interested in the series but don’t have reason to get a PS4? Sadly it’s a question I shouldn’t be asking because I know exactly what kind of answer I’ll be getting, excuses. ________________________________

So yeah, even though I have indeed enjoyed some of the titles available, not even these select games are not enough to sway my disdain for Sony. In fact the games listed that were developed and publish by Sony themselves only serve as a reminder of what the company is now all too willing to throw away in light of the current direction it is going for with its exclusives library.

And really it kind of makes sense that Sony just doesn’t give much of a shit these days, they were never a video game company to begin with, they are an electronics conglomerate. Movies, music, computers, headphones, that sort of jazz. Video games is just another department to satisfy their fiscal year quota, nothing more. People keep praising them for revolutionizing gaming but forget that they never needed to get into video games to begin with.....

Their only incentive to doing so was as a petty, vindictive, butt hurt reaction to Nintendo’s refusal to bend over the same way Michael Jackson did. Sony hates taking no for an answer so they acted like a jealous ex lover and produced a product based on a foundation of hate...and hatred only begets more hatred.... _________________________________

Also figured I give a few honorable mentions that can’t be on this list proper for one or two obvious reasons, but all of them I have experienced on Sony consoles...

CASTLEVANIA SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT; Truth be told I’m more partial to Harmony of Dissonance but I know someone will get on my ass for not bringing this up. But yeah this was also on the Saturn....in Japan. Who’s dumb idea was it to keep the majority of the Saturn’s library Japanese exclusive?

MEGA MAN X6 (But Only On Easy Mode); On anything higher this game is just as broken and near unplayable as people say it is, shit even on easy it’s still a mess. Anyway this was the only PS MMX game I actually played on the PSOne back when it was new, this time on a friend’s console. And I’m not gonna lie I still have kind of a soft spot for it even with the glaring flaws....

KINGDOM HEARTS II; Yes yes this is a far superior game to the first one, gameplay wise. But in a game genre that lives or dies on the story being told there is no question that this was a serious downgrade. Everything that endeared me to the first game’s story this sequel proceeds to fuck up royally, and thus seeing the skip cutscene option as an absolute godsend makes me die a little inside, first rule of good storytelling in games is to make sure no one will ever want to skip the cutscenes even if they have the option to.

DEVIL MAY CRY 3; It was of course the first DMC I ever played and beat, and when said first happens to be the best in gameplay, structure and story it’s pretty hard not to be biased. 

TRANSFORMERS WAR/FALL OF CYBERTRON; I think you guys know by now that I am a big fan of Transformers, so my reasons for liking these games are a no brainer.

BAYONETTA; Yeah it’s weird thinking this game ever saw the light of day on the PS3 and 360, mostly because Platinum had the decent courtesy to port the first game to the Wii U in direct response to concerns about the sequel now being Nintendo exclusive. And what did they do when it was announced a third game was on the way? They ported the previous two titles to the Switch so that no one would be left out of the loop, not even those that passed on the Wii U. That’s what I call customer service, wouldn’t you agree SQUARE ENIX?

DEAD SPACE; Pretty much the last good EA game. The final gasp of air made by EA’s capacity for common human decency before tossing it away and effectively going all in on putting out a constant flow of bullshit on a yearly basis.

ASURA’S WRATH; Pretty much the only interactive movie game in all creation that still feels like a video game, with actual video game segments. Still bullshit that you had to pay additional money just to see the ending but hey at least said ending was actually worth the money, heaven help Capcom if it ended up being a shit ending...     

BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM; Yeah yeah I should be giving the nod to Arkham City but that whole business involving Talia Al Ghul all but killed the second game’s story for me....seriously Bruce what the fuck do you even see in that cunt to make you so sycophantic for her? 

DRAGONBALL XENOVERSE; Well it was fun while it lasted and even now I feel it’s a better “Kingdom Hearts” than any of the latter actual KH titles. But aside from also being on the 360 and such, well, it’s not exactly something I’m willing to play again.

GOD OF WAR: GHOST OF SPARTA; One of two reasons I even bothered picking up the PSP, and while I have since fallen out of love with Birth by Sleep, this is one I’m still able to go back to. Not only is it a decent adventure in its own right but somehow it makes God of War II better from a story perspective as now it gave Kratos even more reason for going against Olympus...

[myvoicenottheoneyougiveme]

In reality, in which "this” is most definitely detached but isn’t so purely scientific to have left the elements of the sponsor(s) off the table, that “personal” element suggests what is even being measured.

There are things that happen that I am meant to believe are legitimate interest or investment from others. They come decoupled from any kind of genuine indication that this is so, but you add in reactions to my “rejections” and the way the non-speak “messaging” goes on around here I’m supposed to believe that it’s the case. It’s all framed to me to be the case. I’m even guilted to believe that it is the case. The problem is, that aside from the roundabout quite empty and lifeless “hinting” that goes on, there is absolutely zero indication without all of that that there is any real genuine interest in such a thing. No sparks. No emotion. I mean I’ve seen emotion to the “disappointment” or whatever on rare occasion, but I’ve never once read “interest” in any kind of anything.

Why point all of this out? Because I believe that you my sponsors want more than anything to believe sorry, to prove that I never once read anything in regards to Michelle accurately--never, never once in all the years before “this” and especially after it started. So you puppet and prop up god knows who, anyone and everyone that’s willing to go along and give absolutely every indication “directly out of sight” and under the radar and completely contrary to reality, in an effort to prove that I when given any indication at all will absolutely run with that “invitation”.

I mean it’s all but proven right? You just have to prove it. ...All but. As in you can say whatever you want, but you can’t actually rewrite history.

You want me to latch onto something and decouple it from reality myself and create a fantasy and get all up in my head just so you can show that it’s all me and always was just me.

It’s the supposed “love notes” from total fucking strangers that would get left in the cafeteria. Or it’s the coworker reaching in or rather being the face of the reaching in and touching topics she ought not to touch. Let’s write things on cups. Let���s position the fake cockroaches in every sexual position imaginable. It’s the pointed remarks in conversation to this effect, but oddly all of the sexual stuff both breaking that ice and attempting to disgust at the same time. It’s the people around said person at one time attempting to hint hint wink wink like we’re all playing matchmaker. It’s the pointed “deep disclosure” of this week without the depth or emotion behind it. It’s the librarian taking pages out of your book, out of what happens here in the home too, and being a running commentary on “current events” framing them in such a way. It’s the other in-person attempts at dissonance and the “at my expense”ness that follow anything. It’s the other guy who never wears a cap EVER but suddenly this week because of “baseball” and “brother” and the emotional content of the media I did dare to watch this weekend and make use of my personal space rather than be paralyzed in anticipation of god only knows what will reverberate back at me. It’s the one lady who after I found something profound or in the very least interesting to point out to “you” while cleaning her office--you know the stuff people put on their walls and shelves to show others that says something about them--who has now gone so far out of her way to do exactly the same thing with the knickknacks like I’m supposed to read intent rather than simple harassment and more to the organized stalking. The list is endless. The bullshit “meetings” at the start. The one coworker who would lead the charge for the other. The “friend” officer who would do the same thing. The other officer who lied about having had contact with said “homeless” student after I saw him through the window talking with her, who when I pointed that out to “this” he magically disappeared and was replaced by the even more overt and raring-to-go bully-beat-down type who you had to reassign again to save face...There is a shit storm that’s been raging week after week for months, and your angle of attack may change slightly but your every aim is to paint and to prove and to smear me in any way possible and to, most of all, validate your own victimhood.

...at my expense. Live out a fantasy about yourself at my expense. You have to be one thing in the mirror, that means I have to be the other. I have to be whatever completes that for you. A crusade, not enough that you simply know or feel something in yourself or anyone in your life, no you need to control me and impose it on me and rewrite my lived experience. I am in possession of the one reflection you need more than any other it seems. You can’t have it. What you did to me was more than torturous. You should have let go when I was pulled out and given the resources necessary to no longer be at your mercy. But that reflection on you just couldn’t stand. You wouldn’t stand for it. You would not rest until you became 100% good and he 100% in the wrong (or evil more like).

And I forgot one more, it’s every new semester like every new jury after you throw out the previous verdict. Trading bad science for worse science. The veneer of truth seeking has dissolved and given way to what it is now. The fact is, when your “scientific method” was at its purest and I had little to no idea at all what was going on and I was hook line and sinker in your ploys, you still didn’t get the results you were looking for. No you got more of the codependent behaviors, long before you showed me yourself, Dorothy, what narcissism even meant before I even knew these concepts were a thing. You got every false result and failures to produce what you were just so damned sure of between the two of you, and your own jury, your own writers, your YOUR, YOUR handpicked personally, JURY, YOUR OWN JURY said “we’ve got the wrong guy”. You’ve been trading them out left and right ever since.

The thing about science, even false results are supposed to tell the scientist something. Repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, is supposed to tell you something. There has to be the possibility for a false result or it’s not science anymore. But you bend and twist and frame and change the game eliminating that possibility anyway, but then you still don’t get it, or you get something that you with the greatest feats of mental gymnastics attempt to shoehorn into a narrative.

You need “this” like oxygen to breath. You need the mirroring. You need it revolving around you. You need the validation. You need to control the narrative. You need to be one thing, and that means you’re going to make me the other thing even if it kills me... and rightfully so, since in your reality, he is, he is, he is, HE IS, HE IS, HE IS AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, and NO ONE IS GOING TO TELL ME OTHERWISE. HE IS THE EVIL. I AM THE GOOD. HE IS THE EVIL, IM A VICTIM. IM A VICTIM. temper temper temper temper ragefest.

Most everything in this shit storm that happens around me is a (desperate) attempt to show me to be the kind of person that will read something that isn’t there, get it up in his head, and make life hell for someone who never had anything to do with his psychotic reality in the first place. All the signs will then be pointed to one thing being true, except for all of the signs that actually matter. And I’m supposed to run with the mere possibility because it’s so compelling. That gets you the result you want.

This week I suspend better judgement and say, OK, fine let’s just assume for a moment, and within that framework here is where I, myself, stand. ...”Not interested.” ...And then I get more again from her to the effect of “devastation” at my “rejection” of her. ...And then I say, ok, whatever, it doesn’t make any sense, but even if there were chemistry, here’s some qualitative reasons why I would not be interested in a relationship with this person. ...And then next it’s all actions and words on her part to the effect of being creeped out like I’m actually the one coming on and this person wants desperately to be left alone.

Well, I wouldn’t have called even her bit “coming on” but you’ve wanted me to believe that is the case. And I’ve known that you’ve wanted me to believe that. And so, now we’re right back to, “who is ‘this’ for?” Who is it helping? Whose life is it making easier or less complicated? I don’t want drama with people, and I certainly don’t want to be supposedly picking someone up for the let down (which is really actually all your doing in “this” if ever true in the first place).

I know I haven’t given those signals, and I know this person hasn’t truly given these signals. And I know theoretically and from personal experience that such chemistry is a mutual phenomenon regardless of the potential indecisiveness of one party. It’s even possible to crush one-sidedly; conscious preferences are like prerequisite gate-keepers that can inhibit one but not the other on account of them not being shared preferences (and commonalities). But chemistry, when it happens, is a product of two.

...You’re creating these scenarios without said chemistry, but supposedly “saying” all the right things (directly out of sight mind you) (cause I’m supposed to run with the mere possibility and not the overt expression), is a vain attempt to prove that what happened on Tumblr or what happened on Facebook was an entirely one-sided affair and that I’m a danger to myself and others because I just happen to people. If you can prove that, then you can prove that your overreaches and criminal activity and the abuses committed at your hands and the immeasurable harm and destruction in your wake is somehow justified... because he deserves it. The padded room in the mock asylum--a justified ordeal--a justified and right destiny for one so troubled. The end justifying the means.

And your game gets to keep going. You need “this”. You need any result that affords you the supposed right to do as you please. Everything you ever do, is an attempt to secure that and to gaslight me into believing any of it. Erase my own grip on reality and on my own lived experience, so you can rewrite history and I’ll corroborate it for you.

[flightyrock]

Ectober Day 3: Spirits

Summary: Vlad snatches Danny from his bed at an unreasonable time with an unconventional invitation.  It’s not at all what you’d expect.

Warnings: I can’t really think of anything?  This one is more melancholy than anything

Relationships: Platonic Danny and Vlad

Word Count: ~2500

Notes are at the end. Enjoy!

Danny was roused from slumber by a cool hand enclosing around his ankle, and pulling him unceremoniously through the floor into the basement of Tucker’s house before he could so much as yelp.

He reflexively glanced down, registering a black glove releasing its grip, before triggering his transformation, trading pajamas for his signature hazmat, and charging an ectoblast.

“Daniel, wait!” Vlad exclaimed, quietly, sparing a quick glance at the ceiling before releasing his ghost form.

“I simply wish to speak with you.”

Danny was understandably suspicious, not to mention incredibly confused.  But since Vlad was here, in human form, he supposed it couldn’t hurt to hear him out.  Appearing so late at night while Danny was at a friend’s house was incredibly unusual behavior for him.  And, now that Danny took the time to look a bit closer, he could feel that something was a bit different about Vlad tonight.

He was fidgeting; just his fingers, drumming impatiently against his leg, waiting for Danny to join him on the ground.  Vlad was always so carefully controlled, every action planned and deliberate, impossible to read, poker face firmly in place without fail. But now, he was getting a strange, nervous energy from Vlad, a level of vulnerability he had never witnessed before.  It was…weird.

Before he knew it, Danny found himself releasing the transformation and standing next to a musty pile of opaque plastic bins in place of the traditional cardboard boxes. Tucker’s parents obviously paid attention to the ghost prevention bulletins that had been issued to minimize ghost activity in the area, bringing Danny an odd rush of satisfaction.  It was nice to have his suggestions taken seriously.  It made him feel like a productive member of society and less like—

“—a child?  Daniel, are you listening to me?”

Jeez, he supposed he was still waking up.  Not that Vlad should blame him for that; it was very late and he had been awoken pretty rudely.  He did idly register Vlad speaking a bit too fast, but truthfully had no idea what he had been saying.

“Huh?” Danny replied intelligently, only to be met with an eye roll.

“Honestly Daniel, did you get any of that?”

Danny’s expression must have been answer enough, because Vlad just sighed and massaged his temples briefly with index and middle fingers.

“Fine, let’s try this again. Daniel, as I’m sure you are aware, we are the only two half-ghosts in existence–”

Danny groaned.  Not this again.  At least once a month, Vlad would give him his usual spiel about renouncing his father, and becoming his evil apprentice, or something.

“Would you please just hear me out?” Vlad snapped.  

Danny snorted in disbelief, but made a show of sitting down on one of the bins, before sarcastically gesturing for Vlad to continue with a careless wave of a hand.

Vlad visibility gathered himself, before bracing himself and starting his spiel over again.

“As I was saying, we are the only two half ghosts in existence.  That means that it is my duty as the eldest to educate you in the ways of our culture—“

“Whoa, whoa!”

Vlad’s glare was cutting, but strangely enough, wasn’t threatening.  Super weird.

“You can’t be serious! Our culture?  You said it yourself, there are literally two of us!  Any ‘culture’ we have you totally made up!” Danny snarked, emphasizing his point with air quotes.

Vlad crossed his arms, with a huff.

“I realize that the educational system in this country has done you no favors, Daniel, but I didn’t take you for a fool.  Like our unique physiology, our culture consists of both human and ghostly elements.  Since you have been a human for most of your life, you’ll forgive me if I skip over that part.

“I was referring to ghost culture, as we are ectoplasmic in addition to flesh and blood.  In this, I have had over twenty years to struggle through the research process, alone, and though I am aware that we do not exactly see eye to eye, this does not change who we are, nor minimize my duty to you.”

Danny was just as confused as when they started this bizarre meeting.  Vlad was saying quite a bit, but communicating almost nothing.  Add his erratic mannerisms into the mix, and it was vaguely alarming at least, utterly bizarre, and almost inexplicably out of character.  Unless…

Vlad was nervous.  

Danny was surprised he didn’t pick up on this sooner.  He was usually great at reading people.

On second thought, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising.  Danny didn’t exactly think of Vlad as another person, he realized, with an idle stab of guilt.  To him, Vlad was less than a person, just an evil obstacle that Danny was forced to overcome.

Right now, Danny didn’t see an obstacle.  He saw another person, a person that was still making no sense whatsoever.

“Oh-kay…” Danny drawled. “But why now?  Why risk talking to me at” he glanced at his wrist out of habit, only to flush in vague humiliation, idly recalling that he had removed his watch before going to bed, “whatever time of night it is, in hostile territory?”

“Well,” Vlad began rubbing his upper arm, “tonight the ghost zone is hosting a display that only occurs on this scale once every seven to ten years or so, and I didn’t want you to miss it. I have only caught it once before.”

Danny blinked in surprise. This was…not even close to what he expected.  Not that he had any idea what he had been expecting when Vlad yanked him through the floor.

“Why? No,” he said, cutting Vlad off as he opened his mouth, presumably to launch into that awkward torrent of word vomit again. “I did figure out that whatever this is is pretty special.  Why would you care if I miss it?”

A strange look flitted across Vlad’s face, before being smoothed over by his usual façade.

“I am not so petty that I would allow our rivalry to prevent you from bearing witness.  But, as you are clearly not interested, I’ve said my piece and fulfilled my duty, so you are free to go back to your little sleepover,” he sniffed, before turning sharply on his heel and transforming.

“Wait!” cried Danny.  “I never said I wasn’t interested.  I’m just…” he paused, trying to gather all his vague disjointed impressions of the evening into a coherent explanation, “it’s just, well, I’ve been dying to learn more about ghost culture for so long, but with the way things are between you and me, I never dreamed that you’d want to share this with me.  Not that you’ve told me what this is,” he said, staring pointedly into glowing red eyes.

Vlad blinked, taken aback.

“So, are you saying you’ll come with me?”

“Wait, what?”  Daniel asked, confused again.  “You are not making any sense tonight.  Maybe you should give it to me straight.  Are you asking me come with you?  Because I can’t even tell.”

Vlad chuckled, relaxing slightly.

“Yes, well, I didn’t really…plan this out.  I was just up, and my calculations indicated that it would peak in about,” Vlad glanced at his phone, “thirty minutes.”

Danny was beginning to lose patience.

“What is ‘it’?!”

Vlad smiled, not smirked, but smiled.  Gah, did he cross over to some weird parallel universe?

“It’s…hard to explain, in words.  It would be much better to show you.  You’ll understand then.  But we should leave now; we need to get to a very specific corner of the ghost zone.”

Danny was admittedly torn. Normally, he’d question his sanity for even considering following Vlad, his arch-enemy, anywhere with virtually no information.  Vlad had outsmarted him, tricked him, more times than he could count, displaying smug delight every step along the way.

But perhaps that was what was so different tonight, and what was putting him strangely at ease.  Absent were said smug undertones, only to be replaced by what only could be described as authenticity.  There was an inexplicable air of sincerity about everything Vlad had said and did tonight.  Nothing sounded rehearsed, heck, Vlad had even sounded sloppy, stumbling through disjointed thoughts like a nervous teenager.

So Danny found himself transforming, and following Vlad out into the night.

Vlad was pleasantly surprised by Daniel’s easy agreement to accompany him tonight.  He wasn’t entirely certain what he was expecting, or what had compelled him to ask Daniel at the last minute like this.

No, he supposed he wasn’t being completely honest with himself.  He knew why he had asked Daniel to come with him.

But he didn’t wish to dwell on that at the moment, so he didn’t, leading Daniel through the Fenton Portal and through the surreal green environment of the ghost zone.

Vlad sighed, taking a moment to enjoy the temporary physical relief granted by the rejuvenating ecto energy that permeated this reality.  It was a strain on his ghost form to exist solely on the human plane for too long.  He could see the boy relax as well, out of the corner of his eye, no doubt enjoying the sensation as much as he.

He led them through a series of doors, one ornate and wooden, one made of a shiny volcanic glass, and one no bigger than a window, into a unique area of the ghost zone split by a dark chasm below and above, infinite in depth and too vast to see across. Vlad wasn’t eager to test his theory about the extent of this anomaly.

The boy stiffened, clearly reevaluating his decision to follow someone less than friendly into a dark, isolated corner of the ghost zone without leaving so much as a note behind.

He really is naïve.  Not that he’s wrong; I could easily take advantage of this, if I was so inclined.

“Relax, Daniel,” Vlad rolled his eyes.  “If I truly wished to dispose of you, there would be no warning.  I would not bother to ask you to accompany me.”

“Oh, is that what you were trying to do?”  Daniel had the gall to laugh, but oddly, the sound put him at ease, rather than on edge as it normally would.  Not mocking, but dare he say, friendly?

“Vlad, most people don’t sneak into rooms and talk circles around someone.  They just ask.”

“How?” Vlad said plainly, curious despite himself, though he hadn’t exactly meant to vocalize that particular thought.

Danny did a double take.

“You mean…you’ve never…”

Vlad chuckled bitterly.

“Do I strike you as someone to indulge in idle companionship?  Most of the time I have a secretary write up paper invitations if the situation truly demands it.”

“Vlad,” Danny looked him in the eye, “seriously, just say, ‘hey, I’m going to do this thing, would you like to come along?’ It’s not hard, though,” he conceded, “I guess it does take some getting used to.  At least that way, as the other party, I’d have some idea of what I’m being invited to…do? Watch?  Could you, maybe, explain now, because I’m still pretty confused.”

Vlad felt his face flush a bit, flustered despite himself.

“Yes, well,” he coughed, awkwardly.  “It’s…quite the experience.  I’m honestly not sure how to explain it.  You’ll know it when it starts, though.”

And know “it” he did. Danny could only watch in awe at the spectacle that unfolded before his wide eyes.

Vlad was right.  The event, for lack of a better word, overwhelmed all senses, known and unknown.  

Visually, the closest frame of reference he had was a scene from that popular movie with the girl and the hair, when they were on the boat on a lake, surrounded by thousands of paper lanterns.

These were not paper lanterns.  But, rising from the lower darkness by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he could claim the effect was similar, much in the way a trickle from the faucet in is bathroom was similar to Niagara Falls.

There was no way to describe the scale of the majesty.  He was powerless before its might, the only possible course of action to bear witness. Somehow, he knew he was in for the duration, but this neither good nor bad.  It simply was.

His heartstrings twinged painfully at the sheer beauty of the lights, shimmering up from the depths with an ethereal quality that he simply couldn’t convey with an adequate degree of coherence.  The toxic ectoplasmic green of the ghost zone fell away, powerless before the gold, silver, and white lights that shone forth radiantly.  They were roughly spherical in shape.  He thought?  Honestly, they morphed and shifted so rapidly, it was much too difficult to follow.

The light.  He felt that light, it pierced him to his very core, and it was everything.  He was almost unbearably happy, devastated, freezing to death, boiling in acid, awash in a dream, painfully lucid, completely numb, and awash in a near infinity of other sensations, blurring together and filling him to a point that pushed him to the brink of sanity.

And the sound.  He would never be able to do it justice, but it cut deep.  He wouldn’t revert to stereotypes and crass comparisons, but it rose and fell endlessly. He was soaring, immersed in the light. He was the light, and it was him, inside and everywhere and nowhere, heartbreakingly beautiful, singing of the essence of existence and void, unceasing in its melodious call.

Tears swelled and overflowed, running unbidden and unacknowledged down his cheeks and from his nose, gathering and dripping off his chin, authentic and unapologetic.

There was no telling how long this short eternity continued, and Danny lost all track of self during that time.  It ended slowly, a few straggles climbing upward, only to disappear into the mysterious darkness above, leaving a tenuous peace to settle over the observing parties.

Only to be broken by a sharp, wet inhalation.

Danny jolted as the heavy silence was broken by Vlad sniffing and wiping at his face with a silk handkerchief.  He had completely forgotten that Vlad was here, was the one who had brought him here in the first place.  To “bear witness,” he vaguely recalled.  Indeed.

Vlad seemed to jolt in a similar realization as he glanced over at Danny, sniffing messily, and wordlessly procured a fresh cloth and handed it to him.

Danny accepted gratefully, taking the time to clean himself up a bit, strangely unaffected by his unconventional companion grossly sobbing alongside him.

They floated in companionable silence for awhile, the spectacle having temporarily erased all barriers between them.  No words were necessary, and it felt wrong to pierce this comfortable atmosphere, but Danny had to know.

“What,” he choked off, voice cracking from disuse, “what was that?”

Vlad seemed to get the idea, though.  He stared straight ahead into the void.

“Spirits,” he stated, content, for once, to leave it at that.

And Danny understood.

A/N:  Sorry, I know it just kind of cuts off there with no real explanation, but at that time, it was more important to maintain the mood.  Danny understood inately what these beings were, but he wanted confirmation from Vlad.  These were spirits of various beings throughout time and space.  I drew inspiration from La Dia de Los Muertos and lantern festivals.

At first, these Ectober one-shots weren’t meant to be connected, but I think they all will read equally well separately or as part of a larger narrative.  I’m mainly using these to practice writing on a daily basis and to push past perfectionism, so I don’t spend as much time editing as I should.  But I love feedback, so feel free if the mood strikes.  Thanks for reading!

[she-shall-conquer]

The Controversialism of Inequality

I dream of a day when the church will no longer piggy back on the latest trends. I dream of a time when the church prides itself at being better at Human Resource Management and Leadership than at Marketing. What’s new right? John Donne has been saying this for (literally) centuries! The Bible has been pretty constant about it’s messages regarding the treatment of people, and yet only now is the church getting “woke”? Excuse me if I doubt your intentions… (however necessary and faux-noble). But also, how can you raise the race issue without bringing up the topic of gender? To be clear: Racial Inequality is a REAL issue and should be discussed and I’m glad that the topic is coming up, but why did it take BLM to make it happen? I’m pretty sure (absolutely certain) that the biggest contention of prejudice addressed in the New Testament was, you guessed it, racism… Now if we do the math: The Bible is one of the best selling books of all time, one of the most translated books of all time, and the fact that a vast majority of the colonized world was colonized by “Christian” nations. Therefore, this colonization should prides itself in establishing the least racist places, with the most selfless and loving cultures and have a great deal of generosity with perhaps a slightly lower poverty gap.

Oh, wait…

That’s right, folks, we stuffed up real good on this one… And how I wish we could all return to the genuine authenticity that I read about constantly. It pains me so greatly. Its like reading Narnia and knowing that Narnia exists, so you go to Narnia and it’s Game of Thrones. Man, oh man, the disappointment. This being said, there are a lot of missionaries and missionary schools that have done a world of good, people with pure hearts and altruistic intentions — these have been besmirched and thrown out with the dirty, grimy bathwater of exploitation, greed, and contempt. Furthermore, there are countless arguments, sides to the story, and this is a very real discussion with personal implications that needs to be had amongst brothers and sisters (in Christ) in practice and in community. Just a note — if you want to effectively teach people anything, psychologically, just talking at people is possibly the worst way to do it (just saying); it’s an organizational problem that requires change and development of an entire culture. This is a debate for another day and a more researched perspective/argument.

I believe it’s important to note that Christianity was never meant to be a social revolution, there are no colour codes or banners or marches or slogans. I don’t believe that Christianity supports slavery, I mean William Wilberforce was motivated to end the slave-trade because of his faith, but it speaks about slavery and how to treat your slaves/masters. This might be confusing at first approach. From my understanding what I see is that respect, love, and one’s heart were far more important than moral absolutes, which completely does in my need for justice.

Y'all got any more of that… Captain America?

But the New Testament is also excruciatingly clear about how people in the church should treat each other. If the Body of Christ (the Church) is family, it should be the safest place, it should b the place where you can be most yourself, and where people can be most honest with you about which parts of yourself are good and bad. It’s all part of the constructive learning process. In the New Testament, the bad parts of people were confronted when they were, in no uncertain terms, told to stop being so prejudiced. They were told to stop treating rich people better than poor people, told to stop treating Jews better than non-Jews, even Jesus treated the sinner and saint with the same love and dignity — a little less dignity, but still love, towards the proud and the hypocritical. From these values arose the declaration that in Christ there is no longer man nor woman, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile. These are arguably the three ‘-isms’ that have wrought the greatest havoc on our current world and society and have been proponents of the greatest evils: racism, sexism, and classism (I see you there, Mr. Marx). Abolished and condemned along with the sins of the world are our prejudices and our shortcomings. But as a Western Charismatic church, I do not believe we have established a church culture that is free of these things, but maybe in our attempt to address the racism in our church culture, these other two will also surface.

Please understand that this piece of writing is not so much about what the practical outworking of it is as much as it is the value structure that influences how we treat people, built into our cognition. If we can work towards addressing that, I believe the practical outworking will follow, or be addressed at a later stage, perhaps by someone else. Inequality, and subsequent abuse, on a broad scale is often the result of an inherent cultural cognition that places features on a value hierarchy: rich are more valuable than poor, white are more valuable than non, men are more valuable than women (as per history’s norm). This is what I would like to address.

Gender inequality is not the “burn your bra” brigade or anything that God-fearing Christians should be afraid of, it’s a commitment to seeing the restoration and empowerment of women — she that gave birth to you. And apparently, I’m not the only one that uses this point — in fact, it wasn’t my point to begin with, it’s the Apostle Paul’s. After the section in 1 Corinthians where he’s done talking about not letting women speak and disrupting everything by asking questions about things they don't know (you know that part where he says they should rather ask the questions at home instead of disrupting the prayer meeting, which really has a lot to do with a lack of education) he speaks about God’s view of women, where there is no hierarchical difference. Woman was made of man, but man is born of a woman. This is gender inequality, where we refuse to see the perspective and heart of God, where God uses people equally, and views people equally — what we ask is that the hierarchy of value be eliminated from, at least, our church culture so that we can start to put an end to the ghastly horrors of violence against women.

Is violence against men a reality? Yes, undoubtedly, yes! But statistics show that a vast majority of victims are female, and of those females, it is more than likely perpetrated by a male. So instead of doing the dumb pretense of guilt thing that we do so often when we finally realize we have been wrong, let us be motivated by guilt (which focuses on others and their suffering) and not shame (which focuses on ourselves). These errors in judgement and culture are pointed out to help us all grow.

The South African news has been rife with stories of rape, murder, abduction, and abuse of women, and these are only a few of the stories. Women in Sub-Saharan African have a 1 in 3 (36.6%) chance of experiencing gender-based violence in their life time, a region with the third highest prevalence in the world. Something has got to give. How can we idly stand by and just send condolences, Facebook-React with a teary face, share, re-tweet, like, or change our profile picture? It’s deeper, friends, far deeper. When will we stop and re-evaluate our culture, our societal norms? How many more of our children, our aunties, our nieces, our students, our girlfriends, our best friends, our dear loved ones must bear the burden of abuse before we start to relook at our culture? If you like me, have stumbled upon the disillusionment of discord, between what you believe, what you read about, compared to what you see in practice, here are a few considerations I humbly ask you to think about, to look into, and to build upon:

Step 1: A Product of Your Society

Research says the relationship between culture and language and cognition is reciprocal, you influence your culture and your culture influences you, and your language shapes your culture and cognition just as your culture shapes your language and your way of thinking. To understand that our value system is a much deeper social construct than our individual upbringing and our own choices and beliefs is a necessity in bringing change. Culture is so very nuanced and so very fundamental to our entire being that we cannot just make a decision to separate it from our way of life, we cannot learn information or even practices that might entirely change the way we think. Even the way we talk influences how we think and therefore what we do, this is why “locker room talk” is a problem, because language shapes culture and cognition and cognition shapes language and culture. I’m not suggesting that we just keep our mouths shut for fear of saying the wrong thing or go on a witch hunt for bad statements, but rather let’s be open to having a brother or sister give helpful, loving feedback on our comments. This can in turn help us to recognize underlying prejudices in our cognition that we were perhaps unaware of. This is not to say that you are not to be held responsible for your prejudices, but let’s all remember that dehumanizing people solves nothing at all. We should all recognise that along with our culture and our upbringing, there are certain values that come along and form apart of our cognitions and processing mechanisms — ones we need to be open to addressing and mending. This is not easy, but if we’re all on the same team of Love, Kindness, and Respect, it makes it a lot easier. This of course, on top of the fact that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds?

Step 2: Right/Wrong are Contextual Variables

A team can be a lot more effective when half the team doesn’t have to run with a limp (or a pair of heels/a dress, ya know). It may be crudely comparable to a soccer game where half the team keeps getting carded for using too much of their hips while running, or flicking their hair too inappropriately, or their shorts being too short, or their laces not being long enough, or whatever ridiculous reason is being used for why the other team keeps scoring. The team would (or should) no doubt be up in arms, because of how it hinders their effectiveness to play the game, which is of course the main point. It may also be like saying that certain demographic categories of players may only be in the team as subs, none of them are ever allowed to be in the starting line-up, but they’ll be used if there’s no one else left. This is not a good strategic move to enable the goal to be achieved. And for some real talk, if we had to put all the highest earning players in the starting line up, it might be that we have selected the best players, but why would we make that a rule and sell ourselves short of employing the best strategy of players and placement based on their strengths and ability according to the context? I’ll not insult your intelligence by explaining just how we do exactly this in the church/societal norms. We forget that there is a great deal of contextualization apparent int he Bible. God remains the same, his heart and values remain unchanged, but in certain situations an action is wrong and in other situations it is right. If we look at the Bible purely as a book of moral absolutes of course there will be irreconcilable contradictions.

One of the reasons I dislike personality test is because they always ask for absolutes, of which I have none in my life. There is no one action that I will always take regardless of circumstance. We all have circumstantial decisions and choices we have made dependent on our values and beliefs. Often our values remain unchanged, be it principle based or outcomes based, even though our decisions differ. What am I getting at? We need to mine the various accounts of the God we serve, as well as personally invest time and devotion, to know His heart, and His values (if serving and following Him is something we want to do), and then, with His mercy and guidance, start to evaluate our current practices and see if they really are as Gospel-oriented as we think they are, and if they are in line with His values. In the culture of the time, I understand, let the educated people teach the other people. So in that case, women don’t teach, right? But if the church is family and family is where you should be most yourself, if women can’t lead or teach, how can you substantiate women studying management, or women being CEOs or presidents, or women being lecturers? It’s a cognitive dissonance that needs to be re-evaluated. Perhaps you don't agree with women being in these “secular positions”. Why? Is it possible that where the church has failed to press on with the agenda and has been crippled and sidetracked by secondary issues that the world has caught up? Let us examine our context in light of His Heart.

Step 3: The Talking Listening Cure

I referenced Freud in this step, but it really has nothing to do with him, except for his novel idea of talking through situations and circumstances in order to understand and reach a conclusion. What he really did, was listen. So should we. Of course I don’t know everything and I never will, not even about this particular issue. I do however know that it’s not so much about the philosophy as much as it is about having and acting upon values that will shape my relationships with those around me. We are focused on the goal of love, but how do we love? This is the question we need to be continually asking. To love is to pay attention, to listen, to hear, to move towards understanding and to value (love your neighbor as you love yourself). May we not only learn to listen, but may a deep yearning and desire to listen be born within our hearts and minds, may we be malleable and teachable. Let’s start the conversations in the closets of our homes, leaning in to hear the heart of the Almighty, and looking at the Bible more holistically and in context, never losing sight of the main point: Love, Truth, Light, Hope — Jesus. And then, take it one step at a time, speaking to those closest to you, then slowly broadening the topic to your community. This may help in emphasizing that is not a “Femi-Nazi rampage” but rather an honest questioning of how to love and value others better, from the very core of our hearts and minds, which will then change how we act, what we say, and how we treat those that are ‘different’ to us.

Final Thoughts

We don’t choose these things when we are born, I didn’t decide to be born a woman, or be born with my skin colour, or be born into the social class that I was, but yet, these are things people use to attribute value to me, each with their own measurement sticks (or pencils)… We all do it to a degree, and we all have it done to us to a degree. This is not my plight to be valued or recognized, this is my questioning of our culture and values that ultimately shape how we treat others and how we mistreat others.

You want to know why #MenAreTrash? Not because you as a man are trash, but because societal values and norms more often than not establish a value hierarchy that enables men to abuse women. The concept of a man that is often taught and learned is trash. Yes, it is a generalisation, but that’s kind of how statistics work. For all the things men are allowed to say or do, even with harmless intentions, that shapes culture and in turn shapes other men, that spirals to rape, murder, abuse, that concept of a man is trash. This is a desperate plea for men and women alike to relook at what you do, why you do it, and what your underlying cognitions are — this is a call to re-examination of values, particularly in the church.

I’m not asking us to revolt, I’m asking us to structure our organization, the church, differently, where we remain true to his heart and the call He has placed upon us. I ask that we move towards a church that exemplifies the heart of God, where everyone has equal value and equal ability to contribute, regardless of race, gender, or socio-economic status/class.

I hold no sway in formal church structures, mostly because I’m young, and a woman, and not married to an elder, (give or take) so in the spirit of using what I have to do the best I can, I aim to start exploring this topic in greater detail, through research, through art, and through engagement/conversation.

[thesinglesjukebox]

TAYLOR SWIFT - LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO [4.39] Man, look what she made US do.

Elisabeth Sanders: Here is the thing about Taylor Swift: anybody that has truly loved (despite themselves) Taylor Swift has done so because of her sharp, frightening edges, because of the way in which she is the mean girl in the midst of a panic attack, because she's petty, because she's crazy, because she believes in things and at the same time when those things aren't as they seem wants to crush them in the palm of her hand. Any interpretation of Taylor Swift that doesn't incorporate this is simply bad research. In 2006: "Go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy--There's no time for tears / I'm just sitting here, planning my revenge." In 2010: "And my mother accused me of losing my mind /But I swore I was fine /You paint me a blue sky /And go back and turn it to rain /And I lived in your chess game /But you changed the rules every day /Wondering which version of you I might get on the phone, tonight /Well I stopped picking up and this song is to let you know why" In 2012: "Maybe we got lost in translation / maybe I asked for too much / or maybe this thing was a masterpiece / til you tore it all up." And finally, in 2014, a culmination of the songwriting combined with the publicity--well, just listen to "Blank Space." I can't quote the whole thing. At the time it was brilliant, a parody that dipped just enough into the real, a joke about both media extrapolation and actual content. But we're past the time for parody. It came, it was good, it went. The criticism still followed, for other reasons, for deeper reasons, for real reasons. Along with, I'm sure, superficial ones. But if "Blank Space" was Taylor Swift's petty Gone Girl fan fiction, "Look What You Made Me Do" is the unfortunate chapter in which we have to acknowledge that the fiction was never that self-aware, and that an excavation of complication, when confronted with complicated times, sometimes reveals not a complex sympathetic maybe-villain, but simply a person not equipped to be making mass art right now. Taylor's pettiness, her villainy, her strangeness, has always been her most interesting feature. Maybe, now, too many years into seeing but not seeing it, it's just--not that interesting anymore. She's not your friend, and she's not your enemy, she's just--well. As she says, "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me." I think that might be her final truth. [3]

Stephen Eisermann: I've never been a big Taylor Swift fan -- I like her music well enough, but there was always something about the details she painted and the cards she showed that it felt a bit... made-up. Still, I always had a weird feeling that Taylor and I had very similar personalities and personal life trajectories (bear with me) and this song reinforces that. When I was younger and "straight" (16-18), I was very quiet, nice to a fault, and introverted. Thanks to my name and skin color, a lot of (racist) older people always said it was hard to believe I was a Mexican teenager because I was so quiet, polite, well-spoken and bright. Much like Swizzle during the "Taylor Swift" and "Fearless" era, I was considered naive but genuine-hearted and people loved to love my niceness. However, I soon started coming to terms with my sexuality and started being a bit more open with myself and others about who I truly was, just like we saw glimpses of pure pop and more evocative lyrics in "Speak Now" and "Red." I still built stories and a narrative that painted me as more mystery than gay, just as Taylor toed the line between squeaky clean young adult and Lolita, but I was a bit more willing to explore. Soon after, the inevitable happened and I finally had my first NSFW encounter with a man, and was even MORE willing to be who I really was. I let my gay flag fly and if people asked, I wouldn't dance around the question, but own who I was. Taylor didn't hesitate one bit when she announced 1989 would be a pop album in its entirety, and I didn't so much was stutter when telling questioning friends my realization. Still, a part of me hid things from ass-backwards family members and people who I knew wouldn't "understand," just as Sweezy continued to play the victim card to hold on to some of the innocence that was slowly falling through her fingertips like sand on the last day of vacation. However, there is only so much sand one hand can hold and BAM -- my family became aware of my sexuality and Taylor was exposed. I was at a crossroads -- do I drop my family and throw out ALL the dirty chisme I had accumulated over the years at different holidays, effectively exposing the most bigoted family members, or do I keep my mouth shut and weather the hate, being all the stronger for it? I wanted so badly to be vindictive and evil, but I choose the high road for reasons I'm not really sure I can effectively communicate. Taylor, however, has opted for the darker route. "LWYMMD" lacks detail, yes, but it's intentional. I just... I just know it. She has secrets up her sleeves she will soon reveal -- nobody willingly takes the villainous role without ammo, and Taylor has been MANY things throughout her career, but unprepared is not one of them. This song is calculated, petty, unnecessary, and very much beneath her, but it allows me to live vicariously through her and I want her to drag her detractors just as I want to drag my family members through the mud they continue to think I belong in. And just as my bigoted family members will get theirs, so will Taylor's enemies, I'm sure. [10]

Will Rivitz: "I think I have a part to play in this drama, and I have chosen to be the villain. Every good story needs a bad guy, don't you think?" -Lorelei Granger, Frindle (Andrew Clements, 1996) [9]

David Moore: Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (Image Comics, 2015) Synopsis: Years ago, a young woman obsessed with music videos and mythic pop celebrity made a deal with the King Behind the Screen -- she gave up half of herself to gain the mystical power needed to eventually lead a coven of music obsessives. Now the deal's gone sour, and her darker, sacrificed self has switched places to destroy the coven with an ill-advised electroclash revival. [7]

Alfred Soto: Electronic swoops, piano on the bridge, lots of boom boom bap -- this single could be the new St. Vincent, or, to return to once upon a long time ago, to a track from Lorde's estimable Melodrama, a flop also largely co-written with Jack Antonoff. A skeptic of her first singles since 2009, I approached "Look..." with caution; on the evidence she's anticipated this caution. "I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me," she sings while soap opera strings add the requisite melodrama, and for a moment I thought she sang "I don't trust my body." I've never cared about biographical parallels in any art, especially in popular art where the insistence feels like conscription; the blank space where she wants the audience to write his/her/whatever's name is a sop to us. Less persuasive is the talk-sung part informing her audience that the "old Taylor" is "dead," as if Fearless fans needed an 808 dug into their faces. It will sound terrific on the radio. I'll skip it when I buy the album. [5]

Crystal Leww: The emerging narrative of Jack Antonoff as the next king of pop production is perplexing because his resume is honestly pretty thin. It's unclear what Antonoff actually brings to the table other than an amplification factor; Antonoff's songs have only been as good as his collaborators. This works when artists are working with a strong vision they can execute against -- e.g., CRJ's "in love and feeling like a teen again" on "Sweetie," Lorde's earnest wide open heartbreak on Melodrama. It is damning if artists are falling into their worst habits. Taylor Swift is a very solid songwriter -- it's nearly impossible to have the kind of career she had in country music if you're not -- but it always falls back on specificity, the emotional connection that she can forge with her fans when she knows what she's trying to convey. "Look What You Made Me Do" fails because it's unclear what it's about -- is this song about haters? Kim and Kanye? Her exes? The media? -- and Antonoff using Right Said Fred makes it all seem very clunky. The song sounds like it could have really leaned into a psycho ex-girlfriend vibe, but it's not self-aware, not funny, not sure of itself. Ultimately, "Look What You Made Me Do" isn't awful, but it's not catchy, which is its worst sin of all. Taylor Swift's still a decent songwriter ("Better Man" was great; "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places" almost made up for that Zayn collab), but this isn't even yucky -- it's just kinda boring. [4]

Katherine St Asaph: The curse continues. Maybe it's that the past month I've been listening to very little but "Anatomy of a Plastic Girl" by The Opiates and "Justice" by Fotonovela and Sarah Blackwood, and here's the exact conceptual midpoint. I've heard comparisons to electroclash, NIN, mall emo, Lorde, but I hear more Jessie Malakouti or Britney on Original Doll: frantic tabloid petulance, slightly updated with a "Problem" anti-chorus, but otherwise things I like. Otherwise, Swift's style has not changed: self-referential ("actress" and "bad dreams" shuffle her images to make her the heel) and threaded with subliminals ("tilted stage" is literal, "kingdom keys" keeps up with the konsonance) Just as "Dear John" parodied its subject's lite-blooz guitar, "Look What You Made Me Do" parodies the austere tracks of 808s and Heartbreak on, like "Love Lockdown" in curdled Midwestern vowels: trading soporific for loaded. The song has inevitably become about everything but itself. Her milkshake duck brought all the boys to the yard, and they're like, this is garb, and I'm like, the Internet deplorables haven't adopted this in any better faith than they did Depeche Mode; any of pop's myriad songs about the tabloids would read as "political" if transplanted into 2017 (is Lindsay Lohan's "Rumours" about FAKE NEWS?), and Swift's suffocatingly prescriptive "Southern" "values" pre-Red were as politically suspect as this, and more insidious. The next salvo of attack: its rollout being unprecedentedly gimmicky and exploitative, never mind how aforementioned Depeche Mode did the same pre-order thing, or Britney Spears upholstered-carpetbombed "Pretty Girls" in everyone's Ubers, or Rihanna's Talk That Talk was launched with gamified "missions", or Srsly Legit Band Arcade Fire spent months on fake Stereogum posts and fake Ben and Jerry's. Doesn't help that when Taylor is bad, she's stunningly, loudly bad; the second verse, in its magnification of the cringiest parts of "Shake It Off" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," seems to last forever. (The phone call is fine, though; no one had a problem with "How Ya Doin'" or, like, "Telephone.") It's no good for catharsis, definitely not relatable, maybe on purpose: like being too sexy for your shirt, all you feel is cold. [6]

Katie Gill: On the one hand, Taylor using the language of abusers in the chorus of her song is clueless at best and worrisome at worst. On the other hand, blatantly riffing off of "I'm Too Sexy" is a surprisingly smart choice for a chorus and I'm shocked that I can't think of anyone who's tried it before with this level of success. But on the one hand, for a song about how she's getting smarter and harder, the lyrics don't reflect that, giving us some petty Regina George level nonsense instead of anything remotely resembling depth or nuance. But then again, that snake is pouring Taylor Swift some tea and all the Taylor Swifts are beating up the other Taylor Swifts in a battle royale hahaha this video is so amazingly dumb. I guess I'll split the difference and give it a [5]

Alex Clifton: I've always wanted give-no-fucks Taylor Swift, but I'm dying for context, as this album (and sing) will sink or swim based entirely on the narrative she creates. She's clearly setting herself on fire in order to rebrand herself, although I question her self-awareness. The music video indicates yes, with a brilliant 30-second scene featuring various Taylors mocking each other. Yet "Look What You Made Me Do" is also curiously passive, with a reactionary title and a bored chorus--more a sign of privilege and status. The ambiguity between honest, wronged victim and villainous persona here is intriguing, especially given Swift's penchant for earnestness; obviously she cannot be both, but the tension drives the song. The song itself is a mixed bag; Swift returns to the messy rapping last heard on "Shake It Off" with an equally cringey spoken-word interlude, but her voice is simutaneously delicate and confident as she comes out swinging. While I love seeing Blood!Swift writing a hitlist of enemies like an evil Santa Claus and the hint of confronting the less attractive/more honest parts of her role in the spotlight, only time will tell whether this is truly a playful new direction or more of the same old tune. (Also, what did we make her do? The answer is classic Swift, diabolically obvious: we made her write a song about it.) [7]

Jessica Doyle: A week on I still hear more self-loathing than anything else. Nothing the supposed New Taylor offers up comes off particularly convincingly; there's no glee in her reinvention. Compare the way she rushes through honey-I-rose-up-from-the-dead when she once sounded like she was thoroughly enjoying Boys only want love when it's torture. She doesn't sound smarter, or harder; look what you made me do, when she's spent the last eighteen months making a point of not doing anything. There's no air in here, no space beyond the multiple annotated versions and multiple thinkpieces declaring her a walking horsebitch of the Trumpocalypse. Just Taylor Swift practicing telling herself to shut up, Taylor Swift wondering about karma, Taylor Swift reading Buzzfeed and taking careful notes, Taylor Swift unable to make a point about anything at all except Taylor Swift. You don't realize, when you're in the thick of it, that self-loathing is just as relentlessly, narrowly egotistical as any other kind of self-obsession. It gets old, finally. It wears you out. It wears everybody out. Right? Yes? Can we all agree to be worn out now? Are we going to allow her to move on? She can't rise up from the dead if we don't let her die first. [3]

Cassy Gress: There was a time when I thought 1989 pajama-parties-and-kittens Taylor was the "real Taylor." I don't know if that really was. What I do know is that trying to figure out who the "real Taylor" is, and arguing on the internet about it, is fucking exhausting. So much of her musical output has been autobiographical, or meant to sound generically autobiographical to women listeners; so much of her reads as "pussycat with claws." Sometimes she emphasizes the pussycat side, soft and vulnerable; "Look What You Made Me Do" is the claws side. But Taylor, who we know has the ability to be nuanced and evocative, is here transmitting her intent (to destroy Kanye, or Katy, or Hiddleston, or her old selves, or just to be the cleverest sausage) like a hammer to the skull. This, like much else about her, is exhausting to watch/listen to. I would much rather close the blinds and put on my headphones and watch GBBO reruns in my jammies. [2]

Olivia Rafferty: Washing in with the arrival of her sixth album are a tidal wave of thinkpieces on Swift, all set within the context of her A-list feuds, miscalculations and politics, or lack thereof. We've all sifted through stories of fake boyfriends, cheap shots and oblivious colonialism, and I'm going to speak for all of us when I say we probably should just all take a goddamn break from the vortex. I'm placing LWYMMD in a vacuum for now. Reaching into the embarrassing depths of my personal history, I can draw up two different past-Olivias who would be a perfect fit for this song. I'm gifting the verse, pre-chorus and middle eight to my 10-year-old self, and the chorus to my 17-year-old self. Olivia at 10 would lap up the overly-dramatic opening lines, the "I. Don't. Likes" and their thick punctuation. It's served with the attitude that would have made you want to stick on a crop top and pick up one of your tiny handbags to fling about during an ill-prepared dance routine -- no, Mum, it's not finished yet! And the moment of absolute pre-teen glory is the cheerleader delivery of the spoken half-verse, "the world moves on another day another drama drama," I can literally see the Beanie Baby music video re-enactment. All of these melodic aspects are playful but lack the precision or maturity you'd expect Swift to deliver on this "good girl grown up" song. When the chorus hits you suddenly mature into that 17 year-old whose friends-but-not-really-friends played that Peaches song at someone's house party. You could probably embarassingly attempt a slut-drop to it in your bedroom, pretending you're a dominatrix who's just split some milk on the floor. But the overall impression is that if Swift is trying to be naughty, sexy or dangerous, she's missed the mark a little. Now at 25 I'm listening and thinking that the chorus still snaps, but if this track was an attempt at sexualising Taylor in a way that's not been done before, it's only made it clear that she's still got a lot of growing up to do. [6]

Joshua Copperman: From the first bar chimes sound effect, I was worried, and I suppose my feelings didn't improve by the time the "tilted stage" line happened. On "Out Of The Woods", Antonoff and Swift brought out the best in each other (Jack's big choruses, Taylor's specific references), but on "Look What You Made Me Do", they bring out the worst (Jack's obnoxiousness, Taylor's pettiness.) Antonoff can do flamboyant earnestness, especially when it blends with Lorde's self-awareness and quirkiness; he just can't do dark and edgy. Or even campy, apparently: the glorious video mostly takes care of that, giving the song an intensity and glamour that it doesn't have nor deserve on its own. Yet even the video often misses the humor inherent in moments like the terrible rap in the second verse, or the already-infamous lift from "I'm Too Sexy". The ultimate effect is like John Green praising a burn of himself without realizing why the burn was deserved in the first place. In this case, it's one Taylor saying to another Taylor "there she goes, playing the victim, again", even though the preceding song couldn't even play the victim or villain well enough. [4]

Mo Kim: There was a time in my life when I looked up to Taylor Swift. I was eighteen once, clearing my throat of all the doubts that haunted it, and the only way I had to express myself was through songs about slights that exploded like firecrackers. But a voice with that strength comes with responsibility. Sometimes you need to stop reveling in the volume of your own speech to see the platform of power you stand on; otherwise you might build a version of yourself on the rickety foundation of innocence only to find it crashing down. On "Look What You Made Me Do," she's still trying for the pottery shard hooks that once made her so important to petty queer kids like me. It works in bits and spurts: that second verse is a bucket of water and an emergency siren to the face, and the pre-chorus utilizes a sinister piano and eerie vocal production to great effect. Too bad, then, that the flimsy chorus and winky-face lyrics cave in on themselves more easily than almost anything she's written before (like a house of cards, some might say). That it so blatantly abjects responsibility onto her audience, however, is the biggest point against it: instead of personability, or at least the pretense of it, there's just layer after layer of metanarrative. Instead of a telling that acknowledges her history -- a complicated, troubling, rich one -- there's just Queen Bee Taylor, sneering over a landfill heap of old Taylors before she discards of all her past selves. I used to hold stadiums in my chest as I listened to the stories Swift spun; now I feel like the lights have finally crackled out, and here she is, dithering in the debris of her crumbling empire, and here we are, looking down. [5]

Josh Love: If Taylor wants to go in, that's her prerogative, but because this is a song that none of us plebes can actually relate to, it's only fair to judge it solely based on whether it goes hard, and I'm sorry to report that Taylor has no bars. "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Shake It Off" seemed like wild stabs at first too, but they possessed an inclusivity that's curdled into Yeezus-level petulance here. There's nothing here to suggest she's capable of making Reputation her Lemonade. At least the video gives me some hope that maybe she realizes she's a complete dork. [3]

Anthony Easton: This is the hardest for me to grade, because I still don't know if it is good, but it is constructed in such a way that people like me (critic, liberal elitist, homosexual) are pressed to have opinions. It steals with such quickness, and with such weirdness that the opinions give birth to other opinons, somewhere between a snake hall and the ouroboros she already quotes. It sounds like Lorde, it samples Peaches, it plays with electroclash, which was a genre that was already heavily recursive. It tries to be without feeling, but it feels all too deeply. That is enough to spend time with, that is enough to unpack. It sounds like Lorde because they are both working with Jack Antonoff. Who is cribbing from who here? Is Lorde playing like Swift, is Swift cribbing Lorde's lankness, are both pulling outside of their influence, by the commercial, mainstreamed weirdness of Antonoff? Swift was always pretty; her main skill was using guile to a stiletto edge. This edges on ugliness, but it is still "ugly." Women like Peaches or the cabaret singer Bridgett Everett know how to sing, have the ambition to sing well, but chose to reject good taste for social and political power. Taylor playing with being ugly, with being flat, with kind of half singing, with no longer being the cheerleader, is not a formal refusal of beauty as a political means but has the louche boredom of a hanger-on, with maybe a bit of anger at not being cool enough. It's a capital blankness that raids and doesn't contribute. Part of the ugliness of Peaches, part of the joy of electroclash, is not only how it absorbs the amoral around it--Grace Jones, The Normal, Joy Division, Klaus Nomi--but that the sex of it works so hard. The fucking is less pleasure than hard work--the grit of dirt and sweat and bodies. When Swift quotes Peaches, she is quoting the reduction of pop to a stripping down of bodies through a formal aesthetic choice. When she quotes noir, it is an attempt to self-consciously think of herself as a body who is capable of doing real damage. Swift flatters herself as someone whose suicide could be a nihilist aesthetic gesture. She flatters herself as a fatale. She's still the kid who does damage, and plays naif. You can't be pretty and ugly. You can't be a naif fatale. You can't pretend not to care about gossip and make your career about what people think of you. You can only be so much of a feminist and rest on your producers this much, and you cannot play at louche blankness if it is so obvious how much work you are doing. This might suggest that I hate the song, but I can't. Swift doing an "ugly" heel turn fills me with poptimist longing, and I want to hear more. [9]

Eleanor Graham: There is a bit in an old Never Mind The Buzzcocks where Simon Amstell says to Amy Winehouse, "We used to be close! On Popworld, we were close." And Amy Winehouse runs her hand down his face and says, half-pityingly and to thunderous laughter, "She's dead." I don't really know why I'm bringing this up except to illustrate that a woman killing off her former self, against Joan Didion's worldly advice, has a kind of power. The crudest hyperbole. Like Amy in Gone Girl. You don't like this thing about me? You wish I was different? Well, guess what -- I'M DEAD! This line, which Swift delivers with the manic kittenish venom of Reese Witherspoon's character in Big Little Lies, is the only redeeming feature of "Look What You Made Me Do." And yet -- even as someone who has openly thrown politics to the wind in the face of such forever songs as "Style", "State of Grace" and "All Too Well" -- this single is too hallucinatory to be a flat disappointment. Quite aside from the Right Said Fred debacle, the "aw" is reminiscent of Julia Michaels, the second verse of a lobotomised Miz-Biz era Hayley Williams, the production ideas of a mid-2000s CBBC show, and the whole thing of a middle-aged man in a wig playing Sky Ferreira in an SNL skit. Disorientating. Almost euphorically horrible. Say what you want about T Swift, but who else is serving this level of pop Kafkaism in 2017? [2]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Weirdly, everything works for me sorta kinda with the second verse. The percussion thuds in the distance just a little more effectively, and Taylor's whining drone of a rap screams up into that high-pitched melodrama, only to crash and burn into an anemic "Push It," as written by someone who forgot Lady Gaga once could fool us into thinking she was funny. Past that subsection and prior, however, the record truly never clicks. You get the sense that Swift, someone so eagerly to seize the moment, doesn't realize that the horror campiness plays her hand too hard. [2]

Edward Okulicz: Saved from being her worst ever single by an out-of-nowhere, brilliant, Lorde-esque pre-chorus (and the existence of both "Welcome to New York" and "Bad Blood"), this is pretty thin gruel for the first single off a first album in three years. Remember how dense her songwriting used to be? See how clumsy it is on this. Taylor Swift's devolution from essential pop star to somewhat annoying head of a cult of personality is complete. At least there'll be better to come on the album. I hope. [4]

Rachel Bowles: I am guessing (and hoping) that "Look What You Made Me Do" is Reputation's "Shake It Off," a comparatively mediocre introduction to what is ostensibly a good album with some timeless songs ("Style" in particular on 1989). Functionally the same, both songs have to reintroduce Taylor in a new iteration to a cultural narrative she cannot be excluded from, both heavy on self-awareness and light on her signature musical flair. Where "Shake It Off" felt anodyne and compressed, "LWYMMD" is beautifully stripped back, chopping between lowly sung and rhythmically spoken word over a synthesiser, strings or a beat -- verses, bridges and middle 8's passing, though ultimately building to nothing -- the chorus of "LWYMMD" being the swirling void at its centre, one that cannot hold, however fashionable it is to build then strip to anti-climax in EDM and pop. What did Taylor do? The absence of her critical action, the bloody, thirsted-for revenge, can only leave us unsatisfied, like watching a Jacobean tragedy on tilted stage without the final release of death for all. What's left is a painful, public death of media citations of Taylor, played over and over, joylessly. [5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: 1989 is Taylor Swift's worst album, but that shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing. For an artist whose vocal melodies were able to effectively drive a song forward, it was a bit odd hearing her rely so heavily on a song's instrumentation to do all the heavy lifting. Additionally, the painterly lyrics that drew me to her work in the first place were mostly abandoned for ones more beige (simply compare the most memorable lyrics from 1989 and any other album and it becomes very obvious). It didn't work out for the most part, but I was fine with the mediocrity. And considering how stylistically diverse the album was, I very much saw it as a stepping stone for a future project. Which is why I'm completely unsurprised by the doubling down of "Look What You Made Me Do" -- it's a lead single that's heavily tied to her media perception, finds her abandoning any sense of subtlety, and utilizes amelodic singing to put greater emphasis on the instrumentation itself. It's conceptually brilliant for all these reasons, but it doesn't come together all too well. Namely, the lyrics are almost laughably bad and distract from how physical the song can be, and her calculated attempts at announcing her self-awareness have reached the point of utter parody. That the music video ends with Swift essentially explaining the (unfunny) joke only confirms this. [3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Every new Taylor Swift single is Vizzini from "The Princess Bride," letting us know that she knows that we know that she knows that we know that she is Taylor Swift, and since she knows that we know (etc. etc. etc.), she can be confident drinking the goblet in front of her, since she knows that she switched around the goblets when we weren't looking, and she's laughing like she's clearly outsmarted us, but little does she know that we've been building up an immunity to her odorless white poison for years. [2]

William John: The hyper-specificity is gone. There are no references here to paper airplane necklaces or dead roses in December or in-jokes written on notes left on doors. In their place, platitudes abound, choruses are forgotten, "time" rhymes with "time", and "drama" with "karma". The latter is pursued with a maniacal intensity, the parody spelled out rather brilliantly in "Blank Space" quickly undoing itself. Rather obviously, "Look What You Made Me Do" does not exist in a vacuum, and the timing and nature of its release are what render it particularly dismaying. Its author, not playing to her previously demonstrated strengths, is seemingly at great pains to fuel fire to certain celebrity feuds, all the while insisting on her exclusion from them. It wouldn't matter so much were she to denounce some of her new fans with the same fervour, but for some reason this era she's opted out of interviews, perhaps at the time when some explanation driven by someone outside her inner circle is most needed. It's one way to forge a reputation, indeed. I do like the way she screams "bad DREAMS!" though. [3]

Leonel Manzanares: An auteur whose entire schtick is about framing herself as a victim, now emboldened by the current climate to address "the haters" using the language of abuse, embracing villainhood. No wonder she's considered the ambassador of Breitbart Pop. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: "Don't you understand? It's your fault that I had to go and become a mean girl!" Yeah, okay, whatever, Ms. White Privilege. [2]

Anjy Ou: For the woman who singularly embodies white female privilege, it's kind of embarrassing that she doesn't have the range. [2]

Will Adams: If you had asked me three months ago, "Hey, between 'Swish Swish' and whatever Taylor Swift ends up putting out this year, which is the more embarrassing diss track?", I wouldn't have thought I'd need to think about the answer this much. [2]

Anaïs Escobar Mathers: "Taylor, you're doing amazing, sweetie," said no one. [1]

Sonia Yang: With an artist as polarizing as Swift, it's easy to make the conversation a messy knot about the real life conflicts she's had, but I find it more interesting to tune that all out and focus on the simplicity of her work as a standalone. "Look What You Made Me Do" is Swift at her most coldly bitter yet, but betrays the resignation of long buried hurt. It's "Blank Space" but with none of the fantastical fun; it toes the line between wary irony and jadedly "becoming the mask." Most telling is the dull echo of the song title in place of a real hook, which is actually a favorite point of mine. Reality doesn't always go out with a bang; it's more likely for one to reach a gloomy conclusion than stumbling upon a glorious epiphany. Musically, I'd call this an awkward transition phase for Taylor -- it's not her worst song ever, but it's admittedly underwhelming compared to the heights we've seen from her. However, I've sat through questionable attempts at reinvention from my favorite artists before and I'm still optimistic about the potential for Swift's growth after this. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: There is nothing Taylor Swift does better than revenge, and this is not that. This is the first Swift single that exists only in conversation with Swift's media-created persona -- even "Blank Space" turned on internally resolved narrative beats and emotional moments -- but it offers little for those who hear pop through celebrity news updates, not speakers or headphones. Compare "Look What You Made Me Do" to "Mean," a pointed and hurt missive that scarified its targets with dangerous care; this new single, however, barely extends beyond the bounds of Swift's own skull. "I don't like your little games," levels Swift, her voice venom, "the role you made me play." The central character -- the only character -- in this narrative is Swift, and she enacts an immolation. Her nastiness is the etiolated savagery of Drake in his more recent and loutish incarnation: lonely and lordly, "just a sicko, a real sicko when you get to know me." "I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time" could be Jesse Lacey on Deja Entendu but sunk into the abyss of The Devil and God -- only it's delivered over ugly, the Knife-like electro clanging. The line that succeeds is classic Swift in its brittle theatrics: "Honey, I rose up from the dead; I do it all the time." The spoken-word bridge -- the song's most blatantly campy and deliciously gothic moment -- acts as a witchy incantation, walking most precariously the line between winking vamp and public tantrum. Swift has brought her monstrous birth to the world's light; contra the title, what it is we've made her do isn't even apparent yet. [8]

Lauren Gilbert: I was 18 when "Fearless" was released, and listened to it on repeat my first term of undergrad, feeling freedom and joy and hope. I listened to "We Are Never Getting Back Together" on repeat in an on-again-off-again relationship that should have ended years before it did. I listened to 1989 over and over again after recovering from a nervous breakdown and for the first time, really, truly focused on choosing a life of joy. I should be Here For This. I am not. Pop music thrives on specificity, and Taylor Swift in particular has made a career of writing about hyperspecific situations. This is... generic; it could be sung by Katy Perry, by a female Zayn, by Kim K herself. Taylor offers no hooks to her own life here, and perhaps that's not a flaw; female songwriters have the right to choose not to expose their own lives, and to write the same generic pop song nonsense that everyone else does. But as someone who bought into the whole TSwift authenticity brand -- even while I recognized it as a brand, even while I knew that she was a multimillionaire looking out for her own interests first and foremost, even as she was the definition of a Problematic Fav -- I can't really say I care that much about new Taylor. I could fault Taylor's politics and personality -- and I'm sure other blurbs will -- but the primary failing here isn't Taylor's non-music life. It's that there's no feeling here; it feels as cynical as the line "another day, another drama". Next. [4]

Andy Hutchins: "I'm Too Sexy" + "Mr. Me Too" - basically any of the elements that made "Mr. Me Too" compelling = "Ms. I'm Sexy, Too." [4]

Tara Hillegeist: Let's leave this double-edged sword hang here for a minute: Taylor Swift's personhood is irrelevant to the reality that she is a better creator than she ever gets credit for. Since her earliest days of the demo CDs she'd like to keep buried, Taylor Swift has never been less interesting or more terrible on the ears than when her songs are forcibly positioned as autobiography. For a decade she has cultivated an audience of lovers and haters alike that never felt her--or truly felt for her--because she never wanted them to know her, driven to own her brand even as she's deliberately averred to own up to what lies behind it. Witness the framing of an Etch-a-Sketch of a song like "Look What You Made Me Do": she releases a song about vengeful self-definition mere weeks after finally winning a years-long case against a man who sexually assaulted her and tried to sue her to silence over it on the sheer strength of her own self-representation, and the air charges itself with intimations that she instead meant it for Katy Perry, whose flash-in-the-pan "friendship" she publicly and memorably disowned in a bad song about bad blood an entire album ago, or perhaps Kim Kardashian-West, a woman whose "feud" with her arguably began with Taylor Swift's attempt to paint herself as the victim in an argument with Kim's husband but ended inarguably and decisively in Kim's favor. To claim someone would mangle her targets so ineptly even the conspiracy theorists have to resort to half-guesses and deliberate misquotes to draw out the barbs is a claim it's especially ridiculous to pin on a musician like Taylor Swift, a control freak who once built a labyrinth of personal references into an album full of songs about protagonists nothing like herself just to prove a point to anyone listening to them that closely about how sturdy the songs would be without knowing any of it. A public conversation that misses the point this drastically can only occur if there's a deliberately blank space where any sense of or interest in the person it's about could exist. There is a hole where this most powerfully self-determining popstar lives where a human life has never been glimpsed--because she cast that little girl and her frail voice aside years ago in search of something altogether more influential than such a weak vessel could ever hold. The girl who cajoled her family into spending enough Merrill-Lynch money to cover for her inability to sing until she had enough professional training to sing the songs she wanted to put to her name was never the girl who could truly be a flight risk with a fear of falling, was never the girl who never did anything better than revenge. But she wanted to be the girl who sang the words for that girl, who put her words in that girl's mouth, more than anything else in the world. She staked her name on nothing less than her ability to capitalize on the reputation she acquired. The Taylor Swift of Fearless and Speak Now was a Taylor Swift who believed she could be someone else in your mind, a songwriter dexterous enough to slip between gothic pop, americana-infused new wave, and pop-punk piss-offs without shaking that crisply machine-tooled Pennsylvania diction. A decade on, she's learned a lesson enough women before her already learned it's shocking she wasn't ready for it: when you're a girl and you make something about being a girl, everyone thinks you just had yourself in mind. The proof that she was more than that--more than the songs on the radio, you might say--was always there; it wasn't hidden, it wasn't obscured. But from Red onwards that Taylor began to die; a straighter Taylor Swift emerged in more ways than just her hair, all the kinks ironing themselves out in favor of her remodeling herself into a different sort of someone else's voice. Where once stood a Taylor Swift who sang for the sake of seeing her words sung by someone else's mouth back to her, there now stood a Taylor Swift who sang everyone else's words about her back to them. Tabloids cannot resurrect a life that a woman never lived, and no amount of retrospective sleight of hand about the girl she might have lied about being can hide the truth that neither can she. Conspiracy theories only flourish when people treat the mystery of human motives like a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be solved--ignoring that she already made it clear that was, still and always, the wrong answer to the questions she wouldn't let them ask. She wanted fame, she wanted a reputation; she wanted them on terms she defined; she never wanted anything else half as much as she wanted that. She has used every means available to her to earn them. Her awkward adolescence took a backseat to her life's dream of conquering America's radio. It's no shock, then, that all this gossip-mongering rings as hollow as a crown. The messy melodrama of Southern sympathy and thin-voiced warbles that defined the sweethearted ladygirls of generations before her and beside her and will define those that come after her, the sloppy humanities of Britney and Dolly and Tammy and Leann and Kesha Rose; these fumbling honesties, these vulnerabilities have never been tools in Taylor's narrative repertoire the way she uses the white girlhood she shares with them has been. She owned her protagonists' anxieties; but those songs have never defined her. This was always the moral to the story of Taylor Swift, to anyone--condemning or compassionate--who cared to really hear it: behind her careful compositions and obsessive pleas, Taylor Swift was never interested in making herself a real person at all. That would have cost her everything she ever wanted. And we, the Cicerone masses, ought very well to ask ourselves, before we let that double-edged sword finally fall: would it have been any more worth it, to anyone, if she had been? [2]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[batterymonster2021]

7 Psychological Effects That Rule Your Whole Life

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7 Psychological Effects That Rule Your Whole Life

Were you aware you might promote a $20 invoice for ten instances its price or then a character you are physically drawn to will not be as sensible and humorous as you believe these things are referred to as cognitive biases and they rule your whole lifestyles with out you even figuring out it listed here are one of the most most outstanding ones beginning with number 7 phenomenon of Max bazerman how rough would it’s to take 20 bucks from an mba student in fact professor max bazerman proves it’s handy peasy in 2010 he first conducted an scan at his type the place he geared up a simple auction he would supply a $20 invoice to the pupil who can pay essentially the most for it the bidding began at $1 the only principles of the public sale the place that bids would best go up by using $1 no less no extra and that the 2d-excellent bidder would pay the entire sum of their bid to the professor so shall we say the quality bid used to be $18 then the 2d-great can be 17 dollars the one who paid $18 would receive the public sale bill and win 2 bucks well the one who bid 17 would simply pay the cash and acquire nothing easy right good at first the public sale went as planned however the stakes rose pretty rapid and quickly the bids reached the nominal value of $20 a pause ensued after which someone bid 21 students started laughing at that however quite the bidding did not stop the auction was turned truly to farce at this factor endured until the students in the end had enough the $20 invoice was offered for 200 $four the overall sum the professor gained totaled $387 as bazerman explained after the tip of the auction it was once the traditional snapshot for any business man or woman he conducted the equal scan with CEOs of important corporations and nonetheless managed to sell the 20 bucks above their face price it all boils all the way down to the truth that no person needs to be the 2nd bidder and lose cash without winning whatever again so the auction continues unless anybody sees the fallacy and decides to discontinue the race many times as you will find it occurs much too late quantity six decoy effect shall we say you’re at an electronics store determining a new SD card for your digicam you see two choices before you one has the potential of 64gb and fees $15 and the other has a storage space of 128gb however fees $30 there is an equal threat of you deciding on either of them some will select greater ability whilst others will go for lessen price which one would you decide upon by the way let me know down in the comments ok and now a third option seems this SD card has the ability of ninety six GB which is greater than the first but minimize than the 2nd but its fee is greater than both it can be $35 this option is known as a decoy and its function is to make the pricier 2nd SD card more favorable within the eyes of consumers indeed while you seem at all three options you without a doubt do not forget handiest the primary two for the reason that the 1/3 one is worse than both of them nonetheless you now look on the 128gb card from an extra perspective it is cheaper than the 96 GB one and as extra cupboard space making it better in all respects the sixty four GB card though is best less expensive than the ninety six GB one but its ability is decrease it can be variety of obvious that you would choose the excellent one proper good advertising and marketing expert obtained you there the only motive why there may be this 0.33 option in the marketplace is to create this decoy to make you buy a more costly product insidious number 5 halo influence adequate talk about cash let’s switch to other concerns ever inspiration how in movies and cartoons excellent characters are often depicted as lovely and appealing to the eye at the same time evil baddies mainly have some repugnant facets like crooked tooth warts or whatever like that this is how our person choice of good and bad character is shaved you can also not become aware of this but when you see an appealing character you tend to magnify their good qualities of persona and that is the gist of the halo outcomes however there’s more to it than that it’s now not only about the bodily features however the overall affect a character makes if she or he is great and charming we usually lengthen these characteristics so everything there is to that individual and our mind attracts them also as sensible funny and witty hmm now that i do know this i will mostly believe my judgment of men and women slightly less oh good quantity four framing influence suppose you’re provided with the alternative of two scientific therapies for some disorder let’s not go into particulars right here the package deal insert for the primary one says it has 80% effectiveness against the sickness at the same time the second one is described as having 20% chance of failure for those who look closely at each of them you’ll be able to conveniently see that they are most likely similar like the equal event however according to data the sizeable majority of individuals would prefer the first treatment over the 2d that is what the framing effect is ready we are likely to select an alternative that is described in a constructive manner even supposing the one other choice is surely the identical individuals will doubtless put out of your mind it in view that it’s been given a terrible description remember the 20% hazard of failure that’s it and the effect clearly applies to something politicians and advertising and marketing experts alike use it so much in their campaigns so pay awareness to the deeper sense no longer the words that body it quantity three phantasm of manage this cognitive bias is on the whole person who describes human nature at high-quality so inform me first when is there a larger danger of entering a avenue accident when you’re using a vehicle or when anybody else is on the wheel and you’re just a passenger hold forth within the feedback i will let you know what the statisticians say about it in a minute in the meantime hear this professor Ellen Langer performed a number of studies to study the perceived control over a crisis considered one of them worried a lottery her subjects had been both given tickets at random or obtained to decide upon their own none of them knew the successful combinations in order that they could not almost certainly comprehend which tickets would have a greater hazard of payoff still the individuals were allowed to trade their tickets to take a look at and win more cash consequently professor Langer saw that humans who chose their possess tickets have been extra reluctant to phase with them also the tickets with familiar symbols were less normally traded than ones bearing specific unfamiliar indicators on high of that despite the fact that the chances were higher subjects with tickets they’d chosen themselves were much less more likely to trade them this suggests that despite the fact that the drawback is utterly random folks tend to believe their choice by hook or by crook influences the outcome we prefer to be in control of the whole lot do not we well I promise to let you know the information for the automobile accident so right here it is the mammoth majority of drivers think that the chances of them getting into one are a lot curb if they’re driving than if they’re using as passengers such self assurance that used to be it authentic for you to give me a like if that was once number two dr.Fox outcomes do not get stressed by the title it is not after any healthcare professional in fact rather the reverse the scan that gave this effect its name was once carried out in 1970 when two speakers gave lectures to an audience of proficient psychiatrists and psychologists the topic was chosen notably in order that not one of the trainees knew some thing about it for the scan to be valid the trap was that some of the lecturers was once a real scientist while the opposite was once an actor Michael Fox below the alias of dr. Myron L Fox an Albert Einstein school of medication graduate when each the precise scientist and the actor gave the lecture in a boring method the students gave higher suggestions to the true lecturer and perform higher on the scan but when they have been both requested to gift the fabric in a more animated manner joking and fascinating the viewers dr.Fox was once rated as extremely because the genuine professor additionally the lecture was once intentionally stuffed with double-speak contradictory statements and downright nonsense but regardless of all that the student spoke very incredibly of dr. Fox’s professionalism and that’s what’s so disturbing about the whole outcome the positive perspective and liveliness of the actor thoroughly fooled a entire audience of particularly trained experts if you happen to ever heard motivational speakers and bought stimulated through their recommendations good possibilities are you’ve got additionally skilled the dr.Foxx result Congrats quantity one spotlight result when you’ve ever felt self-conscious leaving your condo in exceptional socks annoying that all people would laugh and point fingers at you you will have emerge as a sufferer of the spotlight outcomes it is a psychological bias that clearly makes you consider too much of yourself you are the core of your own world that’s for certain nobody lives your existence for you and that’s why you notice every little element in yourself and you naturally tend to suppose that each person else can even see that strange new mole on your forearm or that your nails are not correctly manicured but let’s be sincere how probably do you discover such tiny matters in others my bet is almost under no circumstances that’s considering the fact that every person’s too concerned with themselves to pay a lot awareness to different individuals however don’t get all upset about this it is a greatly fashioned influence just are trying not to believe too much of your own significance in the lifetime of whole strangers so which of those effects have you ever skilled in your own let me recognize down within the feedback in case you learn some thing new at present then supply this video a like and share it with a buddy but hello don’t go anywhere just but we now have over two thousand cool videos so that you can verify out all you need to do is select the left or proper video click on on it and experience keep on the intense side of existence you

[togekissies]

i read the red queen today.............. and, i mean, i read all of it in one day, but i didn’t like it much and i don’t know what i’m gonna tell sarah tomorrow lol (she’s been bugging me to read it)

the premise is: the peasant class (”reds”) has red blood. the upper class (”silvers”) (not all are nobles) have actual silver blood, and with it, neat powers. the silvers force reds that don’t have a job or apprenticeship by age 18 to conscript in the war that’s been going on for 100 years blah blah blah. before anyone asks, yeah, the author’s white.

the main character, mare, is a red living in poverty. she has no skills other than pickpocketing, so she steals things for her family. she’s 17 and knows she’ll be sent to war when she turns 18. she has a younger sister that can embroider, which is a lucrative trade. she also has a male childhood friend who is annoyingly cocky. the story opens with them going to a mandatory event meant to show off the might of the silvers, to scare the reds into submission.

YUP, it’s so blatantly inspired by the hunger games it makes me wonder if it didn’t start off as fanfic.

mare doesn’t get sent to fight to her death or anything--she actually gets a job as a servant by happenstance, serving the silvers. her first day on the job is the... whatever dumb name for the queen choosing ceremony the book had, where basically the noble houses send the ~most talented~ daughter to show her her super awesome powers to try to get one of the princes to want to marry her. and mare, predictably, ends up demonstrating she has powers over electricity even she didn’t know about. (the twist was so damn obvious, like, the fuck)

oh, and she gets the nickname “little lightning girl” from this. hello again, thg.

blah blah in order to hide that a red has powers they decide to claim she’s the lost daughter of a noble house that died out recently, and betroth her to the younger prince. 

it started out kinda interesting? but i couldn’t really shake how the premise was that an actual superpowered human caste was oppressing a non-powered human caste, and the way the narrative presents as the best way to fight it is by... giving some of the oppressed caste powers too. like, it just misses why thg worked. the citizens of the capitol weren’t any better than the citizens in the districts. they were just born into riches. the red queen tries to make us (via mare) care about the silver nobles, by making them feel human, but... they are biologically different from the reds. for no good reason? they have the literal power to destroy innocents with their mind--and a lot of them do!--and that’s why they’re incapable of seeing the reds as fully realized humans. by making the caste system involve ACTUAL SUPERPOWERS......... it really doesn’t make me appreciate the whole “but it turns out murdering silvers is wrong too, it turns out sometimes they have families and feel the occasional human emotion :(” bit the book tries. there’s just no overcoming that power imbalance, why is why the goddamn main character has to get superpowers of her own. 

also, some of the names are just. hilariously first draft. like the author got too attached and kept these hilariously bad names. for example, the town mare comes from stilts. fuckin STILTS. because the buildings are built on stilts, you see. cause i think it’s built on marshy land or something? idfk. then we have characters named will and lucas next to characters named kilorn and ptolemus. there’s just no consistency to it. even within mare’s own family: her siblings are gisa, bree, tramy, and shade. like............. what? honestly i like the punchiness of mare and shade and would have liked to see that sort of thing throughout the reds, while the silvers can get the fancier names. 

oh god and you can totally tell which scenes the author thought of and wrote first, before writing the rest of the book, cause they feel a bit jarring. they don’t quite match, like instead of rewriting or even scrapping them, the author jammed them in to make them fit. 

not only that, but i feel like mare is a weak protagonist. not because she’s actually weak or anything, but because i can’t get a good grasp on her character. you can SO tell the author was trying to write a katniss type character, but trying to shove katniss into acting like a noble wouldn’t have worked, so the author just kinda... makes mare good at it, for no reason? like she gets one morning’s worth of etiquette lessons and then is thrown to the wolves and doesn’t actually do a bad job. it’s so jarring because the mare in the first few chapters i read as always up for a fight, if she needs to. well, it’s textual she always runs if she gets in trouble, but she was down to tussle if she couldn’t. and she’s snappy. but this hardly ever manifests after she has to pretend to be silver, and it devolves into political drama, which i feel the mare of the first few chapters wouldn’t be suited for, and her character changes accordingly. at first mare seemed like an interesting character that wasn’t TOO much like katniss, but now she’s just kinda... half a character.

oh, and the other twists were kinda super predictable, and not in the fun and exciting way they can be if you see them coming. like (SPOILERS) her brother shade not actually being dead. god did i see that coming from the moment someone was like “btw ur bro’s dead.” or maven actually being evil. that felt like hans from frozen all over again. with slightly more hints, but still--the actual betrayal felt super out of left field cause it was all one character telling mare “i don’t trust him” and maven’s mask never ever slipping around her. 

speaking of maven (the second prince, ftr), i can’t tell who he’s supposed to be if this is a thg au. maybe an oc or something. cause the au peeta is obviously the older prince that mare is ~REALLY~ in love with. oh and au gale isn’t actually an irritating piece of shit, mostly cause he has no actual character. this book is about as long as thg is, but it sure sucks at establishing character & dynamics quickly. 

not to mention! basically ALL of the main players in this story are dudes, except for au peeta’s betrothed and the queen, both of whom are baddies. and the leader of the rebels is a woman too, but she has noooo characterization. she’s tough i guess? oh and there’s a female side character who is captured and then takes a cyanide pill.

the aesthetic this book tries to portray is weird, too. like i think everyone is supposed to be wearing kinda medieval-y clothing? but they have technology. like, they have airships and radiation detectors. au peeta fuckin invented a motorcycle. it seems really arbitrary too, since they have lightbulbs and shit but i don’t think they have computers? so like........... how

oh and there’s a line in there about rebellions and sparks becoming fire and shit. it’s so. just. how did it end up in the final copy. just. just cut it. don’t wear the “thg au” badge pls

the writing seems fine, though i have some gripes. like mare will start a paragraph saying one thing, then repeat it at the end like it’s supposed to be a revelation. uh... no? some lines feel really awkward and out of place. it’s in first person present, which i was surprised to discover. most people don’t do either of those things, much less both at once. i don’t actually hate first person like most people seem to (why...?) and write in present tense myself, so i’m cool with it, but i feel like the story isn’t done any favors by being in mare’s head, since, again, i don’t feel like she’s actually a solid character. third person limited may have served this story better. actually i feel like this entire book should have reached the editor and the editor going “alright. now rewrite the entire thing, from scratch.” woulda had a stronger product. 

i know there’s two other books in the series, but i don’t really have much hope it gets better because my biggest gripes are with the premise itself. i’m down for the “young girl destroys and oppressive government” story, hell yeah, i’m not sick of it yet. but damn. do it well. and can we let the katniss and the johanna get together for once? thanks.

[tejarablog-blog]

Minimalism, Mark, Money and Misunderstanding

Minimalism

In a growing debt ridden world, advertisements, lifestyle chasing, ever elongating lists of must haves, a number of people have been adopting a minimalist approach. Minimalism, quite simply is the ‘less is more’ mentality. Having less stuff, spending on experiences rather than things, focusing on things that matter are all minimalist mantras. People are either forced into minimalism by circumstance, or they embrace it willingly; Either way, it is a beautiful thing. It is a decluttering exercise that brings clarity and helps you prioritize.

Mark Zuckerberg

The Independent published an article, where they enlightened us with the reason why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same clothes to work every day. Very similar to the reasons why late Steve Jobs did the same; To focus on the things that matter, and to reduce any irrelevant decision making stress that gets in the way of doing what they’re doing. Minimalism in practice? Yes!

So where is all the misunderstanding?

I’ve been at war with myself, and I’ve come to realize, other folks are too. How do I become a minimalist and feed my growing family? How do I travel and live experiences? Will I have to resort to writing or a drop shipping business for a living? If everyone adopts ‘minimalism,’ will everyone become a writer or a speaker to pay bills? What happens if everyone wants to be a minimalist, what happens to millions of people working in advertising, restaurants, production, and just about everything? I mean if you look at it, everything besides food, shelter and a few basic necessities, becomes irrelevant. The truth is, there are many questions such as these, all of which point to the need for money.

Money changes hands through an exchange of goods and services. No one is going to pay you to have only 50 belongings, or an all white themed room with just a laptop and cactus plant. There needs to be an exchange of goods or services, a way you add value to someone to gain a monetary return to sustain a living. That’s just how it works.

I say, why do we then need to make stuff evil? Being a minimalist is one thing, but imposing the idea that acquiring things is evil of some sort is just impractical. Even if you’re a hardcore minimalist, you’ll find yourself selling or buying something. You need both to sustain. Coming back to Mark Zuckerberg and his wardrobe; He is often considered an ideal for minimalists. A successful minimalist possibly.

Here’s how an uninformed minimalist would think. Mark is a minimalist too, he wears the same clothes; I hate Gucci, and I don’t need all these brands, products and unnecessary clutter in my life. Re-think how Facebook works for a second. Isn’t it all advertising and selling you products? How are they making so much money? Isn’t it all just business?

Let’s not go into what is right and wrong about Facebook.

Bottom-line is, Facebook is a business. For that matter, do not fool yourself that Steve Jobs was only about wearing the same clothes every day. He was selling products! He sold a tonne load to all of us.

Where does all of this lead us to, as ‘frustrated/slightly confused minimalists?’

Instead of a lifestyle, minimalism should be a tool used to enhance our human experience. It should not be a competition to have fewer items in our house or only having possessions that could fit in a backpack. It should only be used by us to determine what matters the most to us. The keyword being, us. What might be a must have for you could be a useless, time wasting, stress creating item for someone else, and vice versa. So why shame every product or every item that we think is unnecessary. It could mean volumes to someone else.

I do not think the world can sustain itself without products and services. Human’s are creators, entrepreneurial, competitive, collaborative and have an inbuilt need to trade—goods,services and ideas. I believe it is comforting to understand that.

Instead of shaming every product which is irrelevant to us individually, maybe we can learn to appreciate the human effort that went into creating it, marketing it, and making it on the shelf so to speak. As a reminder, for myself first, let us take minimalism as a personalized tool to make us efficient, and as a way of decluttering our path to our personal priorities.

Happiness does not only come from getting rid of stuff and by living with less, it also comes from the joy of creating something that someone buys with their hard earned cash because they saw value in it.

Even as a minimalist, you’ll find yourself trading something to make a living. So why shame others who are trying to trade something else? If you are someone who is having second thoughts on setting up a business, or selling something, because you do not want people to be pestered with yet another thing to own, rethink. Trade is a part of human nature.

[violetganache42]

She is responsible. In the video, she talked about how she was previously in charge of the marketing department, the department that specialized in toy production. It's strongly implied that she pretty much used those skills to make a majority of Cartoon Network shows into only toy-driven franchises.

Figures. Networks like CN always seem to heavily depend on toy sales just to promote their cartoons. Although I’m glad Toonami returned, it still doesn’t change the fact that Christina Miller is a terrible CEO; she has zero respect for the CN fans and primarily has her mind set on the shitty toy driven shows instead of the cartoons with high rating like Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball, Clarence, Uncle Grandpa, and Sonic Boom. Honestly, I hate it when networks have a money-centric mind sets—it’s always about profits before ratings. Speaking of which, I would like to quote something from a post on @mrenter’s DA account:

“If the toy-line fails, but the cartoon is successful–end the stupid toy-line, and continue the show. It’s not that fucking hard.”

Popular cartoons like Young Justice, the ThunderCats reboot, Sym-Bionic Titan, Tower Prep, and Green Lantern were all cancelled due to poor toy sales and it upsetted a lot of the series’ fans.

On an additional note, I can name some other shows that focus on ratings rather than toy sales: Star vs. The Forces of Evil, Gravity Falls, We Bare Bears, Adventure Time, Regular Show (R.I.P.), Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, etc. My Little Pony is still a toy driven franchise, but if I remember correctly, Friendship is Magic used to be driven on ratings before making its episodes merchandise driven, starting with the Season 2 finale; even the G3 toys sold well despite having a crappy G3 series. At least they are smart enough to interact with the fanbase on special occassions like conventions to hear their opinions on their franchise in general. As for Yu-Gi-Oh!, it obviously was a hit with manga readers before becoming focused on Duel Monsters and collectible trading cards (ARC-V slightly focuses on character development than the actual card games more than all the YGO series combined, according to TV tropes).

I just wish Miller had the decency to listen to what the people are saying is wrong with CN and try to fix it, but since she is focused on making it “the official cartoon station,” she has pretty much signed its death sentence and/or gave them a one way trip to Hell, so unless she actually does something to fix this mess, I will never watch any of its stupid “hit” shows such as Teen Titans Go! (In reality, I could care less for TTG) and the terrible Powerpuff Girls reboot.

Now I need to show my older brother this video because he needs to know why CN sucks.

[johntropea]

Statement of principle: Technology is never value-neutral.

Brilliant essay by Waleed Aly on the effect technology has on values, the new behaviours that result, and how this shakes the professionalism and ethics of media and journalism...and the new consumption behaviours and patterns that ensue

Transcript here

Video here 

He is a remarkable speaker...doesn’t preach...and doesn’t exclude himself from the negative patterns he presents

Statement of principle: Technology is never value-neutral.

It might allow us to do things we already do more easily. It may offer us new ways of delivering the same service. But it never does merely that.

You can choose just about anything to illustrate this point. The invention of the motor car didn’t merelyallow us to move faster from A to B. It completely changed the possibilities of what A and B were. It didn’t merely save us time, it contracted physical space, and with it, contracted social space. It is only when the motor car became available that the vast modern city became possible: spread out over distances that once upon a time would have encompassed different villages or even rural areas. I won’t waste your time grinding this out, but the point is that this technology changed our entire social organisation.

[…]

So it is simply naïve in my view to assume that as the platforms for journalism change, that the very idea of journalism itself will be somehow remain unaffected; that whether we’re talking about a printed newspaper, a broadcast news bulletin or a website, that we’re merely talking about different platforms for delivering the same content. We’re not. Each of these platforms has its own inherent values system. Each imposes its own requirements on the content it carries.

…And this has a repeated editorial impact.

Stories lie abandoned by television programs all the time because there’s simply no vision to carry them, for example. Broadcast media will decline to speak to certain people, even if they have world-leading expertise on a subject, simply because they don’t speak in a way that comes across well in the medium…

[…]

These limitations are no one’s fault, particularly. It’s as though the medium itself seems to impose them

….The point, to reiterate, is that different mediums will impose different values.

[…]

If I had to come up with a set of online values as they express themselves in media, I’d probably say speed and shareability were the top two.  

…you can see it in the way people will actually apologise on social media if they share something that has been around for more than a day, lest they look like they’re off the pace. That’s actually quite a profound practice: to be slow online, even slightly, is embarrassing. It requires some token of self-awareness, like an apology, because without it, it’s like we’re risking our social status. That’s why it’s more than a consequence of online interaction: it’s a value; a way of measuring our worth.

[…]

Now, speed has always been a value within journalism. Ever since reporters have existed, they’ve wanted to “scoop” each other, be first on the scene, first with the story. And that value has always existed in tension with other journalistic values such as accuracy, context and the explanation of stories.

…But I think the results are potentially radioactive when you combine this with the premium on shareability. To see how this works, consider the context.

The online explosion has meant we have access to more information than ever before. What we don’t have is the time to sort through it, weigh it against other information and consider what the consequences of it are. The result of all this increased speed is therefore increased noise. Our world, and especially our media culture – is just so loud. News, and reactions to news are now so omnipresent that they’re ambient: on screens constantly in public places as well as the most mobile private ones. It’s like we’re living our lives to an industrial soundtrack: the constant grinding of gears in the background. And yet it is the lifeblood of media organisations to attract attention; to be noticed somehow above the din. In online terms, that means to be shared. To invite have your audience harvest your clicks for you. To achieve virality. That leaves us with some pretty new measures of journalistic success.

…online articles are valued if they generate an enormous comments thread and lots of hits. That’s not a point about the evils or otherwise of social media. It’s a point about how what role we want it to play in deciding what is and isn’t successful journalism.

[...]

...although we think of ourselves as professionals, journalism isn’t really a profession in the traditional sense. It’s not like medicine or the law. We have an ethical code of sorts, but we’re not bound to it by some solemn oath. There are no induction ceremonies in which people wear ridiculous gowns or hats. There’s no official body that can strike us off the roll for malpractice.  And no one is suggesting there should be. The truth is that in traditional terms, we’re a trade. We’re pretty much self-regulated. If we stuff up, we publish a notice or an apology, maybe pay a fine if it’s serious, and we move on. We lose our jobs not because we lose our licence to practice but because our jobs either disappear, or our reputations are damaged enough to mean our market value has crashed. If we’re unethical but valuable, there’s nothing to stop us, really.

That means that when we face enormous commercial pressures, we’re vulnerable. It’s easy for us to adopt whatever values commercial realities demand. And as I’ve already said, I’m in no position to criticise the people who have to circle this particular square

(via Waleed Aly presents the 2016 Andrew Olle Media Lecture | About the ABC)

Related

Social media is, at its heart, a media model that thrives off of more; more content, more clicks, more attention. Because of that, social media sites wants more content and more engagement - not necessarily better content or better engagement.

[...]

Communities can do that because they create contextualized, trusted dialog that brings people together - reducing segmentation and extremismvia

via Rachel Happe - Social Media is Broken…. Communities Can Help

We’ve seen the race to the bottom play out, and it’s not pretty. Newer social media managers are particularly vulnerable to demands from organisations asking them to transgress boundaries to get a reaction – any reaction. Stoke a generational debate, play the race card, hot or not. They’re tabloid tactics that have been with us over a century, but they’re no more about meaningful engagement than than they ever were.

[...]

Communities are easily confused with social media. But when it comes to filter-bubbles, there’s no contest. Communities can actively reduce polarisation. The Wikipedia community has been studied at length for its success in promoting less segregated conversations. Communities proactively create culture, and culture ‘sells’ more powerfully than any product offering. Do you have the tools to steer culture on your social channels?

via Venessa Paech - Social media is dead. Long live community.

[throwingideasatthewall]

Clone Wars    Kidnapped

Also, yeah how do you   follow up an episode like that?

    Also isn’t this like the     second kidnapped episode?

Oh

You know we actually needed the levity so that I am completely OK with the saving a   thing plot,

  Gives time to breathe-

Ho-nest,      This place looks pretty     neat,

[Though they still knowingly enabled     Tox be    hav-ior]

This is the equivalent of someone ditch    -ing productivity,      And att      -em       pt       Ing          To     Go     Straight         To     creat-iv-ity        Before      anything’s       set up,]

And I should really be careful   not   to get distracted by the pretty lights,

Wa-     rr    ior-

Well least      tox

  Whe         lp,       In-        Sti        gators       ,    Fe      ck,      -      Oh hey that   war we enabl     -ed

 Whelp

Okay, seriously who is that guy?         (Normally I wouldn’t be so nervous        (but the last few episodes                 Not Krell          The under water                   One)       Introduced a guy of a   random species that we have never heard or seen of    and he died before we ever did,

            So,

             I’m                   a                  Little                Nervous                    ,     (I like different   species,)

His design       seems      nice          ...    Neu       tral.

Yet we won’t assume the amount of   accoun-   tability necessary to     enforce it       Don’t get      me wrong;     I don’t want an  infinity war

  But if you enable, be prepared for the consequences and/or to push it back, (what      ever        You       Left,)         Whenever        it comes for your life,         For the rest of it,  (Or until you snap and       hold it accountable,)

      Pro-tection

Usual spiel    but it works.

You know that would’ve worked really well with overinvolved     positivity,

  Though at this point it’s pretty clear they are going for the clear-cut        Jedi- are      Posit         Ive          Ly         Over-          Involv        e               -d-            (Sith - negative)

  And more so         general   “everyone is a     shithead,”         Kinda         Vibe.

   Which is perfectly fine,

    Why?

   That’s a lot

 [also never mind with the     - warning - or get into lines,]

  Obi-Wan looks really young-er      in the scene for some reason

     -His face

         -it’s too smooth

           - and are his eyes a bit bigger?

  10

  Also yeah they specifically told us not to get involved and that they were going to do it on their own       I-n.       Ia        tiv        e

   But screw that

  “Let’s   escalate the situation!”

   Despite that being literally what the dude       fears and probably        his nightmares

                              [screw respecting other adult’(s) initia     tive]

    I know Dooku is implied to be really feckin tox also

   But talk means nothing

   Dude has to have the actions       Attempt it on himself and decide what to do for        himself,

     He’s decided to enable,          Ain’t nothing       that can be done         about that,

[What    was that look?

   [also did Obi-Wan not ask what happened               down there?]

               Great

                Time for   warfare

                 For the Jedi that can’t take a   “no,”             For an   an   -swer

 Gr      -e         a-t        -       ?       Voice    -act         -ing       -       People        Shield             -               What,          I’ve-         Watch          -ed             The     Watton           Boar         -         Arc-           -      -Battle

   Yeah but it’s      -also      pretty     bullshit          - (when have the separatist ever respected the Gen       eva convention?)

    Rex-        Has a           Feck’in            Point

   I

(Also that doesn’t tell them anything this could be    basic    clankers    when no   in fact they are commando droids              )

Ana       Kin’s         Voice      De-eper?

Com       -man                  do-

       [I have a feeling they���re really trying to contest           the we have no fig           -h-ters)

         Lin                  e-             -             A-g                  ain-

        O-h                           Sir,           Oh,           ,           Also, how?

     But also         ok that            guy,

               Surprisingly,     calm        ly      spoken-

    So this could make a great scene    contrasting Obi- won’s I believe   moral nature,       With another strategist that seems to be believing some kind of     chivalry

   [Also, OH SHIT,   is that where they’re keeping the     pris    oners,

  Whelp

   Anakin is a         dick to        holograms,

Seriously      you could’ve      just turned it off,

     [if you had news       or opinion to share        ?)- 

Ok, where the    fuck?

    [Don’t, get me wrong I know Anakin,         was an ex slave,           Everything else             is new..  .  

 Including his    rage towards it,

      Me,

 Hey, they’re being smart    about this,         -                        Up-   s-   et-

Yes,   thank you,   did I miss     something?

P-ast

Doesn’t     justify any of this     bullshit. .

I     mean,

Literally no one     is smarter   than anyone else

 So       Ana        Kin,      ,      OK but that’s a whole different species     and/or a group - -           this is not “past”    this is I just hate feck     -ing    sl-av        er s              -                       And possibly un-vented            anger at trauma-         -                          Either way pretty damn           va                 -lid                  -                         Dis-              trust                 -              Whe-  

Oka-y         ,          I don’t- 

  Also is that an animal or     sentient?            - A game      I find myself playing           to no         One         ‘s      Cha        -grin-         -,         Oh

    Arro         gan      -c-          e

    Ah- tak        e?          ,            Also he has a    non-evil       pet           -            That’s kinda          cute

       But also kinda sad,            Hint,ing          at the fact              Dude was probably intended to be some kind of   animal      focus        (Someone who works around or just generally likes animals - special             ity)

       Before he went     corrupt

            (Showing some    interest in keeping them out of the battlefield,                    And                  Fond-ness)

       Or this could just be a short han     d-e        d symbolism                 For              slavery          and   grooming          -          Both    -work           -             Do        -Tell           -          [oh yeah         dude totally gave away his plan,]

     Despite Obi-Wan almost clearly not being          in earshot

     Nice interaction         * introduction

   Also     ,doesn’t he         already know,            Holo-gra       -m    -         Formal     in-         tro         duc-          tions            -                Are           Nice,             -              Er-

    Seriously what is up with         these two            people?

     Also why did dude           growl?

    For people that look like cats      they sure act like dogs              (Bor- d       -er)        (Nothing wrong with that-        just-         curious-             “      -i

    How?

    Also they’re just really shout-ing their      plans out here      aren’t they?

    S-u        -rr          en-          der-            -           Obi- won    still playing        along..     ——           W-help            -           He       gave        him            a         chance             -         Whelp-

    O-k

  Honestly he’s acting pretty calm and      diff-erent-ly characterized,             The Kenobi we know wouldn’t raise             a hand to help even himself                   (In ani.)             Also            I’m surprised Aniken hasn’t stumbled across anything by           now,

       Thought that would be the        crutch            of the narr-ative tension in the          office,

       But          Aight           ,         Calling the chips early is completely fine I will never have an issue with chara-     ter     -(s-     acting slightly smarter than expected,

Though wish Anakin had shown some kind of      initia-       tive-

 Like the stories telling us that he’s really      pumped up   “about      the     whole      slave      thing,”          . . .         But has just found          nada when it comes down to      rescuing the slaves,         Or just finding any hints about this    oper     -ation      in general,

To summarize;     What the heck has Aniken been doing the last minute      and a half             ~              ?            No-thing

[like if everyone had told him to chill due to his       clear aggression     believe he caused some harm      in his rage,

   And sent         Ahsoka         in-stead

         That would make a lot    more sense,

  [and make up Obi- wan look like less of a              Irrational Dick        By sh(ar-ing) Anakin‘s backstory         without any permission       or reason,

    While there    he might have to explain to       Ahsoka    why he’s sending her      and not Anakin,]

  Just-        Writer       Th-       ough   -t-         -      Treat-        ment          -    “ You have broken        through my         defenses,”

   Emotionally             or            ...      physically?             . .           Never           mind-

        Would’ve              been nice      if someone actually took him up on that          offer               -              (Like some villain(/enabler) is like you know what my job sucks,    my boss sucks, I could really use an       nap...

    Sure]     ..     They were just standing there          ...      doing nothing,

     Like,      Dude literally just said       there were bombs planted all over the city,

  And, no one’s in a ru-sh            to fix that-

       Or use them to find the           kidnapped people..

[I   mean      fair       ...    but      geez.

   Colo      -nists,

     Again,      where are they?            . . .             You supposedly sent Anakin to find       - them but we haven’t seen anything           -               Also yeah the dude is totally going to give up    his only bargaining     chip         . . .           After being          out gunn        -ed-            -            Well             -           Also you have one button that only activate(s     one mine?

          Like did you, set that up just for the purpose of    in-timi     dating people

   Also congrats    you likely threw away    your only bargaining chip                 -      because from his point of view     the explosion already went off-                        -       And he doesn’t know that you had one     specific button just for that      one mine-             -      (Like it   doesn’t sound that loud but he could’ve gotten     hear-ing probl-em (s-) from the      near- by      explosions,     )

  We-         ll-

   “Col-on-ists,”

  Oh     good thing you told him after you destroy-ed the       thing-

   And he didn’t go into attack mode and you have a light saber press-ed to your throat-

   dumb

I’m sorry but that’s just so adorable

   Look         at            it;

   Man like(s soft squishy things and    he doesn’t seem to be      hurt          ing-           -it,

      Like,           How               ?

        Also, did       no one check               for               that               shit?

Like,      No-

Me-      dic

 Wh-       el        p-

  Bo-

 Several people      -just died           And he         comforts the    robot.. .

   Dick

Also, Maybe       It’s be       cause         Cody         is     Obi-Wan’s        Gen.       (Generation          or      General)            Doesn’t     make much         of a        dif-ference?            -         That          this        flies?      (I mean I can        understand him not giving       too much of a heck,       Due to this being a war      caused by this guys’             Gen,         But     seriously,)

     Also yeah            kinda          ,dick             ,          Screw         medical     attention,

      Well,

     That’s a lot of faith          for a whole              lot a          nothing,

     Also let’s go do the thing       we were supposed to be doing            this entire time,

   (I think)

  My brain started going numb and I half paid    attention            -         Oh, wait 

now we’re getting into the back      story?

 After they’re on the planet

  Without any       pre-emption?

 -Er

My brain      cells      are    asleep,        -        Al        -ive         -           Seriously, what is up with the   -bird     thing,

   (I really hope     it factors into his character)

   Or is brought up

  Frust-      trat-      Ion

“Zy,”

  Dude they’re slave traders    I really don’t think     you want to do that          (Just           a       thought)

Also maybe     suggest     trading        him some       exotic animals,

   Dude seems to have a pen      -chant

   And he seems to treat them    re-     lati       vely       well,

   (There   are some in cages but that just seems to be for      transport,                         ) -  no I thought you should ever take animals        out of a pre-         ferr              ed         Safe  climate

       But he could have one set up            abet a smaller one,

        Wha?             (The      voice acting           there           was         weird,)

       Also, really?

    That’s the     competition?

 (Is there ever a tradition..   

    That isn’t fighting?)

  Also, okay,

 but is it like some kind of style of fighting?

     (I swear he you challenges him to sword fighting.)

   Then again Zy-         ger-          Ian-       fighting-

  Dif-ferent rules   could be interesting

   Possibly establish           Obi-Wan                 as                a          well traveled              man,

                   (So long as he isn’t allowed to use his                         feck -in light saber,                             -) (Which     Anakin      hasn’t        been       doing         at all,

 Also lower      ed risks     are nice,

Again, not saying anything about     deactivating em,

Also what the fuck is with that guy’s facial   expressions,

  Like ever since that moment       it has gone     insane,       (As in I can’t for my life     read what they’re trying to express,       And that is the closest     translation;       I can come up with,

Never   mind      -   he’s an asshole      -    Even th-

  Screw         It

  (The       logic         is not on        the high setting           with this one.”

       Any way,              Per-

        That’s

         [do you know how back when I was revie-       wing the movie I thought about how the escalation one from         1 to 10 and the characterization switched on a dime?

               -Not to   insult,

    But this is starting to feel a lot like   that-

 My brain already very checked out at this   point-

Because I     really   don’t    need      it for     this-      -   W-

  Constant      Characteri-zation?!

   What-  

[Excuse me while I sit over here drinking my       ‘wtf just happened,’          juice

   You know      when I was reviewing (Earlier) scenes       like this;           I used to give it somewhat of a pass    saying;              (Some        thing       along           the          lines            of)

       Well people change on a dime,

  Which I’m starting to realize    getting further into this;        Is that you need some kind of sentiment       Or pre-       -empt         To        Connect          Those           Thoughts      -             The           eyes             need              to           narrow                 -               The             body          language            needs              to             change                 -      The     music       (perhaps)        a subtle       change in tone;         -        It can’t change on    that much of a dime        -

            I               don’t               need                   a                  lot;                 Just some kind of indication about what the      feck just happened,     -             Because otherwise it’s just    spaghetti      -         Like I’m sorry     but it’s true-              -      The expressions before were completely unreadable      and down          right-        unhuman,

      There was no word      ,cues to indicate anything

      And the music     which could’ve been a brief    Cue,        Of whether this is supposed to be        abrupt or         instigated,             Well I don’t,     think there is any,   

                        Fix scen;                                    e

                     This guy smirks, possibly chuckling, the bird leaving his           arm-, possibly pre-facing it with, “ well then,  let’s          be-gin,” or a body posture is simply leaning in before     pouncing,

      Telling me    this is part of the plan,

        And that’s Zygrians value a more wild style of fighting with the element of surprise      being      emphasiz       ed-

    Which makes sense considering what seems to be a      hunting         focus,

    With snark following up either confirming or     denying,  

    That as true           (Or          False)

     That his actions were        prec-        edent-        ed         or        not,

      As it stands,  

   There was no      Cue

    And I’m        completely          lost.              . . .           Whel            -p

                           Well that was a bunch of nothing                                                                                  .  .  .                               Which is a shame because it had a lot of good     subjects to focus on, Slavery, the difference between Wild and Order, tam-ing, groom-       Ing,      Cap-       tivity              -         The concept of an invasive species,

     Unfortunately the writing is so inconsistent,      And generally        poor,         That it can’t carry a beat for longer than a few     min-utes

        Well I’ve noticeably praised the attempt to take on a higher intensity material

         That doesn’t give an     excuse for the apparent drop in quality

          Often; i’ve said that            stupid villains are fine

        However       the thing that often irritates me         in those episodes;           Isn’t that the villain’s            Stupid   

          It’s the lack of          self-awareness             (Not in the poking            fun of one’s                 self                 way)

  Is that it isn’t        framed that way,

  (No snark,    very little realistic the consequences without drawing attention to it,        And very little change       except the     villain is now Stupider          Though it attempts to keep the same dramatic tension          and stakes)

   In sum        -mary:

    While I think this episode had a lot of interesting concepts to work with they will unfortunately             Wasted                   By the episode lack of commitment, consistency, and constant characterization,

      Most        notably;

     - Anakin’s resent             -ment                    Of          slavery             (His care of it turns off and on like a light switch and his intensity             varies)

         Functioning less like a Berzerk/.              accountability button                  (Mild               Responsibility)  

               And                 more                  like                   an                excuse            to have him             flip his lid,

             Make                   odd                 facial            expressions,  

             And generally put, shout  put emphasis In a nonsensical bordering on                  inhumane way

                What seems to be a disturbing trend (with the characters       ;)

               Specifically the                  Zygarian                     here

                 And                      Ani             

              -The                 difference               between            wild and tamed;                   Along with a constant theme of slavery,                  It’s paired with the constant imagery                 of animals in cages

             Which would be fine if it was actually presented as an               excessive detail,

             But the focus is put on it and nothing ever seems to come of it

            (Almost as if it’s expected that just by having      it there, the motif comes with it)

             Which no

             Animals in cages and...            What?

             Like, I have an idea         what they’re trying to hint at,

             But until           the story commits;

             “These animals           are very much like you,”

               Then it remains in                        limbo,

 As wasted time          And wasted     emphasis,            -

      The Zy-             Gar            Ian             (s)          backstory;           Note      this works off another point         about captivity,

        Now, from the little bits,  I could get from the conversation;

        The Republic                inter                   fer                  r                   e                  d,                   Note; this seems to be a pretty big deal

   The antagonist      esp          ecially             affec               t-                e-d

           By                  It,

  But we never learn much about it      or him        (How it affected)

    Yeah he re-peats           Some          po-ints;            But it’s never elaborate-         d on

         What exactly       hap-pened to him?

          What exactly       hap-pened with the conflict?

           How?

            To be more                  precise;                     This presents the idea of a rather fas-       cin-        at        ing      conflict about the over- involve-ment of an outside species into              a           Nother’s            Planet          -           And I don’t think it really       utilizes it

       Drop      ping it almost instantly,          For an almost emotion-    less        fi-        gh          t,        Where are dude repeats ‘they were happy,        And generally everything except “I”             (How he was affected)                 Or any authentic emotion

       Just unread         able        inhumane       expressions            . . .       Not much in the way of themes,        motifs,            Or anything of         real        sub-      stance-         -       Sub      Category;           The clones got injured in an            attack;             This is not treated with any sort of        heaviness              -             Or even note             (Nor to the status/            theme of captiv-               ity- or                Sta              Tus                In               The              Empire-)

            Or         represen-tation               of             order,

           (And is quite point blank pointless)

           Not to speak of the ending where the Anakin is         almost point-blank informed                  That the captives are being held on                    Ty-                    Ger                        ia/                        By the Ty-                       ger-ians

                Po-int being;                      This is pretty subst                  antless                          Sn                            -ack,                             That lacks any kind of consis          tence

       - And isn’t.          worth the                watch,

           (With             nothing              set up)

          (Might’ve wanted to go with an                 R2-D2/ (CpO?) episode)                   Work on that tone                first

               Before trying anything serious,                   With that robots scream of absolute terror                  upon its death..