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cannibalisticdespair · 7 months ago

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🔥the casts of dr 1 and dr 2🔥

I love both sets, but tbh I prefer DR1. Literally the only way I can phrase my issue with SDR2 is that it's too anime. And yeah, some of that is because of the VR, but like, not remotely all of it. Like, you get what I mean, right? DR1 has some wacky nonsense, but it's a lot more grounded in general. It's wackier and sillier than Distrust was, but the dark horror of Distrust still is felt. It's claustrophobic. You can easily understand why everyone would want to get out without needing Komaeda there to make it worse for everyone and there being a giant bomb. Like, DR1 feels like a Fallout Vault, because that is literally what it is honestly. Door and everything.

SDR2, everyone is dialed up to eleven. Genocider feels out of place in DR1, which is the intent. Would she in SDR2? No. And it's not SDR2's fault that their reactions to some of it don't hit the same way for the viewers. It's the genre conventions. Yeah, they're like "holy shit what the fuck" about the giant robots, but for your average weeb, giant robots are a day ending in Y. It's not a human-level threat, it's an anime threat. Big ticking bomb in the middle of everything doesn't quite create the same atmosphere as a naturally psychologically destructive environment. Like, if you removed the giant bomb and killer robots and Komaeda, nobody would want to escape enough to ever kill anyone.

DR1? Yeah, they'd have turned to murder with just the memory wipe, no Monokuma even needed. Lock 15 strangers in a well-equipped and nice to live in Vault with no idea how they got there and no idea what's going on and they're gonna turn to murder from the sheer stress of it eventually. What makes it bearable is the knowledge that it's worse outside. Remove that and grant the hope of escape and the sheer despair of not having any hope of achieving that hope is enough to break most people.

Also there's the factor of how Junko plays the game. In DR1, she's just pushing their natural impulses and they're falling into their own darkness. SDR2? Fuckin despair plague. Trick house. Real Junko doesn't cheat like that. AI Junko cheats. Remember, Despair Disease inverts the personality of those it infects. That's also relevant for Komaeda discussion. I mentioned the NIS America stuff earlier. Now, if he's saying the exact opposite of what he means, Bizarro style, what does it mean when he expresses deep, strong hatred of Hajime? The exact opposite.

But then, it's just cheating to force Mikan to kill. Because it's so outside her nature, truly the exact opposite of who she is. And then the trick house. "I'll kill you all if someone doesn't kill someone!" Real Junko never resorted to such pathetic, underhanded shit. It's blackmail to force someone to kill. The killer and victim are equally heroic for it. It's not them falling to their own moral issues, it's them being so moral that they're both willing to sacrifice themselves to save everyone, while also being such madlads that they go "hey, that means we can have an all-out fight to the death!" Which, again, so anime.

Like, Sakura in DR1, her entire talent is physical combat. The only use of her talent is being a human wrecking ball and fighting Monokuma. The only actual fight in DR1 is just Sakura fighting Monokuma. An entire trial of SDR2 is framed around who was the winner of the shonen battle.

Because of all that, I just find myself liking the DR1 cast more in general. They're more grounded and human. Like, even knowing Gundham is supposed to be a chuuni, he fails to come off as one. The vibe is such that such a person doesn't feel out of place, and he just constantly is selling it. It's kinda pro wrestling, in a good way. Like, realistically you know The Undertaker and Kane aren't undead, one a zombie who once was brainwashed by his step-dad who raised him from the dead but killed him and took his freedom and the other his brother who killed him and became basically Jason Voorhees, but like, they sell it.

You can believe it, because both of them give the vibes. And yes, I know they're both pieces of shit irl, that has already been ruined for me. Gundham's like that. And then in his execution you just have the waters muddied further. Was that just because of the NWP? Or is he fuckin legit about his magic powers and it just applies here? Because like, he certainly didn't seem remotely surprised. He knew it would work. Someone might go "oh come on of course it's the NWP", but y'all, Komaeda's right fuckin there with his magic powers. Komaru's over in Towa City with her magic powers along with her superpowered retired psychosexual serial killer gf. There's too many magic powers in this franchise now to discount magic powers.

And yes, Genocider displays her superpowers in DR1. She's immune to explosions, remember? But again, that feels out of place. She feels out of place. None of the magic powers in SDR2 feel out of place. Everyone's much larger than life in SDR2. In DR1, that's their initial impression, but then that facade is torn away and they're just people. The talents themselves are also less intense. Sakura and Genocider are the most over the top, and I've discussed them both. The rest? An extremely skilled detective? A nepobaby? A biker gang leader? A gambler/con artist? A doujin artist? Baseball? Heck, not all of them are even weird for their age. Leon, Aoi, and Kiyotaka are just "yeah, that makes sense". Mondo's a bit impressive for that at his age, but not that impressive. Street gangs are youth culture. But like, high school sports? Duh. Literally just the biggest kissass in the nation? Okay, makes sense. Olympic swimmer? Yeah, a massive amount of Olympians are teenagers.

And like, the Aoi/Akane contrast. Both of them are Zero Escape references, sharing the names of a brother and sister duo from that series. Both of them are Olympians. Both have a habit of nudity in public (Aoi mentions liking to stand on the balcony naked and feel the fresh air). Both are darker skinned than the rest of the cast. Neither have sports that should be useful to their present situations. But Akane? One of the best fighters in SDR2. And that's just like... weird? Gymnast-muscular and fighter-muscular are two different builds.

Her backstory makes perfect sense for how she's like this, yes. But like... not her sport. Why's she a gymnast? Frankly, Volleyball Player would have actually made a hell of a lot more sense. That's an Olympic sport, and her build being akin to what Mukuro would logically have (stats be damned) would fit perfectly. Her being a gymnast once again hits the dissonance button. I'm sure there's other examples, but gymnast is an odd one. The main connection gymnastics has to being a great fighter is that both require extremely high bodily kinesthetic intelligence. I have no problem with anything regarding Akane here except that they chose gymnast for the sport she does. It doesn't even ever make it's way to being relevant, it could have been different with no impact on anything except making sense.

But I've gone on for so fucking long here, so let's call it now. Point is, I appreciate the tense and more down to earth atmosphere of everything, including the cast, of DR1 more. It just sets a much stronger horror-suspense vibe that I feel SDR2 doesn't have as much because of the anime vibe.

#despair.irl #ask #moots #ask game #danganronpa

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muiltifandomnerd · 1 year ago

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Adventures of Chika Hanabusa: The Restoration of Earth

Disclaimer: This book follows the events of Percy Jackson and Heros of Olympus fanfic, This fanfic will not include Trails of Apollo, The Kane Chronicles, and Magnus Chase.

Chapter 1: School Attack

Chika PoV

The alarm clock was going off and I quickly got out of bed. Today was Friday so I put on my green and white cheer uniform. The cheer uniform is a white pleated skirt with a green trim line, and the top is white with green spelling that says Oakwood Senior High School. I also pick up my scythe, which can transform into a pencil. I walked downstairs and saw my dad making scumble eggs and getting ready to work on the farm. My father is a buff Japanese guy who has scars around his arms, and he has a ponytail and a beard. He is wearing a farmer hat, flannel shirt, and jeans. His name is Isshin Hanabusa, and he use to be part of the Japanese military, but he decided to move to America to become a farmer. He met my godly mother, Demeter, at an agricultural convention and both fell in love with each other.

"How is your sleep, my precious princess? By the way, did you pack your scythe?" he asks as he hugged and kissed me on the cheeks. I’m very lucky to have a good dad, he taught me how to deal with the stresses of life and how to deal with the mythological world.

I hugged him back and kissed him on the forehead, "I did put my scythe in my pencil pouch in pencil form. Hey Dad, I’m happy that we get to have the farm and take care of animals. Once the game is over, I might make dinner later on.” I say as I winked at him.

He smile a calm smile and say in a soft voice, "Don't worry about dinner, I was thinking that we can have some food from Quickway Hibachi. Have fun at the game and maybe find a nice girl at your school.”

I blushed like crazy and say “Maybe, well anyway I must get going.”

“Don’t forget your pompoms and be a kickass cheerleader as always.” As he laughs while he hands me the pompoms.

“I will forever be a badass as always dad, maybe I could save a princess or a queen from danger. I can be like a superhero who can control plants or even the Earth.” I chuckle as I say that. I’m glad that my father accepted me as a lesbian demigod, I truly love him and I hope I can make him proud someday. I wonder if I can spend some time with my mother Demeter. I know that she's a goddess that must look after the Earth and feed all living things, someday I hope I can lighten her burden. I remember Demeter gifted me a scythe and told me the truth about what I am and hugs me very tightly and says she loves me and doesn't want me to be part of her world. She is still traumatized by how Hades just kidnaps her daughter and Zeus lets it happen. Mother doesn't love her brothers for what they did to her, and she will gladly sock all three of them in the face. Mother does get along with her sisters and always says nice things about Hera and Hestia to me and how all three of the girls are best friends. Mother also told me how she lived in Grandad Cronus's stomach and how she and her siblings defeated him in combat. Mother is very anxious for my safety, and she comes over from time to time and helps train me in case I have a huge prophecy. I'm the only one in the last thousand years to have a huge destiny for her kids, I guess she makes sure that none of her kids must deal with the mythological world or be pawns of other gods. I'm so glad that Mother is honest with me and lets me in her thoughts at times, hopefully, she is like this with my half-siblings. I wonder if I ever going to Camp Half-Blood or even Camp Jupiter.

I left my house, and I went to the bus stop. I get on my bus and it’s full of loud kids, I share a seat with an overweight kid who is growing a beard, his name is Dean Arlovski. Dean is not a bad kid and is always nice to me. He could have a crush on me because I do catch him staring at me a lot but I’m not sure, I may have to get a shirt that says I’m gay.

“I guess that today is a football game, you look nice in your cheer uniform. I hope you slept well. I’m curious, are you dating a football player.” Dean says in a shy, bumbling tone.

“Just because I’m a cheerleader doesn’t mean I date football players, I rather date volleyball players because they are just so awesome and cute. No offense Dean but you watched way too many high school movies, people are just way more than what activities they do. I do think that we should stop with the high school stereotypes, for example, I do karate on Mondays and Tuesdays, and I’m part of the environmental club. But those are just fun activities I do, my goal in life is to help improve the earth's ecosystem, travel the world, and analyze some wildlife." I say to him with an upbeat tone and I have to catch my breath.

“Those are very cool goals; I didn’t know that you have scientific goals.” He say in a surprised tone and had an excited smile and looking at me as if he made a scientific discovery that cheerleaders are more than just football players girlfriends.

The bus stops in front of my school which is a wide two-story building and the bricks were covered with white and green painting. I got into the school building and was greeted by a fellow cheerleader named Aisha, a curvy black girl who has a well-toned arm, I find pretty attractive.

"How was your sleep? I can't wait to pass the finals" Aisha yawned as she say that, she must have not slept well.

“Luckily finals are two months ahead, I got to go to my first period which is biology," I say in a high voice, which causes others to look at me weirdly. Curse my loud voice.

“I wish I had your enthusiastic nature. Btw I saw a scary regal-looking Latina who is trying to find you. She shares the first period with you, and I guess the counselor put you in charge of helping” Aisha says in a low, quiet voice.

"Oh, right I did volunteer, ok thanks I will find her," I say in an anxious tone, and my hands start shaking, I don’t want the new student to hate me, Relax Chika that’s just your anxiety talking, Chika take calm breaths I say to myself.

Just as I was about to run, The new student came behind me and say, “I guess you are my guide, I need to talk to you privately. My name is Reyna and I’m here to recruit you to Camp Jupiter.” Reyna says in a loud authoritative voice. Reyna is so pretty with her long braided dark hair, her nice, tanned complexation, and her dark eyes. She somehow makes a purple shirt and jeans look hot. I swear she looks like a queen who has been to wars with her toned arms and her legs have a lot of muscles hiding behind jeans. I notice she has a small facial scar as well; she could be a half-blood like me.

“Nice to meet you, my name is Chika Hanabusa and I will be your guide. You didn't tell me your last name but I'm pretty sure it's not important." I say while sweat is coming down my forehead while Reyna looks at me with the fiercest glare, I bet Reyna could literally stare at monsters and they start peeing their pants and ran from her. Chika, you must keep your cool in front of the attractive new student.

“It’s fine, I’m not comfortable with people learning my last name. I guess you are already aware of the fact that you are a half-blood. We must go before they appear." As Reyna finished her sentence, a group of huge burly men with big noise appear as the school rings, signaling first period. I know what these monsters are, they are the Laistrygonian Giants. One tried to punch me, but I ducked under the punch and give the undercut to the throat which caused him to hold his throat in pain. While he held his throat in agony, I took out my pencil and it transformed into a celestial bronze scythe. I sliced the giant head with my scythe, and I saw Reyna take out some gold sword and proceed to kill half the giants left and right. She cut these huge monsters like they were nothing, they were just lambs in a slaughter. Reyna must have killed monsters when she was kid, she makes like so easy.

As I was busy admiring her, the other giant front kicked me in the chest, and I was sent to the locker room. Oww, that hurts, luckily my backbones are fine and not broken. I moved out of the way while the giant charged toward the lockers, and I sliced him in the back with the scythe while his head is stuck in the lockers. I should have stayed focused on the enemies; I proceeded to dodge the blows of the two other giants and sliced both of their arms off. They screeched in pain and tried to tackle me to the ground, but I moved backward, and I jumped in the air and kicked both in the face and I used my scythe to slice across their necks and watch them down to golden dust. Reyna thrust her golden sword into the giant chest, and he shrieks in pain while he's turning to dust on Reyna's blade. The last giant managed to knock the scythe out of my hand and managed to bear hug me.

“You killed my brothers’ puny demigod, watch as I crush you with my holds. I am the strongest of my brothers, my name is Fraciso.” He says in a thick French accent while he’s laughing like one of those cartoony villains. Luckily, I managed to use my plant abilities to make the roots grow under him and tie around his body. The roots strangle his body and he cries in pain while I managed to free myself from his bear hug.

"I can't break out of these cursed roots, the roots are too strong. I can't believe I will be killed by plant roots." Fraciso says while he's trying to crawl against the constantly growing roots that become branches. I decided to just behead him with my scythe.

“There will be more monsters that will be coming. We will have to leave now; I will take you to camp. Don’t worry your father told me where you are, and he knows that you will come to Camp Jupiter” Reyna says as she takes her breath while she finishes off the last giant.

"Camp Jupiter is for Roam demigods, why am I going to Camp Jupiter," I asked in confusion.

"Because it's the closest to where we are at. Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter decide to work together to recruit more demigods and we are allowed to look for Greek demigods while Camp Half-Blood is allowed to find Roman demigods. Why you didn’t use your powers that much?” Reyna asked as she’s giving me a questioning look and analyzed what my response will be.

"I didn't want to use my powers that much because my powers are not suited for places like the school or the office. Had we been on the football field, I would have been spamming my plant powers to kill as many monsters as possible. Before we go to Camp Jupiter, I want to cheer in the football game and just finish up the school day." As I explained in a calm voice. My back still aches from the bear hug and the kick to the lockers.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that; you will put your mortal friends in danger. I got a Pegasus waiting outside for us. Your father already packed your clothes and other belongings” Reyna says in a regretful tone, her eyes look sympathetic at me, it’s like she’s saying that I’m sorry that your life is not normal anymore. I was preparing for the day to leave my regular life, but I wish I had more time, hurray now off to death quests. I didn’t bother to change out my cheer uniform and we just walked straight to the parking lot with a white stallion with wings and my dad just waiting on it.

@sakuraazharuno @miuyuki-snowfall @thecreatorandcreation

@xxsmexyprincess6969xx @0lympian-c0uncil

#pjo #pjo oc #pjo fanfic #reyna x oc #reyna avila ramirez arellano #demeter

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kjissexy1994 · 4 years ago

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WORDS OF SHAKESPEARE: The Return of a very Supa Occasion! (Special guest: Richard)

On the 19th of June 2021, my old friend, Maiwel alumni and acting veteran Richard and I went to the Supanova Comic and Gaming Convention at Sydney Olympic Park in Homebush Bay. The 2021 edition of Supanova was the first time in two years that it was held in Sydney as last year’s edition was called off due to “You Know What” alongside Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

To implement with the health and safety protocols, the layout of the convention was more smaller and laid out to comply with physical distancing measures as well as entering via a QR Code.

When I first entered the Dome Exhibition centre seeing all of the convention goers and Cosplayers of superheroes, sci-fi and anime. I kneeled down and proclaimed “HALLELUJAH!” as many of the convention fans from NSW were starved of a taste of a full-on convention since the world went upside down early last year (Outside of the smaller edition of Oz Comic Con titled OCC POP UP which was held earlier in March of this year).

Supanova contained a teeming amount of Cosplayers from DC Comics and Marvel Superheroes, Rick and Morty, Steven Universe, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Doctor Who and Power Rangers, Cosplayers from anime such as My Hero Academia, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Naruto and Disney films including Mary Poppins, Mulan and The Little Mermaid, Cosplayers from Video games including Overwatch, Pokémon, Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy, Sonic the Hedgehog and Undertale, Cosplayers from Web animations for instance including RWBY, Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss as well as various furry Cosplayers and cosplays of my childhood such as Pingu. There was also a very innovative cosplay such as an attendee dressed up as a giant functional Nintendo Game Boy System! The costumes looked absolutely well designed and spot on as I asked kindly for photos!

A number of RWBY fans and Cosplayers noticed me wearing Jaune’s Pumpkin Pete Hoodie. I must admit, I’d make a pretty good Jaune cosplayer if I could get his armour, his “Crocea Mors” sword and shield and dye my hair blonde!

There was also the Cosplay stage across from The Dome where there was a competition for the very best and innovative costume, as well as seminars of the bigger name Australian celebrities.

Speaking of the celebrities, Due to the international borders being closed until either the middle of next year or when the majority of the population of Australia is vaccinated, Supanova relied heavily on home grown talent from our country for example (but not limited to) Manu Bennett, David Wenham, Josh Lawson, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Georgia Haigh, Nicholas Hamilton and frequent Supanova Attendee, John Jarratt who is famous for portraying the infamously ominous and frightening Mick Taylor from the horror movie franchise “Wolf Creek.” I still remember being scared straight to high heaven watching the movie when I was very young due to Jarratt’s portrayal of the heinous horror character next to Bill Skarsgard’s portrayal of Pennywise the clown in Stephen King’s IT Chapters one and two, but alas Jarratt was a very generous and friendly larrikin!

There was a lot of great activities to do including the “Black Widow Obstacle Course” where you had to complete a number of tasks within the time limit in order to win a prize, Star Wars Lightsaber demonstrations and tutorials and the “Battlecry” LARP (live action role playing) battle displays and demonstrations where you could fight your friend or one of the friendly Battlecry veterans such as Sammy Owen from the recent Medibank Commercial with a rubber sword or axe. This was a very great debut for my LARPING alter ego, “Boar-Head: The Sworded Brawler” and I am very interested in joining a Battlecry LARP group in the future!

There was a very colourful display of artwork, comics and prints at the Artists Alley, with various comic book artists from across Australia such as (but not limited to) Queenie Chan of Fabled Kingdom, Anthony Christou of Luminous Ages and Camillo Di Pietrantonio famous for illustrating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IDW comics.

The Fabulous Wonder Mama also made a guest appearance as she is a superhero representing the LGBT Community.

The Artists Alley also had tables of independent artists selling comics, prints, bookmarks and badges available. Looking at the artwork made me feel like I was at an Art Museum for the fans of pop culture!

For those who want to spend some dough, there were also stalls selling new and vintage comics and trading cards, Pop Vinyl Figures, Animation cells from cartoons and movies of yesteryear, Action figures and gaming consoles from the eighties and nineties, LGBT pride flags, rock and metal band t shirts and apparel and Plushies from Japanese anime and video game franchises such as Pokémon and Digimon. There were also games to play such as Super Smash Bros Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch so fellow gamers can smash their friends out of the arena! For the con-loving geeks who were hungry, Dominos had a stall selling various flavours of pizzas and garlic bread and the canteens in the Sydney Olympic Park Dome sold fish and chips, bagels, sushi and coffee. Byron Beef Jerky also had a traditional stall selling all kinds of flavours such as Teriyaki, Chilli and the infamous “Devil’s Doo-Doo!” (Not for the faint hearted!)

Whilst Supanova Comic and Gaming Con in Sydney was a fun event for the inner nerds, parts of the con had to be completely modified and or removed in order to be healthy and safe for example, the discontinuation of handing out free goodie bags containing the guidebook and map of the layout of the con and other cool things making both the map and guide digital exclusive via the Supanova Website.

Another notable absence was the Australian Wrestling Federation wrestling ring where the pro wrestlers of the aforementioned promotion would host a series of three wrestling matches per day and the wrestlers would hand out free autographs, this really kind of hurt me as a fan of pro wrestling for sixteen years but it’s better to be safe than sick. At least the Battlecry LARP displays and demos filled in its place!

For the seminars, gone are the days of staff handing the microphone to the audience for the Q&A’s as they have to lineup behind the microphone in order to ask an interesting question to the guests.

I also didn’t like how some parts of the convention was a bit squashy when you first entered, in the artist’s alley and in some of the stalls. Like I said, we are in a receding health crisis and we need to wear masks, be physically distant, wash our hands and get the much needed vaccine shot against the you know what!

All in all, Supanova had a amazing return to full flight in Sydney despite the scare earlier in the week and the lack of International guests. I was starved of a full on convention throughout the year of misery last year and as a person on the autism spectrum, cons are such an amazing way to make new friends and to show out your inner geek, nerd,fanboy or whatever via cosplaying, gaming, greeting guests, purchasing artwork and so on and so forth all in a very safe measure!

I give this year’s Supanova in Sydney a 7 out of 10. This edition was absolutely different compared to last year’s and I have strong confidence that next year’s edition in Sydney and abroad will have well known and beloved international guests back to the much loved Comic and Gaming convention next year, just in time for Supanova’s 20th birthday!

Next time I am in Sydney, I will be going to the Vivid Festival which will be in August so stay tuned for that!

Happy trails!

K.J (Kane)

#words of shakespeare #Supanova #supanova 2021 #sydney supanova #sonic the hedgehog #star wars #sydney olympic park

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mischiefandspirits · 4 years ago

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Colony of Gotham (2/7)

The Colony of Gotham is an urban legend that is whispered about in the dangerous city. It's said the Colony is a family of demons and spirits that stalk the night, hunting for the souls of the guilty.

When Bruce became Batman, he'd never intended to be mistaken for a demon. He was happy to lean into it, though, and as he gained his partners -- as his family grew -- they all followed suit.

First Part ~ Next Part

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When winter came, Jack Drake used a Christmas gala as an excuse to approach Tim. He brought him into a side room to give him the news that Janet was dead, then proceeded to all but demand Tim return to the Drake mansion before the boy could fully process his words. When Tim tried to bring up the others, Jack stated Tim was nothing more than a charity case for Bruce just like Dick and Jason. Tim knew that wasn’t true for the older boys as Bruce had claimed them. For his own case, however, Jack’s words hit hard.

Bruce had yet to turn him. Tim knew the older boys had both been with him for years before their own turnings, but that was because neither had wanted it. Barbara had been changed right away, so why not Tim? He couldn’t bring himself to ask -- wasn't sure he could handle what would happen if Bruce said no -- but they had to know, right? They must have seen the way they watched them when they ate or discussed their nature. They were all detectives, after all.

He started to wonder if Jack might be right and Bruce didn’t really want him. Between that, his mother being dead, and his father actually wanting him, Tim didn’t fight it when Jack tried to lead him out.

Which was when Jason appeared in all his fury. He didn’t know why Jack was there, but he did know he had no right to be anywhere near Tim after what he’d done. Tim tried to talk him down, but that only made Jason angrier. He pulled Tim away from the man and told him Jack didn’t know what he was talking about. Bruce loved Tim just as he loved Jason and Dick. When Tim tried to argue, Jason realized how Tim had linked being turned with being family.

Temper rising and impulsivity at its peak, Jason heard Jack tell Tim they were leaving without even asking if that’s what he wanted, looked the man dead in the eyes, and bit his little brother. He made sure Jack couldn’t see his fangs or Tim’s wound as he gathered his brother into a hug and told Jack, in no uncertain terms, that Tim was theirs and if he had a problem with it he could take it up with Bruce’s lawyers. Then he led Tim away while passing him a dehydrated blood bar so he could complete his transformation.

Jason realized that maybe his timing needed work as the fever haze of turning began to wash over Tim, but the memory of the sunshine smile he’d received when his little brother had realized what he was doing and the tight hug Tim was giving him even in his declining consciousness made it worth it.

At least until they reached the car and Alfred leveled Jason with a look.

The moment Tim was tucked away in bed, Bruce and Dick laid into Jason about discretion and consent. Jason had been sure Tim wanted it, but doubt started to creep in as the younger boy slept through his transformation.

When Tim woke to an apology, he thought it meant Jason didn’t want him after all. The two quickly reassured one another then, with Barbara’s help, managed to make the others see reason as well.

When Tim’s animal form turned out to be a scrub jay, Jason never let his Tiny Jay live it down.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kate Kane traveled the world for years to bring herself out of the downward spiral of alcohol and women she’d fallen into after leaving military academy, then returned to Gotham to make a name for herself as the Batwoman.

They called her a succubus with porcelain skin, lips painted with blood, and red fire for hair that had horn-like ears poking out. Unlike the rest of the Colony, she had eyes that could be seen, bright red with black sclera and slit pupils. There were hints of a curvy figure under the armor she donned. It was black with a bat painted onto the chest in blood.

They said she was beautiful.

They also said she was, without a doubt, the most vicious of the Colony. She didn’t carry guns, but she’d be happy to steal yours to use. It only took a few gunshots to men’s knees before word got around she favored women and protected them, though some never got the hint and still tried to flirt with her.

Bruce was not pleased when he found out who she was, but he knew the woman well enough to know she wouldn’t stop so he brought her into the fold as much as she would allow.

Jason and Tim hadn’t met her before, having joined the family after she’d left. The younger boy got along well enough with her, but the older boy was immediately taken with his new crazy vodka aunt (they were technically second cousins once removed, but everyone agreed aunt was simpler) and Bruce regretted introducing them when he realized the two were sneaking off to gun ranges together.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A new team of heroes eventually arrived on the scene, one that would go on to cause problems for one Tim Wayne.

It began one month after the team’s formation when a certain clone -- in a fit of rebellion against one of the men whose DNA had formed him -- decided to take a trip to the one city the Justice League avoided like the plague and ordered their mentees to do the same.

Despite almost immediately regretting it, he held out for three hours before deciding to head back. The problem came when he realized he had no idea how to do that. He was completely lost and had left his phone at home to be sure Clark wouldn’t figure out where he’d gone.

Not for the first time, he wished he could fly.

He wandered around lost for another half an hour, not willing to trust any of the Gothamites that all seemed to eye him with an even greater distrust, before a boy stumbled out of a coffee shop and directly into him. Kon was impressed the smaller boy hadn’t managed to spill a drop of coffee nor lose his footing in the collision considering the massive bags under his eyes and the way he almost seemed to be vibrating from what Kon realized was a half-empty black coffee with six shots of espresso.

Tim managed to show him the way to the train station in between complaining that he was a creature of the night that didn’t need sleep, wishing destruction on his elder brother for dragging him into the city for a book signing before disappearing on him because of an emergency, the brightness of the day (despite the sky being more overcast than Kon had ever seen it in his month of life), and describing the video game he’d stayed up the night before playing.

Kon was honestly extremely worried about the guy, and he might have forced him to swap numbers before he left on the train so he could make sure Tim got home safe, even if the guy claimed he just needed to call his other brother to pick him up. Tim did get home safe, but he also got a second coffee beforehand so Kon felt justified.

In Tim’s defense, he required three times the amount of caffeine to feel the effects. Not in his defense, he had drunk more than three times the amount that day.

Tim did not appreciate the grumpy, yet overprotective puppy he’d somehow gained. All the same, he couldn’t bring himself to block Kon’s number. Even when he put together that Conner “Kon” Kent was Superboy, a founding member of Young Justice.

Tim also didn’t appreciate his brothers teasing him over his new super friend.

The teasing only got worse some months later when Tim and Barbara went to a convention together where he got into a long conversation with one Keli Quintela about the integration of human and alien technology and the pros and cons of utilizing alien coding language in firewalls. They ended up spending most of the convention together and went home with each other’s numbers and emails. So of course she turned out to be Young Justice’s Teen Lantern.

He would never let his brothers know that Keli set mandatory downtime hours on all the projects they worked on together because, apparently, he had “an unhealthy work ethic” and needed to “take more personal time.”

Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep it from Barbara. She soon started setting similar blocks on his other projects.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stephanie’s story is a familiar one. She took on the persona of Spoiler to help the Colony take down her father Cluemaster whenever he decided to cause trouble. She wore body armor she’d stolen from her father and dyed purple alongside a cloak and a mask that covered the bottom of her face. She interacted with the Robins the most during their on-again-off-again team up so it was no surprise she eventually realized there was more than one. This meant that when Jason decided he was getting too old for Robin, they went with the obvious successor.

Stephanie will never admit how long it took her to realize the lot of them weren’t demonic monstrosities. Or how long it took her to catch onto the vampire thing.

According to rumors, the Red Hood had been the leader of the Red Hood Gang when it was at its prime. He’d been brought back from the dead by Batwoman to serve as her right hand and he held a grudge against the Joker for leading the gang to ruin. He was a brute in armor to match hers under a black and blood-red hooded vest. A red mask covered his mouth and nose while a black domino with glowing red lenses hid his eyes. His hair was a fiery red that matched his mistress’s. They said he was just as vicious as her and while he was thrilled to beat you down with nothing more than his fists, and more than capable of doing so as well, he often used the guns hidden under his vest. Some said he never kills, others said he simply handed those he does over to his mistress. He never spoke but in growls, but his mistress always knew what he was saying.

That might have been because Jason only spoke over comms while his mask filtered his voice into animalistic growls.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

During this time, Cassandra Cain celebrated her eighth birthday by killing Miranda Row on her father’s orders. Cass, trained to understand body language better than most understand words, was horrified as she took in how the dying woman was feeling and fled both the scene and her father. He went down for the crime, but Miranda’s daughter Harper knew the man hadn’t acted alone and was out for blood.

On a happier note, this was also around when Stephanie was turned.

If anyone ever asked Stephanie how it happened, she would be sure to give them a story full of lies that was guaranteed to be far more dramatic than what actually happened while Tim would be off in the corner, blushing face hidden in his hands.

Because honestly, it was an accident.

She and Tim had been cuddling in the cave on their night off. Tim had gotten a little enthusiastic with his fangs, not that she minded at the time. Then she grabbed a drink from the mini-fridge. Unfortunately, neither of them realized just what she was drinking until it was too late.

A human is bitten by a vampire. A human drinks another human’s blood. The human is no longer a human.

The situation made the Colony more cautious around their significant others, to the amusement of one asexual-aromantic Jason Todd-Wayne. It wasn’t a problem for Bruce as Selina had turned before he’d ever met her, but Barbara and Kate both started keeping their blood locked in mini-fridges in their closets. Dick, unfortunately, wasn’t as lucky.

The manor was safe, but he wouldn’t be able to keep anything locked away at Artemis’s apartment without explanation. He could easily just keep all his normal blood at the manor, but he usually had a blood bar or two on him in case of emergency and Wally was known to steal food thanks to his speedster-increased metabolism. The bars weren’t toxic to humans in case someone happened to get their hands on one and Wally had only made the mistake of stealing one once before when Dick had first turned (he’d eaten it too fast to react to the taste, but had immediately gagged after and sworn off ever trying one again), but Dick was still nervous one or both of his partners might get their hands on one by accident.

As a result, he stopped nibbling on Wally and Artemis during intimate moments just in case, something that did not go unnoticed. Dick was a biter, so when he suddenly stopped out of nowhere the two began to worry. They tried to talk to him about it, but he talked around them or played dumb. Artemis then texted Jason, Artemis Grace, and Barbara.

Jason simply sent her a vomiting emoji before saying if she still wanted to come with him and Kate to the gun range, she wasn’t allowed to talk about doing that kind of stuff with his brother around him ever again.

Grace advised them that if Dick wasn’t satisfying them then they should rid themselves of him. When Artemis tried to say that wasn’t the problem, all she received in response was a shrugging emoji.

Barbara said she didn’t know but she’d try to talk to him, then immediately texted Dick to tell him to either get over his fear or tell his partners what was up.

Dick worried over it for a week before blurting out that he was a vampire while the three were cuddling in bed.

The two laughed, assuming it was another of his jokes, until they realized he wasn’t laughing but hiding behind his hands. The three had had a long conversation after that about the nature of vampires, how Dick fed, and the powers and limitations that came with vampirism, the latter of which included Wally receiving a painful kick to the shin over a glitter joke.

The two had taken it well, having seen weirder things in their lives, and Artemis got a lockbox for Dick to keep his bars in to prevent any accidents that could come from Wally’s hunger-induced amnesia.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mary Elizabeth “Bette” Kane was first cousins once removed with Kate Kane, which is how she ended up getting sent to her aunt’s for the summer. She had been excited at first since she knew how much Kate liked to party, but she was more than disappointed when she found out she’d been signed up for a science summer camp at Wayne Enterprises. She fought with her aunt over it and when that didn’t work, she went looking for dirt. That was how she’d accidentally stumbled upon the Batcave.

Kate and Bruce unfortunately didn’t have enough time to figure out what to do about it before something else took precedence.

Barbara was shot by the Joker.

That night affected three young women’s lives.

Barbara’s vampiric durability meant the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but her mobility was still too limited for her to ever go out in the field again. After some time to come to terms with her new state, she settled into the role of Pythia.

It was a serpent made of code, slithering through servers and whispering into the ears of the Colony. It was never seen, only heard. It saw all. It knew all. Beware if it turned its attention to you.

Stephanie stepped up as Batgirl. They needed the cover and she honestly butt heads with Bruce too much to be a good Robin anyway. Plus, purple was much more her color.

Batgirl had grown stronger. When you could see her, she was nothing more than a shadow cloaked in violet. However, it was rare you’d see anything. Thanks to the theft of an invisibility device Penguin had built for her father, sometimes you couldn’t even see her when she was right in front of you.

Bette was in the cave while the others were hunting down Joker, Kate too worried to leave her at home until they were sure he didn’t know their identities. As she watched the Colony work, it suddenly hit her what her aunt was doing as Batwoman. After that day, she put more effort into the camp and even developed an interest in medicine. At the same time, she began to learn how to fight from her aunt. When the summer came to an end, she pulled some strings to get enrolled in Gotham Academy so she could stay with Kate. Then she took her place as Tim’s partner by offering her fashion and makeup skills.

“The shadows have started to overwhelm the Bloody Robin,” people whispered.

The ones that had always wrapped around him rose up in the form of a hood while darkness had ensnared his limbs, leaving only hints of green on his clawed feet and hands. The formation of the hood, though, revealed his neck.

And the long bloody gash that encircled it.

They say the change was done by Batman, that he tore Robin’s head off to bring out his darkness.

During this time, Barbara was dealing with the trauma of what had happened to her. One of the ways she did this was by joining an online support group for trauma survivors. It was through the chatroom that she met Hank Hall and his girlfriend Dawn Granger. The three quickly became friends. Hank was grumpy but well-meaning in a way Barbara was all too familiar with. Dove was more openly kind and caring, though Barbara could see a viciousness lurking beneath.

The three talked for weeks before deciding to meet up for lunch when Barbara was on a trip to D.C. It was only then that she looked them up, not wanting to risk meeting them in person if they were up to something.

She took the teasing over having super friends with far more dignity than the boys. Admittedly their status as super friends was more debatable since the couple were semi-retired and only really went out in emergency cases or as favors to their old Titans friends.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Bart Allen heard his Grandma Iris and Uncle Wally talking about the latter going on another trip to Gotham, he was ecstatic. The myths about Gotham were always the best horror stories to listen to growing up in the future and now that he was Kid Flash he was sure Wally would let him go with him. He’d been waiting for his opportunity since he’d taken the name and joined Young Justice, but there had always been things in the way. Wally had a mission. Dick was busy so Tigress had come to Central instead. Bart had a mission. Bart had another mission. The police commissioner's daughter got shot so no one was going to Gotham. So on and so forth.

It had been over a year, but finally, Wally was going to Gotham and Bart had nothing planned.

“No, you can’t come,” Wally said immediately.

“Why not?” Bart whined.

“Gotham’s too dangerous,” Iris said, from where she was folding towels. She gave Wally a pointed look. “Neither of you need to be going there.”

Wally shrugged.

“But -”

“No,” the two adults cut over Bart.

He went anyway.

Unfortunately, while he could run just as fast as his uncle-slash-first cousin once removed, he wasn’t quite as coordinated as the older speedster so he lost track of him halfway through the city. Not managing to find him again, he ended up deciding to just grab something to eat and head back. Deciding to ask for a local’s opinion, he ran around until he spotted someone moderately trustworthy looking (it took longer than it would normally, but he’d expected that in Gotham). When the shorter teen offhandedly mentioned he was sneaking away from his brothers and their friends, Bart invited him to come eat with him. When the guy couldn’t seem to remember when the last time he ate was, the invitation turned into a kidnapping.

The guy, Tim, was pretty cool even if he clearly couldn’t take care of himself. He actually kind of reminded Bart of the friends Kon and Keli had mentioned having in Gotham, so maybe a lack of self-care was a Gotham thing. Either way, Bart had them swap numbers and proceeded to bother his new friend around mealtimes to make sure he ate.

Tim hadn’t even needed to look up Bart since Dick showed up in his room with a big grin talking about how Wally’s nephew had gotten a new Gotham friend named Tim.

The younger brother wasn’t sure what he had done to deserve this. He hadn’t asked for it. Why did these people keep showing up out of nowhere!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TFW you find out scrub jays are the only non-primate and non-dolphin shown to plan ahead for the future and just can't help yourself.

Steph wears her suit from Young Justice as Spoiler and her Rebirth Spoiler suit as Batgirl.

Jason's Red Hood suit is a mixup. It's the typical Red Hood suit, but the helmet and jacket are swapped out for the mask and vest from Red Hood: Outlaw.

The updated Robin suit is similar to Damian's from the animated movies, just with the usual black robin mask. And bloody.

Vampires' animal forms:

Tim: Woodhouse's scrub jay

Kate & Bette: Gray bat

Stephanie: Golden jackal

#batman #batfam #colony of gotham #fanfiction

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technologywildlife-blog · 4 years ago

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AMAZING WILDLIFE NONPROFITS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

Utilizing Technology and Innovation these Wildlife Nonprofits are Standouts

In the wildlife conservation arena it can be difficult to navigate through the vast amount of wildlife organizations out there, especially ones you would like to support. Most seem to languish with the same projects year after year without making much progress while a handful of the best are growing, evolving and actively creating and solving some of today’s most challenging issues confronting Africa’s wildlife and environment today.

Our team has identified the following organizations as the latest game changers who are forging significant strides in Wildlife Conservation with ingenious and innovative ideas. These nonprofits are using hi-tech, progressive and even old-school remedies to improve our planet in remarkable ways so that donors know they’re getting the absolute most bang (impact) for their buck.

1. INNOVACONSERVATION:

Fully embracing Silicon Valley’s ethos, InnovaConservation is one of the most promising and exciting organizations we’ve seen in the space in decades. This bold nonprofit concentrates solely on the highest impact innovative ideas and technology to change the world.

The brainchild of Chris Minihane, a United Nations contractor and photographer for National Geographic, along with her Co-Founder Mark Sierra, a seasoned startup CFO in Silicon Valley, InnovaConservation focuses on creating and supporting disruptive, offbeat technology and extremely innovative and cost-effective solutions to address and solve some of the most severe threats to wildlife and the environment in Africa.

Some highlights include Sunflower Fences and beehives to repel elephants from raiding crops and a simple light system to keep lions and collateral species from mass deaths due to poisonings.

“Supporting new ideas and technology as well as funding brilliant and progressive people directly in the field who are already contributing in such significant, innovative ways is one of our biggest priorities,” stated Minihane.

One of InnovaConservation’s hottest projects is going hi-tech with autonomous Spot Robots and deploying them throughout reserves and wildlife parks in Africa to bridge the gaps where rangers and dogs cannot easily traverse. The Spot robot shakes and wakes to any human face image using Trail Guard with thermal night vision technology and facial recognition. The robot is weather proof, cannot be knocked down, can traverse difficult terrain and weather and is being modified to employ pepper spray to quickly halt any killings in the event the rangers and anti poaching dogs cannot arrive in time.

There’s even a rumor that InnovaConservaton is partnering up with Goolge since the giant recently bought Boston Dynamics, the company who developed the Spot Robot. InnovaConservation states that this will be the “new generation of anti-poaching for decades to come.”

InnovaConservation’s website highlights all of their programs, detailing the most unique, outside-the-box solutions that are out there today which are already making huge and significant changes to Africa’s wildlife and environmental crises. We can only say, “Wow! It’s about time!”

www.innovaconservation.org

2. WILDLABS.

Created by founders Charles Knowles, John Lukas and Akiko Yamazaki, Wildlabs is the first global, open online community dedicated to technical ideas in the field of wildlife conservation. This site provides conservationists to share ideas and connect to other experts in the field. Wildlabs also provides forums that allow members to share ideas and collaborate to find technology-enabled solutions to some of the biggest conservation challenges facing our planet.

There are workshops and explainer videos that offer instructions to start building technological innovations and how to apply those inventions to conservation ideas or projects.

The greatest aspect of this organization is their open data fields and collaboration forum's which allow conservationists to seek assistance or advice on upcoming technology and how to apply them to the environment and wildlife.

They have built an engaging community which, thus far, has tested, advised and collaborated on several projects.

This is a great concept and we hope to see Wildlabs grow and connect even more organizations and people to create technological solutions to conservation in the coming years!

www.wildlabs.net.

3. CONSERVATIONX

Created a few years ago by Alex Dehgan this organization’s mission is to support research and development into technology to aid conservation.

Dehgan says, “Unless we fundamentally change the model, the tools and the people working on conserving biodiversity, the prognosis is not good.”

One of the nonprofit’s key tactics is setting up prizes to lure in fresh talent and ideas. So far, it has launched six competitions for tools to, among other things, limit the spread of infectious diseases, the trade in products made from endangered species and the decline of coral reefs. The first commercial product to be spun out of the start-up — a portable DNA scanner — is slated for release by the end of the year.

Dehgan hopes that the organization’s prizes and other initiatives will bring innovative solutions to conservation’s deepest problems. Hundreds of people have already been lured in through challenges and engineering programs such as Make for the Planet — a multi-day, in-person event — and an online tech collaboration platform called Digital Makerspace, which matches conservationists with technical talent.

One innovation that has come out of Conservation X Labs is ChimpFace, facial-recognition software designed to combat chimpanzee trafficking that happens through sales over the Internet. A conservationist came up with the idea, Dehgan explains, but she didn’t have the technical expertise needed to achieve her vision. Digital Makerspace helped her to form a team to develop the technology, which uses algorithms that have been trained on thousands of photos provided by the Jane Goodall Institute. ChimpFace can determine whether a chimp for sale has been taken illegally from the wild, because those animals have been cataloged.

Dehgan says that fresh approaches are needed because the field has been slow to change and is struggling to find solutions to huge issues. One problem is that the field is “filled with conservationists”, he says. Dehgan asserts that too much human behaviour and innovation are left out of conservation.

As it seeks to refashion the field, Conservation X Labs is facing some challenges. Foundations find it difficult to support the group’s atypical mission as a non-profit conservation–tech effort, Dehgan says. The company must compete with large tech firms to hire engineers to build devices. And collaborating with conventional conservation organizations brings problems, too. Often, he says, the missions don’t align: many are focused on creating preserves instead of on specific human factors that might be driving extinction, such as the economics of animal trafficking.

Still, Dehgan sees ample opportunity to make progress. “Humans have caused these problems,” he says. “And we have the ability to solve them.” www.conservationxlabs.com

Katherine Kane is an avid writer, conservationist, reader, tech geek and researcher. She has been writing technology articles and conservation success stories since 2016 and enjoys rescuing animals and gardening. You may reach Kate at [email protected]

#Innovative Solutions #Technology #Wildlife #Conservation #Artificial Intelligence #Innovative #Animals #donate

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heroicadventurists · 5 years ago

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Batgirls: The Legacy and Discord among fans

My journey into comics started in the 90s, thanks in large part to the X-Men cartoon. I loved everything about The X-Men; their powers, their fight for equality and their strong female characters. I started reading X-Men comics religiously until I graduated from college and started working at a bank.

Fast forward 9 years, and I go to my first comic book convention and I'm sucked in again. This time around, I'm interested in the Batfamily. I start buying bat related comics and my favorite character changes from Gambit to Red Hood. I actually love all of the Robins; and of course the only Batgirl I have ever known, Barbara Gordon, from the 90s cartoon.

I joined Tumblr to engage with the fandom and to my surprise, there is discord among Batgirl fans (specifically Babs, Cass and Steph). Some fans refuse to call the current Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, her vigilante name; and instead refer to her as Babsgirl?!?! Some Cass fans think Stephanie didn't deserve the mantle; and Stephanie fans don't think she gets the respect she deserves. I'm blown away, and slightly entertained by all of this. The rivalry is real among the Batgirls, moreso than what I've seen with the Robins. Let's talk about it.

Transitions of Power

When I think of Batgirls, I think of Robins. They are both equally important to the Batman mythos. At some point, for whatever reason, a Robin or Batgirl has transitioned out of the role. The transitions between the two groups have been slightly different.

Robins do not give up their mantle readily. They become jealous, angry and downright scary when they are "replaced".

Dick wrestling Robin Jason after a mission; Tim defeating Robin Damian in a fight; Damian defeating Robin Duke and the entire We are Robin crew; Jason defeating Robin Tim.

Now let's compare the Batgirl transitions.

In both Batgirl situations, the predecessor supports the transition of power (even if begrudgingly). There is no violence. The Batgirls handle the situation with more dignity and respect than the Robins. In the Robin's defense, their mantles were either forcibly taken from them or they were not aware they were replaced. The bitterness with The Robins is real.

You Deserve It 👏🏽..👏🏼.. 👏🏻👏🏾 ..👏🏿

I have been seeing several posts lately saying Stephanie didn't deserve the Batgirl mantle, and I wholeheartedly disagree. Again, let's compare the Batgirls to their male counterparts. Robin was created by Dick Grayson, however he outgrew the mantle and Batman's control. Missing Dick, Bruce made Jason his Robin after catching him trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile. That's all it took.

Tim truly put in the work to get the mantle of Robin, so it was probably a slap in the face when Dick took it from him and gave it to Damian. At this point in Damian's arc, he was insufferable. He was violent, arrogant and full of rage (not his fault). He did not deserve Robin; but to stop him from leaving Gotham, Dick handed it to him.

So we have 2 Robins who deserved it and 2 who did not, but by the end of their runs, all 4 made the mantle their own and are dynamic characters to this day.

Stephanie 100% deserved Batgirl. Before becoming Batgirl, Stephanie was already in the batfamily and operated as Spoiler. She even had a brief (and disastrous) stint as Robin. Stephanie was an ally to the bats, and "promoting" her to Batgirl was Bruce's way of saying he recognized her efforts and growth. This was a way to show Stephanie that she truly belonged in their ranks. It was well deserved.

The Batgirls love each other

Another difference between the Batgirls and Robins is their love for one another. These girls support each other, which cannot be said for the Robins. While the relationships with the Robins has vastly approved in New 52 and Rebirth, they still have their moments of discord. I say this because it's ironic that the Batgirl characters get along extremely well and have a sisterhood but the different fandoms have issues.

Babsgirl

When I first saw the phrase "Babsgirl", I didn't understand what it meant. It was only recently that I discovered it was a way to not acknowledge Barbara as the current Batgirl. What a slap in the face to her legacy and history. That's like calling Batman "Bruceman" because you preferred Dick's run better.

Barbara first appeared on the 1960s show Batman and eventually made her way into comics in 1967 (52 years). Barbara helped popularize Batgirl in mainstream media by appearing in animated movies, cartoons, live action shows and video games.

Barbara may not have been the first Batgirl to have a solo series but she laid the foundation for the modern day Batgirl (respect also to Bette Kane).

The Real Issue

The real issue isn't who carries the Batgirl mantle but what they are doing with Barbara, Cassandra and Stephanie. Again let's take it back to the Robins. All of the Robins have had their mantles removed but they continued to utilize Dick, Jason, Tim and Damian very strongly in comics and across media platforms.

Dick as Nightwing, Jason as Red Hood, Tim with Young Justice and Damian with the Teen Titans

All of the boys, except Damian right now, actually have personas that are better than Robin. The Robins have been allowed to headline their own comics, lead teams and interact with the larger DC Universe as a whole.

The only Batgirl who has been afforded this luxury is Barbara, which I attitribute to the strong foundation she has built in mainstream media. She has her own comic, she has created and led her own team, and she participates in DC crossover events as a main player.

I believe the divide between Batgirl fans is because the same is not afforded to Cassandra and Stephanie.

After Stephanie stopped being Batgirl, she became Spoiler once again (which is a great character) but she took a supporting role. As far as I know, she has not been on a team outside of a Bat related group. She just showed up in 2 episodes of Young Justice Outsiders that were cameos at best. I haven't seen any plans for her character at the moment, with Tim (her only storyline) being lost in the multiverse.

After Cassandra stopped being Batgirl, she took up the Black Bat mantle (awesome name) but due to legal reasons, DC couldn't continue using the name. Cass dissappeared for a while and returned as Orphan. This name is truly disrespectful because her adoption has been retconned, so it's a constant reminder, in my opinion, that she is not truly family. Things are looking up for Cassandra as she is on a new Bat sanctioned team and is getting a graphic novel. Her live action movie debut is also around the corner.

I think if Spoiler and Black Bat had been priority characters and participated in DC events, and joined teams outside of the batfamily, the discussion of who should be Batgirl wouldn't be a topic. Cass not getting a push isn't a Stephanie or Barbara issue and vice versa. Sometimes characters, no matter how great, don't get the pushes they deserve. There are tons of characters who fit this mold (Stargirl, Vixen, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Firestorm etc...). And this is not to minimize the situation. I can't imagine how it would feel to have your favorite character missued (Wally West, Roy Harper).

The Batgirl mantle has been held by 5 amazing women. The three in discussion have all brought something unique and special to the mantle. They have all deserved that mantle and represented it with dignity and respect. When I think of the Batgirls, I think of strong women who support one another. Role Models. Instead of creating dissension, fans of the Batgirls need to unite and push for better opportunities for both Stephanie and Cassandra outside of that mantle. Batgirl does not have to be the highlight of their career.

**I know this does not apply to all Batgirl fans

Much respect to the Batgirls

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hexadecimalmantis · 6 years ago

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Argonaut Games Research

This post was originally going to be an absurdly long documentary video, but I realized it would have been a bit boring, so I ultimately decided on making a glorified blog post.

When I joined BioMedia Project last year, I was tasked with researching Bionicle: The Game and its sequel Bionicle 2: City of Legends. I have talked about both games in great detail many times before, and I think we all know about the issues that plague both of them by now. Bionicle: The Game is seemingly incomplete, and filled with content that was cut early on, and Bionicle 2: City of Legends never made it past a private movement demo. For context about Bionicle 2: BioMedia Project managed to obtain an Xbox build of the movement demo a few years ago. It has a few issues, such as broken audio and some missing graphical effects. I began reaching out to former developers in an effort to piece together the entire story of Argonaut Games, and uncover more secrets about both games. (Initially) With the assistance of Liam Robertson of DidYouKnowGaming?, I began contacting some of the developers. For those of you that are unfamiliar, Argonaut Games was split into two different facilities during the development of Bionicle: The Game. The first being Argonaut London, and the second was Argonaut Sheffield. I decided to reach out to the former developers from the London branch first. I initially didn’t get any replies, but I remained persistent. After waiting a few weeks, I eventually I got a reply from a former artist. Keep in mind that personal details about the former developers I contacted will be expunged in order to protect their identities and to prevent harassment and spam.

This is the first message I received after I inquired about Bionicle: The Game:

“Hi, yes I was lead artist on Bionicle. I'd say that it was a game that we cared a lot about, and to be honest we had high hopes for, at least initially. As always with game dev there wasn't just one cause of the games problems, but probably the biggest was we fell in love with the games setting and bit off far more than we could chew. We should have started with far more cautious goals, but we wanted to tell the whole story. I'm surprised if there was that much unused content on the disc TBH but the original scope of the game is definitely visible in naming conventions etc. we had intended each character to have toa levels and toa nuva (if thats the right term?) their powered up versions - before adding the 7th. Given that they have different abilities that was a huge ask of the team.

(Redacted)”

This message was about what I expected, the devs were a bit too ambitious and were unable to complete their ideas during the given development time. I later asked about the developer signatures stored within the BIGB archives, and asked them if they had worked on any of the Kopaka areas, since I found their signature within a subset of those files:

“the 'signatures' probably just refer to the designers - which is a relatively small subset of the team as a whole. I oversaw the project from an art perspective, so characters env, frontend etc then I ended up doing some animation work on the bull, onua, the weird door thing. I didn't work on Kopaka - that work was done up in Sheffield, I used to visit their studio to review stuff & sign it off.”

I’m sure the Bull was probably the Kane-Ra seen in Onua Nuva’s level. There are some pre-release trailers that show a Kane-Ra attacking the player with unique animations too. After that, I asked him about Argonaut Sheffield and their work on Bionicle 2: City of Legends. To my surprise, I got this:

“No, I didn't I thought they were disbanded alongside Argo”

This essentially meant that nobody from Argonaut London was aware of the development of Bionicle 2: City of Legends. With this information, it was easy to conclude that Bionicle 2 was created solely by Argonaut Sheffield as speculated. After failing to get more replies from former developers from Argonaut London, I shifted my focus to Argonaut Sheffield, intrigued by the messages I received from the former artist.

After a bit of waiting, I got a reply from another former artist.

“Hi,

Yes, I worked on Bionicle as a character artist along side artist (redacted). He was my mentor back then as it was my first industry job. I think we modelled about 130 odd characters/modular models back then between us. The character concepts we're drawn up by (redacted).

Argonaut Sheffield was previously Particle Systems who made I-War, the PC Sci Fi game and some other iterations. It was a technically adept small team and great to work with. I didn't have much to do with the London branch. We went on to try and make some failed movie tie-ins alongside them at a later date. Catwoman, Zorro, Star Wars, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and also Bionicle 2.. which was going to be a fluid parkour type platformer. Which never materialised as after being there just shy of two years, London shut us down.

I'm actually working back in the offices where it all happened now. Which seems strange. I did work at Sumo Digital as a lead Char artist for ten years in between. I know there's a basement full of hard drives still here as one of the old directors still rents some space here.

(redacted)

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

(redacted)”

I received concept art for both Bionicle: The Game and Bionicle 2: City of Legends in this message. The art was later posted on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/HexMantis/status/1099883979942084608

Aside from the plethora of art, this message provided some insight about how Argonaut Sheffield came to be. It was previously known as Particle Systems before it assimilated into Argonaut Games. After this exchange, I reached out to a former programmer from Argonaut Sheffield. This time I provided a set of questions for the developer to answer in an effort to obtain specific information. After waiting for nearly a month, I got a reply:

The questions I asked will be enclosed within [ ] to avoid confusion.

“Hey!

There's some incomplete credits here (redacted)

but you could try contacting (redacted) as he was the lead programmer there. He used to work at PKR too, also owned by (redacted).

(redacted)

[Asked about the main development platform for the games]

1) Yep it was PS2. The PS2 version was handled by Argonaut Edgeware and programmers in Sheffield did ports for the other platforms

[Asked about the cut content from Bionicle: The Game]

2) Sorry, I wasn't involved with that bit. I was responsible for adding the hyper threading features on the PC (redacted)

[Asked about interactions with the London branch]

3) Yep, we worked together on it. Designers and Artists in Sheffield were working on assets for the main game.

[Asked about I-Ninja’s compatibility with Bionicle: The Game]

4) I think they should be compatible with each other. I-ninja came out a bit later though.

[Asked about Bionicle 2: City of Legends]

5) Maybe, not sure as it was a long time ago and I then moved to the Edgeware studio. If they did I guess it was just a prototype for a pitch

Good luck with your fact finding!“

I later asked if they knew of any early builds of either game, and I got this reply:

“Hey!

Sorry for the late reply. I believe everything was archived by Argonaut and EA. I'm not sure if anyone archived it personally at Argonaut or not but there were a lot of people working on it. They created archive PCs with everything you need to make the game from the source assets.

Thanks,

(redacted)”

The concept of the supposed “archive PCs” was interesting, but I doubt any of them are still around after all this time. After this, I contacted another former programmer from Argonaut Sheffield. This time with a focus on Bionicle 2: City of Legends:

“Hi William, I must admit, I'm curious where you found my name in the demo. Do you have a source code drop to go with it, or did I leave my name in an error message in the binary package itself?

Either way, yes I did work on the demo, albeit briefly. The engine the demo is built on is largely the same engine used in Bionicle (the original PS2/Xbox/PC game), Catwoman, and I-Ninja. It has an older pedigree than that too, but those were the games it was used on while Argonaut Sheffield was part of the Argonaut group. I was one of the programmers who ported the engine over to PC & Xbox for the original Bionicle, which is why I was involved in the demo in some capacity.

I'm still in touch with a lot of the designers who worked on the movement demo; the lead designer, (redacted), has said that I can pass on his contact details if you'd like to get in touch with him. You can contact him at (redacted).

Cheers,

(redacted)”

I was not surprised to get confirmation that Bionicle 2 used the same engine as Bionicle: The Game, since most of my existing programs I wrote for Bionicle: The Game were compatible with the Xbox demo. I asked if a PS2 port of Bionicle 2: City of Legends ever existed, since the Xbox demo we have has DualShock button mappings present in the game:

“Ah, I'll bet that's because I'll have compiled and built the disc image, so it's embedded my PC's name into the image. The level select would have just been for test levels where I was looking at specific bugs, performance problems or new features.

I really can't remember if we did PS2 or PC builds of the demo, other than the development binaries the design team would have been using. It's unlikely we'll have done a full ISO for the PS2, because the spiders caused real performance problems and we'd have wanted to show it to the publishers on the fastest available hardware.

By the way, the Xbox version will have reference to PS2 hardware because the original engine was PS2 only. The easiest way to port the engine was to, as far as possible, just get the Xbox and PC versions to pretend they were doing exactly the same thing as the PS2. For example, the game scripts don't need to know that when they get a button press from Cross or Circle, they're actually getting button presses from A or B. So although the names are going to be PS2-centric, they're still doing Xbox specific stuff.”

I was surprised to find out that the Morbuzakh Spiders were the primary reason for shifting Bionicle 2 to the original Xbox. I guess it makes sense, given how little time Argonaut Sheffield had to optimize the game. Switching to the original Xbox appeared to be a quick and easy way to avoid the hassle of optimization.

I later asked about the audio issues present in the Xbox demo, and for some general information about Bionicle: The Game.

“Hi William,

I'm afraid I've got no idea why the demo would be silent - it's been far too many years for me to remember the exact details, and I have no idea which version of the demo is the one which has been circulated. The full code for the audio system will have been present, because it was just a continuation of the engine used on Bionicle, and I'm sure the designers would have had at least some placeholder audio to hook up.

Audio is habitually the last thing to get hooked up in any game development, and since most developers prefer to have a silent build and listen to their own music while they work, it's not unusual for it either to be neglected in early internal builds, or for it to have been hacked to be silent (assuming the demo was one built locally rather than for showing to a publisher).

In terms of the development situation on Bionicle, although we weren't directly in the body of main developers, I think most of us were aware that the game wasn't progressing as well as it should. As well as the code team doing the porting work, our design and art teams were making the 'adrenaline levels' - which were the short lava/ice/tree surfing levels. They were only supposed to be short breaks between much larger levels, but it became increasingly obvious towards the end that these relatively small levels were still a large percentage of the actual content, and the other larger levels weren't coming online as fast as they should. QA in particular do full play-throughs on a regular basis, so they have a very good view of how fast the game as a whole is coming together.

I'm not 100% sure on all of the reasons for the delays in development, having been a relatively junior developer in a satellite studio at the time, but the reasons discussed at the time with leads and producers are fairly common ones that I've seen and heard about on other projects since. Inexperienced publishers or IP holders who haven't worked with game developers before often don't understand the lead times involved in producing content.

It's very hard to explain to customers who are used to working with companies like advertising agencies, who can turn around a complete change of direction in a matter of days, that you need to make and lock down decisions months or even years in advance. I think the penny finally dropped for Lego about three months out from submission that if they kept holding up approvals and kept requesting changes, they weren't going to get any game at all on the shelves - which of course meant we all had to crunch like hell to get the content in good enough shape to ship!

Cheers,”

An example of the aforementioned “Adrenaline sections” is the Tahu Nuva level from Bionicle: The Game. This level is actually internally named “Ta Adrenaline” as well. It’s obvious at this point that Tahu Nuva was originally going to have more than just surfing sections in his level, given the evidence in this message and the fact that he has a full set of unused walking animations.

I eventually contacted the designer mentioned by the former programmer, and got a reply after a month. (This designer was kind enough to restate my questions in his message):

“Hey,

I'm so sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I was launching a game and I completely forgot about this.

1. What was your role as a designer like when working on both games? What kind of work did you do?

I was lead designer at Argonaut Sheffield, and we were brought in to help out on Bionicle the Game. We were responsible for what was known internally as "the adrenaline sections". The game was split into third person. exploration and combat levels (which were developed by the main Argonaut office in London), and the fast moving on rails sections that we created. As well as leading the team on these sections I was directly involved in the Tahu Nuva Boss Race near the end of the game.

2. Were you aware of content being cut or removed when working on Bionicle: The Game? Did you work on anything that didn't make the cut?

Like with any game there's work that involved that never sees the light of day. There were a lot of changes to the design over time, sometimes for practical reasons, other times because Lego wanted them. I seem to recall that in the original design you would play as each Toa normally and each one again in their Nuva form in large open levels - with the platform adventure and the adrenaline sections seamlessly blending into each other. Quite soon after we were brought into the project a much clearer separation was made between the two, but I'm sure there was lots of the preparatory work for that ended up on the disc.

3. Do you know if any other character models aside from Matau (The green character) were created for Bionicle 2?

No other characters were made for that demo. I think we had a matter of weeks and everything had to be done very quickly. That build represents a build that we sent to Lego (And Giant who eventually became TT Games) for approval and hopefully for more funding for the company. And we spent a lot of time agreeing the visual look of the character, as it was very different from what we'd done in the first game.

The work done on Bionicle 2 was entirely done up in Sheffield so we had a lot more control over the content. We knew that the Bionicle audience was getting older, and their gaming needs were becoming more sophisticated and we wanted to do something that would appeal both to that audience and be an interesting game in its own right. We felt that the first game had been so compromised by production issues that it ended up being very disappointing. We wanted to make something fluid and interesting that was a joy to play as a platformer, and had the dynamism and the sense of scale that the Bionicle world deserved.

4. Do you know if any other builds of the Bionicle 2 movement demo exist? Like a build that has working audio?

I don't remember for sure if we ever ended up with a build with audio. But it feels a bit unlikely that we would have got to the stage that we did without their being something in there, especially if the audio assets were on the disk. Somewhere in the depths of my home I think I have a PS2 version of the demo, so I may see if I can get that up and running and find out. As I think - so far - the only people who have had access to the game have played on Xbox, right?

Thanks”

Of course LEGO was being difficult during Bionicle: The Game’s development. They did something similar with Bionicle: The Legend of Mata Nui, and that certainly did not end well. This message was a big deal for us at the time, not only did we get a lot of information about both games, but we also got confirmation that a PS2 build of Bionicle 2: City of Legends actually exists! Unfortunately, this developer never replied again, and I was beginning to lose motivation.

I decided I had enough of Argonaut Sheffield at that point, and shifted my focus to Argonaut London once more. After waiting a bit, I got another reply from a former AI programmer.

“Hi William, sure thing, although it was a long time back so may not remember too much :)

probably easier to use my email (redacted) though as I rarely login to Linkedin.”

We later communicated via email:

“Hi William,

on the unused level front, it’s entirely likely that a bunch of the designers and strat coders ’play areas’ would have ended up in the build. Not sure if you’ve had any background info on how a lot of the Argonaut games were built, but here’s a brief rundown :)

So, when I started at Argonaut in 1997 , I joined the Croc 2 team, who were using the first updated iteration of the engine they built for Croc that had its own scripting language written (originally for the level designers to use) to write all the gameplay elements, while the engine coders focused entirely on the main engine for the PS1 (and a separate small team handled porting the engine to GameCube/Dreamcast, PC etc.). The idea being that ASL (Argonaut Strategy Language) Strats would be cross platform as they were just interpreted by the engine.

As it turned out, ASL strats were a bit too complex for the level designers to write themselves without coder assistance, so Argonaut let them focus on the actual level design itself (using the editor that just became known as the Croc Editor) and got gameplay specialist coders (like myself) to work on the strats. This worked out great as we could focus on individual items or groups of them independent of what was happening with the engine and we could quickly tweak a strat and run it on the devkit without doing a full build of the game (which took *AGES* back then ;) ) as well as some basic debugging capability.

This meant that most of the level designers and strat coders usually had a level slapped together with all the bits they were trying out. I don’t know if my one with all the Matorans following you in a chain still exists, but there were some pretty strange ones. In theory these wouldn’t end up on the disk but the build system was pretty clunky, so it’s entirely likely that some ended up there.

So by the time I got drafted onto the Bionicle PS2 project, I’d worked on Croc 2, Aladdin Nazira’s Revenge, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Bionicle Matoran Adventures on GBA. All but the last one using revisions of the Croc Editor and ASL. (The Emperor’s New Groove, Harry Potter 2, Malice, Catwoman & iNinja also got written with the engine). I say revisions as not a lot was actually added to either over time. Also, by Bionicle PS2 I was kind of an emergency response coder for strats, as I got parachuted in after the project started to help fix a lot of problems with how ASL was being used and design issues with the levels.

There were a lot of issues with Bionicle (not as many as Aladdin or Catwoman started with and my 4 days on Malice were certainly interesting, but they’re entirely different stories ;) ). Mostly from inexperience as the team working on it had a lot of new hires or ones that had been drafted from other teams that didn’t use ASL or the Croc Engine, so they weren’t familiar with its limitations. There were some HR issues going on too, but I’m not going to get into those. The team were mostly all professional and good at what they did, but struggling with a relatively clunky engine. By this point Argonaut had split off most of the engine coders to the “Tools” team and we had to officially request any engine or editor changes we wanted through their chain of command (and they weren’t interested in working on the ‘old’ engine).

There were also some issues with inexperience in games from the Lego UK side too. So a lot of the overall design rules were a bit flaky and lead to a lot of levels and gameplay getting changed. The “No Weapons” rule was one we thought was pretty odd, considering the swords, pikes etc. in use. Apparently they’re tools, not weapons. So we weren’t allowed to use them as direct combat weapons for gameplay, only for magical ranged effects. There was also a lot of issues of really big levels being designed without consideration for what could actually be rendered on screen at the required frame rate on PS2 with the old Croc engine. Even updated to PS2 and with everything the engine coders could do to optimise it, the engine and ASL were struggling to do what the designers wanted.

I don’t think it’s a case of biting off a bit more than they could chew (we successfully wrote Harry Potter from scratch in 9 months in time to release with the film using the engine but that was very much a dream team of all the right people with the right skills and a publisher working well in sync). More a case of it being a new team of people not so experienced with the system and a publisher that wasn’t entirely sure what it wanted. So things were that bit harder to get done in the time available.

In theory, some older gold disks are likely still around. (redacted) was one of our engine guys on the project and “Master of the Build” (he was the only one who had enough tasteless Hawaiian shirts for the numerous submission build days). I’ll have a dig through my CD collection, but it’s unlikely I’ve got any Bionicle builds surviving. I *might* still have some strat code floating about on an old hard disk. I do seem to have some of the Catwoman build code that used mostly the same (although slightly updated) engine though.

One thing that I think got axed was my chain of Matorans. The idea was a level where you’d be picking them up from around the level and they’d follow you to a rescue point. Normally this wouldn’t actually be that difficult to code, but ASL never actually had any arrays! I’d been asking for them for a couple of projects by that point but they never got added, so my Matorans were each working as their own array elements and frantically messaging one another in a chain, which never quite worked reliably enough with ASL, so we shelved the idea.

(redacted) was one of the strat coders working with me on Bionicle. I think he’d just joined Argonaut then, but luckily, knew his stuff.

(redacted)”

I guess a few of the unused levels I found in the PS2 port of Bionicle: The Game are examples of “play areas” given how small some of them are. This message also provided some insight about ASL, the proprietary language both games were created with. This gave me a good idea about how difficult ASL was to use as well. The fact that Arognaut also had many new hires that couldn’t handle ASL’s idiosyncrasies certainly didn’t help Bionicle: The Game at all.

I later reached out to another former AI programmer affiliated with the previous one. They had some interesting things to say:

“Wow, I'm really surprised that anyone is that interested in Bionicle, because I didn't think it was a very good game, but I'm happy that you felt strongly enough to do this, I guess. That's quite an impressive bit of digging.

[Asked about ASL]

Q1) ASL wasn't a great language to use, it was being developed at the same time as the engine so it was constantly changing and was occasionally broken as well. The turnaround from making a change in code to testing it on the target device was quite slow. And coming from C++ the lack of modularity was frustrating. There was some talk in the team about wanting it to be object oriented, but anything that made it cleaner and less prone to repetition would have been good. My memory of it isn't that good since it was 20 years ago. I remember the collision and animation systems being awkward and crude as well though. Do you know about the other games that the system was used for? Catwoman took the animation engine a bit further, but it was really horrible trying to program the animation blending for finite state machines with a language that was so hard to debug.

[Asked about scrapped content in Bionicle: The Game]

Q2) I don't remember much about what was scrapped. There were different teams working on different levels and playable characters, I mainly worked on the Tahu levels and the final boss. I think there might have been some stuff scrapped from the other characters. One or two of them were developed by the team who were doing the cross platform conversion for us, and we didn't see much of what they were doing and only saw it quite late.

[Asked if any early builds of Bionicle: The Game still exist]

Q3) I have no idea - perhaps Sony or EA have archives of the earlier builds. Someone on the engine team might do, I can't think how or why a strat coder would have one.”

The issues with the collision system they mentioned are definitely present in Bionicle: The Game. It’s quite easy to glitch out of bounds, as speedrunners have demonstrated many times. We later talked about general programming concepts and discussed ASL further:

“Reassuring to know that I'm not imagining Bionicle being pretty bad! I think object oriented was just flavour of the month in 2003, Java was a highly respected language at the time and we thought it was the future. It would have been nice to work in a language that was used in other places, because having ASL on your CV was a pretty crappy prospect for seeking other work. At least if you used Fortran or Pascal it was recognised by employers as a mainstream language. WTF is ASL? I worked in two other organisations that had proprietary languages and it was annoying. The good thing about starting work at Argonaut at least was that ASL was a proven language that you could make games with, and it did let you get down to the relevant bits of gameplay you wanted to take control of. Before that I worked at Phase 3 studios where they had never made an action game before, and we spent a lot of time programming systems that had hardly any effect on gameplay. So I was grateful for ASL and the toolchain for making it easy to do some limited things. I was very impressed by someone on the iNinja team for getting ropes to work with a vertlet algorithm, we stole that later for the green Bionicle to use. I think the High Voltage Software studio might be using a different language with the same initials? I can't see how it could possibly be Argonaut's language. I'm pretty sure there was some talk about opening it up as middleware to sell other studios but I don't think we ever got there. Many of the staff from Catwoman went on to work at Rocksteady, Sony and Ninja Theory, but I think they just started using whatever engine was in place there. You could find hundreds of people who had brushes with the language.”

I asked about other studios using ASL for their games:

“What release date were the games? Argonaut folded in 2004 I think, so the creditors might have managed to sell off the technology as cheap middleware of last-gen consoles

or perhaps they were licensing the tech while we were using it, and I just hadn't been aware of it”

I sent him some notable examples of games using ASL from other studios, such as The Conduit and Ben 10: Protector of Earth:

“That fits the picture then - liquidation in 2004, sell the technology in 2005, two years of learning the systems and developing content, release in 2007

The PS3 would be the current gen console by then, but the PS2 had a large enough user base to make it a viable market, especially for movie tie-ins and children’s games”

I later asked if there was any possibility that Argonaut received parts of ASL from other sources:

“That's an interesting question... I don't know but I think Argonaut were using strats since 1993 and the language gradually evolved from Starfox to Croc and so on. I think it was around before High Voltage existed. It does seem like a massive coincidence that the header is VOLT but there aren't many words that sound cool to programmers so I still suspect it is just a coincidence. Programming was Argonaut's strongest suit, it doesn't make sense that they would buy tech in like that. I was only at the company for two years or so, ask someone who was there longer.”

Then out of the blue, another former designer from Argonaut Sheffield reached out to me about Bionicle 2. After that, I asked them a few questions:

“Hi William,

Great to hear from you. Let me see what I can do to answer your questions!

[Asked about the development process of Bionicle 2]

1. Designing the demo was a bit of a break from the usual licensed Dev. We had creative control so got to decide what direction we'd like to take things in (hence a departure from the 'standard' platforming fare of the time!) My role was predominantly as a technical designer - that was, creating ideas and prototyping/building in the tools. For the demo I was responsible for populating and scripting some of the functionalities in the level.

[Asked about the broken audio in the Xbox port of Bionicle 2]

2. Not sure on the silence in the build tbh... I seem to remember doing some work on creating and implementing some spot FX and seem to remember we put some audio track on the front end screen. With this being a closed pitch demo, I honestly can't remember if we'd created the track or sourced it from elsewhere!

[Asked if they knew about any other builds of Bionicle 2]

3. I believe a have a variety of unreleased games and demos on various formats somewhere. Most of them will be PS2 from that period.

Thanks”

When they mentioned owning a variety of unreleased games and demos, I was immediately intrigued. I later asked if they had a PS2 build of Bionicle 2 and offered to send him a copy of our Xbox build of the game in exchange for it, and to my surprise I got this:

“Hey William,

Cool, I'll have a search when I get some time and attempt to extract it for you!

Thanks��

I was ecstatic. Finally, after months of searching, I was about to get something tangible! But the days passed, and those days turned into weeks. I was beginning to lose hope until I got this message:

“Hey William,

Quick note on my progress - I've not forgotten! I delved into my garage over the weekend and came away with 3 CDs labeled bionicle 2 with various dates on!

I'll attempt to create an ISO of the latest date and share with you when I get a mo (most likely the weekend again!)

Thanks”

Not only did he have a build of the game for the PS2, but THREE of them! After seeing this, I decided to wait for the weekend to arrive. Unfortunately I would be very busy on this particular weekend, but Bionicle was still my top priority! So I proceeded to bail on my friends to wait for an obscure as hell prototype game from a discontinued children’s toy line to show up in my inbox. However, on Sunday, the weekend was coming to a close, and I had heard nothing from the former designer. My waiting and persistence later paid off after I got this message:

“Hi William,

Give this a go - no idea if it works - let me know!

(redacted)”

At last! I finally got it! The latest known PS2 build of Bionicle 2: City of Legends! But there was a problem. The game didn’t boot. Just my luck. But I wasn’t ready to give up. I ended up rebuilding the entire iso with some proprietary tools, and by some miracle, it booted up in my emulator. It’s about what you would expect: It’s similar to Xbox build in many ways, but it is also different. Unlike the Xbox port, the audio works, and there are some extra graphical effects and animations. I was also able to get the game to boot up on a real PS2 without issue.

I can’t say exactly when BioMedia Project will release this build to the public, but I'm sure it will happen soon. Until then, feel free to watch some gameplay footage of the demo on my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/Dvmzz92F3oo

These past couple of years have been pretty crazy for Bionicle. The Legend of Mata Nui was found TWICE, and there has been so much more activity within the community as a result. I’m glad I was able to make my mark and get this unreleased build of Bionicle 2: City of Legends into the hands of the Bionicle community where it belongs. If you made it this far, Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, don’t forget to share it. I spent a lot of time researching this, and I would really appreciate it. Special Thanks:

BioMedia Project

Liam Robertson

Fraug L. Coolman

#bionicle #lego

25 notes · View notes

ghostiiess · 2 years ago

Text

[NSB HEADCANONS] - kane being your boyfriend

★。／｜＼。★★。／｜＼。★★。／｜＼。★★。／｜＼。★★。／｜

pov: kane is your boyfriend!!

warning: none

type: wholesome and fluff

member: kane ratan

kane being your boyfriend would be pretty cool for real

like he would hold your hands at random time and try his best to make you smile and laugh

he would make pranks on you (he love doing pranks)

he would make jokes with you towards the nsb members (but in a funny and joking way, don't worry! nothing's serious, just casual funny jokes the members do together)

he would put ice cream on your nose on purpose

and he would laugh

"hahaha, you got something on your nose, babe"

he would watch animes with you

anime nights >>>

and he would buy you your fav snacks or drinks

kane is a loyal guy who'll stick with you to the beginning until the end

he's the oldest in the group and all he want is a long term relationship.. so when you started dating, he thought that maybe you could be the one for him..? maybe?

but he'll never say it to you

at least, he'll wait for the right moment to say it to you

kane ratan is a nice and caring guy. if he see you upset, not in the mood or just sad, he'll try to make you smile and laugh with his humor and some tickles?

he know your tickles spot, babe

and he's not afraid to tickle you

he'll kiss your cheek at random times and hold your hand :(

"ohhh i just wanted to kiss your cheek! wait, was it okay?"

you would be super close with his family, mostly with manager ty

to ty, you're like a part of the family 🥺 he's happy that his brother is happy with you

kane would hype you all the time and spoil you a lot

"fine? baby, i think you look gorgeous. you are more than fine!"

he truly appreciate every little things, so if you see him tired or upset, please give him a hug, he'll appreciate it so so much

he would make you discover new animes that you haven't watched yet or was on your 'to watch' list

kane's job is super exhausting and really tiring but he love it very much and we can see how the boys love what they are doing and how grateful they are to have this job! so please give this man cuddles and hugs and comfort, he deserve it so so much

if you have insecurities, he'll kiss them

for example, if you have insecurities about some freckles on your nose, he'll kiss them and smile

"freckles are like stars on your nose! you're so brighter and so shiny, that you have stars in you wherever you go. they're beautiful, gorgeous, super cute. it's like if you had pieces of the universe in your face.."

he's so sweet and so respectful towards everyone

he would go with you to an anime convention! if you don't really love anime, well, don't worry. he'll bring you to convention you'll like.

he just love going with you to his favorite places. to him, going there with you is a sort of intimacy and loving moment

kane would love to do charades with you and the boys! he just love this game so much and let's be honest: he's really good at it.

ratan and you would stay up at night talking why the anime is so damn good or so damn bad (it's rarely bad, don't worry). like tell me, this isn't a kane ratan thing

"no!! this anime is not about that!"

he's only doing that because he think you're cute while 'arguing' with him

if you love spicy food, expect him to put the spiciest thing he have in his food, in your plate

"i hate spicy food."

he would tell you everything about him: his secrets, his projects (you would actually be in the first ones to know), his dreams, his goals... his insecurities (which you'll tell him how he shouldn't have these because he's so perfect and so amazing and so beautiful).. you're one of the person he trust the most and care about

he's not the jealous type, but would definitively make the other person know you're taken if they get too close to you or try flirting with you

he trust his s/o with all his heart that's why he would do online relationship with you if you can't go with him on his tour or can't live with him atm :(

the boys would love you so much

dates with him are A-MA-ZING!

this boy got the conversation damn ;)

"if you could go anywhere in the world without having to pay it.. where would you go and why?"

a lot of memes about him

idk if it's all the boys but i saw that seb was drinking almond milk (it's in one of his videos, i think it's in the "get ready with me" but i'm not sure) so if you drink 'normal' (from cows, idk how to call it) or any other kind of milk, he would buy you some. just because it's a meme with him drinking milk.

you dye his hair and he would dye yours if you're okay with it

"do you think this color would fit me, y/n?"

your opinion on things is really important to him <3 he love you so much

GIFTS, GIFTS, GIFTS! his love language is gifts ^^ he love spoiling you and making you feel like a royalty

he would buy you clothes and hoodies that you can wear while he's far away if you guys are doing online relationships for some moments

but if you ONLY are doing online relationships, he would put some clothes in a box and send it to the post :( he's so kind, like arghh it's so sweet

kane is so underrated like?? what?? i don't see a lot of ff or imagines or headcanons about him and it's making me sad because he's so genuine and so amazing :( this man deserve the best

HIS SMILE OH MY GAWD

please, it's so cute

to conclude this headcanon, ratan would try his best to make you smile, to cheer you up whatever happen, he would also take care of you and would def write (love) song about you with the boys. he would sing you to sleep with his soft and relaxing voice and would hold your hands through the good and the bad times. his mom would def love you. his siblings would too. you're his inspiration like pinterest is to so many people. he would love you so much so please, never hurt this man :( he's like a sunshine who's ready to come out. kane is a nice person and he deserve the best

#headcanons #headcanon #soft headcanons #boyfriend headcanons #dating headcanons #cute headcanons #him as a boyfriend #him as a bf #you dating him #northstarboys #nsb #north star boys #kane ratan #kaneratan #can i have this please

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thecomicsnexus · 6 years ago

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TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #42-44, ANNUAL #3 MAY - JULY 1984 BY MARV WOLFMAN, GEORGE PEREZ, DICK GIORDANO, MIKE DECARLO AND ADRIENNE ROY

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

Donna and Kory finish up a photo shoot at Donna's studio. Gar, naturally, is overwhelmed by the skimpiness of Kory's bathing suit. Tara is present, and asks how Donna could afford such an expansive studio apartment. Donna tells her that it was a gift from Queen Hippolyta. What none of the Titans present realize is that someone is surreptitiously taking surveillance photos of Donna's studio.

Gar and Tara walk Dick back to his midtown apartment. Again, someone continues to take photographs of the group, but none of them seem to be aware of it. After dropping Dick off, Gar and Tara walk over to a nearby frozen pond where Vic Stone and Sarah Simms are ice skating with a group of Sarah's disabled wards. Vic loses his balance and falls onto the ice, and Sarah and the children begin laughing at them. Vic is only slightly embarrassed, but his humiliation is compounded when Gar turns into a bunny and begins poking fun at him. Afterwards, Vic returns home where he finds a letter from his grandparents. The letter indicates that they will be visiting him some time soon. Vic is not overjoyed to receive such news. As before, someone takes a snapshot of him from outside his apartment.

Later, Gar walks Tara down to the East River. She finally relents to his persistent affections and the two share a kiss. Gar leaves, and Tara takes the raft to Titans Tower. She stops by Raven's room and finds the empath in the midst of meditation. Raven doesn't trust Tara, but as she has been dealing with so many emotional issues as of late, she cannot determine whether her apprehension is justified, or if it is just a by-product of her father Trigon's influence over her.

Some time later, the Titans regroup at the tower and Cyborg goes through a training exercise. He succeeds in overcoming a five-ton steel press. Donna and Kory spar with one another atop a floating raft in the Titans' swimming pool. Donna has never defeated Kory during these trials and is determined to win. Kory reminds her once again that she was trained by the Warlords of Okaara, and that fighting is second-nature to her. She proves her point by kicking Donna in the jaw, knocking her into the pool. Terra silently watches the various trials, taking note of her potential teammates strengths and weaknesses.

The next training exercise takes place outside. The Titans want to see what Tara is truly capable of and has her spar against Changeling. Changeling, with his usual aplomb, transforms into a variety of animals, and circle about Terra, disrupting her concentration. He keeps making jokes and poking playful fun at her, not realizing that she each barb is steadily bringing her temper to a boil. Finally, Terra can take no more of Gar's shenanigans and unleashes a volley of earth, rocks and debris at him. Volcanic mounds of dirt begin erupting across the island, and the other Titans quickly realize that Terra has lost control. They finally get Terra to calm down, and they make sure that Gar is okay. Cyborg chastises him for provoking her.

Later, Tara retires to the Terminator's secret lair. Slade criticizes her for losing control, and tells her that it is only through sheer naiveté that the Titans still trust her. Tara tells him not worry about anything.

Elsewhere, a middle-aged woman and her teenage son monitor Slade and Tara's actions. They take a surveillance photo of them boarding a helicopter. The woman is surprised that she was able to get close enough to Slade to photograph him. She whispers to herself, "Slade, it's been a long time. But not long enough for you".

Dick Grayson is at home typing a letter when suddenly the Terminator crashes through his apartment window and attacks him. It quickly becomes clear that the Terminator knows that Dick was once the retired super-hero Robin, though Grayson has no idea how he could have acquired such knowledge. Realizing that the Terminator has a physical advantage over him, Dick baits his foe into kicking him out the broken window. He uses his leather jacket to slow his fall as his body plummets into a pile of garbage. As the Terminator begins firing rounds out the window, Dick (injured) sprints into the crowd. The Terminator gives chase and follows him across a busy street. Two witnesses to this tableaux are the middle-aged woman who had been spying on the Terminator, and her silent teenage son. Terminator follows Dick into a nearby park, but Dick loses him in a crowd of marathon runners.

Fearing that his fellow Titans may be in danger, Dick tries to contact them on his communicator, but nobody responds. He races over to Donna and Kory's apartment, but as he feared, the penthouse is in shambles. He finds evidence of a letter bomb that could've been used to render Kory unconscious. Examining Donna's darkroom, he finds trace elements of poisonous chemicals that had been mixed with her photo solutions. He suspects that the odor from the chemicals would have been strong enough to incapacitate someone of even Donna's hearty constitution.

He next stops at Victor Stone's apartment. Breaking down the door, he finds an empty chair outfitted with clamps and wires designed to electrocute its intended target. He also finds a letter on the floor from Vic's grandparents and surmises that he was reading the letter when the Terminator sprung his trap. Like the others, Vic is nowhere to be found.

Dick then goes to Titans Tower. The tower is empty but for a massive spiraling column of earth. Clearly this is Terra's handiwork. The column leads into Raven's quarters, but neither Terra nor Raven are anywhere to be found. Dick hears a voice from behind him and spins around to see the middle-aged woman and her son standing before him. The woman introduces herself as Adeline and the boy next to her is her son Joey. Adeline tells him that the Terminator learned all of the Titans secrets from Terra. Dick doesn't trust this woman, and is unwilling to readily accept the fact that Terra was a traitor. Adeline tells him that she has unique knowledge of the Terminator and his schemes, due in no small part to one simple fact – he was once her husband.

Meanwhile, the Terminator abducts his final victim – Gar Logan. Playing on Garfield's vanity, he poisons the seal on a pile of envelopes that correspond to autographed photos of himself that he plans on mailing to his female fan base. After licking numerous envelopes, the poison finally takes affect and Gar passes out. Deathstroke collects his quarry and brings all of the Titans to the Rocky Mountain headquarters of his employers – the H.I.V.E.

At Titans Tower, Dick Grayson stands incredulous as Adeline Kane accuses Terra of collusion with their most hated foe Deathstroke the Terminator. As his former wife, Adeline has intimate knowledge of Slade Wilson's origins. She provides Robin with a complete history of Slade's life.

The Origin of the Terminator Having lied about his age, Slade Wilson was sixteen-years-old when he first enlisted in the United States Army. After serving a stint in Korea, he was later assigned to Camp Washington where he had been promoted to the rank of Major. In the early 1960s, he met Captain Adeline Kane who was tasked with training young soldiers in new fighting techniques in anticipation of brewing troubles taking place in Vietnam. Kane was amazed at how skilled Slade was and how quickly he adapted to modern conventions of warfare. She immediately fell in love with him, and realized that he was without a doubt the most able-bodied combatant she had ever encountered. She offered to privately train Slade in guerrilla warfare. In less than a year, Slade mastered every fighting form presented to him and was soon promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Six months later, Adeline and he were married and she became pregnant with their first child. It was at this time that the war in Vietnam began to escalate and Slade was shipped overseas. At home, Adeline gave birth to their son Grant. Some time later, Wilson volunteered for a medical experiment designed to stimulate his adrenal gland in the hopes of increasing a soldier's ability to resist truth serums. The experiment did not go as expected, and Slade fell into a coma. When he awakened however, he discovered that was now capable of using 90% of his brain capacity, and his strength, durability and agility were increased to near superhuman levels. He applied for re-assignment with the army, but they refused him. Although his condition was now stabilized, depression took hold of him and he was desperate to serve his country. At this time, Adeline became pregnant with their second child, Joseph. Unable to further his career in the military, Slade turned towards hunting. He became a world famous safari hunter and great wealth followed soon after. Adeline always suspected however that Slade felt unfulfilled.

A few years later, a group of hired mercenaries broke into the Wilsons' mansion and kidnapped young Joey. Adeline attempted to fight them off, but a gas grenade prevented her from saving her son. When Slade discovered what had happened, he knew he could not keep the truth from his wife any longer. Slade was not only a world famous safari hunter, he was also one of the world's deadliest and most highly sought after assassins - Deathstroke the Terminator. He promised Adeline that he would save their son. Together, they flew to Tangiers and squared off against a rival mercenary known as the Jackal. The Jackal wanted Slade to reveal important information relating to a client or else he would have his men kill Joey. Slade gambled on the idea that he could save his son before the Jackal could give the order. Though he succeeded in disarming the thugs and killing the Jackal, he was not fast enough to prevent one of them from slicing Joey's throat, permanently robbing him of his voice. Grief stricken beyond measure, Adeline attempted to shoot her husband in the back of the head. His lightning reflexes saved his life, but he could not avoid the bullet taking out his left eye. Slade and Adeline parted ways, but Addie always promised that she would finish the job she started.

After concluding her tale, Adeline convinces Dick to allow them to help rescue the Titans. Dick runs upstairs to don a brand new costume, and with it a new identity. When he returns to the meeting hall, he is no longer Robin the Boy Wonder. He is now Nightwing. Joey too has a costume and has taken to calling himself Jericho. Dick is still unsure about having Joey around, but Adeline reveals that the experiments which gave Slade his powers, had a mutagenic side-effect in his son. Joey has the ability to physically possess the bodies of other people. After a quick demonstration, he communicates (through sign language) his desire to bring his father to justice. Nightwing is still reluctant, but agrees to accept his aid. They fly off in the T-Jet on the trail of Deathstroke and Terra.

Nightwing and Jericho go to the H.I.V.E. base nestled in the Rocky Mountains. They sneak into the facility and discover that the Titans have been strapped to a giant machine which is slowly siphoning away their life energy. Nightwing and Jericho fight through a horde of H.I.V.E. shock troops but are eventually captured. The Terminator is surprised to see his son with the Titans and tries to bargain with the H.I.V.E. to let him go. The H.I.V.E. refuses however and Jericho takes this opportunity to possess his own father. Using the Terminator's body and weaponry, he frees the other Titans and begins fighting the H.I.V.E.

Terra is enraged at Terminator and feels that his affection for Joey makes him weak. She accuses him of betraying her, not altogether different from how she betrayed the Titans. She loses complete control of her sanity and years for nothing more than the death of everyone in the room. Changeling refuses to believe that Tara has gone bad, and is certain that the Terminator has brainwashed her. Terra calls him a moron and confesses that she has always been conspiring with Slade against the Titans. Terra's powers rage out of control and twisting columns of rock begin growing from out of the floor and walls. Wonder Girl ensnares Terra in her golden lasso, but Terra knocks her off her feet with a geyser. Changeling turns into a giant serpent and tries to coil himself around her, but she keeps him at bay by hurling a wave of debris at him. One of the discarded chunks of sediment strikes Raven in the face, knocking her unconscious. As Terra's emotions are whipped into a greater frenzy, her powers become even more uncontrollable. Finally she causes a mountain of earth and debris to collapse down from the ceiling, killing herself in the process.

The Titans bring Terra's body back to New York for burial. The funeral service is small and only the Titans and the Outsiders are in attendance. The Titans let Tara's surviving brother Geo-Force believe that she died heroically while fighting the H.I.V.E. From some distance away, Joey Wilson sheds a tear for Terra. His mother comforts him and speaks about the nobility of the Titans. She concludes with, "You'll do well with them".

INTERVIEW WITH WOLFMAN

Dan: Now, going back to The Judas Contract … that was a perfect example of melding character beats and a lot of action and the culmination of a story. So, give us a sense of how that particular story came together.

Marv: I had the original idea and George and I, at this point George lived about five blocks from me. We’d get together at a diner between us and…

Dan: Where was this? Was this in New York?

Marv: Yeah. And we would talk out… I’d come in with the idea and then we’d start talking it out and going back and forth and early on I’d go back and rewrite it as a full plot, broken down page-by-page, and George would take that and do what he wanted. The fact that I broke it down didn’t mean he had to follow it. It was my way of pacing the story and he’d use what he wanted or he’d come up certainly with the action stuff, a million great things.

George’s strength was he also understood the characters 100 percent as I did so there was never any question. He knew. We had talked enough about the characters to know we were exactly on the same page with them. So I said, “Everyone keeps complaining that we’re like the X-Men” and the X-Men had just gotten Kitty Pryde. I said, “Why don’t we really screw around with them completely?” — this is the fans — “…and make them think we’re stealing Kitty Pryde only she’s gonna be bad from Day One.”

You always had characters pop up, certainly at Marvel, who were bad that get redeemed. But this character would never get redeemed. She was insane. In fact, she was the catalyst for everything. She wasn’t working for Deathstroke. He was working for her in many ways and she was leading him because she’s crazy. She’s a total psychopath… and she’d be 15. And she’d be smoking and she’d be trying to seduce him.

The very first time we see her, she’s trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty. It’s just that all the fans assumed because we went out of our way to make her cute — but not too cute, with the buck teeth and everything — everyone would assume that she was gonna become good by the end and that was never the case.

First thing, we made a promise that day that we would never renege on our view that she’d never become good. It’s sometimes hard to do that with characters you like. You want them to become good or something like that. But we never liked the character enough—because we knew what we were doing with her—we never allowed ourselves to fall for the character. Because that’s bad. That’s bad storytelling. You’re doing what you want as a fan at that particular point, not as the creators. The fans had to accept what we were doing and not do the same stories that they had read 14,000 times before. You know, at Marvel, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were villains who became good guys and I could go through a whole list of ’em.

The funniest part — when we got to the end of the storyline and we’re at the diner and we’re plotting the death. At the end of it, four or five hours later, we walk out and I suddenly turn to George and I say, “Do you realize we’ve been plotting the death of a 15-year-old girl and not one single person there said boo. (Laughter) Can you just kill people in New York and no one even cares?” (Laughter)

REVIEW

This story is a milestone in comic-book history. The sidekick that never went back to being a sidekick. Then you have the actual betrayal of Terra, the introduction of Jericho, the origin of Deathstroke, the first “TITANS TOGETHER” (If I am not mistaken). The story has something for everyone.

Furthermore, we get to see Dick investigating the crime scenes and figuring out what happened to his team-mates.

I think the only thing missing from this saga is Romeo Tanghal. Giordano and Decarlo make the book look iconic, but it is still significantly different. I assume the reason for his absence can be explained by the fact that they were preparing for the other Titans title.

While Nightwing was never undone by DC, the actual origin has been fluctuating ever since. Most notoriously, making his origin more Batman-related than titans. Whatever the case, he became a fan favorite character, even more so than Robin (though future Robins probably benefited by their predecessor's success.

I give this story a score of 10

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lcdylvke · 5 years ago

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[ ADELAIDE KANE ] who’s that running? oh that’s just KATERINA "KATE" SMYTHE the TWENTY-FIVE year old HUMAN hunter. throughout town they’re known as the CRIMSON that is a(n) BAKER WHILE IN HUNTING VILLAGE. SHE is ORGANIZED and RETICENT and the smell of APPLES lingers whenever they leave the room. they’re imprinted to CASEY DEIDRICK, TOBY REGBO, NICK BATEMAN, ASK MUN.

[tw: death, murder]

This is my dangerous murder baby named Kate. Here’s some info about her.

Kate grew up right in Wolfstone and prior to becoming a hunter, she was a sweet girl who genuinely fell in love with everyone she met, whether it was platonic love or romantic love. She was a girl who knew no stranger and it was largely due to the fact her parents were in a polyamory relationship as a trio. Love came in all forms and it knew no gender or binary.

While she differed from her mothers and her father in preference as a monogamist, she loved a series of genders, male, female, and nonbinary alike. One girl stood out from the rest: Ava. She was the daughter of the sheriff and she became Kate’s first love, despite the fact Ava’s family didn’t approve of the “hippie child.” Or of the fact it was a female/female friendship.

Things progressed after they finished school and soon they were making plans to be together long-term. Kate started pastry school online to become a certified pastry chef and Ava started school nearby to become a veterinarian.

Kate hadn’t thought much of it when Ava was gone for a couple days, as she occasionally had business to attend to for vet school. It wasn’t until she didn’t return that Kate began to worry and left their tiny town in search of her. Even out of town, Ava always answered her phone or called right back, but this time her phone was silent.

Kate started her own search party after the sheriff hadn’t shown interest in finding his daughter and something drew her to the woods.

It was there that she made the discovery of the love of her life, dead from what appeared to be an animal attack. The case was soon written off as such, but it wasn’t good enough for her. The wolf prints were far too large to be that of a conventional wolf or even a bear. She was accosted by someone in the woods and it was there that she learned the truth about the town: shape-shifting wolves lived in there and it was highly likely that one of them killed Ava. She doesn’t have to die in vain, they said. And it was then that Kate’s devastation fueled her into learning everything she could about becoming a hunter.

When the Elders invited the hunters to a welcoming party, Kate couldn’t not go. Anything to try and find one of the monsters who killed Ava

This is all I have now but I’ll be adding as I go! If anyone would like to plot with Kate, hit the ♥ and I’ll come to you!

#amhq:intro #&&( if a man talks shit then i owe him nothing ) → katerina's conversations #&&( i'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams ) → katerina's visage #&&( they're burning all the witches even if you aren't one ) → katerina's musings

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britesparc · 6 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #375

Top Ten Games That Could be Films

Well. Sonic. That’s a thing, yeah? The last couple of weeks, when not consumed with Avengers-related news and emotions, have seen people on t’net talking about Sonic, and his weird human legs and nice set of teeth. It’s certainly an odd design, although I sympathise with the creatives involved, even the executives who (I’m presuming) were the driving force behind Sonic’s movie look, okaying what the artists and animators were producing and steering them towards something that, I’m sure, they thought would sell. It’s a tough business and, to paraphrase William Goldman, nobody really knows that much when you think about it.

Among the many think-pieces that have sprung up, however, there is one point I disagree with: that it’s pointless to adapt a game into a movie at all. Certainly there should be no attempt to “legitimise” a gaming property with a film adaptation; games are great and will always be great, as games. But there are games with an iconography, storyline, or set of characters that could translate into movies. As it happens, Sonic the Hedgehog is one such game. He’s instantly familiar both to old farts like myself who remember the nineties, and also to the young folk who will be the film’s target audience. As it happens, I think the rough plot of the film – Sonic and Robotnik enter the “real world” – is probably the best storyline to tell, rather than adapting the game’s plot; it gives us a recognisable world, allows for some A-list casting (Jim Carrey as Robotnik, James Marsden as Sonic’s human pal), and following on from the likes of Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Smurfs, Christopher Robin, et al, the notion of CGI characters interacting with humans is a familiar movie trope, so much so that it’s practically a sub-genre of kids’ films (and can end up getting lampooned in adult-oriented films such as Paul or Ted).

No, I think a much worse decision is to try to adapt a game’s plot; to straight-up cart it across from console to movie screen (or, if you’re watching it on DVD, from, er, Xbox to Xbox, I guess). The first generation of game adaptations were especially guilty of this, often trying to graft a more realistic plotline, with character motivations and whatnot, onto games where “story” should really be read as “objective”: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Bros, Doom, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Whilst some of those films still retain a goofy charm (I will go to bat for Street Fighter being an absolute camp delight), they’re not good, not really. Far better, in my opinion, to take an existing world, one with deep and familiar iconography, and tell stories within it: sort of what the Sonic movie is doing, which we can almost assume is in continuity with the previous games. The best example of this, I think, is Halo; there have been a number of shorts and TV series based on the Halo games, set in the same world, often serving as prequels to the games themselves. And whilst they rarely go beyond a spot of pulpy fun, they do feel of a part with the games themselves. What they don’t do is re-tell the story of the games, and in that, they succeed where other game adaptations have fallen down.

There are examples of games with strong storylines that could be adapted, I think, but they would need care and attention, and should avoid being straight-up ports of the games. Use the storylines, if strong enough, but feel free to chop and change to make it work on film.

Another thing that some games have going for them, that makes them difficult to translate into movies, is that they’re really just film adaptations anyway. I think this is why the Doom and Tomb Raider movies have been less successful than perhaps you’d think; Doom is a sci-fi horror film, not too far away from Aliens (and especially quite close, even though it pre-dated it, to Event Horizon); Tomb Raider is basically Indiana Jones with a woman. The same is true for Red Dead Redemption, which I’m sure has Hollywood types arranging meetings as we speak; it’s a blockbuster, a game with instant name-recognition, a built-in audience, and strong iconography. The problem is that iconography is adapted from dozens of Westerns from The Searchers to Unforgiven to Deadwood to Bone Tomahawk. Quite frankly, we’ve seen that before.

Anyway: here are ten games (or game franchises, I suppose) that I think could stand to be adapted. Some of them are strong stories, some of them are great worlds. Hollywood, feel free to get in touch.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990): despite banging on about adapting worlds not stories, Monkey Island has a story worth adapting. Sure, it needs adapting, but it has characters, a beginning, middle, and end, and a world that could be seen on the big screen. Pirates of the Caribbean probably stole a bit of its thunder, but that franchise looks like it’s sinking at the moment (no pun intended), so doing a much wackier, almost ZAZ-style take on the pirate movie could be really good fun. My advice would be to put Guybrush and Elaine together for much of the narrative and give them some screwball dialogue.

Command and Conquer (1995): hear me out… the C&C games have a seam of mythology richer than a source of Tiberium, and could lend themselves to a sci-fi war epic. There are characters in there worth adapting – well, Kane, at least – and whilst the risk of it turning into a GI JOE movie is great, if they keep their tongue slightly in their cheek it could be a really good, fun action movie that harks back to ‘80s genre classics. I mean, the C&C cut-scenes are famously hammy, and whilst I don’t think they should quite dial it up to eleven, maybe keeping it a good seven or eight would be good fun. Also: Red Alert, which arguably is funnier (and funner, if that’s a word), but at the moment “comedy Russian bad guys” isn’t quite so benign a concept.

The Legend of Zelda (1986): either as an animation or live-action, I could definitely see a Zelda movie working. For a start, every game is sort of a reboot, a brand new story but still set in the same world as tropes, characters, and events repeat themselves. That means you could tell a story right from the start, drawing on the best plot elements and pieces of iconography from across multiple Zelda games, but it could still be in-continuity with the game series itself. A sprawling fantasy epic but skewing younger than the likes of Lord of the Rings, it could be an absolute winner. Like Monkey Island, I’d keep Link and Zelda together for much of the narrative, however.

Mass Effect (2007): this one might be cheating a bit, because I think there actually is a film in the works (I mean, there’s probably a film in the works for half of these games…). Also it might be cheating a bit because in this case, I don’t think you’d adapt it into a film, but rather a TV series. I’d adapt the story, roughly, but give it a direct narrative thrust. I think if it was a film you’d have to cut too much; it’d feel too propulsive, and risk becoming just another sci-fi action movie. But a series – maybe a 12-episode Netflix affair or something, with a big budget – could allow room to linger, to have the odd episode go off on a tangent to explore the Geth or Rachni or whatever. I’d also look at both men and women for the lead, and cast whoever was best, in a nod to the gender choices of the game itself.

Fable (2004): this is one where I think it’s the world rather than the plot that’s worth adapting: a fun, almost Python-esque version of a fictional fairy-tale Britain. A new recruit to the Hero Academy who is trying to prove themselves whilst also battling Jack of Blades. I’d keep the humour and the bawdy tone, and add in characters from across the Fable series, making it much more of an ensemble. Arguably it’s the gameplay and the emergent storytelling that’s part of Fable’s charm, but I do really think there’s enough there to hang an adult comedy fantasy film on.

Duke Nukem 3D (1996): this is one that could go very badly, but I still think there’s potential. Duke Nukem as a character is a boor, an oaf, a misogynistic pig, a relic of a bygone age worth forgetting. Whilst I think exploring this character in a contemporary setting would be more interesting in a game (especially as you could explore the twenty-year-old gameplay differences, too), you could use Duke as an avatar of the ‘80s, almost, to critique action cinema of years gone by. A washed-up sexist dinosaur who has to be pulled out of retirement, I’d cast an older actor with some comedy chops but also a solid physical pedigree: maybe even Arnie?! You’d have to be careful that if you had a redemption arc for him you didn’t end up justifying the crassness of the original game, however.

Another World (1991): this is one where it’s the world and the style that’s the key, although there’s a vague enough story there to adapt. A scientist is transported to, literally, another world, and has to survive, ending up joining a slave rebellion. The game is all funky graphics and cool gameplay (by 1991 standards, at least), but with the right director you could transfer that brilliantly to the screen, and it allows enough room to explore the psychological effects on Lester Chaykin. One of the things I really like about the game, is that unlike other human-transported-to-alien-world storylines, Lester is way out of his depth; he’s not a superhero, not a revolutionary. He is battered by the elements, hunted by animals, imprisoned, beaten, and ultimately (spoiler alert) saved by one of the aliens. You’d have to keep this element of the game to avoid it feeling like too much of a cliché.

BioShock (2007): this one might be a bit more conventional, and risk being another Doom-style adaptation of a game, trying to follow a story that’s more about gameplay than literary flourish. But there is something there, I think; for one, there’s the steampunk aesthetic of a decaying underwater 1940s utopia, all art-deco and brass, the outside world rushing in and laying waste to such finery. There’s the philosophical discussion at the heart of BioShock, giving filmmakers something interesting to hang it all on. There’s the horror element: the creepy Little Sisters, the shock-horror Splicers, the terrifying Big Daddies. Finally, there’s the twist, which – I’m gonna be honest here – would not work anywhere near as well in a film, but all the same, it’s a twist. It is, perhaps, the most vanilla of the options I’ve laid out here, but I’d still like to see it.

Jet Set Willy (1984): there are quite a few relatively obscure (compared to, say, God of War) 1980s games that could make good films. The first Maniac Miner; Skool Daze; Dizzy. But I’ve plumped for the surrealism of Jet Set Willy. Picture it: cast someone who broke through in the ‘80s – Pierce Brosnan, Richard E. Grant, Adrian Edmondson – and get someone like Danny Boyle or Edgar Wright to direct. The tale of a drunken gone-to-seed former celebrity who starts out trying to clean himself up after one party too many – possibly in some vain attempt at a comeback – only for the film to just get crazier and crazier as he ventures deeper into his bizarre stately home, discovering hidden treasures, secret rooms, occult shenanigans, and much more. Is it “real”? Is he losing his mind? A freakish, twisty, deeply surreal black comedy ensues. It’d probably make no money but be a cult classic!

Worms (1995): most of these I’ve imagined as being live-action, often big-budget affairs; Hollywood blockbusters. But who’s to say we can’t adapt a game into a cartoon? Certainly, it’s been done before, and with degrees of success: obviously on TV, but there’s also the Angry Birds movie, which I’ve not seen and which doesn’t strike me as being overly impressive, but which was clearly a big enough deal to warrant a sequel. There’s an animated Mario movie in the works, animated Pokémon has been a staple for twenty years, and there are those who’d argue that animation was a better route for Sonic, too. So why not apply that logic to Worms, a great British success story? There could be different clans of Worms warring over a piece of land (perhaps a garden that, from their view, is an epic battlefield); that would allow the different Worm voices to come into play. But something means they have to unite for a common cause. Inject it with a dose of British humour, a splash of surrealism, and a some satirical social commentary, and you’re onto a winner.

There you are. Seemingly-obvious suggestions like Metal Gear, Gears of War, or Half-Life I have quietly shifted to one side, and other adventure games with good stories (Grim Fandango, Thimbleweed Park, Life is Strange) I sort of feel had their box ticked by Monkey Island. But somewhere in this list I’m convinced there’s at least one great, great film. In the meantime, I’m off to see Detective Pikachu. Who knows? Perhaps that will be the film that breaks videogaming’s cinematic duck (or at least Psyduck).

#top ten #movies #games #sonic #detective pikachu #game adaptations #videogame movies #fillums

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archivyrep · 2 years ago

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Examining a basement newspaper archives in 'Stretch Armstrong'

Coming down to the "newspaper archives." This is clearly another stereotype often employed.

When watching this series, I stumbled upon another mention of archives, more positive than any of the other ones I have reviewed in the past.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Aug. 6, 2020.

In the "Fast Times" episode (season 1, episode 7) of the animated series Stretch Armstrong & the Flex Fighters, two of the protagonists, Ricardo and Nathan, a Korean-American kid, do research as the internet goes down. As such, they can't access the digital databases. One character, Kane, even says that before the digital revolution they would have archives, hard copies of records, but now everything is online. Another cautionary tale, a bit like what those 1990s Hollywood films focused on.

They do research in his grandfather's "newspaper archives" which is literally in the basement of his house. As I noted in my last article, putting archives in a basement is a common theme in fictional works.

Inside the archives

Broader view of the newspaper archives

The grandfather talks to them

Anyway, there is a sense the archives is messy, with one character saying the records are "melting." Nathan's grandfather [1] acts like the archivist, asking them what they need, like that medical doctor, Doctor Oldham, did in Gargantia. So, they lie and say they are doing research for a person at school, saying they need to look through his stacks because the internet is down. He responds interestingly, echoing digital archivists who would also laugh at the idea that stuff that is online is there forever:

Grampa? Nobody needs newspapers anymore, everything's online now, the internet is forever. Ha! The shelves are local, the stacks worldwide.

He then asks them what they are looking for...

They are looking for anything about "Harkness General." As he ponders how to respond to them, saying it rings a bell. That ends the first part of the archives scene, coming to a total of about 45 seconds. That's because the story comes back to another of the protagonists, Jake, in their attempt to catch the villain who can summon electricity. We then come back to the archives later on, where the grandfather finds something, and what he finds surprises them, while they are still looking through old newspapers for clues.

He connects the dots and comes to the realization that his grandson, Nathan, and his friend Ricardo, and Jake (unnamed) are the Flex Fighters. What a smart guy! He was able to figure this out, but somehow no one else can? He does admit he was a former reporter who can smell the scoop. This extends the scene in the archives to a little more than a minute. The next scene shows Wingspan (otherwise known as Nathan) displaying the newspaper they got from the old newspaper archives. It shows that Harkness General was an energy company devoted to "maximizing conventional power sources," and how, when Rook took over energy production for the city, the company was put out of business. In the process, their villain, Dr. Sarah Kamen, lost everything and blamed Rook for it all.

Rook realizes she has been beating them, so he gives them all specialized bikes. Later, Nathan says that his grandfather knows they are the flex fighters but vows not to tell. And hey, something else pops up at the end of the episode. A library! The second time it made an appearance in the series, with Jake hiding from Riya, who he likes, but is too afraid to face her.

Jake does get what he wants, with Riya agreeing to go with him to the dance. She realizes he is different than any of the other people, yet she hates the Flex Fighters, which obviously will create a complication for him in the future. Interestingly, in the following episode, "Lie Sandwich," the Flex Fighters encounter something which had been "archived" in the storage facility, following existing procedure. Furthermore, Nathan's grandpa offered to cover for them and say they are working for his newspaper and by the end of the episode, Jake takes him up on this offer. This grandfather, by the end of the first season, was accepting of Nathan's role as a Flex Fighter.

Many episodes later, episode 4 of season 2, "Rise of the Tech Man," the newspaper archives reappears! At the beginning of that episode all the characters there (Jake, Nathan, and Ricardo along with Erica and Riya) along with a cat. Riya praises Nathan's grandfather for the fact he has records no one else has about Rook Unlimited, which makes her overjoyed. So great to see that in a character. The archives serves a role once more!

The grandfather also talks about the clampdown of information by Rook, the show's villain by season 2, and how he has an archive of records that is kept safe from them. If Rook knew it existed, however, then he would probably destroy it. However, he hasn't done that yet because Rook doesn't know their real identities at the present time.

At this point, we can ask ourselves: what kind of organizational methods is he using anyhow? I mean, come on! Yes, the materials are organized into local and international areas, but is there any rhyme or reason for how the information is stored? Is it in subject areas? Considering the grandfather is a former reporter, I would imagine that there is some sort of organization, although I'm not completely sure if there is an index. I say that because in the first episode we see the newspaper archives they are doing a lot of digging to find out about the company. You wouldn't be doing that if there was more of a proper index, perhaps.

In continuing to watch the series, in another episode, "Biomass," there is a brief scene in the newspaper archives. The grandfather knows their teacher, they find out his family fell through the ice and that he has been alone ever since! It turns out that the robot plant of the teacher, Savic, is planning something... and Savic is the monster, Biomass! The location has become a bit of a meeting place for the show's heroes, to say the least.

At the end of the episode, the grandfather meets Savic, now just a normal professor. The grandfather then declares joyfully when walking into the room: "some say I'm packrat, archivist I say!"

I chuckled a little at this line. This is perhaps the best portrayal of an archivist I have seen in animation up to this point.

The newspaper archives comes up one more time in the series. The protagonists meet Nathan's grandfather and Savic there in the episode, "Masters of Order." They look at newspapers for more info about the Epsilon Society. The grandfather tells them to keep searching for any amount of information to help.

Notes

[1] Voiced by Shab Shimono, the character is only called "Grandpa" in the credits of the episode "Fast Times," "Grandpa Park" in the credits of the episodes "Rise of the Tech Men," "Biomass," "Masters of Order," while he is not credited in the episode "Lie Sandwich."

#newspapers #archival science #archival studies #archivists #basements #stretch armstrong #stereotypes #archives #databases #paper #digital databases #suisei no gargantia #gargantia on the verdurous planet #netflix #reporters #libraries #research #mysteries #grandfathers

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sugiraj-mga2020mi5016 · 3 years ago

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Research about VFX

R.Sugiraj ,had more interest in watching fantasy movies in television from the realizing period of time on the particular Subject of the movies so; I want to get acknowledgement on the production of the related fantasy movie movies in this regard one day I have got this opportunity through the friend of my brother with the deep discussion to him about the fantasy movies this opportunity has changed my life of ambition on VFX From 60’s to present time of period we can acquire some clean point of view on the matters in VFX further to; nowadays the technical Affairs have been developing very fast and this type of development will make in fluence on the world of movies also. In this above relation; we are able to compare how to use the techniques in movies in previous period and the usage of the related techniques are being developed at the present time here I fond some notes from the Web first we take a look into the VFX History “While a wide variety of devices had been invented that projected moving images in one way or another to an enthralled public as early as the 16th century, cinema itself is widely regarded by most celluloid historians to have begun in 1895. It was then that the Lumiere brothers showcased their first successful method of both filming and projecting moving pictures in Paris, the Cinematographer. And given the long and glorious role that VFX have played in the evolution of cinema since, it's not too surprising that the first special effect was created not long after. The French effects pioneer Georges Melies is widely credited with the first stop action shot, and he certainly did stumble upon it independently, but It was Edison camera operator Alfred Clarke who got there first, deliberately pausing his shot and substituting a dummy for the body of an actress during a scene recreating the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots. The date was 28th August, 1895. Melies' independent discovery of the same technique may have been an accident — famously his cameras hand crank jammed and took around a minute to get going again by which time the street scene he had been filming changed completely – but he certainly took that happy accident and ran with it, effectively becoming the world's first impresario of effects films. In films such as Indian Rubber Head (1902) and the 21 minute epic (for the time) A Trip to the Moon (also 1902) he pioneered a range of VFX techniques such as the split screen / double exposure process, and was very much part of the European movement that saw film as a loose narrative joining together special effects sequences. This was eventually to prove his downfall as audiences started wanting more sophisticated, narratively focussed fare, but over the course of 500 titles and 10 years he pushed the technology as far as any individual in the early period. Model Hollywood Meanwhile, in the US, news films were recreating scenes from real life events with the increasing use of models for growing audiences. These saw the development of classic practical effects - explosions created using gunpowder, burning cardboard buildings shaking in earthquakes, wooden models pulled along by string, water pistols recreating the jets from a fire hose and so on. They weren't very good, as a generation of craftsmen, technicians and money men all grappled with the new technology, but the audience's tastes at the time were equally undemanding. By the 1910s, however everything had started getting a lot more sophisticated. The first VFX specialists started to appear (though they wouldn't start getting credits until the mid 1920s) and pioneered the use of techniques such as using glass mattes for scene extensions. Industry giants like DW Griffith also started developing the visual language of film using techniques such as shot transitions, iris-in and iris-out for dramatic effect, and so on. The 1920s saw Hollywood really get into its stride, with extensive use of model effects in particular in historical epics such as Ben Hur and the Thief of Baghdad, while Cecil B deMilne led his Israelites though sliced walls of double-exposed jelly to simulate the parted waters of the Red Sea in The 10 Commandments. But the '20s really belonged to the Germans, who were streets ahead of their American counterparts in technique and execution, and in particular Fritz Lang's astonishing Metropolis (1926). The shape of things to come The film is still visually stunning nigh on a century later, Lang throwing all of the top technologies of his day at the project and using matte painting, rear projection, compositing techniques, and pushing the art of miniatures further than ever before to make the animated cityscapes of the film's impressive opening sequence. It was also the first film to successfully use the in-camera, optical technique invented by Eugene Shuftan, the Shuftan process. This used a combination of angled mirrors, paintings and live action to create the impression of live actors occupying huge sets, and is essentially seen as a primitive precursor of bluescreen. Certainly it helped give Metropolis the sense of scale which is a hallmark of the film and a central metaphor for the alienation of the individual. The 1930s are perhaps best characterised as a decade of cautious progress. Rear projection, travelling mattes, miniatures…all these techniques saw steady development, with rear projection especially becoming popular due to the demands of the primitive new audio technology of the 'talkies' making location filming nigh on impossible. As a result, by the end of the decade, rear projection screens as large as 14.5 m were in use, with the key to success being matching both the lighting and the focal lengths of background and studio camera exactly. The introduction of optical printers around this time led to huge improvement in image quality, especially when combining the disparate elements for travelling matte work. If you're looking for touchstones from the decade, King Kong probably stands out along with many of the horror movies made by Universal Studios, with the highlight from that canon being the creative use of the Williams process to achieve the invisible scenes in The Invisible Man (1933). This essentially involved filming an actor wrapped in black velvet with an airtube running up his legs against a black velvet draped set to get the images of his empty clothes walking around. These were then copied to high contrast film in a complicated process involving multiple sandwichings of exposed and unexposed film. By the time we get to Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane (1941), you have a film that was reliant on special effects to tell much of its story, but also one that was not even nominated for an effects Oscar as the majority of them were invisibles. However, it took many of the VFX techniques of the day to their absolute limits, combining matte paintings, miniatures and optical printing techniques in particular to produce Welles' final masterpiece. Add in unconventional lighting, strange camera angles, deep focus shots elaborate camera movements, extremely long takes, non-linear storytelling, and the first appearance of many of the editing conventions that would become part of the filmmaking repertoire for decades to come, and you have the last great movie of the early days of film special effects, and undoubtedly one of the greatest all time. However, it was 1941, war raged across Europe, and for the still embryonic visual effects industry, colour was about to change everything”(redsharknews.com) 60′s Era Had Huge Expectation For The VFX Because They Try To put Into The Real Time Action Footage And If It Failure That Effect To The Whole Industry But Unexpectedly That VFX Work Good And Huge Victory Of VFX Here I Give The Example Work In The 60′s VFX The 60s were the decade of some truly impressive practical effects that had moviegoers in complete "aw" at what was transpiring on the screen. One of those ground-breaking moments were with the infamous skeleton battle scene in Jason and the Argonauts(1963). Created by Ray Harryhausen and done in complete stop-motion animation, he was able to bring these skeletons to life in the film, and integrate them with the real actor. This is a very famous sequence in the effects industry(plural sight Website) For VFX Here Ray Harryhausen Worked As A Stop Motion Model Animator And He Is Work In Mysterious Island (1961) According The Statement Above I Attached Jason and the Argonauts VFX Image Current Era’s 2010 To Upto Date Now The VFX Part We Can’t Called VFX Part We Called As A VFX Industry Because Of Huge Growth Of The VFX Now Days We Can’t See Any Film With Out Any Single VFX Scene Because Of Audience They Loved See The VFX Effect In The Film That is The One Reason Of VFX Got Huge Growth Even I Tell You VFX Huge Welcome To The Television Drama Industry Now the techniques of VFX has widely Developed on the Sector of Mini Cinema And Advertisement Field too in this way the wide techniques are being used in VFX My opinion Of VFX Industry Growth now We Come To The Hollywood Movies Called (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, Avator, Air Bender ) Now we look little bit of deep into the Indian drama industry Earlier days Indian dramas not have a VFX site but they try to including the VFX into the dramas for example from My acknowledgement that “marmadesam, Vidathukaruppu and velan Serials have that VFX site little bit they using Green Screen Techniques in the Drama in that Earlier Stage Nowadays Indian Drama Industry Does not Make A Single Scene Without VFX Scene For Example Mahabatratham ,Nagini, Nanthini Serials

This Serials Currently Going On Indian Tele Drama clearly we can saw that VFX Site How Much Influence into this drama industry going to follow that VFX Technology that the reason earlier I mansion that VFX Will Rule the Cinema industry And Before going to the Hollywood Moves We look for that VFX Step into advertisement side also Like Indian cricket player Dhoni acting that advertisement and that advertisement have VFX part of that and other advertisement belong to coca cola advertisement and they used 3D Monkey character into the Real time ACTION Footage Now We Look Holly wood Side here i mention that Suresh Antony He Worked on Avengers EndGame, Venom, Gurdians of the Galaxy and He Said That” Vfx is Mostly Used in The Real Time Action Footage ” he Worked on the Thomas character Making too The world of effects in films has definitely come a long way from special effects to the dominated realm of visual effects. In the past few years, we've seen movies constantly trying to push the boundaries of visual effects, trying to achieve more realistic and believable visual effects that can hold up next to the real actors and not know the difference. To get a great glimpse into where we've come just in the past decade, take a look at Gollum in The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and compare him to Gollum in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As technology advances and the tools used to create these out of this world characters so do the quality of what is on screen. The recent release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes features extremely realistic apes, and many advancements in terms of motion capture and the visual aesthetics of the apes like the rendering of the fur. For example, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of the first films to use motion capture on location, and not in a specifically designed motion capture studio. More films are being shot largely on green screen stages, leaving the rest of the film up to the VFX artists. VFX is as much of a part as many blockbusters like The Avengers or Pacific Rim as the actors themselves. While VFX is often seen as icing on the cake of a film, it's becoming more of a centre piece. If you want to share some of the films that inspire you as an artist, whether it's with practical effects or visual effects (plural sight Website)

Conclusion In the consideration of the two period (60’s, Present) we can genuinely understand the vital development of VFX in Addition to this; we can get into knowledge that the get continuous development in technical field surely engage the improvement in the production of movies in VFX and will give various view of thoughts about VFX in the Long Run

Reference “While a wide variety of devices had beeninvented” https://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/530-the-history-of-vfx-part-one-from-mary-queen-of-scots-to-citizen-kane

#with out images

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