#i love rendering if that isnt obvious | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cator99 · 4 months ago

Text

the most irritating part about all of this however is that I don't think any if this has been particularly fair to PGs friend who she has screwed over. Sure, you could blame the illegal dweller for not considering the situation more carefully, however if I can be dead serious this very young woman seems to have FASD... she claims to have "autism"(self diagnosed) (as does PG but her identification is purely ideologically motivated) but I've lived with kids who are all sorts of On The Spectrum as well as those with varying degrees of FASD... while both autists and FASD adults are often capable of living normal regular ass lives and even flying under the radar to an extent, and while there may be surface level "symptomatic" overlap, the differences between the two are very clear. This is relevant because the girl wasn't given all the information she deserved to have when making the decision to move in here. She comes across as very naive and stunted even for her young age. She was simply told Fuck The Landlord and don't bother getting on the lease in any official capacity or even so much as informing the LL of her presence, until it was far too late. She was also PGs best friend when she moved in... and still believes this to be the case. Or... did. More on that later. She was moved in under the pretense that the two of them would eventually be moving out together. They were actively looking for places together, for at least a little while. I forgot that this had ever been the case– it's been so long since it was last mentioned. I'm not sure what changed. God--- maybe PGs request to add her to the lease happened because PG quietly realized she really just wanted to leave on her own. It also very much seemed like PG was doing all the work when it came to scouting out places, reaching out, organizing meetings, etc. Additionally, I heard from my coworker who shares the basement with the girl that she never cleans up after herself, never does dishes, and somehow manages to render the bathroom a swamp every time she showers (we're talking fully drenched floor here not just a bit of dampness or puddles here n there– cw suspects she leaves the curtain wide open)... and that PG cleans up after her, every time. Not sure what the deal is, but PG seemed fine with acting as pseudo caretaker for her dear friend, up until she wasn't. I watched her slowly become withdrawn and seemingly annoyed by the girl's presence (fake a mental disability, win stupid prizes... since she started hooking up and spending all her time with that one normie ftm, she's all but dropped the act, dresses better– less and less pins every day!– and even acts more mature..... perhaps she realized that malingering as an autist wasnt doing her social life any favors and didn't make her seem special but rather just. Special.)(and when I say malingering I mean very clear and obvious faking. I had no reason to suspect her of doing so because that sort of thing is ridiculous but lo and behold... she seemed to be able to turn her very caricature-ish "autism" symptoms on and off at will)... And then, this interaction: last week, the girl ran up the stairs when she heard PG in the kitchen practicing her whistle tones along to some ariana tunes. I don't mean to eavesdrop (yes I do) however this is all happening a few feet from my bedroom door. But no to be real I tend to just put my headphones on when people are being annoying out there. This time though, the girl immediately launched into a hyperactive squeal about how happy she is to be living with her best friend. Isnt it awesome? You're my best friend! I'm so lucky to live with my best friend! Yay! Life is so good!! I love it here because we get to be together all the time! PG laughed awkwardly, yes, it's....... so fun... the whole thing was terribly awkward, and all the girl could do in response was up the ante, in desperation it seemed. A few days later... the bomb is dropped. PG has been entirely MIA ever since.

The thing about my living situation........ as I've previously established, Pins Girl took it upon herself to move her door-scratching babytalk bestie into the basement without telling the landlord. Months pass– suddenly a lightbulb pops over PGs head and she realizes that this could lead to some issues. She blasts into the landlord's email announcing that she would like to add someone to the lease. This comes across as less of a request and more of a...... well, it's not a request. LL says she will have to interview the tenant first. Everyone spirals. "She cant do that!!!!!"... and why can't she? Some time passes and PG is at the helm of the Demands brigade, crawling up the landlord's ass about things that dont particularly matter and should probably be set aside until the landlord is finished considering her first command. After a few weeks of this, and further pestering about the new girl (who has been an illegal tenant here for quite some time)– the landlord finally just tells us point blank that she isn't interested in any new tenants right now. Incredible. Immediately after this email, pins girl announces her departure. Amazing. Of course I'm interested to see how this will affect the whole "no new tenants" thing. But the real thing is that this is how these people are responding to all of this:

oh right the unemployed acab tattoo ftm is planning on declaring bankruptcy because he took out a 7.5k loan from some sketchy loan company at a 30% interest rate so that he could pay off his multiple debts (just over 2k) and immediately blew the rest on takeout, new tattoos, neutering his rabbit, and of course paying off that damn interest rate. I'm curious what he means by "I'm out". To where exactly? A homeless shelter? Get a damn job buddy rent is $400 you ain't gonna find that anywhere else in this city

Anyways. PGs legacy thus far: walked out on her job because she refused to stop wearing one billion pins after a complaint about her attire was spread on social media (someone thought she was an employee of the store we were doing week-long contract work for, although I'd hesitate to call what she was doing "work" and it was nice to finish the project with her out of the way), got on government neetbux, refused to speak to me for a week because I made a colloquial "bombed" comment, has said few words to me since, destabilized our situation by illegally moving one of her freaks into the basement and then out of nowhere regretting it and trying to backtrack thus making the situation worse....... and then, after everything, she's just gonna bounce. God I love it here.

47 notes · View notes

william-s-churros · 2 years ago

Text

i know i keep saying im going to stop talking about this but the thing that drives me the most up a wall about the ai art discourse is the immediate and unquestioned assertion that most or even all people making art with ai are doing so entirely to make money (somehow? even though artists are notoriously broke?), and that there's no element of self-expression involved whatsoever. while yes, there are some people who are convinced they're gonna make it big with their midjourney renders and what have you (which, again, lol), it just seems obvious to me that this is primarily a tool that people are excited to use in order to make things that they otherwise would not have the capability to make, for the love of making things. i dont know. its like people cant imagine why anyone who "isnt an artist" (with an extremely restrictive weirdly woowoo definition of what an artist is) would ever want to make art at all without some kind of financial incentive involved. it distresses me lol. obviously the reason most people make art, at least to begin with, is because its fun and healthy to express yourself, and i dont think that people using ai to make art are that different, as we are all human beings with similar impulses toward self-expression, its just that some of us enjoy the process of self-expression through more traditional modes of art creation and some of us just don't lol. i think acting like self-expression is solely the purview of people with a particular set of skills they've had the time, drive and opportunity to cultivate is kind of shitty ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#stop talking matt #ai art discourse #i for one am just a fan of people being able to make their thoughts into pictures regardless of how that comes to pass #i dont know im just really gay for art in whatever form it takes

9 notes · View notes

eclysia · 2 years ago

Note

Rosette, bouquet and fallen leaf?

OUGh thank you so much :pleading_face:

um this is a long post so its going under the cut

🏵️ [ROSETTE] What flower symbolises your OC best and why? What does the flower mean in floriography?

oh man, flower symbolism. im not too well versed in this, but let me see!

a wilted/dead lily fits well for mido; after the events of hiyoshi, being dragged back from the dead and coerced to carry the traumas of several different people took a toll on him. a lily symbolizes purity and innocence after death, but midos case is the complete opposite.

he is not an empty shell like the rest of the interceptors' bodies-- and he cannot take the burdens given to him well at all.

due to his role within the third layer, poppies suit aevis the most. sacrifices had to be made for the greater good- to cheat death and overcome humanitys greatest flaw.

proteas also work quite well for recent developments, as he is beginning to overcome his status as a clone/black box and is stopping trying to take the identity of the true, dead aevis. he is learning to change and embrace individuality!

after being freed from their time loop, xerophyllum suit avan well, symbolizing rebirth and new beginnings. theyre stuck in this world now, so they have to learn to like it... (i also like the pure white of the flower; matches their pokemon who all lost their color)

💐 [BOUQUET] If you could send your OC a bouquet, what flowers would make it up and what is the overall message?

i would get one of the grevilleas to do it instead because i am really bad with flowers HGFDLKASJFV

i suppose i would make color themed bouquets for all three of them matching the flowers i listed prior? but overall messages.. from me, as the creator? ...get your shit together, all of you. no okay wait

mido- open up to your friends please aevis- you are your own person, stop adhering to the orders given to you avan- there is something worth fighting for

🍃 [FALLEN LEAF] What's the darkest period of time your OC has been through?

OUGH.

mido is quite obvious with hiyoshis events. storm-9 as a whole rendered himself and many people he loved dead, and he was too shaken to say no to the preposition of using his body as a host. it was only instinct that allowed him to grow defiant and disrupt the process, but this helped no one.

aevis says that nothing sour has happened in his existence (he is lying). he overlooked many third layer test subjects and has seen a lot of people die- he himself has even tested the means like artillery. considering he is a black box, he can just regenerate even if bullets render his body torn apart, so long as his core is safe. so its completely fine and morally correct to use him.. isnt it?

avan tries to brush it off too, but the catalyst of their whole deal- the unearthly swap of every species of pokemon to a different one, and everyone acting like everything was still normal- they felt insane. to top it all off, code: evo had turned out to be a lunala in xens hands, and one fight later, the rifts instability had rendered their world gone.

..why did they come back? they really shouldnt have, and no matter how hard they try, they cannot die.. until now, at least.

theyre still hesitating.

#oc tag: mido #oc tag: aevis #oc tag: avan #THANK YOU BY THE WAY.#AND YOU HAVE A NAME REVEAL #godsh i am so embarrassed always.. not even a Name alas #v13 spoilers #this post is FUCKING LONG BY THE WAY!! I TALK A LOT

2 notes · View notes

leomitchellart · 4 years ago

Text

So… about this latest Inktober controversy….

Time to begrudgingly chuck in my two penneth… (Remeber you can always press “J” to skip this post altogether)

As most of you may or may not know, Alphonso Dunn released a Youtube video wherein he publicly accused Jake Parker, and creator of the Inktober challenge, of plagiarising his book. Both of these men are public figures, artists specialising in pen & ink. In the video Dunn looks at the preview pages and flip through footage of Parker’s “Inktober All Year Round” and says they draw many similarities in the illustrations, language and layout that he used in his own book, “Pen & Ink Drawing”. Parker’s book was set to this month. Hense why Dunn only used footage and not a physical copy.

Since the video’s release, the art community has been very spilt down the middle. The book’s publisher has halted the launch of Parker’s book until the matter can be investigated. Even DeviantArt cancelled their own Inktober event thing (I’ll admit I don’t keep up with these things DA keeps doing). Parker has since released a statement in the matter. Now it’s up to the courts to decide what’s happening next. The video itself is an hour long, but it’s crucial to see it yourself.

People are, understandably, outraged after seeing it. This seems like a shitty thing to rip-off Dunn - not to mention stupid. Since Dunn is the more popular pen & ink artist with more social media followers and name recognition. Many have called to boycott inktober and condemn Parker. I’ll admit, I was right alongside them at first, at least for feeling outraged. The similarities are there. But if YMS’s Kimba video has taught me anything, it’s that, even if an accusation of plagiarism may be obvious at a cursory glance, sometimes it’s important to take a more critical eye and do more research to learn that things aren’t as cut and dry as they first seem. If there’s a lesson I can take away from the internet as a whole, it’s that no one thinks about the consequences of mob mentality.

The most common defence of Parker is that because they’re both books about pen and ink drawing, then they’re inevitably going to be similar. I’ll admit that, when you pick-up so many art books, a lot of them will cover the same basic grounds of materials, tutorials, strokes, techniques etc. The parts about rendering textures on spheres and cubes isnt new. Look up “texture study” and you’ll see so many examples of artists rendering these kinds of things digitally. I’ve also noticed a common theme of people more formally educated in art pointing out how none of these are original. Everything down to the steps and illustrations are things they’ve learned from years ago. Since I'm a pen & ink artist, inspired by my love of comics, I have quite a few books about inking: Dunn’s included. I own both his books and still highly recommend them. I didn't even preorder Parker’s book. Ironically because I didn't think it could offer anything new that my other books hadn’t already.

While Ethan Becker took the time to cross-examine Dunn and Parker’s books with several others, there weren’t many of the ones I actually owned. So I looked to my shelves to see what I could find. Books like:

“The Art of Comic Book Inking” by Gary Martin & Steve Rude

“How Comics Work” by Dave Gibbons & Tim Pilcher

“The DC Comics guide to Inking Comics” by Klaus Janson

“Making Comics” by Scott McCloud

“Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics”

I’m sure there’s plenty more examples out there. I was planning to go through all of these and take pictures. But ultimately that’s not the core point of these post. Plus it would’ve taken WAY too long and this post itself, is long enough.

Of course, none of the them are 100% close to Dunn’s in the way they’re displayed. Not as close as Parker’s could be considered. That being said, I know Dunn is trying to claim that he invented these techniques. The nucleus of the issue is how similar they are in terms of order and how these pages are displayed. Some I can chock-up to standard practice, while others seem more coincidental.

If there’s one thing I’m adamant about, it’s that I think that Dunn should’ve messaged Parker first before making the accusation public. Some try to dispute that this would've made it easier for Dunn to be “silenced”, whatever that means; but that sounds a bit conspiratorial to me. Ideally, you confront him about it in private, if he makes any threats or blows you off, get your lawyer on the phone and then make the video. Not only is it the more civil thing to do - but it’s the smarter thing to do. This is a serious legal matter, not just internet drama. While I’m sure Dunn had no intention of tearing Parker down or getting a mob onto him, that’s unfortunately what’s happened. A backlash both from the general artisan community and several companies. Wherein it was left to Parker himself to make this an official legal matter. If Parker’s found not guilty, then this could easily leave the gate open for him to sue Dunn for damages, loss of revenue, defamation of character or whatever else, should he see fit. As could the publishers, given how this affected their sales. Companies responded to the accusation of the video alone, before an investigation could be launched. Sure, it wouldn't be “acting the bigger man” but he’d be well within his right to do it. Dunn showed that Jake has mentioned him before, shown admiration for his career and referenced him in other posts. If it comes to light in court, that Dunn is even cited as an inspiration or source in the book itself, then it’s case closed.

Then there’s the other possibility that Parker might not have done this on his own, but that he has a team behind the book. If that’s the case, the most I can accuse Parker of is being a hack. I worry Dunn has kneecapped himself for just how badly he’s handled this situation. Made worse by him not having an actual physical copy to assess and just had footage of preview pages to go on. So far, the circumstances don’t seem on his favour.

I don’t think ill of Dunn. I do think he believes he’s been wronged and no malice in his intentions. I just think he’s made some critical errors on how to handled this. As for Parker himself, I couldn't give a donkey’s doo-dah about him. I’m sure you could accuse me of playing devil’s advocate earlier, but to me, he was the guy who released the annual prompt list. If it really does turn out that he’s a plagiarist and had malicious intent, then fuck ‘im. I never regarded him as an inspiration of mine or paid much attention to him outside of that. It was the community that made Inktober what it is. I’ve never met Parker. Maybe he’s a cool guy? Maybe he’s a bellend? I don’t know.

Granted this isn't the first time Parker has proved himself to be a controversial figure: - Last year people were upset about him trademarking (not copywriting, as many have erroneously claimed) the word “Inktober” and some artists were stopped from selling their related work or zines. Parker would issue a statement: claiming the takedowns were a mistake of “overzealous lawyers” and it’s just a matter of the logo being trademarked. People can sell their Inktober works and even mention they are Inktober-related. Just not use the official logo. On the one hand, from a business standpoint, I get it. It’s the bare minimum you need to do to protect your IP, especially when you have a store. BUT, like most people, I don’t like how, what’s intended as a community challenge, has slowly become more of a brand associated with one man. Hardly a surprise it left a bad taste in so many people’s mouths. But, since it doesn't actually effect anyone’s ability to take part in the challenge, outside of personal principle, I went ahead with it the previous year.

- The year before, when asked if one can do Inktober digitally, Parker said the following:

I know some are still bitter about that, but speaking as someone who inks traditionally and digitally, this came across as needless whinging and blowing things out of proportion. Claiming that Jake had derided digital artists and said they were invalid etc etc. Take it from me, challenging yourself to try out different methods to ink traditionally can greatly improve the work you do digitally. It’s like how learning traditional fundamentals of art can still be applied to digital. Plus he never said “No.” he just gave valid reasons about how it makes it a different experience. That said, if you’re someone who can’t afford any kind of inking equipment or pens and only have a selected application to draw on - then none of this applies to you. Just the aforementioned few who took it upon themselves to get angry over nothing. Recently I’ve heard from subscribers of his newsletter that he’s now embraced the idea of people doing inktober digitally, to the point of selling digital brushes for inktober. I’m sure some will call this “backsliding” or “money grubbing” because people aren’t allowed to change their minds or update their statements.

For weeks I’ve been torn on what to do, not being able to solidify one stance over another. One minute I thought #JusticeForAlphonsoDunn then I wonder “Wait maybe I should look again?” to “But wait, those are way too similar!” Having splinters in my arse from sitting on the fence for so long. The longer this went on, however, I began to realise that I can’t take one stance over another. This case is far too muddy and complicated. I don’t have enough sufficient knowledge or evidence. Nor do any of you. We literally only have Dunn’s video to go on. While it’s a good start, it’s not enough to be taken 100% as gospel when it’s the only thing to hand.

As previously mentioned, a lot of artists have decided to not take part in Inktober at all, or follow different prompt lists. That’s completely fine. A lot of them are based around a specific theme: halloween, kinky stuff, bears, transformers, OCs, Disney or whatever. That has massive appeal. I just can’d do it myself. I prefer the focus on random words, rather than all centred on a single subject; allowing me to be creative with my ideas and execution. I actually did try to make a list of my own random words. Problem is, I worried that because I was choosing my own, I might be subconsciously bias towards certain prompts and not truly challenging myself. Even narrowing down my options was taking too long. In the end…. I’ve decided to just do the official prompts again this year.

For me, that’s what it ultimately came down to. TIME. It’s the middle of September. I can’t afford to wait for the court case to be settled. No other prominent artists I respect have released their own prompt lists. I know there’s been some shitty people who are condemning this choice. Attacking others, accusing them of supporting plagiarism, looking to block anyone who does the official prompts. Even trying to make this a racial issue. Just…. no.

If someone doesn’t want to take part in Inktober, that’s fine. If someone wants to do the official prompts, that’s fine. If someone wants to do their own prompts, that’s fine.

Don’t go around aggressively making snap judgements or accusing people of taking a side. Do whatever makes you feel comfortable. This has been a shit year, let people enjoy something.

If you look at this situation and it makes you feel angry, and you don’t feel comfortable in taking part in a challenge because of it’s creator. I get that, I literally get that. It’s why I haven't done Mermay. And please don’t mention Pinktober, I’m aware of it, but given his insta video on the subject and the things he said, I quickly came to the conclusion that I can’t take this person seriously. I’m sure this might make me seem hypocritical, but how this differs, if only for me, is the sheer amount Inktober means to me. It’s more than a simple challenge. Inktober's the one thing I’ve been most excited about all year. As it was ruined for me in 2019, when I lost my home and I didn't get to complete every prompt. (Long story, I’m okay now). As we all know, 2020, has been an AWFUL year. We’ve got to take whatever joy we can. As I’ve looked longer at the official prompts, I found ideas I’m really excited for.

Once I started to really dedicate myself to it, it became a massive event. I hype myself up as I prepare for the busy month. Buy in supplies, clean the house and workspace, cook and freeze meals in bulk to save time, printing off a sheet that allows me to jot down ideas as I plan ahead. Then once it’s done, after so much work, it makes the reward all the sweeter: Ordering a takeaway, celebrating a great halloween night and still rocking those vibes throughout November. Feeling proud of myself for doing it and seeing myself improve my technique, discipline and earning a few lie-ins to make up for the sleep I lost working. I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas. That said, don’t think that there’s something wrong with you when you understandably can’t dedicate that amount time for a simple art challenge. If anything that’s plenty of reason to why you’re smarter than me. You have a life and don’t push yourself too much.

Now, I need to crack on with the preparations. If you want to boycott Jake Parker, just not buying any of his products should be enough. Doing the inktober challenge doesn't bring attention to him, as I doubt most people even know him as the creator, nor does it even line his pockets. I just hate how cancel culture can do such serious damage like this and then try and put pressure on others to act accordingly without even doing any research themselves.

As long as you’re not harassing anybody. Just do what YOU want to do. That’s fine.

#Inktober #Inktober 2020 #My two penneth #Jake Parker #alphonso dunn

101 notes · View notes

crowsent · 4 years ago

Text

so i started watching kings avatar

this is a no-spoiler reaction mini-essay of the kings avatar anime; an action-adventure anime focused on high-paced fight scenes and an insane amount of dramatic one-liners but has like. a surprising amount of character focus and compelling narratives. the anime released a few years ago, around 2017, and i know its technically a “web series” and not an anime but consider this: anime is easier to type. so anyway, this anime is essentially an e-sports centred around a fictional mmorpg which is. not a genre i like. but for reasons i refuse to admit on this blog, i started watching this anime and im glad i did. because its good.

surprisingly good.

the animation, the music, the characters, the sound design, the environment, setting, killer one-liners, plot, character dynamics, emotional scenes...

its fucking good.

i expected something mediocre at best bc e-sports anime arent generally known for any profound themes and usually just funnel all their budget into fight scenes which certainly have a place in the anime community but its not my cup of tea but kings avatar just. decimated that idea.

8 minutes in and i already got a compelling amount of characterisation for the main character, the setting, and oddly enough, a discussion about the chinese gaming culture and how corporate commercialises the industry and leaves their talent (the gamers) ill-prepared for when they get their contracts released and/or terminated which is. not what id expect

obviously, the fictional depiction of the chinese gaming industry in an anime should not be taken to represent the chinese gaming industry in real life but like. 8 minutes in. i got THIS MUCH from kings avatar 8 MINUTES IN.

there is so much about this anime that i didnt expect and i was pleasantly surprised. for starters:

the music. the music of this anime is stellar. that ost during the first fight we see in the very beginning is just adrenaline-pumping. thats the kind of music youd expect to find from a AAA movie. the kind of music youd expect from a fucking video game boss battle. and its soooooooo fitting for the anime which is essentially about video games and battles. amazing score. 10/10

the animation. there is 3d animation mixed in w the 2d BUT its blended pretty seamlessly that it isnt super obvious. obviously the big boss we see in the beginning is 3d bc its cheaper/easier to animate, but there are some background characters and props that are animated with 3d as well. the animation is smooth enough and the amount of detail is made just so to ensure that the focus still remains on the 2d animation. not revolutionary by any means, but the inclusion of 3d anime allows for something that i found really appealing,

the camerawork. dont know if i talked about this before on this blog, but i am a fucking sucker for good camerawork in animated movies. which is why i ADORED kimetsu no yaiba which has PHENOMENAL camerawork that took all my uwus. kings avatar has the same phenomenal camerawork. huge panning shots of a beautifully rendered environment, action scenes with quick cuts and deliberate rolling focus, numerous perspective shots from different angles to achieve suspense, unease, drama, fucking ALL OF IT

the thing that i loved most of course, are the dramatic moments and one-liners bc im a dramatic motherfucker and i eat that shit up. the most unnecessarily extra tossing of a contract across a table, “rest for a year then come back” announcement, “50/50? id rather take 100″ and so on and so on. this anime is so fuckin EXTRA and i fucking love it

please do keep in mind that i uh,,,, may be a little biased for this anime. ive already mentioned that i usually dislike the genre but i watched kings avatar for a reason and for that reason, i may react to the anime a little more favourably than i would otherwise

but also keep in mind that while i normally post screenshots along with my reactions, i wasnt able to grab screenshots this time around bc i uhhhhhh did not pause the episode to grab the screenshots bc this stupid fucking thing got me waiting with bated breath so take what you will from this ig

dunno if ill do an episode-by-episode reaction or do one huge reaction at the very end with my formal review/opinion of the show as a whole. well see

#kings avatar #crowsas reactions

2 notes · View notes

dahniwitchoflight · 5 years ago

Text

Homesquared Chapter 2

Ohh the part where we get to see the Kids rendered! Id seen panels here and there of these three but now I get to see them see them :D

Vrissy lol cute

LOVING that symbolism of shedding the brackets like a snake sheds its skin, renewal of the ouroborous what is canon becomes non canon what is non canon becomes canon again

Also implying that over time like a snakeskin, Canon will just always degrade to being Non Canon, until its unceremoniously shaken off all at once and becomes Canon but Different each time

Man baby Tavros is just like, exactly like a baby Jake, is he gonna get nicknamed too? or not a problem since Troll Tavros isnt around anyway?

Actually, related: Names being associated with Heart should have been obvious all this time as Unique Identifiers seperating seperate people and identities like the walls between Souls, but it’s nice to have that sorta made explicitly clear, can probably add Names next to Heart’s symbols like Hats

and from that, People sharing the same unique identifier, like all Dirk’s simply being called Dirk, is probably referencing that they are all each part of the Hive-MIND of the being called Dirk

I do remember that once in Homestuck Brain Ghost Dirk was labeled as the full title, even when him and real Dirk never interacted, but now here he is just simply Dirk.

Aww, Tavros speaks in Gamzee purple ): That hurts my soul, that Gamzee would have affected his own self so deeply

Good on ya though Tavros for beating the shit out of his dead body, I’d have done the same

On the next note eyy here’s that bucktoothed child that somehow also encapuslates the rule of every strider being attractive-looking, Harry!

His design is genuinely cute! And maybe a bucktoothed nod to how Roxy may have ended up looking in a timeline where they decided Male was a gender they wanted

Now that I’ve been introduced to all three of the Kids I’m definitely gonna keep my eyes on any classpect stuff for them, which may or may not be relevant ever at some point in this comic maybe? Cuz like, Dirk and Terezi and Rosebot are all up to starting another session and Homesquared so far feels very like the “Journey of the Second Generation” and we just know theres bound to be sburb stuff happening sometime

With the main juicy tidbit being, are their classpects just gonna be mixes of their parents? Unique to them but also with the influence of the parentage, or are they gonna be entirely different?

Like, Harry just from first impression I can definitely see as being a Rogue of Breath, it’s fitting so far

Tavros then could either be a Maid of Hope or a Page of Life, tho I’m HEAVY leaning towards Maid of Hope seeing as that progression would be “relying on others at first for their hope, then learning to create hope for themselves” versus Page of Life being someone incompetently acting out confidence and authority until they gain a truer understanding of it and become rulers in their own right

First impressions fit that very nicely

Vrissy I think genetically is actually meant to be like, Vriska’s true descendant? I think? Like how Aranea was to Vriska, they have that looking up to the other and modeling after their behaviors as a role model dynamic going on, so in all likelihood Vrissy is at least a Light player, but I guess in the troll’s case the class is more up to the individual in question, but Vrissy will no doubt be trying to act out her own Class through seeing the comparisons in Vriska’s Behaviour, same as Vriska Molded her image of Her Ancestor as Thief-like growing up despite Aranea actually being a Sylph, so we may get more clues to Vrissy’s class by seeing how Vrissy idolizes and embellishes what traits she sees in Vriska, so far, she seems to be focusing on how Vriska kills bad people and is straight to the point about it, so nothing really yet. Vrissy seems to be really acting confident around Vriska, but not sure if that’s because she doesn’t really think Vriska is all that cool, or she does and is trying to impress her (The latter being very Vriska behaviour lol)

“ VRISKA: If you want to keep Hanging Out, I mean. Which I assume you Do. “ comes to mind, so definitely think this is Vrissy’s behavioural attempt at wanting in with the Cool People. Try to clarify that she is wanted from the people she values without coming off as wanting to want it haha

Overall she is definitely quite confident and is very open with what she knows and what she doesn’t, suggesting perhaps a Page-y behaviour? we’ll see

it would be like, a perfect little mirror for Vriska to see a younger healthier more stable version of herself literally acting and being like the thing she used to hate and torment herself and others about

so yeah, intital classpect thoughts, really liking these so far:

Tavros: Maid of Hope

Harry: Rogue of Breath

Vrissy: Page of Light

Damn Vriska is gonna get so much emotional trauma whiplash from all the normalcy on Earth C “What do you mean they dont have incinerators at school? where do they put all the viciously murdered bodies??”

“There is something incredibly reassuring, Tavros thinks, about someone who has absolute outward confidence in themselves. The soothing lull of following a simple direction is so overpowering it blots out the logical part of him that knows this is, perhaps, the most outlandishly stupid succession of decisions he has ever made. “

Yeah it is pretty comfortable behavior for a Maid class that isn’t confident to be more confident being led by someone, then again that is also pretty normal behavior for someone who has been abused like Tavros has been.

Hmmm, We get into the nitty gritty of what trauma might do to a person’s classpect as well, assuming the system is more nurture based than predestined nature based. I still lean towards it being predestined nature based, you were always going to be who you ended up being etc Homestuck is just like that after all where Nurture is valued and is absolutely an influence, but with Nature being tied up in timelines and predestination, its just sort of already taking Nurture into account when it’s basing on Nature, Nurture is just inherently a part of Nature already and etc

Imode, Silas and Avril are all 5 letter names, wonder if theres any significance to that? I’m reminded of 5 being a number that pops up in Hiveswap a lot, wonder if it just means “Normal Human bullcrap” in symbolism terms

“JANE: Oh, Tavros, no!

JANE: He wouldn’t--

JANE: Tavros loves his Gamzee! Those rebels must have captured my sweet baby and corrupted his mind.

JANE: My family! My entire family!

JANE: This cannot go unavenged.“

good old Jane, man she is just gone full tilt into only valuing her own perspective of things, her own wants and needs and expectations and the fact that she doesn’t even have a hint of what Tavros’s real situation is like, and she’s already set up to disbelieve any attempt at reconciliation with him

“I’m not bad/evil, it’s everyone else that’s out to get me and my family, even my own family is out to get me.”

hah lol ending on Harry’s “o shit” is great

#Homesquared #Harry Anderson #Tavros Crocker #Vrissy Lalonde #Homestuck

56 notes · View notes

kaialone · 5 years ago

Note

Quick question. I saw on twitter that you mentioned that the Shadowside had things set up, but were changed after Hino stopped writing. You said something about Junior, but were there any other things you think were supposed to be different. Genuinely curious, because I haven't noticed anything, but I'm usually not very good at noticing these types of things. (Love your blog, and I hope you have a nice day!)

Thank you! (Sorry for the slightly late response ^^;)

Well, I’m not sure if I have much to say on this, I don’t have any actual background information of course, there’s just a bit one can read into it.

It’s gonna be a bit long, so I’m putting it under a read more.

The first episode is written by Hino, and in it we see some set ups that don’t really get picked up much afterwards.

One simple example is actually that Movie 4 and the PV for the first episode still used the OG tribes, Charming, etc, but by the time the first episode came out, the Charming symbol on Jibanyan’s arc was changed to Mononoke, from the new system. This means at that point, the new tribe system was just getting invented, and it also indicated Shadowside was kinda suffering from the fact that it was made before YKW4, so changes in mechanics like this were harder to implement.

I feel this is prolly why we don’t got tribe songs anymore, which is a real pity. Like Shadowside the anime couldnt have them, cause the tribe system was literally still being invented as the show was made, and YKW4 the game couldnt have them because well, gotta stick to what the anime did.

But thats more a mechanics thing and isnt tied directly to the narrative.

For a narravtive example, the first episode is mostly told from Keisuke’s perspective, and while I don’t think that has to mean he was going to be the main character at some point, it did make it seem like there was at least the idea of more character development for him.

It made sense to start the series with him, since he has this outsider perspective, but it also sets him up as this easily frightened kid who denies the supernatural. So in the first episode, a major point for him is accepting the existence of yokai, partially through the help of his deceased friend, who has become a yokai.

The episode ends with him saying to himself “Yokai definitely exist, I know this because my best friend is one”.

And yet, immediately afterwards in the next episode, we see Keisuke trying to calm himself by singing “yokai dont exist at all”. Now, one could do something interesting here, like Keisuke fluctuating between what he wants to believe, and have some conflict with that, but

From that point on, all Keisuke ever does is be frightened as a running gag, like the once per episode rule is that he gets scared by the yokai of the week, and thats it. He gets one or two episodes, but even those dont do anything with his character.

In episode 1, Keisuke was a multi-faceted character who happened to be easily frightened and insecure. Every episode after that reduced him to the single trait of “scared”, which maybe a little bit of sass sometimes, but everyone is sassy in the YKW animes.

And then in the final episodes he gets the confidence to help out, but there isnt really much that causes it, outside of a speech from Junior, but in either case, like 50-ish episodes of 0 character focus doesn’t get undone by a tiny bit of focus at the end.

Adding to that, another interesting thing is that like, even though Bourei Banchou is literally his best friend, he never has any interaction with Keisuke again, really.

He gets summoned once in episode 5, where he is taken out in 1 hit with no lip service, and then he is summoned again in the finale as a bit of a nod, but there is no real character there.

What makes this interesting is that in merchandise, Bourei Banchou was actually shown to have a Lightside, Banchō, whom we even get to see some anime-style render of on some cards/stickers:

Considering the development of YKW4 was probably really early at this point (see the part about tribes) it’s unlikely they wouldn’ve created this design unless it was meant to be in the anime.

And when you look at him, he has very typical Yokai Watch sidekick look, doesnt he? So based on that I feel it’s likely that at some point, Banchō was meant to be Keisuke’s yokai partner, and be shown hanging around him and be an actual character and stuff.

But who knows.

One might say “well I don’t care about Keisuke, so I’m glad this didn’t happen” or something, which is a valid opinion to have, I’m just saying it seems obvious there was something dropped here.

Next we get the “Kaima” aspect. In episode 1, Fukurou’s dart hits a human which transforms him into a “Kaima”, which is what “Wicked Yokai” are called in Japanese, but the Japanese term has slightly different connotations, so…

Anyway, the question in hindsight is like: What the heck was that about?

This never happens again.

In episode 2 he hits the boy, but it doesn’t transform him, it shoots “evil” at Charlie the bike yokai, and Charlie turns bad.

After that he accidentally hits Jinta while trying to hit a human? And I think from that point on he either misses all the time or just hits the yokai directly.

And we never really get any explanation of what these darts even are, really.

Like, we know that supposedly it’s to look for the princess, but why?

Why does hitting humans and/or yokai with evil darts help?

One could assume make it’d awaken the Princess, but then why did he aim for what was clearly random punk jerks?

Did only Fukurou have those darts? If yes, how? And if yes, why was Shuten Douji not upset when Fukurou perished, at the very least over losing those darts?

Why did it only transform people in episode 1? In the very finale, we get people being transformed again, so I feel it maybe have at some point been tied to that, if they had a vague idea of what Soranaki was going to be yet.

But it’s clear there’s specific details that were meant to different.

Also, given what we learn later, why was Fukurou serving Shuten Douji, considering Shuten Douji’s main agenda is eventually revealed to be tied to restoring the power of the Oni Tribe, which Fukurou is not a member of.

It’s not like Shuten Douji has countless minions, he just as Douketstu and Fukurou, so I really gotta wonder why the latter is there.

Lastly a bit about Junior.

Now, Junior does not appear in the first episode, so this has less to do with Hino’s writing in particular, but I still think there might’ve been different intentions for Junior originally.

In the show itself, Junior is eventually revealed to have been born from pieces of Jibanyan’s body, and that’s really it. Despite this reveal, Junior doesn’t even get any major interactions with Jibanyan.

That in itself kinda feels to me like the anime writers didn’t have much of an idea of what to do with Junior, like they do with most characters.

And in any case, I really do think that originally, at some point in the production, Junior was meant to be born from Jibanyan and Whisper.

I’m not saying he was meant to be their literal baby, but I think he was probably meant to have been created in a similar manner to the show, but with parts of Whisper involved as well.

I mean, Junior’s design invokes traits of Jibanyan and Whisper alike in such a way that I have a really hard time to believe this wasn’t the intention at first.

There’s another reason I believe this, too.

Before Shadowside the anime was out, Hino showed of some early art during an “Inazuma Walker” stream, which mostly focused on Inazuma Eleven, but has some other stuff, too.

When Junior was shown, his co-host jokingly said “Well, everyone can tell this the child of Whisper and Jibanyan”, to which Hino replied “Um, it’s a bit different.”

While Hino does say that “it’s a bit different”, I also feel the co-host probably wouldn’t have made the “it’s Whisper’s and Jibanyan’s kid” joke unless there was a bit of truth to it?

But this is only speculation on my part again, I could be wrong.

Regardless of what Junior’s origin was going to be, we can also see early teasers of YKW4 showing him next to Natsume, almost like a counterpart to Whisper&Jibanyan for Nate, and Nekomata for Shin.

This makes me think that earlier on, Junior was possibly intended as Natsume’s main yokai “sidekick” or at least one of them, possibly fulfilling a role to her that would be similar to Whisper and especially OG Jibanyan.

But in the final product in both Shadowside and YKW4, Junior is more of a tag along, who doesn’t have a particular bond with any of the human characters.

Alright, those were just some of my thoughts, I hope this is what you were asking about?

Note that I have no idea what the behind-the-scenes of YKW looks like, this is just speculation. And even if I was right, that doesn’t mean any of this was done “behind Hino’s back” or the like. Even when he’s not writing directly, he could still be approving of any change, as far as I know.

To me it just personally felt like the anime writers couldn’t, or didn’t want to, follow up with some of the set-ups Hino made, not just story-wise, but especially characterization-wise.

#yokai watch #yokai watch shadowside #yokai watch 4 #reply

24 notes · View notes

prolapsarian · 6 years ago

Text

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation.

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit. I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it. DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table. JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them. DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures. JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring. DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language. JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities. DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further. JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production. DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images. JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality. DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it.

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

3 notes · View notes

docmurph12 · 5 years ago

Text

Ok. So two parter on CATS coming up. POSSIBLY a three parter depending on how long it takes to get through background. Here we go......

So my first request review comes from my good friend. I'm not sure how this is going to go, because I'm going whole hog on this one, again in the interest of pure objectivity.

My understanding of CATS is this. It was a Broadway musical based very loosely on T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". My friends in and fans of the theater community have told me there isnt really an intended overriding plot. The Wikipedia page I found begs to differ, but they insisted it really is just a collection of vignettes, told through the perspective of a cat. Simple enough? I believe so. Now, I also understand this stage musical to have been adapted a number of times, largely for Broadway and for specific actors and actresses, with the noted exception of the film CATS (2019). Yes that one. Yes I intend to watch it. On purpose. But wait there is more. The 2019 film was trashed nearly universally but everyone before they finished the trailer and after the film was released and viewed. Most people said the performances were fine but visually it was recieved as, to put it simply, fucking wierd. I saw one review that said it was released unfinished, with a CD character model floating into the middle of a scene out of context and with no animation, a mess with texture rendering (apparently Ian McKellan has a scene where his fur just doesn't show. Like the texture is flat. Like it looks like it was published on a floppy disk alongside the original Doom). Not to mention the myriad questions that seem to come up in conversation about the character design choices as a whole. Jesus, how bad is this thing??

My resources tell me a BUNCH of super important contextual things about this one, most important of them being that this is SUPER META Broadway at it's best. Like this is the most Broadway that has ever Broadway'ed. This could be a good thing (one of my favorite musical pieces is fucking everything from Les Miserables), or it could be a bad thing (anyone that knows me knows that with notable exceptions I am NOT a big fan of musicals AT ALL, which is strange for me given my proclivity for weirdness, good storytelling, and music). This is going to be fun for everyone I think so strap in folks. This is going to be a wierd ride through furry land with a guy that wants nothing to do with it, lol. (SCORE, looking like 2 parts)

First I'll be looking at CATS (2019), because I am a glutton for punishment, and my wife says that the best way to get through this is to chew through the shit sandwich first, and then to get through the good stuff, so the good stuff is what sticks. I'm not sure I am going to enjoy either part, but I am open to it so here we go. I'll try to keep my writing as live as possible, per usual.

RIGHT AWAY, as I'm completing the Amazon rental purchase, this cast is fucking loaded. Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson. Judi Dench, Jason Derulo (wait, he acts too? Maybe his part is the worst part in this, I hate his music worse than I dislike Taylor Swift), Idris Elba, Ian McKellan, Rebel Wilson, and more. And that doesnt even include any love for people I am not familiar with that might carry some star power over from Broadway. So this thing is loaded for bear with acting heavies. That said, I really don't understand the comic appeal of Rebel Wilson. I don't think she is funny. You already lost me with Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo. All that said, this cast roster looks expensive.

Ok I am a minute and 47 seconds in and my first thought already is what the hell am I listening to? If this was originally put together in the 80s, and its either loved (ironically I guess?)or reviled, why would you stick with the same musical choices as instrumentation is concerned? I'm guessing I am going to have more on this later.

So completely inconsequential to the actual review the word jellicle as it relates to cats is totally ruined thanks to my learning of a word not in may people's vocabularies. Farticles. Thanks to my cousins for that one.

Alright, so full disclosure. I am not a fan of Rebel Wilson. I enjoy aspects of characters she plays, and she can be funny at times, but when your whole act revolves around one aspect of you (in her case it is that she is a large woman. Seriously its like every joke in all 3 Pitch Perfect movies) it says a lot about your ability to tell a story or joke. That said, it is so nice to not hear Rebel Wilson tell fat jokes. She is genuinely talented. It's hard to watch her in this cat suit (? Cat body? Cat war crime? More later), but it's interesting to see someone explore another side of their craft.

The sound design is...off. I'm not sure how else to describe it. You can LOUDLY hear body parts hitting set pieces. Footfalls, people jumping and grabbing on things. Like seriously you can hear it over the music. It sounds like someone got lazy in the mixing room, or they were trying to make it feel more like a stage production. News Flash. It doesn't make it feel like a stage production. It makes it feel like nobody in the production staff cared as much as the actors. I am beginning to suspect that ALL the money on this movie was spent on casting. And concept art.

I am genuinely confused by the choice to have only a couple cats wear clothes, and when they remove them, their fur looks exactly like the clothes they removed. I'm finding myself looking at things they did that wasted money. Money that could have been spent anywhere else to improve this thing.

All things considered, I could watch Idris Elba play the title character in Jaws, and enjoy it.

I'm pretty impressed by the entire cast's commitment to everything they picked up from their movement coaching. It is obvious that they were trying to incorporate a lot of typical feline movement and habitual aspects, even going so far as utilizing ballet movements for some of the dancing (probably because it is more "feline", to use the word again.) Nobody has really slipped yet. It's pretty impressive.

I think the thing that has me most surprised throughout is that this thing has the ability to elevate some (Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo, Francesca Hayward, Jennifer Hudson, the VFX artists) and drag others through the dirt, (Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, the VFX artist team), most times in the same scene. It's crazy how on one hand someone truly can astound you with their performance, blow you away with a wonderful rendition of a song some people know well, and on the other hand you see wonderful, well established actors really putting their asses into a performance that has no way of doing them service because there isn't anything there. For comparison, look at Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, or Lucky Number Slevin, versus his performance in Bloodrayne. It's really hard to watch these respected thespians work their asses off for something that won't ultimately pay off for them because it doesn't have the capability to.

Ok so halfway verdict here:

This was a fucking mess. Now I didnt see the original theatrical release, so I have no idea how truly barrel bottom things got here. I CAN say, that I can see the bones of what this is supposed to be buried in the mess of cat shit (see what I did there????).

The concept of the costuming is essentially what I imagine it is for the stage show, but seeing it in it's execution is.....disturbing. The movement coaching was pretty solid and worked well with the dance choreography, but in combination with the actual character design there is an implied sexuality in the feline-ness that makes you uncomfortable, but not in the thought provoking way, just in the "forced to look at naked people covered in cat fur for an hour and a half" kind of way. Like I was even kind of into Idris Elba's performance of Macavity, until he took off the hat and trench coat and now I'm just watching a naked Idris, but with cat ears and a tail. To be honest seeing this throughout the film really took you out of the immersive aspects of it. Not to mention that while lighting was ok, the actual character models pasted on the motion capture actors moved strangely, sometimes the faces were disjointed with the heads, sometimes textures looked unfinished (not as bad as I thought it would be but I know people that could do better than that on their computers at home.) Just a jarring experience visually overall.

The score was ugly and dated too. Or maybe not the score, so much as the instrumentation. Sound design was atrocious throughout, it seemed like the intent was to make it feel more like a stage production, but if that's the case, why go the route they did in terms of set design and all that? Being able to hear hollow flooring under heavy footfall, or people loudly slamming hands into bars they need to grab to catch themselves, or the piss poor choice in instrumentation, the whole thing feels like B roll for the DVD extras. You know what actually did great in updating the music for a more immersive experience? Aladdin. Check my first review out for more on that one.

So halfway verdict? I say a rough D. I dont see myself going back for this one, but I'm not unable to see the appeal. I just am sort of anticipating the 1998 Broadway production (part 2 of this review) so I can see what this is really SUPPOSED to be. Watch for part 2, coming later!

#cats #cats 1998 #cats the musical #broadway #movie #review

0 notes

themoneybuff-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Questions About Car Seats, Leftovers, Medical Insurance, Budget Brands, and More!

Whats inside? Here are the questions answered in todays reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question. 1. Early or late retirement contributions? 2. Purchases for infrequent use 3. Used car seats? 4. Excessive leftovers 5. Friends want me to spend 6. Value of one bag living 7. Buying a house on $35K 8. How to avoid drive-thrus 9. Medical insurance difficulties 10. Budget brands? 11. Starting career advice 12. Thoughts on taekwondo One of the most enjoyable parts of writing this mailbag column is the wide variety of comments and questions I get from readers. I usually try to keep the stuff I choose for the mailbag at least somewhat within the realm of personal finance, maybe slipping in one or two questions or comments a week that arent related to the topic, but I get quite a lot of great stuff from readers that covers completely different topics that I just cant reasonably fit into the mailbag. For example, just in the last week or two, Ive received the following notes from readers: A reader wrote in to talk about the joys of playing Magic: the Gathering with her son and how they were building Commander decks together. A reader wrote in to encourage me to pick up some of the writings of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, particularly his essays Psychopolitics and The Scent of Time (which Im currently reading). A reader has been trying to get me to debate him concerning a number of hot button political issues. A reader has been writing to me consistently for weeks asking for step-by-step help in getting a batch of homemade kombucha to work. A reader invited me to his dynasty fantasy football league. Thats just over the last several days. Honestly, I love this kind of thing, because it represents human connection. Theres a sharing of ideas and interests and a sharing of concern behind all of it that goes way past merely writing about financial issues, and it means a lot to me, even if its not fodder for the mailbag. Speaking of the mailbag, here are this weeks questions. Q1: Early or late retirement contributions? Is it better to contribute to a Roth IRA early in the year or as late as possible? I have money set aside for my 2019 Roth contribution but I dont know if I should do it now or wait. Brian Unless theres some specific reason thats unique to your situation that points to waiting, you should put those savings in there as soon as possible. The longer the money is invested, the more time you have for compound interest to work in your favor. Having said that, investment markets are unpredictable. Theres always a chance that right after you put your money in, the markets dip. Remember that this could happen no matter when you put your money in there. You could put your money in now and immediately see a dip, or you could wait until next February to put it in and immediately see a dip. The difference is that, on average, its much more likely that the investment youre putting your money into will go up in value over that period. If you wait, its very likely that youre going to miss out on growth. Put your retirement money away in retirement accounts as soon as you can. Dont sit around holding them, because youre usually doing nothing more than missing out on growth if you do that. Q2: Purchases for infrequent use Im considering purchasing a pair of bowling shoes. I only bowl once or twice a year, but it seems like its a wise investment since I could get a pair of perfectly good bowling shoes for around $25 instead of paying $3 or so each time to rent them. How do you view rarely used purchases like this that, while adding to the stuff you own, will eventually pay for themselves? Adam My philosophy on purchases like these is similar to yours. I try to look at the total cost of ownership of the item over an extended but still reasonable period of time, like five years, and I figure out which is going to cost less. I also consider how frequently Ill actually use the item, and it basically has to be annually at the very least and preferably much more frequent than that. That type of thinking requires full honesty to be valuable. So, in your situation, is it cheaper to rent shoes for $3 a pop twice a year for five years or buy a pair of shoes for $25 once? Well, the cost for rental over that period is $30, so Id probably swing toward buying a pair, assuming that Im bowling twice a year. If you assume that its actually going to be much less than twice a year, youre going to be better off renting. I usually use a five year measure for calculations like this, because I figure its pretty hard to predict accurately what my life will be like beyond that time threshold and its also probably a reasonable guess as to the wear and tear that an item can take. Usually, with a five year calculation, its obvious whether its a good move or not. Again, in this situation, those bowling shoes arent going to be worn out after ten wears, so its likely you will be able to continue wearing them at that point or theyll have some minor secondhand value. This pushes the pendulum even more toward buying them. Q3: Used car seats? I am expecting in November. My husband and I are starting to pick up baby items from FB Marketplace and Craigslist. Whenever a carseat is listed on Marketplace someone always comments that you shouldnt buy used carseats because theyre not safe. How are used carseats not safe? Amy A carseat is one of the few baby options I wouldnt buy used. The reason is simple: a big part of whats protecting that baby when theyre in the carseat is plastic, and you dont know how that plastic has been treated. Theres some chance that the plastic has become brittle and could easily crack or break in a severe impact, just when you need it the most. This can happen, for example, if a carseat has been left in the sun too much over the course of years. Its not an issue of negligence its an issue of you not knowing the history of that carseat. It may have had years of sunlight exposure, rendering the protection that it offers your child much weaker. Most baby items are fine to buy used clothes and baby monitors and things like that. Those arent things that will cause calamity if they fail and its usually obvious if theyre doing their job or not. A car seat, though, is something you should invest in. 99.9% of the time, it wont matter, but 0.1% of the time, it matters more than anything else and youll never, ever want to skimp on that situation. Q4: Excessive leftovers On any given night we will have 2-7 people at our house for dinner. By default we cook for 7 but that means that many nights we have a ton of leftovers. We eat leftovers for lunch every day but they still get tossed a lot. We cant give them to the food pantry either. Ideas? Andy My first suggestion would be to simply have a leftover buffet night for dinner twice a week or so. On, say, Wednesdays and Saturdays, just pull out all leftovers, put them on the table, and let people assemble their own plates of leftovers and heat them up (or heat up the hot items before putting them on the buffet). That way, the leftovers get consumed directly and you have a free dinner. Another suggestion is to frequently make meals and side dishes that are easy to remix into another meal if you have a low turnout. For example, if you make a bunch of spaghetti, you can save it for two nights and then mix in a few additional spices, put it in a greased 9 by 13 pan, put a couple cups of mozzarella and provolone shredded cheese on top, and bake it for 30-45 minutes, covered for the first half, to make a nice spaghetti bake. We also often have plain vegetables as a side dish and save the leftovers to make quick soups later on, for example. A final suggestion is that on nights where you have a low turnout, simply prep leftover plates for the next night and have the same thing for dinner again, or prepare a different dinner the next night for just the two who ate the night before. I dont think you need to feel obligated to have a fresh meal on the table for whoever happens to show up each night. Q5: Friends want me to spend Im 23 and got a nice job out of college paying $45K per year. Several of my friends from college are in the same area and have jobs as well so its fun to hang out with them, but it feels like they want to blow their income as fast as possible. They go out drinking and to clubs constantly, upgrade their phones all the time, ride around in Ubers when they have cars, and throw money at stupid stuff. I want to get rid of my student loan debt and start saving for a house and Im already contributing to retirement so I can get out of this as young as possible. Its not like Im avoiding fun but theres a ton of stuff to do that doesnt cost $50 or $100 for an evening. When I suggest anything else other than clubs or an expensive restaurant, I get ignored. Do you have any suggestions? Amy Find new friends? I mean, that sounds fairly cold, but it sounds like your values are diverging from the values that your friends hold, or perhaps they were always divergent and the income just exposed it. While I dont mind being acquaintances with people with drastically different lifestyles than my own, I have found its far more pleasant and easier to have close friends who have similar values and lifestyles to my own. That way, Im not pushed to overspend constantly just to spend time with my friends. I have been in situations where it felt like I had to pay some kind of admission fee (in the form of going out when I didnt want to) just to hang out with a friend and if I wasnt willing to do that, that person wouldnt hang out with me. That just isnt worth it. Id suggest digging into activities that you feel internally interested in doing. Find groups in your community that match up well with that by using things like Meetup and there youll find people who are also interested in what you happen to be internally interested in. Get involved in those groups. Youll find its not too hard to build friendships that way. Q6: Value of one bag living I found your post on one bag living to be interesting but not practical. Its not like more than maybe 0.001% of your readers will actually ever do it. What is the practical value of such an article? Ollie The practical value of it is that it really shows you how few items you actually need to have a happy and comfortable life, and when you realize that, you begin to realize how much extra unnecessary stuff you have and how much that stuff is costing you, both in terms of the stuff itself and the space youre paying for to store all of that stuff. Lets say, for example, that you decided to try it for a month. You packed a big duffel bag full of stuff and aimed to live solely out of that bag for that month. During the month, almost everything you use comes out of that bag other than maybe a few kitchen items, you really dont use anything else in your home. At the end of the month, youre left asking yourself what the point of all of that other stuff is. Why have any of it if youre able to have a great life without touching it? Why have shelves full of books and DVDs you never touch? Why have a television if you have a good life not watching it? This is likely to lead you to start downsizing your possessions, recouping some money along the way, and its also likely to lead you to question almost all of your physical purchases. If you keep going in that direction, youll find that you likely have excessive living space and can easily be satisfied with a smaller home or apartment, and if you downsize that, then youre on the way to some serious financial improvement in your life, as youre losing far less money to utilities, insurance, property taxes, and so on. Q7: Buying a house on $35K I am a single woman with a four year old child from a previous marriage; the father is not involved and avoids paying child support. We live in a small apartment in [a large city with a moderate cost of living]. I make $35K per year. My mom lives about five miles away and takes care of my son when Im working and hes not in preschool as she has a pension thats enough for her to live on because my father died in the workplace. I would like to be able to afford a small house for us and get out of this apartment building before hes too old because theres kind of a rough culture of teenage boys here. I would like to be in a house in four years. I have no debts and am saving about $200 a month for emergencies. Carrie First of all, Id contact a lawyer and do what you can to get child support. The cost of supporting your child should not be borne solely by you and hes legally obligated to provide financial help here even if hes uninvolved. Second of all, $200 a month in savings thats also used as an emergency fund isnt adequate to get to where you want to go in four years. I looked into your area and a small starter home is going to run you in the $300K range now and will probably be closer to $350K by the time you want to buy. 20% of $350K is $70K. If youre saving $200 a month, youll get to about $10K in four years if there are no emergencies. To get to $70K in four years, you need to be saving around $1,500 a month and have no emergencies that tap that money. Considering that youre making about $3,000 a month before taxes, thats an extremely difficult proposition. Thus, to make it to your target, youre going to have to do some radical things. The first thing I would do is sit down with your mother and discuss the option of cohabitation for a few years, with you splitting up the housing costs. If she could move into your apartment or you two could move into her dwelling and its a tenable situation for a few years, youll both save a mint. If youre paying $1,000 a month in rent and it suddenly drops to $500 a month, theres $500 a month toward savings, and probably more than that because youll have lower utility bills and you can more easily share food costs. You may find that after you buy that starter home, it may make sense to have your mother continue to live with you to keep costs manageable going forward, at least for a while. If you can swing something like that, use a lot of smart frugal tactics like sticking with store brand items when shopping, get on that child support issue, and keep working at your career to move toward a better salary, you can make this work. Without those kinds of big changes, this probably isnt a realistic goal. Q8: How to avoid drive-thrus How do you stop relying on the convenience of drive-thrus? I understand that its way cheaper to make meals at home but when I can just go to a drive-thru and get a quick meal and have it eaten before I even get home or eat it right when I walk in the door and theres no cleanup because I just toss the wrappers, its hard to convince myself to make a big mess making a meal at home. Leon There are a few good strategies for solving this problem that work well for different people. I suggest trying one for at least 30 days, see if it clicks with you or merely causes frustration, and either stick with it if it works or move on to another if it doesnt. First, try simply packing a meal for yourself at home before you leave in a small cooler. Make something simple that you like a sandwich and some baby carrots and a drink or whatever. Pack the individual items in reusable containers and put them in something insulated with an ice pack to keep it cool. Take that meal with you when you go out and save it at your desk or in a work fridge until youre ready to leave, then eat that on the way home. You can do the meal prep the night before while watching a television show and if you use reusable containers, cleanup is really just a matter of popping stuff in the dishwasher and wiping off the table (which youd need to do anyway). If you want, you can designate Fridays as eat out days and keep it as a treat for yourself for getting through the week. Another thing I strongly suggest is to simply get better at cooking at home. Cooking seems very difficult at first and even easy things like scrambled eggs feel like a giant mess and a big time and energy investment, but once you get more practiced, it stops feeling so challenging. Start by making really simple meals that you like grilled cheese sandwiches or scrambled eggs or spaghetti. Another strategy is to cook things in advance, make individual meals out of them in reusable containers, and keep them in the fridge. For example, you could make a huge batch of spaghetti one night and pack three or four individual meals of spaghetti with a breadstick in resealable containers in the fridge. Then, you can take them to work with you and youll also know that one is just waiting for you when you get home. Yet another strategy is to use a slow cooker. Start a simple dump meal before you leave (a dump meal means you just dump several ingredients in there and turn it on low) and youll have a hot home-cooked meal waiting for you when you get home. Slow cookers are great for stews, chili, soups, and simple casseroles; it can also make a mean pot roast. The goal of all of these things is to either put something in your hands directly so that youre not tempted to stop or have something at home waiting for you so youre not tempted to stop. Q9: Medical insurance difficulties I am covered by [a major medical insurer] through my workplace. A few months ago, I had a procedure done that my doctors office informed me would be fully covered by my insurance. They filed this with the insurance and the insurance company came back saying that the procedure wasnt medically necessary and wouldnt cover it, so my doctor is now billing me for it at the tune of $30K. I dont even know where to start. Should I contact a lawyer? Petra Without seeing the bills and documentation, I cant give you full advice on what to do. However, my first step would be to document every single detail that you can recall about this entire process, including dates and what you were told by both your doctors office and insurance. If you have any supporting documents, such as receipts and printed information about the procedure or about the costs, thats all valuable here. Then, I would go through the process of appealing this claim with your insurer, providing a copy of all of that documentation. An appeal should definitely be your first action. If you find that your appeal is denied, you should then discuss the matter with your doctor and attempt to get their bill reduced. If youre still finding that youre paying an excessive amount, then I would take all of this documentation to a lawyer and get legal help. It very much sounds like you were given inaccurate guidance from a doctors office and a lawyer can usually help here. Q10: Budget brands? Are there any budget brands you trust for making high quality stuff? Meaning brands that are cheap in price but the quality of their stuff is good? Darren The store brands at most department stores and grocery store chains fit that bill. For the vast majority of product types, the store brand is as good as most of the name brand options. They might not beat some of the really high end premium versions of those products, but the store brand is usually as good as 80% of similar items on the shelf. For things like charging cables and basic electronics like computer mice or keyboards, Ive found that Amazons generic brand, Amazon Basics, is really good for the price. For many different kinds of smaller electronic items, like external batteries for charging devices on the go or headphones or things of that nature, I strongly trust Anker. If theres an Anker option for a small electronic device, youre probably getting great bang for the buck with it. Those are the ones that immediately come to mind as brands that I strongly trust that consistently provide good bang for the buck across a wide variety of products. Q11: Starting career advice My oldest son is about to graduate from college with a degree in electrical engineering. I am collecting career advice from some people I respect to pass along to him. What advice would you give to a fresh college graduate in a technical field today? Robert First of all, treat the first decade of your career as an opportunity to build skills and relationships above chasing salary. A killer resume ten years from now will be worth a lot more than earning an extra $5K or $10K right out of the gate. If one job pays a little more but feels like a dead end, while the other job pays a little less but feels like its overflowing with opportunities and ways to build relationships, take the latter job in the first decade of your career. Second, if your workplace offers a 401(k) plan, take advantage of it immediately and contribute as much as you can stand. You will never regret this. Just do this and then start off with smaller take-home checks theyll still be a lot more than what you had in college. Pay yourself first. Third, no matter how tough a situation is, dont burn bridges, even if it would feel good. If youre moving on from a position, do it as gently as possible and be as positive and flexible as you can on your way out. Finally, eat healthy, get some exercise, get plenty of sleep, and dont work too many hours. If you dont do those things, youll be far less productive during your work time, the quality of work you produce will be lower, and youll have a harder time picking up new skills. If your workplace is obsessed with 80 hour workweeks, carve out as much of that 80 hours toward self care and rest that you can reasonably get away with. Q12: Thoughts on taekwondo I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on taekwondo from the perspective of both a parent of a student and as a participant with an eye toward cost. Is it worth it? Do your kids get value out of it? How about yourself? Brenda I attend a local taekwondo school with the rest of my family. It was an activity that my two oldest children wanted to try and the family plan isnt much more expensive than just the two of them participating, so when our family schedule lined up and our youngest was old enough, we all joined. In effect, our third family member was half price and the rest of us are effectively going for free, and the price has actually gone down as some family members have reached black belt rank (and those who havent are at a belt rank approaching black). First of all, if youre new to martial arts of any kind, its something you should shop around for. Any city of any size likely has a few martial arts schools; a larger city likely has some dedicated taekwondo schools with branches in various locations. Different schools offer different prices and different philosophies. Taekwondo is a martial art thats focused on fast, high kicking. That means that it really works hard on agility and balance. Theres also an emphasis on forms, which are sequences of kicks and other movements that are memorized and done from memory, which challenges a persons memory while physically exerting themselves. Our familys interest in martial arts lies much more in the realm of self improvement, character building, self defense, and fitness rather than training to fight. There are definitely martial arts schools that are very focused on simply training to fight, preparing people for things like mixed martial arts. Theres nothing wrong with that, but its not what Sarah or I were looking for in a school. We wanted a school where the merit wasnt in whether you defeat someone in a fight, but whether youre working hard and genuinely improving yourself so that youre better at the techniques, better in all around fitness, and better in character than you were the day before. Again, I have nothing against a school focused on fight-focused training, but its just not what Im looking for or what I would direct my children toward until theyre old enough to make those kinds of choices for themselves. Perhaps someday theyll take what theyve learned and move in that direction, and Im fine with that. When my oldest son and daughter began expressing a genuine interest in taekwondo, we shopped around for local schools that offered dedicated youth programs and were focused on a self-improvement type of martial art philosophy, and we found one that we liked that had classes near us, and over time, we all joined up. I think it has genuinely helped our children improve their ability to focus, their ability to overcome challenges, their character, and most definitely their ability to defend themselves and get out of a threatening situation. As a parent, Im thrilled with the impact taekwondo has had on them. As for myself, I joined because I agree in a deep philosophical way with the goals and direction of the school, as well as the fact that I was looking for a fitness program for myself and an opportunity to mutually encourage my family to be more fit. This hits all of those marks and with family rates, its pretty inexpensive. If you divide our session fees by five, theres absolutely no way any of us could be in a sport or a fitness program at these rates. If someone is interested in taekwondo or martial arts in general, Id start by figuring out why you want to do it. What are you hoping to get out of it, or what do you want your child to get out of it? Self-discipline? Fitness? Self-defense? Character? What are the one or two things you want most for yourself or for your child that you hope martial arts can provide? Start from there and shop around at a lot of schools in your area. Theyll all have different philosophies and centers of focus some of them will line up well with your own goals and philosophies, while others will go in a different direction (not wrong or bad, just different). Find some that match what you want, price compare them, and give one a try for a session and see if its right for you. Got any questions? The best way to ask is to follow me on Facebook and ask questions directly there. Ill attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive many, many questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours. https://www.thesimpledollar.com/questions-about-car-seats-leftovers-medical-insurance-budget-brands-and-more/

0 notes

definitionpaper1-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Technology and modernity essay

study Topic:\n\nThe influence of the technical shape up on societal and cultural isolation of current large enactment.\n\nEssay Questions:\n\nHow low olfactory modality the reading of assert(a) technologies provoke peerly isolation of distinct muckle?\n\nIn what path the scientific encourage influences the level of refining?\n\nWhat do culture, intelligence, psycheal identity operator and economy form?\n\n thesis Statement:\n\nThe mishap of hu earthkindduction the cut-how and opposite vital schooling influenced the economy of the countries and so importantly changed the standard of heart sentence. The benefits of the scientific progress were obvious to a strikinger extent e trulyplace nought ever vista that this benefits would likewise lead off under ones skin a nip expression the view of isolation.\n\n \n applied science and forward-lookingeity essay\n\n \n\n knock back of contents:\n\n1. Introduction\n\n2. engineering acquaintanc e as a vernal religion.\n\na. Is applied science a inclose?\n\nb. Responsibility for slew\n\n3. Technologies beat frustration.\n\na. Causes of kind isolation\n\nb. applied science and madness\n\nc. Influence of cyberspace\n\n4. Conclusion\n\nThe march of science and engineering does non express growe intellectualcomplexity in the lives of any(prenominal) multitude. It often instrument the diametrical.\n\nThomas Sowell\n\n \n\n1. Introduction\n\nThe boundary applied science is employ in so m apiece(prenominal)(prenominal) con schoolbooks now that it is very hard to endue one complex rendering of this phenomenon. Ordinarily, this margin implies the collection of either the present-day(a) disc everywhereies, inventions and innovations that shorten a physical entailment. It is parking lot fellowship that the study priority of any terrestrial engineering science is to relieve the forge of recreateing and liveness of every tender-hearted being. In oppositewise words any technology is always a in like fashionl, a facility employ to solitary(prenominal) conviction and perfective tense the life. Origin aloney, technology was used in order to survive, as it was the main(a) goal of the homosexualkind since their foremost day of existance. engine room was born(p) thousands of years ago when a slice started inventing parvenue vulgar instruments to improve the nucleusiveness of hunt club and fishing.The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century changed the course of benignant development as it introduced industrial technologies to the innovation and gave birth to unattended operation. The quality of machinery grew and this situation subject the possibility of mass win and thereof was an enormous feeling into life-level improvement. The second step was the invention of the telegraph as it started the coeval period of nurture technologies. The possibility of sharing the know-how and other vital inform ation influenced the economy of the countries and so signifi female genital organtly changed the standard of life. The benefits of the scientific progress were obvious only when nobody ever thought that this benefits would also slang a flip side the side of isolation.\n\n \n\n2. engineering science as a recent religion\n\n present-day(a) pile earth-closet non cipher their lives without the lodge of modern technologies. expert progress has blend an indicator of the cultural development of every addicted coun campaign and soul because it resembles the superpower to see. Controlthis is the point technology is all about. Since the ancient time men needed a tool to cover for separately(prenominal) one process in their lives and different technologies became the fist aid rig for this problem. applied science straight off has conk out a modern religion. It in sincereity has frequently in common with any religion in the world. If to exaggerate, the concept of r eligion implies that a someone has faith in the fact that his deity leave behind lead him to a burst future and prayers can jockstrap the domain to control God giving him exactly what the man require. God protects his men . The alike(p) thing is about technology. The technical development provides a expert future for a somebody, too. Technology improves the life of each individual; it does protect for it surrounds a man with a comforting airwave of tranquility for his health, security and in addition to that it keeps the person on top of the latest counterbalancets hap on the planet. Altogether it turn ins a perfect illusion of control all over life and is horizontal stronger than the religious faith.\n\n \n\n2.a. Is technology a shrine?\n\nIt is hard to get around the fact that some(prenominal) modern-day mickle devotion technology. This is to begin with due to the fact that mountain simply can non imagine their lives without its numerous embodiments: cell-pho nes, Blackberry communicators, iPod players, laptops, speed-automobiles, airplanes, automatic kitchen equipment, galore(postnominal) others plainly curiously estimators. Computers nowadays have live on almost family members and troubles with a computer be perceived with spacious emotional involvement.\n\nNot many quite a little remember that the legal age of technologies were created in order to renovate the process of connection surrounded by plenty. The problem is that the progress of information technologies outstripped the homo ability to return. The market is a flood of flimsy amounts of information technologies that wipe the knowledge(prenominal) touch from every iodin message transmitted from them. mass worship the technologies that save their time and give them more than opportunities to prepare and earn money. Isnt it howling(prenominal) that now a man does non have to real wreak a person to say, I do it you? whole he has to do is circularise a n sms, an internet-card or in the silk hat(p) case send a hand-written post-card or make a call. In Malaysia it is point allowed to fall apart by a text message. Seeing technology as a shrine pr purgets deal from visualizeing that all these technological embodiments exist, in the first place, to equilibrise the real person-to-person communicating only not on the whole replacing it. Too much of anything is destructive. No difference with the modern technologies. They entered the life of people surrogate men with machines, replacing real speech with communicators and real love with cyber-relationships. So, the reality is that the inability of people to control the process of technological influence toped in dissimilar negative effects such(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as: affectionate isolation and estrangement of people from each other.\n\n \n\n2.b. Responsibility for people\n\nTechnology has influenced so many spheres of life that it can be even said that it re al bestows accountability and thence controls at to the lowest degree four major blocks: culture, intelligence, individualised identity and economy. Culture is touched through the ethics that accompanies technology in such manifestations as quality of life owing the modern house noneffervescent and portable equipment and in the process of amicableization, which implies the increase (or decrease) of the cultural level. word of honor is influenced by technology in a way that a lot of decisions are make by machines: up-to-date programs allow people to rely major tasks to computers to count everything themselves and simply give the result: a prognosis, an stinting calculation etc. in-person identity is definitely influenced too, as technology provides the opportunity to chose the way of living, which corresponds to the inner condition of a person, but equalizes everybody at the comparable time, for each person is no more that serious some other user. Economy is not an except ion as it inspection and repairs to fabricate corporation all over the globe crating strong sparing alliances. Technology gradually leaves no limits for the possibilities of humanity and humanity gradually survive desperately subject on it. The major topic is that though technology is creditworthy for the changes in the society it cannot take this tariff. It is the humanity that is to be trusty for what it invents and contributes into the world. And even more than that each person has to take responsibility for the technological beloveds his children use.\n\n \n\n3. Technologies cause frustration.\n\nIn spite of the comfort modern technologies bring they cannot eliminate such stringy side effect as frustration. This frustration primarily deals with the domination of the technology over human values. The social side of the technological progress resulted in antisocial numbers. A man does not need a friend to come over to help him, or just to talk because everything that is to be make is done my machines and one can talk with a friend over the phone, or croak through sms or cyberspace. much(prenominal) social changes with an antisocial display case grow with the ontogenesis of number of advanced technologies. Frustration carcass invisible until people actually see that their children do not go out but spend hours playing computer games, talking on the ICQ or choosing avatars for their chat nicknames.The lifestyle of the contemporaneous generation become more isolated and therefore result many frustrations. One of such frustrations is the inability to demonstrated advance social communicational skills. two people feel more halcyon sharing face-to-face information by delegacy of the computer that in a face-to-face conversation. Technology is a frustration also because it pollutes the atmosphere, uses too much natural resources, go forth lifeless earth and makes people useless, as the machines do everything sort of of them. Psychologists are tired of retell how important is the tactile get to for each person and that the weakest consequence of such deficit is aggression. net-communication, a computer deciding what is the best color gamut for the bedroom, virtual-traveling, remote education, computers recounting fairy-tales to infinitesimal children - this is just a small part of what is waiver on around us. Depression, isolation, alienation are looking for new victims that lose their contact with the removed world.\n\n \n\n3.a. Causes of social isolation\n\n technological progress expands our contacts we can have hundreds of people in our contact-lists, but still we get the self like(prenominal) result social isolation. We do not meet these people; we do not take them by their hands or give a stuff when they need it. Technology brings up a generation of people without proper social skills and therefore immature people. New technologies have forgotten the values and human goals. Technology is above a man n ow, because it is in slap-up demand, brings profit and dominates. Technologies promote human interactions through technical devices but many people record this calling too literally. The term society means that a person belongs to a large formation, a conglomeration of many people with definite peculiarities . This sort out of people has common goals and therefore is a unity. When a person loses this sensation of unity he becomes socially isolated of his own accord. When a person understands that he does not need to meet anybody in person in order to talk and finds it comfortable than he is trying to hunt down the reality. Why do so many people try to escape reality? The contemporary life has proved that people have so little time to talk to each other because of their jobs, not even mentioning the tactile contact that their social frustration leads them to search for a solution. The solution is often shew in mesh and afterward some time the person becomes absolutely isolated he buys everything he needs in the internet-shops, communicates with people via Internet and go in love in the same manner.\n\n \n\n3.b. Technology and alienation\n\nIn order to understand alienation through technology better it is important to know the existing types of alienation which allow in alienation between the prolific and the poor, between genders, races, interests and so on. Technological alienation implies that a person does not need to gear up social contacts to achieve his goals, because everything can be done with the help of technological devices. Technology, as it has been mentioned before, does save time, but this time is nowadays is spend on more technologies like Internet and therefore causes alienation for many people . People become the slaves of modern technologies and do a good job in not letting anything else in their life they even prefer to work over the Internet not to be torn outdoor(a) form their deity. Alienation means forgetting something that once used to be considered a good manner the ability of a man to reflect and feel the world and other people in it.The technological development of the contemporary world leads to the weakening of the social contacts and connections whose simplification is harbored by the new technologies existing in the frameworks of the society. Nevertheless, the society is trying to figure out the problem of weakening of tralatitious social relationships through the populace of corresponding new technologies. Since the growth of in the flesh(predicate)ization leads to the breakup of traditional social relationships, alienation becomes a peremptory component of the modernness.\n\n \n\n3.c. Influence of Internet\n\nAccording to Robert Kraut, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon Universitys forgivingComputer Interaction land greater use of the Internet leads to shrinking social support and happiness, and increases in depression and privacy[Sleek, 1998]. Modern technologies have people the possibilit y to communicate with each other on great distances, to find new acquaintances all over the world, to search for information and obtain it in hardly a(prenominal) minutes and many other opportunities. Each of these opportunities is a rally of a face-to-face interaction. The other problem is that Internet is used only to communicate with conflicting relatives but also with people leaving next-door and as a source to find a matching partner. The research make by Robert Kraut proves the existance of inverse correlation coefficient between the time spent in the Internet and the personal sensation of happiness in real life. People become less involved in different types of social activities and substitute them with Internet community activities .\n\nInternets verdict is that it can help us to communicate people we would have neer met without it, but at the same time it prevents us from communicating with the people we know, like our family and friends. This fact makes million people feel lonely and it is important to subscriber line that it makes them actually feel lonelier than they are in the beginning and makes them sincerely yours lonely after some time.\n\n \n\n4. Conclusion\n\nModern technology has converted contemporary life into a constant optimisation machine. The amount of things that get under the process of optimization is enormous. Human social relations are not an exception. Technology will be precarious for this sphere of interaction until people learn how to master and control the influence of the technological achievements of them.People started treating technology as a religion, as it is only technology from their whimsy that can change our lives for better. The prime reason for that is because technology makes the military man see themselves as powerful beings, which cannot be achieved without it. So, what once was created, as assistance to humanity, now has become a goal. In other words the goal of new inventions is to make more new inventions and it has nothing to do with lot the mankind. If men do not have time to look at emotions with their relatives and close people even having all these devicesthan do they sincerely need them? The malaise of modernity is something that technology has caused in its very essence. Humanity needs to clearly define what invention needs to be made, why and what accomplishable consequences it might have. Otherwise, the depression, loneliness, frustration, alienation of the modern society will only grow.If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Custom essay writing service. Free essay/order revisions. Essays of any complexity! Courseworks, term papers, research papers. 100% confidential! Homework live help. Custom Essay Order is available 24/7!

0 notes