#i should state that its a 2000's game too if that helps why it looks old đ
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I saw others doing this and I couldn't resist lol this is just for fun ngl đŞ
#i haven't done a prompt list since my persona 4 days where i drew one character each day in October LOL#funny enough i also did that traditionally#oh yeah you can notice with day 3 the pen switch in some areas#my good pen died đ#so now i have my other pen that is literally dying#uhh also i know the perspective of day 3 Mettatons arm is screwed LMAO#nothing i can do with pen and paper :'>#also i have not drawn tvs any different since my persona 4 obsession KJSVSVSVSV#i should state that its a 2000's game too if that helps why it looks old đ#nonetheless i hope these aren't... too bad lmao#its fun taking a break from digital now and then especially since im going through a small art block#mettaton#undertale#alphys#mettamay#mettaton may#prompt event
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Let Me In - Part 2
Prompt: âIf I knock politely will you let me in? Iâll make it worth your whileâ
Pairing: Baekhyun x Reader
Word Count: 4,950
Warnings: Vampire AU, smut, blood, mentions of death, murder & torture.
A/N: Part 1 was in my Halloween drabbles from a long ass time ago. I continuously got requests for a second part so it finally came into being today. Let me know what you think, comments help me greatly given the large breaks between posting for me, they help me work out if Iâm still any good at this writing business.
âS-so, a-are you g-gonna k-kill me?â You stutter out, your fear making it hard for you to get the words out.
He smirks and steps back, freeing you from the wall. Before you can even think about regaining some semblance of composure he kneels on the floor and sinks his fangs into the dead manâs neck. Your eyes widen as you stand frozen to the spot, unable to blink, run, anything. It takes all you have just to remember to breathe.
He drops the corpse back to the floor when heâs finished feeding, licking his blood-stained lips as he sets his eyes on you again. âI think youâve bought yourself some time.â He steps closer to you, caging your body between his arms, your back pressed back against the wall. âConvince me to let you live, but your case had better be compelling since you wasted my time earlier.â His dark gaze feels like its searing lines into your flesh as you feel it travel from your eyes to your lips, throat, & chest before raking back up to your eyes. âYou still havenât let me in.â He smirks.
What was that stupid saying that you used to say to your friends? Mark me down as scared and horny. Thatâs pretty much where you were right now. Terrified for multiple reasons (vampires were real, one sent a madman to kill you then killed said madman in front of you and was maybe, probably, most definitely doing to kill you) but also horny. It was impossible to deny how attractive Baekhyun was, both before when you thought he was human and now as he pinned you to the wall. Your mind is racing, jumping between freaking out about your impending death and lewd comments about his lips, hands, hips. If it had the capacity to take on anything else it might also be disgusted with itself for allowing lust to creep in at a time like this.Â
Somewhere deep down in your psyche a thought sparks. Draw this out, stay alive as long as you possibly can. The longer you are alive, the closer you are to sunrise. Make it to sunrise and escape. It wasnât much to go on but it was the best you could think of. There was no way that you would overpower him with strength. If you wanted to win here then you were going to need to be smart and bide your time. Use every advantage that you could and the sun was a powerful one. His ego might just be another.
âI want to know more about you.â He raises one brow in response.
âWhy?âÂ
You inhale, steeling your nerves as you say the words that will change your life forever. âIn the bar before, we talked. I liked that, liked getting to know you -â the words were not untrue. The bar had been nice. Youâd captured the attention of the man every person, men and women alike, desired but he had only had eyes for you. You had been sitting at the bar enjoying your Old Fashioned when Baekhyun had first approached you. At the time it was immensely flattering but in hindsight you were probably just easy prey. You were alone and no one else had been paying much attention to you. â- but now that I know that youâre well, not human, I feel like that was all lies. Tell me about you first. Then Iâll let you in.âÂ
He shifts back and considers your words. âWhy should I tell you anything at all? I could just compel you to let me in and use you until Iâm bored of your body.â His tone betrays him. He might be impatient and used to getting what he wants but from the way his tone shifted when he said he could compel you, you could tell that doing so would ruin the fun for him.Â
So you played with fire, figuratively speaking of course. Standard negotiating probably wouldnât work here because a) you were terrified and b) impatient vampire. You werenât trying to get out of sleeping with him either. You were attracted to him even through your fear and there was no denying that you wanted him. All you were trying to gain was time. The closer it got to sunrise, the higher your chances of survival were.Â
So you tried to match his ego to unnerve him.âWhere is the fun in that?â You shrug. âIf all you want is a body to fuck, then why ask me to convince you to let me live? Surely itâs better for you with a willing participant.â You take a step forward, avoiding the dead body on the floor, and advance on Baekhyun as you continue to speak. âOne that wants you, that begs for you, that needs you.â You lick your lips as you finish, your words affecting you more than you thought they would. âWhy put it all of the effort at the bar when you could have simply locked eyes and told me what you wanted me to do? I think you enjoy the hunt so why spoil it now? What harm is there in telling me about yourself when Iâm just going to die anyway?â You shrug.Â
Baekhyun takes a few steps back and looks at you, really looks at you. His eyes narrow as he takes you in and tries to work out your ploy. âInteresting tactic little one. Futile though.â He smirks and turns away from you, heading off towards your kitchen.Â
Left with the corpse just behind you, you decide to follow him rather than rush out the front door. Baekhyun has already proved that he is faster than you so you probably wouldnât get very far and even if you got to a neighbour in time there is the very real possibility that theyâd die and it would be your fault.Â
As you enter the kitchen you spot Baekhyun mixing drinks. He points at the two armchairs you have in your makeshift reading nook, a place that has brought you comfort over the years. If there was ever a place for you to fight for your life then this would be the one place that would bring you strength. You make your way over to one of the armchairs and sink into its comforting embrace while you wait for Baekhyun to finish making drinks.
âIâll play your game for now little one but donât push your luck.â He says as he carries two drinks over, handing you one once he is close enough. You notice that heâs made the same drink that you were having at the bar. âYouâre not wrong, compelling a mark kind of ruins the vibe but if I have to do it, I will.â
âNoted.â
âAsking me to tell you about myself is a bit vague given my lengthy existence so why donât you try something more specific? Iâll let you ask as many questions as you want but there is a price for my answers.â He smirks.
âName it.â
âEach time I answer you, you must remove an article of clothing. Once removed Iâm free to touch the unclothed area. When you run out of clothing, your question time ceases and you submit yourself to me to have you as I please.â
You gulp as you try not to let on how appealing his price sounds. The logical part of your brain tries to yell over the burning lust that is taking over your senses about the dangers involved here but as far as you see it your options are die in pain or die in pleasure. Given the choice, you will avoid pain at almost any cost. He thinks he has you trapped, like a cat cornering a mouse but you arenât so sure that youâve been beaten yet. Not that he needs to know that.
âI accept your terms.â You say before taking a sip of your drink. The whiskey soothing any errant nerves.Â
You see Baekhyunâs eyes darken with desire as he sits opposite you, a smug look on his face now that he thinks heâs won. âIâll give you a point for not forcing an unnecessary negotiation or rebuttal upon hearing my price.â
âYou said not to waste your time. Your terms are not unsurprising and it did not seem like it was up for negotiation when you delivered it.â
âSmart woman.â He relaxed into the armchair, swirling his drink in one hand as the other beckoned for you to begin your questioning.
âHow much of what you told me about yourself at the bar was true?â
âAll of it.â He states bluntly, chuckling at the surprised look on your face. âI do work at a law firm in town with 8 others, itâs how we exist in human society. I donât have traditional family as such anymore as Iâve long outlived them. I do prefer to go out at night for obvious reasons beyond my control and I find great beauty in the night.âÂ
Baekhyun was right, he had told you the truth, just a very short version of it. Should that make you trust him any more? Probably not, but it did instil a small amount of something in you about him. He could have just lied about everything in order to lure you away but he chose the truth. In some weird way that counted for something.Â
âNo lies, you just never bothered to dig deeper at the time.â He purred, eyes roaming your body as he waited to see what you would remove.
You slipped out of your leather jacket and draped it over the back of your seat. Baekhyun groaned impatiently when he saw the long sleeves that remained covering your arms. Victory, it would seem, was not yet within his grasp. Begrudgingly he took another sip of his drink as you laughed internally at his reaction.
âIs your normal pattern to trick someone into letting you into their home then you kill them?â
âNo. My clan and I have tried many things over the years. Letâs see. There was compelling which was just too easy and made our existence dull, posing as missionaries which weirdly enough worked better than it should have⌠not that Iâll ever let Suho know that. Next was outright frenzy where we razed a town, feasted and moved on - that was one of the early ones.â He grins as he reminisces. âWhere was I, oh yes. We told people we were vampires - that one was particularly popular in the 2000âs, weâve pretended to be injured or dead then attacked the person who was kind enough to try and help us, also too easy in my opinion but effective. You humans are gullible.â He chuckles. âWe also tried to use blood banks but supplies could not sustain our hunger without detection, so then we tried setting up our own donor systems but that was a logistical nightmare and more red tape than you should ever have to deal with as an immortal. Roleplay was a fun one, biting is a real kink for so many people - who knew? - and now the current approach which is an amalgamation of past methods - seduction and pleasure followed by feeding.â He finishes his account of vampiric blood sourcing by licking his lips, his fangs hidden from your view.Â
If you hadnât seen them plunged into the neck of the now deceased man in your entryway you could be fooled into thinking that the man sitting across from you was just that, a man. But you had seen them and you knew they were real. You also knew the telltale signs of an impatient man and Baekhyun was most definitely impatient.Â
For an immortal being who could remain as still at the night he was fidgeting and tapping his glass more than any vampire should. Whether it was hunger or something else causing it you didnât know. The erratic movements were unsettling and causing your nerves to return. His gaze pierces yours as he waits.
You set your drink on the floor and stand, moving your arms behind you as you unzip your skirt, letting it fall to the floor, revealing a small amount of flesh at the top of your thighs, your garter belt and stockings covering most of the unveiled skin.
You hear him inhale, something he does not need to do. âYouâre just going to leave it on the floor like that? Little one, it will crumple.â His voice is rough as he chides you.
You smirk and turn away from him before giving him what he wants. You step out of the skirt, bend at the hips and collect the discarded piece from the floor. You can feel his eyes on your ass as you bend forward, leaving little to the imagination. Only a small strip of fabric prevents him from your sex.
After you place your skirt on the back of the chair, on top of the jacket, you sit. Your brain doesnât register the movement but before you can cross one leg over the other Baekhyun is there, kneeling between them, his hands on the uppermost part of your thighs where the skin is exposed.Â
âYou,â He growls. âdo not know the fire with which you are playing with.â You can see the tips of his fangs now. Your body betrays you as you feel heat and want rushing to your core and your eyes close. His fingers trace patterns into your thighs, ghosting near the edge of your panties and down your inner thighs which only builds your arousal.Â
âYouâll beg for me to fuck you before youâre fully undressed little one. Why deny yourself what we both know you desire?â He grazes his fangs along the column of your neck as your core clenches around nothing.Â
When you open your eyes he is back in his seat swirling his drink like he had never moved. The absence of his touch left you wanting. Your stubbornness is the only thing keeping you from rushing through your questions because Baekhyun is not wrong, you want him - badly. âAre you going to kill me?â
He cocks his head as he ponders your question. âHonestly havenât made my mind up yet. Before this current bargain I was just going to fuck you and drain you, the only variable there being if I let you enjoy it or if I let you feel pain. Now⌠Iâm not sure. You might be interesting enough to keep alive for now. It all depends really.â
Your fingers expertly undo the buttons of your blouse and you shrug out of its sleeves, leaving you clad only in your underwear and heels. âOn what?â You ask. The lines of this little ruse are starting to blur for you. The original plan to keep Baekhyun talking in order to reach sunrise is fading, leaving only images on the vampire taking you every which way, giving you pleasure you could only dream of.Â
âOn you little one.â Baekhyunâs voice comes from directly behind you. You feel his hands moving down your sides, one snaking between your legs and gripping your inner thigh and the other splayed over your stomach. You feel his fangs drag over your throat and you shudder. âYou might just convince me.â You feel his presence disappear and know without turning around that he is no longer standing behind you. You can feel where his hands were on your body, the ghost of his touch remaining.Â
As you look around you canât spot him anywhere. You know heâs still in the house because why would he leave now? You make your way to the various rooms in your home as you search for the vampire but he is nowhere. You start to feel frustration overtaking your lust as you call out. âBaekhyun! Where are you?âÂ
His voice sounds from a room that you had already checked, your bedroom. âThis game needs to continue in another room little one.â You make your way back upstairs to your room as he speaks again, his voice closer this time. âYou are far too indecently clothed to be in a sitting room.âÂ
As you enter the room you see him leaning against your bedpost, his eyes roaming your body. Your ears register the sound of him moving past you but your eyes do not. The door closes behind you and he appears to have not moved. The fear inside you spikes back up as you witness a modicum of his power. Youâve been toying with him when all along he could just snap you like a twig.the thought terrifies you but you try to push your fear down. It will not help you now.
You saunter towards the bed only for him to hold up a hand and stop you. âI believe you asked a question little one. You know the rules.â Left with only a few options you step out of your heels and continue towards the bed.
By your count you have three questions left before this little game ends and you plan to use them to ensure that whatever happens after doesnât hurt you and might just lead to you keeping your life. You arenât going to bother with asking more about his past. You are pretty sure you know enough, heâs been undead for quite some time but from looking at him you would guess that he was in his 20âs when he was turned. He can be cruel - you have not forgotten the madman he compelled earlier - he is determined, overconfident, smug, impatient and alluring and he has made you crazed with lust.Â
âHow do you want me?â you ask sultrily as you reach the foot of your bed.
Out of the corner of your eye you see him remove his jacket and place it over the chair at your dresser. His shoes and socks are next, then he starts to unbutton his shirt as he moves behind you. You can feel him standing behind you but he does not touch you. He lets the anticipation build, he knows this game has almost reached its end, he is one step closer to getting what he wants from you.
âNaked and wanting.â He confesses. âReveling in the pleasure I give you, begging for more.â
Your bra drops to the floor, making him groan. âAnd what will you do to me?â You ask, before he can say anything to alter your train of thought. Your mind is set on one path and one path only now. You want him. You want him to make you forget that you were ever afraid of him, that he ever posed a danger to you, that he is anything more than an incredibly attractive man with eyes only for you.
âEverything.â He whispers in your ear. His hands cup your breasts, fingers lightly pinching your nipples. âIâll make you feel pleasure like youâve never felt before. Make you beg for me to never stop fucking you, for me to bite you. And I will, once you beg for it.â
A moan escapes your throat, giving away just how aroused you are. Your hand brushes against his crotch as you move to undo your garter belt and you feel how hard he is for you. He stops your hand and completes the action for you, sliding the stockings down your legs and off your feet. He spins you and pushes you down onto the bed, removing the shirt from his shoulders and undoing his pants as he kneels at your feet.Â
âWhy me?â you manage to say as you watch him undress, your eyes taking in the lean planes of his body. He wasnât wearing underwear you muse as your eyes are drawn to his cock, hard and waiting to enter you. His eyes follow yours and he grins when he realises where their gaze has not wavered. Shuffling back of the bed far gracefully than he has any right to, he moves back into a standing position so that he can remove his pants.Â
Fully naked, he moves back to his position between your legs. âWhatâs the point of being immortal if you deny yourself the simple pleasures in life?â he responds as he kisses your ankle, before moving up your calf, to your thigh, hip, breast, neck before finally reaching your lips. âI find beauty in the night and I take what I want. Right now, that is you.â
His lips crash into yours in a kiss that is so desperate that you donât register the ripping of your panties until you can feel him, all of him flush against your skin. His body doesnât emit heat, rather it is cool to the touch but it isnât a bad feeling. Rather it is refreshing in comparison to how hot you feel. His mouth works against yours, the lip ring providing a new sensation for the kiss.
When he breaks the kiss to allow you to breathe you see the dark fire in his eyes, his desire palpable. âYouâre mine now little one. I told you your game was futile, that you would give in to me and here we are, your wet little cunt begging for my cock. Do you think you deserve pleasure after how long you made me wait?â
âYes.â you breathe.
He looks amused. âOh? And why is that?â
âI was scared of you. There was no desire to let you in before we talked more but now, now I want you even though I know part of the truth about you. You said it was better if the other person was willing, well, now I am.â You laid out the truth for him. You were no longer scared of him even though you knew he could still inflict the worst pain imaginable on you and kill you. What you felt now was desire so strong that nothing, not even fear of death, could break through.
He grinned, baring his fangs to you. âYou, my dear, have proven to be far more interesting than I gave you credit for. There is one thing I didnât tell you though, something that will make what is about to happen much more pleasurable for you. Vampires can direct the blood flow of any body that they are in contact with. You think you want me now? Wait until you feel as though youâre on fire, your skin burning with need as I taste you. Youâll beg me to drink your blood from wherever I please. And I will.âÂ
You shuddered at his words. Desire pouring through you, making you feel as though you were drugged. âKiss me.â The words left your mouth without any thought. Baekhyun leaned down and his lips closed over yours gently, seeing if you were going to try and get away from him. When he realised that you werenât going anywhere he intensified the kiss, increasing the pressure and igniting your senses.Â
He ran his tongue along the seam of your lips until you opened your mouth, allowing your tongues to work against each other. You could feel his fangs grazing your lip but it did not scare you, rather it made you want more. His hands roamed your body as the two of you kissed, teasing your nipples and brushing near your core, never where you wanted the friction the most.Â
âPleaseâ you moan.
âWhat do you want little one?â he teases.
âTouch me.â His hands grip your thighs, spreading your legs wide for him. You try to roll your hips, desperate for any sort of friction but you donât achieve the contact youâre after. You whimper as the frustration builds. You want him to touch you so badly, you need your release and soon.
âPatience little one.â He chuckles. âAs flattering as it is to see just how badly you want me, I want to savour this. His eyes drift down. âYou look delectable.â He shifts his body down the bed so that his face is level with your dripping centre.Â
He slowly drags his fangs from your thigh, up your leg, and moves over your centre, to the other thigh. The sensation makes you whimper as you try to grind your hips, but he holds you down with his hands as you try to find some friction to help you along. âPleaseâ You breathe.
Smirking he moves back to where you need him the most, flicking his tongue against your clit. Your mind goes blank at the sensation as he repeats the motion, deepening the pressure heâs applying until you moan loudly. If anything, it only serves to spur him on, attaching his lips to your clit as his tongue presses and swirls around it. Your hips would have been bucking into his face if he wasnât holding you down.
He pauses for a moment to confess âYou are fucking delectable, I could do this all night.â before resuming his feast. You bite your lip as he rolls his tongue against you, his fangs lightly grazing your clit and sending a whole new wave of pleasure flowing through you. You never expected his fangs to draw such a response from you but you felt yourself moan louder every time they grazed over your clit. You could feel his eyes watching you as he pleasured you, taking in every reaction and building his actions on that. Your arousal builds as he alternates the pace and pressure of his tongue, and increases the feel of his fangs against you.Â
âFuckâ you whimper. The sensations are building too quickly and you can feel your release approaching with haste when he detaches his mouth from you. You look down at him and he smirks at you before you can utter a complaint, not breaking eye contact as he pushes one then two fingers into your wet heat.Â
You canât stop yourself from moaning his name as he starts to move his fingers back and forth in a steady rhythm. âYou like that?â he growls as you clench around his fingers. âLittle one, you are so wonderfully wet. Just for me. You love it donât you? You love how my fingers feel, how my tongue feels and most of all you love how my fangs feel against your clit. Donât you?â His pupils are so dark and blown out with lust as he lowers his skilled mouth back to your bundle of nerves.
The combined sensation of his long fingers, skilled tongue and sharp fangs become too much for you. He moans against you as he works, curling his fingers inside you and fluttering his tongue against your clit. You writhe on the bed as he increases his speed to a level that a mere human could never achieve and right before your orgasm hits, he sinks his fangs into you. The pleasure was so intense, so overwhelming that you sobbed his name as he helped you ride out your high. You were too far gone to realise that he was tasting you, really tasting you now that his fangs penetrated your flesh. You felt no pain, only white hot pleasure.Â
When he released you he looked up at you, mouth and fangs dripping with a mixture of your juices and blood. Your body still tingles with aftershocks of your orgasm and you feel like youâre on fire. You should be spent but you only want him more.Â
God you wanted to him to fuck you.
He flips you over, positioning you on your knees. He grunts as he enters you in one fluid motion. He meets no resistance given how ready you were for his cock. He grips your waist tightly as he sets a brutal pace, the only sounds in the room are of skin hitting skin and cries of pleasure.Â
âYou fit my cock perfectly. Look at how much you want this, at how badly you want a vamp to fuck the life out of you.â He grunts in between thrusts.Â
âBaekhyun. Fuckâ You moan when he hits your g spot.Â
You had never felt pleasure like this before. Youâd had great sex before but this was on a level of its own. Baekhyun had had an unknown amount of time to perfect this act and hone his skills and he was not disappointing. He moved between a pace that felt more like what you were used to and then a pace faster than you could have ever imagined.Â
âThis.â He growled, âIs how a vampire fucks you.â and lifted your body up so that it was flush with his, tilting your head so that your throat was exposed for him. He ran his tongue along your neck, making you moan deeply as you recalled the feeling of his fangs.
âYou want it donât you?â He asked as he pounded into you. âWant me to sink my fangs back into your flesh as I fuck you?â You couldnât form words to respond to him, only moans of want and pleasure. He grazed his fangs along your neck and you writhed against the touch.
His fangs pierced the skin of your neck and the sensation barreled you over the edge. Everything was heightened and a feeling that you had never experienced before flooded your system. You felt full, alive, and like you were about to explode. You shuddered and cried out as your orgasm ripped through you harder than last time as Baekhyun chased his.Â
The last thing you saw before you blacked out were his eyes, now a deep red as he stared down at your form and smiled. âI think Iâll keep you.â
#exowritersnet#kloversnet#kwordsmiths#exo fic#exo drabble#baekhyun fic#baekhyun drabble#exo smut#exo scenario#exo imagine#baekhyun smut#baekhyun scenario#baekhyun imagine#baekhyun vampire#exo vampire au
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2000:Â âGhetto Quâran (Forgive Me)â 50 Cent (Trackmaster Ent./Columbia)
Itâs been over a year since I teased the idea of doing a post about my favorite 50 Cent tracks, so I guess now is as good a time as ever to get around to it!Â
With the exception of maybe Kanye, I canât think of another rapper with more raw talent whose career has been more disappointing. Obviously both Ye and Fiddy have been monstrously successful, but IMO they either burned brightly before descending into white supremacy apologia (Kanye) or never achieved their best possible trajectory (50). Itâs not an accident to put them together in this way, either; just 12 years ago next month they faced off in what turned out to be a very underwhelming battle over whose album would sell better (this was back when album sales, not streaming numbers, still meant something). In many ways, it was a crossroads for each artist: Kanye dropped what I believe was his magnum opus, then followed it up with his fourth-best album, third-best album, and second-best album, before dropping off a cliff, while 50â˛s release basically removed him from the conversation about who was relevant in rap (âMy Gun Go Offâ and âI Get Moneyâ are honorable mentions for the list below, but otherwise Curtis is entirely forgettable).Â
These days, 50 has gone the Ice Cube route and is probably more recognizable as an actor than as a rapper. So, itâs hard to remember that once upon a time he was the savior of gangsta rap and (co-)author of one of the 25 greatest albums of all time. He beat the odds to survive a shooting, link up with the two heaviest hitters (at the time) in the rap game, and even be included on some GOAT lists. He also essentially established the âflood the streets with mixtapes before your album dropsâ strategy of self-promotion that Gucci, Weezy, and even Drake would follow in the days before Soundcloud was the go-to resource for building a rep. He singlehandedly destroyed a rivalâs career, launched a clothing line, video game, and music label, and made a halfway-decent biopic. And then... he just sort of petered out.Â
But! 50 is also responsible for some of my all-time favorite raps, which is why itâs so frustrating to me that he never lived up to the buzz surrounding him back in 2003. These are my five favorites, listed chronologically, with some commentary:
1) âGhetto Quâran (Forgive Me)â (2000) Before the G-Unit days and before Eminem and Dre helped launch him to superstardom, Curtis Jackson was an up and coming rapper from Queens who had attracted the attention of another rap legend, Run-DMCâs Jam Master Jay. A mutual friend introduced 19 year-old 50 to Jay back in 1996, and the veteran producer/DJ gave him a crash course in how to write songs and signed him to his fledgling label. The business relationship didnât work out, but it helped lead 50 to Columbia Recordsâ Trackmasters imprint where he recorded Power of the Dollar in 1999. However, this debut album would never see the light of day after 50 was shot nine times while sitting in a friendâs car and subsequently dropped by Columbia. In the wake of the shooting--and then later, after 50 blew the fuck up in 2003--it became a sort of âlost cult classicâ among rap fans. âHow To Robâ got the most attention at the time, a funny-yet-vicious song demonstrating 50â˛s hunger through fantasies about sticking up famous rappers and R&B stars (the song was also clearly an homage to Biggieâs unreleased âDreams,â and provoked an oblique diss from Ghostface). But âGhetto Quâranâ has had a more lasting impact, primarily because of how it was rumored to be the source of 50â˛s shooting, Jam Master Jayâs murder, and the Ja Rule/Murder Inc. beef. While all of that intrigue is important to rap lore, it distracts from the fact that itâs a near perfect rap song from a technical perspective: a catchy hook, a fantastic beat and sample, an effortless flow, and a well-crafted story that is equal parts celebration of the Queens underworld and subtle shots at street legends. Seriously, this is akin to what traveling bards used to do in medieval Europe, what poets in Ancient Greece wrote, what west African griots did/do, and what narcocorrido artists do now. If you want to learn about the Supreme Team, Pappy Mason, the Corley Family, and the Rich Porter/Alpo crew in Harlem, then this is a good place to start; as 50 puts it, âconsider this the first chapter of the ghettoâs Quâran.â The secondary title to this track--âForgive Meâ--has a double meaning now. It was initially a plea to forgive 50 for the pain he caused in his criminal life but in retrospect an appeal to the figures whose names he drops. Also, itâs interesting to listen to this first and then compare 50â˛s voice with the next four tracks: this was recorded before the shooting, which left a bullet fragment lodged in his tongue that affected his speech and gave him his now-distinctive flow.  Â
2) âHeatâ (2003) There are several standouts on Get Rich or Die Tryinâ (âMany Men,â âBack Down,â âWhat Up Gangsta,â âPatiently Waiting,â and âPoor Lilâ Richâ spring to mind, and I will always love â21 Questionsâ for the âI love you like a fat kid loves cakeâ line alone) but this one has always been my fave. Itâs a perfect distillation of the image that 50 was trying to project when he burst onto the scene: a hood-hardened gangster who wouldnât hesitate to do his enemies harm. And given his recent history, you could believe him, too! Thereâs really nothing about this song that should be praised in any way, but Iâve been thinking about the gravity of the following line a lot in the past month or so: âThe summertime is a killing season/ Itâs hot out this bitch, thatâs a good enough reason.â Also, 50â˛s boast âthe DA can play this motherfucking tape in courtâ *has* to be one of the inspirations behind this great Key & Peele sketch, right?Â
3) âA Baltimore Love Thingâ (2005) The Massacre was incredibly disappointing on the whole. I can remember clearly sitting around with my friends in a dorm room at the Shoreland listening to it all the way through the day that it dropped, wanting to love it but slowly realizing that it wasnât going to live up to our expectations. âSki Mask Wayâ could be an honorable mention on this list, and âPiggy Bankâ is kind of funny, but otherwise itâs a steaming pile of shit. âBaltimore Love Thing,â though, is a masterpiece. Itâs incredibly dark, rapped from the perspective of heroin itself (sort of like what Nasâs âI Gave You Powerâ does for guns) in order to detail the destruction that addiction--and, by extension, drug trafficking--leaves in its wake. Even more fucked up, 50-as-heroin voices an abusive partner addressing a woman, threatening her should she ever try to leave him. For my money, âYou broke my heart, you dirty bitch, I wonât forget what you did/ If you give birth, Iâll already be in love with your kidsâ is one of the coldest lines in the annals of rap, full stop. In the second verse, he switches to the flip side of an abuserâs mindset: âI never steer you wrong, if you hyper I make you calm/ Iâll be your incentive, your reason for you to move forward.â All in all, itâs a great concept song that shows off 50â˛s range as a rapper... and is a testament to what he could have been.
4) âHustlerâs Ambitionâ (2005) Goddamn, I fucking love everything about this song! The beat is fantastic (great sample, btw), prefiguring the sound on a future great mixtape from the G-Unit crew. 50â˛s flow here is flawless, arguably the best, smoothest heâs ever been. This was basically the âthemeâ for 2005â˛s Get Rich or Die Tryinâ film, and tells the story of his come up in the drug game (or, at least, 50â˛s version of his carefully constructed hagiography). The lyrics are the true gems here, so Iâll just let a few of the standouts speak for themselves:
âCheck my logic: fiends donât like seeds in they weed, shit/ Send me them seeds, Iâll grow âem what they needâ
âI sell anything, Iâm a hustler, I know how to grind/ Step on grapes, put it in water, and tell you itâs wineâ
âI made plans to make it, a prisoner of the state/ Now I can invite your ass out to my estateâ
âPour Cristal in the blender, make a protein shakeâ
and finally
âThe feds watch me, icy, they canât stop me/ Racists pointing at me, âLook at *****raceâ: Hello!â  Â
5) âGhetto Like A Motherfuckerâ (2011) I remember first encountering this track on a Tumblr compilation (I think?) called Donât Fuck This Up, Curtis! and allowing myself to get excited that the old 50 was back! As the compilationâs name implies, around that time 50 had been releasing a string of online-only singles that were better than anything heâd put out in five or so years, and so there was some hope that heâd soon be making a triumphant return to the rap game. Sadly, this was not to be. But I still bang this track every month or so. The idea here was that 50 had written something, set it to a very sparse, stripped-down beat, and posted it online as an invitation for DIY rap producers to play with it and layer their own compositions on top of it. In that sense, it represented a melange of rapâs earliest roots--dudes spitting over vinyl cuts in basements and parks, just fucking around and having fun--and the possibilities afforded by the digital age and rapâs embrace of online platforms for mixing and remixing material (on a side note, I like to think of this as part of 21st century rapâs âpunk rockâ aesthetic, and would argue that this genre has done it better than any other). As with âHustlerâs Ambition,â âBaltimore Love Thing,â and âGhetto Quâran,â this track gives 50 a chance to really showcase his talents as a writer and a rapper. The lyrics are as grimy as the beat, painting a picture of urban poverty and pre-fame 50, and 50 switches up his flow at multiple points throughout. Here are some of my favorite lines:
âSlim chance Iâma go back to killing roaches/ Be quiet, you can hear the rats in the wall/ Make you wanna pump crack âtil you stack racksâ
âDice game, shake âem up, prayingâ for a 6/ The wolves out there hungry, they lookinâ for a lickâ
â****** pissed on the staircase, in the elevator/ Now Iâm pissed cuz Iâm starting to smell like piss, playerâ
and
âAll a ***** need is a block and a connect/ And a box of 9 MMs to load in the TEC.â
50â˛s last two studio albums--Before I Self Destruct and Animal Ambition--honestly werenât half-bad; I would venture so far as to say that they were both better than The Massacre and Curtis. But for 50 it was too little, too late, really. Too many rappers had come along since then doing what he did, only better and fresher. This is a Migos world now; weâre just living in it. And so, Iâm left to ponder what could have been.Â
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AÂ âKind of seriousâ UtaPri Q
âIf there was one thing you would change about UtaPri what would it be?â Content distribution Allow me to explain this for you UtaPri ,as we know it, as almost been around for 10 years. Its official âstart dateâ was back in 2010 on June 24th and in that time there was a lot of content that came for the STARISH members and also later for QUARTET NIGHT especially when you consider they have now been in a game since the Debut and All-Star. Now you think about THAT and then you think about where this post is about to go and I promise you some people are gonna get mad...not my intention but letâs discuss this
So Uta no Prince-Sama started as a franchise officially in 2010 and as an Anime in 2011 when Maji Love 1000 came out (Henceforth called âML1Kâ) and it was basically the season long story of how STARISH was formed and then later in 2013 they were given Maji Love 2000 basically where they again were the main focus (and thatâs fine) but we also met the trio that would gum up things for the STARISH in HEAVENS and we know their story. They were a âTrio of Amateursâ as Shining put it that would face off against STARISH at the UtaPri awards and there would be more on the line than JUST an award as Shining and Raging put up the futures of the groups in which STARISH wins but as we know HEAVENS gets saved and comes back as a 7 person group at the end of Season 3. NOW...here is where we start to talk about the idea of âcontent distributionâ By the time that Season 2 came out there had been (and I checked this) 2 games that featured QN in some way: Debut (which was their intro into the series) and then All-Star Now I have stated before that I think if you wanted to do the idea of a ârivalryâ with STARISH and QN it should have been around here (considering at this point there was at least a game or two of content for QN) so the idea of having to âcreateâ the group to be the rival for STARISH from a âMade upâ Agency (i.e. one not in the game canon) to me was kind of âHuh?â (and this mind you comes from me when I never read the stories for any character in any of the actual games). But alright now STARISH is going to beat HEAVENS the first time...fine and as some might not be aware I was happy about that cos I assumed (and I found out I was wrong seconds later) that HEAVENS was going to go away and then NOW we would get on with the STARISH/QN rivalry. Looking back on this here is what I was kind of hoping would have happened Okay you want to give an OVA for the Shining Agency..Iâm fine with that. The issue comes with HEAVENS For some reason after they wrote it where HEAVENS would lose the thought enters your mind (or it does mine anyways) âWhat did HEAVENS losing accomplish?â Here is why I say that HEAVENS losing makes sense IF  - They are going to disband OR  - We are going to get an OVA or some kind of content chronicling them on the road to going to face off against STARISH again. I think I once made the suggestion of an idea where what you would do is have STARISH win but HEAVENS gets saved and then simultaneously have something where they have an OVA/Season to chronicle the formation of the 7 person group for HEAVENS. The issue if you did a season for it would be I dunno how many people (especially those on the STARISH side) would have watched it BUT it could have made them very sympathetic characters for Season 4 (not that Season 4 didnât succeed on some level but it also caused a great divide too). This is where I get a little bothered What I would like to know is this How many people in the fandom AFTER the UtaPri Awards season wanted to see something related to the content to develop HEAVENS as characters? Iâm not saying your a âbad personâ if you didnât care one way or the other but it would have helped if you had a way to get to know at least the Trio BEFORE Season 4 started so that you had them and then we could intro the other 4 characters...would work right? The other thing that could have been done was to create a Drama CD just of the Trio so that you could really get behind HEAVENS and start to cheer them on if you wanted to...it wouldnât have been a bad idea and it would have worked out I think..they didnât though and that is kind of a bother. Like the point I am getting at as far as getting to Season 4 is that HEAVENS could have had some content wrote for them to make them more appealing and likable and I know that might not have been financially viable but it could have been a very interesting revenue stream if they just THOUGHT about it! NOW...Iâll hear this argument (and its not wrong) âBroccoli didnât know what they were going to do with HEAVENS at this timeâ This isnât wrong because you ARE right! Broccoli didnât know they were going to add HEAVENS into Revolutions or Legend Star so their loss in ML2K would have been a perfect ending and then if you wanted to go with STARISH and QN then its perfect! NOW...Iâm going to tell you the biggest flaw about not just the content distribution but also the way the story was wrote. I have heard this argument when it comes to HEAVENS âTheir role was to make STARISH betterâ Here is why I have had an issue with this logic Putting QN to the side for a second...in the context of the timeline between STARISH and HEAVENS whom is the senior group? While you are pondering that allow me to then bring this into the equation QN is the Senior group of all three of them in storyline. No matter how you write it or want to believe it QNâs role should be (and kind of was) to make STARISH better. THAT made sense because they (again in theory) are the Senior group to STARISH NOW...get back to the question How the hell is a group of Amateurs (âHEAVENSâ) supposed to be in the position to âMake STARISH betterâ? It doesnât make sense from a STORY perspective because of the fact that HEAVENS became the âup and comersâ but for some reason Broccoli panicked come Season 4 and didnât want to tell that story. That is why most of the Duet singles really sold like s**t because they didnât do the job to make BOTH PARTIES in the duet likable and they REALLY F***ED IT when they botched the Mighty Aura episode which was the first one in the set! How the hell do you get one part of the fanbase to like HEAVENS when you take arguably the most popular Seiyuu in STARISH and f**k the story so damn bad to make it look like something that DIDNâT FUCKING HAPPEN! Like I have ranted about this before but the story SHOULD have been wrote so that STARISH helped get HEAVENS to look better in the public eye (both in the Anime and in the real world) so what I would have done is okay you have the drama parts for each episode and thatâs fine BUT if the HEAVENS member went to the STARISH member (or vice versa) to find out what was going on with them that would have helped greatly...it also would have made it to where I wouldnât have literally had my blood pressure go up every week wondering how the STARISH fans were going to take to each member. Eiji ,Shion ,Kira...they were gonna be the easy ones in my head...Van was a wild card (turned out to be a dork) and then you had Nagi ,Yama and Eiichi...we know how the last one went! Going back to the original point of this post âWould more content have made HEAVENS more sympathetic to STARISH fans?â I think yes because...especially with Eiichi we could have SEEN that there was not a lot of happy times going on with that household and Raging being a shithead to Eiichi...I can only imagine what he was like to Eiji! We would have gotten to SEE the struggle between Kira and his family in a flashback and we might have gotten to see why Nagi had the complex he had...now sadly if we were to get THAT someone would accuse the series of biting off of another idol series everyone knows (And Iâll say this now...I have no issue with Tenn as much as I did but Iâll still take Nagi over him if you pressed me). Like I could list the # of things that Broc could do but trust me that would take me for fucking ever! Okay NOW they are getting a radio show and NOW they are being put in as âside charactersâ to the STARISH/QN show but what is that going to accomplish for the western fans? When it comes to Dolce theyâll be the âforgotten groupâ because we know when they were announced to be in the game I can PROMISE you that I was more hype than probably a lot of people on this site! Fine but try to act like you are happy for those that might not fall into the âMain 2âł fandoms (and I say this with me also being a QN fan). People wonder why some of us get annoyed with Broccoli and I will repeat it that its a whole thing about âcontentâ. Whenever Broccoli announces most new goods or when show some art it HAS to be HEAVENS attached to QN and STARISH. They COULDNâT have done just something for HEAVENS for Halloween it HAD to be with those two for promotional stuff that had to do with the Movie that no one knows fuck all about yet! You want me to get happy about the Halloween art cos...why?! Then you just have to face this reality} STARISH fan will never get why HEAVENS fan is pissed off and some (not all) donât give a f**k...youâre lying if you claim you do. You donât HAVE to worry because you got the ENTIRE story basically to be centered around you and you got your two big wins...meanwhile you want to claim HEAVENS are equals? HOW?! HEAVENS will NEVER be equals to STARISH or even QN as long as they are tied to them...FACT! If QUARTET NIGHT wants to do the job that STARISH should have done I will be all for it but I canât see Broccoli allowing QN to do that because they (Broccoli) still plug their ears and act like everything is fine. Maybe for STARISH and QN fans because they got their cute little MVs...anyone remember what the fuck they did to promote HEAVEN SKY? THEY DID A STILL FUCKING IMAGE! You mean to tell me the company that has a franchise that probably prints the most money for them right now COULDNâT AFFORD TO ANIMATE SOMETHING FOR HEAVENS TO NOT MAKE THEM LOOK SECOND F****ING RATE?! HOW THE F**K DO YOU ACCEPT THAT?! It just blows my mind on a personal level and people can say I make a mountain out of a molehill...I just care alright? I care about as much about HEAVENS if not more than most people would THINK to put out content on here for UtaPri and that is a FACT! I probably get more people pissed off and annoyed because I go off like this but you know why you get mad at me? Cos you know deep down there is a little bit of truth in what I say and in gnaws at you that someone that has only been around the franchise for 4 years is more annoyed with HEAVENS treatment than most that have been around for the entire eight and that pisses you the f**k off! To that I say this GOOD...now you can know what its like for someone like me and also what it was like for me to watch Eiichi get snatched up by his daddy and no one in the UtaPri fandom on the STARISH side gave two shits! If youâre mad its cos I got through to you...if you arenât then maybe you SHOULD BE!
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Thoughts on the comic book industry, Part 5
In my last rant about the state of the comic book industry, I talked about how completely out of touch the Big 2 publishers are with reality, both creatively and politically. And naturally, it's going to beg the question: "Why not support other publishers?"
It's not an invalid question on its face. But it is a very difficult question to answer, because of the way the industry has changed over the last 26 years. Again, the Big 2 are acting like it's still 1992-1993, when the industry was at its peak thanks to the '90s comic book boom. And at that time, the industry had expanded to such a point that smaller publishers were growing in prominence and new publishers were showing up in droves. But over the last two decades, the industry has massively atrophied, with many smaller publishers dying out, distribution channels shrinking to a monopoly benefitting DC and Marvel, entry into the industry perversely becoming harder at a time when digital media should be leveling the playing field, and the remaining other publishers making their living on wares that have a limited shelf life.
Simply put, it's not so easy to ignore DC and Marvel when the current comics market doesn't allow for any true competition to emerge.
Let's go back to the early '90s and see what was going on at the time. DC and Marvel were obviously still the market leaders. But you also had Image, founded by several of Marvel's biggest and most popular artists, launching their own creator-owned properties and making a huge splash based on star power alone. You had Valiant, founded by former Marvel editor Jim Shooter, which relaunched several vintage comic book properties in addition to their own, more modern superhero/vigilante books. You had Dark Horse Comics, which made its name with both high-profile creator-owned material (Hellboy, Sin City, The Mask), classic mnaga books, and high-end licensed comics (The Shadow, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien, Predator). You had Topps Comics, which did licensed books like Zorro (and its spinoff Lady Rawhide) and Bram Stoker's Dracula. You had Defiant, another Jim Shooter company. You had Malibu, a superhero-themed outfit that eventually became a Marvel brand. You had special imprints from the major publishers, like DC's Vertigo, Helix, and Paradox Press and Rob Liefeld's Maximum Press. You had Fantagraphics doing everything from classics like Usagi Yojimbo to off-the-cuff indie material. You had Penthouse, of all people, launching their own comics line that included fully-painted adaptations of Bible stories. And tons and tons of indie publishers were available, with long-standing cult books like Zen: Intergalactic Ninja getting new attention (and movie deals, too).
There was a lot to choose from at the time, and much of that was due to their being a big range of distributors. I recall one of my all-time favorite catalogs, Advance Comics, whose parent company used to be my local comic shops' distributor of choice until 1996 or so. Every issue of that catalog was like a comic book adventure in its own right, because there was so much to see, so much that I was unaware of previously. The comic book industry at that time was so much bigger than I could have imagined, and to see it all brought together in one monthly catalog with news articles was always a treat. And because there were still a lot of distributors to work with at the time, the barrier for entry to the comics industry was wide open for anyone who had the talent...and admittedly, for some who probably shouldn't have been let in. One of Wizard Magazine's Top 20 best-selling comics of 1994 was Double Impact, an indie comic ripoff of Andy Sidaris' tits-and-guns flicks. So yeah, there was definitely some drek that slipped thru the cracks. But that aside, the state of the industry was that of a wide playing field where anybody and everybody could be part of it.
But to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the greed of the Big 2 was what brought it all crashing down. Marvel was at a high at the time not just because they were a breeding ground for the hottest artists in the industry, but because they had the #1 comic book franchise in the world: the X-Men books were always Top 10 sellers. So they not only bought their own toy company (Toy Biz), but they also bought their own distributor â Heroes' World â and went exclusive thru them. Not to be outdone, DC went exclusive thru Diamond not long afterward. This obviously impacted the other distributors, who now had to deal with losing a ton of business as a consequence. Gradually, the other larger publishers joined up with Diamond as well, killing off all the other distributors completely. And when Marvel suffered financial problems near the end of the '90s, they too joined up with Diamond.
Thus we ended up with the distribution monopoly we have now, and it was a sad thing to see play out. Not only was it a shame to see things like Advance Comics slowly lose more and more content before finally being snuffed out, but it also led to (a) comic book fans and shops having to deal with a single distributor they had problems with and (b) a greatly increased barrier for entry into the industry. If you don't get into Diamond's Previews catalog, you're screwed. And in an age where digital media dominates, for the comic book industry to be so closed off not only limits your choices for what's available, but it also cuts off any real chance for there to be legitimate challengers to DC and Marvel.
Again, let's look at what's changed between 1992-1993 and 2018. Image, which initially looked to be a real competitor to the Big 2, has splintered and shrunken. Jim Lee sold out his portion of the company to DC (and is currently helping to run DC into the muck), several of its artists have returned to DC and Marvel, Todd McFarlane doesn't draw anymore, and the properties it was hyping so hard died out with the '90s. (Seriously, does anyone even remember Spawn anymore, much less care about it?) Most of Image's output now is small creator-owned projects, with The Walking Dead being known far more for its TV incarnation than for the comic it originally was. Dark Horse lost many of its licensed properites to Disney-Marvel as a result of Disney acquiring Lucasfilm and the 20th Century Fox library, and many of its big creator-owned properties have ended. It's a shadow of what it once was. Valiant got bought out by Acclaim Entertainment and suffered financial issues that shuttered it for years, and has only been making a comeback in recent times. Malibu got shut down after Marvel bought it out. DC shut down all of their imprints besides Vertigo, which went from being one of their crown jewels to being a non-entity. Topps, Warren, Defiant, NOW Comics, Maximum Press, Awesome Entertainment, and countless other publishers have bitten the dust over the years. CrossGen, the Florida-based publisher that tried to take on DC and Marvel in the early 2000s, died a swift death a few years later and got bought out by Disney (and their artists picked up by Marvel). Really, the only publishers of note that have shown any real endurance are three fairly recent ones: Zenoscope, Dynamite and IDW. Beyond that, it's gotten much, much harder for new companies to get any traction or really develop into powerhouses in the current market.
It should also be mentioned that companies like Zenoscope, IDW, and Dynamite are getting by in large part by emulating what made Dark Horse such a force in the '90s. Creator-owned material. Licensed comics. And in Zenoscope's case, reinventions of public domain fairy tales. All of this is well and good in and of itself, but it's not really the stuff of major players in today's market. Don't get me wrong: properties like Star Trek, He-Man (currently split between DC and Dark Horse), Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony, Flash Gordon, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, Zorro, and The Green Hornet are deservedly iconic and long-lived, and I'm all in favor of them being comic book staples. But those properties frequently go into periods of hibernation from version to version, and no one version lasts indefinitely. It's all well and good that IDW's made its fame with My Little Pony, but what happens when it's time for that property to go back to sleep? What happens to Dynamite when their versions of The Shadow and The Green Hornet run their course? You can't build your brand purely on licensed material. It's partly why Dark Horse got hit so hard by Disney buying out Lucasfilm and the Fox library. And in today's smaller, more monopolistic comics landscape, the '90s Dark Horse model isn't enough to make you a powerhouse on par with the Big 2.
(And if current rumors of IDW possibly shuttering its comic book operations and going full Hollywood end up coming true, it'll be yet another publisher going down...and again, more attrition for the comic book industry.)
Now, it can be argued that part of the reason Image and so many other companies fell off when the comic book boom ended is that they'd banked themselves too much on popular trends of the era. Big Titty Bad Girls, Big Gun Pouch-Wearing Vigilantes, trading on flashy art over quality writing, attempting DC/Marvel-style event-gimmicks with characters nobody knew or cared about...all of that's true. I can't and won't make excuses for that. But in an age where digital and social media dominate, there's no excuse for comics to be so closed off, so hard to find, or so hard to break into. The equal parts country-club-and-echo-chamber setup of the current comics industry certainly benefits the major publishers and their major players of choice, but it also curtails any real chance of new blood making a splash and reinventing the game. It's not uncommon for indie or small-press creators to make their living hustling on social media and on the convention circuit. And sometimes it pays off; husband-and-wife team Adam Withers and Comfort Love (The Uniques, Rainbow in the Dark) have been very successful at that, even racking up Harvey Award nominations. But again, it's the artificially high barrier to entry imposed by the Diamond monopoly that's the issue. Not everyone can get in, and unless you can get into Diamond's Previews, you're going to have a hell of a time getting your comics out there. And since the industry is still staunchly brick-and-mortar, that's another added hurdle.
And it's not just small-press or indie creators who face these problems. Established industry talent who've been shed by DC and Marvel often have trouble getting their books published, often turning to crowdfunding instead. Sometimes it pays off handsomely (Tom Grummett's upcoming Section Zero, Steven Butler's John Aman: Amazing Man), sometimes it hits the skids (Kieron Dwyer's proposed West Portal). Unless you're the current flavor of the moment, it's far from a given that long-standing comics creators can see their projects to fruition. Again, that's down to the atrophy of the comics industry and the impact of the distribution monopoly. Because it's shrunken so much, become so biased in favor of the major publishers, and abandoned any notion of being accessible to a wider audience, even industry talent with years â hell, decades â of work to their name have a difficult time getting a green-light for their projects, and have to rely on the crapshoot that is crowdfunding. And even at that, while you might get some really good individual works, it's still not going to be nearly enough to challenge the Diamond monopoly, much less present an alternative to the dominance of the Big 2.
So much of the state of the industry makes little sense when viewed in context of today's digital age. There shouldn't be such a huge barrier to entry for new creators. It shouldn't be so hard for established talent to get their projects green-lit. It shouldn't be so damn hard, especially in the age of digital media, for indie and small-press works to find wide distribution. And it definitely shouldn't be impossible for a new comics company to rise up and take the industry into the future, since DC and Marvel won't. But that's where we're at. Even the distribution model is over two decades out of date, and as a monopoly it's unfairly stacked against anything but entrenched industry players. No real opportunity for growth, no real opportunity for change, just the prolonging of an ever-shrinking echo chamber stuck decades in the past.
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Host Directorâs Dashcam Takes Pandemic Horror to Scarier Place
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Creating an interesting protagonist in a horror movie is a difficult thing. Conventional wisdom suggests they should be blandly appealing, and thereby a surrogate for any viewer to insert themselves into the nightmare. More often than not though, they are treated as disposable. Interchangeable faces who eventually become pieces of meat, lambs to the slaughter. Whether by fluke or design, the âheroesâ of entire popular movements in the genreâslasher flicks in the â80s, torture porn in the 2000sâeventually devolved into figures of ridicule: victims who the audience would root against, sometimes uncomfortably so.
All of which is a long way to note the uniquely diabolical nature of Rob Savageâs Dashcam and its hero Annie (played by Annie Hardy). Following in the footsteps of Savageâs Zoom shocker from last year, Host, Dashcam is a relentless found footage chiller that is more scary for how it reflects our status quo in a post-COVID world than its use of any demons, witches, or whatever else is rattling up there inside Savageâs imagination. Indeed, one could argue the biggest monster of Dashcam is its main character herself.
Vividly played with a total fearlessness by Hardy, who apparently improvised much of Annieâs dialogue and her penchant for sick rhymes with an even sicker lack of political correctness, Annie is a COVID denying, racial stereotyping, anti-masker whoâs spent her quarantine cultivating minor internet fame by being an online troll who is game for any laugh. Sheâs the type of strident personality whoâd be run off most college campuses on a rail. Sheâs also a very difficult character to like and an even harder one to cheer for when creatures in the woods descend on her head. Which makes her self-made predicaments fascinating as a narrative, as well as a potential test for the viewerâs threshold for empathy.
Set and filmed during the tail-end of 2020 lockdowns, Dashcam finds Annie at a moment of extreme boredom. Constantly streaming her daily activities and off-the-cuff vitriol in some nether region of the web, sheâs a person who would now say her best friends are fellow trolls and malcontents that egg on her diatribes about rejecting masks and CDC guidelines. Their anonymous and often gleefully offensive banter is visible in a near constant stream of text on the side of the screen for the whole film. We watch Annieâs experiences through their bitter eyes. They delight when she ignores State Department recommendations and flies to the UK in that surreal pre-vaccine era where airports resembled ghost towns; and theyâre frothing with blood in the mouth when she reunites with a former band mate from back in the day, Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), and his mask-wearing, sanitizer-using girlfriend.
At first, Stretch is amused that his riotous old chum has showed up at his flat unannounced, even taking her around London as he makes deliveries as a driver and spits some rhymes for Annieâs fans. But things quickly get too toxic after Annie refuses to wear masks inside of restaurants and leaves a âMake America Great Againâ hat out for Stretchâs progressive girlfriend to find. Thatâs small potatoes though when compared to Annie taking Stretchâs car and also his gig as an on-demand driver. When she picks up one passenger who doesnât seem well (Angela Enahoro) and agrees to drive her to a strange house in the woods, abstract dangers become a lot more immediate for both Annie and any friends who bother to come looking for her.
Dashcam clearly follows in the footsteps of Host, wherein a group of bored friends spend their quarantine summoning a demon on Zoom. But whereas that horror film used modern technology to tell an old-fashioned haunted house yarn, Savage attempts to tell a distinctly current thriller that could only be made in this exact moment with Dashcam. During a time of extreme polarization and tribalism, a woman vomiting blood in the backseat is almost relievingâhere is something we can all agree is screwed up, right?
The irony of Dashcam is the perpetual flood of abusive text and edgelord flippancy on the side of the screen suggests otherwise. Itâs clear that Annieâs let her online life drive her toward performative levels of toxicity, but of course that digital space is no help to her when shit gets real. The question then is once she finds herself in a pseudo-Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity situation, complete with running in the forest from unseen spooky forces, will anyone care? And that goes for the audience at home as much as it does for Stretch or any of her online kindred spirits.
This pseudo-ethical dilemma has made Dashcam an already more polarizing film than Host. To be sure, Host is the stronger and more coherent experience, with its events all occurring in one digital space (and a handful of physical places), which also doesnât need to have the audience suspend so much disbelief about why the characters keep recording. By contrast, Annie and other characters have no reason to keep streaming the events of Dashcam after about the halfway mark of the movie. However, for all its chaotic and eventually impenetrable weirdness that reaches a bonkers crescendo in the third act, I suspect the real reason Dashcam is a more divisive film has everything to do with its inkblot test of a heroine.
Can you have empathy with someone who doesnât care if she spreads a plague that you (hopefully) are still concerned about right now? And can you root for her to survive a genuinely grueling experience? That might be the most interesting thing about Dashcamâs reception when Blumhouse releases it to a wide audience down the road. Personally, I cheered on some of the side characters in this film, but found my relationship to Annie and her struggles constantly evolving, which in turn led me to question my own more horrific instincts in These Timesâ˘.
For Dashcam to invite that kind of interior interrogation, and likely a vast array of reactionsâespecially when the bifurcated realm of social media discourse gets its hands on thisâis a bold choice by bold storytellers. More, please.
Dashcam premiered Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It currently has no release date.
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[TRANSLATION: DUeT 07.2021]
7 MEN SAMURAI
Proofread by aji10647731 (Twitter)/ @janiappend
Scans not mine
Neither an English nor a Japanese native speaker
Feel free to correct me, thanks
7 MEN äž
6 members, 6 individuals, their thoughts and real feelings are written in a page...
You and Our Diary
In the official site ăJohnny's Webă, 7 MEN äž's blog ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ăhas started! With the expectations on the diary project that the members write on daily except during Fridays, the motivation and energy of 6 people were told. (Interview was done during the first 10 days of May.)
Nakamura Reia
[Diary] I am really happy that ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ăhas started! I only have written a few times, but there were only few chances where we could convey our feelings with written compositions to the fans until now, so it is really a fresh experience. In the diary, I want to show more of real me. The diary I have written so far is the class journal during my elementary days. I remember that I was really looking forward to the comments of my teacher. After all, receiving a reply makes me happy.
[Recent Happening] I suddenly wanted to play a game at night, I started playing a car racing game, but it was not fun playing it alone so I tried to call Yabana (LOL). I thought that the other members are definitely already sleeping, but just as I thought, Yabana, who is nocturnal, was awake and we played together. Moreover, we got excited and played until near early morning! Even when I invite him all of a sudden, he often plays with me (T/N: Lit. He often matches with my mood), Yabana, who stirs up the excitement, is a really good friend. I want him to stay nocturnal as he is now (LOL).
Sugeta Rinne
[Diary] ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ăhas finally started. I talked about it in my first entry, then I talked about radio show for my next entry, then when I put my spirit into writing an inside story from Johnny's Jr. Channel, I don't know anymore which topic would be good for my next entry...(LOL). But, the blog is a long-awaited chance, so I want to properly write what I thought at that time. I want to write in detail about the beauty regimen I am into right now. Recently, I finally decided to get a facial care device, and I started doing a skin care. I still don't know its effectiveness, but I am aiming for a more beautiful skin!
[Recent Happening] The sunlight are now stronger since it's going to be summer soon, so I am looking for a good sunscreen. I heard that the effect of cosmetics changes with the cotton being used, so I tried to choose a good cotton. I am searching for a skin care regimen where one can be prettier without spending much & with simple steps as much as possible. My goal now is to share it to more people! The more you do the beauty regimen, that more effective it is, and it is a "swamp" where the more you know, the deeper you'll get into it, and it is fun.
Yabana Rei
[Diary] ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ăjust started, and I am looking forward to writing for itâŞWhile I'm on the train or during my spare time, I can write about the content with my "off" state, so it feels like it is close to one of my hobbies. That's why, the tension may be lower than when I'm in videos, but I want people to think that that is "the real Yabana Rei." Also, with the way of writing and emoticons, the personalities of 6 of us show, I hope people can also enjoy that. The fans too, if you take this opportunity to start a diary or blog, we can enjoy writing together (LOL).
[Recent Happening] I broke a guitar. I put the guitar on my shoulder and played without checking if the guitar strap was properly attached, then the main body came off and fell. The cable that is connected to the part of a guitar was broken and the repair cost was 7,500 yen! Neglecting what I usually always do lead to a great disaster. It was an unnecessary expense more than I had imagined~ I was sad when the remaining money in my wallet was only 2000 yen. Please be careful of carelessness, everyone!
Konno Taiki
[Diary] Since the fans read ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ă, that's why in a manner of being close to my real self, I want to write about something that is close to me. Taking turns with the members, we each update once a week, so recently, I take a memo of the everyday events and thoughts, and I try to do a detailed report to everyone. Since it is lonely to not have replies, I will be happy if everyone tells me what they thought about my blog entries.
[Recent Happening] Since my time at home has increased, I am looking for a hobby that I can do at home. What I want to try is craftsmanship! When I was a middle school student, making radio during our industrial art class was super fun. If I am going to create something now, candle and glasswork would be great. I think one's sense is tested more when the materials are prepared and the craft is created from scratch. Instead of trying to make one by following the sample while being taught by the teacher who is a pro, I want to try doing it by myself through trial and error so that I can show my personality! I wonder if I should suggest for 7 MEN äž to have a craftmanship project in the Johnny's Jr. Channel. It looks super interesting, right?
Sasaki Taiko
[Diary] I am happy that the platforms, other than videos in ISLAND TV and Johnny's Jr. Channel, where 7 MEN äž can be seen has increased! In the blog, I write just like the way I speak (LOL). I want for people to accept that my sentences are short because that is my character. I plan to write "one line diary". I will deliver my behavior and feelings at that time. Even in my summer diary, I am the type of person who finishes my entry with just a single line each day, so please do not hope that much for a long entry (LOL). What I want to convey to the fans is that, "Read my blogs if you want to know me!"
[Recent Happening] I often stroll during my day off. I want to move my body once a day so I walk 10,000 steps around within an hour. Since I am often being told, "You are fast," so I might be walking briskly. I concentrate in walking near the riverbed while listening to music, and I observe people too...I get healed by looking at the children playing, and when I see couples that are students, I enviously think, "They're enjoying the youth~" (LOL). Thanks to strolling, my lack of exercise is also solved!
Motodaka Katsuki
[Diary] Since before, I like expressing things through writing, so there are a lot of things that I want to write about in ăItanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~ă. It would be nice to be able to share about my thoughts and things that I am thinking of on that day. I want to cherish the blog since I can directly deliver my opinions and my feelings. It would be nice if there will be a valued place for us and the fans. When I was a high school student, I read various books like business books, and from there, I took down notes of the things that looked helpful and my thoughts. Even when I read those notes again now, I still gain informations and I can check that, "I thought like this back then," and I thought that records are important.
[Recent Happening] I had the opportunity to appear in the reenactment in the special programăAishi no Appeal-chanăthat is broadcasted at the end of May. But, my role is an unlikable guy who unconsciously puts himself above other people! I did my best and planned to look like someone who really is like that, but what should I do to people who saw me in the show for the first time and misunderstood that I am really like that, it's a little complicated...(LOL).
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The Crypto Daily â Movers and Shakers â January 17th, 2021
InvestorPlace
10 Smart Stocks to Buy With $5,000
If youâre looking to build a portfolio of stocks to buy with just $5,000, the advent of fractional share ownership has made it a whole lot easier. Google the words âfractional share portfolios,â and you get 527,000 results with everything from reviews on seven of the best fractional share investing brokerages to links to some of the leading players in this burgeoning area of the markets. Many think of Robinhood when they think fractional, but the truth is almost every major online broker in this countryâs got some offering or service.InvestorPlace â Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips Heck, I can remember years ago, when FolioFN was the only game in town. Launched in 2000, it was acquired by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) in May 2020. FolioFNâs self-directed accounts are scheduled to be transferred to Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ:IBKR) early in 2021. In the meantime, for those who donât want to do the work of constructing a $5,000 portfolio of stocks to buy, here are 10 recommendations to help get you started. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) SVB Financial (NASDAQ:SIVB) Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU) Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A, NYSE:BRK.B) Dollar General (NYSE:DG) Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) Williams-Sonoma (NYSE:WSM) Thor Industries (NYSE:THO) 9 Stocks That Investors Think Are the Next Amazon Their share prices will add up to $5,000 or less. To make things interesting, all 10 stocks must have share prices exceeding $100. Stocks to Buy: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) $1,740 Source: BigTunaOnline / Shutterstock.com Itâs funny, I had intended to include Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in my list of 10 stocks to buy, but given I was limiting my names to those companies with shares prices greater than $100, the e-commerce giantâs $3,166 share price would have made it awfully hard to fit nine more under $5,000. So I went with Alphabet, a company I didnât write about at all in 2020, but helps me achieve my task. InvestorPlaceâs Mark Hake recently suggested that rising ad sales make it an attractive investment in 2021. My colleague compares Google to the valuations of Apple, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon. He reckons that Google should have a similar valuation to the three companies at $1.43 trillion or 6.7 times sales. As I write this, Googleâs market capitalization is $1.18 trillion, 17% below Hakeâs simple calculation, which puts its share price at $2,112 per share. I like the upside. Tesla (TSLA) $845 Source: franz12 / Shutterstock.com The second-highest share price in our $5,000 portfolio, we can thank Elon Musk for doing a five-for-one stock split in August 2020. Without it, TSLA would take up 86% of our investment capital. Iâm an unabashed Tesla fan, so Iâm not going to give you reasons why the valuation is over-the-top, although thereâs no question it puts all the other large car companies to shame with its $810 billion market cap. InvestorPlace contributor Matt McCall recently gave investors some wise advice regarding the electric vehicle (EV) maker. McCall believes that rather than griping about the price you have to pay for its shares, embrace the fact that even the mighty Tesla has corrections, so buy like crazy on the rare occasion that it happens. To illustrate his point, McCall references its pullback in September 2020, shortly after its stock split. On Aug. 31, it was trading just under $500. In a week, it fell 34% after Tesla was left off the annual additions list for the S&P 500. 7 Cheap Stocks to Buy as Democrats Gain Control Ultimately, Tesla was added to the index on Dec. 31. As money managers added TSLA to their portfolios, it moved even higher. Nvidia (NVDA) $528 Source: Hairem / Shutterstock.com If youâre one of the lucky investors who joined the Nvidia bandwagon five years ago when it was trading around $26, youâre sitting on an annualized total return of more than 79% through Jan. 13. Itâs crazy to think that things can get any better for NVDA shareholders over the next five years. Still, they actually could, given the growth in gaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. As my InvestorPlace colleague, Faizan Farooque, recently stated, you most certainly wonât be buying Nvidia if youâre a value investor â it trades at 45 times its forward earnings, far higher than many of its peers â but when it can grow sales at 50% a quarter and continue to beat analyst expectations, it most certainly deserves a premium valuation. In June 2019, I argued that Nvidiaâs free cash flow made it a great stock to buy on dips. At the time, it had lost about half of its value over nine months â October 2018 to June 2019 â and was trading around $145. Some 18 months later, itâs up almost four-fold and generating more than $4.2 billion in 12-month free cash flow. Buy some now and wait for the next big dip. Itâs bound to happen sooner or later, no matter the near-term prospects. SVB Financial (SIVB) $465 Source: Pavel Kapysh / Shutterstock.com Iâm not going to say too much about SVB Financial because itâs one of those bank stocks to buy that you have to get to know for yourself to understand why itâs so special. You wouldnât think this was the case by the analyst coverage of its stock. At the moment, 21 analysts cover SIVB, with eight rating it a buy and 12 a hold with an average price target of $424.49. Sure, itâs come a long way over the past year compared to its peers â it has a one-year total return of 74.2% â but thatâs because investors recognize that the bankâs laser-like focus on providing lending, asset management, and banking services to innovators and entrepreneurs will always be in demand. Recently, it announced that it would pay $900 million to buy Boston Private Financial Holdings (NASDAQ:BPFH) for a combination of cash and stock. The Boston-based private bank specializes in wealth management and other banking services. Together, SVB Financialâs wealth management business will have almost $18 billion in assets under management. The 7 Best Marijuana Stocks on the Markets Right Now Continue to ignore SIVB at your peril. Roku (ROKU) $418 Source: JHVEPhoto / Shutterstock.com The streaming platform has gotten off to a hot start in 2021, up 26% year-to-date and more than 205% over the past 52 weeks. Roku and HBO Max parent, Warner Media, buried their longstanding disagreement recently by announcing that the streaming service would be available on Roku as of Dec. 17, 2020. By getting a spot on Roku, HBO Max is now on all the major over-the-top platforms. âWe believe that all entertainment will be streamed and we are thrilled to partner with HBO Max to bring their incredible library of iconic entertainment brands and blockbuster slate of direct-to-streaming theatrical releases to the Roku households with more than 100 million people that have made Roku the No. 1 TV streaming platform in America,â Scott Rosenberg, SVP of Rokuâs platform business, said in a statement. The key part of the above statement is that Roku believes that all entertainment will eventually be streamed. I couldnât agree more. Thatâs why I recommended ROKU stock in December 2017 and still recommend it among stocks to buy in 2021. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) $235 Source: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com I recently read an article about the reasons why Warren Buffett failed in 2020. This kind of analysis of the Oracle of Omaha has been going on for years, possibly as long as Buffettâs been investing in stocks to buy. Yes, Berkshire Hathaway severely underperformed the S&P 500 in 2020 â up 2.5% versus 16.5% for the index â but Iâve always believed that the biggest boost to BRK stock will come when the holding company has to be methodically wound down due to the passing of Buffett and Charlie Munger. Consider that its equity portfolio, which is massive at $271 billion, represents just one-third of Berkshireâs assets at the end of September 2020. I can assure you that the true value of the $418 billion or so in privately-owned assets on its balance sheet is worth far more than this. When the time comes to wind it down, the board will do whatâs necessary to ensure fair value is obtained for every business. Itâs possible the process could take a decade or more. The 7 Best Startups You Can Buy on StartEngine Right Now When people say that Warren Buffett has lost his touch, they forget that the final tally has not been given. Not by a longshot. Dollar General (DG) $213 Source: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com Itâs not a secret that Dollar General caters to customers that donât have a tremendous amount of disposable income. It probably also doesnât come as a surprise that its employees arenât flush with cash, so the fact that it will pay those of its 157,000 employees who get a vaccine four hours of pay is noble. And smart business. ââWe do not want our employees to have to choose between receiving a vaccine or coming to work,â Dollar General (DG) said in a press release, noting that its hourly workers face hurdles to getting vaccinated, such as travel time, gas mileage or childcare needs.â If thereâs a retailer that has done well during Covid-19, Dollar General would have to be at the top of the list. In early December, Dollar General reported Q3 2020 results that included 12.2% same-store sales growth and a 62.7% increase in earnings per share. As a result, itâs passed on a total of $173 million in 2020 for employee appreciation bonuses. As it continues to open more stores while simultaneously growing its gross margins, the fact that it remembered that its employees are the ones who deliver this good fortune to shareholders is a big reason why DG stock will continue to move higher in 2021. Apple (AAPL) $130 Source: Hadrian / Shutterstock.com Most of the talk around AAPL stock right now revolves around its long-simmering Project Titan and its efforts around delivering its own autonomous electric vehicle. The Verge recently reported that Apple held discussions in 2020 with Canoo (NASDAQ:GOEV), the EV startup using a platform based on a skateboard to provide a much better cabin design for its future vehicles. Canoo apparently just wanted some investment capital. Apple, on the other hand, was thinking more about acquiring the business and integrating it into its existing work in this area. The two didnât come to an agreement. Canoo went public and Appleâs now working with Hyundai (OTCMKTS:HYMTF) on getting a self-driving EV to market by 2024. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives recently suggested that Apple could be worth $3 trillion by sometime in 2022 due to strong iPhone 12 sales. He projects it could sell as many as 250 million in 2021. âIf Apple continues to execute at this pace, a $3 trillion market cap could be on the horizon over the 12 to 18 months,â Ives is reported to have said. 7 Dividend Stocks That Are Growing Their Payouts As I write this, itâs at $2.2 trillion. Williams-Sonoma (WSM) $125 Source: designs by Jack / Shutterstock.com Several news outlets reported that the retailerâs CEO, Laura Alber, sold some Williams-Sonoma stock just before Christmas. Donât be alarmed; it was only 15,000 shares or 3.5% of her total holdings. And it was part of her Rule 10b5-1 trading plan started in September 2019. As I always like to say, even wealthy CEOs have bills to pay. Over the past year, Williams-Sonoma stock has delivered a total return of 61.4% for its shareholders, including Alber. Thatâs double the returns of the specialty retail sector as a whole and three times the entire U.S. marketsâ performance. In June 2016, I called WSM one of the best retail stocks to buy due to its excellent omnichannel experience. Going on five years later, nothingâs changed about that assertion. During Covid-19, business at the retailer has been full-speed ahead. Hereâs what I said about it in December: âItâs got a business thatâs ideally balanced between online and brick-and-mortar sales. In the second quarter, it generated 76% of its sales online; in Q3, due to the novel coronavirus constraints, its online sales accounted for 70% of its total revenue â while growing by almost 50% over last yearâ and thatâs during a pandemic,â I said on Dec. 9. âMore importantly, its Q3 profits were through the roof â up 151% to $2.56 a share thanks to significantly higher margins â and that was only through Nov. 1. It doesnât include Black Friday and Cyber Monday.â The worldâs going digital, and thatâs good news for Williams-Sonoma. Thor Industries (THO) $105 Source: Angel DiBilio / Shutterstock.com There is no question that 2020 was good for recreational vehicle manufacturers such as Thor Industries, as people young and old sought the great outdoors, away from the maddening, Covid-19 crowd. The problem for investors whoâve followed the RV industry for any length of time is that the good times never seem to last. In the case of the novel coronavirus, once vaccines make humans comfortable with packing together in large crowds, the great outdoors wonât be nearly as enticing as Paris or Australia. That being said, the latest push into RVs may be coming from a sub-set of consumers who might actually take to the open road. âAll dealers are reporting a high mix of first-time buyers as evident by lack of trade-in units,â said Wells Fargo analyst Tim Conder in a July 15, 2020 note. âDealers are saying as high as 80% of customers are first-time buyers ⌠vs. the typical 25% mix. The pandemic is driving the purchase decision for new-entrants.â If even half of those first-time buyers stick around long enough to upgrade to a bigger or better model, Thor Industries might not have to worry about the eventual downturn. To me, THO is one of the perfect stocks to buy for the long haul, buying more whenever it corrects by more than 5-10%. On the date of publication, Will Ashworth did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. Will Ashworth has written about investments full-time since 2008. Publications where heâs appeared include InvestorPlace, The Motley Fool Canada, Investopedia, Kiplinger, and several others in both the U.S. and Canada. He particularly enjoys creating model portfolios that stand the test of time. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the time of this writing Will Ashworth did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. More From InvestorPlace Why Everyone Is Investing in 5G All WRONG Top Stock Picker Reveals His Next 1,000% Winner It doesnât matter if you have $500 in savings or $5 million. Do this now. The post 10 Smart Stocks to Buy With $5,000 appeared first on InvestorPlace.
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My second review will, without a doubt, make some people mad; not just because what Iâm going to say about this piece will fiercely disagree with what many people had to say about it, but because Mass Effect 3 had such a large and passionate following, that it would be impossible not to offend someone.
So without further ado, hereâs:
Why Mass Effect 3â˛s Ending Was Actually Good and Those Who Complained About It Are Being Babies (Spoilers)
(People are allowed their opinions, I donât think they are actually babies, just that they expected too much and they had a huge overreaction to what essentially ends up being about 10-20 minutes of a 30 hour game. I want to acknowledge Iâve seen some arguments saying that the ending isnât what people wanted. People wanted Shepard to win and to live happily ever after with his love interest with a happy family. The end. And I will admit, I wanted that for my Shepard too, but I can accept that it didnât happen. Because what we want, isnât always what we get. And even if you do everything right, things may not turn out the way we had wanted or expected. Thatâs were the emotion comes in. When Shepard fails to survive even when he made all the right calls. Thatâs just how it happens/happened. So if you say the ending is bad for this reason, I have no sympathy for you, and you are, in fact, a baby.)
Iâm going to start by saying this is not a review of Mass Effect 3. I will review Mass Effect as a series later, but for now letâs focus on the point of contention that most people had with the game: The ending.
So being a huge Mass Effect nerd Iâve spend a lot of time in this universe (I counted it up the other day, Iâve played over 2000 hours of the Mass Effect series) which has allowed me to fully grasp and understand what goes on in these games. This also gives me a huge bias towards the game that I will fully acknowledge. However, I propose that from a writing and programing standpoint, this game (and the ending) is pretty good, not perfect, but good.
Alright legitimacy established, hypothesis stated, letâs get into the nitty-gritty. So we have 2 characters, the Illusive Man and Admiral Anderson plus a Shepard (your male/female projection of yourself that allows you to interact with the world, i.e. not actually a character). The Illusive Man is a master manipulator running a splinter military organization in order to further humanityâs status in the galaxy, at any cost necessary. He has been implanted and indoctrinated by the Reapers, but not directly controlled by them, just influenced. Opposing him, you and Anderson stand, in a trance induced by the Illusive Man via Reaper tech. Anderson is a leader of the Alliance forces, proud and humble all a the same time. Heâs been friends with/mentor to Shepard for years, and has been a large part of stopping the Reapers thus far. These two characters are foils, exact opposites that highlight each others strengths and weaknesses. However this scene plays out, Anderson and the Illusive Man end up dead and Shep near death. BUT not before each character has had a chance to make an appeal to you. Illusive Man wants to control the Reapers and use their tech to make the galaxy a better place, great idea, but how is one supposed to control the Reapers? Anderson says to destroy the Reapers, anything less will be damnation of the sapient races of the galaxy, and he has a point, the Reapers are the antagonists after all. But how do we do that? They are just so powerful it has been impossible up to this point.
Thatâs where the MacGuffin comes in. Thatâs right, the Crucible, a giant space device passed down throughout millions of years of development has just been activated and Shep can die in peace knowing he kills the Reapers. But wait, what through yonder window breaks, tis a message that it doesnât work. Shep passes out and then we see him ascend via unknown force into the Crucible.
This is the point in which I see people getting mad.
Shepard wakes inside the Crucible approached by a semi translucent little boy, that has all the answers in the universe. He says, I offer 3 different color solutions to the problem, and because you are space Jesus you get to pick which one happens by sacrificing yourself, the end. Okay, I understand that sounds dumb, and thatâs why people donât like it. There is an out of left field, totally unexpected thing happening, that boils down to a color-coded trinary choice that ends the magnificent series about the consequences of choice, right?
Wrong. Letâs unpack everything we know, and make an effort to understand before we start to judge.
First the child. Everyone seems to criticize Bioware for making the âStar Childâ, as the community refers to him, a significant part of the story. The âStar Childâ is based off of a child in the intro of the game. Shepard looks out of his office on Earth (thatâs important) down on the child (the first young child weâve seen in the games to this point, i.e. important), who is playing with a toy in the garden. The Reapers then launch the invasion of Earth and Shepard soon after encounters the boy in a small vent that Shep canât fit into (also important) and tries to help him. The boy replies, âYou canât help meâ (IMPORTANT!). He then disappears. Later, Shepard is about to leave Earth to unite the rest of the galaxy and beat the Reapers. There is a touching scene where Anderson gives his spiel about staying at home and fighting the good fight for the citizens of Earth. I canât do it justice in this review, but itâs been decided that Shep will leave despite not wanting to. As his ship begins to take off, he spots the boy get into an evac shuttle. And the ship is destroyed. The boy then haunts Shep in his dreams after every major mission in the game hence forth. In each dream sequence, we an extended look at the end of the dream, where the boy sits in flames, then in the last Shepard sees himself and the boy burning. These dream sequences got labeled by fans as out-of-place, unnecessary, and stupid. These are ignorant claims, because almost everyone making these claims do not understand why the child should be important enough to haunt Shepard. They say, âShep is a grizzled war vet who has seen atrocity after atrocity, why would one child dying haunt his dreams? Shouldnât it be the friends heâs lost?â Now already, these people canât understand the ending, because theyâve missed a huge themeing device, because they can only take things literally. Going back to the beginning, we start on Earth. Home. Home is associated with safety, comfort, our childhoods. Then we see the first child in the series ever, hinting that this child will be important. More than that children are considered innocent and the future. Then seeing the child in danger again in the vent, we are supposed to see that Shepard cannot reach this innocence, his future. And finally the giant walking metaphor says, âPlayer, you cannot help me. You cannot keep your innocence. You may never reach your future. Saving everyone is not a possibility, even thought it is your goal to save as many people as possible. Donât expect every battle to be a victory.â
And if it wasnât blatant enough for you, the writers decide that the child should die, AND constantly remind you of the themes via dream sequences at appropriate intervals through the story. This also builds up to a climax, in the last dream sequence when Shep and the boy perish in flames together, both foreshadowing some of the possible endings, and implying that Shepard will not see the future.
âBut then how/why did the âStar Childâ appear to Shepard as the boy?â
One, itâs the most ancient and advanced piece of technology in the universe with mind altering power, and you just plugged the biggest battery ever created into it. Iâm sure it could have appeared as anything it wanted to. Two, themeing is important. Three, suspension of disbelief. This is sci-fi, get used to it.
Okay, so first point of contention, gone. The âStar Childâ is important and now you know why. Now the Blue/Green/Red ending. I feel this was what the majority of people were mad about.
First off, Iâm throwing the argument "it didnât incorporate any of the decisions that I made previously and thatâs why itâs badâ in the trash. Why? Itâs not a good argument. There is no way to make a branching code that would have incorporated decisions made over the course of 3 very long games into the ending AND made it a coherent and satisfying ending to the trilogy. Thatâs unrealistic. Second, the decisions made did/do matter, they are what led Shepard to be in that situation. The âStar Childâ literally says that in his speech. Plus the decisions matter in the much larger scale of each personâs own personal game; who lived and died, what races survive the apocalypse, the relationships forged, people affected, and everything that is and was. If you think the ending negates those decisions, youâre wrong.
Getting into each ending specifically Control, Destroy, and Synthesis; each has their own merits and affect the galaxy after Shepard. (There is also a secret fourth ending, but it isnât quite as satisfying.) This also matters. It is a metaphor of choosing the legacy you want to leave behind. Each has its own consequences: Control is the proposition of one of your enemies, the Illusive Man. What seemed impossible is now a possibility. Can you see past the bad things that he had done and see the logic in the solution he was seeking? Or do you go with what his foil and your friend, Anderson, would have done and destroy the Reapers? It has always been your goal, but the cost is the deaths of some of your friends and allies. Or do you ignore both extremes and come to a solution never available to you before, blurring the lines between synthetic and organic. This is the most mysterious of the options, and you may not fully grasp the concept as it is foreign, but it would seem like a paradise. And yes each one had their own color, but to boil down those decisions to just the  colors, is showing your own ignorance of said consequences. And with the addition of the FREE Extended Cut ending, it fills in all of the gaps that the previous iteration neglected to mention.
The decision is up to you/Shepard, but only you have to live with the consequences of your decision. And you get to see some of those consequences, as each ending has itâs own unique narration, showing outcomes of decisions made previous to the ending and what the galaxy does with the opportunity given to them.
That is a fucking great ending.
#mass effect#mass#effect#ending#endings#mass effect ending#mass effect endings#mass effect 3#mass effect 3 ending#mass effect 3 endings#analysis#game analysis#story analysis#mass effect analysis#mass effect 3 analysis#ending analysis#mass effect ending analysis#mass effect 3 ending anaylsis#babies cry when they don't get what they want#you don't always get what you want#the rolling stones are cool too#fun tags#mass effect good#good ending#happy ending#good endings#happy endings#review#game review#spoilers
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Castle of Shikigami: An informal rant nobody asked for about my most obscure obsession to date
STOP i spent like 2 days writing this post and im only posting it on tumblr because itâs the one website iâm a member of that can hold the most text. i wanted to infodump somewhere...... read this to learn something i guess (´シĎシ`)
Bad voice acting is the Peak of comedy to me, and while I was looking for something to laugh at one day, I found this game called Castle Shikigami 2 for the PS2. The US version of the game's dialogue is rife with machine translated text that makes no sense, and awkward voice acting to boot. They even have voice actors saying the wrong lines, voice actors speaking implied commands, and a few voice lines are left in Japanese. Apparently, Roger Craig Smith (Sonic the Hedgehog's current voice actor) was in this game but I don't think he's even credited?! I think I know which character he voiced but Iâm not exactly sure.
The history behind this gameâs localization is REALLY weird. Castle of Shikigami/Shikigami no Shiro was originally an arcade bullet hell shoot em up game. The series was created by Alfa System and it was one of Alfa Systemâs main IPs. There are three main shmup installments and a text adventure game for the PS2, Nanayozuki Gensoukyoku. Nanayozuki was practically fanservice for whatever number of CoS fans there were back then. Each main game in the series was originally an arcade cabinet, but they were all ported to PC and home consoles. In CoS 2â˛s case, it came out on the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast, but only the PS2 version got localized. The western publisher, XS Games specializes in publishing quality budget titles such as âBass Pro Shops: The Strikeâ for the Wii. I theorize they didnât care too much about the actual content of CoS 2 and were more focused on selling a game quickly for a low price, so they just machine translated it and adjusted a few things. If youâre wondering if Castle of Shikigami 1 was also translated this badly, the answer is No. XS Games instead removed all the dialogue from the western release of CoS 1, and released it with the title âMobile Light Force 2âł.
âWait, what do you mean âMobile Light Force TWOâ if Castle of Shikigami 1 is the first game in the series?â If you want to know what Mobile Light Force 1 was, itâs GUNBIRD; another shmup game, but by a completely different developer than Castle of Shikigami. I donât know why they did that. What really kills me though is that both MLF 1 and 2 use the same boxart, which is COMPLETELY unrelated to the actual contents of either game. AFJQHJFOKLJFDS look at this
Thereâs more hilarity behind Mobile Light Force that isnât hard to find so you can search that up if youâre interested. But thankfully, Castle of Shikigami 3's Wii edition got more of a proper localization by Aksys Games.
Now I would bluntly say something like âstan castle of shikigamiâ but:
1. This seriesâ lore is insanely convoluted. Itâs an essential part of this expansive fictional universe referred to as âMumei Sekaikanâ (I donât know what this translates to in English) where thereâs like, 7 different parallel worlds. Thereâs more obscure ass games and manga that are tied to this universe, and I think thereâs even a tabletop RPG made based off it. Have you heard of âGunparade Marchâ? Most likely you havenât; itâs an obscure video game made by Alfa System that also got adapted into an anime, and I feel it can be described as Mechas x Persona. One of the characters in CoS 2 is just one of the GPM characters going undercover to find her senpai who traveled to the CoS world. Or something like that. The 7-world universe isnât explicitly talked about in the game but they make so many references to it without defining anything that itâs like you Must know about it. There is NO documentation in English about the Mumei Sekaikan I could find on the internet, although there is a wiki in Japanese where I got a ton of knowledge from (GOOGLE TRANSLATE IS MY TRUSTED FRIEND) I feel like I might be THE person in the United States who has the most knowledge on the Mumei Sekaikan, and I could go on another tangent talking about what I know so far (and who this one specific dude Shibamura Yuuri is) but I wonât.
2. The writing isnât excellent and can be pretty Unwoke â˘; the first game came out in 2001 and the third game came out in 2005 if that gives you a sense on what era these writers were in. As far as the games dialogue goes, the characters appear kind of flat. CoS 1 and 2 Kotaro (i refuse to use the official âKohtaroâ) is stupid and driven by JUSTICE to a point where itâs annoying. I canât tell if Hyuga is trying to be a Ladies Man in CoS 2 and 3. Kim, a religious tae kwon do instructor, spends CoS 2 thinking about how he should atone for his sins, then he turns himself into jail at the end. Sayoâs backstory is that she was a shrine maiden raised as a âhuman weaponâ to have no emotions and her only goal in life was to kill god and then die, something like that. However, after CoS 1, she gets a crush on Kotaro because he actually treats her like a human and Of course thatâs what youâd expect from the main teen girl and boy in the series. In CoS 3, Sayo's character is mostly played out to be a major tsundere for Kotaro even though surprisingly HIS character in this game changed a ton compared to 1 and 2 (he had to kill an illusion of his older brother, who he learned actually died earlier, and now he has to kill an illusion of his childhood sweetheart... damb that shit sucks :/). Heâs still stupid though
Thereâs a gag in CoS 2 that I canât clearly remember where itâs like, Niigi makes Sayo and Fumiko, who are both romantically interested in Kotaro, think that heâs only into little girls? Meanwhile, Fumikoâs magic goes wrong and her appearance turns to that of a child though in response sheâs like âhee hee maybe Kotaro will like thisâ. basically more On-Brand early 2000â˛s anime unwokeness than average. Speaking of Fumiko, sheâs a 400+ year old militaristic witch who constantly teases Kotaro (whoâs like 16 or 17) and she wants to marry him for his magical potential since heâs like one of the candidates for becoming God??? From the official CoS 3 character descriptions, âHer hobby is to steal the men from other women. Her second hobby is trampling upon people.â She canonically stole her stepmotherâs husband from her stepmother (the 3rd boss of CoS 3). I donât get how that shit would have worked
3. The game itself is HARD af but to be fair Iâm a scrub gamer. I canât get past stage 3 on easy difficulty without continuing. Yes i bought CoS 1 on Steam, Yes it has a port on steam i feel like i should have mentioned this earlier
4. Besides CoS 1 having a port on Steam, CoS 2 and 3 might be hard to obtain legally. The poorly translated CoS 2 was apparently super cheap back then, but since itâs an old game, its value mightâve increased. When I tried looking up prices for English CoS 3, all the listings were like at least $40 and being broke I wouldnât want to spend more than $29 for a Wii game in 2019... honestly I just emulated CoS 2. shout out to PCSX2
Last month I was desperate, bored enough, and deep enough in the Shikigami rabbit hole that I tried to find the manga based off of it online. The CoS manga only tells the events of the first two games so I still donât really get anything about CoS 3, like who Mihee, Batu, and Emilio are supposed to be. However, the plot events also differ. For example, Roger Sasuke exists as a character in CoS 3 but in the manga he literally Dies. Thereâs 11 total volumes of this; 3 volumes dedicated to CoS 1 and the latter 8 (the âTwisted Castle arcâ) dedicated to CoS 2. Only the very first 3 chapters were scanlated to English all the way in 2011. Fortunately, I did find the entire manga uploaded though............... in CHINESE. So you know what I did? I ��readâ the entire thing using my phoneâs Google Translate OCR app to take pictures of each page and comprehend the translations. Of course I still donât understand CRAP because of the Mumei Sekaikan jargon + machine translation but I understood enough to get emotionally attached to some of the characters. I wish I hadnât. At least through the manga I learned that the characters DO have some depth and pre-established relationships. For instance, the reason why Roger Sasuke became a ninja is because when he first landed in Japan as a kid, he was getting bullied or something and he didnât know Japanese then Kotaro saw this and told the bullies to stop. Then after Roy /sorry i mean Roger learned that he was set to home-stay with the Kugas in the first place, he decided to dedicate his life to Japan in order to protect Kotaro back. I think. DO U SEE HOW ABSURD THIS SHIT IS Anyway Nanayozuki takes place between the second and third games and sets things up for CoS 3. Thereâs a full playthrough of it uploaded to YouTube and I think it contains a lot of juicy lore, but itâs just too much to go over with Shitty Google Translate OCR. Thereâs also Shikigami no Shiro novels which apparently contain the most backstory, but I have a 0% chance of finding these online for free. Not to mention that these would ALSO be too much effort to Google Translate.
in conclusion: You donât HAVE to play Castle of Shikigami. Like, Iâm not gonna recommend it for the content, but if you love shmups and are looking for a shmup game you havenât heard of then I will recommend it for the gameplay (old touhou mutuals assemble theres a POWER-UP-BY-GRAZE MECHANIC). Iâve counted like 4 total fans outside of Japan that like this series for the story, and I donât think that number is going to increase because I doubt CoS 2 will ever get retranslated and ported. I just want you to know that this series exists and that thereâs a ton of wacky shit behind it besides the bad Castle Shikigami 2 dub. also if someone knows enough japanese or chinese and has an INKLING of interest in this series umm talk to me and help me decipher stuff
Iâm kinda sad that the series is pretty much Dead though. This is the most recent piece of official Castle of Shikigami art I could find, and this was for the 2018 New Year. The next most recent piece of official CoS art I found was also drawn by the character designer Sonoda Miku all the way in January 2008, commemorating the end of the CoS manga serialization. Alfa System released a spiritual sequel to Castle of Shikigami on the Japanese Switch eShop called Sisters Royale, with character designs I think are still by Sonoda. By âspiritual sequelâ I mean that it has some of the EXACT same shot types as CoS and the same mechanic where grazing bullets increases your power and score. This is the closest weâll get to a Shikigami no Shiro 4. I wonder what the business decision behind that game was but it actually looks like fun and I want to play it so OK Go off i guess
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Which city should be the next to host an NFL franchise?
Los Angeles has two teams now and Las Vegas will have one soon. Whoâs next?
NFL teams have never been shy about moving around. The Rams began in Cleveland, moved to Los Angeles, uprooted for Saint Louis, and then ducked back to Los Angeles in favor of a stadium that will cost more than the GDP of 35 nations. The Cardinals played second fiddle in Chicago through their first four decades, moved to Missouri for a while, and now bounce around the Phoenix metropolitan area every so often.
Even entrenched teams have been subject to temporary rehoming. The Bills have played all of their 60 seasons in Buffalo, but theyâve also experimented with home games north of the border in Toronto. The Jaguars have been in Jacksonville since 1995, but are an annual fixture in the leagueâs International Series in London. New markets get tested every fall.
In the past 25 years, Baltimore, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Houston all welcomed NFL franchises within city limits. So which cultural center will join them? A cross-Atlantic market in Great Britain? One of the worldâs largest cities in Mexico? The current Canadian home of the reigning NBA champions? Wilmington, Delaware?
Here are our candidates.
London, England
Foisting American sports off on the Brits has been a proud tradition that dates back to 2007. After luring fans to a packed Wembley Stadium in the late 2000s with a lineup that included recent (and even current) Super Bowl winners like the Giants (â07), Saints (â08), and Patriots (â09), the league then tested Englandâs limits by making the Jaguars an annual fixture overseas in 2013.
And it went pretty well! Only one of the 21 games to take place at Wembley drew fewer than 80,000 fans. All three of 2018âs games at the stadium eclipsed the 84,000 mark. Anything over a 78,000 average would give a London franchise the leagueâs second-highest attendance behind the Cowboys â though thatâs a little misleading since most teams donât have stadiums that can hit that 80k mark.
Of course, fatigue would set in as fans adjusted to either the growing pains of an expansion team or a franchise whose performance had dropped enough to make relocation passable. Thatâs a concern, but this is also a city thatâs averaged 84,240 fans per game while watching the Jaguars go 3-3 in London. You can argue some of those fans were lured to the stadium due to the novelty of the game and high profile halftime shows, but Wembley nearly hit 86,000 for last yearâs Philadelphia-Jacksonville game that had no halftime performance. And nearly 84,000 still came out for a 2016 game that featured Robin Thicke at the break, which feels like more of a punishment than anything.
Travel plans and finding a full-time stadium are major logistical concerns, but manageable ones. West coast teams would likely have to plan an east coast game the week before heading overseas to prevent the headache of a 10+ hour flight to the isles. Whatever team, new or requisitioned, would need to work out a timeshare on a soccer pitch before working out their own plans for a(n American) football-specific stadium. But between the NFLâs stated goal of expanding the game globally and the bundles of money that would come with a greater European presence would make those headaches worthwhile.
Otherwise, letâs throw a team in Anchorage, Alaska. Give the world an outdoor stadium that can wrest the âfrozen tundraâ moniker away from Green Bay. The largest city in Americaâs largest state (by area) only has 10,000 fewer residents than Pittsburgh or Cincinnati and is has a greater population than Buffalo or AAF standbys Orlando and Salt Lake City. The west coast needs more teams to balance out those 4pm EST kickoffs â why not get weird with it? â Christian DâAndrea
Portland, Oregon
Take a cruise down the list of the largest cities in the United States and most of the top 20 or 30 consists of places that either:
A: Already have an NFL team, or B: Are boxed out by a nearby franchise or two.
Itâs hard to imagine California getting another team soon after taxpayers balked at the idea of paying for new stadiums in San Diego or Oakland. That eventually resulted in two teams relocating. Itâs also going to be difficult for Texas to get a third team so long as Jerry Jones keeps pushing back on a team coming to take a slice of the Lonestar State pie.
If all that means places like San Antonio, San Diego, San Jose, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso are scratched from the list (which it might not, but letâs assume it does), thatâd leave Portland as one of the biggest cities in the country without an NFL franchise.
Portland currently sits No. 25 in the United States in population â ahead of plenty of NFL cities, including Baltimore, Atlanta, Kansas City, Miami, and Minneapolis. Itâs also the 22nd largest media market, according to Nielsen.
The only major professional sports teams in Portland right now are the NBAâs Trail Blazers, MLSâs Timbers, and the NWSLâs Thorns FC. All three are well supported by the city. The Trail Blazers and Timbers both consistently sell out their venues, and the Thorns FC dominate the rest of the NWSL in attendance.
That doesnât necessarily mean a 60,000+ seat stadium would get filled too, but itâs a really good sign. It helps too that the earthquake-inducing fans of the Seattle Seahawks have shown the Pacific Northwest has a passionate bunch of sports supporters. Portland would probably should up in a big way for a football team they could call their own. â Adam Stites
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio isnât the biggest market for an NFL team, but theyâd be a nice spot for a new team.
Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio, believes the city will have a team within 10 years. Hereâs what Nirenberg had to say when asked about his 10-year timeline to host an NFL team:
âItâs a horizon. A fairly short horizon as it relates to the economic growth of the city. The economic growth of San Antonio and the success we are experiencing now is profound and it has been a concerted effort, a deliberate effort on my part and other city leaders to make sure that our profile in pro sports is rising.â
âIncreasingly professional teams and leagues are looking to San Antonio as a place where they can find success and thatâs very exciting for the San Antonio citizen in general who wants to see the economy of our city succeed, but its also great for San Antonio sports fans.â
Prior to settling down in the Oakland Coliseum for one last season, the Raiders were pondering a one year move to San Antonio prior to their relocation to Las Vegas. Nirenberg said that he wants San Antonio to remain âon the radarâ in any relocation talks â permanent or temporary.
San Antonio has already showed that they can support a professional basketball team with the support theyâve shown the Spurs over the last 20 years. Admittedly, itâs easy to support a team thatâs consistently good like the Spurs have been, but it does show that the potential fanbase is there for an NFL team.
San Antonio can also look at another team in their own state to rapidly build a fanbase in the Houston Texans. Houston joined the NFL in 2002 and has already cultivated a passionate group of fans â the Texans ranked 11th in attendance last season.
Football reigns supreme in Texas. Given the longtime success of the Cowboys and the recent success of the Texans, San Antonio should be confident they can sustain a professional team if they received one. â Charles McDonald
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis almost had an NFL franchise back in the 1990âs but could only watch as Carolina and Jacksonville were awarded expansion teams. The team was to be called the Memphis Hound Dogs, which sounds pretty cool. That franchise came to exist anyway in a bizarre 9-9 season playing in the Canadian Football League.
All that drama led to Memphis having a tense relationship with the NFL. But there is reason why they should (again) be a candidate for expansion.
For starters, they already have a stadium in the city. The Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium is already the home for the Memphis Tigers football team and hosted the Houston Oilers for a couple of games in 1997. For a team thatâs new to a city, already having a place to call their own is huge. Itâs one of the major hurdles for any city looking to woo a franchise â even if itâs only a temporary home while an NFL-quality stadium is built.
The AutoZone Liberty Bowl, which is hosted every year in Memphis, had the 11th highest attendance of all the bowl games last season and has averaged over 50,000 fans since 1998. The market for football is there in Memphis.
Memphis already has the Grizzlies (granted, theyâve had a recent attendance decline), but the city should be looked at if the NFL is hunting for a viable city. Plus who wouldnât want to hear the Hound Dogs called out on their TV on Sundays? - Vijay Vemu
Mexico City, Mexico
The NFL wants to get international, but a team in London, eight hours ahead of the Pacific time zone, is a tall ask. In North America, they have some real options, including Mexico City. Not only is Mexico City closer to teams in Texas and Florida than those teams are to, say, Californiaâs teams, but the potential market size is enormous.
Not only is the population huge, it would largely be comprised of extremely passionate fans. Iâm not here to knock the fans of any American teams, but sports fans in Mexico bleed for the teams they support. I donât know how well an NFL team will be embraced right out of the gate, but the market is large enough to support them.
Plus, if the team is actually good, the potential fanbase is even larger. Theyâll immediately be some of the most passionate fans in the sport. Mexico City is also a very nice place, if you werenât aware. You should go sometime.
Itâs worth noting (well, itâs worth it to me, you probably donât care, but youâre reading this anyway) that when I relocate a team in Madden, I always relocate to Mexico City, which the game gives top grades to in market size and fan dedication. Iâm nearly 20 years into my Madden 19 franchise in Mexico City, and it would be rad if that team (mine are the Mexico City Diablos) became a reality. â James Brady
A Canadian City
As stated above, the NFL has been trying to go international for years. The NFL is the only one of Americaâs major sports leagues without a team in Canada. Even the MLS has three Canadian teams. Itâs time to expand the NFL past the northern border.
Toronto would be the obvious choice here â especially with the recent success of the NBA champion Toronto Raptors â but they havenât exactly shown dedication to American football. The Buffalo Billsâ played six regular season games in Toronto from 2008-13 and averaged a little more than 47,000 in attendance. The Toronto Argonauts also have one of the lowest average attendance in the Canadian Football League.
The city does seem dedicated to increasing the popularity of the CFL as a road to an NFL franchise, but have yet to be successful. Other major Canadian cities like Montreal or Edmonton could be just as successful or more so than Toronto, though
Edmontonâs stadium â Commonwealth Stadium â is the second largest in the country with a seating capacity of 55,819. The MLBâs Montreal Expos were successful and were supported by the city and fans for decades before their relocation.
Hockey is always going to come first in Canada, but the NFL should be able to capitalize on whatever success the CFL has and make a franchise all of Canada can root for. â Kennedi Landry
Sethâs House
Itâs nice! â Seth Rosenthal
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Social Media Influences Millennialsâ Purchasing Decisions
Social media channels are now the main sources of news, opinions and debate. According to Shaz Memon writing in HuffPost (032317), âlogging on and 'liking' are daily interactions. The number of friends and followers you have has become central to personal happiness and professional success. We are social.
Born between the early 80s and early 2000s, millennials live life online. Also known as Generation Y or Generation Me, this is a group that has become defined by the digital world and has prompted the huge cultural shift towards capturing every moment on camera phones, in tweets and Snapchats for the rest of the world to see.â
This has been caused by the death of newspaper, all the worldâs a stage and an opinion of out with the old.
The death of newspapers and their reluctance to immediately jump in to the digital and mobile arenas, allowed for social media platforms to explode and take the eyeballs away from them. The âall the worldâs a stageâ comment is that everyone wants attention to what they have to say. The world today is in fact their stage. And they express it constantly. Then there is the opinion âout with the oldâ. This can be seen everywhere. They want to throw everybody out (look at the past Presidential election) and they have very little patience with the elderly. They really want noting to do with the past. Therefore, your being in business since whenever, doesnât play to this audience.
Social media has changed all of that and it rules today.
Social media brings the customer closer to their favorite purchases and has forced business to rethink their entire marketing strategy.
Why do brands spend so much time and effort courting millennials on social media? Andrew Arnold writing in Forbes (122217) noted, âDigital marketing is a big undertaking, it can be expensive, and thereâs lots of competition. Still, companies seem to be committed to engaging on social media. The simple reason behind this is that it works.
Social media is a major influencer when it comes to the purchasing decisions of millennials. In fact, 72% of them report buying fashion and beauty products based on Instagram posts. And the further role of social media influencers goes way beyond this one network.
Why do brands spend so much time and effort courting millennials on social media? After all, digital marketing is a big undertaking. It can be expensive and there are lots of competition. Still, companies are committed to engaging on social media. The simple reason is that it works.
Engagement not promotion or advertising is often the drive behind purchasing decisions While influencers and peers may hold the most influence over millennials purchasing decisions, that doesnât mean that brands donât have a voice at all. They most certainly do. However, itâs important to keep in mind that they are more impressed by engagement than promotion. Sixty-two (62%) percent of this group states that they are more likely to become brand loyal if a company engages with them, sincerely, on social media. Not only does brand loyalty drive purchasing decisions, it also drives those ever important social media recommendations. Millennials who become particularly bonded to a brand can even be elevated to the level of brand ambassador influencer like 50 North Yachts does.
Businesses that are interested in influencing millennials should certainly use social media to address them. That being said, in order to be successful, it is imperative that brands recognize exactly how millennials look to social media for information and feedback. Itâs not so much promotion and advertising that makes a difference. Instead, this generation values sincerity, peer and influencer recommendations, and values.
Peer recommendations carry a lot of weight with millennials As mentioned above, recommendations from peers can reap a lot of customer conversions. According to Hubspot, 71% of people are more likely to make a purchase online if the product or service comes recommended by others. This may be driven by millennials inherent distrust of brands and traditional advertising. They simply tend to believe what their peers say, seek their opinions and often validation.
However, according to McKinsey, a small number of influencers are accountable for the lionâs share of referrals brands receive via social media. For example when studying products such as shoes and clothing, it was discovered that 5% of the influencers offering product recommendations were driving 45% of social influence. They have earned the trust of their followers as a result of establishing expertise or other influence in a very specific niche. According to entrepreneur Andrew Molz, in order to reach millennials, brands should focus on earning those referrals and recommendations. Molz built a Shopify based website and generated $2.2 million in sales using only social media to generate traffic.
Fashion is now driven by influencers on social media âIndustry influencers in niches such as fashion and beauty hold a lot of sway over this consumer group,â Molz said. They start trends, determine whatâs cool and desirable, and curate the must-have items as fashion magazines used to do.â For instance, last August, 80% of Nordstromâs mobile traffic came from a single influencer, RewardStyle Network. This same influencer network also drove 21.94% of Sephoraâs traffic, 34% of traffic to Revolve.com, and 30.83% to Net-A-Porter. This means, Molz argues, that âcompanies must recognize who has the ear of the millennials in their target audience. This includes bloggers and vloggers, publishers, YouTubers, etc. Getting their seal of approval could be key in pushing millennials further into the sales funnel.â
The influence goes way beyond fashion too. For example, the release of the video game overwatch was  highly anticipated. A week after its release, Elon Musk tweeted that he liked the game and congratulated the publisher on a job well done. That casual, likely offhand remark generated over 3800 retweets and resulted in 12,000 instances of engagements. This happened in only minutes.
User generated content has a big influence on purchasing decisions According to Gartner research, 84% of millennials are likely to be influenced to make a purchase based upon user generated content that is created by strangers. While many brands are already using user generated content to increase their followers and further branding, Molz says this can act as additional motivation to encourage followers to share content such as reviews, images, and stories. âSeeing a product in  use or simply reading personal stories from other consumers clearly has a big influence on this consumer group,â he added. When a user takes user generated content to a new level, they become brand ambassadors. These âpower usersâ can help you to take your brand onto the next level. For instance, Covergirl has worked to create relationships with popular beauty vloggers James Charles and Nura Afia. By working with Afia specifically, the brand stands to capture the interests of Muslim women who may have previously felt ignored by the cosmetics industry. Thatâs significant as it is predicted that Muslims will spend between 464 and 730 billion dollars on fashion and beauty products and services by 2019.â
A number of months ago, a client, during one of our weekly âNext Weekâs Topicsâ meeting said he didnât believe that there was one case where social media proved it could draw sales. While he did admit that both traffic and sales were up, he wanted to see proof that social media actually was working.
That very day, after our meeting had ended and we were walking the floor, a woman had actually walked into his retail store and bought an entire living room full of furniture. The client saw this, went over and asked what drove her into the store to buy today. She didnât say a thing, and put her mobile unit in front of him to a post on Facebook we had posted on his behalf. Then she said, âThatâs why?â.
Retailers, manufacturers, brands of all kinds can no longer claim that social media does not work. It works. And for those who use it as a major play in their marketing budget, social media works above expectations.
#customerexperience#Customerengagement#customerbehavior#customerloyalty#consumerbehavior#consumerexperience#consumerengagement#consumerloyalty#socialmedia#socialmediaengagement#socialmediatrends#socialmediainsights#data#digital#direct#mobile#millennialengagement#millennialbehavior#millennialexperience#millennialacquisition#cnasophis#lancehanish#industryinfluencers#millennialpurchasingdecisions#furnitureworld
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Not for Us (or, the righteous butthurt of an intelligent female fan)
As a kid, it happened with masturbation, cartoons, comic books, then sci-fi. Iâd be totally into it, but then Iâd feel like an interloper in a secret world of pleasure, so Iâd drop it and try to find something more âappropriateâ.
I was never into dolls or the Babysitterâs Club, though, so I just read horror fiction and tread water.
Cut to 2000-something, when the uproar about New Who began. I love love LOVE sci-fi, but I eschewed watching it because...I might like it too much. I didnât want to commit.
I never really asked myself why this summary dismissal was a thing with me.
The steady influx of Moffat indignation on my timeline, then a little research into the writer and his work, helped me to see the big picture more clearly.
These shows -Sherlock and Doctor Who - just like GI Joe, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and most comic books - were not written for girls/women. In the 60â˛s, 70â˛s, 80â˛s and 90â˛s, that was okay. We had our own entertainment in Barbie dream houses, Dream Date board games, and My Little Pony, right?
Spider-Man, Spawn and Constantine is for the boys, as us girls donât do grisly or nerdy or understatedly heroic.Â
Why would I want to look through the heroâs eyes, when I could lust after him at the appropriate, ego-boosting time? Thatâs the only way my female gaze would fit into the narrative.Â
Sexually.Â
A thirst for adventure, or even the non-sexual curiosity about the trials and tribulations of the everyday Marvel superhero or extraordinary gumshoe are not relevant.
Iâm a lady. Ostensibly, I should be content with spiky hair, an eyebrow raise or a smexy bowtie while the boys play how they may. The companions, and therefore us women, are just incarnations of the Madonna/whore complex, reduced to on/off buttons of emotion.
Buttons, ha! Men complain that weâre too complex, but maddeningly, it doesnât show where it should - in their written depictions of us. Case in point:Â
1) Rose flirts, simpers and giggles much to the young handsome Doctorâs delight, but never clearly states her feelings...except when sheâs willing to internalize the time vortex which forces Nine to absorb it and die to save her, then later, risk ripping the universe apart and let every living thing in it die to see the Doctor.Â
She saved the Earth, but was willing to watch Nine, then the Universe burn for another snog.Â
Rose is young, foolish, and extraordinarily selfish, and sheâs written to be the Doctorâs one and only. It speaks volumes about what the writer thinks about women.
2) Marthaâs written thirsty because if there isnât a beautiful woman lusting after Ten, the âdashing doctorâ trope is fucked. The fact that it makes her into a farce of herself although sheâs far more intelligent and empathetic than The One Who Came Before is unimportant. Sheâs just the current companion after the hallowed Rose, and guess what?
She saves the Doctor, full stop. Ten gave up nothing, and she gave up everything to save his freckly hide. But, again, sheâs written as a placeholder. Rose is still the thing.
3) Donna is a thirty-something redhead who is stridently Not Attracted to the Doctor(r), but the visible, straining effort to make Catherine Tate a frump makes me want to extricate my brain and throw it at the wall. Itâs obviously written after the fan uproar about Martha, and it backfired a bit. Â And Rose is still around, still fucking things up.
Why, oh why did you do that to the lovely Billie?!
And donât get me started on Tentoo. That is a hairpulling, indignant screed all its own.
And thatâs the RTD era, which I love. On to Moffat:
Amyâs perplexingly pointless.
Claraâs irritatingly irritating.
River is....fuck.
And what about femaleMaster!? Jesus.
And speaking about Sherlock, what about Molly?Â
A lovely, fragile dumpster blossom (as sheâs written, as scientists canât be sexy) whoâs just as useful as what she can do for Sherlock. How many times has she..ahem...saved him?
And Mary - sheâs strong, so she naturally has to be shockingly callous. Again, a clever, strong woman canât be empathetic, or unselfish. Thatâs not the way it goes, since such a women wouldnât fit the on/off button paradigm.Â
The actresses are brilliant. This is metric fucktons of talent wasted on retarded writing.
And so, the male characters suffer for the writerâs lack of nuance in writing the women as people.
Let that sink in a while. Yeah, itâs deep.
This was passable 30 years ago, when women âwerenât paying attentionâ. The boys could feed their egos on the hero and their eyes on the dimepiece, nodding indulgently at how silly them girls is actinâ. Sadly for the boyâs club, itâs not the case any longer.
Guess what, boys - bitches can have empathy. Funny women can be devastatingly sexy. Beautiful women can be selfless. Strong women can be gentle, and not be out to denigrate every male in sight. Impulsive, foolish women can have the best of intentions. Our primary function as women isnât to save you, emotionally or physically, and any relationship based on that is emotionally draining and breeds resentment.
Fair is fair, so same goes for men.
I donât need to see men systematically emasculated to prove the show is âpro-womanâ -  I love dashing, clever men. Thatâs why DW became so popular, so donât castrate the Doctor and make him a bumbling second to a woman who is his equal. Donât pander to women, thinking weâre so foolish we wonât see it and be put off.
The game needs to be upped. Get more clever, funny, sympathetic female writers in the crew to create some checks and balances. Match your heroes to complex, fully-developed female characters worthy to be their equals.
Donât cheat yourself, treat yourself.
Us women are watching.
#doctor who#sherlock#sherlock season 4#david tennant#matt smith#amy pond#rose tyler#donna noble#peter capaldi#chris eccleston#russell t davies#the righteous butthurt of an intelligent female fan#clara oswald#martha jones#fandoms#comic books#mary morstan#molly hooper
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Science on a fast track is like a virus. The post COVID world is panic driven!  The scientists were expected to be more scientific! Science should not deliver its results like a magic without going through protocols. Researchers race to deliver results, academic journals race to publish, and the media races to bring new information to a scared and eager public. Openness and transparency are the hall marks of science! It should divorce in no unequivocal terms from the influence of power, privilege, finance and politics! It starts small, but if itâs shared enough times, it can cause global disruption. Science Has an Ugly, Complicated Dark Side. And the Coronavirus Is Bringing It Out. The druggists and the researchers are busy announcing results of old anti-viral drugs, anti-malarial drugs and anti AIDS drugs on corona virus with an Antibiotic here and there. They find themselves in a hurry to announce their results even if it is as low as 20% success. This is to capture the early bird advantage and clearly a one Up- Manship attitude. With confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide surpassing 4.3 million and continuing to grow, scientists are pushing forward with efforts to develop vaccines and treatments to slow the pandemic and lessen the diseaseâs damage. Some of the earliest treatments will likely be drugs that are already approved for other conditions, or have been tested on other viruses. People are looking into whether existing antivirals might work or whether new drugs could be developed to try to tackle the virus. Drug development is sometimes described as a pipeline, with compounds moving from early laboratory development to laboratory and animal testing to clinical trials in people. It can take a decade or more for a new compound to go from initial discovery to the marketplace. Many compounds never even make it that far. Thatâs why many medications being eyed as potential treatments for COVID-19 are drugs that already exist. There are three stages of infection at which the coronavirus could be targeted: keeping the virus from entering our cells, preventing it from replicating inside the cells, and minimizing the damage that the virus does to the organs. As of now there is no success in combating COVID19 in any of the three stages! Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd said on Tuesday it will begin a new clinical trial in India to test a combination of two anti-viral drugs, Favipiravir and umifenovir, as a potential COVID-19 treatment. Glenmark has received approval from the Indian regulator to initiate the study. âToo wise too lateâ. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine prevent coronavirus. The study, which had prompted even the World Health Organization (WHO) to pause HCQ clinical trials in Covid-19 patients last month under its giant âsolidarity trialâ, has been questioned for parsing through data in lesser-than-usual time, and has faced allegations of data fabrication too. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two prescription medications that are approved to prevent and treat malaria. In China, doctors used chloroquine to treat patients with COVID-19 and it seemed to help. But doctors elsewhere in the world say that more research is needed. A large global trial to carefully study the effectiveness of these drugs vs. the coronavirus is currently underway. WHO has studied the use of these drugs on 96000 patients worldwide and has temporarily suspended the use of these drugs in COVID19. ICMR had initiated a study on the use of these two drugs on front line corona warriors numbering around 2000 and was to publish the results in June- July. But now ICMR has also suspended the trial study after WHO decided to keep these drugs on suspension. India depending on studies and drug approval from West shows it suffers colonial hangover. Take Remdesivir, for instance. Indiaâs drug controller approved its emergency use  only the green light given by the USâ Food and Drug Administration- The FDA Now authors of two controversial studies published in Lancet and New England journal of medicine have retracted their papers as they could not vouch for the veracity of the data sourced from a private company for their analysis. In  two open letters written to the editors of both journals on 31st may more than 100 scientists flagged major discrepancies in the quality of data from across the world Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia which can result in death! FDA has stated that âWe will continue to investigate risks associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 and communicate publicly when we have more information.â The peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association released a new study Friday that said researchers cut short a study testing chloroquine as a potential treatment for Covid-19 over safety concerns, citing a âprimary outcomeâ of death The drugs have been touted by President Donald Trump as a potential âgame changerâ in the fight against the coronavirus. I do hope that president Trump stops promoting injections of bleach powder. Remdesivir Remdesivir is an experimental broad-spectrum antiviral drug originally designed to target Ebola virus The drug Remdesivir has been under the spotlight as a possible treatment for critical cases of COVID-19. Globally, it is one of the four possible lines of treatment being investigated in the Solidarity trials under the aegis of the World Health Organization When the virus engulfs itself around a human cell, it injects its RNA inside the cell. The RdRp enzyme causes viral replication. Remdesivir inhibits the enzyme and stops further replication . Researchers have found that Remdesivir is effective at fighting the novel coronavirus in isolated cells. Initial reports said it is 30% effective. This treatment is not yet approved in humans, but two clinical trials for this drug have been implemented in China. One clinical trial was recently also approved by the FDA in the United States. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has said it can consider using the drug if local manufacturers are willing to procure it. Remdesivir is currently not available in India. The ICMR plans to wait and watch for the results of WHOâs Solidarity trials to make an assessment on the efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 treatment. Ritonavir and lopinavir Ritonavir and lopinavir are two antiviral drugs used for treatment of HIV. These too work by inhibiting the virus;s RNA. Specifically, they target the enzyme that helps the virus split proteins. These two drugs are being used in India and several countries for seriously ill patients. In HIV patients, these two antiviral drugs work together to decrease the viral load in blood. Their use in COVID-19 patients seeks the same outcome. âBut so far, it has not shown great success in viral suppression,â said Dr Pravin Amle, infectious disease expert. He relies on the antibiotic azithromycin as his first choice. whether it is safe to take ibuprofen to treat coronavirus symptoms. It began harmlessly, when the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, a respected journal, published a 400-word letter from a group of European researchers that raised some safety concerns about the drug. But much of the world treated the mere suggestion as if it were derived from the results of a clinical trial. Within a week, the French health minister, followed by a spokesperson from the World Health Organization, recommended that people with COVID-19 donât take ibuprofen. A day later the WHO backtracked, saying it did ânot recommend againstâ the use of ibuprofen. Good science requires time, Peer review and Reproducibility But in the past few months, the scientific process for all things related to COVID-19 has been fast-tracked!  Yes, of course, it is understandable on some levelâthousands are dying worldwide every day. And, at the same time, unverified opinions circulate widely on social media and on TV from so-called experts, which makes understanding the situation all the more difficult. Conducting and communicating research without a breach of protocol during a pandemic is need of the hour!
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Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force
Science Fiction (Tor.com): Anyone who has played Traveller (or even just played with online character generation sites like this one) might have noticed that a surprising number of the characters one can generate are skilled with blades. This may see as an odd choice for a game like Traveller that is set in the 57th century CE, or indeed for any game in which swords and starships co-exist. Why do game authors make these choices? Just as games mix swords and starships, so do SFF novels. The trope goes way back, to the planetary romance novels of the Golden Age. Here are five examples.
Fiction Review (Legends of Men): Savage Heroes is a sword & sorcery anthology thatâs pretty rare in the U.S. Thatâs because itâs a U.K. publication. The first S&S anthology I reviewed was Swords Against Darkness. Itâs a great anthology that came highly recommended by an expert scholar in the field. Savage Heroes is better though. It captures very well the combination of historical adventure, lost world fiction, and cosmic horror that makes Sword and Sorcery unique.
Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Hard-boiled noir is an interesting subgenre. Itâs mostly remembered in the mainstream, if at all, for cheesy parodies that family sitcoms and cartoon used to do back in the 1990s. What it is remembered for is as a genre about hapless detectives in black and white 1930s settings having to find a killer among a cast of twelve or so shifty character archetypes. Plenty of fun is poked, but they hardly take the genre seriously.
Science Fiction (Scifi Scribe): Weâve all seen the memes, right? The minute the world started talking about the mere idea of a United States Space Force, we were all instantly greeted by âLOL, Space National Guard/Space Force Reserves!â All joking aside, the irreverent interservice banter and, shall we say, ârobust,â back-and-forth on social media reflects the very real, and very important, national-level discussions about creating a new military service branch.
Cinema (Jon Mollison): The birth of Dungeons and Dragons is a strange and fascinating story of how creatives can draw forth order from the froth of chaos. I went into this film expecting a lot of defensive snark about how Gary Gygax was a Johnny-come-lately who yoinked the idea of RPGs out from under Dave Arnesonâs nose. A fraudulent Edison to Arnesonâs Tesla, if you will. And there are hints of that within this film, but only hints.
Art (Mutual Art): Theron Kabrich quietly gazes at Roger Deanâs watercolor, The Gates of Delirium. He has been Deanâs friend and representative at the San Francisco Art Exchange for thirty years, selling his paintings, drawings, and prints to an international audience of collectors. Millions of copies of the image have been made. If Tolkienâs timeless classic inspired Deanâs enduring fascination with pathways at the beginning of his career, it is Robert McFarlaneâs writing about wandering journeys along the ancient tracks twisting through the British landscape that have his attention in the present.
Art (DMR Books): Stephen Fabian, as Iâve pointed out before, is a living legend in the fantasy art community. His output from the 1970s to the 2000sâboth in quality and quantityâcan only be called astounding. I covered some of that in my three-part series on his Robert E. Howard-related art. However, a friend of mine recently brought Fabianâs artwork for In Lovecraftâs Shadow to my attention. That book, in some respects, may be Stephenâs greatest sustained work. In Lovecraftâs Shadow was a collection of August Derlethâs Lovecraftian fiction published in 1998 through a joint venture by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box and Mycroft & Moran.
Review (Tea at Trianon): I remember as a twenty-two-year-old being excited when I saw a new book called the The Mists of Avalon by an author called Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mists was presented as the retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women of Camelot, which I thought was a thrilling idea. However, I found the book heavy on paganism and morbid, explicit sex scenes, but light on romance, heroism, chivalry, mystery, faith and all the qualities I had come to love in the Camelot stories. This brings us to Moira Greylandâs recent book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.
Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Iâm going to look at three of his stories that feature the same character, Sergeant Jaeger. First is âFearful Rockâ. Originally published in the February 1939 issue of Weird Tales, the central character of this novella is Lt. Lanark. He and Jaeger are leading a cavalry patrol in Missouri during the Civil War, looking for Quantrill. What they find is a young woman being sacrificed by her step-father to the Nameless One in an abandoned house under the shadow of a formation known as Fearful Rock.
Fiction (DMR Books): Tanith Lee was a force to be reckoned with in the â70s, â80s and on into the â90s. She exploded onto the SFF scene with her debut novel for DAW Books, The Birthgrave. That book was labeled at the time as being âsword-and-sorceryâ. I would probably call it heroic fantasy, but it remains a minor classic regardless of specific sub-category. During her forty-plus-year career, Tanith published ninety novels and a myriad of short stories. Her prolificity was on display right away. She quickly followed up The Birthgrave with more notable books like The Storm Lord and Volkhavaar, along with short stories like âOdds Against the Godsâ published in Swords Against Darkness II.
Science Fiction (Men of the West): The book. Not the movie. If you can even call Verhoevenâs bastardization âStarship Troopersâ at all. Robert A. Heinlein is an increasingly controversial figure in recent years, moreso than he was in his lifetime. This, of course, is due to his dubious content in his later career. But he was nothing if not influential on the genre, and his early works, such as his juvenile novels (of which this was the last), remain worth a read. We may go into Heinleinâs other works later, but the focus is not so much on the man as on the book.
D&D (Jeffroâs Space Gaming Blog): I think Gygax is pretty clear about how initiative works in the DMG. (His surprise rules do make a bit of static, though.) Hereâs my take on it: 1) DM decides what the monsters will do. Check reaction and/or morale if need be. 2) Players declare their actions. If they want to win at rpgs, they will advise a high t caller who will then speak for group.
Cthulhu Mythos (Marzaat): âBells of Horrorâ, Henry Kuttner, 1939. This is a fairly good bit of Lovecraftian fiction from Kuttner. He uses a typical Lovecraft structure. Our narrator opens by mentioning a weird event then gives the back story of what led up to it and concludes with a not all surprising event. (Sometimes Lovecraft managed to surprise with his last lines, sometimes not.)
Authors (Goodman Games): While all of Wellmanâs oeuvre is worth reading, it is his Silver John stories that most impacted the world of fantasy role-playing. Wellman is one of the names on Gygaxâs Appendix N roster of influential authors. Although no specific title is listed alongside his name, itâs been suggested that the character of Silver John influenced the bard class in D&Dâa wandering troubadour who uses song, magic, and knowledge to defeat supernatural menaces. Stripped of the pseudo-medieval trappings of D&D, the bard and Silver John become almost indistinguishable from one another.
Pulp Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): It shouldnât be any surprise that the artists that illustrated Short Stories would appear in Weird Tales and vice versa, though to a lesser degree. Fred Humiston is a good example. For many years, he illustrated half of each issue of Short Stories along with Edgar Wittmack.
Cinema (Film School Rejects): Most movie fans associate Martin Campbell with the Bond franchise and other blockbusters. However, before he became one of Hollywoodâs A-list directors, he helmed Cast a Deadly Spell, a genre-bending TV movie that originally aired on HBO back in 1991. It isnât the most known movie in his oeuvre, but itâs easily one of his most entertaining and rewatchable efforts.
Tolkien (Monsters and Manuals): I have no idea what Tolkien had in mind for the geography of Rhun and the peoples within it. But it seems to me that, while one shouldnât think of Middle Earth as being too closely paralleled with the real world, there is a case to be made that its character is roughly akin to the Eurasian steppe this side of the Urals â more specifically the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea (with the Sea of Rhun here being a bit like the Black Sea).
Gaming ( Walkerâs Retreat): The other day I posted a new BattleTech lore video. I mentioned that the channel posting that video did more to promote BattleTech than anything that the current owners of the propertyâCatalyst Game Labsâhave done. All of the other lore channels and battle report channels contribute to this effort, and it helps that Harebrainedâs adaptation is very close (but not identical, which it should have been) to the tabletop game, but thereâs sweet fuck-all for marketing from the company itself.
Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/
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Game 345: Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia (1992)
If you count the subtitle, I think this is the longest title so far.
        Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia
United States
MicroProse (developer and publisher, under its Microplay label)Â
Released 1992 for DOS
Date Started: 2 November 2019
Iâve been looking forward to Challenge of the Five Realms for a couple of years. The team behind it, working at Paragon Software, had been responsible for the 1990-1991 spate of licensed Games Designersâ Workshop (GDW) disasters, including the two MegaTraveller games, Space 1889, and Twilight: 2000. Each of the games had its qualities, but in general, the sense was that Paragon had taken on too much too fast. The gamesâ poor reviews and sales led to the collapse of Paragon and its purchase by MicroProse in 1992. Now, the team, working for more competent managers, was free to develop a game without any GDW restrictions. Would it be better or worse? Iâve been anxious to find out.
It takes a while to get into Challenge. It begins with a long, unintentionally hilarious, animated opening sequence with fully-voiced dialogue, the second 1992 game to do so (after Ultima Underworld). It accompanies a long backstory in the game manual. The two donât fully gibe with each other, but Iâll do my best to summarize below. First, we get a female voice on a black screen welcoming us to the kingdom of Alonia, one of the titular five realms, âwhere folklore and myth are a way of life.â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
I know this isnât the only flat world weâre going to see this year.
           We have a brief glimpse of Nhagardia, a flat, oval world. Because itâs flat and does not rotate, the parts that support life have always known eternal sun. This revelation sent me off on a bit of Googling. I have a basic understanding of why planets are naturally spheres due to the way their formed by aggregating rotating collections of matter. I also understand how gravity favors orbs and thus works over time to turn any shape into a roughly-spherical one. What I wonderedâand still wonder, since I couldnât find enough discuss on the topic to satisfy meâwas whether the slow process of gravity pulling a large amalgamation of matter into a sphere necessarily outpaced the same processes that give the same body an atmosphere and the conditions necessary for life. That is, if some weird freak of accident did result in a flat-ish âplanetâ (I realize the definition of âplanetâ presupposes a sphere, but you know what I mean) in stable orbit around a sun, would it be possible for such an object to trap an atmosphere and create complex life before the natural tendencies of gravity made a sphere out of it? How would gravity even work on such an object? Could an atmosphere truly exist?Â
Discussion welcome, but back to the game. We move from planet level to Castle Ballytogue, which must be based on Ballyutogue from Leon Urisâs Trinity. It is the year 1000 âA.S.â The pompous King Clesodor is haranguing his advisors for not allocating enough funds to the New Yearâs celebration. âI want this to be the greatest celebration in Aloniaâs history,â he demands. The manual doesnât have any credits for the voice actors, but Iâd swear that Clesodor is voiced by Maurice LaMarche, testing out a precursor to âThe Brainâ voice that heâd bring to Animaniacs the following year. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Clesodor meets with his advisors.
            Clesodor takes some time out from his party planning to yell at his son, the Prince, for idly reading a book. âI swear, the boy is just like his mother. Witches and seers and myths. What kind of king will you make if all you care about are mindless stories? A king is a ruler, not a dreamer!â The first bit about the mother is all the more harsh if youâve read the backstory and learned that Clesodorâs wife, Queen Feya, is in fact dead, killed in a tragic accident at âthe cliffs of Mahor.â
(I had to take a break from the game at this point to call Patrick, the British friend that Iâve talked about before. Back in 2007, we were traveling along the west coast of Ireland. He happened to mention that the last time he was there, a few years prior, heâd heard on the news that a British tourist had been killed while falling from the Cliffs of Moher. The same night, we got into Galway, checked into a hotel, turned on the TV, and immediately caught the opening headline from the local newswoman: âTragedy in County Clare today as a young man fell to his death from the Cliffs of Moher.â Ever since then, we have this ongoing joke that every Irish television news broadcast begins with a report of yet another death at the Cliffs of Moher. Maybe you had to be there.) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
The idle prince idles.
         The perspective now shifts to the Prince, a complete milquetoast, who is reading a picture book that should be far below his age. Itâs called The Legend of Nhagardia. Recently, the Prince, worried for his fatherâs health, had followed from the castle a mysterious stranger who had met with his father in private. The stranger turned out to be an ex-sorcerer named Shiliko who had been summoned to help stop the kingâs recurring nightmares. Unable to do anything, Shiliko had cast a placebo spell. When confronted by the Prince, Shiliko gave the boy the book.
The book tells the story of an ancient emperor named Shamar who, seeing that the end of his life was near, set off on a quest to extend it. Before disappearing, he divided his crown and power among his five territories. Alonia, the terrestrial realm, was given to King Adama. The elf Sandro took over Fraywood, the forest realm. Oberus ascended to rule the skies in Aerius. Lorelei, the (curiously male) king of Thalassy, took over the ocean. And inside the depths of the world, the gnome Kyke became the ruler of Alveola. Over time, the portals between realms closed and the rulers lost contact with each other. Clesodor is presumably a descendant of Adama. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
The original must have been huge.
              Suddenly, thereâs a disturbance by the window and a fearsome apparition appears. The cloaked, scaly, black-skinned creature introduces himself as Grimnoth. âThough I come to you now as a mere apparition, heed my warning,â he says. âI will return to your world on New Yearâs Day and claim power over your kingdom. You will surrender your crown to me on that day.â He continues by warning Clesodor that even in his âastral form,â he can destroy him.          Â
The kingdom is menaced by Xusia.
          Clesodor of course mouths off to Grimnoth, so Grimnoth extends his hand and vaporizes Clesodor and his advisors with a ray of light.           Â
Grimnothâs spell destroys two courtesans before it reaches the king.
        âNooooooooooooo,â the Prince shouts.            Â
âDo not want!â
           Addressing the Prince, Grimnoth says that heâs put a plague of darkness on the world, and if the Prince brings the crown to him at Castle Thiris on New Yearâs Day, heâll lift the darkness. This seems a little unfair. Before he killed Clesodor, Grimnoth was prepared to return to the castle to collect the crown. Now heâs making the Prince trek hundreds of miles to bring it to him. Thiris is in the center of the world, the seat of the former Emperor Shamar, now abandoned and monster-ridden.
The Prince vows to avenge his father and begins by ransacking his motherâs belongings, finding among them a reference to a witch named Cagliostra, who Clesodor had banished. âFather, I know you thought I was a dreamer, but Iâll avenge your death. Iâll make you proud!â the Prince declares, just before a hand appears from off-screen, and someone clocks the Prince over the head with a mace, knocking him unconscious. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
This just isnât his day.
          Paragonâs titles had all featured a MegaTraveller-inspired character creation process by which each character went through a career in a military branch or profession (or both) which shaped his or her skills and abilities. Since the protagonist of Challengeâthe Princeâhas more of a fixed background, I didnât expect the character creation process to be quite the same. It isnât. Instead, the game feeds you a number of situational questions and asks how youâd react to them.             Â
One of many, many questions in character generation.
           This is often described as Ultima IV-style character creation, but itâs not. Ultima IVâs scenarios were about pitting one virtue against another to help determine what virtue primarily guided your moral compass. Challengeâs questions are more about pitting various skills and abilities against each other, ultimately determining if youâre more of a fighter, mage, diplomat, or thiefâor a balance among them. I lost track of how many questions the game asksâI think it is in the ballpark of one hundred thousandâbut it later struck me that the âquickâ option, which just rolls random numbers for your attributes and abilities, performs just as well.
There arenât that many skills, making me hope that unlike the GDW games, this one actually uses all of them. âStealth,â âCrime,â and âFlyâ were all set to 0 when I started (the lowest score I got was otherwise 20), so perhaps it doesnât use those. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
The gameâs attributes and skills. The Prince takes a level in badass in his portrait.
         The game finally begins when the Prince wakes up in his motherâs bedchamber, head throbbing, bereft of equipment or supplies, including the crown that heâs supposed to bring to Grimnoth. He soon runs into Hastings, the dead kingâs seneschal, in the next room. Hastings explains that when the king was killed, his knights looted the castle and fled with its riches to Duke Gormond of Vinazia, who despises me. Rumors are already spreading that the Prince killed his father. Hastings recommends that I forget about Cagliostra, but if Iâm determined to seek her out, her old friend Sir Oldcastle hangs around the Boarâs Head Tavern. Hastings stays to guard the castle after giving the Prince a key to a chest.                      Â
Encountering my first NPC.
          Challengeâs interface is axonometric with continuous movement and real-time events. A row of icons offers party options, disk options, navigation options, spell options, combat options, and speech options. Of the developersâ previous titles, it most recalls Space 1889, but with some elements tossed in from other games. For instance, if youâre trying to speak to a moving NPC, you can use the âHailâ option to get him to stop; this is from MegaTraveller 2. Most commands have redundant keyboard backups except (annoyingly) movement, which has to be done with the mouse. One key Iâm using a lot is (P)ause, every time I stop to blog or something, because commenters have warned me that the game has a time limit. âRidiculously shortâ is how one described it.
I naturally started exploring the castle. As Hastings said, most of the court had fled. Sir Feldoth and Sir Elault still guarded the ramparts. Imrid the Manservant was wandering the lower halls and begged me to just give Gormond the crown. A couple more servants, Horric and Horville, were in the basement. Horric told me that a thief carried of a chest with the queenâs insignia on the lid. Dialogue so far has been entirely scripted, with the Prince (or I guess, King) responding to questions on his own. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
âI do not know, but you will die for your failure!â is an option a really good RPG would have given me.
             Finally, in one room, I found a broadsword, axe, long bow, rapier, and arrows. You basically have to hover your mouse over all objects that you think you might be able to pick up. As far as I can tell, chests and wardrobes and such are just decorations, as there is no command to open them and (F)ind never seems to do anything.        Â
Finding some weapons at last.
          In the kitchens, Wilagon Blacklost gave me the Holy Book of Equus, which has a spell called âTruth.â I tried to learn it, but the game told me that I wasted half a day and failed. I tried again, and it told me that I destroyed the book. I reloaded and figured Iâd save that for later. The kitchens also had a variety of spell components and food.
Outside the castle, some flowers and other objects joined my list of spell components. A rough character at the end of the drawbridge offered to give me a hint for 100 gold pieces. Since I started with 1,000, I paid him. He said that there are a couple of loudmouths at the local tavern who claim to have stolen the queenâs treasure chest.
I continued exploring the castle outskirts. In one shop, a man offered to sell me spells for small fees. Almost every one I chose required components that neither he nor I had, except for âWarding Spell,â âOpen Lock,â âLightning Bolt,â âInner Noise,â and âSlow.â Paying the man didnât actually get me the spellsâjust books that give me a chance of learning them. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Some of the spell shop selections.
       Elsewhere, I found a healer, a pawn shop, a weapon shop, a food store, an armor shop, and a tavern. At the tavern, I bought some chainmail and equipped it. The inventory system seems needlessly complex. From your character screen, you can go to âinventoryâ (which never seems to have anything) and separate buttons for your pouch inventory, your backpack inventory, and your chest inventory (you start with no chest). But you can also go to âgarb,â a screen with a paperdoll of the character, which also has links to inventory, pouch inventory, backpack inventory, and chest inventory. Spell components seem to show up in none of those places.           Â
Part of the confusing inventory system.
         In the tavern, I met Sir John Oldcastle and several of his friends. Oldcastle had been a skilled swordsman, but he was banished by King Clesodor for drunkenness. He is clearly based on Shakespeareâs Falstaff, although a bit more competent. I tried to enlist him into my cause, but he mocked me by calling me âMiss P.â and said that he doubted Iâd be able to stand up to Duke Gormond. He agreed to join me and help me find Cagliostra if I would bring him the Widow Frazettiâs fabled jeweled brooch.            Â
The tavern from the outside is a nice looking building.
         As I explored, it became clear that several houses had been looted in the chaos following the kingâs death, including Frazettiâs. I ultimately tracked down the bandits, the Hammerhand brothers, to a bar in the western part of the map. They were drunk, which made the subsequent combat a little easier.            Â
An NPC shows a shocking lack of respect for the king and his neighbors.
          Combat appears to take place in several phases and draws heavily from the MegaTraveller system. In the first phase you place your party members on the combat map, which is the same as the regular map without the surrounding command interface. Once combat begins, you issue orders for each characterâtarget a particular enemy, cast a spell, defend an area, or moveâand then unpause the game. Characters act on their own until you pause again and issue new orders.           Â
The game has me fight the second Hammerhand brother as the first lies dead above me.
          In short order, I killed the brothers and looted their bodies for my motherâs chest, the Frazetti brooch, and a bracelet that they pillaged from another NPC. I returned the brooch to Oldcastle, who joined me, but it occurred to me that I should have tried returning it to the Frazettis first.
I also found the house of the wizard Shiliko. He had hung himself. A note nearby indicated that he blamed himself for the appearance of Grimnoth and all the chaos that followed, but it didnât explain his reasoning. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Shilikoâs hut, with Shiliko hanging in the upper-left.
      At this point, I think Iâve exhausted exploring the castle. Judging by the world map, there are a couple of other cities in Alonia to visit, and then the other realms. Oldcastle said that weâd find clues for Cagliostra in the city of Farinor, so I suppose thatâs where Iâll go next.            Â
Oldcastle insultingly joins the party.
        Itâs been a relatively promising start. Although aspects of the animated sequence were a little goofy, the backstory is strong. The interface is a little clunky but not overly so. I like that weâre already seeing side-questsâone of the few things that Paragon did well in its previous titles. Dialogue is verbose enough to actually give characterizations to the NPCs, but I wish there were more options from the PCâs side. Overall, I look forward to my next session and seeing how the game develops.
Time so far: 3 hours
source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-345-challenge-of-the-five-realms-spellbound-in-the-world-of-nhagardia-1992/
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