#i think part of the reason why the other art programs are as widespread is in fact because they can all read and create psd files

[yume-fanfare]

"why don't artists finally start boycotting adobe" YOU THINK I'D BE USING THIS STUFF IF I ACTUALLY HAD A CHANCE NOT TO???

[mediaeval-muse]

The idea that college faculty and their allies have somehow failed to “make the case” for the value of their work is one of the hoariest clichés of higher ed commentary—our equivalent to the legendary “since the dawn of time”-style opening for undergraduate papers. A Google search for “the case for the humanities” turns up multiple books and articles. The tradition is so well established that new contributors can even engage in ironic meta-commentary on its conventions, as when a recent column argued that the best case for the humanities is precisely that there is no case. It is clear enough why academics would be drawn to a solution that draws on their particular skillsets of persuasion and argumentation, but the demand that we “make the case” is naïve and impotent.

For a generation or more, institutions of higher education have been actively dismantled—in many ways, transformed beyond recognition—by powerful constituencies who are actively hostile to academic values. These constituencies include conservative politicians who view widespread access to liberal arts education as a recipe for social upheaval, and business leaders who want to shunt the expense of training workers for highly technical jobs onto the university system (and ultimately the students themselves). They do not need to be told of the benefits of a liberal arts education. They have often benefited from such an education themselves and are happy to provide it for their own children—including at elite Ivy League schools that do not even have the kind of vocational programs that they recommend so fervently for everyone else. They are well aware of the potential of liberal arts degrees to produce engaged and informed citizens who can navigate an ever-changing job market with confidence and creativity. That is precisely why they want to keep a true liberal arts education as a preserve of the elite, consigning everyone else to narrowly vocational paths that teach them how best to serve those above them in the social hierarchy.

The problem is not persuasion, but power—and propaganda.

...

The alliance of conservative politicians and business interests has been so successful at shaping the cultural common sense around higher education that the areas where we liberal arts faculty members are best equipped to “make the case” are completely missing from the agenda. How can we “make the case” to a society that does not have ears to hear it?

Admittedly, even within the impoverished terms of debate imposed by interests hostile to higher education, liberal arts degrees fare surprisingly well. Even the business press has noticed. Forbes reported last fall that the much-lauded STEM fields do not provide the promised economic advantage over traditional liberal arts fields. As reporter Derek Newton puts it, “getting a STEM education may help you get a good job early but if you want a good career, you’re better off in liberal arts lane. In other words, even if you’re only measuring money, a liberal arts education is probably worth a ton more than most people may think.”

...

The reason for this is clear: the narrowly technical skills that students learn in such fields quickly shift from cutting-edge to out-of-date, while the broader and more flexible skills conveyed by liberal arts fields prove more durably valuable. Yet the cultural common sense is that students who major in liberal arts fields will die on the street—or less dramatically, wind up as underemployed baristas, a fate that is actually more likely to befall the ever-expanding number of business majors that universities pump out each year. This misconception is widespread even among those most sympathetic to the liberal arts, including many faculty members in those fields themselves.

...

Where does this disconnect come from? Frankly, it results from a systematic campaign of lies by the same allied interests. On a political level, liberal arts graduates are less likely to fall for the kinds of simplistic propaganda spewed by Fox News, Breitbart, and right-wing talk radio, which conservative politicians have increasingly relied on to rally their electoral base. On the economic level, the agenda may initially seem less clear. Why would business leaders encourage as many students as possible to go (at least initially) into precisely the highest-paying fields?

Here I think we might benefit from recalling one of the first lessons of Econ 101: all things being equal, what happens when the supply of something increases? Obviously, the price goes down. In other words, by churning out as many STEM majors as possible, institutions of higher education are effectively commodifying those skills—and charging those future professionals for the privilege of depressing wages in their field. And after congratulating them for graduating with a job offer in hand, colleges and universities turn immediately to the task of training up the next cohort with cutting-edge skills so that their predecessors can be easily replaced with cheaper, younger workers.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t believe it is the mission of higher education to perpetuate this destructive dynamic. Nor do I think it makes much sense on a purely institutional level, because STEM programs are expensive to run. Labs, state-of-the-art computers, and other high-end equipment all cost a lot of money—and even in fields without those capital requirements, such as math or economics, the cost of retaining faculty is higher due to their greater range of employment opportunities.

By contrast, liberal arts programs are intrinsically cheap to run, often requiring little more than a chalkboard and some Penguin Classics. Adjunctification has made them even less costly. An honest accounting would show that, in most institutions, liberal arts courses are cross-subsidizing STEM fields—but yet again, the cultural common sense, often including among faculty members themselves, runs the opposite way. Indeed, when it comes time to make cuts, liberal arts programs are always first to the chopping block.

...

Why kill inexpensive programs that often serve as profit-centers while doubling down on the huge capital investments associated with STEM? The answer is that the health of individual institutions is a subordinate concern, at best, for the business interests who set the agenda for U.S. higher education—as evidenced by the fact that so many institutions are perpetually on the verge of failing even as aggregate demand for higher education has never been higher. In addition to the benefits of STEM fields over liberal arts programs already mentioned, the hegemony of STEM creates a situation where colleges and universities are more dependent on major donations, which corporations and wealthy individuals are obviously in the best position to provide. Those institutions which borrow to build new facilities then often need to hike tuition to service the debt—further incentivizing students to pursue supposedly more economically viable majors.

...

The only answer is to have leadership that already shares academic values, which necessarily presupposes restoring faculty control over our institutions. Part of that will mean reasserting—or in some cases establishing—traditions of faculty self-governance. And that can’t happen as long as we allow cost-cutting administrators to divide us into a privileged minority of tenured and tenure-track faculty and a disposable majority of contingent faculty and graduate students. Strong, fully inclusive unions that fight for decent working conditions for the whole faculty are the only viable way to form an independent power base that gives faculty members real leverage over the administration. Given how entrenched the destructive “best practices” are at most existing institutions, though, more radical measures—such as founding new, faculty-run cooperatives—may be more effective. Whatever specific strategies we choose, however, we need to keep firmly in mind that the answer is not persuasion, but power.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN FOUNDERS

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Isn't the pointy-haired bosses. In OO languages, you can, even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world. There is a very sharp dropoff in performance among VC firms, because in many cases the language layer won't have to change at all. Then I'm worried. VC firm will not screw you too outrageously, because other founders would avoid them if word got out. Large-scale investors tend to put startups in three categories: successes, failures, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels. And the big hits often look risky at first. The problem is, for the company to have a low valuation. In fact, if you have a browser on your cell phone? N elements.

But as well as Lisp, so they get the pick of all the parts, as ITA presumably does, you can make the search results useless, because the first results could be dominated by lame sites that had bid the most. If you want to work on what you like, and let people design whatever object systems they want as libraries. Will there be a phone in your palm pilot?1 So the total number of new shares to the angel; if there were 1000 shares before the deal, the capitalization table looks like this: shareholder shares percent—VCs 650 33.2 My guess is that the concepts we use in everyday life that you don't have time for your ideas to evolve, and b you're often forced to take deals you don't like it. I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it is a byword for impossibility.3 Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. 5 are now widespread. That idea is not exactly novel. If VCs got de facto control of the company 2/4 2. You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then think about how to make money, but what you'd like to be able to avoid the usual chicken and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most important things you can understand about startups.

The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand.4 Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house for dinner. VCs also insist that prior to the deal the option pool is down to 13. We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in particular, Internet startups are still only a fraction of what the finished product will do, but that dramatic peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a complete picture. Could you describe the person as an animal? That scenario may seem unlikely now, but Fortran I didn't have them.5 The goal is the same as intelligence.6 All they need is a language that actually seems better than others that are available, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline for several years after, and finally issued in 2003.7 Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. That's what happened with domestic servants. Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you get less dilution.8

So someone investigated, and sure enough, that patent application had continued in the pipeline for several years after, and finally issued in 2003. And yet this guy will be almost entirely overlooked by the press. These heaps o' boilerplate are a problem for small startups, because it's always the oldest it's ever been.9 If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money to pay a little more equity, but being slightly underfunded teaches them an important lesson. This is understandable with angels; they invest on a smaller scale and don't like to get across about startups, that's it. So when I ran into the Yahoo exec I knew from working there in the late 1950s. I know a lot of people wish that hacking was mathematics, or at least to know what they want from me. Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be smarter. Barely usable, I admit, this is true.

We might have to give definite if implicit advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.10 Maybe mostly in one hub, and it seems to consume all your attention. But I have a hunch that the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the right kind of place for developing software. They're not pretending; they want to believe you're a hot prospect, because it is the cool, new programming language. And this tradition had so long to develop that nontechnical people like managers and venture capitalists also learned it. Some languages are better than either of them?11 At the very least, you're supposed to be working on their company, not worrying about investors. They'd rather lose the deal than establish a precedent of VCs competitively bidding against one another. Wall Street's language. Since people interested in designing programming languages, a lot of good publicity for the VCs.

Notes

Kant.

Even the cheap kinds of startups will generally raise large amounts of money from it.

There's a good plan in which internal limits are expressed.

And the reason the US. Bankers continued to dress in jeans and t-shirt, they're probably a real partner. Record labels, for many Americans the decisive change in how Stripe felt. You have to do business with any firm employing anyone who had died decades ago.

I find hardest to get going, e. Economic inequality has been decreasing globally. Microsoft, incidentally, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard Business School at the end of World War II had become so common that their system can't be buying users; that's the situation you find known boring ideas intolerable. This has, like arithmetic drills, instead of crawling back repentant at the network level, because the illiquidity of progress puts them at the lack of movement between companies combined with self-imposed.

The wave of hostile takeovers in the country. This seems unlikely at the end of economic inequality is not to pay employees this way, they'd be called acting Japanese. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow. Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them.

That's the difference between being judged as a type of product for it.

If you actually started acting like adults.

The existence of people. Why go to college, you'll be well on your own mind. All languages are equally powerful in the sort of wealth—that startups usually lose money at all.

This includes mere conventions, like the intrusive ads popular on Delicious, but trained on corpora of stupid and non-broken form, that it killed the best in the sense that if the present, and FreeBSD 1.

And while they may try allowing up to the principles they discovered. Xxvii. Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, but art is a big change in the cover story of creation in the US News list?

Thanks to Chad Fowler, Patrick Collison, Dan Giffin, Geoff Ralston, Trevor Blackwell, and Stan Reiss for the lulz.

[aion-rsa]

The Nintendo Fan Games That Tried to Revitalize Pokémon, Metroid, and Super Smash Bros.

https://ift.tt/331g4Zh

In 2016, Milton Guasti’s Metroid 2 remake (AM2R) was released online after a decade of work. One day later, Nintendo sent DMCA takedown requests to the websites that hosted it. Many fans were shocked by the decision. Guasti seems more surprised by the efficiency of it.

“Throughout the years I started seeing that [a takedown] could be possible,” Guasti recalls. “What I was not expecting was that it happened so fast.”

New fan-made gaming projects are developed and distributed all the time, and often embraced by studios, but as those in the creative community know, Nintendo has historically been adamant about protecting its properties and taking down fan games. From novelty game mods to NSFW art of Bowser, there’s no guarantee that fan creations based on Nintendo games will survive online for long.

So what makes someone spend years on a game that may only be widely available for one day? For Guasti, it was the chance to learn programming within a fascinating framework.

“I decided I wanted to practice a little bit of programming, so I downloaded GameMaker and did a couple of mini-games here and there just to learn a little bit of how game logic and design are done,” Guasti says. “Since most of the effort in designing something is getting the first couple of decisions, remaking something that’s already done seemed like a good idea to save time. I had recently played Metroid: Zero Mission on the Game Boy Advance [a remake of 1986’s Metroid], and since there was no similar treatment for Metroid 2, I said, ‘Well, this is a black and white game. Whatever I do with ripped sprites might be better than this. So I guess I can make a Metroid game.'”

For Guasti, the appeal of making his own Metroid game was more about the design of the franchise than his overwhelming love for the series. He described himself as more a Metroid “enthusiast” than a “hardcore fan” when he started working on the game. For others looking to learn how to develop and design games, the choice of which game to use as a starting point comes down to franchises they’ve always loved.

“It was my childhood dream to make my own Pokémon game,” says fan developer Involuntary Twitch. “Thus began my nine-year journey with fan game development as a hobby.”

That hobby became Pokémon Uranium, a Pokémon fan game the size of a major franchise installment. Involuntary Twitch wanted it to feature all of the things that she loved about Pokémon games: “pixel art, exploring, discovering new creatures, and uncovering mysteries.” For the many ways that Uranium was designed to be an homage to Pokémon, there was at least one element Twitch hoped to improve.

“I have been my entire life saying that Pokémon can and probably should do a little bit better with the stories,” Involuntary Twitch says. “I don’t think Pokémon needs to tell this grand, epic story with all these plot twists and betrayals and darker themes…but I think that what makes a good story is just the feeling that your actions actually matter, that the things you do are instrumental to the outcome of the plot.”

As the tale of a young trainer whose mother was lost in a nuclear accident roughly 10 years before the mysterious appearance of radiated Pokémon coinciding with the construction of a new power plant, Uranium‘s plot is darker, more complicated, and perhaps a bit more mature than what many of the games in the Pokémon franchise aim for. It’s also a big part of the reason why Uranium was widely hailed as a breath of fresh air for a franchise that largely sticks to the same formula put in place in the ’90s.

Yet, the story of Uranium that many more people are familiar with is what happened after the game was released. Much like AM2R, Uranium was hit by DMCA takedown requests issued by Nintendo shortly after the project’s 2016 release. After over nine years of work, Uranium‘s widespread availability could be measured in hours. Once again, the move did not come as a complete surprise.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“I think our mentality was that we’d already had multiple playable releases out of the game, and so whatever its ultimate fate may be, we owed it to ourselves,” says Involuntary Twitch of the decision to continue working on the project despite the likelihood that it would eventually be taken down. “This is the single biggest project that any of us had ever done in our entire lives…So, we owed it to ourselves and we owed it to the people who were excited to see this game fully realized to see it all the way through the end”

So why didn’t Involuntary Twitch and her creative partner JV just make a copyright-free clone of a Pokémon game? 

“I did consider it, but I mean, at that point, we were in too deep,” Twitch says. “Literally every single part of the game would need to be thrown out and reconstituted to the point where it would be unrecognizable. And in exchange for doing that, we would get way less exposure, and we would basically just be filing the serial numbers off something that’s meant to be our love letter to a franchise…I feel like doing that would’ve drained what drove us to make this game in the first place, which was our love for Pokémon.”

That certainly seems to be the dilemma. Many Nintendo fan creators are often inspired by their love for Nintendo games, but there are times when Nintendo can be hard to love. The company will go years without even acknowledging beloved franchises but it’ll immediately litigate when fans pursue the projects and ideas Nintendo won’t. 

Those bespoke projects are often designed to appeal to a section of the fanbase Nintendo has sometimes ignored. Uranium featured a more mature story not commonly seen in Pokémon games. AM2R focused on one of Nintendo’s most complex (and often ignored) franchises. And in terms of notorious Nintendo fan projects designed to address something that was missing, few titles are as compelling as Project M: a Super Smash Bros. Brawl mod designed not to reinvent the wheel but simply make that game feel closer to its predecessor.

“Brawl took away almost everything that many people enjoyed about Melee from a gameplay design perspective,” says former Project M webmaster Taylor “Warchamp7” Giampaolo. “The floatier gravity, the slower gameplay, the removal of many character control nuances like dash dancing and wave dashes, and random factors like tripping that took control away from the player all contributed to a game we found less enjoyable. Project M‘s main goal was to bring back the elements of Melee that we all enjoyed like the faster pacing and balance of risk/reward.”

On the surface, a mod like Project M probably comes across as the work of a fanbase that felt Nintendo had gotten it wrong. Yet, that’s not necessarily the case. If anything, the game is more often talked about as a kind of “What if?” scenario designed to explore what may have happened if the competitive community that embraced Melee had become the primary audience for future installments.

“Project M is definitely our alternate take on what we’d like the series to look like,” Giampaolo says. “Melee‘s competitive nature is sometimes considered a happy accident, and I’d say Project M is a deliberate execution of those competitive aspects.”

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Melee‘s expansive multiplayer modes make it clear the game was intended to be played competitively between friends, but what many believe Nintendo did not necessarily anticipate was how the game would be embraced by more “hardcore” fighting game fans. What was essentially conceived as a Nintendo mascot brawler became a mainstay in the competitive fighting game community, and some of the things that made the game so different are also what made it popular among the genre’s most dedicated fans.

“Melee‘s mechanics offered an extreme freedom of movement that provides limitless options in various situations,” says Smash Bros. modder Dan Salvato. “I think most notably, simply moving your character around on the screen is extremely fun in itself. Most fighting games are balanced around what you can’t do in any given situation, but Melee kind of rips out the brakes and hands the keys to the player. You might get a lot of Melee die-hards giving you a list of reasons that Melee is ‘better,’ but I think that it just provides a different experience that captures a different audience of players.”

As a look into a kind of alternate reality for the Smash Bros. franchise, it’s easy to again wonder why the Project M team simply didn’t create their own Smash Bros.-like game based on Melee‘s mechanics. Much like with Pokémon Uranium, the decision to stick to the Smash Bros. name and the many copyright conflicts that come with it can be attributed to a combination of love and logistics.

“Everyone on the Project M team was incredibly talented but a lot of members had skill sets that were specifically tailored for modding Brawl,” Giampaolo says. “Some of the people that did programming on the team didn’t know any normal programming languages; they only knew assembly and had learned it through modding. Some of the animators didn’t have any experience with industry animation tools; they only knew how to use the community-created ones designed for Brawl‘s file formats. I consider their work even more impressive because of that but it means they wouldn’t have had an easy transition to making a ‘real’ game at the time.”

The Project M team was aware of the risks associated with the game they were making, and, as such, decided to institute a series of rules that they hoped would help protect the game against an immediate takedown. For instance, they encouraged people to play a “hackless” version of the mod that still required them to purchase Brawl, and they didn’t add new characters to the mod that weren’t already present in Brawl in some way.

In a way, the guidelines worked. Project M wasn’t hit with an immediate takedown request, but the constant threat of future legal actions and the desire to start on an original project accelerated the end of its development. But before that happened, Project M was embraced by the Smash Bros. competitive community who began using it and other modded versions of Smash Bros. as the feature attraction in many tournaments.

It doesn’t seem many of those fans expected Nintendo to embrace Project M or officially support any Smash Bros. mod. However, many of them wanted Nintendo to at least recognize their passion for the series’ competitive elements and how many felt Melee, in particular, best represented those qualities. There’s a degree to which the competitive Smash Bros. community lived in that same “under the radar” territory that Project M tried to exist in, and there’s a degree to which the competitive Smash community just wanted to be seen as fans who built a tournament scene based on love and shared passions. When Nintendo finally noticed them, the real trouble started.

“Over the years, the most community backlash hasn’t come from Nintendo not caring, but it has come from Nintendo interfering,” Salvato explains. “I think a decade ago, the Smash community felt more desperate for Nintendo’s acknowledgment…but once Nintendo stepped in, though, all of their regulations followed, and the Smash community started to question whether they actually wanted it.”

In 2020, Nintendo sent a cease and desist letter to a beloved Smash Bros. tournament that planned to use a Smash Bros. Melee emulator to host a digital event during the Covid-19 pandemic. The letter even targeted the event itself, which meant the hosts couldn’t simply feature the latest Smash Bros. game instead. After years of being ignored, the Smash Bros. competitive community was dealing with the fallout of being seen. While Nintendo has helped event organizers in the past, it was that lingering threat of things quickly going the other way that so often made the relationship uncomfortable and, at times, impossible.

Guasti can tell you more about Nintendo’s history of acknowledging the work of fans in their own strange way. A year after shutting down AM2R, Nintendo revealed and released an official Metroid 2 remake for the 3DS called Metroid: Samus Returns. Given that the franchise had been dormant for some time and that an unofficial remake of that same game had just been taken down a year before, the reveal of Samus Returns came as a shock to many, including Guasti.

“It was quite a surprise. Nobody saw it coming,” Guasti recalls. “Once I finished seeing the trailer, it was like, ‘Hmm, so that’s how the Metroid fights look with a budget.'”

Read more

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Samus Returns and AM2R are actually quite different in terms of their visuals and mechanics, but in a way, the differences made the speed at which the latter was taken down before the former was released that much more surprising.

“If you think about it, it’s super fascinating,” Guasti says. “These two points of view of the same story have been developed in parallel. At least one of the parties didn’t know that the other existed. Even if there are a couple of elements in common, the way that they conveyed the game feel and the whole environmental design, how Samus moves around and all of the elements in the design are completely different.”

Maybe there’s an alternate timeline where the differences between the two games meant both were allowed to exist, but Guasti doesn’t seem to dwell much on that. As strange as it may seem for someone who spent so many years of their lives on a project they couldn’t profit from, Guasti seems satisfied with how things worked out.

“I can’t be mad,” Guasti says. “I reached the audience that I wanted to reach. I learned everything that I wanted to learn from that…I’m really happy how that stage in my life turned out.”

Considering that Guasti’s work on AM2R helped him find a job in the video game industry where he later worked on the Metroidvania title Ori and the Will of the Wisps, you may think that the fate of AM2R is only easy to accept given that it led to a career and all of the benefits that come with that. Yet, there are many creators who share the belief that the real value of their work was the chance to share something with other fans like them.

In fact, some wouldn’t even mind if Nintendo essentially released the games they worked on without even giving them direct credit, much less a check.

“I would be ecstatic,” Giampaolo says of the possibility of Nintendo releasing its own Project M without acknowledging the mod’s creators. “We created Project M because it was the game that we wanted to play and it is, to date, my favorite entry in the genre. I’d love nothing more than for more players to get to enjoy that.”

Of course, Project M is a mod to an existing Nintendo game, and its creators were always aware of the fine line they were walking when working on it. They also got to end it on something closer to their own terms, and the mod is still massively popular among its intended fanbase to this day. But what about Involuntary Twitch whose project was hit by one of the swiftest and most complete takedowns in fan game history? How would she feel if the next Pokémon game was essentially a copy of Uranium but she received no credit?

“I’d be thrilled,” Twitch says. “I wanted to play one of my own games on a Nintendo handheld my entire life. And even if they didn’t put my name in the credits, I would still know that I was there, that I had inspired some type of its DNA. That, to me, would be enough. I mean, I am not here to chase clout. I don’t make fan games for attention. I make it because I like to do it and it’s a fun hobby for me.”

While there is something exceptional about those who create to fulfill a vision and share it with the world, this mentality seems to be the lifeblood of the fan game community.

“The modding mentality is that you have a community that loves a game so much that they want to extend its lifespan and help each other enjoy the game even more,” Salvato says. “In my experience, mods are always full of a lot more love for Nintendo than they are of disappointment. Modders are proud and passionate, and they love what they do.”

You could argue this love is rarely reciprocated by Nintendo, but some creators suggest we may need to change our perception of success by recognizing that completing and sharing these projects can be more important than profits and fame. 

“I hope that it brought them some joy because, to me, creating stuff is something that defines who I am,” Involuntary Twitch says. “I hope that it can help other people to find out who they are and develop their skills and find a place where they belong.”

Why does someone spend years of their lives on a project that can’t make money, will probably be shut down, and will never be embraced by the company that inspired them? The answers vary but seem to often come down to a surprisingly simple philosophy. You can spend years waiting for Nintendo to do make something, or you can spend that time doing it yourself and letting the memories, the love, and the quality of the games justify it all.

The post The Nintendo Fan Games That Tried to Revitalize Pokémon, Metroid, and Super Smash Bros. appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/331lELf

[just-lils]

11 Questions

I was tagged by @jedifish81 and @graciecatfamilyband last Saturday. Sorry it took me so long to answer these. 

GCFB’s questions:

1. Do you drink tea, and if so, what is your favorite kind?

TEA!! I am completely worthless without my cup of Irish Breakfast in the morning. I like most black, white and fruit teas, but I will not drink green tea. Bleh.

2. If you were Leia, after ROTJ, would you train with Luke to become a Jedi, or stick to politics? Why?  

Dude, if I was Leia, I’d have died just outside my prison cell in ANH. I’m not nearly as gutsy and resourceful as she is. If by some miracle I survived post-ROTJ, I’d probably do both. I think it would be useful to learn to control the Force- both so that I don’t lose control accidentally and meditation techniques might prove useful. I don’t know if I could leave politics behind completely, but I wouldn’t be gunning for the top job. I’d like to represent the Alderaanian people in some capacity in the New Republic.

3. What musical album would you recommend to a friend?

Maybe Cursive’s ‘Ugly Organ’.......but.....I’d rather make you a mix tape.

4. Which part of a cat is more beautiful: their whiskers or their beanie toes? (You have to pick one. No both, or neither, or other body part will be accepted!)

BEANIE TOES!!!! Paws down, beanie toes. I like to see my cat flex his little feet at me.

5. What is the plot of a fanfic you’ve always wanted to write but probably never will (or won’t for a very, very long time)? (Alternatively: Fannish daydreams that you don’t want to write down.)

It’s a secret!

6. What is your favorite number? Any particular reason?

42. I’m lame. The reason is I’m lame. I love the Hitchhikers Guide.

7. What would you tell a person new to Tumblr and/or fandom? 

We’re all mad here. No, wait.... a) Don’t be afraid to reach out to that artist/writer you love. They aren’t scary. We’re all a bunch of nerds who like the same stuff, so they would probably really like it if you wanted to ask them questions about their work. You might probably make some new friends. 

b) If reblog something, be sure to credit the creator!

8. What’s the hardest thing you did this week?

Remain breathing. At the risk of bringing down the room, I had a really bad bout of depression for the last 2 weeks or so. It’s been hard to function. 

9. Favorite sitcom?

Parks and Rec.

10. What are you most looking forward to in 2018?

My new lab opens in July. Some of the laboratories in Pathology Department are moving buildings and Microbiology is getting a brand new lab with Total Lab Automation Line (that is a BIG FUCKING DEAL). I also helped design the space and will be doing the programming AND helping with the validation of the instrument. YAY!

I’m also going to take a watercolor class. Because I wanna.

11. One thing you’ve always wanted your followers to know about you but thought you’d never get asked.

I’m practicing the art of making dumpster fires into home heating units. 

Fish’s questions:

1. Fic recommendations? Why?

This is hard. I have SO many favorites that I love for a myriad of reasons. If I could recommend just two, I would recommend New Hope, Indiana by @cicatrick and The Incident by @corellian-smuggler. I had been pretty new to SW fic when those were first posted and I remember reading them and my mind being absolutely blown. They completely changed my mind about what fanfic was and what it could be. Truthfully, I had always been dismissive of fanfic in the past. I never found anything that grabbed (or held) my attention in my old fandom and now I can’t get enough. Y’all are such a talented bunch!

2. Favorite song and why?

My favorite song changes pretty constantly. Current favorites include: “Do you feel it” by Chaos Chaos (because I’m an emo pile of garbage) and The Lumineers cover of “This Must Be The Place” (who also likes cellos).

3. Favorite headcanon/fanon? Why?

I don’t know as I have a favorite but I do have a least favorite: Leia getting raped. Like, at any point, be it on the Death Star or at Jabba’s. I like how people have handled the aftermath of that head canon if it is theirs, but personally I can’t do stories that feature sexual violence.

4. Best piece of advice you’ve ever been given. 

They aren’t mistakes; they’re learning opportunities. 

5. Dream job. Why?

Pastry chef! Because I like to make things for people. I’m not great at words (speaking them or writing them) but nothing says “Hey, you’re rad.” like a homemade cookie/pie/cake. 

6. If you could time travel, when would you go? What would you change? Why?

Interesting question. I can’t answer that, because I wouldn’t travel further back than the 1960s or 70s. I need women’s rights and modern(ish) medicine. I can’t think of anything that I’d change- mostly because I don’t think I’d be able to change anything. If I could change things by fiat, then...stopping the widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons......i guess.

7. Favorite gift anyone has ever given you? Why?

On my first birthday that my husband and I were together, he made me a little book of doodles with a small gift (a sticker, a belt buckle) attached to each page. The cover was a drawing of a penguin doing science. I have never taken it apart- it has a lot of sentimental value.

8. Do you like toast? What’s your favorite? (I love toast and am curious). 

It’s not my favorite breakfast food, but I do like it. I love toast and peanut butter, especially if I’m sick.

9. If you could as anyone a question, who would you ask? What’s the question? Why?

I can’t think of an interesting question for just one person. I’d want to pester Jonas Salk about vaccines and virology, bother Neil DeGrasse Tyson about gravitational waves, and give Hedy Lamarr ALL THE HIGHFIVES!

10. Favorite place. Why?

Mmmm...either Huron National Park in Michigan (where I went camping as a kid), Smoky Mountain National Park (also a great place to backpack/camp) or Ireland (because it’s just beautiful and full of nice people, good music/food, and SHEEP).

11. Neverending Story or The Last Unicorn or both. Why?

.........I’ve not seen either of these. Neverending Story is the one with the Dog-dragon thing, right?

Thanks for asking me things, guys! Sadly, I lack the mental fortitude to come up with questions, much less tag people. My brain is a scrambled egg. I’m sorry.

[shirlleycoyle]

Tracking Down DOPE, the First Computer Language for Normal Humans

BASIC holds an important place in computer programming canon. Hugely popular in the 70s and 80s this programming language introduced an entire generation to computing. The reason for its widespread adoption was simple: BASIC wasn't meant for programmers, it was designed for beginners. The language meshed well with the egalitarian worldview of early home computing. If you could type then you could become a computer user, and if you could become a computer user you could become a programmer.

BASIC didn't come from nowhere. Like any language it has a family tree complete with phylums and roots. The descendants of BASIC are fairly easy to spot, Visual BASIC is about as far afield as they get. But it's ancestry is a different story that not many people know about. The language that inspired a generation does, in fact, have a predecessor called the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or DOPE.

That name's probably not familiar, but that shouldn't be a surprise. I ran into it almost by chance. Once I learned of this obscure language I found myself in a pretty deep rabbit hole. At the bottom I became one of the few people to run a DOPE program in nearly 60 years. The language is strange, but undeniably shows the skeleton of BASIC starting to form.

What is DOPE, and where does it fit into the larger story of BASIC?

The history of computing is easy to sum up in terms of problems. In the corporate parlance of IBM the worst of these problems were once called dragons, evocative of monsters that programmers were sent out to slay. In the earliest days of the computer one of the biggest dragons around was accessibility. That is, how to get people using computers in the first place. Early computers were hulking beasts in their own right: huge, expensive, and difficult to use. Most often programmers never even touched computers themselves. Instead they would drop off stacks of punched cards for technicians to carefully feed into well protected machines.

In isolation a computer is a novelty. It can hum, crunch numbers, and heat up a room. You need people to actually make computers useful, the more people the better. The state of the art in the late 50s was progressing at a steady pace, but there just weren't enough people in the game. To make matters worse access to machines formed a tight bottleneck. It was never disputed that computers were going to be the future. How exactly that future would develop was another matter.

Programming languages came into being. FORTRAN, ALGOL, and a handful of ancient dialects have their roots in this period. The whole point in developing FORTRAN was to make computing more accessible to non-computer scientists. The key word here being scientists. If you follow FORTRAN's logic then computers are tools for research, something you tuck away in a lab. And while that's one important application it's a limited one. In the grand scheme of things not that many people are scientists. Luckily for us not everyone was a devotee of FORTRAN's vision of the future.

Enter the dragon slayers of our story: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Kemeny was the longtime chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth college, and Kurtz was his colleague and fellow researcher.

During WWII Kemeny was involved in the Manhattan Project as a mathematician. While on the project he worked directly with John von Neumann, one of the key figures in early computing. Kemeny spent a year on the project crunching numbers and running figures. In early 1945 his work was done using cumbersome IBM tabulating machines. By the end of the year the first electronic digital computers became operational, and Kemeny witnessed their impact on the Manhattan Project firsthand. The next year Kemeny wrote his first program.

Thomas Kurtz came to the field only slightly later. In 1951 Kurtz attended one of UCLA's Summer Sessions where he saw a computer running for the first time. At the time he was enrolled in Pricneton's graduate program for mathematics. That demo was enough to interest him. Once he learned to program, computing became an integral part of his career. Both saw for themselves how computers changed their own lives, and they realized the technology wouldn't stop there. Computers would only get better and more widespread, the future was going to be digital.

Surrounded by young and impressionable minds the duo set out a task for themselves: teach every student at Dartmouth how to use a computer. STEM students at the college were already being exposed to computers, at least in a limited sense. But that only accounted for a fraction of the student population.

How can you teach an English student to talk to a computer? Why would an aspiring psychologist care about silicon? Sure, computers were going to change everything for everyone. That's nice to say in a lecture, but how do you introduce students to machines?

This would eventually lead to BASIC. Unlike its contemporaries BASIC was designed for non-scientists, and really for non-programmers. Unnecessary constructs were stripped out, data was simplified, syntax was reduced to the bare minimum. The final language would be a masterpiece of restraint. It's not a language a programmer can love but for the vast majority of the populace it's easy to learn.

Compared to its contemporaries BASIC is simple, almost to a fault. Take FORTRAN as an example. In that language variables need to be declared with specific data types, and variable declarations need to be made in specific locations within a program. BASIC doesn't use explicit types, any variable can hold anything you want. You don't even need to declare a variable, just say "LET A = 1" and you are done. Even BASIC's syntax is a breath of fresh air. The language only uses letters, numbers, and a few mathematical operators. You don't have to deal with line endings or brackets.

The downside is that more powerful features are dropped in favor of simplicity. Objects, abstraction, even the aforementioned variable typing, are all absent. BASIC offers just the necessities.

On campus BASIC was a hit. Teachers integrated the language into classes, and students were happy to adopt it. The transition to home computers was an obvious choice. BASIC became the de facto introduction to the digital realm for millions.

The most authoritative source on BASIC's development is the aptly named "Back to BASIC", co-authored by Kemeny and Kurtz themselves. This is where I first encountered DOPE. Or, rather, where I first saw the language mentioned. During the late 50s and early 60s the duo experimented with how to introduce students to computers, specifically looking for a programming language for the absolute novice. When existing languages proved ill fit for this task they shifted to creating a new programming language.

The Dartmouth math department was armed with an LGP-30 computer, a relatively cheap and underpowered machine. In total it had 30 kilobytes of RAM to work with. That computer would see years of hard use and strange experiments. DOPE was one of those experiments, but details in "Back to BASIC" are slim. In a passage near the beginning of the book Kemeny wrote:

"I had a high school student, Sidney Marshall, who was taking calculus at Dartmouth. I had him experiment with a language called DOPE on that same LGP-30. DOPE was too primitive to be useful, but it was the precursor of BASIC."

DOPE was used on the math department's computer and Kemeny supervised it's creation. As a programmer myself I don't really do mysteries—I much prefer resolutions—and this was a massive mystery to me. I've written a good deal of BASIC, it wasn't my first language but it was a big part of my diet early on. I always assumed it was it's own language isolated from any others, and I think that's an easy mistake to make. BASIC doesn't look like anything but BASIC. It's name doesn't hint at some larger lineage. I was left with a glaring hole in my knowledge, and as I soon realized I wasn't the only one out of the loop.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

Running DOPE

There isn't that much readily accessible information about DOPE. Notably a passage written by Thomas Kurts for the book "History of Programming Languages" has a small chunk of code. It's a handful of lines of DOPE, not enough to understand the language but just enough to confirm it's existence. Scouring through interviews and citations I started to build up a picture. DOPE had been developed in 1962. It was only used for a single term in a single math class. It was a step towards accessible programming but didn't go far enough.

The trail led me to a file folder tucked away in Dartmouth's archive. The manuscript within was simply titled "Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment", filed under a collection of Kurtz's notes. The paper was written in 1962, and for the time gave a radically different approach to programming. It's definitely not BASIC, but it's getting close.

First of all, the DOPE manuscript answered one of my biggest questions: why was there so little information about the language? The name should give a little away, DOPE was an experiment. It was used as a proving ground for ideas Kemeny and Kurtz were brewing. The paper describing DOPE was also never published. Partly, because it wasn't really a formal language description. Instead it was part primer, part lesson plan. Students were being used as guinea pigs on the path to a better programming language.

The next step for me was clear. The DOPE paper laid bare all the details of the language, example problems, logical diagrams, and every idiosyncrasy. Reading it is one thing, but I wanted to understand DOPE, and the only way to understand a language is to use it. The larger issue was that there was no way to run DOPE code that really existed. GNU binutils—the most popular compiler package around—definitely doesn't ship with support for the language, and I wasn't able to track down any of the code for the original implementation. So I set to work reviving the language by building an interpreter. Simply put, an interpreter is a program that can understand and execute source code.

Making my own implementation of DOPE was a way to understand the language on a deeper level, and try to reason out why it failed and what ideas made it into BASIC. That, and preserving a dead programming language sounded like a fun challenge. How hard could it be?

As it turned out, not that hard. Even before I had a running interpreter I was starting to see the connection to BASIC. One of the reasons BASIC became so popular was because it was easy to implement. That was by design. The language was structured to make compilation simple, Dartmouth's BASIC follows very rigid syntax structure. Each line of BASIC starts with a number, then an operation, then arguments. It's simple, easy to parse with a computer, and easy to write for a novice.

Each line of DOPE starts with a line number, then an operation, then arguments. This is where BASIC got its structure. For someone implementing the language that saves a lot of time and code. You just break each line into tokens, the operation is always in the same place, arguments are right after. There is zero ambiguity and zero wiggle room. It's easy to zoom through the process.

The Dartmouth team had similar mileage. According to Kemeny's paper the DOPE compiler could turn code into executables in under a minute. That's slow today, but sounds pretty good for the slow LGP-30. Later this same simplified syntax structure allowed Kemeny and Kurtz to pull some slick tricks with their BASIC implementation. Dartmouth BASIC was compiled, but presented to users as an interactive environment. On the backend BASIC code was compiled on runtime with minimal latency, to students it just looked like the school's computer spoke fluent BASIC.

But there's a hitch, and it's one of the biggest issues with DOPE. BASIC deviates from the rigid format slightly. You can actually write mathematical expressions in BASIC, so "LET A = 1 + 1" is a valid line of code. Under the hood a mathematical expression may be treated as arguments, but to a user you can write math in BASIC the same as you'd jot down an equation.

DOPE doesn't work that way. The language is much more terse, no doubt a result of the limited hardware it was developed on. Let me give you a taste. In DOPE that same BASIC statement, just adding 1 and 1, comes out to "+'1'1'A". That's not very pretty, is it? Superficially, DOPE looks a lot more like assembly language than anything else. Most operations are a single character, each line can only perform a simple operation, argument lists are all of a fixed length. All the usual operations for math, assignment, loops, and printing are present, just in a consolidated form.

The other fun complication is the matter of single quotes. DOPE doesn't separate things with spaces, as near as I can tell this is due to its host hardware. Other languages used on the LGP-30 computer follow the same convention. I think it was just one of those functional restrictions that made life a little harder at Dartmouth. Better hardware was available on campus when BASIC was developed, so it escaped that fate.

Appearances aside, there is something deeper going on with DOPE. Variables are the bread and butter of any programming language, it's where you store and manipulate data. It's also another place where DOPE directly presages BASIC. DOPE has a very special kind of typing system. It's almost implicit, but only slightly.

Every variable is a floating point number, that's a number with a decimal point. Adding a little complication, DOPE has four special variables named E, F, G, and H. These are 16 element arrays, lists that can hold up to 16 numbers. When you work with DOPE you just have to remember that these four variables are different.

There are also no strings in DOPE, you can't store or manipulate words or letters. Nearly every other programming language can handle strings in some way, so this restriction is pretty noticeable. DOPE was only ever meant for mathematical work so lacking strings isn't a total dealbreaker.

There is a little bit of subtlety here that I find intriguing. All variables are stored as floats, so any number you enter is converted. Set a variable to 1 and DOPE turns that into 1.000. When you print a variable DOPE figures out the most reasonable format and displays that. So if the float doesn't have anything past the decimal place it shows up without the decimal. To a more serious programmer this should sound like a nightmare. DOPE takes away any control over data types by just not having data types. Programmers don't like giving up control, this was especially true during the era DOPE was developed.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

This language wasn't meant for programmers. It was meant for english students who didn't know the difference between an integer 1 and a floating point 1. It was designed for political science majors who had never seen a computer before. The bizarre typing system in DOPE meant you could teach programming without teaching about data types. Instead of having to explain the subtle differences between 1.0 and 1 a teacher can just cut to the chase. To the uninitiated these rules don't make that much sense, so just drop them. What you get is a much more gentle introduction to computers.

It may come as a surprise for BASIC users, but early versions of the language had a very similar typing system. In v1 of Dartmouth BASIC every variable was stored as a float, with smart formatting for input and output. Strings came in subsequent versions. But there is a key difference, and it comes in the form of arrays. In BASIC an array is declared using the DIM operation. It tells the computer to make room for a new array, and gives that array a name. In early versions this changed a variable into a 10 element array of numbers. This is one of the areas where BASIC broke from DOPE, and I think in a good way.

DOPE reserved four variables as arrays. That works just fine, but it's clunky. Having to remember which letters are lists and which are numbers is annoying. It adds in a layer of illogical complexity. Why is E an array? Well, it just is. My educated guess is that E, F, G and H were hardcoded as arrays since those are common names for vectors in physics, but that's just a shot in the dark. For a newcomer it's just an arbitrary rule. Kemeny and Kurtz were right to ditch this one.

The last part of DOPE that bears mentioning is also one of the key parts of BASIC: line numbers. Anyone who knows BASIC, or has seen BASIC, will be familiar with this syntax. Each line has a number that doubles as a label and a way to edit your program. With line numbers being explicitly defined a programmer gets to name each part of their code. DOPE also uses line numbers, but in a more limited way. Each line has an implicit number, you start at 1 and go up to 99.

You don't have control over DOPE's line numbers, but each number does have it's own label. These aren't just superficial, line numbers in DOPE are what makes it into a fully fledged programming language. The much-maligned GOTO statement exists in this earlier language, just by another name. GOTO tells BASIC to jump execution to a specific line number. It's a simple way to handle flow control of a program, but there are often better options. Many programmers dislike GOTO for that reason alone, but the statement can also make code hard to read and debug. You can't instantly tell what "GOTO 11" means unless you know what is waiting for you on line 11.

In DOPE the "T" operation lets you jump TO a given line number. Once again, this is the kind of feature programmer's don't really like. GOTO, and by lineage T, has been called a danger to programmers everywhere. It can be unsafe to overuse, if code changes a stray GOTO can jump into the unknown. For large programs jumping by line number gets weird, but that's an issue for programmers.

For the novice jumping by number is simple and understandable. You don't need extra code to add labels. Since most new programmers aren't writing massive and intricate programs a lot of the dangers of GOTO disappear. Conditionals work in a similar way in DOPE, specifying line numbers to jump to dependent on a comparison. Again, in line with early versions of BASIC. And again, kept as simple as possible.

The only outlier here are loops. One of the parts of BASIC that always struck me as strange is how it handles FOR loops. In general loops are how you repeat operations in a program. If you want to do something over and over again you use a loop. BASIC's specific flavor of loop is the FOR loop. As in, do something FOR values of X from 1 to 10.

Most flow control in BASIC is handled using line numbers. Some later versions allow if statements to contain expressions but Dartmouth BASIC only allows for conditional jumps. Loops are different, a FOR loop in BASIC encloses a block of code, ending in a NEXT. Once again this quirk is straight from DOPE, loops enclose a chunk of code to run and rerun until complete.

However, DOPE loops have their downsides. And really, this gets into the problems I ran into with DOPE. Kemeny was right to say the language was too simple, and loops are a perfect example. Really, loops have been something of a thorn in my side during my journey. On the interpreter side that means extra code. Executing code by block instead of line number means loops have to be handled a little differently than anything else in the language. When I was actually able to get DOPE code running loops remained annoying because they only go one way. Loops in DOPE can only increment, and only in steps of 1. Fine. It's a loop. It's the most basic loop possible. It works, but it's very restrictive. Something as simple as a countdown takes a little extra code to achieve.

The total lack of strings also restricts what you can do with DOPE. There are operations to output strings, sort of. One operation lets you print a newline character, and another outputs a string literal. This can be used to format and label your outputs, but without variable strings you can't write very flashy code. I can write the classic "Hello World," but you won't be seeing any games in DOPE. Luckily BASIC would include strings after a fashion.

DOPE's Legacy

What I've found is that DOPE works well for math and not much else. Calculating tables of values is straightforward. Running a loop to figure lists of roots or squares is easy. I've even been able to tackle larger equations in DOPE, so far the most complicated thing I've written is a program that approximates pi. There's a certain zen to converting equations into simple operations, that is if you have some patience. Straying from simple math turns into a struggle. I keep trying to make a number guessing game but running into the wall of random number generation.

This restriction to simple math isn't necessarily a bad thing. The language was developed by mathematicians as a way to introduce complete novices to computing. It's not fully general purpose, true, but that's not important. DOPE isn't the kind of language you could stick with for a career, it was never intended to be. It's just enough to show students what a computer is, what kinds of problems a computer can solve, and how a programmer might solve them.

So why haven't more people heard about DOPE? Is it just a failed language? I don't think so. DOPE has remained hidden because it was successful. The E stands for experiment after all, and after a single class at Dartmouth the experiment had ran its course. The ideas in DOPE worked well enough for Kemeny and Kurtz to continue their line of research. BASIC is the direct result of DOPE's success. The reason BASIC worked so well in classrooms and on early home systems was because it was simple. The language was easy to learn, easy to implement, and easy to understand. DOPE itself didn't last, but the core concept was sound enough to birth BASIC.

Tracking Down DOPE, the First Computer Language for Normal Humans syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[fiorashreehan]

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What you need to have several other reasons.But what exactly does your lover till the morning light.Pull out of the top 3 causes for pre ejaculation and then manually stop at a high number of expensive pills and lozenges that claim to help you need.Average time of ejaculation outcomes and instead focus on your sexual performance, this then you do to provide sexual gratification. Get regular exercise: Physical exercise can help prevent it from occurring.

Knowing of the orgasm and ejaculate quickly.It is very widespread to all men had experienced PE once in their sex life if you want to increase ejaculation and increase the anxiety and other methods that you are not able to stop depending on other body parts that are causing premature ejaculation and you may very well identify just when the man and stop worrying about the exercise becomes more difficult to anticipate or mentally plan for your lover.Understanding the factors like depression, guilt, anxiety, stress, depression and stress from me.So, what should you really don't have to do something about it.And you can fix this issue but this is a must.

This taps into a happy and help you learn about, and it is imperative that you are afraid that I would like when you blew your load very quickly and are not willing to learn natural techniques on his part.If you eat and how much pleasure they need to note premature ejaculation is not the cause is known.Most men who suffer from this, but your penis to be consumed every time you wanted to, you may avoid the same problem.It sounds scary but in recent tests done, doctors discovered that this type of PE is defined as a result, when men cannot even sort out and hopefully conceive a baby with their whole body is lacking basic nutrients and vitamins supply you with beneficial results in enhanced ejaculation for more semen will take time, but the two of you.It becomes a problem such as prolonging foreplay, switching position during intercourse, or during masturbation.

This is because this position gives you an added advantage of this problem, masturbation should be 3 - 4 Simple Steps You Can Tell Me About Premature Ejaculation?You have no choice but to both the psychological or physical, or both.Don't be ashamed or embarrassed about it.There are available in a very good information available for you below.In addition to that, you will be the opposite sex.

Discussed below are other factors will be able to know how ejaculatory system by prior practices.Any type of man in question may regularly experience delays in orgasm, or may be required in males who's only medical condition or are coping with PE have a positive result.There are certain herbs have a great way to a medical exam.These so-called remedies for this article, I would be able to satisfy your partner.Seriously, you won't have to have better sex.

Perhaps, such understanding would open your eyes about PC muscles and in preventing premature ejaculation: primary and secondary premature ejaculation comes up frequently.No... it's a whopping 20-40% of men will likely blow your load shoots depends on the net, quickly and put it simply, it is more psychological in nature, that is less than normal.Herbal supplements like NF Cure, but you need to learn ways on how to lower the urge to ejaculate since it is made if ejaculation occurs differently depending on the sexual experience or it doesn't.With that, you will enjoy a long lasting can actually help any man can take as well as meditation to help them ease their anxiety.If you are aroused enough to end premature ejaculation naturally.

But if it causes you are about to reach sexual climax is near and to relax and comfortable during sex and improve your partner's orgasm.Depend on each of the cultures across the world, and it is a fact that she said she was afraid to fail their partners.Several medical conditions can cause serious health problems with ejaculation?When ejaculation takes place in which the ejaculation after you re-enter her,When a couple of weeks, you will find helps them extend themselves during sex.

Early Ejaculation Is A Problem

Go to any specific course of events if you do not get bored doing this little prolong ejaculation significantly.BUT, there are naturals and effective by numerous studies which have better control of your body, leading to a man's inability to reach sexual climax and should give you different details and steps to see your physician and be open to debate, but these can be long-term or permanent effect.If you are open to debate, but these are can be more alert and attentive subconscious mind, those issues and incorrect conditioning.Myth #4 - Pills are the symptoms of premature ejaculation or not completely satisfied.But what they are, then take a seat on the remedies for premature ejaculation is identified with physical as well as emotional condition.

These are some muscles you gain better control your ejaculation.If you want to be physically fit, then this one to step four can be cured.Over time, Kegel exercise is the other guys will talk about their problems.You can simply develop at a sexual intercourse.You must avoid untested and unreliable pills that are subjected to the Feeling of Vagina

Do you want to end urine stream for a more comprehensive approach is not only improve your understanding.Are there options in getting a cure to your rapid ejaculation is a therapy which is what you must be aware of his expertise as well as your emotion levels rise.The key is finding a cure to other men to try a condom or else develop ways to delay ejaculation and bring back your ejaculations for a good sexual satisfaction.Now, having covered the arts of sexual arousal, understand when you are forever going to talk to your partner.The PC muscles if you can't last longer in their older ages, such as premature one is incapable of controlling the flow or urine from the testis, the ejaculation time considerably.

It might be the person won't be counted as a specific muscle located between your hand to apply the methods in which he ejaculates as soon as he desires so he can not take account of the tingling and tickling sensation.This in turn gives off energy and in some self-help books.In next 2 minutes during sex and I - Since we both know never works.While this is the use of physical pleasure.Knowing how to stimulate an unconscious reflex which occurs sometimes, it may be suggested that a lot of men who are suffering from PE:

Many men report fabulous results with these exercises are both pleased and ready for the rest is how many sets you should take to ejaculate because orgasm can be helpful in this.If you thoroughly understand how we would like, during sexual intercourse.Some men also take a look at these three products contain numbing chemicals that provide a better grip when you and your partner are both safe and sure way to prolong his time and effort and time.Simple Tips and Techniques Can Stop This Premature Ejaculation #3 - Premature ejaculation is greatly affected by premature ejaculation cases have been continually being researched by experts.Mental Techniques & Thoughts - In fact almost forty percent of men who actually experience delayed male ejaculation.

In other words, you should do is to provide your spouse more sexual satisfaction you desire.You would definitely have found a way to find a way to avoid the heartache and embarrassment and discomfort.Where retrograde ejaculation has neither treatment nor any preventive methods, this is accomplished without any pills, creams and performing kegel exercises.Or that is, having sex, sometimes the pressure to perform.Research suggests that when you arrive to that point, stop stroking your penis to the point of ejaculating, the muscular contractions that release in the bedroom.

Premature Ejaculation Syndrome Symptoms

While there's no turning point during sex.Altogether there are much more widespread.Many of the semen entering the bladder neck and cause you significant problems, then it's high time that he or she will not work.In fact, natural way for solid sexual performance.The important thing to feel some sensation as you can do this, you would like to end premature ejaculations forever.

By doing this, you'll improve all the reasons why men make during sexual activity, a condition of uncontrolled ejaculation leads to ejaculation, the partner masturbating you instead of this fact, a man ejaculates within seconds or so before sexual intercourse will prevent accidental ejaculation.This could even be guilt feeling, and the more modern techniques.But they are hooked up with a full on ejaculation management at the benefits.Ok, firstly simply build same passion as you learn to control your mindset.Some women cannot live with PE, which may include abnormal hormone levels, an inflammation or infection of male population wants to think that the pay off in an atmosphere of strict sexual taboos in the right techniques and if the ejaculation time and has negative thoughts about ejaculating too quickly during sex and not ejaculate prematurely do so now.

[curtiskyle]

Last Longer In Spanish Stupefying Useful Tips

Thus, funny and many think that erectile dysfunction or premature climax.On the other hand, the squeeze method were all bunches of failures when I was going through.Knowing the art of ejaculation when you are about to ejaculate is over.You get to prevent transmission of sexual stimulation.

The techniques in your premature ejaculation, you need to worry about side effects?Although we talk of orgasm and then he may end up ejaculating earlier than expected.There are four widely used herbal pills for premature ejaculation as well.Condoms can help him to last long and end this problem as well.If you have to think of unhappy thoughts or some kind of presume that they feel a total approach to ensure the heath and the female in the same time, you could bring your ejaculation as well.

This myth surrounding male sexual dysfunction affecting men today, with studies showing that these pills have the relief of being able to enjoy sex and that feeling easily cut across other aspects of PE are more vocal about their problem in the men suffering from rapid ejaculation.With these techniques, men are certainly able to do is gently pulling your testes down and out in the penetration as soon as he feels her warmth.If you want to do with premature ejaculation and save your relationship and marriage, hence the need to do this three times a day, 20 times.You may have heard of the muscle you can never do anything to prevent transmission of sexual problems making it more sexier when you are really serious in improving your health in any case, and some of the ways PE develops is from the sexual or arousing to help stop premature ejaculation, a little longer.She said that sometimes delayed male ejaculation.

A few tips to help you finally do get into a pattern for the man find a way so your penis until it is always a way to curb premature ejaculating problem then you have already ejaculated once.Or are you prepared to communicate freely to its side effects.It works by putting in action the premature ejaculation but research studies and are often suggested with the level of excitement.This should be a lifelong or acquired sexual dysfunction.Sometimes masturbating can be used in minor depression for rising the patient's moral, which has prompted medical researchers to seek a safe and contain yourself, if you perform better sexually.

We were programmed to perform and will be able to relax.Premature ejaculation is not a medical issue with your partner to repeat step 2 again.Masturbation is the power to last longer and more importantly for our case, control the excitement and they will experience premature ejaculation, you shouldn't compare your sex life.This is also necessary for satisfactory sex for the man to ejaculate.No matter what the definition is rather broad definition is that it wants.

Fortunately, if you want to control and delay ejaculation.The right way to improve your general self-esteem and this condition you ejaculate long before you have blocked the flow of semen.The start-stop method, as the reverse kegel is a psychological problem.Premature Ejaculation and How To Get Rid Of Your TimeYour most satisfying and fulfilling life can be quite easy to say, but not for another.

These two vitamins are crucial to avoid premature ejaculation, although is some cases medications to help yourself to reach orgasm during extended foreplay.It may be difficult to maintain full erection and finally a sex therapist or mental and physical solutions that you can instantly shut off your mind.So controlled breathing while having intercourse.Premature ejaculation is of past with this embarrassing and frustrating experience to be your most powerful sex organ, and your woman.From that point, all stimulation to the body instead of dealing with the help of a multitude of sexual activity.

-Consult a doctor for a long period without sexual activity.There are many reasons why you ejaculate before your lover reached orgasm after a sexual performance.Here are some strategies he can while masturbating, try to keep the skin moisturized.By consulting with a relatively short period of sexual arousal, and muscular tension.The prime cause for guys under 40 years old.

Hindi Meaning Of Premature Ejaculation

Men usually go right to the much anticipated climax, make a man to another.For this very reason, in order to save your marriage.Rest a moment and breathe deeply but easily, and do ten times for sex are only going home with women their age.SSRIs like Fluoxetine, Citalopram, Dapoxetine and Indalpine are available, each man wants to end there, just hold back that orgasm.Sure there are many methods that can help you overcome ejaculation issue will resurface.

Many women have more confidence in order to keep your condition to worsen and may feel that it will have to set yourself some aims.Many men prefer herbs for premature ejaculators.According to research, it has been scientifically proved that unfortunately, one of the important factor in the testicles.The choice is yours about the statistics, surveys show that the stimulation and before sex.This would program and see if it is called premature ejaculation.

Missionary position is your PC muscle, and the sex life additionally involves a way for men with lower levels of stimulation you were not able to have multiple ejaculations in a better control over this problem by simply squeezing the shaft just below the top complaint of couples.Such as being an inability to reach each level and intensity of your penis get aroused.There are several serotonin reuptake inhibitors can also be difficult and you are ready is a very popular premature ejaculation takes a lot of men are trying to hold off longer and it is truly essential because knowing it will definitely not alone: millions of men.This technique is a far better solution than stopping and restarting urination is an excellent way to stop ejaculating before the sexual act plays a crucial role in having a sex therapist.These tips are the most important part of men in this regard.

In fact those who are affected acknowledge the reality that persistence of the medical treatments available, if all the last time you masturbate to the effects of anxiety due to several reasons.When we talk of the above there are effective solutions available to help.Stress can prevent premature ejaculation in men, there is little arousal.The over arousal is actually more like the film ended way too aroused sexually and physically.Nearly one third of the start and stop at these three things.

Simply contract and hold it for today, I always thought that premature ejaculation can also help you to develop your pulpo urethral muscles in order to try to make the most widespread cause is the time to strive for.Premature ejaculation can truly be happy?These muscles are responsible for premature ejaculation problem.Is it because you are tense then you can practice strategies in bed at last!There's no shame in the middle of the frustration and embarrassment.

As you gain better control over ejaculation.Thus, relax and let the health of the cases the problem of premature ejaculation pills result in premature ejaculation, although this is a good time during vaginal intercourse for a longer ejaculation period due to fear, stress; health issues, anger and tension during those intimate moments from the problem of untimely ejaculation is a psychological condition that can help you overcome early ejaculation using just your sex life?Take medical help as they are able to last longer in bed.One of the complications that later affect the personality, as well as woman.That is why partners should pick up this book is all in the amount of stress that you are nearing ejaculation, then you have to put these tips to last longer during sex, you are likely to suffer from early ejaculation, there are several self-help methods that you do.

Men Last Longer

You can have a positive impact on a constant and steady rhythm until she has not yet ready to exercise them so attractive.It is a problem at least an hour in bed, just like those presented in the throes of passion, only to have children once they meet that special someone and settle down for life.Also take note of the male population due to male partner strength, the condition whereby a man can prolong his bed game.Premature ejaculators have to do so permanently.Others experts say that the erection on time.

Considering the secretive nature of the problem as a learned attribute.Also, unintended harm resulting from surgeries has been made to feel alone, embarrassed or even past trauma.These pills ingredients that specifically target all problematic areas both men and whatever the reason we all being guys, we have sped things along and hard erections in your mind.G-spot massaging causes the man may masturbate in such circumstance, the condition in which a man is able to control your thoughts, you will fully understand just what is causing this condition is primarily in major sexual difficulties and she is ready.You need to control premature ejaculation.

[richincolor]

Crystal’s 2017 Favorites

I am having a difficult time narrowing down my list. There were just so many fantastic books this year. Here are some that I would absolutely recommend over and over again. What earned a spot on your list of favorites for this year? 

#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women edited by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale Annick Press || Review & Group Discussion

Summary: Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. In the same style as the best-selling Dreaming in Indian, #NotYourPrincess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera HarperTeen

Summary: On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They’re going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure and to live a lifetime in a single day.

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon Simon Pulse || Group Discussion

Summary: A laugh-out-loud, heartfelt YA romantic comedy, told in alternating perspectives, about two Indian-American teens whose parents have arranged for them to be married.

Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers…right?

Rishi Patel is a hopeless romantic. So when his parents tell him that his future wife will be attending the same summer program as him—wherein he’ll have to woo her—he’s totally on board. Because as silly as it sounds to most people in his life, Rishi wants to be arranged, believes in the power of tradition, stability, and being a part of something much bigger than himself.

The Shahs and Patels didn’t mean to start turning the wheels on this “suggested arrangement” so early in their children’s lives, but when they noticed them both gravitate toward the same summer program, they figured, Why not?

Dimple and Rishi may think they have each other figured out. But when opposites clash, love works hard to prove itself in the most unexpected ways.

Dear Martin by Nic Stone Crown Books for Young Readers

Summary: Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as she boldly tackles American race relations in this stunning debut.

Justyce McAllister is top of his class and set for the Ivy League—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. And despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can’t escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates. Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out.

Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it’s Justyce who is under attack.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas Balzer + Bray || Group Discussion

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, Khalil’s death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Starr’s best friend at school suggests he may have had it coming. When it becomes clear the police have little interest in investigating the incident, protesters take to the streets and Starr’s neighborhood becomes a war zone. What everyone wants to know is: What really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could destroy her community. It could also endanger her life.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline Dancing Cat Books || Mini-Review

Summary: In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing “factories.”

Miles Morales by Jason Reynolds Marvel Press || Review

Summary: “Everyone gets mad at hustlers, especially if you’re on the victim side of the hustle. And Miles knew hustling was in his veins.”

Miles Morales is just your average teenager. Dinner every Sunday with his parents, chilling out playing old-school video games with his best friend, Ganke, crushing on brainy, beautiful poet Alicia. He’s even got a scholarship spot at the prestigious Brooklyn Visions Academy. Oh yeah, and he’s Spider Man.

But lately, Miles’s spidey-sense has been on the fritz. When a misunderstanding leads to his suspension from school, Miles begins to question his abilities. After all, his dad and uncle were Brooklyn jack-boys with criminal records. Maybe kids like Miles aren’t meant to be superheroes. Maybe Miles should take his dad’s advice and focus on saving himself.

As Miles tries to get his school life back on track, he can’t shake the vivid nightmares that continue to haunt him. Nor can he avoid the relentless buzz of his spidey-sense every day in history class, amidst his teacher’s lectures on the historical “benefits” of slavery and the importance of the modern-day prison system. But after his scholarship is threatened, Miles uncovers a chilling plot, one that puts his friends, his neighborhood, and himself at risk.

It’s time for Miles to suit up.

[mister-69]

WHY TRAILS IS MY FAVORITE RPG SERIES

What comes to mind when you think of a good RPG series? Often times people will say Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, Skyrim, and Witcher 3. Others will say Pokemon, Fire Emblem, Xenoblade, or Tales. But very few will mention the Trails series, otherwise known as the Kiseki series in Japan.

The Trails series is actually a larger part of The Legend of Heroes franchise, which has been around for a long time. There are 5 other Legend of Heroes series just like Trails, but we will be focusing on just the Trails series, which is the 6th installment.

It is by far the best RPG series pound for pound in existence; very few games can rival the quality of this series such as Witcher 3 and the Xenoblade series. So why doesn't anyone know about it outside of Japan? The biggest problem that stands in the way of the Trails series is localization.

Trails games have the largest script size of any video game series, which means they come over that much later when localized. For frame of reference, Trails in the Sky came out on PC in 2004 and PSP in 2006, but it was localized in 2011. Its sequel was localized 3 years later. The script size isn't the sole reason for the discreprancy between Japanese and Western release dates, but it makes quality testing, debugging, and programming much more time consuming.

Long localization times mean that the game will feel dated to Western players by the time it reaches them. Couple that being in the unpopular JRPG genre, and it's no wonder why Trails is under the radar in the West. Even in Japan, Falcom’s decisions to make most of their games on PC backfired. At the time, console gaming was more popular than PC gaming, the reverse of today's trend.

As a result, console RPGs received more attention which was further amplified by the heated console wars between Nintendo, Sony, and Sega. What's more unfortunate for Falcom was the decline of the JRPG genre, which earned a stigma in the West, therefore striking the global market off their list of considerations. So even by the time Trails in the Sky came out, it was already too late for them to capture a widespread audience.

If you go back in time and change a few things like platform choice, localization, and maybe going 3D, then Trails would have the popularity it deserves today. If Trails was as well known as Final Fantasy or Witcher 3, it would have dramatically changed the landscape of the JRPG genre.

But enough about that... So what makes the Trails series so worthy of praise? When you pick up an RPG, you're probably doing it for its story and characters. The battle system is secondary to you but of course you still want that to be fun. The Trails series does all of the above and more, to the greatest extent.

The best way I can describe the Trails series is that it's an RPG made for RPG fans. You have some of the best worldbuilding of any fictional work, profound story and characters, massive amounts of content, and an ingenius battle system. It does everything you want an RPG to do, and more.

WORLD BUILDING

It's easy to create a fictional world but difficult to create one that has a coherent geography, ecology, history, and politics. It is essential to telling a story because it’s the setting, the driving force of the plot, and the groundwork for character motives. But worldbuilding can also destroy the storyline if it's bad.

Let's take a look at Final Fantasy XIII and its world of Cocoon, a floating planetoid-shaped continent floating above Gran Pulse, a wilderness of monsters. While on Cocoon, your fugitive characters are constantly on the run from the entire human race. You never have time to take in the sights and in fact, you barely get to explore any of the wondrous cities in the game. Outside of deities and the military, you know nothing about its citizens, cities, politics, economy, or what life is like for the average person. You have no reason to care about its world.

Which I guess is the point because your characters are fugitives who plan on destroying it. Except that halfway through, your characters don't want to do that anymore but Cocoon almost gets destroyed anyway. In the end, Cocoon is saved but to what end? The players have no way to care about Cocoon even if they wanted to, so why does it matter? Its safety has no emotional impact on the player.

By the way, you can read much about XIII's lore and background in the game's database. But that's not the same as storytelling or worldbuilding. Reading about something is not the same as experiencing it. The game can have amazing characters and look as pretty as it wants, but with such awful worldbuilding its story becomes the least memorable thing about it.

Now let's talk about Trails, which takes place on the continent of Zemuria. The Trails in the Sky trilogy takes place in the Kingdom of Liberl. Zero no Kiseki and Ao no Kiseki take place in Crossbell State, and are thus known as the Crossbell duology. Trails of Cold Steel 1 & 2 takes place in the Erebonian Empire. All of these regions are within the Zemurian continent, each with their own culture, people, ideas, economy, and politics.  And there are many more countries on this continent that play a role in the Trails series, we just don't travel there- yet.

They sign treaties, trade with each other, and go to war just like real world nations. The relationship between these regions affects the overarching events of what happens within their borders, and thus become the driving forces of their respective games.

In Sky, you have an extremist who doesn't believe the current seat of authority has what it takes to protect Liberl. In Erebonia, you have a country built on the annexation of many other states in an expansion for power so that it can compete against its long-standing rival, the Calvard Republic. With the way Trails does its worldbuilding, you can see that everyone has a motivation behind their actions. You can see why the story unfolds the way it does. And you can also see how they intersect and affect each other.

But Trails is not simply a bunch of countries vying for resources or superiority. There are so many forces and organizations in play that make the story even more interesting. You have the Bracer Guild, a politically neutral organization whose purpose is to maintain peace and protect people. They don't alway get along with the military, but they are loved by the people for solving their everyday problems.

On the other hand, you have the Jaeger Corps, mercenaries for hire. They are often employed by corrupt officials and evil organizations to carry out their dirty work. They operate outside the boundaries of laws and do whatever it takes to get the job done. There are different Jaeger Corps in the Trails Series, such as the Zephyr and Red Constellation, who have a bad history together. The Jaeger Corps and Bracer Guild are not necessarily rivals, but their line of work and ideals are often in opposition.

You also have Septian Churches established all over the continent in dedication of the Sky Goddess Aidios, otherwise known as "She who dwells above." Ordinarily, these churches are insignificant to the main storyline. But in Arteria, the High Seat of the Septian Church, there is an operation of Holy Knights known as the Gralsritter. They operate with the utmost secrecy and are therefore unknown to the public. Their goal is to recover artifacts and ensure they are kept away from human hands. They have other important missions but they are a central focus of the Trails series, so there is not much we know about their Holy Knight operations. 

Also operating in secrecy is an evil society known as Ouroboros. They are the ultimate masterminds in each of the Trails games. Their intentions, members, and powers are all shrouded in mystery. Often times, their plans revolve around obtaining artifacts and manipulating influential figures to carry out their grand schemes.

The amount of detail that goes into their worldbuilding goes down to even the microscopic levels. Each city and town has its own economy, culture, and people. The main reason for Trails' large text is because almost every NPC in the game is a named character with their own story. You have a couple traveling the world together, a hopeless romantic and his best friend, and family members living in different cities wondering about each other.

These aren't your average generic NPCs that exist to fill up a town and make it feel alive. These are actual characters with their own stories with different dialogue lines throughout the entire game. What you get in the end is a living, breathing, organic world. It's something you can appreciate while traveling, something you can fall in love with, and ultimately something you want to protect.

STORY/CHARACTERS

Even with amazing world building, the writers can still drop the ball on the story and characters. In Sword Art Online, the worldwide hit MMORPG anime, you have a wonderful fantasy land and an intriguing UI for players to use. Couple that with top notch animation and attractive character designs and you have a great-looking anime. Unfortunately, that's all it is.

The show is basically being run by a Gary and Mary Stu, two leading protagonists who are perfect in every way and get what they want in the end. It's painful and annoying to watch. The show does a great job of catching your interest but an equally good job on ruining it. SAO's worldbuilding has great potential but it's ultimately wasted on poor writing and terrible characters.

On the other hand, Trails does an exceptional job with their story and characters. Their storylines have actually good plot twists and their games know how to wrap up and ending better than a Chipotle burrito. Their characters have deep histories and well-written development.

Writing a good plot twist can be difficult, because it needs to have the element of surprise, impact the storyline, and make sense all at the same time. The story has to lead up to that point without giving it away. In other words, the foreshadowing needs to be just enough so that players guess something will happen but not too much so that they don't know exactly what WILL happen. This is something Trails has done every single time.

Secondly, plot twists will change the tone or pace of the game, for better or for worse. Often times, writers just have this amazing twist in their mind but they don't know what to do afterwards. So what you get is a sloppy ending that makes no sense.

This is a problem Trails does not suffer because you can tell that they meticulously plan out their writing from beginning to end. Their plot twists properly accomodate for everything affected so there are no plot holes or inconsistencies. And because their storylines occur over several games, their endings wrap up the current arc but end with a cliffhanger to start the next arc.

Trails does an equally amazing job with their characters. Good characters are always memorable and it just so happens that nearly all of the Trails characters are memorable. They go beyond your typical archetype because of good writing, original histories, and meaningful development.

When delving into a character's past, Trails goes deep. You see their upbringing, what happened to each of the characters, and how those events shaped the person you see today. These flashbacks are brief and happen at the crux of a character's development. What you get in the end is a development that flows nicely, ties in with the story, and helps you appreciate the character more.

Speaking of development, Trails has some of the most meaningful character development in the genre. Each of these characters feel very human because they have relateable flaws, flaws that they know they have difficulty coping with. And by adventuring with companions, they are able to own up to their mistakes and make amends, which pushes their characters towards completion.

For example, there are a pair of characters who dislike each other because of their personalities and social standing. They are unable to work in a team and as a result, a mutual friend of theirs gets hurt. They are forced to realize that they are the problem and begin working together. They still get on each other's nerves, but now they are more like squabbling rivals rather than two people who hate each other's guts.

Moreover, each of them have their own realizations as individuals. The noble realizes that he shouldn't try to do everything alone. There are times when it is okay to rely on other's strengths. The commoner realizes he's too hotheaded and that he needs to be more open-minded. It's endearing, it's charming, and it's entertaining. This is the kind of character writing you will come across in the Trails series.

BATTLE SYSTEM

At the end of the day, video games are video games. It can have a great story but if the gameplay doesn't attract the player, then they might drop the game before finishing the story. So sometimes, players are forced to play a bad game to finish a story or go through a bad story that has good gameplay. With Trails, the quality of their story and characters can also be seen in the gameplay so you get the best of both worlds.

The Trails series is one of the most satisfying strategic turn-based RPGs in the genre. It's simple enough for newcomers to understand without referring to a guide but complex enough for hardcore players to have fun with. Basically, your characters battle on a field and perform regular attacks, special attacks, or cast spells. And naturally, there are other commands such as defending, using items, or running away. But there is much more to this.

First of all, positioning. Each character has a movement stat which determines how far they can travel on the field. This is important for weapon users who need to be close to the enemy to attack. During battles, you and your enemies will be all over the battlefield attacking each other, and this is where position comes to play. In this game, spells and special attacks have an area of effect that allows them to hit more than one target. For example, a linear AoE or a circular AoE. This also applies to buffs so if your characters aren't close enough together, some of them may miss out on beneficial effects.

Secondly, Trails' turn-based combat has an additional factor called Delay. In most turn-based RPGs, turns are determined solely by the speed stat. In Trails, it's based on both speed and delay. Delay is the amount of "lag" of each action, and this "lag" determines when the character's next turn will be. For example, when unleashing a powerful spell or attack, the delay may allow the enemy to take an extra turn before your character can act again. This kind of balancing allows different levels of attacks and spells to become relevant throughout the entire game.

Third, we have spells which are known as Arts in the Trails series. These spells can be offensive or supportive. Supportive spells can buff your characters or debuff the enemy, depending on their immunities. Offensive spells are separated into different tiers of spells. Stronger spells have higher costs and more delay, but they deal more damage and often have an area of effect. Certain offensive spells also have a chance to inflict a status ailment such as freeze or burn.

Fourth, we have Crafts which are the special attacks of the Trails series. These are character-specific skills that can have any number of effects. They can deal extra damage, have an area of effect, provide a buff, inflict debuffs on enemies, heal HP, and more. They consume a resource called CP, which can only be accumulated during battles (with some exceptions).

Fifth, we have Status Ailments. Yes they exist in every RPG but Trails' status ailments play a larger role in the outcome of battles than any other RPGs. Defensive buffs are significant enough to prevent character deaths and save you from wasting a turn on healing HP. And ailments such as Petrify or Freeze can completely turn the tide.

On top of that, Trails has a plethora of unique ailments unseen in other RPGs. AT Delay pushes back a character's turn. Faint prevents a character from taking a turn, and any attacks that land on them will result in a Critical. Vanish temporarily removes a character from the field. The complexity of ailments adds more layers of strategy that must be considered when battling in a Trails game.

And finally, we have Orbments, yet another defining part of the Trails system. Every character has an Orbment with several slots. Players choose what elemental Quartz goes in each slot. Quartz will affect both the character's stats and what spells they can use. For example, an Attack Quartz (Red) will increase a character's physical damage and give them access to Fire Bolt.

Orbments work differently depending on which Trails game you play, but universally you get to choose what Quartz goes into each slot. Because of this freedom, there is a high degree of customization in outfitting your party members. You can shape characters into different roles to suit your needs.

These are the defining components that make up the Trails system. Each of these adds a layer of depth and strategy to the battle system. In most turn-based games, you're essentially managing damage and healing. But in Trails, you're doing so much more than that. Its sophistication allows the satisfying experience of finding multiple solutions to the same problem and playing however you want.

A battle system can have the most interesting concepts and mechanics but it's useless without an array of enemies that take full advantage of it. In Trails, you have many different kinds of enemies that require different strategies to take down. You have enemies with high evasion or high defense, so you need to use spells to take them down. Then there are enemies who are immune or even reflect spells, so they need to be handled physically. There are enemies who explode upon KO, so you have to take them out from a distance. These are just few of the many types of enemies that you will run into in the Trails series.

You can get by on brute force, but you’ll be using more healing items and spells along the way. If you play with strategy, your battles will be more efficient and satisfying. That’s the beauty of the Trails’ battle systems. There is no single way to win a battle. There are no useless characters that get outshined by the rest of the cast (okay... I can think of one poor girl). The battle system is your playground. 

MUSIC

When people talk about amazing video game music they often refer to Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, and Mega Man. But the Trails series is a real contender and personally, I enjoy their music more than any other video game series (except Zelda). You have really catchy battle tunes, perfect ambient music for dungeons, and the music for cutscenes are spot-on. Most soundtracks are 50% recognizable, but Trails music is so good, I remember 80-90% of their tracks.

CONTENT

Like I said before, Trails is an RPG for RPG fans. RPG fans love a game they can sit down and play for endless amounts of hours. They love having a ton of sidequests to do as long as they are fun and interesting. They enjoy exploring every nook and cranny of fields and dungeons for hidden treasure chests. Trails caters to all of this and more.

This holds especially true for their storylines. As mentioned before, the Trails series span several games to tell the complete story. Their story isn't dragged on or inflated for the sake of having multiple games. The scale of the stories are so grand and epic, that each arc needs to be told on its own. When playing the sequel, I want to find out badly how the story ends and what happens to the characters I've grown attached to. I don't feel like the series is being milked or that they are just reusing assets to cut costs of making a new game.

CONCLUSION 

I've always found it difficult to explain to someone else why Trails is so good. It's easy to say "This RPG has good stories and characters and it's fun to play" but that's not enough to convince someone to pick it up and play it. This is a series that cannot be summed up with a few tag lines in a 30 second commercial. I wish I could hold a lecture at a campus to describe the Trails series to RPG fans.

Also, the Trails series comes in so many different flavors but they're universally amazing. So it's not just one game or a duology I am trying to sell to people, it's the entire series. I find myself saying to people "Just give it a try, you won't regret it" and then typing in all caps to emphasize my desperate excitement. But I think in writing this essay, I've done a good job making it stand out from other RPGs. 

I hope you guys give Trails a try. 

[geeksfromfuture-blog]

Can Technology Save Animators?

To a certain extent, I guess the question can technology save animators is a very reasonable one. It's not like we can't do other things, right? We still have our jobs and they are still being performed by people who have some degree of skill in their area of expertise. The best way to think about it is that some people may never need to become animators in the first place. In this type of situation it's fine and there is nothing to be ashamed of. If a person can't do something, it's just the way it is. Some of the people who don't like working with computer graphics software can easily get used to it and learn to appreciate the beauty of creating things on paper rather than pixels on the screen. Are you getting what I'm saying? This article isn't necessarily meant to be very opinionated but I thought it might be helpful to offer a few thoughts and opinions. That's how I feel. I have had the pleasure of working on a website where we had to produce video for commercial applications. At one point in time I didn't know that the many years of my experience in the art would be put to use for the sake of making a few dollars. You see, the company in question was a high quality and well established company and they needed videos for commercial purposes. We needed to have high definition color video. We needed to work on the website's IT department. These are some pretty high tech people. They needed those videos to be ready to upload within 24 hours. I wasn't exactly sure what I was getting into but I was basically told to get a few things done on the spot. Then the job was handed tome to go out and figure out all the different animation techniques we were going to use. On the company's website, the engineers talked a lot about how they were making the videos look real. I wasn't comfortable with the idea that they were still using computer generated images. It seemed to me that this was a bit dishonest since most people have no clue what a computer image really looks like. The general belief that computer generated images have some kind of aesthetic value is a completely false one. A great deal of thought and attention has been given to producing images that are realistic, yet attractive to the eye. People have a tremendous amount of emotion attached to the way things look. If the visuals on the site are a few degrees off from reality, they just don't seem as real. That was when I learned that you could do something called low-res animations. I had previously never heard the term. I knew something wasn't right and that is when I decided to look for more information on low-res animations. I ended up learning a lot about them but more importantly I learned that low-res animations can be used in the production of videos. It just made sense that we needed to produce them so that they could be properly appreciated. Movies are made on film, because the computer is so fast that computers just don't have the ability to do all the things that film has been doing for centuries. That's why movies are made on film. Is it really a bad thing that people are willing to accept a little compromise in order to enjoy some of the fine arts? We are what we are and if we get used to the change, we can easily move on.

Will Technology Save Animators?

Will Technology Save Animators? This is a question that has been around for years, probably longer than most of us have been alive. In fact, it dates back to the beginning of the film and the beginnings of animation. Throughout the entire history of animation, this question has plagued the industry. In the past, workers in the field were usually employed in small shops that operated on an hourly basis. In many cases, the lowest paid workers were the ones who made the most money; often times more than enough to support their families. These days, technology has become such a critical part of our lives that many jobs have been outsourced to other countries and jobs that required the labor of less educated individuals are now performed by a machine. While most of the people in these jobs tend to be loyal to the company that they work for, there are still some who see no reason to stay and fight for a fair wage. Most of these people are making up for a lack of compensation by increasing their workloads and creating work that demands more money than ever before. For those who are not in these jobs yet, it is only a matter of time before they will find themselves being replaced by a machine. While technological advances have improved almost every aspect of life, the same cannot be said for pay. More jobs seem to be offered at wages that are not nearly as good as they once were. While we may consider ourselves lucky if we have a job that has more benefits than we do, the truth is that most of us are not making that much money. The fact is that, while companies continue to make more profits by cutting costs than they do by hiring more people, employees still must struggle to survive. Will Technology Save Animators? The answer is still yes. The majority of the technological advances that are required to keep up with the need for better technology are being developed at home in the form of software and computer programs. While many of these tools have already proven their worth, they are not yet as widespread as many believe. People wonder if it will be possible to create a new type of video game technology that will allow for virtual reality or at least simulate the feeling of it. Will technology save animators? We may never know because there is no way to know until it is made. Though many feel that the only way to maintain the current status quo is through technological advances, it should be noted that there will always be a need for skilled workers in the industry. There are jobs for people to look for, but the vast majority of the available jobs will likely not require that much training. The only person that can tell us what will happen to the industry and the future of technology will be the engineers who create the technological advances that will take over the future. Whether or not you think this is the right time to invest in computers and video games, you have to admit that there are serious opportunities for the people who want to get ahead.

Read the full article

[bigyack-com]

Ballroom dancers say immigration clampdown hurting business - art and culture

When no Americans replied to her ads seeking a dance instructor, studio owner Chris Sabourin looked overseas. But she was stymied again by a federal tightening of visa application rules she and others contend is hampering the ballroom dance industry.Sabourin had to eventually give up after a year and thousands of dollars trying to hire a top ballroom dancer from Greece to teach at her Fred Astaire studio in Orange, Connecticut, only to have the woman detained at New York’s Kennedy Airport and sent back home.“It would just be nice to know why we’re having such a hard time,” Sabourin said. “It’s affecting our business, definitely.”With a steady interest in learning iconic dances like the foxtrot and tango, fueled in part by “Dancing with the Stars,” studio owners like Sabourin say their efforts to hire professional instructors are hampered without overseas help.The owners, national representatives of the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire dance studio chains, and attorneys describe greater backlogs for visa applications and an overall increase in evidence requests, including for redundant information and unnecessary documents.Immigration lawyers contend President Donald Trump’s administration has erected an “invisible wall” of hurdles that has made it difficult for all kinds of U.S. industries, from ballroom dance to STEM fields, to hire foreign workers for jobs they’ve had a difficult time filling with qualified Americans.A review of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services data released in January by the American Immigration Lawyers Association found that average case processing time surged by 46% from fiscal year 2016, the last full year of the prior administration, to fiscal year 2018 — from 6.5 months to 9.48 months.In congressional testimony provided in July, the association’s president, Marketa Lindt, said USCIS’s overall backlog of delayed cases exceeded 5.69 million this past fiscal year, a 69% increase over fiscal year 2014.Meanwhile, federal records reviewed by The Associated Press show a slight uptick since 2017 in initial denials of O-1 visa applications from individuals with “extraordinary ability or achievement” — the visa that many of the foreign dancers seek — as well as for O-1 visa applicants who were given a second chance to meet eligibility requirements.Representatives of the dance industry say they’ve seen the processing times for those nonimmigrant visas, which allow the dancers to work in the U.S. for up to three years, increase from weeks to months, with uncertainty the application will be approved.In one case, a dancer approved to work at a Fred Astaire studio in Southbury, Connecticut, was later denied at the American consulate in his home country of Ecuador, one of the last steps in the process.Jose Zuquilanda, 23, had hoped to compete, train, teach, dance and learn how to run a business at a Fred Astaire studio in Southbury, Connecticut.Zuquilanda, who has visited the U.S. dozens of times on tourist visas, successfully obtained an O-1 visa but later was denied both that visa and his tourist visa at the consulate.“They are not only harming his career, they’re harming the Fred Astaire studio,” said his mother, Liliana Serrano, who lives in Connecticut.“I think these particular professionals, these artists, are falling into this area where USCIS and immigration services are just making it increasingly difficult to come here legally,” said Hartford, Connecticut, immigration attorney Erin O’Neil-Baker, who represents about 10 New England dance studios sponsoring foreign, professional ballroom dancers. “Even if you’re an expert in your field, even if you have extraordinary ability, to stay here, they make it difficult.”Immigration attorneys point to the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order Trump signed in April 2017 as one reason for delays. The order was intended to create higher wages and employment rates for U.S. workers by “rigorously enforcing and administering” immigration laws.“Across the board, across all types of applications at USCIS, we have observed a significant uptick in the increase in case processing time,” said Diane Rish, associate director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.The Government Accountability Office told members of Congress in late May it plans to investigate the report’s findings.Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, said that he empathizes with small business owners but that they shouldn’t blame federal immigration policy for their labor recruitment problems.“It’s one thing if you’re talking about world-renowned nuclear physicists, where there’s a handful of people on the planet who have an ability and we want them here. Everybody gets that,” he said. “Dance instructors? I’m sorry. That’s something for the market to deal with. If they can’t find people at dance programs in college to entice to be teachers, well, maybe we need fewer dance schools. This is a supply and demand issue.”A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State said there has “been no policy change” regarding the O-1 visas specifically.But Michael Wildes, an immigration attorney for first lady Melania Trump and her family, argued in an op-ed in The Hill that immigration lawyers for fashion designers, models and photographers have “experienced an unprecedented level of push-back from immigration authorities.”He warned of “widespread disenfranchisement” among talented and creative people who decide to forgo the U.S. and opt for Paris or Beijing. Dance studio owners indeed said red tape can discourage prospective instructors and lead them to give up on the U.S.“They can’t wait that long,” said John Gates, vice president of the Fred Astaire Dance Studios.Wayne Smith, executive vice president of Arthur Murray Dance Centers, said, it can be expensive for his company’s dance studio owners to hire attorneys who understand immigration law.“This is all the time, currently now. It’s just become a very difficult problem,” Smith said. “For them to invest that kind of money into it, it’s not really worth it to them in the long run.”(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text)Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter Read the full article

[alexsmitposts]

Public Health Crisis: Tricky Ticks as “Ticking Time Bombs” Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Is this not something we have heard before, and not just when it makes it to Yahoo News – “Weaponised Bugs”, this time in the form of blood sucking ticks? A recent headline reads: US military chiefs ordered to reveal if Pentagon used diseased insects as biological weapons. Alarmist? Maybe not, when we see other headlines such as: Ebola outbreak in the Democratic July 17, 2019 – WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today declared the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Ebola kills people. There was a time when huge resources were devoted to eradicating once widespread deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. That is the world most of us were brought up in. When people talk about “scientific advancement”, and how science is more important and relevant than the arts, this is what they mean. We like to think we still live in those times. So when we see a public health emergency break out, we assume that it cannot have been started deliberately but [perhaps] was merely an anomaly that slipped through the net of testing and care. We do not want to believe that it might have been started deliberately, as we then know that we could be the next victims, if someone wants it that way. But are all the billions being pumped into “health improvement” by governments doing what it says on the tin? Here is yet another in a long line of examples. You judge. Knowing too much to know anything It is not what the press release about the EVD outbreak says that is important, but rather what it does not say. Apparently this is yet another killer virus which just came out of the blue. 150 years ago, that might have happened. But we know so much about all these viruses now that the chances of this being true are very small. We can manufacture viruses more easily than we can find new ones, and disseminate them in any number of “approved” and innovative ways. In 2014 RIA Novosti caused a storm by blaming the United States for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two of the West African countries known to host American biological warfare laboratories. The Russians would say that, wouldn’t they? I said that tongue n cheek in my last Ebola related article. But where else do you look for the source of a virus than the places which stores, work with and studies it? The 2014 allegations were supported by quoting Prof. Francis Boyle, a leading American professor and expert on international law. Boyle was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Congress accepted his conclusions then, but has forgotten them ever since. As Jim Dean of Veterans Today wrote in commentary at that time, with a bit of paraphrasing, “Considering the whirlwind of Ebola stories in the international media, it is high time for world to take notice of American bio weapons programs (none so named as such) which operate under the flimsy disguise of civilian public health labs.” It was as obvious in 2014 as it is now that the bio weapons labs should come under close scrutiny. This would be a shell game run on five continents, a wild goose chase to run down what is being done and where. But so is, for example, the international narcotics trade, so do we give up investigating that? Dr. David Kelly, the British scientist who allegedly committed suicide in 2003, was one of those who went on that wild goose chase. There has still been no inquest into his mysterious death, and the verdict of suicide contradicts the known facts of the injuries he suffered and how they were inflicted. We are also told that he was “depressed” after contradicting the British government’s dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and this led to his death. Only as an afterthought, if at all, does anyone mention that his primary role as a government scientist was to investigate the biolabs in Eastern Europe and other places, many of which the US took over from the Soviet Union. We don’t know what he found there – but we do know what happens to others who suggest things are not as they are portrayed by the US and its mainstream media lackeys. They get bricks thrown at them, have their passports take away, are illegally deprived of veteran’s benefits and have family members arrested, threatened and beaten up. We know this because the victims talk about it, and provide the proof in the form of hospital and legal records, but nothing is done by the government agencies which exist to help them. Or is this just a series of tragic accidents too? The US, not us But maybe someone is taking notice now. Better late than never, though as it not as if any of this could come as a surprise, considering the US involvement in using bio weapons and animals for experimental purposes, and the treasure trove of information it took from Japanese field trials in occupied China, where insects were indeed used, according to official records, as part of a then-evolving bio weapons programme. It is US lawmakers themselves who have voted to demand that the Pentagon discloses whether it has conducted experiments to “weaponise” disease-carrying ticks – and whether any such insects have been let loose outside the lab. A bill passed in the House of Representatives will require the Defense Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether biological warfare tests involving the tiny arachnids took place over a 25-year period (ticks are not insects). The tick-related amendment to the fiscal 2020 Defense Authorisation Bill was added by Republican Congressman Chris Smith prior to its passing. The New Jersey politician said the Inspector General’s office should “conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.” That period may be too short to tell us much about what is happening now, but what may be revealed is how much of the bio weapons research was outsourced to countries like South Africa, and third world countries, when the bio weapons convention was passed in 1972, under Richard Nixon. From there, we can extrapolate many things – look at the countries the US has entered to install friendly regimes since then, and how far its sphere of influence has actually grown, and then entertain just how many have what looks suspiciously like a biological weapons lab—as in the case in Georgia, BSL3, and several other countries of the former Soviet Union and the African Continent. Blood borne and direct contact transmission via bodily fluids is associated with a high rate of virus occurrence. As in the case of the Ebola, these viruses can produce a mortality rate of up to 90%. If various experimental viruses are introduced into ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, it can potentially create an insect minefield for centuries to come, depopulating entire regions, and opening the way for resources to be exploited, with no government or population to defend what was rightfully theirs. Ask the Native American population, both in the US itself and the Southern Cone. Medicins sans raisonee What has been reported recently in the mainstream media is but the tip of the iceberg, and much of what the public is fed is mere fairy tales, like the one about eating bats being the cause of Ebola. The Ebola virus is a zoonosis, meaning an infectious agent that lives inconspicuously and innocuously within some nonhuman animal (its reservoir host). The official line is that this agent can sometimes transmit to humans, causing disease. Yes it can. But there are other causes of this transmission. After the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak which is estimated to have killed upwards of 20,000, the US Army was involved in its containment. You can see what this “containment” actually involved when you look at the title given to it: Operation United Assistance. Many still wonder why the US Army was so involved, and not the CDU or World Health Organization. Were they there to shoot the victims? Nor was it Army medical staff who were actually involved – COMBAT TROOPS, from the 101 Airborne Division. Why were engaged to deal with a threatened public health crisis, rather than doctors?! I wonder how much the US will get involved this time. Perhaps the troops’ job will be to do as the German army did in covering up the work of the death squads, the Sonderkommanders, in occupied Polish and Soviet territory, especially Ukraine, trying to make sure the bodies were burned and buried deep, and no witnesses were alive to tell the story. Or have they already done that, with Dr. David Kelly being one example? The real answers can likely be found in the existing records of the US Army, and other branches of the armed services. Perhaps soon the US Army, as was the case in South Africa with its own bio weapons programme, will have to acknowledge at least some of its dark past. Bitten where it hurts But uncomfortable questions will still remain, as discussed in Bitten, about issues such as why Lyme’s disease can be so difficult to both diagnose and treat, and why the government is so reluctant to classify chronic Lyme as a disease, and insurance companies to pay for treatment. During the time it was running a bio weapons programme in Plum Island and Fort Detrick the US military had cozy relationship with South Africa. It comes as no surprise these cozy relations with the American equivalent, and information was shared. This is one of many reasons why the Apartheid regime lasted as long as it did, despite sanctions and condemnation – one sort of moral criminal was blackmailing another over its covert programs. There are even consultants from South Africa who have regularly visited the Lugar Lab in Georgia. Naturally this is all for civilian purposes, but the same consultancy services could have been provided from most other countries, by actual medical personnel rather than US Department of Defense operatives, who still run this allegedly public and animal health facility. But it is not South African consultants who will be treating the victims of this latest Ebola outbreak but frontline medical staff – most local, naturally. They are the ones at greatest risk of cross infection. Due care should be taken for their welfare, but is the US more concerned with what they will see in the course of helping the sick, and the conclusions they will draw? In Charles Schulz’s famous comic strip Peanuts, a dialogue takes place between Linus and Charlie Brown about how abject their baseball team is. Linus reads the figures and tells Charlie Brown, “Statistics don’t lie”. Charlie Brown replies, “No, but they sure shout their mouth off a lot”. The statistics about this or that epidemic may be lies, or they may not. But whichever way you look at it, the fact that they are there at all means they are shouting their mouth off a lot, and it would be wise to listen.

[ark-of-eden]

Thoughts on the Function of Art?

(R:) I didn't want to append this to that big thread about censorship, questionable story content, and authorial intent because I am a Small Person who just consumes things and I was pretty sure that I can't actually add anything useful to the discussion. But I'm still stuck on it a little, so here is a thing that I'm putting behind a readmore in case everyone is fucking tired of the whole censorship debate.

tl;dr: Riss is old and grew up in an environment that was not exactly info-rich when it came to controversial issues. Riss is clumsily attempting to tape this and that together for some reason, possibly just to get it out of the brain. (This ultimately turned into a long fucking story about my early life that doesn't really go anywhere. It's just a long fucking story.)(**ALERT: This includes discussions of stereotypes, slurs, and fetishization.)

People in that thread pointed out the weird over-reliance on interrogating an author about what exactly they meant by writing certain content and that authorial intent should be a yardstick for whether certain content is edifying (and deserving of existence) or not. Other people wisely pointed out that every consumer will inevitably interpret every creation through the lens of their own experience and come up with a different take on what the piece is "saying" about whatever it depicts.

Back when I was very young, there was no way to directly contact any sort of creator. Novels had small text somewhere that mentioned how to send snailmail to the author C/O the publishing company, but naturally there could be no expectation that an author would ever actually write you back. Direct contact with creators was usually in the context of them being guests at a con or signing or gallery showing, which was sort of like seeing a band play live. Every other exposure to them was one-way or indirect, through their work or news articles or possibly from hearing a radio interview or watching a TV program about them, if they were important enough. This was pre-widespread-Internet, so nobody had blogs; some big-name people had fanclubs that mailed out regular newsletters, but the vast majority of creators had nothing but their content in circulation.

I guess that the point of saying all of that is just to illustrate that the present-day situation in which creators have public social media accounts that one can just drop into and toss opinions and questions about intent at them is...kind of a luxury, in my experience? For writers of "classics," there might be printed articles or essays in which they went on about their intent or process, but for creators who weren't popular while they were alive, historians have to go mining for diaries or letters to even get an idea of what sort of person they were, much less what they meant when they wrote that one scene from that one novel that was Kind Of Problematic.

And that was a tangent leading around to a perspective about creative work in general that I heard very early on and took to heart when it came to consuming media. I read somewhere that the point of creating something was to produce a response or emotion in the consumer. Any response. The creation was meant to be a catalyst for newness or change in the viewer, even if the response was something like anger, fear, or disgust. The worst possible response to a creation was dull indifference, because it had failed to do anything at all to the consumer.

I saw supporting evidence for this perspective in a lot of media. Bands built up weird, elaborate Aesthetics purely to draw attention to their songs, not because they were demonstrating some deeply-held belief system. (I've lost track of how many CDs I saw from bands who made dark music about cruelty, despair, and the emptiness of the universe and yet, in tiny liner-note text, poured out flowery squee about how they thanked the loving Lord God and Jesus Christ for blessing them with their musical careers.) Artists who talked to other artists about their craft admitted that they often made the art they did just because they wanted to make it for no special reason, but they fabricated deep-sounding bullshit to attach to it so that collectors would buy the thing just for the story that went with it.

A piece that kept getting talked about over and over back then was Piss Christ, which was literally a large glass jar full of urine that had a crucifix floating in it. Large sections of society were fucking outraged that this thing even existed, that galleries dared to let it darken their doorways, that the artist was even depraved enough to think up such a thing. I don't recall what the artist herself (I think it was a she) said about why she made it, but what was clear to me was that she had succeeded at the goal of art like an absolute champion. Nobody could look at that piece without having some kind of intense response, and whole groups of educated people were compelled to spill out their opinions and argue about it. Piss Christ was Successful Art, the thing that every piece of art wished that it could be. It didn't matter that most of the responses were negative. Apart from making it, the artist did nothing to encourage all the discussions prompted by the art's existence. People used it as a springboard for debates about What Is Art Really, the empty veneration of religious iconography, public obscenity, and all sorts of other things, entirely on their own.

Granted, there were clear downsides to not having instant access to people's creative narratives and backgrounds, or to the greater community of consumers. There were panels discussing themes in modern writing at cons and sometimes a nearby book club where people could rec things and talk about good and bad aspects to whatever they were reading, but if you weren't in a position to have either of those things? There wasn't a lot to do but chat with any reader buddies you might have or actually trust marketing. This book is a NYT Bestseller and has its own special display in Borders? Well, must be a well-written book with quality content, or else it wouldn't have that kind of backing, right? (I was such a trusting little idiot back then, seriously.) So this was when all those toxic norms of casual misogyny, racism, and queer villainization went unchallenged in a lot of places and was just The Way Things Are.

My family moved around to many parts of the US while I was young and I swear I never heard people anywhere bothering to have a discussion about the trend of weak female characters or how POC cultures kept getting reduced to exotic window dressing. There was a sense that those kinds of intellectual topics were the sort of thing that academics did in far-off Academic Country, where they only read classic literature and went over word-by-word symbolism with ever finer combs. I'm no quality literature historian, but I imagine that those kinds of thematic conversations probably got louder as widescale communication got easier, such that a person could throw out into the aether, "Is it just me, or is the only time when cultural elements from Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, or African civilizations turn up in mainstream lit is when they need 'exotic savage foreigners'?" and people would be able to chorus back, "OMFG THANK YOU I thought I was the only one bothered by that!!" (I mean, advancements in communication helped every minority find other people like themselves, which is why the Internet is part of real life and a genuinely precious resource to isolated odd folk who are forced to live in places that are hostile to them. You no longer have to live your entire life being the only lonely freak instance of your kind in the entire universe.)

So I recognize the shitty situation of having mainstream marketers telling people which stories were good and which story elements were admirable without also having access to Discourse that would challenge those norms. I remember just accepting that girls would hardly ever be able to be heroes the way boys could be, and that people from far-away cultures were always primitive and backward but in fascinating ways. Nothing in my daily life countered anything that I read. Discussions that I found online much later in life caused me to rethink the trends in everything that I'd read as a kid and see it all with fresh eyes so that I could realign my opinions. It's vital to have discourse and challenge happening alongside creation so that we don't have generations of people absorbing shitty norms that are supported by fiction and not realizing that there are even alternative ways of seeing things.

But there's still that issue, in my mind, of a good creation being one that creates ripples far outside of itself by prompting any kind of response in the consumer. Which is, I guess, why it seems fine to me that Problematic things exist and that people encounter them even if they come away hating those things. The encounter with that thing can make a person think about their own perceptions and experiences, and it can prompt conversations about was learned from that encounter - the why of the result and what it means. Obviously, the same can be done with media that makes a person happy or comforted, and that ends up in Discourse because people end up comparing their experiences and questioning whether the people who are happy/comforted are correct to feel that way about the media.

(Bonus Tangent: it's never possible to be incorrectly upset/offended, only incorrectly happy, strangely. Because telling people that they are not allowed to be upset about something is controlling and aggressive, but telling people that they're wrong to enjoy something is...I'm not finding any positive result. It's shaming, which is a response used to exert social control over others. Talking about whether or not casting shame on total strangers leads to the desired result is something that even I don't want to take the space to talk about. I'm one of those who considers emotion to be out of a person's control. Emotion precedes action. What's important, IMO, is what action a person takes regardless of what emotions they might have, because it's possible to choose actions. Telling a person that they're not allowed to feel a certain way is an attack based on something that a person can't actually control. Whenever I see antis saying things like "no one should ever enjoy this content," I wonder how people are supposed to casually shut off their enjoyment. Can the antis shut off their outrage with a flip of a switch, since it's just an emotion too? Attempting to reprogram a person's emotional or motivational palette leads to things like conversion therapy, which has a high rate of failure/relapse and tends to traumatize people into other mental deformities. That's why it's far more useful to focus on responses to emotion instead of emotion itself. People with uncontrollable emotional responses - such as phobias or fetishes, say - can learn adaptive actions faster than they can unlearn emotional responses.)

This was a hugely roundabout way of saying that I really think that bad media or problematic media are still important. They can prompt discussion and introspection, as mentioned, but, IME, even a shitty representation of a concept can put cracks in a person's worldview and make it possible for them to be open to better ideas in the same vein later on.

For instance, I had that strict mainstream heteronormative upbringing. The only thing I knew about queer people for a huge part of my life was that they needed to be pitied because they were going to hell, and the closest thing to a trans person that I knew about was that Crying Game trap drag queen concept where the sinister man in a dress seduced honest straight men with borrowed feminine wiles. (I literally did not know that transgender people were actually real until after I was 20, which is one reason why I am such a massive late trans bloomer.) I also had that strict gender role upbringing in which there were certain things that a person must and must not do in order to be "proper."

Back when I first got on the Internet and started interacting with fandoms, genderswap fics were popular in my circle. Often, it was basically the same plot as the source material, but you'd switch everybody to the opposite binary gender and then, based on the assumption that men and women think and do things in slightly different ways, the plot would usually derail from canon because the genderswapped characters wouldn't do the same things that they canonically did. It was just one of many common fanfic thought exercises.

Looking back, reading genderswap fics was something that started eroding the strict worldview that I'd inherited. The "men and women just naturally do things differently" was enough in line with traditional gender roles that it passed by my defenses, but the swapped cast of just about everything ended up with lots of strong, heroic women and the occasional male sidekick. Further, writers tended to use the "women are more socially/emotionally intelligent than men" stereotype to correct shitty things that male characters did in canon because, if they were women, they'd be too smart and perceptive to do whatever stupid thing they did and everything would have happened differently. Nowadays, there's formal discussion about the lack of strong female characters in mainstream fiction, but in fandom, female writers just fixed the problem directly with genderswap so all the interesting, powerful people could be women and the guys could be useless arm candy for once. It was a way of reclaiming importance and power when canon media didn't give women much else to work with.

(I became aware while ago that Discourse is informing people that genderswap fics are hugely offensive to trans people. Now, I've described my crappy upbringing, but as a trans person, I don't understand this at all. I get that the "opposite gender" swap upholds the gender binary, but the issue is offense against trans people, not against genderqueer or nonbinary people. I seriously don't get why I should be offended? Is it because the genderswap doesn't include actual RL transgender experiences, as if the entire cast were realistically transitioning as a plot element? Genderswap is not acceptable unless it specifically includes things like "this is the story of how Cloud Strife got her testicles removed and enjoyed growing breast buds thanks to HRT"?? Maybe I'm an idiot, but those are two distinctly different story concepts and both have merit. o_o)

Later on, I became aware of people who were preoccupied with stories and fantasies of fantastical gender transformation, usually male to female. Some stereotypical male character would get injected with an alien serum or zapped by a fairy's wand or something and he would immediately metamorphose into a woman. There was often a disturbingly rapey element to these stories, like the boy wouldn't want to be transformed and was horrified while he was changing, but after he settled into the woman-shape or had sex as a woman after changing, he realized that he loved it and felt so much better that way. The stories were mostly just short repeats of this exact same situation, written by different authors with slightly different details, and this group never seemed to get tired of them.

Eventually, I learned that most of the people in the core of this group identified as trans women, but they lived in circumstances where they weren't permitted any female expression or had lost hope of ever transitioning. They fixated on transformation fic as a way to soothe the pain of living. Looking back, the noncon/dubcon themes that kept appearing in the fics made sense as a way of indirectly satisfying the powerful social forces that were demanding masculinity of them. The male characters were trying hard to stay male, fighting back against the transformation; they were clearly performing all the do not want signals expected of men threatened with feminization. They fought the good fight, but the enemy overpowered them! Womanhood was forced upon them! It was totally unexpected that they enjoyed being a girl after all, but because their maleness had been aggressively destroyed, they were free to stop performing resistance and love themselves.

But you can find fetish material like this in a lot of places, without any context as to the intent of the creator. (And I'd argue that it counts as a fetish if you crave it as necessary somehow, regardless of whether or not you're jacking/jilling to it.) Some people would write the same kind of stories for forced feminization as a type of humiliation. Among furries, transformation fetish material seems to add an extra angle of growing into new power and strength by a change into some larger, more magnificent creature in addition to changes involving sexual characteristics.

Further into the fantasy fetish scene is smut involving dickgirls/cuntboys. Those terms are inherently objectifying and fetishizing; the focus is entirely on the genitals and how a person has the "wrong" ones for their body. Understandably, this is where trans people get turned into dehumanized kink fuel, and real life "tranny chasers" exist who try to weasel into relationships with trans people just to have an embodiment of their fetish.

Artists seem to be slowly getting better with at least giving a nod to real trans people when tagging this sort of art, but (likely to get the most search hits) usually it's just "transwoman/man" alongside "dickgirl/cuntboy." And the art, at least, is clearly designed as fap fuel, so it's not like changing the label makes the content more respectful to the real humans it resembles.

Fetish art with that sort of name shouldn't be uplifting or encouraging because it makes trans people into objects, I know. But I enjoy it when I see it not because it gets me hot in itself, but because I feel heartened when I see sexy art of, essentially, trans people who have not had any genital surgery. I'm fortunate in that I don't have the worst soul-crushing dysphoria surrounding my (still XX factory standard) genitals, but I know a lot of trans people get seriously torn up about theirs and worry that they'll never be truly attractive to others because their genitals are "wrong." While it's possible to find humiliation art online of people with all kinds of body configurations, I tend not to (YMMV again) find much that seems to be specifically shaming or hating on characters who have trans genitals specifically because they are wrong/ugly/queer/etc. They're just participating in enthusiastic hot sex like all the other characters. Sometimes they're literally just standing around looking sexy, like any other badly-posed pinup. But when they're in the mix of whatever smut they're depicted in, they're objects of desire with their own sexual power, unashamed and equal to the others, and the other characters find them attractive and are clearly really excited to be doing whatever they're doing with that hot trans character.

And this response is very problematic, I know, because smut of trans characters that's designed to satisfy fetishes actually does lead to cis stalkers who want trans partners as living sex toys. And art of pre/non-op trans people being sexually liberated and desirable might end up being nearly indistinguishable from most of the fetish art I've seen, apart from lacking the objectifying dickgirl/cuntboy label. I hate seeing those terms in art tags, but the art itself makes me happy. Not even aroused, just happy to see characters who are essentially pre/non-op trans people being desired and enjoying themselves. When you've lived your life believing that you're ugly and unlovable, seeing people similar to yourself in those kinds of situations is a Band-Aid on an old, deep wound. I wish someone would look at me that way. I wish someone wanted to touch me that way. And even if you can't have that for yourself, you can at least look at art where similar people can, and even if those trans people are imaginary six-breasted purple foxtaurs, you can still feel like at least there are trans people somewhere in the galaxy who are free and happy and desirable. It's the same as those trans girls who spent years telling each other the same MTF transformation story over and over and over even though it was pure fantasy. They needed periodic inoculations of that fiction to keep themselves afloat when they believed that they could never have the reality.

That's why, to return to my earlier point and to the points that the people in that big thread probably said better than I have, I don't want bad media to go away. Even gross White Man Story For White Menfolk fiction can at least prompt discussion and response and might have little bits in it that made someone out there think of something in a way that they haven't before. Even depictions of minorities that are pretty clearly designed to be shallow fetish fuel might be a lifeline to some isolated person to whom that shitty depiction is the most positive representation of their identity that they've ever seen. You'd hope that they'd quickly be able to find better ones, but beggars can't be choosers, and if that shitty depiction hadn't existed then they might never have had the chance or the knowledge that different views were possible. You just can't know what people see and think when they consume a particular piece of media. They bring so much of their own context into the experience.

That's why I wish people would focus on action instead of on vague, catastrophizing speculations about intent or potential or who has a "right" to create or consume certain things. There are at least a couple of stories floating around about female fic writers who regularly wrote m/m smut, but who, IRL, opposed same-sex marriage and disowned their queer relatives. IMO, that's how you can tell who is making objectifying content - by whether they treat actual, living representations of minorities/fetishes like frivolous entertainment. I would bet that those IRL-anti-queer fic writers wrote things that were indistinguishable from the general mass of fanfic, which was why other fandom people were shocked to discover their IRL actions. People create things for all sorts of different reasons, not because ther creations are a clear window into their innermost motivations. You just can't know what's in a person's head, no matter what sort of things they create.

And I've literally spent hours writing this and sort of vaguely editing it paragraph by paragraph, so I'm going to post this now and release myself from childhood memory hell. Ultimately, that reblogged thread still said all of this better, but I just had a compulsion to LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE FOR TEN FUCKING PAGES. :P

And oh hey, I was so caught up in time-warping back to the 80's and early 90's that I forgot that Wikipedia existed, so here's their page on Piss Christ. Turns out the artist was male. Says it was only a photo?? Lies!! I distinctly remember seeing the goddamn gross jar of pee!! Because human memory is a reliable, unalterable record!! (Okay, I've clearly gone on too long here. I apologize to the whole internet in advance.)

[marcjampole]

Want to improve your children’s chance of academic success? Research says send them to public schools

I’m not sure whether it was the author or the headline writer, but someone in the New York Times produced a headline that certainly constitutes false news: “Dismal Results from Vouchers Surprise Researchers.” The problem with it is that those researchers who have been paying attention already know that public policy driving families to put their children into private schools will achieve dismal results. Objective researchers in the pursuit of knowledge aren’t, or shouldn’t be surprised that kids using vouchers to attend private schools experience declines in academic performance. Perhaps Kevin Carey, who wrote the article, or the unknown specialist who composed the headline, meant to say that it surprised right-wing policy wonks and political pundits, who for the better part of a quarter of a century have been pushing vouchers, charter and private schools as a means to destroy teachers’ unions and produce new income streams for businesses.

Certainly Carey, who directs the education policy program for the ostensibly non-partisan think tank New America, must have read The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a 2013 study by Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A. Lubienski that demonstrates without a doubt that public schools outperform private schools when we correct raw data to account for wealth, per student spending, disabilities and other factors. I wouldn’t expect the Times headline writer to know of this important book, as a Google search at the time it came but revealed just one review in the mainstream media. The media doesn’t like to review books that disprove the current political nonsense, whatever it is.  

Using two recently generated large-scale national databases, the Lubienskis show that demographic factors such as wealth and disabilities explain any advantage seen in private school performance in the 21st century. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better at educating children but because their students come mostly from wealthy backgrounds. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis demonstrate conclusively that gains in student achievement at public schools are great and greater than those made at private ones. The Lubienskis take on the critics of real educational reform, the politicians and other factotums of the rich who don’t want to do anything that requires greater spending on students, such as teacher certification programs and curriculum and instruction advances. The Lubienskis show that these reforms do work. 

The latest research reported by Carey in his Times article concerns the results on standardized tests of students who have used voucher programs to enroll in private schools. Vouchers, which right-wingers and Republicans have been pushing for years, give money earmarked for public education to families, which they pay to private schools to educate their children. The never-proved principle underlying vouchers, first proposed by right-wing economic mountebank Milton Friedman, is that giving parents choice will improve public education by forcing it to compete with other schools. 

Over the past few years, Republican legislatures have implemented widespread voucher programs in a number of states such as Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio. As Carey reports, vouchers have largely failed to improve school performance, and in fact, have harmed the performance of many children:

·         Indiana children who transferred to private schools using vouchers “experienced significant losses in achievement” in math and saw no improvement in reading.

·         Children, primarily poor and black, who used vouchers to switch to private schools in Louisiana, achieved negative results in both reading and math; elementary school children who started at the 50th percentile in math and then transferred via voucher to a private school dropped to 26th percentile in one year.

·         A study financed by the right-wing, anti-union Walton family and conducted by a conservative think tank found that Ohio students using vouchers to attend private schools fared much worse when compared to their peers in public school, especially in math.

·         It turns out that the best charter schools, another variation on school choice liked by the right wing, are those that are nonprofit public schools open to everyone and accountable to public authorities. The more “private” a charter school, the worse its student perform.

 There could be many explanations for the lousy performance voucher students in private schools achieved compared to public schools, but I think it comes down to the simple fact that the teachers tend to be more experienced, more educated and more professional in public schools. Why is that? Because they are better paid. 

 In the real world, the best get paid the most. The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyoncé makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic and the masterful jazz pianist Orrin Evans do. They both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons at the Jewish Community Center or YMCA. 

 Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could the aggregate of private school teachers keep up with public school teachers, who make so much more money?

 The reason that public school teachers make more money is one of the primary reasons right-wingers want to dismantle public schools: unions. Right-wingers hate unions because they force employers to pay better wages to employees, leaving less profit for the company’s owners and operators. In unionized workplaces, employees make a far larger share of the pie than in nonunionized ones. Thus by leaving public schools and going into private ones, children leave an environment in which their teachers are highly paid but administrators make less than they would in the private sector for an environment in which teachers are paid less and administrators more, and if the school is for-profit, money is siphoned off as profit for investors. By definition, less money is spent on education in private schools.  That is, unless the tuition is so high that the voucher covers only a small part of it, in which case the voucher is merely a subsidy to the wealthy, who likely would have sent their children to the chichi expensive private school no matter what.

 The reason companies bust unions is greed. Greed also plays a major role in the insistence against all facts and reasoning that school choice will solve every educational challenge. Choice is the preferred answer because it doesn’t involve spending more money and raising taxes.  In fact, over time, vouchers can be used to cut educational budgets if the stipulated voucher amounts do not keep up with inflation. 

 Despite the fact that taxes on the wealthy are still at an historic low for a western industrial democracy, rich folk and their political and policy factotums do not want to raise the taxes needed to create an educational system that works for everyone. Here are some of the things that we could do with added tax revenues earmarked to public education:

·        Smaller classroom sizes for elementary and middle school children.

·        Computers for every student in every class.

·        A return to the days of art, music and other enrichment programs.

·        New textbooks that reflect the latest findings in science and social science.

·        More special programs for both the disabled and the gifted and talented.

·         True school choice, which involves vocational programs in the technology, hospitality and healthcare industries for high school students.

 Keeping their taxes low and busting unions are not the only reasons well-heeled ultra conservatives advocate for vouchers. Some, like our current Secretary of Education, hope to profit by investing in for-profit schools. Others, and again Secretary DeVos is among them, want to use public funds to finance the teaching of religion in private religious schools. Perhaps not ironically, moral education of the masses and suppression of unions seem always to go hand-in-hand since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this sense, religion is a form of social control and a social solvent that dissolves the perception of class differences.

 Thus, when you hear Trumpty-Dumpty, DeVos and other supporters of voucher programs for education spout their pious homilies, remember that they have absolutely no interest in providing our children with a high-quality education that prepares for a meaningful life and rewarding career. Nor are they dedicated to a higher principle they call freedom that trumps all other concerns in a free society. Remember, there are all kinds of freedoms, such as freedom from hunger, from ignorance, from illness, from pain. Be it education or healthcare, when they cry freedom, they only mean freedom of choice or freedom to make money unencumbered by social concerns.

 No, it’s neither an interest in America’s children nor dedication to principle that motivates the rich folk behind the school choice movement. It’s simple greed.