#imagine only taking part in a conversation via context clues??

[butdotheykiss]

the comments on the lack of subtitles for sign language in the same episode of heart's argument with his mom about her not learning sign language to communicate with him is so outstanding to me. like hey. the deaf & hoh community do not owe you anything.

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Wonder Woman 1984

The first 3/4 of 2017’s Wonder Woman was my favorite film of that year. The last 1/4 was my least favorite film of that year. What can I say, I have a complicated relationship with the DCEU, and the part I keep getting disappointed by is the big smash-em-up, explosions everywhere, muddy mess of orange/blue filter in the “climactic showdown” between hero and villain. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore, and I was so hoping that the Jazzercise vibes of Wonder Woman 1984 would do something different. 

As it turns out, this movie was trying to warn me like so many stories that have come before - be careful what you wish for. Just how badly did my wish go bad? Well...

I’d already heard some questionable things about the movie before I tuned in, so my expectations were tempered but I guess it was on me. I should have known better than to wish for a story with reasonable pacing, some kind of consistent tone, villains with discernable motivation, or a Wonder Woman movie that was actually about fucking Wonder Woman. I’m not even mad as much as I am puzzled. That and tormented by Pedro Pascal’s manic televangelist energy in my dreams. 

Some thoughts:

I have never wanted to go anywhere as much as I want to in 2020, and the place I want to go more than any other is Themyscira. Love this first sequence. Why is the whole movie not about Themyscira??

If the Olympics were like this whole long Amazonian warrior triathlon, I would be WAY more into track and field. 

Also I legit don’t understand the problem with her taking the short path? Like, it’s there for a reason? She just caught up to her horse? Someone explain this to me.

So this mall...basically the hub of American commerce in the 80s that was practically printing money, it made it so fast...is secretly a front for antiquities trading on the black market? And these unorganized-ass dipshit criminals who seemingly just walked in off the street and decided to engage in some light robbery today are after antiquities? Sure, Jan.

Ohh I miss Waldenbooks so much!

This thwarting of crime sequence in the mall feels so...cheesy. Schlocky, almost. Like a 50s comic book come to life. I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like the tone I was expecting. In the context of the whole film, we really blew our action load in these first 2 sequences, and also this is the last point in the movie in which Diana actually resembles her character from the first film.

I would also be stammery and blushy when talking to Diana Prince for the first (and second) time, but I’m kinda getting a gay vibe from Barbara. This meet-cute + date is definitely playing up romantic vibes. Kristen Wiig is so good at characters like these - in less than 2 scenes, I have such a clear picture of who Barbara is, what she wants, what she fears, and that’s all down to Wiig’s choices. [ETA: This makes it all the more infuriating when Barbara suddenly is like “I want to be an apex predator” when nothing about her character’s reaction to getting positive attention indicates she would want to start shitting all over everyone else.]

Pedro Pascal is skeeving me out as our villain Max Lord, which really just shows his range, because normally I love him and find him wildly charming in everything. But he’s playing this oil baron creep to the max, as they would say in the parlance of the 80s, and it makes my skin crawl. 

The mechanics of how Steve Trevor returns are wildly confusing. Why is this other guy involved at all? Are we supposed to be ok with the idea of Diana fucking *some other dude’s body* without his consent just because Steve’s spirit/consciousness/whatever is inside the guy? Also that guy DEFINITELY got fired from his job after going AWOL for a whole week, right? 

I am thrilled with Steve’s clothes montage. One of my favorite things in any 80s film, and his enthusiasm really sells it.

I do really like Diana and Steve playing detective, following clues, crafting theories. In spite of the absolute dumbassery of how Steve came back, Chris Pine and Gal Gadot have incredible chemistry and I do find their scenes together delightful. 

I think that’s why it’s so frustrating to me the way their entire relationship was handled. If the whole point of the wish going bad is that it has a cost, wouldn’t it have been better, instead of making Diana weak, to have Steve slowly start to be more and more of an asshole - aka not the Steve Diana remembered and loved? Make her realize that the Steve she knew and loved is really gone and she has to stop letting his memory hold her hostage. Maybe his last moment of self-awareness would be realizing that this wasn’t who he really was, and she was better off just remembering who he was and moving on rather than trying to hold on to this thing that isn’t good for her? 

The sequence with the fireworks made me emotional. The only time I’ve ever been on a plane on the 4th of July was when I was coming back from a visit with my uncle in Dallas. He had flown me, my mom, and my grandma down for a whirlwind trip, and we flew back the night of the 4th. I got to see fireworks from above for the first time, and it felt so magical. My uncle passed away 2 months ago, and feeling that magic again (via Diana and Steve) made me miss him and all the adventure he brought into my life something fierce.

Am I supposed to be like...anti- the idea of Barbara absolutely kicking the shit out of this drunk catcaller who attempted to assault her earlier in the movie? It feels like the film wants us to be like “oh no that’s bad” but my empathy goes on vacation for attempted rapists. 

Like...did anyone do ANY kind of fact-checking on this script? The Maya haven’t been “wiped from the face of the earth” there are still 6 million of them living in Central and South America. Escalators were invented in the 1890s for fucks’ sake. PLANES IN THE 80S DONT WORK LIKE PLANES IN 1918. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ALL THOSE SWITCHES DO STEVE. Also...just because the plane is invisible doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. Isn’t the whole point of radar to detect things that you can’t, y’know, SEE? Seriously, how many people fiddled with this script until it turned into an incomprehensible mess?

Did I Cry? OK yeah, I did when Diana and Steve had their conversation after they escaped the White House. But I feel like I should have cried more then, as well as earlier when Diana tells Steve that she only wants this one thing. I love Gal Gadot in this role, but I do wish her acting expressed a little more emotional depth and honesty for the moments like this that should really tug on the heartstrings.

I know Wonder Woman is bulletproof, but are we saying she’s also...immune to electricity? 

If there’s one thing that living through a global pandemic has taught me, it’s that we can’t rely on the inherent responsibility of every individual person to do the right thing in order to save their community (or the world). So the climax of this film really feels like a big ol’ fictional FUCK YOU to every person who has been quarantining since March as the US government twiddles their thumbs and relies on personal choice to lower infection rates. I know they made this film during 2019 and had no idea what would be coming, but this entire sequence was the most horrifying, short-sighted, offensive way to have good overcome evil I could imagine for a 2020 movie. “Just count on people to do the right thing and everything will be fine!” We’re WELL FUCKING PAST THAT, Diana. 

And maybe this is my debbie downer pessimistic ass, but the message “the world is a beautiful place the way it was” feels like some real bullshit. Do you mean the world is a flawed, complicated place where beautiful things exist DESPITE all the violence, inequality, and poverty? Ok, that I’ll buy, for sure. But “Everything was fine the way it was!” is uhh not what I would have gone with. That’s a first draft edit if ever I heard one. Seriously, how did this make it through MULTIPLE studio drafts and no one thought to point this out?  

I literally had to go back after the credits were over and rewind to figure out what happened to Pedro Pascal at the end. If I not only don’t care, but also can’t remember what happened to the villain at the end of the movie, that’s a big motherfucking problem.

I was giddily delighted by that first post-credits scene though! Probably the biggest moment of joy I felt during the film.

For being a Wonder Woman movie, it feels like there’s so little actual Wonder Woman IN the movie. The first film is rooted firmly in Diana finding her place in the world, understanding and coming into her power. This feels like she’s a bystander in her own life, and her most significant moments are always in the context of someone else’s narrative arc. And there’s nothing that comes even close to the breathless wonder of that No-Man’s-Land scene, aka one of the best superhero movie moments of all time. 

This doesn’t have the knowing wink of Aquaman or the nuanced character arcs of Birds of Prey. It doesn’t have the childish glee of Shazam! or any of the nonsensical grimdark bullshit of Zack Snyder’s entire ouvre. It feels like Wonder Woman 1984 suffers the same fate as its protagonist - a profound lack of presence or drive. Sure there are some fun sequences, and the actors are doing the best they can with a weak script, but it’s just not enough to save it. In a year where I saw so few contemporary films (focusing more on catching up on past films I’d missed), I can’t think of one that disappointed me more. 

[mayonakazkrazy]

Soooooooo I wanna talk about an Animated Movie

One night recently, I may have been watching a show that started giving me too many... ‘too real life’ vibes, when what i needed in the moment was ‘taking a break to mentally and emotionally recharge’ time. SOOOO to redirect my overstimulated brain I changed over to a ‘safe’ non threatening movie, Monster House.

Spoilers below the cut in a sort of review as well as some random details that i noticed that make me go ‘... well that got real fast...’ and one tangent/character dive i been wanting to get into toward the end.

Also fair warning about my run on sentences... they’re not going anywhere

Monster House is... a CG movie that oddly enough gives off Claymation vibes... at least to me from certain style design choices. I honestly feel that sort of works in it’s favor since the CG of the mid 2000s was.... terrifying if care wasn’t take in the process. Not good if you want you film to be taken seriously, buuut this movie manages to tow the line because a) it IS supposed to be at least a little scary to kids... haunted house? and b) even though the characters take things seriously enough the writing itself doesn’t try TOO hard to pretend it’s more than it is.

As it stands, the movie is Ok - in the best possible vein of ok. Not some epic, groundbreaking thing but I think it warrants being on people’s list of fun movies to play on Halloween. Visually interesting and funny, you can tell that the people who made the movie at least had fun working on it; and cared more about the project than some other kids’ movies that get put out purely for the easy cash grab via paint by numbers. (I found out that this movie was nominated for Best Animated Feature apparently?! like... i like this movie but... i don’t know, i’ll have to see what other movies came out that year cuz while i like it i’d like to reiterate that i don’t know if it’s BEST (animated/kids) movie of the year material...)

I can honestly say that it was at the Start if not ahead of the ‘remember the 80s?’ fad in movies. Again, not to the film’s discredit. It’s less concerned with smacking you over the head with ‘EIGHTIES!’ and is more set in the time period to make things more plausible. Ya got kids running around unattended for hours without parental guidance, and a number of other 80′s tropes that are, easily ignored at worse and make story elements more believable at best. I mean... .when ELSE would you believe that kids could run around basically unattended for HOURS just before Halloween....hell one kid ACTUALLY STEALS an amount of cold medicine that would have you on MULTIPLE investigative lists even 15 years ago. And NOT just because “the parents are just bad parents”... there’s arguably only one ACTUALLY bad parent in the film who’s only mentioned off-hand but i’ll talk about in a little bit. The rest are parents with semi justifiable reasons for either not believing their respective kid about the haunted house or not thinking they’re NOT unattended (ie. someone’s supposed to be babysitting one of these kids but SURPRISE! she’s in the “selfish teen is a disinterested babysitter spending more time talking to or about boys than ACTUALLY doing the job she’s paid to do” trope)

TLDR on that paragraph, this movie spends so little time being WE”RE THE 80′S! that i wasn’t even sure WHEN it was supposed to take place if it wasn’t for the lack of iPhones and the stationwagons all over.

ANYWAY. some details that tend to stand out to me with this movie tend to be the things that we just get to hear about briefly and are arguably meant to encourage conversation if someone NEEDS to know more about it rather than just getting EVERYTHING explained for no good reason. So enjoy me conversing with myself here.

First up, Chowders family life is kind of sad. Like i said earlier there’s only one or two parents to the three main characters of the movie that people would likely consider ACTUALLY bad. 

The lead’s, DJ’s, parents go out of town at the start of the movie and could reasonably be expected to think that their kid was being watched by the babysitter (see trope rant above). 

The mother of the token female character (Jenny) is Maaayyybe a bad parent but that is to be argued as we only have a few reasons to believe so and some can be explained by the aforementioned 80′s era lack of parental awareness. All we really know is that, this girl is walking around selling candy on her own, gets nearly eaten by the Monster House, and when she calls her mother to tell her about it, the mom doesn’t believe her as no parent ever does about monsters. Sooooo while she does get points off for her kid not even having someone with her during the candy selling, we also don’t hear from or about her again for the rest of the movie until just, coming to pick her up at the end. She get’s a *shrug* on the scale of good or bad parenthood.

Then there’s our secondary male character, Chowder The Dumb One Comic Relief. He’s the one with arguably the most complicated family that we get any insight to. and it’s pretty much just from his off-handed comments on it and a single snipet of a phone call we get to overhear. Literally, what you are about to read, my brain managed to over think from these freakin context clues... SO, it WOULD be SUPER easy to miss what we get about this family and just chalk it up to ‘OH those kids movie parents and their rampant absenteeism and DEATH’ but no. Chowder’s family life is... a little sad if i’m honest. we only hear about 2 calls regarding these kids and their parents. One is when Jenny calls her mom to try to tell on the House for eating her and the other is when Chowder’s dad calls looking for his son. NOW, Chowder himself tells DJ (and the audience) that his Dad is working at a Pharmacy the night Chowder goes over to DJ’s house and nearly gets himself eaten by the Monster House. The boys end up spending the entire night after that, watching the house to see if anybody or anything else gets attacked. Chowder’s dad doesn’t call DJ’s house to find out where his kid is until morning, so we’re lead to believe that his lack of knowledge about the boys’ impromtu sleep-over because he works the graveyard shift (or at least late enough that he would assume Chowder’s in bed until waking the next morning). 

The somewhat sad part comes with the second bit of information we get from Chowder after he tells DJ that his dad is at work that evening and it’s, “Mom is at the movies with her personal trainer”. 0.o ooooooh the scandal... i mean, yeah in general cheating spouses isn’t exactly the most uncommon occurance....anywhere. but isn’t it just a little sad that part of the reason that this is not only the reason that Chowder is home alone (making it SUPER easy for him to just leave when DJ calls). But she’s also apparently gone long enough to ALSO be out so late as to not notice that her kid is GONE all night. Looking at it nowadays just... reminds ya WHY there were ads in the 90′s asking parents where their kids were at 10pm.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

well not about the cheating Chowder’s mom part.

More like the WHOLE thing that got me wanting to type about Monster House in the first place.

A sad story with more potential doom than maybe even the film intended.

YOU SEE

A major plot twist of the movie is WHO is possessing the house. DJ and crew initially believe to be the someone they kind of know - the house’s owner, Mr. Horace Nebbercracker. At first glance, Nebbercracker is obsessively protective of his house, literally the first scene of the film is him SCREAMING in a little girl’s face and confiscating her tricycle when she accidentally ends up on his lawn (again, where are her parents?). He’s literally Mr. “Get off my lawn”.

So it’s not difficult to imagine that he’s the one haunting the place when the house seems to come life immediately after his sudden heart attack. (PS. WTF to the writers cause we AND THE TWO TEENAGED LEADS see the heart attack happen real time and the boys may have even contributed to it!! THERAPY FOR EVERYONE) Especially since Dj’s babysitter invites over her.....boyfriend? maybe. who reaffirms that Mr. Nebbercracker has been screaming at kids and confiscating toys for YEARS. yeah, super easy to see this dude sticking around after death and continuing his time honored tradition of AGGRESSIVELY dealing with trespassers. Only now as a house that WILL eat you just for stepping on the grass.

So as you may have already guessed, this later gets proved to NOT be the case. As Horace ends up returning in the climax alive and well (enough to sneak out of the hospital and steal an ambulance LIKE A BOSS).

Throughout the course of the movie, we and the kids find out that this creepy old man once had a wife but not only is she not around, rumor has it that he ATE her. for some reason. When the kids go into the house to try to ‘kill’ it and stop the house from eating people, they find a bunch of old pictures inside that at least confirm there was a wife at some point. When they end up in the basement among the piles and piles of stuff that’s landed in the yard over the years, the ALSO find a shrine to Mrs. Nebbercracker. Which is also her final resting place (a spot where she was apparently covered completely with cement).

DJ puts 2 and 2 together pretty quick when Mr. Nebbercracker returns and starts trying to calm the house. Mrs. Constance Nebbercracker is the one haunting the place, not Horace. That’s when we unlock Horace’s Tragic Back Story:

Sometime in the 1930′s Horace (a former demolition man) fell in love with Constance. Constance was being exploited as an “attraction” at a circus/freak-show at the time (during the height of just being abnormally tall, short, or obese made you a relevant ‘freak’). This place made her sleep OUTSIDE IN A CAGE and you know people were happily entertaining themselves by throwing things at her and laughing at both her weight  ‘freakishness’ and helplessness.

So to follow a simple love story, the sweet skinny boy sneaks her away, his feelings are reciprocated, and the two start their life together. They’ve gotten to that nice, building their own house stage when everything goes terribly wrong.

For me, this is sort of the start of my opinion that... things for the Nebbercrackers weren’t likely to go well anyway. Like we got the impression from their wedding photos that they managed to have SOME normalcy in their honeymoon phase but when we see the beginnings of the house, Horace is JUST THEN taking apart the cage/cart that Constance was kept in. i’m presuming he was originally gonna use the various parts in the house but dear christ that means that not much time may have past between leaving the circus (guess they at least didn’t care enough about her ‘as property’ to keep the couple on the run?) to getting married and going on a vacation to buying the land and beginning construction.

That said, the mid-twentieth century isn’t exactly known for it’s forwardness on mental health, and oooooohhhhh boy, if this poor couple aint a fitting example that “and they lived happily ever after” doesn’t happen often. Halloween happens to come around and kids get up to their traditional mischief by, what else? Egging what little of the Nebbercracker house existed at the time. 

(Disclaimer i am an expert in nothing so i may get somethings wrong here but this IS just me hashing out an idea i have) When we first see Constance, we see someone actually throwing food and trash at her while she’s “on display”. And when we see her at the skeleton of the Nebbercracker house, she get VISIBLY upset at the children throwing things at the house, she seeks out her husband telling him that those monsters ‘are attacking [their] house and they’re hurting [her]’. In my mind, she and Horace likely haven’t really dealt with her trauma from the circus. Yes Horace removed her from the bad situation and stopped the trauma, but as of good ole 1935, i doubt they really talked about it much, let alone saw a therapist. Both likely just trying to power forward INTO their future.

Horace’s confusion when Constance becomes triggered by the children throwing things and laughing like assholes shows us that he likely hadn’t seen or had to deal with a situation like this before. He does try to get her to focus on him and remind her that she’s with him and not back at the circus, so maybe he’s had to reassure her (like after a nightmare or maybe he got small panics when in more crowded areas - thus the house that’s likely on the edge of town since they don’t have close neighbors). But the course of events indicates that he’d never seen such a STRONG episode from her. 

Perhaps she’d just finally gotten comfortable with being truly free since they could build their own home and so the perceived ‘attack’ on her home became an attack to her safety and happiness. When she goes to her husband, her savior, and (in her eyes) he doesn’t fix it/ he doesn’t get the chance to. When that egg hit HER BODY. it was game over.

Constance tried to take matters into her own hands, remove the ‘threat’ herself.... with the axe Horace was holding. Now it’s a kids movie so no children come even close to getting hurt, but one could take this to mean that, if constance had lived, she may have only gotten more violent as time went on if she didn’t get the help she needed... help Horace may not have been able to give or get for her.

We’ll never know since the way you get a haunted house is... pretty obvious. In a desparate attempt to stop Constance from likely maiming some kids or hurting herself, Horace causes constance to fall into their uncovered basement. As she falls, she tries to grab the cement mixer for stability and ends up dumping the load on top of herself in the basement (making for a VERY creepy site for a shrine). Horace’s guilt compels him to finish the house and he stays there.

Now such a violent, angry moment right before death MEANS THAT SOMETHIN’S GETTING HAUNTED. SO Constance’s spirit possesses the house and begins “defending” itself from the people of the growing town that happen to get too close. ESPECIALLY on Halloween... ya know one of the nights where EVERYBODY goes out and willingly approaches people’s front doors.

Throughout the rest of the flashback we Mr. Nebbercracker trying to keep people away with more and more desperation. Likely because DJ and Chowder haven’t witnessed the first of Constance’s victims. As the movie’s climax pics up we see how Horace talks to the house, trying to placate the angry spirit by taking care of the house and trying to be the first responder when someone enters the lawn before Constance gets to use HER WAY.

From here, Horace’s relationship with the House begins to look...pretty abusive actually. When he gets back home from the hospital he’s grumpy to the kids, but then we see him pause, he’s apprehensive as he turns to get back to the house. From the expressions the house is given and the way Mr Nebbercracker responds, it’s TELLING him to get HOME NOW. He’s timid, and fearful, and the kids begin to get the idea that if he goes into the house now, he may not come out again. And when the house LITERALLY GETS UP AND STARTS CHASING PEOPLE, he’s desperate. He tries soothing her, he tries to redirect her away from the targets of her anger - the kids. 

Can you just imagine the 45 years leading up to this? Horace having to isolate himself from the whole town until it’s just him and this angry house under the pretext of “IF YOU DO NOT DEFEND HOUSE THEN THE HOUSE WILL DO IT”. He even get’s the heart breaking line of “then i’ll have nobody”. Like so many victims that feel they CAN’T leave their homes. I like to imagine that the house is PRIMARILY motivated by the rage and fear that was driving Constance in her final moments but like... what if she hadn’t? Even if she didn’t kill those kids from 45 years ago, would they have been able to get her the help she needed? Like so many back in those days, Constance and Horace likely would’ve only had the option to self medicate or get her institutionalized (ie. Imprisoned again). Would that have devolved into Constance manipulating Horace with things like “i won’t make it without you” and similar tactics. Would have maybe gone the other way? with Constance still not technically being free because Horace would (intentionally or unintentionally) encourage her dependence on him... 

Anyway, when pleading to the house to just leave the children alone fails, he makes the decision to stop her. with dynamite from his Demo days. 

Constance does not take this well.

From there we get the exciting confrontation where the main characters destroy the house WITHOUT the self-sacrifice that Mr. Nebbercracker may have been planning. We even get a nice little moment where constance’s spirit (unattached to the destroyed house) get’s to move on after a quick goodbye to Horace. And now we get our kids movie happy ending with DJ, Chowder, and Jenny helping Mr. Nebbercracker begin redistributing the pile of toys still in what’s left of the basement to trick-or-treaters and the living things that the house ate somehow climb out of whatever pocket dimension they were trapped in. Nobody seems to question why Nebbercracker’s house is just a crater now....and that this old man that left the hospital without a discharge is now homeless....

Buuuuuuuut i’ve been typing for like 2 hours now. I still have thoughts about other side characters and maybe more exploring the dynamics of technically being in a relationship with a haunted house. buuuuut i need to sleep.

Stay nerdy fellow overthinkers.

[nerdarchy-blog]

The follow up to 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything must indeed possess powerful magic to contain so much stuff in 192 pages — the exact page count of its predecessor according to Jeremy Crawford, principal rules designer of the game. The product of 18 months work the book includes material for Dungeons Masters and players of 5E D&D alike. I had an opportunity to join the press briefing with Crawford and Greg Tito, communications and press relations director for D&D and let me tell you, sitting on this was really exciting. Reading and hearing what players speculated on and wanting to say, “You’re all right! It’s all in the book. All the character options and new stuff you’re guessing about are inside!” So let’s get into Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

On the cover for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything Tasha holds an ornate grimoire covered with symbols from the planes of existence in stunning art by Magali Villeneuve.

A delightful conversation about 5E D&D

No sense burying the lead — all the options and fresh new modular content you thought might be in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is there. Subclasses for all the classes are in there. Alternate class features from the most popular Unearthed Arcana in the entirety of 5E D&D are in there. The artificer class is in there — including some tweaks, new infusions and the Armorer subclass that was loved by people, according to Crawford. The Aberrant Mind sorcerer, UA’s most highly rated content ever, is in there and so are many from the past year. Spell Versatility and new Beast Master Companions are in there and I know there’s untold numbers of players stoked to hear this. There’s new artwork for the Artillerist Artificer Specialist that was shared during the briefing too.

A human artificer balances his Eldritch Cannon on his shoulder as seen in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Art by Brian Valeza]

Like XGtE the book explores the titular character’s wonderfully complex point of view in comments on the content throughout, with nods to Tasha’s history in her comments and captions. One clue about Tasha’s mysterious origin reveals itself on the cover. The tattoo on her cheek is a chicken leg, which Crawford explained is an “echo of the chicken-legged hut that Baba Yaga lives in.”

A bunch of subclasses and class features only chicken scratches the surface of the scope of material. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is organized into four chapters. While perusing the material in the book readers learn more about Tasha and the lore surrounding her. Tasha’s life has involved the fantastic since the very beginning of her origins in the fey realms. As she became a brilliant and powerful wizard her adventures took her to other planes and dimensions so she is unfazed by beings of any sort, least of all her frenemy Mordenkainen.

Character options

Spells and magic items

Group patrons

Tools for Dungeon Masters

Customizing your origin is an important part of the development of the book and something the design team seems particularly proud of, for good reason. Players love the idea of more personalized character origin stories. I use This Is Your Life stuff from XGtE all the time and TCoE builds on that tremendously. Like, seriously a lot. The design goal was tools for players to create truly unique characters with amazingly magical origins and backstories.

This includes modifying traits during character creation to better reflect the story players want to tell and offers a lineage template with fill-in-the-blanks tools to totally personalize characters. The Lineage System introduces a new way to approach creating and playing characters and adventures in 5E D&D, a responsibility the design team takes very seriously as stewards of the game. During the press briefing Crawford and Tito explained how TCoE is one of multiple books demonstrating a shift in how D&D handles things like race.

Other changes include the removal of negative racial modifiers for certain races from Volo’s Guide to Monsters via errata. Crawford explained how their original intention for races like kobold and orc was as Monstrous Adventurers, separate from standard character options. This is why those options are included in their own section in VGtM along with options considered more powerful than standard in some cases, like yuan-ti and to a lesser extent goblins. Because this context is lost through the way so many players engage with 5E D&D through online tools and resources like D&D Beyond, it became a pain point for players and TCoE will include updated versions. Hooray for kobold and orc enthusiasts!

The Lineage System offers tools to create characters not bound by a species archetype. I love the way Crawford explained how this modular piece of content interacts with existing 5E D&D material. The core game, what is presented in the Player’s Handbook and other sources, illustrates an archetypal adventuring character like an elf. Choosing this option for your character represents playing Elfie McElferson in other words — the exact kind of elf that comes to mind when you think of D&D elves. The Lineage System gives players and DMs tools to disentangle characters’ personal traits with cultural traits. And worry not! The path to customization is very smooth according to Crawford, who emphasized it is not complicated at all.

Along with the new class options and alternate features players can customize how each class feels. This includes something that worms its way into the mind of every edition of D&D sooner or later.

Psionics! The Aberrant Mind is just one of the psionic themed subclasses from UA. Along with a few others, these psionic subclasses use a modifed version of the playtest mechanics, which Crawford described as “evolved.” I’m pretty middle of the road when it comes to psionics, neither thrilled to use them or abhorred by their inclusion in the game but I’ve got to say I really dug that Psionic Talent die so I hope that’s what he meant.

During the press briefing they did not get too deep into new spells and magic items in TCoE but there are some tidbits to share. For starters Tasha adds new spells of her own design to D&D canon. Tasha’s caustic brew and Tasha’s otherworldly guise are two mentioned and I’m excited to see more. Spells named for the wizards who created them evokes a sense of mystery and wonder in all D&D players and after all her incredible excursions and magical experimentation I’m certain Tasha’s influence on 5E D&D will be immense.

Spellcasters can boost their power with new spell focus magic items too, which sounds awesome. There’s got to be a magical cauldron, right? One of the magic items Crawford talked about sounds totally awesome — the Tarokka Deck. Not like, any old prophetic card deck though. This is THE Tarokka Deck, an artifact capable of trapping spirits. Can I tell you I lost track of what they said for a moment because I was daydreaming about a Ghostbusters inspired 5E D&D campaign.

Sidekicks (remember them?) get expanded in TCoE too. Resources to create your own customized sidekicks sounds like a lot of fun new toys to play with. When asked what the most surprising thing about the book is, Crawford revealed there’s a sidekick class. You can play as a Warrior, Expert or Spellcaster, which offers a slimmed down experience for perhaps new players or those looking for less complexity. This sounds awesome to me. I’ve used the Sidekicks content from UA several times and it is terrific, so more of that and more ways to use it can’t go wrong.

More than that though Crawford was surprised by “how much liberty players have to customize.” The Lineage System, tons of new class options and alternate features, spells, feats (wow I didn’t even mention those!) all combine to create more levers and dials players and DMs can use to tailor our game experiences and tell the kinds of stories we want with exactly the kinds of characters we imagine.

“Our work on the game is a delightful conversation with the community that never ends,” as Crawford put it. With tremendous amounts of fun, cool sounding new content like they’re brewing up in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, I don’t doubt it.

#gallery-0-3 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-3 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

A tiefling sorcerer levitates several feet off the ground. [Art by Kieran Yanner]

A lineup of four homunculus servants. [Art by Irina Nordsol]

The young wizard Tasha studies her spellbook in front of Baba Yaga’s hut. Looming nearby is Baba Yaga herself, watching her adopted daughter intently. [Art by Brian Valeza]

This is a massive tome holding secrets of ultimate evil. The exterior of the book reflects the evil within. The covers are made of dark demon scales, which are trimmed in rune-carved metal shaped to look like demonic claws. [Art by David Sladek]

Two wood elf lads swim in a glittering pond, which is fed by a waterfall that pours out of a face carved in a bluff. [Art by Robin Olausson]

A youthful merfolk king lounges on his throne underwater. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Using a psychic spell, a wizard battles a troglodyte underground. [Art by Andrew Mar]

Sidekicks will be expanded in the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

An alternate cover art version is only available through local game stores. [Art by Wylie Beckert]

A heavy, ominous storm brews at sea as clouds gather. But these are not normal storm clouds. These have formed into a churning mass of enormous skulls in the sky. [Art by Titus Lunter]

Oh! Are you still here? One last thing I’ll mention is the section on Magical Environments includes Eldritch Storms, magical fruits and magical roads, a Mirror Realm and a Mimic Colony. Stay nerdy.

Congrats! That new #DnD stuff you thought would be in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is in there. #staynerdy The follow up to 2017's Xanathar's Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming…

[mysticalmindblog]

The challenges you face today could well be your victories tomorrow, but in order to tackle the issues at hand you need to have the clear intention of being mindful to know how to wade through the minefield of the EGO to get to the other side.

So many of us are swept up in our own self-importance that when troubles or challenges come, we go scurrying quickly into safe-spaces and comfort zones whining. We live in the Age of the Ego; of the Selfie, of the hot Social Media profile, of the Likes, and Followers. Narcissism is ritualized and celebrated in every form of media and entertainment. We want to be better than anyone else, even if it means stepping on others, or we have to fake it to make it.

Does your Ego make you feel good about yourself?

How important are you, to you..?

An awkward question to contemplate, and answer, right..?

For the greater majority of people, if asked this question, an instinctive mental answer would arise out of the ego and say, "I am the most important thing to me." However, I wonder for how many people a deeper part of the pure mind would interfere in that reply actually being spoken out loud.

Humility, and a deeper - often overlooked sense of understanding where the evils of ego are concerned, are present in all of us; and fortunately can be triggered into blocking us from making embarrassing blunders when conversations go a certain way in social situations.

The reality though, is that we humans to all intents and purposes appear to be creatures driven and motivated by insatiable desires, expectations, and self-importance. We are on this planet for a very brief time, and we spend so much of that time trying to prove to everyone else our value and worth, while having no clue about our real identity or purpose.

And yet, for all we think about ourselves, our ego, our gutsy desires, our wildly exaggerated social media profiles, and self-marketing - for the majority, we really are nothing more than temporary consumers on this planet.

We are so distracted with seeking the next best comfort item, escapism, comfort food, and comfortable environment, apathetically being lectured each and every day by the commercial advertising thrown at us in practically every aspect of our lives - only to consume, and consume, and consume some more, and keep consuming, and want to consume more, and on and on it goes.

Do you think I am being a bit harsh and narrow minded with the above statement..?

If you do, please read on, to understand this angle of perception.

You, I, and every other individual, are nothing more than a potential revenue source, a consumer who needs to be told what they need to consume in order to be happy, in the eyes of every business, company, and corporation. We are simply a means to an end - and that is to generate revenue, make profits, provide finance for others to live from. The care is only for the bottom line, and whatever it takes to ensure the bottom line is fruitful.

And then there is us, the customer, the consumer. For us, wherever we think the grass is greener (the price is cheaper) we will inevitably always run. And why not, right..? After all, everyone wants a great deal and a super bargain, get more for less, or maybe get stuff for free - even better! Whoever likes to make a dash towards anything that takes away from your pleasure center, and instead gives suffering and hardships..?

Nobody. It's all about the comforts and pleasures.

So, what has all this got to do with the Image Quote theme for this blog entry..?

Everything to do with it, actually.  I myself am a firsthand witness that when you get completely and utterly frustrated by a situation or a bundle of challenges in life, you 'can' learn the most important lessons of your life.

It really has to be clear that when suffering occurs and painful choices and procrastination are concerned, a lack of due diligence will return the human psyche into a repeating cycle of "I am hurt, I need sympathy and comforting because it's all so unfair'.

The potential to grow, and retain enlightening information to be able to pass on to others, is inherent in every challenge you will ever encounter. This is a fact of life. Nobody is exempted from this potential for so long as they have breath in their body.

If you notice I highlighted the word 'can' in the above paragraph. The reason being is that a typical knee-jerk response to a tough life challenge is to experience a surge of emotion, giving rise to instant anxiety and a sudden quest to find the nearest comfortable looking 'safe-space', whether physical or mental; from calling someone for help, to rushing to obtain escapism through alcohol or narcotics. This is another tragic set of statistics, alcohol and drug abuse as a result of individuals falling into despair after being afflicted by a severe life trauma or negative series of events. Challenge after issue after trauma after problem, can stack up in a literal heartbeat - and with the demands and constraints of modern society, it is all too easy to fall down, and fall hard.

The Fortunate Few

Some are fortunate enough to have supportive and caring families, or friends, while others invariably end up alone, forgotten, ignored.

There is so much sadness and suffering in the world related directly to our inadequate understanding of our true potential for overcoming the pain that life brings via those life-changing challenges that everyone will endure regardless of age, race, gender, or social status.

So, how do we discover and realize our true potential..?

How do we achieve a real state of peace of mind..?

How is it possible to rise above the pain and suffering that affects us, and undoubtedly will again and again..?

How do we interpret life's challenges as great lessons to make us wiser and stronger individuals..?

LESS ATTACHMENTS.

LESS DISTRACTIONS.

LESS WORRYING ABOUT THINGS WE CANNOT CONTROL.

MORE ACCEPTANCE.

MORE SELF CONTEMPLATION.

MORE LIVING IN THE MOMENT YOU ARE IN.

MORE COMPASSION.

Please, for a moment or two, imagine the above 7 points are titles for sections of a typical college course syllabus.

Now, imagine the course syllabus is called "My Life".

The first semester begins on the day you are born.

The last semester ends on the day you die.

Do you see the proper context now..? Is your perspective changing yet..?

Compassionate

The best way to learn in life is through hands on experience. There are things that hold true regardless of whether you are religious or not, irrespective of your beliefs - in life, that sculpt you and shape you. When you see by looking back over your life how you have been educated by the most tumultuous times and harshest challenges, you'll realize that by embracing those things that normally cause you anxiety, you can not only overcome those issues, and learn a great deal from them, but also in fact speed them right along to their conclusion - all the while maintaining a warm and compassionate heart - especially for others who you know are going through the same challenges.

Believe in yourself. The pure YOU beneath all those layers that the cold, cruel world sees daily. Cast off those layers, embrace the lessons life is teaching, and pay-it-forward by taking your hard earned wisdom to others who are suffering needlessly.

[omegangrins]

The Hateful 8: Chris Mannix was made the Sheriff of Red Rock by his siblings so they could kill him from a distance.

Tl;dr: Due to his intelligence, mouth, and aspirations, Chris Mannix "was" appointed Sheriff of Red Rock via a sham election organized by his siblings so they could kill him anonymously from a distance.

I love the ambiguous nature of Walton Goggin's character Chris Mannix in The Hateful Eight. A man who joined his father and family to ransack towns in order to inspire fear for the Confederacy, dying by the side of the type of person he hated most. All whilst claiming to be a lawman. And it's always made me wonder if he was telling the truth or.... not really actually. I always thought he was telling the truth. Cause he never lies throughout the whole movie. In fact, he catches several people in lies (Marquis, Gage, Daisy). There are even several times where he refers to himself as a Sheriff believing that he will live to carry out his threats. He's either an excellent actor with his own side game in this movie, or he truly believes what he says is true.

Here's where things get subjective and I don't have a lot of information on (Part of why I'm putting it out to the world.). There's a line by John Ruth where he says that Chris is Erskine Mannix's youngest boy. Now here's where you can imply a few things. We know he's not an only child definitely not one of two sibling, or Ruth would refer to Chris as "the other one" or some such. And he says youngest boy so we can infer that Erskine had daughters. Meaning that if this is a regular Carolinan family from the 1800's, they would have as many kids as possible. Low ball estimate of 2 girls and 4 boys. But enough of them to dislike the little one.

Now let's look at Chris. If he's the youngest of the family then one could infer that he's had the hard life. Almost a runt in the litter type. But he's a man who values dignity and true leadership. Both traits of honest men. Then if we take what he says about being Sheriff to be true, he also never tells a lie, makes a deception, or attempts to hurt/kill anyone preemptively (at least any one that hadn't already tried to kill him 😄). He even realizes his tongue is getting him into stupid trouble on the stagecoach so he shuts down the conversation and apologizes for his getting riled up. Clearly a man that understands the rules of society and is happy to play by them. Yet still an honest man nonetheless.

His honesty can even be seen in his dissemination of other people's lies. It takes him less than 15 minutes after learning of Marquis' letter to realize it was a fake, and he didn't even have to read it. All he did was add up the pieces of Major Marquis Warren he knew. Joe Gage he more or less guessed/used instinct. But, he figured out that all of what Daisy Domergue said was bullshit the same way he figured out Warren's letter was shit: character context clues. So, he's great at spotting lies. This will come in later with the family bit.

This is what makes me think about this the most though. He always refers to himself as the new Sheriff of Red Rock. Not just in greetings but in negotiation stances and regular interactions. When Mannix meets John Ruth and Co. and Ruth asks for his badge, Chris tells them that if they're bounty hunters, it's him they're taking their dead bounties to. And when John Ruth refuses to let him board without manacles, Mannix tells O.B. that he will be legally obliged to inform the Marshal at Red Rock that Ruth left the new Sheriff to freeze without assisting him. A similar thing happens when they reach the Haberdashery. When Marquis draws his weapon on Sanford E. Smithers, and Oswaldo Mobray's reminds him that he'll hang in Red Rock if he does. Mannix steps next to Smithers and reaffirms that he will make sure that Marquis will hang, seeing that he is the new Sheriff and all. In fact, one of the first things that Chris does is interact with the person he believes to be Red Rock's new hangman. Going so far as to ask if he can see the hanging papers for the man who shot the Sheriff that Chris is replacing. He even cordially chats up with Oswaldo, reasoning they'll be working together soon.

And finally, near his deathbed, with no one to care, he declares his "first and final act, as the Sheriff of Red Rock" is to have Domergue hanged. A rather strange moment to commit to a lie, if it were one. Especially considering Marquis lets him read the faux Lincoln letter minutes letter. Sure seems like the perfect opportunity to confess all of one's lies and yet Chris stays quiet. So we can assume that he meant what he said. Or at least, he thought it was true....

This is where the Mannix family comes back into play. We learn during bits of dialogue throughout the movie that Erskine Mannix led a team of Confederate rebels known as Erskine's Marauders during and after the Civil War. It can be implied that the entire Mannix family was apart of this, since it's said their numbers reached around 400. So of course Erskine's kids would hop on this hate train. Chris says as much when talking about fighting under his father's command. Erskine Mannix held the Marauders together after the war with nothing but his command and respect. In fact, it's one of the things Chris most admired about his father. You can tell he looked up to his daddy.

Now I get into the extrapolating subjective era. Remember what I said about the number of kids? Call it 6 kids for Erskine with Chris being the youngest but probably smartest. Several characters also bring up that Erskine died recently. So this leaves a power vacuum. It's probably one of those situations like in the stagecoach where he can run his mouth a bit too much, or like he does with Ruth and Warren, use legal leverage to gain an upper hand. (If this was Game of Thrones, Chris would be a Tyrion type character. Good natured, hated, but bloody good at playing the game.). He's a player that needed to be shut up. I'd wager there came a time after/before Erskine died where Chris wanted more power in the family. He started to exert influence and amass bits of power, becoming more politically dangerous. Sort of like Fredo.

Seeing this, his brothers and sisters decide to hatch a simple scheme to kill him one of three ways. First, they pay a man to kill the Sheriff in Red Rock (I imagine as Marauders they would have plenty of cash. Look at Chris, he ain't dressed in rags.) and bribe public officials to rig the election so Chris becomes Sheriff. They do this in order to make it seem authentic to the already established sharp-eyed Chris Mannix. With the hard part done, next comes the killing. The first death they set up in Red Rock along with the previous bribing. All it takes is finding someone else *also* willing to kill the Sheriff. That way when Chris comes to town, he suffers the same fate as the Sheriff before him. Second way is by horse. This is closer to conjecture but Chris doesn't seem to have the attachment to his horse that Marquis did. Meaning either that it wasn't his horse, it was but he didn't care, or that no one asked him so that's something about him we'll never know. What it could mean though, is that he was given a lame horse without his knowledge. Third thing is the blizzard. It's a long distance from Wyoming to Red Rock. And a blizzard that large would have signs that would be spottable even back then. So he was sent into a white hell on a lame horse heading to an eventual bullet. Sounds like a plan that we're not seeing all the pieces of. So if his family was planning to get rid of him and his overly smart and mouthy ways, they had set up several opportunities to have it done.

Final weird thing to think about. There is a complaint that The Hateful Eight title doesn't work numerically with the characters we are given and their backstories. To that I would add that it does. I think O.B. and Mannix are the two odd "good" guys out, either with integrity or by not trying to actively hurt anyone in the story. Everyone of the main characters tries to kill other people in cold blood, and only O.B. and Mannix shoot no one, or wait until they are shot at. And if you include his telling the truth to himself that he is Sheriff, then he and O.B. are the only "pure of heart" ones.

In the end, Chris was telling the truth and also unknowingly lying. True that he'd been made Sheriff, and a lie that he would stay that way for long. He's the best of both worlds. The greyest of grey characters.

[satoisms]

so i had written up all my thoughts on the newest chapter on a twitlonger and instead of just rewriting it all for a new post here i’m just gonna copy+paste what i had to say so if you’re ready here’s my jumbled ass rambly thoughts

if you know me you know i have nothing but the utmost love and compassion toward ritsumafu as a whole with mafuyu being my favourite character and ritsuka coming along in tow. i've written mafuyu for over 2 years and have strong feelings for both. that being said this chapter in its entirety had me in a nervous wreck because from the start i could feel something to some degree was going to hit and of course that gut feeling was right. so let's move on. we know full well both ritsuka and mafuyu have communication issues and it's been a thing that's come up quite a bit. they have talked stuff out once via the classroom scene and had solved things. though one should note a bit influence for mafuyu making sure they spoke was the fear and anxiety he'd felt after having been trauma dumped on prior and not wanting things to fall apart. the fear pushed him to speak up and it's very clear both care for one another. both ritsuka and mafuyu have been dealing with things in their own way throughout things. while it's understandable for mafuyu to struggle opening up on subjects like the past or his insecurities and fears it's impossible for ritsuka to fully understand and grasp what mafuyu wants or needs if he doesn't hear it from mafuyu. while it's definitely difficult to do so, ritsuka has attempted to give mafuyu time to think on things or figure out what to say. ritsuka on the other hand has dealt with so much for so long. while he puts up a front of being fine it's been evident through the latest chapters and also in this one that he is very much not all right. ritsuka is someone who wears his heart on his sleeve and has repeatedly been shown to be kind and compassionate to others whether he likes them or not. such as voicing concern for hiiragi and shizu in the previous chapter despite being at odds with hiiragi due to clashing personalities. his face has shown the effects of how hard he's worked on the song alongside having to masquerade as another individual he has little to know knowledge about while completing a song that was made for his boyfriend. that is something that would cause anyone turmoil especially when it's from your current partner's previous significant other. he's been there for everyone else making sure to help when he can but he hasn't once pushed his insecurities and fears onto others because he doesn't want to burden them because he can't bear to see such a thing. thus brings onto this chapter. it was very comforting to see ritsuka and mafuyu have a moment to see each other and how ritsuka rushed as fast as he could to see his boyfriend when receiving such a text message. it's clear even with how things have been he cares for mafuyu so deeply he rushed all the way from his own home to take a train to mafuyu's place since the two don't exactly live close to one another. but even so he rushed as much as he could so he could see mafuyu when mafuyu had said he wanted to see him. while the two didn't exactly get to properly talk as one might want it's when you have to take a moment and put yourselves in their shoes to consider some things. how exactly would you, a seventeen year old who doesn't have all the pieces put together, bring up such a conversation? regardless what they would need to talk about would be difficult territory to tread and even mafuyu himself stated he can't say things well. these kinds of discussions while important do need to be dealt with in a specific manner and simply wording things the wrong way could lead to misunderstandings and could cause unintentional damage in the long run. that's why it's such a difficult thing to go about. even if communication is wholly important in any relationship (romantic or otherwise) some topics are more difficult than others and what needs to be talked about is most definitely a sensitive area not just for mafuyu but ritsuka as well so both would need to tread with caution. not only that, but communication can only occur if both parties participate. if only one party talks it wouldn't be both communicating the issues and coming up with solutions but more one party speaking while the other listens and thus pressure is put wholly on the one speaking to problem solve for both parties rather than both speaking together and coming to an understanding. bringing up practicing together in a one-on-one setting was not in any way done with malice. ritsuka would never do anything to intentionally hurt mafuyu given how deeply he cares for and loves mafuyu. practicing wasn't something that was an issue prior so how would he know offering such an idea would hurt mafuyu? he wanted to spend time with his boyfriend since he hasn't had as much time due to obligations to practice and play support for syh and it was something the two had done together in the past multiple times prior. music was something that brought them together but at this time mafuyu's own insecurities and fears surrounding music has him wanting to avoid it altogether. looking back at chapter 31 mafuyu had mentioned not being able to hear the music well which could tie into how that chapter also started his fears building up thanks to the linking ritsuka having his part-time job and practice with syh eating up his spare time similar to what happened in the past with yuki. we also have last chapter when he'd woken up from the nightmare and thought along the lines of "how long has it been since i last sang? how did i use to sing?" as if he'd lost his voice and ability to remember how to properly sing which was his method of communicating his feelings most fluently but due to his fears and insecurities getting the best of him he can't hear music well or even sing as it's all getting the better of him inside his head. ritsuka, while given some slight context on things with yuki and mafuyu in the past via hiiragi's words, he doesn't have the whole picture nor knows what a mess mafuyu's mind most definitely is. with that in mind he wouldn't know the topic of practicing together would cause harm. then comes the invitation to the concert. the thing is while timing most definitely was not kind it is something that was going to have to happen sooner or later. the concert and yuki's song are both bombs waiting to go off and no matter how much we try to ignore it the issue still remains. of course mafuyu's reaction tied to the concert makes sense, but it probably is best it was ritsuka inviting him rather than hiiragi or shizu. if either one invited him instead he'd probably still hesitate but the idea of "why didn't uenoyama-kun invite me himself?" would undoubtedly linger and cause more friction than what happened here. and if mafuyu wasn't even invited in the first place then there might be the lingering feeling of not being invited or included which is an issue that stemmed from his time with yuki as well. either way the situation with the concert invitation wasn't going to be one that was going to end well and while it's hurtful for both boys and undoubtedly feeds into both boys' insecurities it's best to tackle earlier on than let it fester and have the reaction get worse. it doesn't help with ritsuka's limited time. he's 17 years old and has a curfew alongside with trains only running so late. as much as it would be nice to spend more time to properly try to tackle this head on he had to return home and didn't have as much time to go about things. it's not the greatest but you can't fault him for something out of his control like train schedule or curfew. especially since yayoi when greeting him mentioned him going out late so without thought on curfew time he rushed to see mafuyu as fast as he could. the two live far apart so it's not like he could easily walk there and back without concern for the train. and of course he finally admitted, while quiet, he isn't okay. it's been clear he hasn't been okay for a while but he's bottled it up so much but to finally admit it is definitely big for ritsuka. he often wears a strong front for others and while is probably the most expressive one in the series hides his moments of insecurities and negativity to himself so not to worry others. he has to put on the strong front especially when trying to be there for others like mafuyu who he has been nothing but caring and trying his best the whole time. remember this is ritsuka's first love and first relationship. he's been stumbling about uncertain of which way is the right way but trying his best to be there while also secretly keeping his insecurities and thoughts to himself. this is the closest in this entire series he has been to breaking down and also the most vulnerable ritsuka has been to us reading. he's scared and doesn't know what to do. he feels as if everything is breaking apart and everyone is going separate ways and doesn't know how to fix it all because he's often the one trying to figure out how to better things. all his worries and insecurities flooding at him while not knowing what to do or who to turn to. mafuyu's expressions and reactions hurt him and scared him undoubtedly. he hates seeing those kinds of looks on mafuyu's face and to see he caused it probably hurt him more than we could ever imagine. he's lost and doesn't know what to do. it's nothing short of heartbreaking having him be in this kind of state and how he's even visibly deteriorated since the whole start of the mix arc. ultimately this isn't a simple issue that can just be solved in one go. both ritsuka and mafuyu have been in their heads trying to wrap around things but have no clue where to even go. they're both still young and trying to figure it out. i will try to hold onto blind faith something will work out since i believe in both of them but it's ultimately painful to read for how important these two are to me. if i could give a take on how to fix things i would but there is no easy answer to give especially with how severe everything is effecting the two at this instant. only time can tell in the next chapter how things will go but i'm quite anxious to see what happens. with that being said i thank you for taking the time to read this rambled mess of a twitlonger. this is why i put it all here given how much i wrote. but i hope this gives insight on my take of things this chapter and whatever time it is for you i hope you have a wonderful day/evening/night. thank you very much for your time and patience and giving my thoughts a read. i appreciate it.

[safitheartist]

A closer look at the circus freaks and Ben 10 (2017)'s pretty amazing world building. Also potential Kevin forshadowing?

Okay, stay with me here for a second because I have very shocking news to you guys. Season 2 of Ben 10 so far was really good.

No seriously, it feels like moa *actually* lead us on the entirety of season 1 and now they actually reached early SU level of subtle world building. It's insane.

For example, lets look at three characters all other incarnations of Ben 10 so far has been glossing over for the most part.

Acid Breath, Fright Wig and Thumbnail.

Because this time. They come with lore! And lore that leaves some pretty dark implications might I add.

So lets dig in guys, because there is a whole can of worms to devoure here.

Now lets have some context, the original circus freak trio were introduced to us as Zambozo's three henchmen in the original series and have been treated as a trio eversince, they never had much characterization out side of the fact that they are vilans and their only motivation seems to be money or other forms of profit.

Most of them time, if they aren't under somebody else's command Acid Breath seems to take the leader role.

The things interesting about them often were the fights they would have against Ben, due to their really unique powers. However, on the personality front there really wasn't much to work with.

Another thing to note is that they were introduced to us as adults.

Now the reboot, is taking a pretty different approach.

It's humanizing them.

First, we aren't even introduced to them alongside Zambozo, they don't even make a appearance in Zambozo's debut episode.

And they only get introduced as a trio after Fright Wig already made her first appearance where we learn that she apparently has encountered Ben on several occasions, that and later context lets me believe that the trio probably does their solo thing until Zambozo would need them. Luring them in with false promises.

It's also then that they establish that at least Fright Wig is significantly younger then her original incarnation. Something that striked me as odd and slightly insulting at the beginning but now, with the newly established context, makes a lot of sense really.

Now Acid Breath's and Thumbnail's introductions don't establish much other then their return as a trio unit.

It's not until season 2 that the big bombs regarding their characters are droped.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASON 2 HERE GUYS!!!!!

In a episode where Zambozo tricks people with a convoluted hypnothis scheme involving a fake voting campaign done as a distraction so the trio can rob a bank we get something I honestly never expected for these three. Genuine characterization.

We find out in a conversation Ben overhears between these three that Fright Wig is really into science, apparently aiming to get new equipment with her pay. Establishing her as the brains of the trio and most likely to take on the strategist role.

Acid Breath comments that he wants to get mouth water 'for the ladies'. Establishing him as a lot more inmature then his original self and the disgnated goofball of the group. However later interactions also imply he still is the one who is in the leader position...my guess is because he's the oldest and has been with Zambozo for the longest time. It's a pretty big depature from his OG self which always seemed to be the most bitter and no nonsense kind of person. And that has it's reason as the episode establishs later.

Thumbnail doesn't talk, as per usual, but we get a glimpse of his personality as he imagines himself having a spa day with his cut. Establishing him as a rather sensitive person who just wants to enjoy himself a bit. It's again, somewhat different from his original self which honestly never had any personality outside of being the brawls of the group.

This seems minor but it is a very effective way to establish them as people outside of their vilan live. And it also serves as something the other serieses again never did.

Establishing them as friends.

They take interest in eachother. Want to know the other's opinion. Have playful arguments that don't come off as threatening at all. Again. It's simplistic but very effective to make them seem more real. It even translates into their fight scenes. In OG Ben 10 and the sequels the trio, while established as a team, never actually acted as such (if I recall right). They always acted as three individuals who attack Ben and the others together but never actually as a team.

The reboot has them leaping off of Thumbnail, throw eachother around and attack as a actual team unit. Similar to a circus act (and the scenes have some very nice camera angles too might I add. The animation is still meh but they use a lot of techniques to conceal that fact and keep the action dynamic).

Now the thing to keep in mind here is that non of their established desires are expensive, Fright Wig's probably being the most expensive, and even then she seem to only want some new beakers. Ben even comments on it, saying he almost feels sorry for them.

We then find out that Zambozo never paid them before, only having promised he would do so at a later date. Clearly having no intentions to actually follow through with that. Which actually ties in very nicely in the overall narrative of the episode.

Ben then makes them realize that Zambozo is playing them, as Fourarms might I add, either implying Ben himself has diplomatic talents or that Fourarms' dna donator had them (Achi, once you read this, you are very welcome).

The trio react very differently to that realization. Thumbnail gets furious, realizing he will never get his spa day. Fright Wig seems to see Ben's point and points out how Zambozo doesn't seem to care about anything but his own gain.

Now Acid Breath....is something alright.

At first he seemed hesitant to abandoning Zambozo until Fright Wig points out that Zambozo doesn't care about them...which prompts a series of flashbacks that clue us in to some really dark aspects of their relationship.

We see a slightly younger Acid Breath, with hair and teeth. Remarking how he thinks he should go to the doctor as his teeth seem too be starting to rot while Zambozo is uncaring and not at all bothered as he is too busy admiring his profit...which Acid Breath probably colected for him. This repeats a few times with his condition worsening over a seemingly pretty short period of time. At first I thought his mutation was only kicking in now, but what is more likely is that using his powers is causing serious health problems for him. At first I was confused why he was so gullible in the first place and didn't just go to a doctor himself (maybe stealing some money to go to a check up) until his last line....

He remarks, as his hair and teeth are falling out,

"Seriously, I'm only 16!"

.........ouch.

Now that puts his situation into a completely different context doesn't it? Not only does that mean Zambozo was employing children without paying them (again Fright Wig is also younger and I think it's safe to assume that Thumbnail is as well) essentially exploiting them. He also failed one of them as he basically was destroying his body for him, probably scared and confused about the situation and searching for comfort from the only parental figure in his live at the time.

Now that's just fucking depressing. It's pretty fair to assume that Acid breath probably is 16-17 still in the series, going off of context clues and his overall behavior. I think Thumbnail is around the same age if not a bit younger and Fright Wig probably is the youngest, young enough to pose as Gwen's friend, so I peg her as anywhere between 12-15 (probably looks younger then she actually is). That's just speculation on my part based on their behavior around eachother though.

After the flashback Acid Breath decides that they should ditch the clown (thank fuck.) aluding to him being the unofficial leader of the group as it's his decision that is the final.

They sent Zambozo a angry message consisting of emojis (again, heavily implying that they are teens....look, the show isn't perfect okay.) followed by them sending a picture with a 'we quit' sign.

In the end we get teased that we didn't see the last of them. Clearly establishing them as a separate entity from Zambozo, most likely for good as we get a glimps of them enjoying themselves on a vacation somewhere. Showing them still as a close unit.

Now this. This is some very, very dense world building stuffed into one episode and conveyed with very little exposition really. We get the most important context clues via plot development and the little exposition there was felt quiet natural.

It raises a lot of questions. Like 'how did these three get into this situation?' 'Where are their parents?' 'Why is no one trying to help them?' And most importantly, 'What is the follow up to this going to be?'.

Like, think about it. The episode went out of it's way to separate them from Zambozo while also making them more relateable. They wouldn't do that if it's not important. So what narrative purpose does it have?

Now I have a theory what they might be going for here. You see. This entire set up feels familiar to a very iconic character we had in the original show.

A kid with powers who was mistreated and exploited due to them. Somebody who got on the wrong course more due to the nature of his environment rather then his own wrong doings.

Boom. Now isn't that a interesting concept?

Do I think they will make Kevin one of the circus freaks? Eh. No that would be a stretch. I mean sure, it could happen, but we first have to wait and see how they are changing his character.

Do I think they are at least on a thematic basis forshadowing Kevin's introduction? Yes. Absolutely. And there are other clues as well.

Vilgax, on two occasions, has been teaming up with other vilans. Animo and the weather bots. With Animo he almost immediately betrayed him, leading Animo to team up with Ben temporarily and...well that's a bit too much of a spoiler but lets just say.....something very interesting happens that also ties into the thems of Kevin's OG character. The weather bots again, go against Vilgax, leaving him saying 'never again' which probably is a joke since from a narrative stand point there is no way this will be his last team up. Rule of three anyone?

Moa has been exploring a lot of themes that they never got to explore in length in their original show. Stuff Alien Force then took a dump on mostly (I don't fucking care what you guys say. On a writing stand point Alien Force fucking sucked!) They have been putting a lot of emphasis on magic in their show, establishing it as a clear and unmistakeable aspect of their universe. However another aspect Alien Force screwed up was the concept of mutants until Omniverse retconed that again.

In OG it was heavily implied that Kevin's mutation caused people to discriminate againt him. Show casing him having clear abandonment issues and triggers. However they never went into detail with these concepts. Causing....Alien Force to assassinate that entire concept (again. Alien Force was the worst Ben 10 incarnation and you can fucking fight me!!!). So for them to actually forshadow Kevin and making his entire storyline a lot more significant makes a lot of sense.

Anyway. I am actually enjoying the show so far and am very curious as to where stuff is going there. I hope the circus freaks are getting even more development and maybe even a redemption, who knows? I also hope they are keeping the 'found family' vibe they have alive. I'm a sucker for that stuff.

[resonanteye]

via http://resonanteye.net/youve-arrived/

you've arrived

hosting/reposting

  The Great Awakening

You have arrived.

It’s been a long journey. Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Get a glass of water and sit down. This is going to be long. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, but it’s what you didn’t even know you needed to hear. The totality of this is greater than the sum of its parts and I implore you to read all the way to the end. It’s going to make you angry. It’s going to make you feel a lot of things you don’t want to feel, but you wanted to wake up and this was the only way. You are going to want to dismiss it. People will tell you not to read it. Belief is the most powerful force in this universe, and your belief is about to be challenged in a way you didn’t expect. Fortunately, you don’t have to actually believe anything written here. All you have to do is read it with an open mind. If you get to the end of this your thinking will change. You will be one step closer to being free, and then you can then go on to free the others. Where we go one, we go all.

  Before we go any further, we need to set some ground rules:

1) The language here is going to seem really… off, but I promise you it will make sense by the end. This document is designed to be interpreted _literally_. I can’t stress that enough. Do not look for hidden clues—there are none. There is no misdirection, no deeper meaning, no numerology or special calendar to look at. This is the end of the line. This is a 1:1 conversation, speaking as open and honestly as possible. We are just two people having a chat. Any other meaning you try to derive outside of what is written here is on you.

2) Much of this is about language. To some, the language is going to seem very strange, crude, cryptic, nerdy, or childish at times. I’m trying to be as authentic as possible. Please understand it is not meant to be interpreted as racist, sexist or bigoted. Internet culture, “the chans” in particular, have a kind of language that is systemically all these things, but people do not interpret the language literally in use. I will try to keep it as civil and digestible as possible.

3) Be kind to yourself. Be kind to each other.

  And before we even really get started, we need to everyone on the same level, with something that approaches a fair knowledge base. Over the past three years people have joined this movement from all around the world. Q Drops have been translated into dozens of languages. There are now mobile apps, shirts, hats, podcasts and documentaries. QAnon means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As I’m writing this, former military generals are swearing oaths to QAnon. The movement has grown beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. Many people are joining the QAnon movement, but they don’t really understand what they are reading. They are confused. I want to talk just briefly about the history of a part of the internet where QAnon comes from, not in an attempt to legitimize myself as some elder sage, but to build understanding. To truly understand all of this you need context. Context about the people and platforms that now bring you your information—and ultimately, your news.

  Some of you go all the way back to the Something Awful forums and the days when platforms like IRC and ICQ still felt new.  Some of you literally just joined yesterday. I am going to give you an abbreviated history of the chans as it pertains QAnon. Most people know 4chan and 8chan as the place where Q lives online, but they don’t really understand them. “No outside comms” seems to be what the 99% of QAnon understands—that these are the “official” channels where Q posts. But have you ever been there? Have you ever really gone to boards and looked at them? Some you have, but the vast, vast majority of QAnon followers have not. Perhaps that is no surprise, as they aren’t easily comprehensible. So, let’s talk briefly about three things: Something Awful, 4chan, and 8chan/8kun. And I do mean briefly. You could write a book about each of these, but we can move forward with some broad strokes that should give you the context you need to truly understand Q.

  We have to quickly go back to 1999. In 1999 someone known as “Lowtax” created a website called Something Awful (which I will refer to as SA going forward), which still exists today. You can go and check it out if you like. Before Facebook and Twitter, before YouTube even existed, and even before most people knew what Google was, there was Something Awful. SA has been a lot of things over the years, but it is mostly a forum—a message board. On SA everyone was mostly anonymous because, at the time, no one other than academics used their real name on the internet. SA was a semi-private board. It was the internet’s first large “secret society” of sorts. It was mostly focused on video games and Adobe Flash content, and it birthed some of the internet’s very first memes. It was a trollish but a (mostly) well-meaning community of nerds. Some members, known as the “GoonSquad” or just “Goons” would often group up and bombard players of the early MMORPGs to troll them. It was (mostly) harmless fun and pranks. In the late 90’s and early 00’s only nerds were on the internet anyway, so it was mostly nerds trolling other nerds in video games. You could identify other Goons by asking as simple question: “Do you have stairs in your house?” If someone answered, “I am protected,” then you knew they were a fellow Goon.

  Why am I talking about this? Well, if you had to pick a place to put on a birth certificate for where internet culture itself was born, Something Awful would be that place.

  A few years later someone known at the time only as “moot” created a website called 4chan. 4chan is a fully anonymous (seemingly, anyway) message board, based on a Japanese message board design known as 2chan. It’s actually better described as an “imageboard,” since you have to upload an image with every post. 4chan was open to all. There were few rules, and on some boards—none. Post whatever you want, do whatever you want. For the most part, everyone except moot himself was simply labeled as, “Anonymous.” This is where the “Anon” in QAnon comes from.

  Like SA, 4chan was originally a haven for nerds talking about video games and anime. But its anonymous and open nature allowed to build its own form. The most iconic memes, from lolcats themselves to Rickrolling and beyond, started on 4chan. SA might have birthed internet culture, but 4chan gave it form—and it still powers much of the creativity of internet itself to this day. The anonymous nature of the form allowed for a kind of collaborative creativity that—and I truly believe this—has changed the world for the better. It’s a special kind of creativity and one that you really need to experience if you want to understand it. On 4chan you will see new creative concepts born and shaped in real time, and you can watch them spread around the world. You can contribute whenever and whatever you like, and the community then gets to riff on your contribution. 4chan has even birthed new formats and new types of creativity. I want to talk about some of these specifically, to provide some kind of context for what “the chans” are really all about it, but we are just scraping the surface here. You might have to Google around for quite some time to truly understand this if you are new.

  Among the myriad of things that get posted on 4chan, one of them is known as a “green text” or “green text story.” A green text is a short story format that includes green colored text and a small picture, often a meme of some kind, like a Pepe. It can be pages long or just a few lines. It is often written in broken sentences and shorthand. They often start with the line, “be me…” and then launch into a short narrative. They can be true or fictional or somewhere in-between. They are often designed to be shocking, depressing or trollish, but they can also be uplifting. It is perhaps the simplest and most pervasive form of content on 4chan other than image macros themselves. I’m going to coin a new phrase and call this a form of Creative Anonymous Fiction or CAF for short. The anonymous nature of the platform lets you tell a story in a new way. Often times people will take green texts and remix them, giving them a different ending. I could post examples, but I’d be doing you a disservice. You are better off looking them up and reading them yourself until you understand it.

  Green texts can sometimes end with what’s called copypasta, which is a type of bamboozle. Copypasta is a snippet of short form copy that gets reposted over and over again. A bamboozle is a type of switcheroo—you start telling what the reader feels is a novel story, building to some climax, and then end it with a classic copypasta for that “gotcha” moment. It is, essentially, a prank. A text based prank. This sort of content now exists all over the place, far beyond the reaches of just 4chan. You might be wondering where all of this is going… we’ll get to that. In some ways this is actually the most important part of this entire document. I wanted to make sure that everyone has some context for what is to come, but I can assure this is going somewhere. Please do not let this extensive clarification distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

  So that’s a quick overview of the playful side of things. But on 4chan you will also see some dark and disgusting shit. With the good comes the bad—and the bad can be really bad. Because everyone is anonymous, everyone subject to being hassled by other anonymous posters. Everyone is gay, a fag, a retard or an autist. A thread without insults is a failed thread. The more people who tell you how gay and fake your shit is, the more people actually like it. 4chan may have given us lolcats, but it also ended up being a place for violence, misogyny, bullying, extreme racism—and even far more heinous things. For 12 years moot moderated the site. May criticized him at the time, but I think we can all look back now and know that he really did a fantastic job. For over a decade he was the beam scale that balanced free speech against the darkest depths of humanity—and I meant that literally. He developed a system to help identify “anonymous” posters and worked with the FBI to put away pedophiles, child pornographers, and even would-be domestic terrorists. He did this all while being told constantly how gay he was and how many dicks he sucked (as is the way). Moot was a hero we never deserved.

  The two most popular boards on 4chan are /pol/ (for politics) and /b/ (which stands for random). People who post on these boards are often referred to as /pol/tards and /b/tards respectively, with /b/ being one of the more nefarious (but also one of the more creative) boards as it had essentially no rules on what you could post. If “tard” sounds harsh, know that it is said lovingly. Even seniority within the community itself is derogatory. There are “oldfags” and “newfags,” where being called an oldfag is an informal compliment and recognition of seniority. Opinions will differ, but oldfags are generally recognized as being those who were around 4chan since before the pool was closed—one of the very first large raids. In 2006 a sort of prank was organized on 4chan by a group of Anons to “raid” the Flash game Habbo Hotel. Hundreds of people created black avatars in the game and went around spamming the chat with racist and anti-Semitic nonsense, drawing swastikas and blocking off the pool area in the game, declaring that the, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.” Why? For laughs. The average age of the userbase for this game was around 15 years old. Then again, the average age of the then Anons was probably the same. There is a lot more to this story, and I encourage you to look it up if you have the time, but the point is that this event eventually lead to 30 seconds in the spotlight on some news outlets. This was the first big event that was attributed to 4chan and Anonymous as a group. It was the first time that most people outside of the depths of the internet had ever even heard of 4chan.

  After this, more newfags joined. 4chan grows and the subgroup of /b/tards and /pol/tards that would come be to known more formally as “Anonymous” starts to take shape. All the while, moot is trying to balance what content stays and what content goes. The rest, as they say, is history. You start to see all kind of digital activism being organized on 4chan. Raids turn into DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks that shut down websites. People get arrested. Splinter groups form. Anonymous becomes more political. /b/ and /pol/ start to leak out of the internet and into the real world. People start protesting various things, like the Church of Scientology, wearing the iconic mask that the character V wears in the movie V for Vendetta. Logos are created. Anonymous comes into its own as a digital force. The group aligns itself with what DnD players call, “Chaotic Good.” Anons enjoy playing a character that is either an anti-hero or anti-villain. Sometimes Anons will pretend to have some super elite hacker ability, and while that is sometimes true it is mostly embellishment. Some people refer to this as Live Action Role Playing (LARP or LARPing), but it is not quite that. LARPing is when people take their Dungeons and Dragons game to the next level or dress up like Harry Potter characters and roleplay out in the woods. What happens on 4chan is very much a form of roleplaying, but one specifically shaped by the anonymous nature of the platform. I’m going to coin a second term here—Creative Anonymous Role Playing, or CARPing. More on this later.

  Moot continues to run 4chan until 2015. During that time, it gets harder and harder to manage. Anonymous becomes more unruly, and the site starts to spiral. Cyberbulling goes to a whole new level. There are celebrity nude photo leaks. Gamergate. A series of actual murders and killings get posted on 4chan. 4chan didn’t cause them, but that’s where the content ended up living. The site starts to become unmanageable with the old rules in place. Why moot bothered to keep it going I’ll never understand. There was never much money in the site itself and it always seemed like a huge headache. But the site starts to take moderation more seriously as harassment ramps up.

  Boards like /pol/ start to get more strict rules. Even /b/ starts to see more and more threads get removed. In 2013, a piece of shit Anon known as “Hotwheels” doesn’t like what’s happening to 4chan decides to splinter the group and starts 8chan.  While moot is trying to wrangle 4chan into something better, Hotwheels goes in the reverse direction and starts empowering (and in some ways, encouraging) harassment with things like Gamergate. 8chan doesn’t remove anything. No morals. Doesn’t matter who gets hurt. Free speech above all.

  This stance obviously has consequences. While moot would work with law enforcement, Hotwheels gives them the proverbial middle finger. As a result, all of the bad actors now had a new platform. You see swatting become a popular tactic. More and more violent threats. While moot would work with the FBI to help track down pedophiles and terrorists, Hotwheels decides to relocate the site to Philippines (where the age of consent is 12, mind you). He can barely keep the site running. No one wants to host this content; he can’t even keep the .com anymore because the registrars don’t want to work with him. Hotwheels finds some other shitstain in Manila who runs a pig farm and a porn site designed to get around Japanese pornography laws. They partner up. After three shootings (Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso) in 2019 where the shooters posted their manifesto to 8chan, Hotwheels finally admits the site got away from. The site shut down for a while, but the pig farmer and his son started it back up and rebranded it as 8kun after finding a Russian hosting provider who was willing to host the content. It is now a safe harbor for literally the worst of humanity, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Hotwheels himself now advocates for shutting the site down, but the pig farmer and his son have run away with it.

  This is where your information comes from. This is where it lives.

  Now that you have a better understanding of who is creating this information—your news—it is time. This next part is going to be hard.

  You have been bamboozled. QAnon is a hoax. It may well be one of—if not THE—greatest, most pervasive, hoaxes of all time.

  How do I know this? Because I am Q. In fact, I am the original Q. One of them, anyway.

  This is the point where many will stop reading. You are likely either angry or starting to feel embarrassed. I’m going to ask you to try and put those feelings aside for a moment and keep reading. You have absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed. This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. You got caught in a world you didn’t fully understand and there are people now trying to prey on you at every corner to sell you hats and t-shirts.

  If you are willing to go forward, allow me to explain.

  What has happened here is what I’m going to call a “Galaxy Quest” moment. There is a lovely movie that came out in 1999 called Galaxy Quest. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s worth a watch. It’s a family friendly comedy about an advanced alien race who watches a TV show made on Earth called Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is a TV show, but the aliens don’t know it. They refer to the TV show as the, “historical documents.” They built an entire civilization around the historical documents, never realizing it was a TV show. It’s a fun concept. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Anyway, the aliens weren’t stupid. In fact, they were the furthest thing from stupid as they made all the science fiction from the show come to life (although they are portrayed are dumb for the sake of comedy). The aliens simply did not have the context necessary to understand what they were seeing. They didn’t realize it was fiction. They didn’t know what fiction was. That is what has happened here with QAnon. You have read things on platforms you didn’t fully understand, and you brought your own context and understanding to it. You read fiction as non-fiction and no one has bothered to explain to you how or why this content even exists.

  We are going to go back as far as I can remember. I ask that other Anons corroborate what follows, not for me, but for those who are trapped by what has become a truly insidious ideology.

  This all starts in the summer of 2016. Someone on /pol/ makes a post pretending to be someone working with “intimate knowledge” of the “Clinton case.” They made a post in the style of an AMA (which stands for Ask Me Anything, a form of Q&A popularized by reddit). This is just another form of CARPing (Creative Anonymous Roleplaying). The first two responses are: “Will the Hillary get Pregnant again?” and “Why are you on 4chan on a Friday night?” This thread almost instantly devolves into what is commonly known as a “shitpost.” It is nonsense. You might say to yourself, “Why would someone go on the internet and tell lies?” Well, this person isn’t really lying, they are shitposting. It is a form of artistic expression. It’s an attempt to get someone to suspend their belief for a few moments. Any seasoned oldfag or /pol/tard knows exactly what this kind of thread is. No one takes this literally.

  However, at the time /pol/ is growing. You’ve got new people coming in daily. Much of /pol/ favors Donald Trump, broadly for his trollish nature and memeability, but also for his politics. Months later, someone cites the AMA as the FBI source behind the Pizzagate theory. This finds its way to Twitter. No one actually understands what they are reading, and no one checks the sources. Someone actually thought a months old shitpost on /pol/ was some kind of real leak. Long story short, someone goes into a Comet Ping Pong pizza with an AR-15 and starts shooting. A Friday night shitpost turned into shooting.

  Fast forward about six months.

  Someone on /b/ posts a depressing green text asking for recommendations on a new cult to join after they found out their girlfriend was cheating. Someone mentions that OP should become a Tibetan monk, because Tibetan Buddhism is a really great cult (e.g. because you can “light yourself on fire if you ever get too depressed OP”). Tibetan Buddhism goes on forever because the Dalia Llama gets reincarnated infinitely, so maybe if you are lucky you get to be him one day. This is the thinking. This isn’t exactly enlighted discussion. I respond suggesting that I have a great new cult that OP can join (which is loosely based on Heaven’s Gate, I’m just making this up on the spot). I had recently listened to a podcast about Heaven’s Gate and I was riffing on it. I loved the absurdity. OP asked for more sauce, but I decided to start a new thread instead.

  Warning: This about to get really nerdy.

  I started writing some shitposts with pseudo biblical writing, talking about saving humanity. I’m actually more embarrassed about it now than anything, as it was not my finest work. I would refer to “the awakening” as being the time when I would deliver the evidence that would let people “wake up” and realize we were in a simulation. Have you ever seen the Matrix? Yeah, like I said… not my finest work. I signed my posts as Q. Where did Q come from?

  Well, initially, because of John de Lancie’s character of Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The character of Q was omnipotent and omnipresent. In the show he would speak to Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise in his own form of strange riddles. Q took a particular interest in humanity as a whole and would appear as a jester-like sort of mix between an anti-hero and anti-villain, always giving Picard hints on how to expand his mind to solve a problem, usually to save all of humanity. So, this was my model.

  The goal was to get a few believers and then set a date a few weeks later and reveal “the awakening.” The Awakening was just supposed to copypasta. It was a bamboozle. I was trolling I never even did it because I got bored with it. Most people could see through it (fake and gay) anyway. But someone was watching. Someone who likely called me fag and told me to choke on a bunch of dicks and kill myself was watching.

  A few months later I start to see the first “Q” posts, which would eventually be called “Q Drops.” It migrates from /b/ to /pol/. Wow, so original. You took one shit idea from /b/ and made it political. Round of applause.

  This person knew exactly what I was doing, not that what I did was that original either. Star Trek is pretty popular among internet nerds. But this is why Q has always talked the way he does. This was the model. This is where Q comes from.  The “Q Clearance” stuff that came later is, well… coincidence. But not even a good coincidence because it doesn’t even really make sense, as that is a clearance for the Department of Energy.

  The Q from Star Trek also exits as what is known as the “Q Continuum”, where there are other omnipotent beings, and everyone is referred to as Q. This is where the habit of Q referring to himself as “we” comes from. It’s a Star Trek fan, just like me—only one who managed to make a piece of creative anonymous fiction into something political. Likely for lulz at first, because lets be real no one thought it would turn into what it has.

  I suspect that Q has been played by many different people over the last couple years as the tripcode has changed, but likely all of them are Star Trek TNG fans. You can really see it in the writing and the constant talk about “humanity.” It’s also possible that the person currently playing Q is the same as the person who was shitposting in my original thread. It doesn’t even matter.

  So that’s it. That’s Q. Q eventually moved from 4chan to 8chan and then 8kun. It should be obvious who controls the narrative now. There is nothing truly anonymous or secure about 8kun. We have technologies for that (i.e. tor, torrents, modern cryptography) and 8kun ain’t it. QAnon is the cash cow for the pig farmer and his son in the Philippines who run 8kun, giving a platform to future terrorists and pedophiles. There is a reason for “no outside comms” and “no dates”—control the narrative and keep the machine rolling as long as possible. Why? Money. Between ad revenue and merchandise QAnon is now a profitable venture. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually you will make some prediction that will feel real enough, even if 99% of everything you say is bullshit, and keep the train running. In fact, it’s much easier than you think.

  Take the twitter account, for example.

  In early June I saw a number of trending hashtags around #JFKJRRETURNS. I could not believe the amount of people who were latching onto this. I watched the account go from zero to tens of thousands of followers in a day or so and then disappear. Everyone was saying that Twitter “banned” him. But when Twitter bans an account the language on the page says that the account was suspended. The account page for this account said that “This account doesn’t exist.” That means one of two things: 1) the account holder changed usernames; or 2) the account holder deactivated the account. When you deactivate an account, it puts it into a 30-day limbo period where you can recover it. I thought to myself, “If I could get ahold of this account perhaps, I could do something good with it.” I never thought I’d actually be able to do it. Low and behold, thirty days later I went to see if the handle was available and it was. Now I would get to play Q once again.

  I just started riffing on whoever was playing Q with the account before me. No idea who that was. The envelopes were just responses from various government departments, nothing more. The postmarks are meaningless. Turns out if you write a letter to a government agency they will respond, and you get some cool looking envelopes. You can try it if you want—pull a FOIA request on yourself. July 22 was a date I pulled out of my ass. HUMAnity and ALl GOod ThiNGs are just more references to Star Trek TNG. The last episode of the show is called All Good Things, hence ALGO TNG. The very first Q Drops on record talk about Huma Abedin, and I thought maybe someone would try to make a connection with, “HUMAnity.” The last post from !!Hs1Jq13jV6 also mentioned “humanity”, but I didn’t even make that connection. It’s really not hard for those coincidences to pop up when you are all playing the same character. Manila, well, you know what that refers to now. St. Augustine is a reference to St. Augustine, Florida, where the largest QAnon merchandise operation is run from. The mentions of Hotwheels, moot and having stairs in my house was my way of gauging to see if anyone really had any idea about anything. The strange code in my location was just a Google Maps Plus Code. I picked a spot in the middle of the ocean off the Cook Islands and pulled the code for it. Turns out I didn’t even do it right, so it shows a different answer for everyone when you plug it into Google Maps.

  So that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Beginning to end. Call it whatever you like, but that’s the story. The story of the chans, of QAnon and how Q became Q. Do with this what you will. Believe or don’t believe, it doesn’t matter.

  Maybe this is all 100% true. Maybe it’s all 100% nonsense. Maybe truth is somewhere in the middle. What’s important is that you have more information today than you did yesterday. Where we go from here is a choice, and one I leave to you. What will happen to me? Well, I’ve been at a standing desk for 14 hours straight in order to bring this to you. I have done what I set out to do over three years ago and fulfilled my purpose as Q. My palms are sweaty. My knees are weak, my arms are heavy. It’s starting to fall out of my pockets already.

  Mom’s Spaghetti,

  Q

[andryuska]

🔥 + the fandom's interpretation of andrei

send  🔥 + a topic for an unpopular opinion ( accepting )

where do i even fucking begin? okay, there are a lot of not so good interpretations of andrei through the great comet fandom ( which is what i’m gonna focus on, the war and peace book fandom is pretty good ) and so i think my unpopular opinion on them is that they just… exist at all, tbh. like, the source material ( literally just one song ) is not exactly great at portraying the depths of andrei, i get that, but there are some ways that it’s taken that are totally off the mark and it really bothers me. i’m gonna put the general things here and you can read more if you want to, because i have a lot to say about a few particular things: first, andrei is not a villain, second, andrei had every right to refuse to forgive natasha and this should not be seen as a malicious action on his part ( because it fucking isn’t ), and third, ( in a bit of a different direction ) andrei and natasha would not have had a good marriage. explanations under the cut.

andrei is not a villain. he’s not. it’s just not a thing, he’s not a villainous character and when he’s malicious it’s because he’s trying to contain a very deep grief through repression, and because he grew up in a household where expressing emotions was not okay ( especially for andrei, who was being molded by his father into a very traditional and unhealthy image of masculinity ), he ‘s trying to suppress those emotions. the way he knows how to do that? by being cold and very standoffish, and then by just completely refusing to talk about it.

when pierre comes to see andrei, andrei refused to see him at first, and is engaged in a debate about politics. while he and pierre talk, andrei is reserved and pretty much just pushes away every emotional question. he says he can’t forgive her, and that’s it, that’s the end of the story, he doesn’t want to talk about it, and the way he expresses it is almost forceful because that’s the person he’s been told to be by traditional russian society ( via his father ). when he tells pierre to go and to never speak to him of the matter again, it’s about avoiding questions. and after that, you’ll note, he and pierre relationship as friends is essentially over, because andrei has just buried himself so deep in repression and this desire for revenge against anatole ( to defend honor and because he’s understandably upset ) that friendship won’t do anything. andrei self isolates, but it is NOT out of a desire to be malicious or evil. it’s just a thing that he does, that is unhealthy and comes off kind of badly when you don’t have the whole context of the rest of his reaction.

further, and there’s a post out there somewhere about this but i’m not going to dig it up, when he “ smiles coldly [and] maliciously ” it’s not because he’s happy about hearing natasha’s in bad shape - he most certainly is not. rather, he’s trying to push thing away, and again it comes off as kind of horrible, even if that is in no way his intention. you gotta remember, andrei is not very adequate socially, he’s not good at these emotional cues, and so sometimes the right expression just won’t translate. expressing grief with a sort of pained smile is one such miscalculation, in my opinion, and it shouldn’t be taken as an expression of actual and intentional malice toward natasha.

andrei had every right to refuse to forgive natasha and this should not be seen as a malicious action on his part. my mom kind of put this in perspective for me when i told her about great comet, and it basically goes like this: andrei doesn’t have to forgive natasha, because even though it’s sad, and even though we sympathize with natasha and know she made a mistake and was definitely manipulated in some degree by anatole, she still fucking cheated on him. as far as andrei knows, she had every intention of going through with her elopement and she refused him very much on her own volition. the complexities of those actions are known to us, but they are not known to andrei, and again. she cheated on him, no matter the motivation behind it, and so he has every right not to forgive her because of that.

also important is that in refusing her, andrei is not acting maliciously ( imagine me, having to clarify this again and again ) against natasha, but acting in accordance with his own grief, and with the sense of betrayal that’s come with her refusing him. no matter the circumstances of their relation from his perspective, which i will get in to in the next section, what she did hurt him a lot, and he has every right to respond to that pain with not wanting to forgive her immediately and reconcile their relationship. take what happened and put it in another story, and we’d all be agreeing with andrei, not having this discussion about the ethics of refusing to reconcile your betrothal with someone who very much intended to refuse you for another man despite having already promised marriage. 

( all of you who made it this far: thanks for putting up with me, and be warned that this next one is the unpopular opinion that is probably the most controversial. )

andrei and natasha would not have had a good marriage. listen, i know it’s nice to think about them living in a happy marriage with each other and all of their problems being solved, but it wouldn’t work out. whether you count in the anatole drama or not, they just wouldn’t have been able to sustain happiness together. there are reasons on both sides for this, but this unpopular opinion is about andrei, so i’m going to focus on why he wouldn’t have been happy marrying natasha. that’s not to say they did not love each other: andrei loves natasha lot, even after she refuses him, and he is indeed very invested in her happiness and would do a lot of things for her. he loves her unquestionably, but that does not necessarily make up the basis of a happy marriage when there are other factors at play. so here we go;

exhibit a: before he leaves, when he asks for her hand and when she says yes, he already suddenly loses a lot of the hope that he has. like, she says yes, and he suddenly clues into her faults and starts to forget that very temporary bout of happiness he has after otradnoe. it’s not natasha’s fault, it’s just who andrei is: he has a disillusionment deeply ingrained in him, and the moment he gets too close, the moment he can lift the veil of ignorance, he’s going to find faults and its going to make him unhappy, and it’s a pervasive problem: much earlier on, he says to pierre that he can’t sleep because he has all these intellectual burdens, and that applies just as much to marriage.

this is because andrei is not so cool with the idea of marriage itself. there are some sexist reasons ( which i do not condone and completely downplay here, because tolstoy was a dick and i’m not making that a part of my portrayal ) and more importantly here, there are some objections to the “ consequences ” of marriage that andrei has. namely, a life that is heavily focused on inaction and society, one wherein people talk about political affairs and military operations as though they’re games, when it fact they’re something he sees as an enormous tragedy and failing of mankind, that should not be taken likely. he feels useless when he’s married ( see: his very bad marriage to lise ) and marrying natasha, regardless of love, wouldn’t change that.

exhibit b: andrei and natasha are fundamentally different people that, though in the early stages of their relationship, might be okay, would not have led to a long term happiness between them. andrei has a very cynical view of the world and of other people, he does not enjoy things in society, and he is intensely intellectual and judgmental and harsh to those who cannot necessarily keep up with that intellect. natasha is wonderful, and i love her, but she and andrei couldn’t have kept their happiness up for long because andrei would inevitable become disillusioned with her, and then likely get bored and end up miserable again. not because he would fall out of love, but just because they’re not exactly that compatible. andrei needs someone in the long term who can not only offset his cynicism, but can also fight against it, and who also has at least enough similar interests that they’ll never lack for intellectual conversation. because, after all, andrei does not do talk about emotions and other people very well, he needs that political and intellectual side as well, and for all the things she does have, natasha doesn’t really have that.

there’s also the thing about natasha being very young and still quite inexperienced whereas andrei has had a lot of very terrible experiences and some difficult trauma from them, and the fact that they cannot seem to keep up their relationship with separation, which is something that would have happened a lot in their marriage - whether he wanted it or not, andrei would have been going away frequently. so, while there’s a lot of points for their relationship, like that love and affection, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to something long term and sustainable.

tl:dr: their marriage would have been a bit of a mess, and probably would have caused them both unhappiness even if they continued to love each other.

anyway, i guess i should conclude that long, completely unedited rant with a saying that if you have a different opinion, that’s fine, this is just the interpretation that i take from having read the book. if you want to hear more anger ranting about andrei, i actually do have more opinions, so send me that ask with the same topic and i will continue, i promise. otherwise, um, thanks for putting up with me and my bitterness.

[the-organizing-principle]

‘Twin Peaks as Fugue’ Theory, Part 1: Who Is Margaret Lanterman?

Expanding on the theory I started to articulate in this post, I’ll focus now on what this might mean when viewed in light of specific characters and plot points. I’d like to start with Margaret Lanterman (The Log Lady), exploring what this particular character could represent if the theory that all of Twin Peaks was dreamed up by Dale Cooper/Richard holds true.

I think one of the biggest clues into this character can be found in the “Log Lady Intros,” a series of short vignettes written and directed by David Lynch for Bravo Network’s re-airing of the series in 1993. Consider that—for all intents and purposes—the show was over at this point; Lynch did not expect it to be revived. So this was probably his last chance to say whatever he might have felt was left unsaid after the season 2 finale, and with these vignettes he was able to add a kind of director’s commentary to each episode, however obliquely.

I’d like to look at the last Log Lady Intro, first:

"And now, an ending. Where there was once one, there are now two. Or were there always two? What is a reflection? A chance to see two? When there are chances for reflections, there can always be two--or more. Only when we are everywhere will there be just one. It has been a pleasure speaking to you." —Episode 29 / “Beyond Life and Death”

This line struck me as familiar: a few years later, Lynch would direct the film Lost Highway, in which a character known as “The Mystery Man” (Robert Blake) would have a spooky conversation with Bill Pullman’s character, Fred, wherein Fred learns that the man he’s speaking with is simultaneously in front of him and inside his house (the man hands Fred a phone, and Fred calls his house and speaks to the man, who answers). After failing to convince Fred that they’d met before, the man concludes the unsettling conversation with the line, “It’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

Lynch himself has confirmed that Lost Highway is a film about a character suffering a psychogenic fugue / what he describes as a “parallel identity crisis” (x). There is also evidence that Lynch considers Lost Highway and Twin Peaks as works that share some overlap in terms of the fictional universe they occupy. Furthermore, the Mystery Man character is widely believed to be a personification of Fred’s jealousy over his wife’s unfaithfulness (x). 

Of course, these similar lines of dialogue aren’t obscure enough for it to qualify as direct evidence of a connection between the Mystery Man and Margaret Lanterman, but it was enough to draw my attention to a potential parallel even if it wasn’t intentional. The Mystery Man knows things that shouldn’t be known, especially by a “stranger.” Fred is afraid of him, and of his unsettling insight. Fred is trying to escape the truth of what he did. Meanwhile, Margaret also has preternatural insights. In the original series, I got the sense that Dale was wary of her whenever they were forced to interact. Remember the scene where Margaret first approaches him at the diner, with a message from her log? Dale seems distinctly uncomfortable, only humoring her at Harry’s nudging (unusual for Dale, who is normally so friendly). Why would the Log Lady make Dale nervous? If Dale/Richard is trying to escape a painful truth from his past via the conjured fantasy world of Twin Peaks, what might Margaret represent to him? In the same way that the Mystery Man personifies Fred’s secret, repressed jealousy, I think Margaret might personify Dale’s secret, repressed understanding of the illusory world he inhabits. Through Margaret, Dale receives coded hints about the true nature of this world.

We can find these hints all over the series, but they seem especially potent in the Log Lady Intros. Consider the very first one:

"Welcome to Twin Peaks. My name is Margaret Lanterman. I live in Twin Peaks. I am known as the Log Lady. There is a story behind that. There are many stories in Twin Peaks. Some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery – the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks. To introduce this story, let me just say it encompasses the all – it is beyond the "fire", though few would know that meaning. It is a story of many, but begins with one – and I knew her. The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one."

I will go into more detail about Laura later, but for now, consider the theory that Laura is the central focus because she represents a distortion of Dale/Richard’s deepest pain and sorrow, repressed and kept secret from himself by his fractured psyche, likely originating out of some kind of trauma involving someone named Judy. Out of this trauma, Dale/Richard has invented an entire world to cope with his break from reality: the world of Twin Peaks, the “story of the many [various characters].” What is the obscure meaning of “fire” that the story of Twin Peaks is “beyond”? I believe that “fire” represents a catalyst; a force that can be destructive or cleansing; ultimately, the truth. In the context of the fugue theory, the “fire” Margaret refers to here might be the real-world incident that caused Dale/Richard to retreat into the fantasy world of Twin Peaks. More on this later. 

Then there’s the intro to the third episode:

"There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Yes – we are ignorant of many beautiful things. Things like the truth. So sadness in our ignorance is very real. The tears are real. What is this thing called a tear? There are even tiny ducts – tear ducts – to produce these tears should the sadness occur. Then the day when the sadness comes. Then we ask, 'Will the sadness that makes me cry, will the sadness that makes me cry my heart out, will it ever end?' The answer, of course, is yes. One day, the sadness will end."

Although this could be a reference to various characters’ sadness over not knowing the truth about what happened to Laura Palmer, it’s difficult to imagine how this particular truth could ever be considered “beautiful.” Neither would whatever unknown trauma Dale/Richard might have experienced prior to his retreat into Twin Peaks. So what “beautiful truth” is left to be sad about? I think Lynch is referring to a sense of understanding and acceptance that eventually follows a period of grief, even if it is only arrived at once a person has crossed over into a new awareness, beyond death. Remember, death is “just a change, not an end.” Although very esoteric, this message might indicate that Dale/Richard’s pain and sadness temporarily “ended” when he retreated into his fantasy world, but will never really end until he confronts the “beautiful truth” that is genuine understanding of his trauma and how it has affected him.

Now consider the fourth intro:

"Even the ones who laugh are sometimes caught without an answer. These creatures who introduce themselves, but we swear we have met them somewhere before, yes? Look in the mirror. What do you see? Is it a dream, or a nightmare? Are we being introduced against our will? Are they mirrors? I can see the smoke. I can smell the fire. The battle is drawing nigh."

Are the “creatures who introduce themselves” the various characters Dale encounters in Twin Peaks? Has he met them before, in that they are simulacra of people he has encountered in the ‘real world’ (i.e. the psychiatric institution, etc)? These characters could be mirroring real people, but they are products of a dream/nightmare in the world of Twin Peaks. Perhaps Dale/Richard can’t choose who enters this dream or what form they will take in here, and perhaps some are harder to obscure in the dream language than others, and their real selves slip through the cracks in small ways, causing stress on the fantasy’s foundation. Margaret is particularly savvy: she can see the “smoke” that indicates the “fire” of change: the fantasy can’t be maintained forever. The “battle” might refer to the struggle of his consciousness to keep the truth obscured in this unstable delusion.

This thread continues with the fifth intro:

"I play my part on life's stage. I tell what I can to form the perfect answer. But that answer cannot come before all are ready to hear, so I tell what I can to form the perfect answer. Sometimes my anger at the fire is evident. Sometimes it is not anger, really – it may appear as such, but could it be a clue? The fire I speak of is not a kind fire."

The fire is not kind: the truth hurts. Margaret’s apparent “anger at the fire” could indicate Dale’s unconscious frustration with his inability to face the truth. He’s not ready to hear it: not any of his various personifications are ready to hear that they don’t “exist” outside of his fantasy. The truth comes out in small clues that are made palatable to his psyche.

The fire thread picks up again in the intro to the twentieth episode:

"My husband died in a fire. No one can know my sorrow. My love is gone. Yet, I feel him near me. Sometimes I can almost see him. At night when the wind blows, I think of what he might have been. Again I wonder: why? When I see a fire, I feel my anger rising. This was not a friendly fire. This was not a forest fire. It was a fire in the woods. This is all I am permitted to say."

Again, we see secrecy surrounding the concept of “the fire” in “the woods.” Read on to see what I think “the woods” really is...

Now, intro to episode eight:

"Hello again. Can you see through a wall? Can you see through human skin? X-rays see through solid, or so-called solid objects. There are things in life that exist, yet our eyes cannot see them. Have you ever seen something startling that others cannot see? Why are some things kept from our vision? Is life a puzzle? I am filled with questions. Sometimes my questions are answered. In my heart, I can tell the answer is correct. I am my own judge. In a dream, are all the characters really you? Different aspects of you? Do answers come in dreams? One more thing. I grew up in the woods. I understand many things because of the woods. Trees standing together, growing alongside one another, providing so much. I chew pitch gum. On the outside – let's say, of the Ponderosa pine – sometimes pitch oozes out. Runny pitch is no good to chew. Hard, brittle pitch is no good. But in between these exists a firm, slightly crusted pitch with such a flavor. This is the pitch I chew."

I’m including this because it clearly speaks to my theory that all the characters in Twin Peaks are aspects of Dale/Richard’s dream/fugue state. Less clearly: if Margaret “grew up in the woods” and “understand[s] many things because of the woods,” the “woods” might represent the unconscious. Margaret is a link to Dale’s unconscious mind, hence her prescient understanding and Dale/Richard’s nervousness around her. He can only tolerate her veiled truths in specific doses, hence the “pitch” that is just right (neither too vague nor too direct).

Then, before episode twenty eight:

"A log is a portion of a tree. At the end of a crosscut log -- many of you know this -- there are rings. Each ring represents one year in the life of the tree. How long it takes to a grow a tree! I don't mind telling you some things. Many things, I mustn't say. Just notice that my fireplace is boarded up. There will never be a fire there. On the mantelpiece, in that jar, are some of the ashes of my husband. My log hears things I cannot hear.  But my log tells me about the sounds, about the new words. Even though it has stopped growing larger, my log is aware."

Margaret’s fireplace is boarded up because her character is not permitted too close to “fire,” or the catalyzing force of truth. Her log is the conduit through which secrets from Dale/Richard’s unconscious mind pass; a method of limiting and regulating what breaks through Dale/Richard’s protective mental barriers. Margaret can help Dale/Richard, and he sometimes relies on her insight to solve problems in his dreamworld, but she can also harm him by revealing too much and breaking the illusion he wants to maintain. He doesn’t want to be completely divorced from his unconscious mind, but it contains repressed information that is dangerous to his illusory world.

Even more evidence! Episode nine:

"As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside. Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does. Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe? What really is creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else?" 

This speaks further to my theory that the entire world of Twin Peaks could have been dreamed up by one man, i.e. Dale/Richard. His trauma has pervaded his mind, affecting his interior experience to the point that he has lost touch with reality. Creamed corn, we know, is a substance that represents “pain and sorrow”/”garmonbozia,” and is consumed by the lodge inhabitants (The Arm). We learn this in TP:FWWM. Why creamed corn, though? Maybe Lynch is just very creeped out by this food; also, maybe Dale/Richard has been fed creamed corn during his hospitalization, as this food would not be uncommon on a hospital menu. Maybe Dale/Richard hates it so much that his unconscious has incorporated it into his dream world as a particularly insidious substance.

Now, episode twelve:

"Sometimes nature plays tricks on us and we imagine we are something other than what we truly are. Is this a key to life in general? Or the case of the two-headed schizophrenic? Both heads thought the other was following itself. Finally, when one head wasn't looking, the other shot the other right between the eyes, and, of course, killed himself."

Is Dale/Richard “the two-headed schizophrenic”? This might seem like an allusion to Leland (who hadn’t been revealed as the killer yet at this point in the series), but Leland’s second head—i.e. BOB—was a separate entity, not just another “side” of Leland. BOB didn’t think “the other (Leland) was following [him]self.” Leland, unknowingly possessed by BOB, was unconscious of BOB’s presence. If the fugue theory holds up, then this Log Lady Intro could more accurately refer to Dale/Richard’s perception of himself as someone “other than what [he] truly [is],” and the projection of BOB (who he does, in fact, pursue, and who ultimately pursues him in return) as an externalized, evil force, could be Dale/Richard’s unconscious distancing himself from an internalized source of fear and pain. Remember, BOB is “with” Dale’s doppelganger, and the doppelganger is ultimately an aspect of Dale/Richard’s fractured psyche. Therefore BOB, however far removed, is ultimately part of Dale/Richard, too.

Without added commentary, let me share the following intro from episode thirteen, which should be self-explanatory now:

"Sometimes we want to hide from ourselves. We do not want to be us. It is too difficult to be us. It is at these times that we turn to drugs and alcohol or behavior to forget that we are ourselves. This is – of course – only a temporary solution to a problem which is going to keep returning, and sometimes these temporary solutions are worse for us than the original problem. Yes, it is a dilemma. Is there an answer? Of course there is. A wise person once said with a smile, the answer is within the question."

I swear I’m trying to skip over some of these but they just keep supporting my theory! Here’s the next one from episode fifteen:

"A poem as lovely as a tree. As the night wind blows, the boughs move to and fro; the rustling, the magic rustling that brings on the dark dream. The dream of suffering and pain; pain for the victim, pain for the inflicter of pain – a circle of pain, a circle of suffering. Woe to ones who behold the pale horse."

This has always been my favorite Log Lady Intro, but it wasn’t until recently that I began to think about the idea that Dale/Richard might be the “inflicter of pain” referenced here. Leland is an obvious alternative, and given the timing of this intro in the series, it probably does refer to Leland on the surface. But could there be a subtextual meaning, wherein the blowing “night wind” could mean dark, disruptive thoughts surfacing in Dale/Richard’s consciousness, and the “magic rustling” is the rearrangement of those thoughts into their distorted perversions, rendered psychically acceptable in the “dark dream” of Twin Peaks? Keep in mind that, although a fantasy world, Dale/Richard cannot control everything that happens in Twin Peaks; in fact, I think the whole series is about him gradually losing control over this unstable delusion.

From episode twenty three:

"A hotel. A nightstand. A drawer pull on the drawer. A drawer pull of a nightstand in the room of a hotel. What could possibly be happening on or in this drawer pull? How many drawer pulls exist in this world? Thousands, maybe millions? What is a drawer pull? This drawer pull - why is it featured so prominently in a life or in a death of one woman who was caught in a web of power? Can a victim of power end, in any way, connected to a drawer pull? How can this be?"

To me, this seems to emphasize the significance of the end of Josie’s arc as a literal “compartmentalization” of her character by her dreamer, Dale/Richard. Her story was spiraling out of control, and so the dreamer had her killed off and tidily packed away inside a drawer pull (the drawer being a symbol of a mental compartment). She wasn’t completely erased, though, as both Ben Horne and Pete saw her in various other wooden objects at the Great Northern in episode 27, and there was a cut scene from the finale wherein Dale was supposed to see her in the curtains of the lodge. I’ll have to go deeper into what Josie could represent in relation to Dale/Richard as the dreamer, later, but for now, consider the recurrence of Josie’s likeness in objects as a potential side effect of Dale/Richard’s compartmentalization; a kind of cognitive dissonance resulting from her erasure.

A big, self-described clue comes in the intro to episode twenty seven:

"There are clues everywhere, all around us. But the puzzle maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else. And the something else, the wrong interpretation of the clues, we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen. How should we interpret the happy song of the meadowlark or the robust flavor of a wild strawberry?"

This significance of this vignette (in relation to the fugue theory) is so obvious that I wonder whether this was meant to be a big reveal on Lynch’s part... Does it even need to be explained? Out of context, it sounds like an esoteric rumination on the nature of reality. I think that this meaning could double as a direct reference to the world of Twin Peaks as a “magical smoke screen” for the harsh reality of Dale/Richard’s actual world.

...

That’s all on Margaret for now — stay tuned for more character / plot point analyses, which will hopefully be much shorter!

[nightingveilxo]

Film, Lit, Music Video, & TV References: Sherlock (Updated 6/27/19)

A Continuing Work In Progress - Most of this is relevant to S3 and S4, but it does go back into the previous seasons.

Related to Gatiss and Mycroft’s Love of Old Films (especially psych thrillers and film noir)

German Expressionism Modernized in Sherlock ( x ) (Includes some meta linked below).

Stay Explains Lighting, Editing, Twins, Flat Emotions, etc ( x ) The Original Meta ( x ) + Stay Review Explains Enough - Including the “Rug Pull” ( x ) (Also linked at bottom of this page)

The Lady From Shanghai & Swimming With Sharks ( x )

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Sherlock S2-S4 ( x )

Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and John ( x )

Bank Holiday as a Sherlock Intertext ( x ) by @devoursjohnlock

Granada The Devil’s Foot, Sherlock S4 Imagery, and Moriarty or Mortimer ( x )

A Glimpse Into Granada’s Eligible Bachelor ( x ) by @ebaeschnbliah

The Woman in Green (x)

Terror By Night, Trains, and Sherlock ( x )

The Voice of Terror ( x ) by @finalproblem

The House of Fear ( x ) by @welovethebeekeeper

Kingsmen: The Secret Service, AGRA, & Sherlock ( x )

S4 and Casablanca Continues ( x )

Clue Umbrella and Cane ( x ) The Hat ( x )

Sherlock Holmes in New York ( x ) by @ebaeschnbliah

Faith Eurus & Culverton Smith as Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects ( x )

Mycroft’s Umbrellagun ( x )

Replicating Neues vom wixxer and Norbury Scene ( x )

———————-

Related to Gatiss and John Watson’s Love of Horror & Bond Films

Batman and Sherlock Holmes ( x )

Take the Bloody Shot ( x ) by @devoursjohnlock

The Ring and TFP Part I ( x ) (I only added pieces to wonderful meta by @may-shepard

The Ring and TFP Part II ( x )

S4 Film References in One Video ( x ) by @goodmythicalmail

Horror Europa ( x ) by @isitandwonder

Argento’s Demons in HoB ( x ) by @isitandwonder​ and Suspiria as TFP ( x )

TRF, TEH, and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans ( x )

John Rug Pull, TFP, and Saw ( x )

The Ring, Inception, Silence of the Lambs, Saw, Orphan, Shutter Island, Paranormal Activity 2, It, Morgan, Yellowbeard, Skyfall, Spectre, Sinister, Neues Vom Wixxer ( x ) by @goodmythicalmail

Yellowbeard ( x ) @princess-of-fireflies

Parade Scene from Spectre and Gatiss/Abbington SDCC 2016 ( x )

--------------------

House MD as S4

Sherlock HLV-S4 (aka EMP) vs House MD ( x ) by @smoljohnlock

-------------------

Hannibal

A Shared Memory Palace: Hannibal Part I

Need Emotional Context? Tell a Story: Hannibal Part II

Imagine Your Best Possible World: Hannibal Part III

Have a Little Faith in Red: Hannibal Part IV

Families, and Blurred States Drawing People to One Another: Hannibal Part V

-------------------

Star Trek Original and Next Generation

Sherlock 3/4 and Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Time ( x )

Moriarty’s Construct ( x )

We Can Learn Something From Non-Disclosure? ( x ) by @ebaeschnbliah

12 Times 'Star Trek' and Sherlock Holmes Overlapped ( x ) via Mental Floss

———————-

Literary, Religious, and Psychiatric References (Not Shakespeare)

S4, Freud, and Vampires  ( x )

Goethe and Sherlock ( x ) (mini meta w/S4, Freud, and Vampires)

Why is John a Balloon? Because…Freud ( x )

TFP, The Uncanny, and Freud’s Influence ( x ) by @the-blue-carbuncle

A Vampire for Sherlock ( x ) by @tendergingergirl

Sherlock and the Thirteenth Tale ( x ) by @wibblywobblybowtie

Sherlock on the Ocean~When Neitzsche Wept ( x ) by @tendergingergirl

Sherlock & Denying the Devil ( x )by @tendergingergirl

Sherlock, The Wicker Man, & The Rashomon Effect ( x ) by @tendergingergirl

By the Pricking of My Thumbs ( x ) by @tendergingergirl

The Cat & The Hound ( x ) by @tendergingergirl

The Scarlet Thread of Murder and Sherlock S4 ( x )

Garden of Paradise: Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tale ( x )

Entanglement Theory and My Cousin Rachel ( x )

Greek Myth and TLD ( x )

Sherlock’s Vow, Greek Oaths, Water, and Guardian of Ships ( x )

Paintings Used in TAB ( x ) by @sagestreet

———————–

Music Video

Sherlock’s #OhWhatABeautifulMorning, TRF, and Placebo’s Pure Morning ( x )

--------------------

Dr. Who/Torchwood/Sherlock/Dr. Strange Overlaps

Amy’s Choice ( x ) by @goodmythicalmail

Dr. Who and “Losing” Seasons of Sherlock ( x )

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Dr. Who, and Sherlock ( x ) by @isitandwonder @tjlcisthenewsexy and @devoursjohnlock

Knock Knock (Dr. Who) Season 10 & Sherlock Parallels ( x ) by @jenna221b

Torchwood S3 and Johnlock ( x )

Miss Evangelista and TAB Mary Watson ( x )

The Wedding of River Song & Sherlock: TFP ( x )

MHR and Dr. Who “Blink” ( x )

John’s Choice ( x ) by @tjlcisthenewsexy

Torchlock, TLD, Jonto/Johnlock ( x )

Torchwood ARG ( x )

In Case of Villain ( x )

Gaslight(ing), Dr. Who, and Sherlock ( x ) (Related to Mycroft’s love of old films.)

Dr. Who, Snowmen, and TAB ( x ) by @heartofdeduction

Dr. Who Dreamlord, TLD, and the Nyte Inspiration ( x ) (I added on.)

Dr. Who, Pilot Fish, and Sherlock ( x )

Dr. Strange Sherlock ( x )

Dr. Who “Tarmac” Conversation ( x ) by @a-candle-for-sherlock

Moffat 207 to 702 ( x ) (Two pre-existing metas about Moffat reusing these numbers.)

Miscellaneous

Why would Sherlock be close enough to hear John at the cemetery, yet not be visible to a Moriarty accomplice? ( x )

Meta Remaining…(May add to list, later)

S3 and 4 Are Resurrected Info - Lazarus Is Go ( x )

AHS: Murder House, The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, The Amityville Horror (1979), The Shining, Carriers, The Devils, Hammer House versions of Child’s Play (1984) and The Two Faces of Evil, The Third Man (1949), The Stranger (1946)

Stay-The Naomi Watts Connection (goes with The Ring, Mulholland Drive, and Sleepwalkers metas)

[cm-sheridan-writes]

Chat Window

However it happens, it starts with putting yourself out there and hitting the Enter key. Leading up, there are several little moments on the forum, and out of the sea of usernames, a few start to stick in your memory. Eventually, you begin to keep track of their posts.

It takes months, but you realize that you’re forming a picture of a few of the users. One usually shows up in the middle of the night, active for a few hours before disappearing again. You wonder if they have insomnia, or if they live out of the country. Curious one night, you search for other posts they’ve made, digging for clues, cultural references, anything that could give you an answer. It occurs to you that someone could be researching you at that very moment, and your fingers pause above the keys. Is this creepy? Are you crossing a line? You’re ten pages deep in their old posts, though, so any wisdom from this realization is too little, too late.

You start edging into the conversation around them. It’s a fine line that you’re completely anxious of: you want them to notice you, but you don’t want to be a bother. You play with the idea of a direct message, but without any sort of context or post to reference, it feels way too vulnerable. Better not. Besides, what if they turn out to be a completely obnoxious person, or a bigot, or they reveal that they love Ayn Rand, like, on a deep and cellular level? Can you deal with that? (Memories of reading The Fountainhead for a lit class in high school may scar you a little more than you want to admit. Your instructor clearly had some sort of expectation about that book when he assigned it, but whatever it was, you cannot imagine.)

(You post something about this lit class, and Ayn Rand, and spend a few hours commiserating with most of the replies. One Rand supporter sneaks in and questions if you really absorbed the piece, and you find yourself disabling comments because the ensuing brawl is cluttering up your inbox.)

A few weeks pass, and suddenly there’s a note in your inbox, and that familiar username is behind it:

One new message from snaplolcat01:

    saw ur post on ayn rand.. the comments were a trip and i read every single one. really glad no one made ME read anything by her

There’s a little flutter of validation in your chest, and you eagerly type back a response:

    Haha, yeah, the comments got way out of hand, I should have known what I was doing when I posted that. Yah, your lucky. There are a couple scenes I just CANNOT unread. If you want my advice, stay FAR AWAY from those books.     *you’re (ugh, first impressions, and that happens)

A few minutes pass without a response, and you shrug it off and click away from your inbox. As you scroll and tap and read and respond, you have a little, vague smile on your face. Being noticed is always nice. Communication is slow but constant over the next few days, whenever you find yourself near your computer and with some free time. They never seem to be on at the same time you are, but usually, you find a new response from them. You tiptoe around each other, keeping the talk to whatever latest drama is happening in some section of the forums, but you carefully reveal small pieces of yourself, and the conversation branches to news and politics, movies, and one day, when your schedules seem suddenly to overlap, favorite childhood cereals.

It’s been months, you realize, since that first introduction, and your talks would fill several dozens of pages at this point. For the most part, they still respond while you’re asleep, and one day, you say, “You’re always up so late, you must be on a different timezone than me.”

You’re up late that night, working on an essay, when one of your open tabs chimes at you. You glance up and click through, and in your inbox find:

    haha, well idk what ur schedule is but im only able to get on after school and work     i usually read stuff here til i fall asleep

The essay can wait.

    Oh, gotcha     What are you studying

The picture in your head starts to flesh out just a bit more. You find out that you two have a mutual interest in biology, though you’re in a pre-med track and intending to go into law school, while they’re doubling with computer science and interested in how this all ties in with genetics. They’re balancing a few restaurant jobs as well as a position grading for one of the professors in their department. You can sympathize with the lack of available time; you’re supposed to be writing an essay right now, after all.

    oh dude i dont wanna distract u!!!

    No, you’re fine!     I need a break anyway, my brain feels like cement

The process of sharing is natural, sometimes abundant and sometimes halts, but never feels forced. The person behind the pixels seems as flesh and blood as anyone you know “in real life”, though you’re forced to confront your growing disillusionment with that phrase. You’d scoffed at a friend in high school who had had an internet girlfriend, asking how the relationship could be real if you’d never seen them in person. The internet had been a barrier back then, and while intellectually it made sense that there was a human being on the other end of the Ethernet cord, it was like watching shadow theater play out behind a scrim. It had never made sense that someone could fall in love with what you only saw as black and white pixels on a screen.

More and more, however, you’re forced to accept that you know more about this person than you do about many of the people you see on a day to day basis.

****

    This might be a bit weird but go with me on this

    yeah?

    SO I’ve never ever seen you in real life, but it’s so weird that I know more about you than the girl in my cell bio class that I’ve been crushing on and I see her for actual hours a day     And I don’t know a damn thing about her     We braethe the same air     *breathe

    it’s wild dude     i know whatu mea n     (sorry long day, typing sucks haha)     one of my tas was talking bout th is at a party (she was hella stoned, fukin wild XD)     going on about global societies an d how we as like a people could connect so mjuch faster to somenoe acoss the globe     easier than th people we see evry day     somthing about a keyboard makes it easier     ^^^her exact words

    Whoa

    i know rt?     maybs if bio girl gave u her fb u two wopuld talk     fuck dude i gott slep     i kno my typing sucks but this is embararasing     *embasrasing     FUCK

    HAhahahaha, no worries     I should get going too (though I wanna hear more about this TA)     (I never run into any of my profs or anything at parties)

    haha highly recomend, its an EXPIERENCE     cya dude

This idea of global society sticks with you, and their TA’s comment about keyboards. A keyboard offers a backspace key, and a way to edit yourself. You’ve said plenty of dumb shit on the internet before without necessarily stopping to think through the consequences, but then it occurs to you that at the start of this whole friendship, you’d sometimes gone through ten variations of the same two-sentence message before finally deciding to send it. It was a series of self-edits and careful selection of which parts of yourself you’d wanted seen. Just like real life.

There was comfort in the distance, though. Without a person in front of you, and with the limitless communication offered by a message sitting in your inbox, you couldn’t see reactions -- or judgment. This correspondence held more personal information about yourself than some of your in-person friends knew.

****

    So I got Maya’s facebook page     We’ve been talking, and we’re going to get drinks this weekend, maybe see a movie if there’s anything good out

    YAY!     thats awesome1!!

    Thanks! :)     If we hadn’t talked about global societies and stuff a few nights ago I dunno if I would’ve gotten up the courage to talk to her. Your advice for talking via computer made it soooo much easier.

    so ur saying im resopnsible for this new relationship?     *responsible     ur welcome ;)

Drinks go fantastically, and you and Maya decide to forgo the movie and head back to her place. When you finally make it back to your computer, there are a few frantic, nosy messages.

    HOWZ THE DATE     cmon dude im dying to kno

    i can only assume ur havn massive amounts of sex rn     and im v happy for u     but i need to know

    r u alive????

You can’t keep the smile from your face, and you start to type out a response. Maya hadn’t thought it strange at all that you had an internet friend who had pushed you to finally ask her out. She’d even teased you, ���Make sure to brag about me to your buddy.” The memory of that, her lips grazing your skin and her breath tickling your ear, raises goosebumps, and you shiver just a little bit. Some things just can’t be replicated over the internet, you decide, but friendship doesn’t seem to lack.

[russellthornton]

How to Ask a Guy Out Over Text: 15 Moves to Get the Answer You Want

Wondering how to ask a guy out over text? You found the right article. Learn how to ask him out and get the answer you want.

Texting. What a wonderful invention. It lets us ask a quick question without an hour long phone call, lets us get to know someone without the jitters, and lets you ask someone out with a bit less fear. Asking your mom for advice when it comes to knowing how to ask a guy out over text might not be the best idea. Seeing as texting was only invented in about 13 years ago. But good news, it’s not that hard.

Before asking him out, break the ice

You do not want to start a texting conversation with “will you go out with me?” That will catch him off guard. Instead break the ice. Chat about your day, a new song you discovered, or anything that can be carried over into the potential date.

You can even bring up a movie you’ve been dying to see or a restaurant you love as a smooth transition into the ask out. [Read: How to text a guy you like and leave him wanting more] 

Keep things light

Before asking him out, you want to make sure there is some sort of chemistry there. It can be hard to determine that via text, but it is possible. Instead of texting like you are sending a business email, make jokes, be sarcastic, even flirt.

His response to these types of message will help clue you into his interest level. If he responds back with one word answers and shuts down your attempts to flirt, you may want to abort mission. [Read: How guys text when they like you – 15 things they do differently]

How to ask a guy out over text

Onto the actual ask out. Don’t worry too much. It shouldn’t take you hours to come up with the perfect thing to say. If you are that nervous to ask him out, you may not be ready for the date.

So take these tips, type up a text, reread it for any weird spelling or grammatical errors, and hit send. Waiting for a response is the hardest part.

#1 Make it clear it is a date. Before going in make sure you are being clear. You don’t want to offer him two tickets to a show, you want to invite him to go with you. Reread what you wrote to make sure it makes sense without the context of you dwelling over what to say all day. [Read: How to let a guy know you’re interested without being overeager]

#2 Avoid words like hang out or meet up. Vague words like hang out indicate that you are just in fact hanging out. In that case, you have nothing to be nervous about at all. But you want to ask this guy out.

In person chemistry, eye contact, and more make it clear you are asking him out on a romantic date. But as you opted to go virtual, you have to make sure you actually use the words date or go out. 

#3 Don’t second guess yourself. This has happened to me countless times. I wrote out the perfect ask out text, reread it, and then deleted all of it because I lost my nerve.

But there is no need for that. You like this guy, so go for it. If you don’t ask him out, you’ll never know what could have happened. [Read: How to build your confidence and alter your life]

#4 Have confidence.  Whether you want to put on your best outfit and swipe on your favorite lipstick to amp up your confidence, do it. Look in the mirror and know what a catch you are.

This will make the waiting part easier and hitting send will feel more like you are inviting the guy you like to get to know you better, not sending off the last text of your life as you know it.

#5 Be direct. When you’re trying to figure out how to ask a guy out over text, whether you are fretting over the exact words to use or not, just bite the bullet and hit send. Be straightforward.

No offense to guys, but they tend not to be great at reading between the lines or picking up on subtle clues, so just go for it.

#6 Avoid giving him an out. For some reason girls have been conditioned to always be uber polite, almost to an annoying point. Do not say something like, “it is totally okay if you say no.” This just makes you seem unsure.

Not to mention it seems like you aren’t eager to actually go out and that you would be perfectly happy if he said no. Part of asking someone out is showing interest, not making it seem like you sort of don’t want to because you’re scared he’ll say no. [Read: The walkthrough all girls need to know about asking a guy out]

#7 Include something you know he likes. Maybe you bonded over a love for live music or he has a high score in bowling. If you invite him to do something you know he feels comfortable with, your chances of him saying yes will be sky high.

Along with that, avoid something he may have zero interest in. Yes, being spontaneous and doing something unique is all fine and good, but bringing him for a couples massage on your first date might be sort of awkward.

#8 Get him to ask you out. This is a little tougher, but if you really want him to be the one to do the asking out, you’ll have to master both being subtle and obvious at the same time.

You’ll have to make it clear you are interested without actually saying so. If he brings up a band he loves, say something like, “They are the best, I would love to go to one of their concerts.” Or even say you would be an awesome person to check out an art gallery with.

This can lead him into asking you out which reduces your risk of being rejected. But it can also be a little more time consuming. I say just go for it, but now you have an alternative option. [Read: How to get a guy to ask you out – A foolproof, sneaky guide]

#9 Keep it short. You can chat all day and share your entire lives over text, but keep the initial ask out text short. You don’t want to send over a novel. Not only may he avoid reading it if he’s busy, making you wait longer for a response, but no one likes reading super long texts.

Along with that, don’t break it up into three or four texts. Just keep it to one or two sentences; short, sweet, and to the point.

#10  Offer a plan. Saying something like, “do you want to go out with me this weekend” is perfectly fine, but offering a set plan leaves less to the imagination. It gives you and him more time to get used to the plan.

And if you don’t offer a plan now, you could both keep putting it off and then all this worry was for nothing.

#11 Wait for his answer. When it comes to knowing how to ask a guy out over text, this is the hard part. Those three little text bubbles are like torture. But keep your cool. Not matter what his response is, your life will go on one way or the other.

If he isn’t a fast texter, put your phone down and keep yourself busy. Read a book, get some work done, or make some food. This will make waiting a lot easier. [Read: How guys text when they like you – 15 things they do differently]

#12 Have a back up plan. So he didn’t say no, but he didn’t quite say yes. Maybe he is busy that day. Have a second option. If you tell him, “well, let me know when you’re free,” this could go on forever.

Instead offer another day and another time. If he makes another excuse perhaps he is busy, but he might be looking for an excuse to say no. Having a back up plan lets you give him a second chance to give a firm yes. It also shuts down your fear that the date will never happen due to conflicting schedules.

#13 Don’t double text. Whatever you do, do NOT double text. There is no excuse in the world for this. Whether he is taking forever to respond, sort of answered and then went silent, double texting is a sure fire way to look desperate.

As a feminist, I like to think looking desperate really isn’t a thing. Just be you, but double texting is just so obvious and cringy. [Read: The 6 biggest rules of double texting every texter needs to know]

#14 Remind yourself you rock regardless of the outcome. You are an amazing catch. This guy would be lucky to spend an evening with you. You are funny and smart and awesome.

So whether he says yes or no, you will continue to be a kickass woman. [Read: 16 ways to develop and build your self-confidence]

#15 Work out the details. Nail down the plans now. Don’t wait until the day of. Don’t say okay we’ll work out the details later or talk on Friday. Decide if you are meeting there or who is picking who up. This way there is less to worry about come date night.

[Read: A surefire guide for the shy trying to ask out a guy]

And now you can go forth with your mission because you know how to ask a guy out over text like a cool cat. Congratulations! Next step is doing it in person, but we’ll take our time with that.

The post How to Ask a Guy Out Over Text: 15 Moves to Get the Answer You Want is the original content of LovePanky - Your Guide to Better Love and Relationships.

[longevitytechnologies-blog]

What We Talk about When We Talk about Risk

Measuring security risk is not that hard if you get your terms straight and leverage well-established methods and principles from other disciplines. How enthusiastic would you be to ride on a spacecraft if you knew that the scientists and engineers who designed it and planned the mission couldn't agree on the definition of mass, weight, and velocity? A quick look at the word "risk" in Wikipedia provides a clue regarding the variety of definitions that exist for a foundational term in our profession. But inconsistent formal definitions are really just the tip of the iceberg. For example, I like to ask audiences, "Which of these are risks?": Vulnerabilities Disgruntled employees Reputation Untested recovery plans Sensitive consumer information Weak passwords Cybercriminals Almost without exception, the answer I hear is "All of them!" The truth, however, is that none of them are risks. Vulnerabilities are not risks and we need to stop acting like they are. Disgruntled employees and cybercriminals are threat communities; reputation and sensitive consumer information are assets; and weak passwords and an untested recovery plan are (deficient) controls. In other words, although these are all parts of the risk landscape, they are importantly different from one another. Furthermore, when I asked an audience of seasoned infosec professionals to list the top three risks their organizations faced, the following word cloud resulted:

Source: Jack Jones   I find "unknown" to be particularly ironic. Why does it matter? Can't we usually glean the meaning of a term through the context in which it's being used? Although that's often true in conversation with colleagues in our profession, clarity is crucial when we're speaking with people outside of our profession — such as executives — and when we're trying to measure something. I'll touch on measurement in a minute. For now, let's focus on communication. As a profession, we've been saying for a long time that we need to speak the language of business in order to get and maintain the support we need to be effective. That being the case, it's only logical that our use of the word "risk" be driven by how executives think about it. What senior executives and boards want from us is to help their organizations manage the frequency and magnitude of infosec-related loss events. These loss events are the "risks" we're supposed to manage. This is aligned with the rest of their risk world, and it also enables far more effective measurement and communication. A couple of example infosec risks are: Cybercriminal compromise of consumer personal data Disgruntled employee crashing a system that supports a critical business process The same executive stakeholders whose eyes glaze over when we talk about vulnerabilities and threat vectors suddenly take interest when the risks we talk about are loss events. These risks also provide the context in which we can measure and express the significance of problems in the risk landscape like changes in threat vectors or the vulnerabilities we're trying to resolve. Imagine, for example, being able to explain to an executive how a change in threat activity increases the likelihood of the compromise of personally identifiable information by somewhere between 20% and 30%, with a resulting increase in loss exposure of between $500,000 and $1 million. No executive in the world is going to have difficulty wrapping their mind around that. Of course, that raises the question, "Can we measure infosec risk?" The short answer, despite what you may have heard or believe, is yes. In fact, we do it all the time. Measurement is a prerequisite to prioritization, and you and I both know that we prioritize all the time. Unfortunately, given the inconsistency and ambiguity with which we approach infosec risk, we're horrible at it. Here's some bad news: 70% to 90% of the "high risks" I've examined in organizations over the past several years do not, in fact, represent high risk. This means that those organizations have a significant signal-to-noise problem and aren't able to focus on the things that matter most. And if you think about it, the inability to prioritize effectively is a gift to the bad actors (as if they didn't already have enough advantages) and a failure on our part as stewards of the resources we're given. The good news is that measuring infosec risk is not that hard once you've gotten your terms straight and when you leverage well-established methods and principles from other risk disciplines. Good sources of information on this include: How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk by Douglas W. Hubbard and Richard Seiersen Measuring and Managing Information Risk: A FAIR Approach by Jack Jones and Jack Freund Every discipline we think of as mature today — math, medicine, physics, etc. — all went through an early phase in which nobody could agree on fundamental terms or principles. In that sense, we're in good company. But given today's imperatives surrounding cyber and technology risk management, we do not have the luxury of decades to get our act together. via What We Talk about When We Talk about Risk Read the full article

[jeanshesallenberger]

Conversational Design

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Erika Hall’s new book, Conversational Design, available now from A Book Apart.

Texting is how we talk now. We talk by tapping tiny messages on touchscreens—we message using SMS via mobile data networks, or through apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults owned a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in 2011. We still refer to these personal, pocket-sized computers as phones, but “Phone” is now just one of many communication apps we neglect in favor of texting. Texting is the most widely used mobile data service in America. And in the wider world, four billion people have mobile phones, so 4 billion people have access to SMS or other messaging apps. For some, dictating messages into a wristwatch offers an appealing alternative to placing a call.

The popularity of texting can be partially explained by the medium’s ability to offer the easy give-and-take of conversation without requiring continuous attention. Texting feels like direct human connection, made even more captivating by unpredictable lag and irregular breaks. Any typing is incidental because the experience of texting barely resembles “writing,” a term that carries associations of considered composition. In his TED talk, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter called texting “fingered conversation”—terminology I find awkward, but accurate. The physical act—typing—isn’t what defines the form or its conventions. Technology is breaking down our traditional categories of communication.

By the numbers, texting is the most compelling computer-human interaction going. When we text, we become immersed and forget our exchanges are computer-mediated at all. We can learn a lot about digital design from the inescapable draw of these bite-sized interactions, specifically the use of language.

What Texting Teaches Us

This is an interesting example of what makes computer-mediated interaction interesting. The reasons people are compelled to attend to their text messages—even at risk to their own health and safety—aren’t high-production values, so-called rich media, or the complexity of the feature set.

Texting, and other forms of social media, tap into something very primitive in the human brain. These systems offer always-available social connection. The brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more. What makes interactions interesting may start on a screen, but the really interesting stuff happens in the mind. And language is a critical part of that. Our conscious minds are made of language, so it’s easy to perceive the messages you read not just as words but as the thoughts of another mingled with your own. Loneliness seems impossible with so many voices in your head.

With minimal visual embellishment, texts can deliver personality, pathos, humor, and narrative. This is apparent in “Texts from Dog,” which, as the title indicates, is a series of imagined text exchanges between a man and his dog. (Fig 1.1). With just a few words, and some considered capitalization, Joe Butcher (writing as October Jones) creates a vivid picture of the relationship between a neurotic canine and his weary owner.

Fig 1.1: “Texts from Dog” shows how lively a simple text exchange can be.

Using words is key to connecting with other humans online, just as it is in the so-called “real world.” Imbuing interfaces with the attributes of conversation can be powerful. I’m far from the first person to suggest this. However, as computers mediate more and more relationships, including customer relationships, anyone thinking about digital products and services is in a challenging place. We’re caught between tried-and-true past practices and the urge to adopt the “next big thing,” sometimes at the exclusion of all else.

Being intentionally conversational isn’t easy. This is especially true in business and at scale, such as in digital systems. Professional writers use different types of writing for different purposes, and each has rules that can be learned. The love of language is often fueled by a passion for rules — rules we received in the classroom and revisit in manuals of style, and rules that offer writers the comfort of being correct outside of any specific context. Also, there is the comfort of being finished with a piece of writing and moving on. Conversation, on the other hand, is a context-dependent social activity that implies a potentially terrifying immediacy.

Moving from the idea of publishing content to engaging in conversation can be uncomfortable for businesses and professional writers alike. There are no rules. There is no done. It all feels more personal. Using colloquial language, even in “simplifying” interactive experiences, can conflict with a desire to appear authoritative. Or the pendulum swings to the other extreme and a breezy style gets applied to a laborious process like a thin coat of paint.

As a material for design and an ingredient in interactions, words need to emerge from the content shed and be considered from the start.  The way humans use language—easily, joyfully, sometimes painfully—should anchor the foundation of all interactions with digital systems.

The way we use language and the way we socialize are what make us human; our past contains the key to what commands our attention in the present, and what will command it in the future. To understand how we came to be so perplexed by our most human quality, it’s worth taking a quick look at, oh!, the entire known history of communication technology.

The Mother Tongue

Accustomed to eyeballing type, we can forget language began in our mouths as a series of sounds, like the calls and growls of other animals. We’ll never know for sure how long we’ve been talking—speech itself leaves no trace—but we do know it’s been a mighty long time.

Archaeologist Natalie Thais Uomini and psychologist Georg Friedrich Meyer concluded that our ancestors began to develop language as early as 1.75 million years ago. Per the fossil record, modern humans emerged at least 190,000 years ago in the African savannah. Evidence of cave painting goes back 30,000 years (Fig 1.2).

Then, a mere 6,000 years ago, ancient Sumerian commodity traders grew tired of getting ripped off. Around 3200 BCE, one of them had the idea to track accounts by scratching wedges in wet clay tablets. Cuneiform was born.

So, don’t feel bad about procrastinating when you need to write—humanity put the whole thing off for a couple hundred thousand years! By a conservative estimate, we’ve had writing for about 4% of the time we’ve been human. Chatting is easy; writing is an arduous chore.

Prior to mechanical reproduction, literacy was limited to the elite by the time and cost of hand-copying manuscripts. It was the rise of printing that led to widespread literacy; mass distribution of text allowed information and revolutionary ideas to circulate across borders and class divisions. The sharp increase in literacy bolstered an emerging middle class. And the ability to record and share knowledge accelerated all other advances in technology: photography, radio, TV, computers, internet, and now the mobile web. And our talking speakers.

Fig 1.2: In hindsight, “literate culture” now seems like an annoying phase we had to go through so we could get to texting.

Every time our communication technology advances and changes, so does the surrounding culture—then it disrupts the power structure and upsets the people in charge. Catholic archbishops railed against mechanical movable type in the fifteenth century. Today, English teachers deplore texting emoji. Resistance is, as always, futile. OMG is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But while these developments have changed the world and how we relate to one another, they haven’t altered our deep oral core.

Orality, Say It with Me

Orality knits persons into community.

Walter Ong

Today, when we record everything in all media without much thought, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a world in which the sum of our culture existed only as thoughts.

Before literacy, words were ephemeral and all knowledge was social and communal. There was no “save” option and no intellectual property. The only way to sustain an idea was to share it, speaking aloud to another person in a way that made it easy for them to remember. This was orality—the first interface.

We can never know for certain what purely oral cultures were like. People without writing are terrible at keeping records. But we can examine oral traditions that persist for clues.

The oral formula

Reading and writing remained elite activities for centuries after their invention. In cultures without a writing system, oral characteristics persisted to help transmit poetry, history, law and other knowledge across generations.

The epic poems of Homer rely on meter, formulas, and repetition to aid memory:

Far as a man with his eyes sees into the mist of the distance Sitting aloft on a crag to gaze over the wine-dark seaway, Just so far were the loud-neighing steeds of the gods overleaping.

Iliad, 5.770

Concrete images like rosy-fingered dawn, loud-neighing steeds, wine-dark seaway, and swift-footed Achilles served to aid the teller and to sear the story into the listener’s memory.

Biblical proverbs also encode wisdom in a memorable format:

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.

Proverbs 26:11

That is vivid.

And a saying that originated in China hundreds of years ago can prove sufficiently durable to adorn a few hundred Etsy items:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, ascribed to Lao Tzu The labor of literature

Literacy created distance in time and space and decoupled shared knowledge from social interaction. Human thought escaped the existential present. The reader doesn’t need to be alive at the same time as the writer, let alone hanging out around the same fire pit or agora. 

Freed from the constraints of orality, thinkers explored new forms to preserve their thoughts. And what verbose and convoluted forms these could take:

The Reader will I doubt too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse; the very length of it will convince him, that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter.

George Tullie, An Answer to a Discourse Concerning the Celibacy of the Clergy, 1688

There’s no such thing as an oral semicolon. And George Tullie has no way of knowing anything about his future audience. He addresses himself to a generic reader he will never see, nor receive feedback from. Writing in this manner is terrific for precision, but not good at all for interaction.

Writing allowed literate people to become hermits and hoarders, able to record and consume knowledge in total solitude, invest authority in them, and defend ownership of them. Though much writing preserved the dullest of records, the small minority of language communities that made the leap to literacy also gained the ability to compose, revise, and perfect works of magnificent complexity, utility, and beauty.

The qualities of oral culture

In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong explored the “psychodynamics of orality,” which is, coincidentally, quite a mouthful.  Through his research, he found that the ability to preserve ideas in writing not only increased knowledge, it altered values and behavior. People who grow up and live in a community that has never known writing are different from literate people—they depend upon one another to preserve and share knowledge. This makes for a completely different, and much more intimate, relationship between ideas and communities.

Oral culture is immediate and social

In a society without writing, communication can happen only in the moment and face-to-face. It sounds like the introvert’s nightmare! Oral culture has several other hallmarks as well:

Spoken words are events that exist in time. It’s impossible to step back and examine a spoken word or phrase. While the speaker can try to repeat, there’s no way to capture or replay an utterance.

All knowledge is social, and lives in memory. Formulas and patterns are essential to transmitting and retaining knowledge. When the knowledge stops being interesting to the audience, it stops existing.

Individuals need to be present to exchange knowledge or communicate. All communication is participatory and immediate. The speaker can adjust the message to the context. Conversation, contention, and struggle help to retain this new knowledge.

The community owns knowledge, not individuals. Everyone draws on the same themes, so not only is originality not helpful, it’s nonsensical to claim an idea as your own.

There are no dictionaries or authoritative sources. The right use of a word is determined by how it’s being used right now.

Literate culture promotes authority and ownership

Printed books enabled mass-distribution and dispensed with handicraft of manuscripts, alienating readers from the source of the ideas, and from each other. (Ong pg. 100):

The printed text is an independent physical object. Ideas can be preserved as a thing, completely apart from the thinker.

Portable printed works enable individual consumption. The need and desire for private space accompanied the emergence of silent, solo reading.

Print creates a sense of private ownership of words. Plagiarism is possible.

Individual attribution is possible. The ability to identify a sole author increases the value of originality and creativity.

Print fosters a sense of closure. Once a work is printed, it is final and closed.

Print-based literacy ascended to a position of authority and cultural dominance, but it didn’t eliminate oral culture completely.

Technology brought us together again

All that studying allowed people to accumulate and share knowledge, speeding up the pace of technological change. And technology transformed communication in turn. It took less than 150 years to get from the telegraph to the World Wide Web. And with the web—a technology that requires literacy—Ong identified a return to the values of the earlier oral culture. He called this secondary orality. Then he died in 2003, before the rise of the mobile internet, when things really got interesting.

Secondary orality is:

Immediate. There is no necessary delay between the expression of an idea and its reception. Physical distance is meaningless.

Socially aware and group-minded. The number of people who can hear and see the same thing simultaneously is in the billions.

Conversational. This is in the sense of being both more interactive and less formal.

Collaborative. Communication invites and enables a response, which may then become part of the message.

Intertextual. The products of our culture reflect and influence one another.

Social, ephemeral, participatory, anti-authoritarian, and opposed to individual ownership of ideas—these qualities sound a lot like internet culture.

Wikipedia: Knowledge Talks

When someone mentions a genre of music you’re unfamiliar with—electroclash, say, or plainsong—what do you do to find out more? It’s quite possible you type the term into Google and end up on Wikipedia, the improbably successful, collaborative encyclopedia that would be absent without the internet.

According to Wikipedia, encyclopedias have existed for around two-thousand years. Wikipedia has existed since 2001, and it’s the fifth most-popular site on the web. Wikipedia is not a publication so much as a society that provides access to knowledge. A volunteer community of “Wikipedians” continuously adds to and improves millions of articles in over 200 languages. It’s a phenomenon manifesting all the values of secondary orality:

Anyone can contribute anonymously and anyone can modify the contributions of another.

The output is free.

The encyclopedia articles are not attributed to any sole creator. A single article might have 2 editors or 1,000.

Each article has an accompanying “talk” page where editors discuss potential improvements, and a “history” page that tracks all revisions. Heated arguments are not documented. They take place as revisions within documents.

Wikipedia is disruptive in the true Clayton Christensen sense. It’s created immense value and wrecked an existing business model. Traditional encyclopedias are publications governed by authority, and created by experts and fact checkers. A volunteer project collaboratively run by unpaid amateurs shows that conversation is more powerful than authority, and that human knowledge is immense and dynamic.

In an interview with The Guardian, a British librarian expressed some disdain about Wikipedia.

The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers must ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window.

Philip Bradley, “Who knows?”, The Guardian, October 26, 2004

Wikipedia is immediate, group-minded, conversational, collaborative, and intertextual— secondary orality in action—but it relies on traditionally published sources for its authority. After all, anything new that changes the world does so by fitting into the world. As we design for new methods of communication, we should remember that nothing is more valuable simply because it’s new; rather, technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful.

From Documents to Events

Pages and documents organize information in space. Space used to be more of a constraint back when we printed conversation out. Now that the internet has given us virtually infinite space, we need to mind how conversation moves through time. Thinking about serving the needs of people in an internet-based culture requires a shift from thinking about how information occupies space—documents—to how it occupies time—events.

Texting means that we’ve never been more lively (yet silent) in our communications. While we still have plenty of in-person interactions, it’s gotten easy to go without. We text grocery requests to our spouses. We click through a menu in a mobile app to summon dinner (the order may still arrive at the restaurant by fax, proving William Gibson’s maxim that the future is unevenly distributed). We exchange messages on Twitter and Facebook instead of visiting friends in person, or even while visiting friends in person. We work at home and Slack our colleagues.

We’re rapidly approaching a future where humans text other humans and only speak aloud to computers. A text-based interaction with a machine that’s standing in for a human should feel like a text-based interaction with a human. Words are a fundamental part of the experience, and they are part of the design. Words should be the basis for defining and creating the design.

We’re participating in a radical cultural transformation. The possibilities manifest in systems like Wikipedia that succeed in changing the world by using technology to connect people in a single collaborative effort. And even those of us creating the change suffer from some lag. The dominant educational and professional culture remains based in literary values. We’ve been rewarded for individual achievement rather than collaboration. We seek to “make our mark,” even when designing changeable systems too complex for any one person to claim authorship. We look for approval from an authority figure. Working in a social, interactive way should feel like the most natural thing in the world, but it will probably take some doing.

Literary writing—any writing that emerges from the culture and standards of literacy—is inherently not interactive. We need to approach the verbal design not as a literary work, but as a conversation. Designing human-centered interactive systems requires us to reflect on our deep-seated orientation around artifacts and ownership. We must alienate ourselves from a set of standards that no longer apply.

Most advice on “writing for the web” or “creating content” starts from the presumption that we are “writing,” just for a different medium. But when we approach communication as an assembly of pieces of content rather than an interaction, customers who might have been expecting a conversation end up feeling like they’ve been handed a manual instead.

Software is on a path to participating in our culture as a peer.  So, it should behave like a person—alive and present. It doesn’t matter how much so-called machine intelligence is under the hood—a perceptive set of programmatic responses, rather than a series of documents, can be enough if they have the qualities of conversation.

Interactive systems should evoke the best qualities of living human communities—active, social, simple, and present—not passive, isolated, complex, or closed off.

Life Beyond Literacy

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation.

Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began

Literacy has gotten us far. It’s gotten you this far in this book. So, it’s not surprising we’re attached to the idea. Writing has allowed us to create technologies that give us the ability to interact with one another across time and space, and have instantaneous access to knowledge in a way our ancestors would equate with magic. However, creating and exchanging documents, while powerful, is not a good model for lively interaction. Misplaced literate values can lead to misery—working alone and worrying too much about posterity.

So, it’s time to let go and live a little! We’re at an exciting moment. The computer screen that once stood for a page can offer a window into a continuous present that still remembers everything. Or, the screen might disappear completely.

Now we can start imagining, in an open-ended way, what constellation of connected devices any given person will have around them, and how we can deliver a meaningful, memorable experience on any one of them. We can step away from the screen and consider what set of inputs, outputs, events, and information add up to the best experience.

This is daunting for designers, sure, yet phenomenal for people. Thinking about human-computer interactions from a screen-based perspective was never truly human-centered from the start. The ideal interface is an interface that’s not noticeable at all—a world in which the distance from thought to action has collapsed and merely uttering a phrase can make it so.

We’re fast moving past “computer literacy.” It’s on us to ensure all systems speak human fluently.

http://ift.tt/2DsNpNF