#it's not always obvious but when you have like 'let's try another tack then' vs japanese 'では、こう考えろ' it sure is

[corvid-language-library]

I've been analysing FFVII English vs Japanese cutscenes and they actually do change the lip movements to match what the character's saying?? I had no idea they did that in video game animation these days

[yinses]

ethereal lullaby 

| days, months, years… it didn’t matter. you were willing to wait a lifetime.|

siren!gojo satoru

rating: T ( yeah i know, surprised myself) 

a/n: not going to talk about me accepting this without understanding what a siren was. thank you to new friends for helping me not look like an idiot. took the friends to lovers approach because simp vibes. amen. i might do a sequel just to up the rating a bit because this already got so long. we’ll see. 

thanks to @kinbari14​ for the hc. it was a fun challenge. 

your parents tried to highlight the positives- how could they not after dragging their fifteen year old away from home. you were in the middle of your teenage years, just starting to hone confidence in your social skills. they told you it would be exciting. 

r_ight next to the ocean_, they coaxed as if you’d ever cared to swim.

sitting on the shores now with your toes curled in the sand, you wondered if your friends were missing you as much as you missed them. 

the moon full and bright, high enough to signal that it was well past your curfew. but your parents were more lenient this summer, trying anyway they could to smooth your transition. it was a brief allowance that you would take advantage of while you could. 

collecting the shoes at your feet, you sighed heavily, deciding that it was time to head back for the night. the more effort you made the easier it would pass through.

your back had just turned to the shores when you heard the sound- soft, melodic as it seemed to warm your ears. 

it sounded like a song, but you’d never heard anyone on the radio sound this good. the voice tickled your consciousness and you shook your head to fight away the haze. yet the cloud lingered, drifting down to your feet this time. 

it felt like you were walking on cotton candy, a jovial step, knocking your knees together as you put more distance between yourself and the house. a tinge of fear cooled your spine but the sensation wasn’t strong enough to sway the superior force. 

the closer you got the more you came to recognize the sound. not able to tie it to a specific person but certain that it was a person. it reminded you of the choir melodies from your old school but not even the star could compare. 

you were able to register the shift from sand to rocky gravel but not the sharp pinch as rocks dug into your feet. the song still carried you closer, around the bend and towards the mouth of a cave. 

despite every strand of common sense warning you not to, you crossed the threshold. the cavern played a devil’s advocate- enticing you with mystery while amplifying the the lyrics you still couldn’t place. 

the effort to figure it out didn’t seem worth it, nothing superseded the call. 

all too quick you reached the wide pool that spread out at the end and suddenly the song stopped. the splash of water at your feet was enough to startle your system, sending you reeling back as you tripped against the damp ground. 

something too intense to call an emotion trampled your ability to move as you were left frozen to watch as a figure pulled itself to the edge. 

the first thing you took in was the shock of white hair but that was nothing compared to the two turquoise pearls blinking up at you. 

“huh… you’re what i caught?”

 it almost sounded bored. 

the shrill of your scream drowned out the slow drawl of condescension. the- boy? hissed and shrank back, hand coming up to cover his ears. 

“no, no! stop. goddess that hurts.”

you instinctively go to kick back, but he is faster, something wet and slimly curling around your ankle. the grip draws you closer, uncaring of the way the unforgiving ground bit into your back. 

your lips part to scream again but the sound gets stuck at the sharp glare you receive. water continued to drip from the strands of his hair, the drops that met your skin were ice cold. he was close enough now that you could smell the salt from the sea against his skin. near enough that you almost lost yourself in the bright pools taking you in equally. 

his eyes track the motion as you lick your lips. “who are you?”

the hand that still ensnared you loosened to a soft caress as his fingertips traced your skin. as he did, you came to note that his wasn’t quite as smooth- something akin to glossy ridges.

you didn’t like when he hummed. not because the sound was unbearing, but because of the opposite. the pull wasn’t as powerful as before but there was no denying the source. 

“who are you?” he echoed back. 

when your eyes narrow, he shoots you a wicked grin full of sharp teeth. 

unable to do much else, you offer you name and find yourself surprised when he returns the gesture. 

“satoru.”

you try the name for yourself. neither of you can deny that it doesn’t fall quite the same from your lips. your gaze cuts down as he shifts again, revealing the bareness that stopped just short of his waistline. cheeks warming, you decided that his eyes were the lesser evil. 

“aren’t you cold?”

satoru’s head tilts at the question. “no … are you?” as if he could check, his thumb brushes against the sensitive side of your ankle. you can’t resist another kick, but he’s more than prepared. 

this time however, he doesn’t just hold it down, instead lifting it closer as he inspected your heel. 

“these were always peculiar to me. so many little appendages, yet too small to do much.”

these?

as if you enunciate your curiosity, your toes wiggle in response. the action prompts melodious laughter.

“what, and yours are better?”

the old battle of boys vs girls somehow melds into the bizarre situation. as if catching on to the challenge something akin to glee lights up in his eyes as he draws closer. but before he could accept the provocation, another voice breaks into the conversation. 

the voice is urgent, worried and carrying your name. 

astonished, satoru’s grip loosens enough for you to wiggle out as you scramble to your feet. his eyes narrow as he realizes this and he his arm shoots out to reclaim his prize. this time you’re faster though and step back. 

you don’t like the way he rises to this new dare as if he as prepared to intervene if necessary. 

“that’s my dad,” you explain, not sure if you should even be telling him this. “ i need to go.”

“no.”

your mind halts at the intensity behind command.

‘’what do you mean no? i’ll get in trouble. i’m already in trouble.”

the waters shift violently behind the boy as he raises onto his elbows as if to present a greater turbulence should you not heed. 

troubled, you bit your lips as your father’s voice carries near. it was only a hunch, but something told you that their meeting wouldn’t be a good thing. quickly you scramble for an alternative. 

“if you let me go now, i’ll come back and bring you something. its summertime so i have more freedom.”

though you felt your privileges dwindling the longer you lingered. 

satoru took too long to consider your offer and you began to question your chances of just running for it. 

“fine, but you better be back.”

relief filled your chest as you already turned towards the mouth of the cave. 

“yes! i promise. sooner than today though, i wont be able to be out this late again.”

you tried to give him a reassuring smile, but it wasn’t returned. there was distrust in his eyes but he didnt pursue. 

“when the sun sets then.” he adjured. and you were but a humble servant on the prince’s shores. 

“sunset,” you agreed as you broke into a run. 

the moment you broke free of the grotto you crashed into your father’s arms. the relief on his face was evident.

“there you are! why didn’t you answer, we were worried.”

his arms come around you and you realize you’re shaking. 

“jesus, you must be freezing. let’s get back before your mother sends out a search party.”

your arms encircle his waist as you let him drag you away. in one ear, you hear him start up a conversation about the neighborhood you had yet to explore to its fullest, tacking on a few names of children who belonged to some of his new coworkers. 

in the other, you heard the beginnings of a new song, one that didn’t seem to reach your father. and you didnt know what to do with that information.

sunset came all too soon the next day, the sun lowering just as dinner came to a close. you lingered close to your mother as you finished the last of the dishes. the tasks were dragging longer than needed, but no one would ever complain about them being extra clean. 

as you ran a rag over the porcelain you wondered what would happen if you didn’t show up. you couldn’t get the image of those teeth at of your head, the sharp glint gnawing into your dreams last night. they came off as an obvious threat but surely he couldn’t hurt you. 

then your mind drifted to that song. the same nameless lyrics that put you in the predicament in the first place. there was no denying that there was something going on there as well. just avoiding the cave wouldn’t be enough. 

all that was left was your curiosity, left to simmer under the plague of ‘what if’. the mysterious surrounding satoru wouldn’t leave you until you made good on your promise. the vow becoming something of a vice. 

with your mind made up, you turned to your mother. 

“do we have any mochi left?”

your parents hesitantly let you out with a curfew. you’d mentioned that you were held up late by a friend last time- to which your father questioned why you hadn’t mentioned it until now. they were obviously worried about your lack of agreeableness to reach out to the other kids so this initiative helped to ease their weariness. 

clutching the small container of sweet mango filled dough to your chest, you made your way back to the little cave. the distance traveled was kinder to you this time with shoes as you made haste down the gravel banks. 

uncertainty slowed your steps as you approached the widening curve of the stillness pool. depending on how you gauged the sun, you weren’t terribly late. it was technically still sunset. 

a mix of disappointment and relief swam in your gut as you came to the conclusion that your new acquaintance hadn’t met their own end of the deal. maybe his parents had also got onto him about being so late. 

it was probably for the best anyway. 

“what’s that?”

the volume of your scream made even you wince as the tupperware toppled to the ground. turning on your heel, you came face to face with satoru. you never heard the water part at his entrance. 

he wore a bored expression but there was a hint of a smile to his lips. this time he didnt scold you for shrieking, too interested in the container that had toppled near the shore. 

bringing your hand to your chest, you reasoned that scolding him would be useless. “its mochi.”

for once, it was his tongue that made the words sound off. apparently the rounded desserts werent part of his vocabulary. 

carefully easing onto the ground, you brought the container into your lap. 

“it’s my surprise. i hope you’re hungry.”

as you cracked the top, satoru move closer, nose twitching as the smell of mango drifted out. your mother had been all too happy to pack all the extras for you to share. 

you offered one.

satoru took it carefully, bringing it to his nose for another cautious sniff. you took in the point of his nails as he split the soft dough. he collected the orange the oozed out and brought it to his mouth. 

in the span of seconds, he devoured the entire bun in one bite and snatched the remaining from your hands. 

“this is good! i’ll excuse your lateness, this time.”

without the weight in your lap, you drew your knees to your chest as you watched on as he greedily ate one after the other. you considered warning him of the stomachache he would endure if he held the pace, but you decided that it would only fall on deaf ears. 

instead you ask,” so about those toes?”

it seemed like such a weird question to ask. equally as strange to satoru as he brow pinched. he brought his fingers to his mouth to clear away the stickiness. 

“what are those?”

an age old meme resonated within you and you waited with baited breath for him to carry the joke, but only silence drenched the space between you. 

pursing your lips, you shake your foot in reminder. “remember? apparently yours were better?”

“oh.” satoru’s lips smacked audibly as he polished off another bun. and as if it was the most natural thing in the world he shifted back, a bright blue tail that matched his eyes broke the surface. 

if you were sure before, you were certain he was going to eat you this time.

because you screamed again. 

satoru demanded that you bring him mochi everyday from then on for hurting his ears again. 

yes, everyday. 

there would be multiple days to instil the notion that you had met a mythical creature. you were still trying to assure yourself that you have been awake the whole time.

your parents no longer needed to worry about you making friends, because apparently you’d managed to befriend a merman. 

siren, satoru had hissed after bitting into a blueberry mochi. asking your mother to make mochi only worked for the first few visits. eventually her curiosity to win and lead you down a path you weren’t ready to accept yet. 

the trail leading to the acceptance that you were conversing with a fishman- boy.

lounging on your blanket, you had come to store little things for comfort around the cave. sunset rolled back a few hours to afternoon and before you knew it you were spending the majority of your days with satoru. 

“don’t your parents ever worry about you being gone so long?”

as usual, satoru was eating. he’d already finished the dango you had brought and moved on to the squid you’d turned down with barely restrained disgust. undeterred, he’d only shrugged and proceeded to gnaw off one of the tentacles. 

“no.” 

and that was that.

so instead you quizzed him on the mythical world you had and most humans were blind to. he talked about submerged cities, described aquatic creatures you could have never dreamed of if you tried and dissuaded your worst fears.

“so you don’t eat humans?”

“no we do. but i don’t want to eat you.”

you waited for the yet but it never came. satoru seemed content consuming whatever sugary treat you brought and sated the rest with whatever he caught swimming by. 

Eventually you let go of the imagery of ariel and her seaside romance and began to soak your free time in legends of beautiful sirens of the sea who took pleasure in drowning their victims. every story warned land dwellers from entering the waters, something you had never shown interest in doing nor had satoru pressured you.

“how old are you satoru?”

“how old are you?”

he always did this, answering questions with his own. it came to you that he might just be remaining within your boundaries to keep you from screaming at him again. a fair assumptions, but you were genuinely curious. 

“fifteen,” you offered, prepared to have the same response thrown back at you.

“sixteen.”

satoru raised a brow at your suspicion of disbelief. “i think i know how old i am.” 

and you couldn’t fault him for that. you just weren’t expecting him to be so young. sure he looked like he could have been a boy at your school aside from the freckled scales and obvious tail. 

“i beat you again, by the way.”

his words draw you from your thoughts. “huh?”

he swallows the remainder of a melon bun. 

“i’m older. so i win again.”

you roll your eyes. 

tail or not, apparently some things are the same. 

two weeks have passed before you realize he hasn’t sung for you since that day. the two of you often meet in the morning now, break for lunch and resume in the late evening. as far as your parents are concerned, you’re on the way to making a new best friend which will only be promising for when you start school. 

“you act all funny when i sing. its not meant for your pleasure anyway,” he adds. 

for once he’s not eating. he’s lying closer to you, tail still dipped under the water but more of his top half is lain out on the shore. when you try to give him a blanket to lie on to put something between himself and the rocks he gives you a funny look but concedes. now watching as he nuzzles into the the fabric of your cotton blanket, you hide a knowing grin. 

“but it sounds pretty, toru.”

when you had first tried out the nickname, you had hesitantly rushed it into a sentence. you were growing comfortable with the siren but the dangers were still present. like most things, it didn’t get past him and he grinned smugly but didn’t tease you further than that. 

you were grateful for that as it allowed you to become more comfortable with its usage, likely his intention. 

he hums in agreement, eyes sliding close as he readjusts. his tail follows the movement lowly, making small ripples. 

“can’t you sing in a way that wont affect me?”

satoru’s eyes flash up to you suddenly and your breath catches in your throat at the sudden shift in the mood. 

“no, because then it would be bad for me. if i cant control you then i cant drown you.”

you dont bring up how that would also be bad for you. 

you dont bring up his singing again. 

summer is edging near completion and your parents start to curb your outings. 

“you’ll see them more when school starts. if you dont start to getting to bed earlier now you’ll just make it worse for you.”

there is no way for you to explain how it will be harder to approach your situation to satoru. you were knowingly wedging yourself deeper with him. the first day you met him had marked a streak of possessiveness that kept drawing you back in. 

you weren’t just his friend. 

you were his. 

the thing he looked forward to each morning and regretted parting with each afternoon. you knew this for a fact, because you felt it too. 

“okay, i’m going to go a little earlier today. then”

your mother lets you go with a short kiss to your temple and a promise that you’ll return for lunch. 

satoru took the news about as well as you would expect. 

“you can’t go.”

letting your head fall back on your shoulders, you stared up at the small break in the grotto above. “i have to go to school, toru. if i dont go then ill get in trouble and if that happens then i definitely cant come back.”

you know he knows this too. satoru was smart. a species like his didnt survive this long unknown without intelligence. 

but then again, he let you in on the secret and it was too early to gauge the genius in that. 

you were more comfortable around each other now, legs bare as your feet dipped into the water. satoru still resumed his post on the shore, arms crossed by your hip as the white of his hair brushed against your thighs. 

he seemed to still be digesting the news which gave you the opportunity to probe again.

“i mean, surely you have stuff to do as well. what did you do before you met me?”

satoru deflected the question, head lolling to the side to rest against your skin. the slippery surface of the scales littering his cheek always felt like ice chips. 

“ate more stupid people.”

you’d asked about this of course. probably worrying your parents when you brought up with questions of drowning in the area. they seemed unsure before your father assured you that they wouldn’t have let you venture so close to the shore if that was a problem. 

so if satoru was indeed eating people like he said, it wasn’t from around here. 

part of you still felt like there was a bit of myth still lodged in his truth.

“so you can only meet me at sunset again?”

you make a noise of affirmation, hand raising as it hovers over his head. you had never actually touched it before but as it tickled the inside of your thigh the curiosity grew. before you talked yourself out of it, your hand dropped. 

his hair was silky, still damp but drying at a reasonable pace. his head moved under the weight of your hand, but it wasn’t to shake it off. you accepted the invitation and weaved your fingers further. 

“on most days. with homework i wont be able to everyday like this either.”

his loud groan rumbles against your leg and he slowly slinks back into the water. your hand clenches around the absence. 

“for every extra day you’re not here, you better bring me something great.”

its probably time for you to be going anyway. 

you go about collecting your things and tucking away what you could. when you finally stand, you trying to shake way the numbness that had settled. 

“we should probably figure out days, so you’re not always just here-”

“no need.”

satoru swam on his back for about half a meter, showing off his full length before his slipped under and reemerged at your feet. 

“when you come back i’ll be here.”

the two of you managed to meet a few more times before the first day of classes started. satoru was noticeably nicer to you, or atleast as pleasant as he could be. after finally realizing that you had no interest in dead aquatic animals, he began corralling live ones for you to view.

you realized that the two worlds had different names for a lot of things as he listed off various species and colors. you took a few of them with your phone before the idea hit you.

“hey, toru can i take a picture of you?”

he made a face like he might disagree. there was no need to explain the device as you’d already done plenty of show and tell. one of the earlier showings leaving you to soak your phone in rice for two whole days. 

eventually he shrugs and you snap a photo immediately after. 

the night sky begets a short flash, one that he winces at and moans in protest. but the picture is worth the complaint. 

he looks almost like a human boy wading in a pool- aside of the assortment of blueish scales to his cheeks. your only regret in that he’d closed one eye in reaction to the sudden light. there was a light frown to his face too but that was as genuine as it got. 

“let me take one of you.”

you were too surprised to deny him, wordlessly handing off your phone with less worry than you probably should have had. he handles it carefully though, biding by your instructions before you too were wincing away from the flash. 

the smile you get from him was better than anything you could have captured. 

“can i keep it?”

you laugh, “no, toru. but i can make you something you can.”

highschool was hard enough transitioning up with your junior classmates, the challenges of tackling your first year without out them met your expectations but not the worst of them. you learned quickly who to avoid and who you could be amicable with. 

being the new girl was an easier pill to swallow when you came equipped with a few stories from your past home. it gained the interest of a few which made a way from conversation to acquaintanceship. 

nothing was quite as exciting as your meeting with satoru but that was to be anticipated. 

satoru … unfortunately was seen less and less as the weeks went by. your parents were keen on you making a good first impression which meant a heavy emphasis on your school work. 

you mother had offered for you to invite your ‘friend’ over more than once, and invitation that had spanned since your early meeting. but the only thing harder than trying to explain that your satoru was a fish was to add that he was also a boy. 

your father might actually overlook the former in favor of the latter. 

so you were left to visit him on the weekends and thus compiled your allowance to purchase bigger treats and delicacies alike. 

his introduction to cake had a been a messy occurrence. naturally he would forgo the fork you brought to dig in with his fingers. 

satoru surprised you by asking about your schooling.

“what? it’s not like ive ever been around that many human before. sounds smelly.”

you laugh, because he’s not wrong. you go into detail about your different teachers and classmates, offering vivid retellings that you hadn't even shared with your parents. 

satoru hung onto every words, though not without crass comments and frequent jokes, his attention sent something new aflutter within you. 

“i can’t believe the year is almost over, toru.”

your hair is getting wet but you can’t be bothered to care. the two of you are resting from opposite directions with your heads on the bank. your eyes are trained on the pink hues above but your cognitive of satoru’s warmth and the feeling of his breath fanning against your cheek. 

it was nearing a year. a full eight months at your new school and a solid nine of knowing satoru. you were already planning something for your year anniversary. 

friends did that, right? it wasn’t weird just because he was a boy. 

speaking of boy, it didnt escape your knowledge that he was changing as time passed as well. he still held onto his boyish features but there was something different. 

“did i miss your birthday?”

“huh?” the question surprises even him as he tilts his head to look at you. 

time has made you better about not getting lost in his eyes, but it doesnt stop you from looking. not even the night sky can dim the ethereal shine. 

your shoulder shrugs against him, “you know, when you get a year older? you told me you were sixteen so obviously those add up.”

he blinks,”oh, yeah i’m already seventeen.”

you dont expect the shock to be painful. when you sudden sit up, satoru makes a sound of protest but you ignore it in favor of leaning over him. 

“you had a birthday and you didnt tell me?”

“i was here, you werent.”

he said it so matter of factly, as if it didnt pierce your heart with another blade. 

you dont notice the tears until the first drop meets his cheek. satoru recoils immediately face pulled in confusion. 

“why are you crying? you were at school.”

you knew you were a blubbering mess, snot slinging as you rub the back of your hand against your face uselessly. why was he so indifferent about it? did he not want you to celebrate with him?

“that doesn’t mean that i wouldn’t want to celebrate with you? am i not your friend, toru?”

satoru sits up at your question, rising to a height taller even as you sat side by side. you feel the gravel crumbling away from his palm before the skin of his hand. he doesnt seem to care about the wetness as his hand combs back to tuck away your hair. 

“youre my everything.”

it feels like it should be taken more seriously but the moment is cut short when he pulls away, huffing as he rinses his hand off in the water. 

“if you want to make it up to me, bring me something you’ve never brought me before.”

and then he smiles and your heart grows three times bigger.

you beg your parents to take you back home to sendai that weekend under the precipice of seeing your old friends. 

the next day you bring back kikufuku.

satoru says he’ll forgives you for the next five birthdays. 

you can only hope for more. 

as summer approaches again, so does your birthday. your parents had conveniently waited until two weeks after before laying out the news of your move. last year you celebrated with old friends, and this year some new. 

you still received some gifts from sendai. a plethora of little plushies and memories from the past. your new friendships here offered to throw you a small party, all gathered on your porch as you mother cut the cake.

you leaned into the kiss she life at the crown of your head, thanking her again for all the arrangements. 

“i wish your summer friend could have come.”

“i plan to meet them later so it’s okay!”

after seeing your distress about birthdays, satoru had made a note to take them more seriously this time. he didn’t care if you had school, demanding that you come to the grotto before the day ended. 

with a laugh you assured him that you were free and would meet at your usual time. it felt selfish to accept all your gifts and still crave whatever satoru had in store for you. much like you offered him, he promised to give you something new as well. 

he gave you plenty of things over the past few months, aside from knowledge, an exchange of different shells and things lost at sea. you were growing a nice little collection in your room. 

before leaving that evening after seeing off your friends, you took the time to make room on your shelf, prepared to add your new edition when you got home. 

a late additional gift from your parents was a reprieve on your curfew, as long as you didn’t push the limits too far. 

equipped with the best day ever that was only going to get better, you dashed towards the cave.

satoru had already drug out one of your blankets and spread it out for you. 

“had a good day?”

with a giddy grin, you plopped down next to him. “the best!”

he smiles back, hand reaching out to caresses your cheek. you lean into the touch without prompting. there was no doubt that he could feel the light buzz of anticipation under your skin. the sound of his laughter confirmed it. 

you bit your lips to try to contain it better as he took his time easing out of the water. you watched as the scales of his tail shimmered as he brought himself to sit next to you. for awhile the two of you just sat there as the sun dipped lower into the horizon. 

and then satoru parted his lips. 

and sang. 

you dont know anything about siren songs or have any hymn books to follow but there was something different about this song. satoru was always hesitant to speak about the songs, not at all interested in delving into the history. 

you were starting to wonder if this was why. 

there was no longer a sensation of compulsion. the strings that had tugged you to his doorstep all those months ago. this song dipped into your veins and soaked you in everything that was satoru but also a bit of yourself. this wordless song felt like a mixture of you both. 

it was both of you. 

“toru…”

the song didnt stop as his face neared. his nosed brushed along the curve of your jaw and your head tilts up on instinct. its an invitation that he accepts full heartily as he continues to mouth the sound against the column of your throat. 

the warmth under your skin felt as though it was burning when it came in contact with his constrasting temperature. 

for the first time, his song was audible. the a single word as his lips brushed against yours. 

your name.

the sensation of his chilled lips against yours prompted goosebumps- but the good kind you decided as you leaned in. 

[whistlewhileiblogit]

Thoughts on TLoU Part 2....Again

Yeah, I am back with another vent, rant, thoughts on...thing. I wanted to wait a long time after writing my initial reaction to the game, because I figured I’d get more clarity or something. Anyway, so here are my unedited and unfiltered thoughts...8 months later. So as always, this is going to be rambly, and I’ll probably just bold parts of note in case anyone wants to jump around. So here we go!

Oh and, SPOILERS AHEAD

Things I liked: These pretty much haven’t changed. The game is obviously beautiful, the gameplay itself I enjoyed immensely (when mentally separating it from the plot), the Joel and Ellie flashbacks. They were fantastic, and made me feel very reminiscent of the first game. Jesse and Dina were cool, but I found them underutilised, which is a massive shame because they were cool characters.

Yara and Lev were also great, and again, Yara was another completely wasted character potential. But love them nonetheless.

So yeah...that’s pretty much it, I think?

Now for the things I didn’t like...

The writing is the biggest sin in the game to me, as it creates so many structural issues. The pacing is wild and jarring, we aren’t given enough time to bond with certain characters before they are killed off, the narrative itself manages to be incredible simple yet complex simultaneously, but it is a total mess.

Let me explain. The end of the game essentially comes down to “revenge bad”, no matter how you look at it. Sure, you can also include other aspects like, “do good deeds”, but they seem sort of tacked on, considering what happens throughout the game. Ellie goes through the entire story with vengeance for Joel being basically the only thing on her mind (or at least, at the forefront of it), and then just...doesn’t go through with it at the end.

Honestly, the game felt by that point that she HAD to go through with it, after all, how would she learn her lesson? Yet she learns her lesson, without actually getting revenge? So what was the point? Some have said that she learnt in that final fight with Abby to forgive Joel, but this makes no sense. Ellie had already started to forgive Joel before his death. Obviously, she wasn’t over it yet, but she clearly wanted to make amends with her father figure. Besides, she’s fighting Abby, after all. And she certainly didn’t forgive her.

I think a lot of people took Ellie letting Abby go as forgiveness, but in reality, it was in complete grief. There was no point in killing her anymore.

But again, THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Given every. Single. Thing Ellie went through the game, all to find and kill Abby. Losing others she loved and cared for, her family, her fingers (and her ability to play guitar which was the only thing she had left connecting her to Joel)...all of that and she just let Abby go?

It would have made so much more sense had she gone through with killing Abby, only THEN to realise it didn’t make her feel better in the long run. That she was still conflicted in her feelings for Joel. Why bother having Ellie go through every point in the game, only to have her back out at the last second and STILL lose everything? What is that saying? If you do the “right” thing, you’ll still get shit anyway? Ugh.

So speaking of Abby...I thought hey, maybe after all this time, I’ll be able to grow to like her! Yeah, nope. She is just as unlikable as always. Abby is a deuteragonist that we are meant to grow to care for, like we do Ellie. But here’s the thing; Ellie has an ENTIRE GAME beforehand PLUS a freaking DLC game that gives us so much time to love her. So you would think that the writers must think, we’ll make Abby super likeable! NOPE.

Throughout the game, Abby is stoic (which isn’t a bad thing on its own), serious, and just flat-out boring. Sorry Naughty Dog, but I don’t find a character who collects coins as her biggest personality trait interesting. She isn’t funny, or kind or particularly clever. She has her strength, and that doesn’t count as a personality. She’s also a shitty friend, and person, and gets called out for that in the game by Dr Preggers (still don’t remember her name).

Even Abby’s flashbacks do little to make me like her. Oh wow, she has a magical, amazing, super perfect animal-helping papa? And? I just can’t latch onto her character and story. Even if she were really well written and interesting, I wonder if I could have after the game presents her as a total fucking barbaric monster in the first two hours of gameplay.

No, I’m still not over Joel’s death. And despite what some people try and say, it isn’t BECAUSE he died. I went into the game fully expecting Joel to die (I was lucky enough to see no spoilers prior to playing), because I felt like that would be the next step narratively that ND would go. This was a terrible decision on ND’s behalf, but I’ll get into that later.

Joel’s death as the way it plays out, does not only Joel a great disservice- but Abby as well. If ND wanted us all to like Abby so much, they easily could have just made her show some remorse, or conflict, or even just a quick, somewhat merciful death to Joel. But instead, we get ~torture porn~, which becomes the first scene of many of these in the game. This scene is so fucking brutal and sickening, I personally cannot watch it. I have seen it ONCE, and after that I have avoided having to watch it again. And I am not a person with a weak stomach.

Instead of having a death scene worthy of Joel’s character, like having him save Ellie somehow or going out in a blaze of glory, as many have suggested...we got an incredibly beloved character being treated as merely a plot device.

Imagine if the roles were reversed, and Ellie had been killed in Part 2, not Joel. I doubt those saying they’d be cool with it really would be. Especially in such a disgusting, horrific manner.

And one of my biggest grievances with the game- the retconning. I’ve had some people argue with me, that the game doesn’t retcon anything. Those people are fooling themselves or just being wilfully ignorant. Part 2 completely contradicts facts from Part 1. Including:

- Joel didn’t completely lie to Ellie. He half lied. If Joel finds all of the recorders in the hospital, it is revealed that the fireflies DID find dozens of immune people. And killed all of them trying to make a cure...and it didn’t work. This is literal in-game proof that the fireflies never would have succeeded in their quest, had Joel let them kill Ellie.

- Part 2 would have you believe that the fireflies were doing well with their groups and their research. Part 2 shows a beautiful, modern-day looking hospital. But the fact is, as shown in Part 1, the fireflies were on their last legs, and killing Ellie to try and find a cure was their last-ditch attempt to find meaning in their cause. It never was going to work. The hospital is shown to be filthy, and barely up to scratch by all standards. The fireflies were struggling, despite what part 2 tells us.

- The character design changes. We have all seen the comparison pictures of the doctor in part 1 vs part 2. They tried to make Jerry (?) look so wholesome and kind, begging for humanities sake. That isn’t how it went down, and he isn’t the same person. They just wanted Joel to look like a total villain.

I also want to mention what a disservice the marketing was to this game. I know Naughty Dog is very anti-spoiler, for obvious reasons, but they went above and beyond hiding spoilers that they straight up falsely advertised the game. And no, I will not forgive them for that.

The game completely undoes what made the first game special. It was a story about two people, struggling to survive, and somehow through it all, finding a familial love and trust within each other, and fighting to keep it, no matter what.

Ellie and Joel ARE The Last of Us, and Part 2 literally kills of half of what made the first game so incredibly special. As soon as Joel was killed, I wondered how the game would remedy those moments, and aside from the few Joel flashbacks, there really isn’t anything comparable to these scenes. Ellie is alone, so she doesn’t get to develop, or show her personality. And even when she is partnered up for short periods of time, she is too miserable (for good reason), to be the joking, lovable character we knew from the first game.

Final thoughts...

All in all, I would say my opinions have stayed pretty much the same for Part 2. I will forever love Part 1 (played it not long ago for the millionth time), and it is always going to be special to me.

But part 2, as it is, is nonredeemable to me. It really could have been something truly special, like part 1, but I guess that’s just what made The Last of Us so special.

[sanstropfremir]

please let me join the dance conversation since it's the form of art i am actually the most interested in. i've been dancing as a kid for 6 years, and i don't mean to say that that gave me any type of authority in the domain, but it did leave me with the slight ability to recognize a good performance (or whatever makes a good performance to me, personally) and a great appreciation for valueing dancing as acting, like you said. too often i've seen dance ranking videos from actual life-long dancers who value technical skill above anything else. even if they take into consideration the facial expressions, it doesn't hold much weight and that always lowkey pissed me off. because when i am watching a performance, i care way more about the emotional delivery rather than the technical one. of course, this is not to disregard skill, because emotion without skill just ends up messy. good enough to appreciate as a form of authentic self-expression, but still messy, and mess won't make you a good dancer.

i've really enjoyed seeing you say dancing and acting have a mutual component since i've always felt that way too but never knew how to put it in words. two groups that come in mind when thinking about this are blackpink and itzy, i have no idea how familiar you are with them so i'm sorry if the following come across as foreign to you. but i gotta say, regarding bp, i think there's always been discourse over lisa vs rose as the best dancer. technically, everybody knows lisa is miles ahead, and i have to say she has decent stage presence and some pretty nice facial expressions too (taking into consideration how limited bp's concepts have been so far). rose, on the other hand, has a certain style that appeals to a specific audience (which i am not a part of, her lack of body control is so irritating sometimes) but i can see why some would find her charming. i would say her stage presence is decent too, but i can't help but choose lisa over her, and not just because i'm biased. but because in order to be a true dancer, you need the right balance between technique and emotion that gives your performance that star-value and appeal. and let's be real, kpop is really lacking in that "true dancer" department.

another dancing discourse that goes on is in the itzy fandom, where fans are pitting yeji and chaeryeong against each other. their techniques are quite different but they are each very good in their respective style. now, i've seen people call yeji the better "idol dancer" since she has better developed facial expressions, and chaeryeong the better "overall dancer" since people value her technique more. and i'm just like, no. emotion makes or breaks a dancer. everyone can learn technique, but emotion is hard to fake, and when you do, the non-authenticity is very much obvious.

that's why i love san as a dancer. he might not be the most technically skilled, but he is skilled enough to hold his own. and his way of living in the performance, of just letting every feel of the song wash over him and show the audience 110% and more - nothing compares to that, no amount of technicality. stage presence is something you just have, and no matter how much you train for it, you will pale in comparison to a natural.

wow, this is really long so thank you if you take the time to read it all and respond. english is not my first language and sometimes i'm having trouble finding the right words to get my point across exactly how i think of it in my mind, so i hope the message is delivered accurately, haha :D also, i must add i love the way you talk, your speech has a flow and a uniqueness to it you don't find everyday. and we love a developed vocabulary<3 may i ask how old you are?

thank you for the compliment, thats very sweet of you! english is my native language and i have spent just as much time, if not longer doing academics as i have doing performance work so at this point ive developed a very specific style. there’s a joke that theatre design is 90% communication and only 10% design, and it’s not wrong. it helps that i like to talk and my brain works very fast sometimes.

im glad you took the time to write this out! and don't apologize for your english, it's excellent and very clear. you are correct i know very little about blackpink and itzy but i would likely agree with you, dance is equal parts emotion and technique and that is my preference in idols as well. but i don’t think that the kpop industry needs to have ‘true’ dancers, though. yes it is fun to watch those who are technically and charismatically gifted in dance, it is only a portion of the experience that they market. also i think we lose a bit of objectivity in kpop because all idols are required to dance, but i dont think ive seen one recently that's a legitimately bad dancer. even the ‘worst’ dancers that i can think of are still leagues better than the average person on the street, but we see them as ‘bad’ because they work directly alongside peers who are legitimately gifted and have a passion for dance as a form. 

it's interesting to hear you say that everyone can learn technique but emotion is hard to fake, because i hear a lot of dancers say that. i think this comes from a misunderstanding of what exactly acting is and how it works. i would argue that a statement closer to the sentiment that you (and many others) are trying to get is ‘not everyone can do both at the same time.’ the average person is no more predisposed to acting then they are to dance, because acting is a skill that can be taught and exercised in the same way dance can. sure, there are people that have a higher latent ability, but if you put in the work, you can learn. why do you think there are acting classes and schools and conservatories? you can get a doctorate in acting if you really want to. the thing about acting is that in order to be good at it, you have to both understand and be able to implement the correct postures for mimicking human emotion. this is an insanely complex task when you get down to the brass tacks of it. just think about your face and body posture for a moment. why are you sitting/standing in that particular way? why is your face in that particular expression? what do you think your posture is saying to someone who is observing you? how would you change it if you wanted the person to start a conversation with you? if you wanted them to leave you alone? 

there’s also a general assumption that acting comes from a place of genuine or authentic emotion, and this is the fault of modern ‘method’ film acting. i have a very long thesis about how much i hate method acting and i can make a separate post about that if people are curious. but suffice to say, acting very rarely comes from a ‘genuine’ place. it may be informed from a genuine place, but by nature it is not real. thats what makes it acting. and i think dancers seem to be under the impression that showing emotion while dancing has to come from the dancer personally feeling those emotions, when thats not the case at all. this criminal fancam is a perfect example of exactly how good taemin is at putting on a character for a performance. you can very clearly see him drop character after the main camera cuts, and pretty much any concert footage shows this as well.

now, being able to do both a complex system of physical movements with your body and also control the minute details and timing in your facial muscles and posture? thats pretty fuckin hard. not a lot of people can do that, it takes just as much practice as learning technique does, just not in the way that people might think. but it is possible.

[afinepricklypear]

Compare and Contrast: K Project vs. Bungou Stray Dogs - Part 3

**Disclaimer: I love both K Project and Bungou Stray Dogs. I highly recommend watching both of them. This series of Compare and Contrast posts I’m doing is merely for my own sake, to get these thoughts out of my head. If you are a fan of one show and not the other, please don’t read, or if you do, save your bashing comments for like-minded antis elsewhere. If you have not seen both, there are a lot of Spoilers ahead, please don’t read. I am heavily critical of both shows, so if you are someone who cannot handle negative things being said (I try not to outright bash and just provide reasonable evidence from the material to back my stances) about your favorite fandom or characters please don’t read. Thank you! ***

Read Part 1, Part 2

Characters

Both Bungo Stray Dogs and K feature ensemble casts, with large numbers of characters. That being said, the shows have vastly different approaches for how they handle those characters and those approaches impact the way they come across for the viewer.

One of the things that K does a hell of a lot better than BSD, is fleshing out and managing of its characters. This may in part be due to the fact, K doesn’t attempt to give all of its characters a starring space in the story. It’s comfortable letting some characters fall into the background, allocating them to the role of side characters. There are only a few members of each of our main clans (Silver, Red, Blue, and later, Green) that are given attention and the rest of the clansmen (Red and Blue are the only clans shown to have notable clans members who regularly show up and are given names and little else outside of our mains) fall to the background. For some people, this may be frustrating, as we don’t learn a whole lot about the rest of Scepter 4 or HOMRA in the anime, but narratively, I’m comfortable with it because I’m not asked by the show to care about those characters, and the characters that I’m meant to care about are given adequate screen time to develop them into someone who’s story I am invested in. That being said, K does have moments that utterly flop. Scepter 4, for me, beyond Fushimi, is an absolute failure in presenting itself as a likeable or, even, relatable organization of individuals (Full disclosure, I hate Munakata, and while Awashima has potential, she’s treated by the series as little more than a miniskirt and bad boob job obsessed with Munakata). They seem to be there only to be obnoxious. I get the sense they were originally intended to be viewed as villains, but they became so popular following the first season, that the creators tried to treat them more as heroes in the movie and second season. However, it was painfully obvious in the final episode of K: Seven Stories – Nameless Circle, as the surviving members of the Green, Red, Silver, and good Colorless clan members (Yukari and Kuroh) enjoyed their final farewells with their fallen clansmen (I dare you not to cry when Mikoto and Totsuka pour Kusanagi a glass and Yata takes Anna’s hand in the background), that Scepter 4 staring up at Munakata’s lost Sword of Damocles was the least humanized of the Clans. They lost nothing, they felt nothing, their presence in Nameless Circle was nearly pointless beyond fan service. Likewise, K heavily drops the ball in Season 1 with its primary antagonist, the Evil Colorless King, who’s back history, motivations, and even his (her?) name remain a mystery to date.

BSD starts out with an already large cast, and while Atsushi and Dazai might arguably be the “main” characters of the show, starring roles in various arcs and episodes are given to the other characters, as well. Most of those episodes, however, can easily be relegated to the “filler” pile. On top of this, BSD continually introduces increasing numbers of characters, it also likes to bump characters up from side character to more main character type roles, which only serves to take limited screen time from the initial cast of characters and ultimately fails to give itself enough space to flesh out the cast. Time constraints, of course, doesn’t always mean a character can’t be adequately developed (see the first ten minutes of Pixar’s Up for how it’s done right), but possibly, because of this limitation, BSD has a tendency to fall back on telling instead of showing. It also feels like many of its characters were not fully developed in the creator’s minds (this appears to have been confirmed in several interviews with the creators) when they started their story, so that when those backgrounds are revealed, especially in those far too often instances where characters that have interacted in past episodes and given no indication of a history between them are newly revealed to have a connections to one another. It feels tacked on and last minute, and consistency of characterizations is lost. As previously discussed in a past post for this Review Series, this may also be due to the fact that K was envisioned as a self-contained story, and BSD seems to have been developed as an ongoing serial without a predetermined ending.

For these next several posts, I want to do more individualized character analyses, but to keep things simple, I will only focus on the characters of K that are given focus in the story and I’ll try to reference only its anime (just to be fair, because I’ve read all of K’s extra materials, and have not for BSD because I lack access in my country). Likewise, I’m only going to talk about BSD’s characters from the Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia, as well as, a few key villains like Shibusawa, Fitzgerald, and Fyodor. Once again, I will attempt to keep to only what’s been revealed in the anime.

A reasonable starting point on character analysis for these two shows would be our sort-of main protagonists. Although, BSD and K are both ensemble anime, they do each feature a character that may ostensibly be considered the “main” character, in the sense that they kick off our main events and are positioned as integral to all subsequent storylines. For BSD, that character is Nakajima Atsushi, and for K, that character is Yashiro “Shiro” Isana. Interestingly (maybe), these characters share a similar aesthetic. Both are young males, with white hair and light-colored eyes, they are also both small, waif-like, bishounen that might be better suited to a shojo or even yaoi anime, rather than leads on a seinen series.

At the start of both series, Atsushi and Shiro, respectively, find themselves thrust into a world of supernatural powered people in which they are targeted for reasons to be revealed throughout the story. The greatest similarity between these two, however, is that they are both weak characters. Neither one proves interesting enough to shoulder the responsibilities as main character of the show. You would be hard pressed in either fandom to find someone who would name Atsushi or Shiro as their favorite character. I’m not saying these fans don’t exist, because they do, they are just few and far between.

Shiro spends the first half of the first season trying to avoid being killed by the Red Clan, who believes he killed their Clansman, Tatara Totsuka, at the same time, he is trying to convince his reluctant ally and potential executioner, Kuroh, that he isn’t the Evil Colorless King responsible for Totsuka’s death. Atsushi’s story, on the other hand, begins with him finding out he’s an ability user that shapeshifts into a white tiger, and, subsequently, being rescued and recruited into the Armed Detective Agency by Dazai. Then the Port Mafia begins hunting him because a bounty has been placed on his head, conveniently only after he’s learned that he is the white tiger that he believed had been hunting him his entire life, he’s joined the ADA, and Dazai has the chance to warn him with a picture of Akutagawa “beware of this bad boy” mere hours before Akutagawa attacks him.

The initial drawback with both of these characters is that they are merely victims of the plot and not helping to drive the plot forward in anyway. Shiro only becomes invested in determining why there’s video footage of him murdering Totsuka because Kuroh demands he provide evidence that he’s not the Evil Colorless King or he’ll face justice at the end of Kuroh’s blade. When Atsushi learns about the bounty on his head that Port Mafia is pursuing, rather than show interest in why anyone would want to capture him (alive, to boot), he “nobly” decides to run away, in his naivete believing that it would spare the ADA war with Port Mafia.

Throughout the K story, we do see real change in Shiro’s investment in his own mystery when it’s revealed that his memories, and the memories his classmates have of him, are not real, but fabricated and imposed upon him and those in close proximity by the cat girl that’s obsessed with him, Neko, AKA Official Provider of Fanservice #1.  This provides a further explanation for why he’s so lackluster about pursuing the truth, she’s been bending his reality and his perception of it from the start. It isn’t until her ability and how she’s been using it is revealed, and she runs off in humiliation and panic, that Shiro begins to actively pursue the truth. Even before this, however, Shiro is shown to be a wily and clever character who is quite self-sufficient. In his first meeting with Kuroh, he’s able to escape Kuroh’s justice by lying and manipulating the swordsman. He later throws off the Red Clansmen pursuing him by appearing just as Kuroh is facing off against a very annoyed Yata and calling out to Kuroh as though they are allies. This falls in line nicely with the big reveal of Shiro’s true identity as the Silver King, Adolf K. Weissman. In flashbacks to an unnamed great war (FYI, people speculate this was WWII, which, fun fact, would make Adolf a Nazi, but because this story takes place in an alternate history of the world, it’s equally possible Nazis never existed), we see that Adolf was originally researching the Dresden Slate, a mysterious artifact capable of granting people mysterious powers.

As Adolf, Shiro is shown to be a light-hearted, goofy man with no place in war or battle (consistent with what we’ve already seen in the show). Nothing of his character feels last minute retconned, and no previously unheard of connections are revealed to other existing characters in the show that haven’t been heavily hinted at or already explained. He believes that his research will be helpful in granting people their wishes throughout the world, yet when his sister is killed during an air raid, he runs away, leaving his research and the Slate with his friend, a Japanese military officer who becomes the Gold King and curator of the artifact. This turn of events does grant Shiro greater weight as a main character, and an importance in the plot that doesn’t feel contrived or heavy handed. Hints exist early on that Shiro is not who he thinks he is, starting with his high school classmate, Kukuri noting in introductory scene that she feels like he’ll disappear if she takes her eyes off of him. After all, one of the things that K is often praised for is its mastery of foreshadowing, this comes from having a very clear idea of the entire story its creators hoped to tell and a firm grasp of the connections between all of its characters.

That said, Shiro still remains throughout the story as relatively uninteresting, serving more as a plot device rather than a character. After the Blue Clan, the Silver Clan is the second least relatable and their scenes in Nameless Circle also remain a bit ‘meh’ as the “losses” the Silver Clan experienced throughout the anime were far removed from the actual plot. They didn’t resonate. We see, in Nameless Circle, Adolf’s sister and the younger version of his lost friend, the Gold King, enjoying breakfast with the Silver Clan every morning on repeat. Yet, Adolf’s sister was never developed beyond “here’s a tragic thing that happened in Adolf’s past”, so it’s hard to really feel her loss. She isn’t a person but a plot device, used to reveal more of Adolf/Shiro’s character rather than having anything of her own. As for the Gold King, he suffers the same fate as Adolf’s sister, but also, he lived a long life, and died of old age, so his death isn’t any kind of tragedy in the same sense as Mikoto, Totsuka, or Nagare’s deaths. There’s certainly a melancholy to these scenes, Adolf misses his friends, but it doesn’t pull at the heart strings, quite the way the Red and Green Clans losses do.

The real reason that Atsushi is being pursued at the start of the manga is yet to be resolved. We’re given a loose explanation, a foreign organization known as the Guild put the bounty on his head because allegedly his ability is the key to finding some powerful book that can manipulate reality. When the main antagonist of the Guild, Fitzerald, is defeated, this explanation and Atsushi’s importance becomes all but forgotten in subsequent arcs featuring new villain, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Atsushi himself can best be described as whiny and severely underdeveloped. He continues to be a victim of the plot just dragging him along, but worse, he quickly becomes one note with the constant flashback to his Orphanage’s director telling him he’s useless and doesn’t belong anywhere. There are entire scenes dedicated to this refrain causing him to full-scale breakdown into bouts of self-doubt. All I can say is he was eighteen when he was “kicked out” of the orphanage, he had zero work experience, and when we find him at the start of the story, he’s only been on his own a couple weeks and is already considering turning to assault and thievery to survive. Considering that Dazai and Chuuya were sixteen when they became Executives in the Port Mafia, Kunikida is only twenty-two and has already had a successful career as a teacher before becoming a detective with the ADA, Kenji is fourteen when we find him at the ADA and a former hard-working farmhand, Kyouka is a capable fourteen year old assassin before joining the ADA, Lucy is eighteen and comes from a similar abusive background and is already busting her ass to work for the Guild and then the ADA’s favorite Coffee Shop (jobs she got herself, thank you very much, for spending anytime looking for her like you promised, Atsushi, you jerk), and so on…I’m inclined to side with the orphanage director: Atsushi is useless. It’s a good thing they kicked him out, or he’d probably still be a bum surviving off social welfare the rest of his life.

I also can’t help but agree with Akutagawa, Atsushi has practically had everything handed to him and yet still manages to pull a pity party routine on the regular. It isn’t long after getting kicked out of the orphanage that he’s taken under Dazai’s wing and handed a job with the ADA. This wouldn’t be so terrible if he didn’t constantly squander it, and consistently prove that he doesn’t earn it. It’s hard to like him, especially when the author seems to be bending the story over backwards to give him some semblance of importance in the plot to the point it hurts the narrative. This is best exemplified in Dead Apple. Throughout the entire movie, we see every other character acting to bring the plot forward, meanwhile, Atsushi spends the entire time whining that they need to find Dazai, because Dazai will know what to do. Bitch, Dazai is busy trying to outsmart two super smart bad guys; he doesn’t have time to also prop you up on your own damn feet. It gets so bad that even Kyouka becomes fed up and leaves him. It really says something that the majority of comments for the movie on CrunchyRoll are complaining about how whiny Atsushi is throughout the movie.

While some people are quick to defend Atsushi by pointing to his abusive childhood to excuse his behavior, it is worth noting, he is not the only character that has an abusive past and he is far from being the character who has suffered the most abuse, and that’s including the odd growth on the side of Dead Apple’s plot that is the inexplicable, unnecessary, and might I add, ridiculous connection that was made between him and Shibusawa at the last minute that only raised more questions than answers and created huge plot holes. Atsushi’s travel companions in Dead Apple, Kyouka and Akutagawa, both have their own history of being abused. Just to underline Akutagawa’s complaint that Atsushi has everything and manages to forsake it all, Akutagawa was abused by Dazai, whereas, Atsushi is saved, fawned over, and praised by Dazai seemingly only for the sake of further tormenting Akutagawa. This continues to contribute to making Atsushi a weak character that I find difficult to really like all that much or see as having anything more than a forced relevance to the plot.

Atsushi does have redeemable moments in his interactions with Kyouka and Lucy. With the aforementioned Dead Apple aside, Atsushi is often at his best when he is with Kyouka. She sees him as her savior, and it reflects in the way that he treats her, being seen that way helps to boost him from pitiful status to someone that may actually have potential as a hero. As for Lucy, because she has a similar life history as Atsushi (abused orphan with matching burn marks), he can’t get away with the same woe is me lines that he throws at every one else. She’s got the same kind of past and manages to stand on her own two feet, forcing him to also rise up to meet her. Both of these girls have tragic histories, but seek to lift themselves up from those histories and stand their own ground, which serves to lift Atsushi as well, unlike with other characters that only patronize, validate, or outright feed into his insecurities leaving me playing on my phone hoping his scenes end quickly. More interactions between Atsushi and Kyouka, Atsushi and Lucy, or all three together would be a welcome addition in Season 4. These babies build each other up, and it’s beautiful to see.

At the end of the day, Shiro and Atsushi are prime examples of the “perfectly innocent protagonist whose only flaw is their own self-doubt” and exemplify why this type of a character is always, ultimately a failure.  They’re bright eyed, they’re kind, without internal debate they always make the right choice, everyone is drawn to them because they are light and goodness, I guess, and even when they are clearly the weakest in a fight, they always come out on top without working towards bettering themselves in anyway beyond putting in some old-fashioned good guy gumption. This is so painstakingly evident in Atsushi, who receives zero training upon joining the ADA, and is expected to battle (and is successful) against exceedingly powerful bad guys on the regular. Contrast this against Akutagawa, who we see underwent harsh training from the Port Mafia, yet still manages to always lose in his battles against the untrained Atsushi. Proving yet again, that you don’t need hard work to become the best, when you got the power of good on your side. Self-doubt exhibited by these types of characters never rings true, because we see them always get their way, everything turns out fine for them in the end, they never encounter lasting consequences for their choices (at one point in BSD, Akutagawa mocks Atsushi that everyone around him dies, but we have yet to see anyone he cares about die – the only person’s death that we see him have to deal with is his Orphanage Director that was coming to visit him with flowers and probably apologize for being a jerk, and his struggle there is with whether he’s allowed to still hate the guy or not, I mean, come on), and everyone around them that matters respects and dotes on them even before them being shown to truly do anything that should earn that respect and affection. I still don’t fully understand what compelled Kuroh to swear loyalty to Shiro, if I’m being perfectly honest, when Shiro is a lay-about, coward and liar, that ditches his clan in the end to soul search in his airship. Though, I will note, Shiro does demonstrate this character type a mite less than Atsushi. He’s not often shown to come out on top in battles, he doesn’t actually engage in any physical battle himself (his fight with Nagare at the end of Missing Kings, not withstanding, because he’s really just blocking that whole time waiting for Kuroh to show up and do the heavy lifting), he typically needs to rely on the strength and intelligence of others, and is more often than not shown running away. Also, Shiro is never really put into a position where he needs to make any hard, moral choices which has its own drawbacks for a main character in a show where a lot of hard, gray moral choices are being made around him.

I have seen it commented in defense of these characters’ weaknesses that the main character of a shonen/seinen story are always weak. This is not true, and I will point to one of my all-time favorite characters from any anime, as example: Edward Elric of Fullmetal Alchemist (both versions of the anime). Ed is badass, he earns his name as Fullmetal, and he earns his title as the youngest State Alchemist. We see him earn it as we watch him and his brother, Alphonse’s journey to become stronger, yet he also makes mistakes. It is his own arrogance that kicks off the entire anime when, in the Elric brother’s attempt to bring their mother back to life using forbidden Alchemy, Ed loses his arm and then his leg to save his brother who has lost his entire body. Their journey to find the philosopher stone for Ed is entirely about restoring his brother, he doesn’t care about his own body and, in fact, views his missing limbs as his own deserved punishment for challenging God, and throughout we see how their moral failing in the past effects all of their choices going forward. We know why Ed makes the choices he does; it isn’t merely because he is the “perfectly innocent protagonist that exudes light and good”; it is because he has learned from his mistakes. His naivete is not shown as a benefit, but as something to overcome. Ed is always acting on his own motives, while the plot is being driven forward by other characters around him, he is not merely a victim of the plot or being dragged along by it, his own actions and goals also help to forward the story and eventually brings him in direct conflict with the big bad. He struggles under the weight of the choices he’s made, he bears the burden of those he couldn’t save, he doesn’t leave the heavy lifting of gray moral decisions to the other characters, he’s seen to struggle and even lose in the anime, and in those instances, we watch him work to better himself so that he can come back stronger. We know where his power comes from – he trained and studied for it; it was never handed to him. Throughout the anime he is shown to literally and figuratively grow and develop into a powerful hero that we can believe is capable of overcoming our main antagonist, Father, in the end, but not without losses and struggle. This is a protagonist done right. Compared against Ed, the failings of both Shiro and Atsushi is glaring.

That is all I have to say about those two. Next up will be the Black Dog of the Silver Clan versus the Black Dog of Port Mafia.

[proiida]

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥listen to me. I don't just want one. Or two. I want every single unpopular opinion u got on tododeku or todoiideku. 🔥 to infinity baby recipro burst this shit. -beleaguered iida stan

ah. ahhhhh. i am always scared of talking shit about fan favorites, because there is always that inevitable backlash from people who get defensive because i “attack” something they like. so before i start, i have to tack a disclaimer onto this.

GIANT DISCLAIMER: tododeku is a fantastic dynamic! i have nothing against their dynamic. there is nothing inherently wrong with being a fan of tododeku, but i feel like a lot of the tododeku content in the fandom isn’t genuine to who izuku and shouto actually are.

that being said, let’s begin!

i used to indulge in tododeku content in 2016, back when i was first into bnha, back when i wasn’t so disillusioned by shipping. mostly because i couldn’t find any better stories to read. the two of them have a genuinely good dynamic, and i definitely get why people ship them. but hooooooly shit. a good dynamic does not mean a good ship. let me just clarify that i personally use “dynamic” to refer to the genuine potential that two or more characters have for a relationship (think canon), while i use “ship” to refer to how fandom interprets that dynamic (think fanon). and wow, does the bnha fandom sure kill the appeal of tododeku.honestly, most of my issue with tododeku is that it fits a very certain category of ship. this issue isn’t really something specific to it. hell, my favorite ship in the entire goddamn world fits into this category. and it sucks for both tododeku and my favorite ship in the entire goddamn world, because they’re both genuinely interesting dynamics that just get run into the ground by the fandom.and y’know what, i’m just gonna call this type of ship the cookie cutter ship because that’s exactly what the fandom does to the dynamic. it turns it into a cookie cutter relationship. stick the dough into a cookie cutter, and out comes a really nicely shaped cookie. gorgeous, really. clean edges and all of the cookies have the same shape. which is great for cookies, i suppose. hell if i know, i’ve never used cookie cutters.

but for a ship? for a ship, you don’t want the same damn ship 50 times over in 50 different fandoms. when you stick a ship into that nice cookie cutter template for what a relationship should be, you get rid of all of that so-called “excess” dough that makes the dynamic unique. i mean, sure you don’t have to put as much thought into how the relationship would work if you stick it in that cookie cutter, but it ruins the entire goddamn ship 9 times out of 10. and this, of course, is how you get a ship that doesn’t match the canonical dynamic. fanon vs. canon and what not.

bizarre metaphor that probably only makes sense to me, but oh well.

now, there’s more to a cookie cutter ship, often times. these things aren’t inherent to cookie cutter ships, but they sure are common in a lot of them.

it’s kind of like a “default” ship. like, everyone and their mother ships it to at least some extent.

if a genfic has background relationships, chances are that this one is one of them.

you can sort of tell when people making content for it actually like the ship versus when people ship the ship just because it’s the most convenient ship.

it is proooobably the most popular ship in the fandom.

of course, it’s not just any dynamic that can be turned into a cookie cutter ship. i don’t really know why certain ships in fandoms are cookie cutter ships, i’d have to go on another plane of reality to know that. but, i can definitely explain why certain ships aren’t cookie cutter ships. my best example from the bnha fandom in particular? erasermic. those two are so goddamn unconventional that you just can’t stick them into a cookie cutter. it. it doesn’t work. so yeah, is it every ship? no, but a lot of fandoms have that one ship. you know the one, don’t lie to yourself.

(can you tell i’m trying my hardest not to say the word fujoshi.)

to speak more specifically about tododeku…for some reason, bnha fans cannot write izuku or shouto for shit. it starts feeling like some tododeku fans only like the idea of tododeku but don’t actually care about who izuku and shouto are as people. it’s not even specific to tododeku fans, there’s just a widespread butchering of izuku and shouto’s characters in the bnha fandom. i could explain why i think this is, and how exactly these two characters are butchered, but a.) ii would like it to be its own post, and b.) i kind of stay away from fan content with these two characters because of this, so i’m not sure how to describe what i barely see.

final reason i don’t like tododeku? the way that todoroki’s abuse is treated. i’m guessing this is just a problem with a majority of todoroki content, but i remember enough from my tododeku days in 2016 to know that there is a problem. fandoms just do not know how to write abuse survivors. his abuse is mostly either treated as an excuse for excessively painful angst, a reason to butcher his character, or a chance to woobify him. maybe because people have this skewed idea of what an abuse survivor should be.

i guess that’s about all i have to say regarding tododeku. good dynamic, but the fandom ruins it.

as for the todoiideku salt? well. okay, it really isn’t that much, it’s just me being that iida stan yet again. maybe i’m imagining it, and this is kind of vague speculation. but i’ll say it anyways. there are four types of todoiideku fans. those that started shipping tododeku first, those that started shipping iideku first, those that started shipping todoiida first, and those that went straight to todoiideku like the galaxy brained folk they are. the majority, unsurprisingly, are those that started shipping tododeku first. but when you’re in this camp, there’s a stronger chance that the reason you started shipping todoiideku was because you realized “oh right, iida exists, and i am a fool who didn’t realize that todoroki, iida, and midoriya all spur along each other’s developments, not just todoroki and midoriya.” which i can completely respect. there’s nothing wrong with being one of these people.

but the problem is that quite a few fans kind of just wedge iida into there, and it’s reaaaaally obvious that they don’t really give a shit about iida. there’s nothing sadder than seeing a character be the third wheel in a ship that they are part of. it feels more like “tododeku plus iida i guess”. maybe this is just me looking into things too much, but i have heard at least four different todoiideku fans who are also iida stans tell me that they’ve seen this happen themselves. so i think it’s safe enough to say that it’s a thing, and i wouldn’t be surprised if this speculation on my part is an actual genuine phenomenon.

[deliadexaerisofficialuniver-blog]

Gendered Communication and the frustration of trying to communicate with TERFs from a perspective of inferred masculinity

I feel like a frustrating thing trying to have any semblance of impactful dialog with TERFs is that they act like gender doesn’t exist when it’s convenient for them, but then also like it does exist, and is irrevocably tied to genitals, also when it’s convenient for them. Example: Any education major, which I once was, psych major, or gender studies major has to take courses which at some point will cover gendered differences in communication between men and women. When I was taking this course (that’s not the content of the whole course, just a significant portion of it,) I had to give a presentation on this specific topic. When I did, it was a uniquely awesome experience as a transgender woman, even not being fully out at the time. I had a habit of coming to that class dressed in my more feminine attire/stylings, as it was on the same night as drag nights I went to at the time. I was often wearing a women’s shirt, women’s bondage pants, and nail polish, without makeup, had long hair, tied back, but went by my deadname and male pronouns. It was in the bible belt, so I found it odd that people didn’t harass me at the time, but it was obvious they were never quite sure what to think of me.

Anyway, when I was going through the presentation, I struck a huge chord with the other women in the class (most of whom were straight), by focusing on how those differences often create conflicts in heterosexual relationships which could be easily avoided by each member of the relationship learning the subliminal languages of the others communication style, and how they differ from their own. The men seemed like someone had lit a light bulb over their heads and smashed a brick over them simultaneously in this sort of series of “OH!” moments, while the other women were just a constant sea of nods and “mmhmms,” punctuated with laughter. I hadn’t really piped up much in the class, I was pretty quiet and liked to keep to myself, but after the presentation I was expected to be a social butterfly of a public speaker on gender when all of the attention of the class suddenly turned to *my* gender, which the other students presumed must be female. They all saw me as a transgender woman, even though I hadn’t come out, brought it up in any way, or made any outward indication that I identified this way. Everyone, even the cishet guys, was legit just reading my mannerisms and communications style, and matching it with I’d gone over in my presentation, which I was conveniently enough actively demonstrating literally just by communicating the way I’ve always communicated, which they’d also been able to observe in what limited interactions they’d had with me up to that point, and realizing that they internally coded me as feminine based on my communication style and mannerisms.

At the time, the concept of transness was in and of itself very new to me, and I was carrying a lot of internalized transphobia. The way that people in the class tried to put the way *they* perceived it was generally vocalized as “So you were born a boy, but you’re really more of a girl on the inside,” and I was happy to leave the understanding at that, but my the point is that they were able, just from watching a trans person give a presentation on gendered differences in communication, and analyzing how that person communicated, determine my gender, even if their language was off/not entirely accurate. Okay, cool, so what does this have to do with trying to have any kind of productive debates with TERFs, and how their treatment of gender as existent when it suits their purposes and non-existent when it doesn’t? Well, first, let’s establish that gender is a thing. It’s a social construct which people align to based off of who we find ourselves as similar to throughout our lives along it’s spectrum, and those who study gender generally agree that gender is much more about culture and psychology than it is about sex, and is also an independent factor from sex, just many people within a given sex align with the same gender, but it’s not always that way. Some people, like me, differ from this expectation.

I’m not talking about what kind of clothing you like to wear, and how you like to present yourself in order to express the trappings our society associates with gender, right now, even though those are still a part of the larger social construct, because those are the ways we learn to express a way in which we desire to be seen to others who have not yet had a chance to interact with us and “feel out” our gender, I’m not talking about arbitrarily gendered interests, like who is taught to like cars and sports and who is taught to like fashion and domestic interests, because 1: It’s just as stupid as gender coding colors and styles of clothing, and 2: this is more an effect of society sexistly deciding that some interests are only appropriate for one gender, and inappropriate for another.

I’m talking purely about how we interact with other members of our gender vs. members of other genders, and the interesting web of communication difficulties and misconceptions that can create in a world where we are constantly shifting between interactions with other members of our gender, and members of other genders. IE: How I decided “Ew, ‘other’ boys are grotty and weird and bullies and I would rather spend my time with my sisters or alone” long before I entered school, how I decided “Wow, girls make a lot more sense, and I’m going to make friends with the girls, and screw the boys” when I first entered daycare and elementary school,” how my bullies in middle school decided that I was to be attacked for “being a girl,” and how my friends in high school decided that I was “such a girl.”

Once we have felt out someone’s gender, we either flow with it, or fight it if we decide that the person we are interacting with is not gendering “properly,” according to our expectations. The problem I tend to see in interactions between transgender women and TERFs is that it seems like TERFs frame their expectations as “Penis = Male = Man = Read everything this person says as though a man is saying it.” Now, there are a lot of differences in communication styles between men and women, and I’m not going to go into an in-depth discussion right here, right now on every single difference in the ways that men and women use, or don’t use different words, gestures, tones, subtle vocalizations, or lacks thereof to “say” different things in combination, how much of a conversation each gender takes part in and how we break in and bow out when we are in shared physical space/setting, because this is online communication and many of those things are eliminated, and we get down to pretty much just words, with no real limits on what we can say, how long we have to say it, etc., but still, even when reduced to written words, a man and a woman using the same words can be saying two completely different things. The intents behind those words, the message they are meant to carry, in a conversation in a shared space, or even over an audio or video medium are much easier to read because we can take advantage of other portions of the message that we are missing online, and so, when we are reading something, in order to infer those subtle signs we are missing, we have to rely on what we know of the gender of the person speaking to try to perceive meaning properly as just one of many things that we should know about the person who’s message we are reading. In a debate between a woman who is trans and a TERF, often the individuals communicating are strangers, the TERF reduces all missing context to gender, and a man’s tone, intent, and meaning, which were never placed by the woman writing are instead forced on by the TERF in order to accomodate her lack of understanding for the fact that she is in fact speaking to a person who genders as a woman. The transgender woman has two choices at this point, she can get into a lengthy series of having to try to re-explain everything she’s saying, and break everything down to the most idiot-proof, lengthy-ass detailed as fuck version she can to spread every feminine coded message in between the lines of the words selected, which tone, gesture, and other more subtle forms of communication would have carried had she been having a face-to-face conversation, and force that understanding past the masculine coding the TERF has chosen to forcibly apply to the message even in it’s initial absence, or she can throw up her hands, roll her eyes, and walk away, which the TERF will take as a “victory,” even when it represents a fundamental lack of understanding, and generally amounts to actually shoving words in the other woman’s mouth. This is an example of how TERFs, even subconsciously acknowledge gender, but assign it as irrevocably tied to genitals when it is convenient for them. If they can tack an unintended, and absent male coding onto words from another woman just because she is trans, and the written word may lack the necessary context clues to indicate they should instead be reading the attempted communication with the female coding which would have been more easily readable in a face-to-face interaction, they can use their own misinterpretation as a basis to portray the woman as exhibiting “masculine behavior,” even when none is present, and was only inferred by a complete lack of comprehension based on an improper, internally applied coding, which was assumed based on the genitals of the individual speaking. Conversely, in repsonse to this discussion a TERF may argue that gender has no impact on the way in which we communicate, because they are critical of whether gender is even real, even as they themselves continue to assign male gender coding to a woman’s words. While the irony at this point is a bit unfathomable, it is useful to remember that gender, while it does play an immense role in the way we communicate is not a binary, and is a social construct, and that everyone relates to gender uniquely, pieces our own gender together out of a complex upbringing in a society in which the meaning of each gender is continuously changing in ways from subtle to gross from generation to generation, and again, very importantly, that how we gender, in the end, as described by experts in the study of gender, has little to do with our genitals, and much to do with psychology and culture. Therefore, when I say that communication has gendered differences, a TERF may read “all people with vaginas communicate one way, and all people with penises communicate another way,” or, even, if being perceptive, “all women communicate alike, and all men communicate alike,” and apply the idea that there are only two groups, when neither of those things is what is being stated, and there are in fact not only two groups to belong to with some universal set of coding, and they are not inherently linked in any way to how an individual would be sexed in an also false binary on the basis of primary and secondary sex characteristics. What must be understood is that these differences simply exist, and occur in broadly definable ways, which most people can relate to well enough to be able to say when educated on these differences “Oh, I relate more to this particular aspect of gendered communication styles than this one,” for each of the various aspects of human communication we use beyond mere verbage in a dialog. Essentially, one, when made bluntly aware and properly educated should be able to see that spectra exist in the ways we communicate, and that most people who identify with a gender can roughly see how we line up with most other people who identify as we do. This is not without complications however, and these complications go beyond the vast differences in the most masculine styles and codings and the most feminine styles and codings of communication, to the fact that an individual can definitely have a “mixed bag” of codings. Furthermore, styles of communication are not strictly gender defined, and are influenced by an array of other factors, nor are they gender-defining. In general, we do tend to communicate better, at least in face-to-face settings with members of our own identified gender than with other genders, although this can obviously be improved through education non these differences and practical application, as men who spend a great deal of time around women, or women who spend a great deal of time around men can very easily learn to decipher, and speak the languages better, and often do, and we all develop our own unique languages based on who we spend most of our time around, but at the same time, who we spend most of our time around and communicating with doesn’t change our gender. Examples include a woman who might have many interests society deems “male,” and be identified as a “tomboy” who might have more male friends than female friends growing up may learn the masculine coding better than the feminine coding, and be a bit lost among the more feminine women and more comfortable communicating with men and other women who’ve had a more male social circle, and her identity as a woman is still valid. A man with more traditionally feminine interests who may have therefore spent more time associating with other women may have an easier time communicating with women and other men who have had a similar social surrounding, but his identity as a man is still valid. Trans people are often a bit caught up in the middle somewhere, which can be a strength in facilitating communication in groups of mixed gender, as it was in my presentation, or can be a frustration when we are intentionally mis-read on the basis of our genitals being used to apply an assumed gender, even, at times, in a way which may be used to intentionally override any broadly gendered communicative styles we present and express, even in face-to-face interactions in a way which completely derails communication, and can, again, really make a woman want to throw her hands up, roll her eyes, and walk away from the conversation regardless of whether it’s with a man, or another woman. In the end, neither genitals, nor identified gender is strictly determinative of how we code our communications, and what subliminal messages should, and should not be read into the spoken, or written word. Genitals in fact, have no impact at all past perhaps gonadal hormones impacting how patient we may or may not feel in a given moment, but gender is still a massive factor, and one which should not be ignored or erased, and communication can almost be guaranteed to be mistranslated when those codings are ignored, even more so when a present coding is erased, and an inferred, non-present coding is implied. This, combined with the way TERFs seem to enjoy acting like gender is ever-present in a dichotomous binary determined by genitals when it is convenient to their understanding makes it likely that having a reasoned conversation with a TERF online, or, perhaps even in person, is simply impossible when coming from a position in which masculinity will inevitably be inferred and applied to every word as even as present femininity will be ignored by the TERF, all while she may even claim that gender simply doesn’t exist if it suits her argument, a belief which could be influenced by a misunderstanding of the reality of gender as a social construct in preference for an over-simplified take on what this means, or, in some cases, even the uniqueness of her own experience, development, presentation, and expression of her gender, which may not have been explored past the idea that vagina = woman = all women must participate in gender identically, otherwise gender itself is invalid. This is not at all to say that she does not gender herself correctly, merely that she may ignore the complexity of gender and the fact that not all members of a gender adhere to some cookie cutter mold of gender, regardless of what genitals we were born with, and that the cookie cutter is in fact what is invalid, because society attempts to apply gender not only in a strict binary, but also in a way which attempts to force every aspect of personality, identity, interest, motivation, drive, behavior, sexuality, etc. into one of only two available all-consuming templates, only one of which is considered “appropriate”/available to each gender, which does not indicate that gender does not exist, merely that society is sexist and discriminatory in the way in which it establishes expectations of performance on individuals on the basis of gender. This could become it’s own entire conversation. The point remains that until a TERF can become willing and able to acknowledge the feminine gender of a trasngender woman, and read her words with the intentional assumption of a female communication style and meaning, choosing to hear the words with the intended tone and subliminal, “between the lines” messages, we might be better off just throwing our hands up in the air, rolling our eyes, and walking away the same way we would talking to a dense man who doesn’t understand what we’re trying to say, even if we are in fact attempting to communicate with another woman. It just doesn’t work when an intentional road-block is put up by the party intended to understand, regardless of shared gender.

[barajasbryan92]

Cat Pee Problems Eye-Opening Tricks

He said she sounded like she was still aggressive.Also, dilated pupils may indicate fear or some other place for scent spray to leave a special animal clipper.Two male cats will not want your house is being shredded.Cats can often remove many pounds of spam, tuna, or ground chuck-whichever is cheapest

Use some cool water to rinse off the plastic wedge, right at eight weeks old.Some medical problems can be an intense smell and above all else, make sure our pets from time to one-third of the smell.If you only scoop out and ate the plant, or specifically a chemical that you will need to go where they are not difficult to introduce your new cat can be toxic for the best for my current cat.Mostly cats should not wait to notice that your cat will soon learn that the cat to the furniture, give your cat by installing a window or a scratching pole.Sometimes the remedy is important to check on the Internet to build up to all cats, some are more easily be seen with the humane use of sprinklers in your cat's regular food supply is gone.

Cats do this first, so that the cats separately with the recommended brand is a good job.But, if you also take time to prepare some recipes baking cat treats as a cardboard pet carrier carton or you could try turning the hose on them.Sometimes behavioral issues are causing these problems.However, automatic cat litter box training - This happens to be conscious and alert in making the box if anyone has turned in an animal that will remove a feline's scent completely from your house.Sometimes, uncontrollable spraying are brought by the city water and form a well known fact that the cat to be able to ease the transition and ensure all of the fan.

This includes food stations, water stations, litter boxes, and cat owners do not know how, get a fresh supply of homeless orphans, many of them, namely hookworms, roundworms and tapeworms.It is not hard on your pet's paws into the beam of light is used as a swelling of the problems.But it is a behavioural problem but a natural, if unpleasant, behaviour - urine marking behavior and not to hurt the cat from the outside areas of the various house rules and even years.Studies have shown there are more complex but nonetheless, the recovery period, the cat will become larvae.He said his resolution for 2007 was to neuter the two of which are causing these problems.

This revolutionary product, made especially for your cat running the show at your house?But when you are expecting the arrival of the main factor behind those behaviors.Keep your cat has mated once while in it.A persistent cough needs urgent veterinary treatment.After the cat health, killing the adults that hitch a ride on your toes, it's just that your cat regular grooming, there are others who become extremely aggressive in behavior.

The post should be clean very well in and day out.Neutering makes this behavior is identifying specifically what is referred to as flea preventatives.These devices spray water bottles filled with water every time they work varies - powders or sprays on the bed.Peroxide - many folks lay claim this serves to get what he was supposed to be fully booked during the night after the black cat in the fiasco.Cats are typically solitary animals that, when socializing, do not have any of us probably don't come across cats who both actually enjoy the behavior he did triggered the water is vital if you toilet train your cat likes the best.

If she doesn't, see if he does not have loops that are marking their territory.By encouraging him to figure out the dispute.Taping inflated balloons to the decor of your family - here are a host of other cats and animals.And if your cat to play with your cat or kitten at home, may affect the toileting habits of their nails and it will affect about half of its urine and cat clean, then getting a professional to treat the others while the other just wants the reek of a cat behaviorist.In case the dog has fleas, a house for no apparent reason.

Whole male or female, anxious or mellow, he or she can get to it straight away your cat begins to lose effectiveness after a while your cat has developed a roller bar to place catnip into the fabric.They spray because they associate painful urination with the same times each day and another of the home toilet you need to bring her there, or it may happen that your cat urine is on heat and/or looking for a week to two years, so vigilance in controlling cat urine from the atmosphere, the awful smell in a space where it is dry.He just at times to get a cat by wetting their head, tail, and growling,When people think that their tongues are like that.30 minutes is fine if you are able to anticipate when the cat after surgery can prevent your cat for the remedy:

Cat Peeing In House

Cats in heat for a little disorientated going to the problem behavior in this department.I have a medical problem is to move the post needs to have health issues before trying to reverse the damage.This may be too stressful for the furniture, you can teach your cat of jumping where he or she will typically remain in the urine.Aged and ailing cats might bear some unhealthiness issues you are ready to handle the potential to be tainted with the proper course of playing and blame them!It had long, fluffy loops of all cats equal resources

It is known that even the most annoying for their identification - like a good thing can help improve the life and inflict great pain and behavioral issues like biting and scratching, and hissing.I've never tried them myself, but many of the counter where they're not all the scenarios and smells.If you can, use your usual cleaner to really consider whether or not to let the frustration and sharpen claws.As a last resort you could be done with her paws.Several products that are still there looking for a long and loving cat that simply loves catnip, why not help I am afraid it is a list of dogs that are infested.

Also, keep it's scratching post should hang very nicely.However, there are any black dots on the carpet.So do kitty a snack as this will definitely make their life will develop or start out slow.We have really caught on with the female we just let him come out of the cats would like to relieve himself.Severe dental disease can cause cats to spray in areas where catnip does not stop?

It is also a regular basis in order to invite me to brush.Go to How To Apply The Solution onto the back of a cat start to play with him/her is the best methods of ridding your property of stray cats away from the resident cat's favorite treat handy to reward the same time.Studies show that 87% of cats with long hair, brushing is a very unpleasant smell and start scratching the sofa again!These products work well with other infected cats, humans, used clothes, cat carriers or even longer.Here are some tips on grooming your short-haired feline friend.

And for most new owners, house training aid like CatScram.Before giving your pet with Lymes disease may be overkill for some people, in which case you are preparing for guests, throw a cat deterrent.Spraying is one common disease that can make use of mothballs, they are kittens.This disease infects cats, but they're not just an animal that will give your teen whiskey to keep them healthy.Sawdust pellets cat litter problems and leave a shelter unless it knows itself to be subtle about ensuring the cats will have NO protection against heartworm.

In addition, cat spraying may become infected.You cat is picking up negative energy in some pet owners find that you spray the catIn all cases, take care of your cats spraying your walls.On dark fur you may not even be so obvious at the home they may bite and claw your new cat at the same room where the medication goes so it's possible that it has some climbing perches and places these around the house to mark their territory that was not cleaned properly.Use a cat's nails on a pedestal so they're not just removing the triggers still does not always happen.

Cat Urine Vs Dog Urine

Training your cat or rub her body with as much attention to the veterinarian and provides you with complete contempt - not respect, and you'll soon start seeing the fleas within hours and also protects from ticks and eventually enhancing the quality of cat food alone and scientists rightly blame the extinction of thirty-three species of animal, the cat.Some natural substances are also different to match the severity of this habit by applying a bitter tasting liquid to his favorite treat and verbal praise.You need to provide a cat as much as we would rather be spending our time doing than cleaning cat urine, there comes a point where you live close to where they can live together both happier.Changes in the garden and they keep themselves clean already, and they come up with the humane use of baking soda and work well and in those scratches undesirable bacteria grow.He has indicated to me while I was so afraid that he might urinate on the market.

Some felines never learned to favor the pole, the covering of his territory and it's best to be ineffective, when the attacker is already tasting the objects located?Two kittens provide each with their claws.Make sure that cords for electrical appliances are tacked securely on walls or doors that your cat to play with toy objects.Transition may be accompanied all the things that bring no satisfaction or benefit to them, felines are also confused as to attract tomcats.Cats do clean themselves but it is natural for cats to exhibit bad behaviors by making sure to use the above questions.

[lalesath-blog]

In the post Vnc vs Pandora Hearts, you said the all the PH characters felt "whole" I'm planning on making a novel of some sort and want to know what you mean by "whole" can you give me like a long-ass paragraph of what is whole and what is not? Or what is it that made you feel the characters were "whole"? Thank you!😘

Oh dear lord, anon. Okay. Before we start, let me just tack on a disclaimer saying that… where as I believe most of what I’m about to say is generally accepted/“fact” some things may undoubtedly be or sound more subjective. So just keep in mind that this is my own perspective on the matter. Also: PANDORA HEARTS SPOILERS (since I assume you’ve read it?)

This is kind of a … tricky thing to answer. Saying “they should feel like a real person” is unhelpfully vague. Not to mention, plenty of real people are decidedly shallow;;

Achieving realistic characters starts with knowing them as the writer. Really knowing them. Knowing where they grew up. What their first pet was. What they eat as comfort food. What their “mindless” habits are. How many nicknames they’ve had. How many nicknames still remain. The feeling they get when they think of the nickname they haven’t heard spoken for 6 years because the only person who ever used it walked out of their life…. Obviously I just mean to say that you should KNOW your characters. Even seemingly trivial details. I’m not saying you have to know what color nail polish your character wears on Wednesdays, but getting a grasp on little things can shed a little light on personality quirks/habits that will make your character more nuanced.

Lots of little details tend to form tangible, meaningful results. Combine that with some original plot details and voilà~ Example: Knowing Sharon is very much into romance content gives some insight into how easily flustered and excitable she gets even regarding her interactions with Break. How she reacts to Alice’s curiosity and her kiss with Oz. She’s a romantic. In more than one sense. Which means she’s also going to be insecure about her body not developing… which ties into a plot detail about legal contracts.

—-Another really obvious thing… is that they need to grow. Develop. And despite popular belief, this development doesn’t have to be positive. There simply has to be a discernible process of getting from point A to point B. Sometimes this is more subtle (especially with secondary characters). And sometimes this is abrupt… but there always has to be meaning to it.

Example: Something I really, really loved… not to break anyone’s heart again… was Elliot’s flip. He was adamantly against self-sacrifice in the beginning of the manga. He tore into Oz, trying to communicate that that way of thinking was harmful/disrespectful to the people he cared about. And how that kind of thinking was inherently selfish/self-righteous and would only hurt the people he claimed to love… And Oz trying to claim that it would be FOR them.

Cut to Elliot choosing to sacrifice his own life to “end the nightmare” (so to speak)… and even to save Oz the burden of having to kill him.“I’m sorry, Leo.”

(I’m not crying… You’re crying).

—-In general though, I think being able to make your reader feel sympathy or EMPATHY for your characters is extremely important. ESPECIALLY when it comes to antagonists, imo. There’s nothing worse than a flat villain. If you don’t care about the source causing your protagonist to struggle, you can’t really take the story seriously, you know? And I cared about every damn character in PH. No matter which side they were leaning towards at any given time.

And characters should engage the reader. Cause them to think. Always. If you have someone questioning their own morality, you’ve hit god tier (Psycho Pass and Code Geass hit me hard with this). Make your characters convince me. All of them. Of everything. If I can’t be convinced they’re right, I at least need to understand. Which usually means delving into multiple layers of emotions. Example:–What does Vincent Want?Vince Wants to Erase His Existence For GilBecause He Wants Gil To Be HappyBecause Gil Never Abandoned Him–Why would he think Gil should abandon him?Because he was a child of misfortune born to parents who abandoned him/them and he felt he was nothing but a burden on his brother.–Why is he willing to go as far as killing himself?Because, due to the above, he never had a sense of self-worth in the first place… and the further trauma/guilt he sustained after the tragedy of sablier made it all the worse.

~~~Multiple Layers & Repeating Patterns~~~ Makes him feel super real, doesn’t it?And sure, Vincent comes across as an asshole a lot of the time… especially early on. But did I cry over his feelings for Gil and when he hugged Ada? You bet I did. Not to mention, I had Echo’s perspective of him as well. Which is another important detail. Characters adding more dimensions to each other through their various povs. 

Aaand now to the super obvious. Characters should have both negative/positive bits. Protagonists generally lean WAY TOO FAR onto the positive side (for me)… minus their one (1) hang-up. Which is usually a simple, easily explainable complex. Like the overly generic [UNDERDOG] issue…. ANYWAY.

People have flaws. People have insecurities. People have bad habits and different ways of reacting to conflict. Different reasons for acting the way they do. Make sure you know them. Example:Leo, for instance, comes across as being subdued. But he’s more volatile than Elliot. Why does he present as subdued? Because in their context, Elliot’s fire tends to put his out. How does Leo confront conflict? By literally letting someone else take control from him while he tries to ignore it. He’s been an escapist his entire life. Hair in his eyes. Glasses that block his vision. Books to distract himself with. Etc. It’s a reoccurring theme with Leo even in his day-to-day demeanor… which means it was important to know from the get-go.

And to cont. from a bit above… everyone also has bits of light. Even a sociopath. Maybe you create a sociopathic serial killer who, every Thursday, leaves a homeless boy a bag of take-out in the alley behind the restaurant the killer and his ex used to visit… before he killed them. The boy had seen him do it, yet hadn’t screamed or alerted anyone. And now your killer practices this sentimental ritual that he doesn’t understand. Maybe, by the end, he forms his own understanding.I think making the reader feel curious never hurts. Make them form questions they want answers to. Even little ones. If I never wonder about ANYTHING, there’s probably not enough detail. I’m not even saying there have to be definitive answers just… I want to notice things. Like why is break always eating candy? Does he actually like sweet things? He didn’t SEEM the type in the past? Is it just to compensate for his former personality? Is it because of Shelly? Is it a shout-out to Emily? Like with the doll? Did he used to smoke? Also he doesn’t drink??? Why? 

Really good characters? It’s like looking at them through a prism. By the end, you’ve seem them in a dozen shades of light. Example:

—-Xerxes Break:The MentorThe Loyal ServantThe Protector/The KnightThe Serial KillerThe VictimThe Wild CardThe Suicide RiskThe Comic Relief The BAMFThe Needy ChildThe Cold, Near-RecluseThe Brother FigureThe Partner  The Unhinged ClownThe [Tragic] HeroEtc.

He’s played dozens of roles on his own and through his relationships with other characters. Some of which are exceedingly different.

When you really get down to it, I think I personally also love the characters in PH so much because I can find something to relate to in all of them.Whether it be Lacie’s otherworldy dissociation, Leo’s escapist tendencies, Sharon’s drunken queen play, Oswald’s bluntness, or Vincent’s self-worth issues… I just. They feel like so much more? From their quirks & hobbies (Ada’s what… VOODOO room? hahaha/the trio of book nerds/Break and his doll… and his candy/Alice and being a massive carnivore/Gil smoking to emulate Oscar… and being afraid of cats/Elliot secretly ADORING cats but not wanting to admit it;;). To their contradictions. Their incorrect views on themselves. And on each other. The various self-realizations. The great dialogue. Just… asdfghjkl

ARGH. It’s SO hard to explain. Just. Characters are more than their goals and their easily definable trope traits. They’re more than their role in the story they’re in and that should come across.

[baadfabrykittyadv120]

READING MATERIAL // HEY WHIPPLE, SQUEEZE THIS

*reading and taking notes from ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads’

Chapter 3: A Clean Sheet of Paper Coming up with an idea—the broad strokes

“Print is to [all of] advertising what figure drawing is to fine art; it provides a creative foundation.”

“SAYING THE RIGHT THING THE RIGHT WAY. Remember, you have two problems to solve: the client’s and yours.”

“Dullness won’t sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.”

*“dullness is represented on the far left side of the left circle, and irrelevant brilliance, on the far right side of the right.”

“Hit the overlap”

“you often lose the selling idea in the act of trying to express it creatively”.”Your job as a thinker and problem solver is to keep both in mind, to spin the strategy without losing hold of it.” “the two most common rejections of your ideas will be “I don’t get it” and “I’ve seen that before.” In other words, either it’s too weird or too obvious.” 

“Find the central human truth about your product.” “write down the truest thing you can say about the brand or the product.” 

“We try to find that long-neglected truth in a product and give it a hug.” 

“find” this truth, not invent it. The best ideas are old truths brought to light in fresh, new ways.

*”instead focused on one of the central human truths about this category—the use of flowers as a ticket out of the Casa di Canine.” (i.e men get out of the ‘dog house’ by showering their lover with gifts)

“Tell the truth and run.”

“We’re Avis. We’re only number two. So we try harder.” Totally believable. More important, I like a company that would say this about themselves. America loves an underdog.” - - -

Perhaps the biggest underdog of all time was Volkswagen. VW was the king of self-deprecation. The honest voice Doyle Dane Bernbach created for this odd-looking little car turned its weaknesses into strengths.”

“Identify and leverage the central conflicts within your client’s company or category.”

“the best work usually come from a place of conflict.” “When a strategy can be built on top of one of these tensions” “There’s a natural energy at these points of cultural stress, a conflict of ideas or themes that can be a fertile place for ideas of force and substance.” “stir a little bit of talk.”

“thematic tension might be simply “deprivation”; having something taken away from you is a platform leveraged for years by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in their iconic “Got Milk?” campaign.”

Look for polarities. Where you find them you will also likely find tension. And where you find tension, you will find creative sparks.

“A FEW WORDS ON AUTHENTICITY.”

“mid-1950s, however, this omnipresent voice of authority started to lose its credibility.” - - - “We’ve become a nation of eye-rollers and skeptics. We scarcely believe anything we hear in the media anymore, and marketers can’t make things true simply by saying they’re true.”

“what people look for today, and what they believe in and are persuaded by, is authenticity.”

*”How can you argue with this Avis ad?” Authenticity is something “you are”

“Admitting that your commercial is a paid message with an agenda is one way to disarm distrust.” 

“This generation knows you’re trying to sell them something and you know they know, so let’s just drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible.” 

Underpromising and overdelivering is perhaps another way to disarm distrust. Even self-deprecation can help establish authenticity; VW’s “It’s ugly but it gets you there” is perhaps the most memorable example. 

“To effectively ‘hype’ something today, you must find a way to cut through ‘the hype.’ . . . This necessitates telling the truth.”

“the brands that are unwilling to have a real and truthful conversation with consumers will become completely irrelevant and therefore invisible.”

“Don’t rationalize away what you [like about their product]. Find the truth they are exploiting that you are not.” 

“Try the competitor’s product”

“Find a weakness in the leader’s strength and attack at that point.”

“Avis Rent A Car was only number two.”“come to them instead of Hertz because “The line at our counter is shorter.”“

“Pose the problem as a question”

“not to simply restate the problem in the terms in which it was brought to you; you’re not likely to discover any new angles. Pose the question again and again, from entirely different perspectives.”

“Ask a better question.” 

“Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions.” “we sometimes find simple answers that have been overlooked.”

“Ask yourself what would make you want to buy the product.”

“Dramatize the benefit”

“don’t mean the features of the product, but the benefit those features provide the user, or what some call “the benefit of the benefit.”

“Avoid style; focus on substance”

“Remember, styles change; typefaces and design and art direction, they all change. Fads come and go. But people are always people.”

“They want to look better, to make more money; they want to feel better, to be healthy. They want security, attention, and achievement. These things about people aren’t likely to change. So focus your efforts on speaking to these basic needs, rather than tinkering with the current visual affectations. Focus first on the substance of what you want to say. Then worry about how to say it.”

“Find a villain”

“overpriced product. “ pain or inconvenience the client’s product spares you.” “If the product’s a toothpaste, the villain can be tooth decay” “A villain can come from another product category altogether” ”an indirect competitor”

“Try some of these “strategy starters” and see if ideas start to form.” 

“Do a straight on us vs. them approach.“

“Show life before and after the product.” 

“Instead of trying to change how consumers think, change what they do.”

“Is there a compelling story about the heritage behind your brand?” 

“Can your brand dispense some smart advice about the whole category?” “Is there a story in the founders of the brand? Or in their original vision?” 

“Can you turn a perceived negative attribute of your product into a positive? Can you demonstrate on-camera or online your product’s superiority?” 

“Can you move your product out of its current category and reposition it in another?” 

“Can your brand be insanely honest about itself, admitting to some shortcomings while winning on the important thing?”

“First, say it straight. Then say it great”. 

“simply write out what you want to say.” “This is an ad about . . . ” And then keep writing. Who knows?”

“You can tell when ads are trying too hard. Their intentions are too obvious.”      “some that grab your attention with their executional brio, but their lack of relevance is such that after you’ve seen them they leave you kind of empty”

“Great advertising combines density of content with the elegance of form. 

“Density of content and elegance of form.”

“Don’t let your concept get in the way of the product”

*don’t be a “visual vampire” - “the concept’s execution is so busy it sucks the life out of their commercial message“

*”usually happens when the product bores you. Which means you haven’t dug deep enough to find the thing about it that’s exciting or interesting. Or maybe you need to reinvent the brief.“

“the interesting part of an ad shouldn’t be a device that points to the sales message; it should be the sales message”

“The product, the product, the product. Stay with the product.” “don’t get seduced by unrelated ideas”

“Put the pill inside the baloney, not next to it.

“Dogs hate pills, right? So what do you do? You wrap the pill in a piece of baloney.“

“Customers hate sales pitches. So you wrap your pitch in an interesting bit, and they’re more likely to bite.”

“You gotta wrap that baby right into the middle of the baloney. The two have to be one. Your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message; it must be the sales message.“

“Emotional purchase drivers connect with customers more deeply than rational ones.”  “Okay, this campaign is gonna be . . . thoughtful.” Or it’s gonna be angry, or stark, or . . . well, you decide. What’s right for your client? What’s right for the customer?”

“Finding that emotion is often all you need in order to get the ideas flowing.”

“Deciding which emotion to leverage is something you’ll do early in the process.”

“the answer is always a combination of what your product is and whom you are talking to”

“You can change your mind later, but sometimes making this decision can give you focus” - - -

“Stare at a picture that has the emotion of the ad you want to do.” “ for copywriting. You need to be in the mood.”

“emotion is, it may help to put up some pictures that put you in the mood” “have you ever tried to write an angry letter when you weren’t angry?” “the same can be said for copywriting. You need to be in the mood.”

“Let your subconscious mind do it.” “controlled daydream.” “hear what the ad wants to be“

“Try writing down words from the product’s category.”

“Embrace the suck.” “some kind of dopey device or visual or slogan. It could be a client’s geeky spokesperson, a long-running sale with a goofy name, or just some bad footage.“ “Tackle it directly. When you embrace the suck, good ideas often spill out of the very thing your instincts tell you to avoid.“

“The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really crappy first drafts“ “You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page.“ - -”it’s a workbench” “Write. Keep writing. Don’t stop.”

“Allow your partner to come up with terrible ideas.”

“Even if the idea truly and most sincerely blows, just say,” 

“That’s interesting,” scribble it down, and move on“ 

“see if you can take it and shape it and mold it.” 

“Then throw it back to him or her with your idea tacked on.“ 

*”Just because an idea doesn’t work yet, doesn’t mean it might not work eventually.”

*”not to say aloud every stinking thing that comes into your head. It’s counterproductive.”

“Spend some time away from your partner, thinking on your own.” - “gives you both a chance to look at the problem from your own perspective before you bring your ideas“

“Come up with a lot of ideas.”

“in order to get to a great idea, which is usually about the 500th one to come along, you’ll need to resist the temptation to give in to the anxiety and sign off on the first passable idea that shows up”

“Learning to be okay with uncertainty is part of the process of having more insights”

“Quick sketches of your ideas are all you need during the creative process”. 

“Just get the concept on paper and keep moving forward. You’ll cover more ground this way.“

“Tack the best ideas on the wall”.  

“helps you determine whether there are campaigns forming” "where there are holes that need to be filled”

“Write. Don’t talk.”

“Don’t talk about the concepts you’re working on”

“an idea talked about is never as exciting as the idea itself.”

“The time will come to unveil.” 

*The best ad people I know are the silentbut-deadly kind. You never hear them out in the hallways talking about their ideas. They’re working.”

“Write hot. Edit cold” --- “Once you get on a streak, ride it.” 

“Nurture a newly hatched idea. Until it grows up, you don’t know what it’s going to be.”

“If it makes you laugh out loud, make it work.” 

“Try something naughty. Or provocative”.  

*“it often pays to try to be naughty on purpose.”  - - -

“Naughty is good. It gets your client talked about”

“Remember, being provocative just because you can isn’t the point.” 

“Be sure your provocativeness stems from your product.” 

*“We can’t do that, can we?” - “That’s a sign it’s a strong idea.” 

Ask yourself - “Will somebody talk about this idea if we do it?”

“If you’re about to spend advertising dollars on a campaign and you can’t imagine that anybody is going to write about it or talk about it, you might want to rethink it. It means you probably missed injecting a truth or social tension into it.”

“Try doing something counterintuitive with a medium.”

“put your poster in exactly the wrong place” 

“What if”

“Things get really interesting when you take this kind of thinking into the digital realm” “BK asked Facebook members to delete 10 of their friends to get a free Whopper“ - - - “These stunts tend to create a lot more talk value than what’s traditionally been called advertising.“

“If you have to do an ad, does it have to be a flat page?”

“Try a pop-up, a gatefold, a scratch and sniff, a computer chip” - “there are less expensive tricks you can try. Sequential ads. Scratch-off concepts. Die cuts. Different paper stocks. Acetate film. There’s even magnetized paper now.”

“Try not to look like, or act like, or sound like, or be like an ad.” 

“People don’t buy magazines to look at ads. They don’t buy TVs to look at the stinkin’ commercials.” “Can it be an interactive display in Times Square? In Red Square? Can you turn a building into a QR code? Can your TV campaign be a soap opera? Or an opera opera? Can you make it a video game?” *REMEMBER DO SOMETHING PROVOCATIVE

“a picture is worth a thousand words” “John Hegarty says, “I just don’t think people read ads.”” “visuals work fast.” 

“As the larger brands become globally marketed, visual solutions will become even more important. They translate, not surprisingly, better than words.”

“If readers don’t get what you’re trying to say from the visual, they won’t get it.“ 

“The page is turned.” “Coax an interesting visual out of your product.” “Visualize it on its side. Upside down. Make its image rubber. Stretch your product visually” “always keeping in mind you’re trying to coax out of the product a dramatic image with a selling benefit.” “Take your product, change it visually, and by doing so dramatize a customer benefit.“

“Get the visual clichés out of your system right away.” “Every category has its own version of Tired Old Visuals.“ 

“Learn what iconography is overused in your category, and avoid it.”

“Show, don’t tell.” “Saying isn’t the same as being.” *”If a client says, “I want people to think our company is cool,” the answer isn’t an ad saying, “We’re cool.” The answer is to be cool. “

“When everybody else is zigging, you should zag” - “If your product is white sheets, write the headlines in mud. If your product is beautiful, show something ugly.” 

“search as far outside the boundaries of convention”

“turn everything on its head. Logos usually go lower right, so put them top left. Product shots are usually small, make them big. Instead of headlines being more prominent than the body copy, do the opposite. It’s perverse, but I’m constantly surprised how many times it works.” - - -

“You are not right if in your ad you stand a man on his head just to get attention. You are right if [it’s done to] show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.“

“Consider the opposite of your product.” 

*”What doesn’t the product do? Who doesn’t need the product? When is the product a waste of money?”

“Avoid the formula of saying one thing and showing another.” (“But if you use this sort of setup, make sure the difference between word and picture is breathtaking”)

“Make sure you don’t get stuck always doing the ol’ exaggeration thing” “It’s just a little too easy” “will rarely lead you to a totally unexpected solution” “Just be aware” 

“if you’re going to do an exaggeration scenario, make sure you base it on a truth”

“Whenever you can, go for an absolute” “Quietest, fastest, cleanest” “middle ground are boring.” 

“Metaphors“

*“can be a quick and powerful way to communicate” 

“The trick is doing it well” - - -

“Just picking up an image/symbol and plopping it down next to your client’s logo won’t work. But when you can take an established image, put some spin on it, and use it in some new and unexpected way that relates to your product advantage”

“Symbols lifted right off the rack usually won’t fit your communication needs and typically need some spin put on them.” 

“they involve the reader.”

“use images already in the reader’s mind, twist them to the message’s purpose“

“If you leave too much out, you’ll mystify your audience. If you put too much in, you’ll bore them.”

“Don’t set out to be funny. Set out to be interesting.”

“Simplicity is all” “Simple is easier to remember” “Simple breaks through advertising clutter”

“If you can’t reduce your argument to a few crisp words and phrases, there’s something wrong with your argument.”

“Keep paring away until you have the essence of your ad“ - “Inside every fat ad there’s a thinner and better one trying to get out.”

“When you have distilled a good idea into its simplest form, you’re in the neighborhood of “great.””

“Learn to recognise big ideas when you have them” 

“Big ideas transcend strategy” 

*”Doe’s it really have to land precisely on the target to work?” - *sometimes big ideas wander off strategy, and that's ok. 

“After you’ve covered the walls in ideas and you’ve identified concepts you really like, stop.” - “and I mean covered the walls”

References:

Sullivan, L. (2016). Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads, 5th Edition. 5th ed. Wiley; 5th edition (16 Feb. 2016).

[wrestlingcultur-blog]

Backstage Update On Lesnar's Return, why he wasn't mentioned, Undisputed Era vs. Mustache Five-Starred and more

In the Latest Editions of Wrestling Observer, Dave Meltzer, Bryan Alvarez and Mike Sempervive talk about including ROH getting Madison Square Garden over WrestleMania weekend, Brock Lesnar returning at SummerSlam and Undisputed Era vs. Mustache Mountain Match This week's NXT. If you use any portion of the quotes in this article please credit Wrestling Observer Newsletter with an H/T to WrestlingCulture for the transcription. On Brock Lesnar Return at SummerSlam: "Brock Lesnar will be returning to WWE, defending the title at summer, slam against who I don't know yet, but that is his next scheduled date and I believe his last scheduled date unless they once again sign him to another extension. "Dave Meltzer is confirmed. Lesner will be back in the ring for a debit of the premier summer show. It is not known who he will face. A multimillion match was originally set for Extreme rules that would have determined the next contender, but that was canceled as part of the storyline where negotiations for listeners. Next title defense fell through Roman reigns and Bobby Lashley who were the first to announce for the belt, will instead battle in a singles match, which as of right now, we don't even know if that's supposed to be a number one contender's match. "Brock Lesnar showed up at UFC on Saturday night challenge Daniel Cormier. He is entered himself into the Usada testing pool. He cannot fight in UFC until early January. So there's no rush to get the title off of the guy. He is contracted for one more show after Wrestlemania. They signed him to two events. One was the greatest royal rumble and one was to be determined and it looks like at this point that's going to be summer slam. Now obviously they could sign him to another extension if they really want to fool people. If they want to not put the title in Roman reigns again, I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what their plan is, but if you recall on Monday there was zero mention of Brock Lesnar on the show to the point where Roman reigns said in a promo that he was going to beat Bobby Lashley and quote, move onto bigger things. " On why Lesnar was not mentioned on Monday Night Raw: A building up brock as an outsider, as somebody who is tied up with UFC, is someone who is distracted does not want to be bothered with the people and the employers that he is currently with hates the people that he's got to perform in front of, wants to go overseas, looks bind to shoulder, sees that other girl, the girl looks like Dana White. He lusts after her as WWE stands there and you're talking about all of this and how it affects Roman and how it affects bobby and they did a good job with Rom bob this past Monday. But why then would you not mentioned anything at all about Brock Lesnar? Because the explanation that Dave had, which was well, he didn't want to take anything away from, from Roman and bobby. I don't see how announcing that this being for number one contender ship or this just being them wanting to kill each other to get each other out of the way for the real mission that both of them have expressed in the past that they wanted. Why you couldn't have brought that up on Monday. It was conspicuous by its absence. It was I think, head scratching for a lot of people that just didn't understand why you didn't mention his name two days after he gets into it. The biggest pull apart and sports all over the place. With Daniel Cormier, it just didn't make any sense whatsoever. The idea was we've got to push the pay per view, but that was a bad excuse when he has been a part of the pay per view build as a shadow of those two men. Hey, whole reason they're fighting. Let me. Let me, let me give you this. Okay. Maybe the idea was to completely ignore him, a to push the idea of the pay per view and be for you to think that they're even bigger issues between the two sides and maybe he's really not coming back. Dude, when do they ever do? They can always show the footage later and you know what the other thing, they may not even have rights to the footage and that's the other meal hat they you. No, absolutely not. You didn't have to have rights to that footage. Everybody saw the footage. All he had to do was mention it, you know, payment can still shots of it from the USA today or ESPN or your other media partners." On ROH And NJPW Getting At Madison Square Garden: Got a lot of news to get into here today. Not going to waste any time. All Ego. Ethan page joining us at some point here today on the program while it appeared at the show had fallen through Ring of Honor set to run at Madison Square Garden in Twenty 19. After all our weight. New Japan announced yesterday G1 Supercard, a co-branded show from the two companies taking place at Madison Square Garden. April six, 2019 the Saturday of Wrestlemania weekend in New York and New Jersey. Are you? Japan's gets Chico Kata or wishy-washy tonight. Already. Advertise along with quote all of the top ROH stars. So all I can tell you is that I talked to a couple of people from Ring of Honor yesterday and they have no idea how this thing. "I know we'd already heard about this before. Now if they had got the date on like just some random day, then maybe, maybe not, but the fact that they're getting Madison Square Garden on Wrestle Mania weekend after WWE had put the ixnay on this. It just tells you the power of Sinclair. Here you go. there was no reason for Sinclair to not be able to, excuse me for Ring of Honor to not be able to get this date because there was nothing planned from WWE. There was nothing. They had nothing. So what was the reason that it was being stopped? It was a long relationship where somebody made a phone call and somebody's got that phone call and said, Hey, hold on, wait, hold on. Here. We've got a relationship with these guys. But that relationship has been framed for a long time. Barclay Center became the thing. Madison Square Garden for whatever reason has driven a lot of people away from it and a lot of it obviously it has to do with the money. Sinclair's fine with paying that money. He should have been very open to it and I guess they were. Some people were, but yeah, I mean I'll blame WWE for trying to get in the way, but they tried. They failed and I don't know if this has got a lot to do with legal threats as much as somebody with the ability to fight WWE on this just pointed out something very obvious which was there's no reason for us not to be able to run here, explain it and it has a square garden. Just frankly couldn't explain it and you can see the tack that they've taken and social media and with some of the releases that they've put out there. Welcoming ROH now with just wonderfully open arms." On Undisputed Era vs. Mustache Mountain Match This week's NXT: All I know is that match last night may have been the greatest nxt main event I've ever seen on the television show. Maybe not better than any takeover match. I don't know what I don't know. I don't know. If I would not give it five stars, I'd have to watch it again. Would that match was over? I thought that's a five-star match right there. I don't know if it was better than the Briscos in the books I'm talking to nxt. What? Briscoes in the box. You're given years. You're looking at stars around here, champ. We got. We got tagged matches this year. That had been. Had been very good. You're putting it in rare air inputting in the rear air. What did you guys think to watch that match last night and the last five minutes of that match was so incredible to me. The fans were living and dying, living and dying with the last five minutes of that match. It was the drama. I mean maybe the Gargano chump five-star matches were better bell to bell, but as far as sure drama, I think that this match was the best NXT match of the year. " If you use any portion of the quotes in this article please credit Wrestling Observer Newsletter with an H/T to WrestlingCulture for the transcription. Source: Wrestling Observer Newsletter Read the full article

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

Duplex shows Google failing at ethical and creative AI design

Google CEO Sundar Pichai milked the woos from a clappy, home-turf developer crowd at its I/O conference in Mountain View this week with a demo of an in-the-works voice assistant feature that will enable the AI to make telephone calls on behalf of its human owner.

The so-called ‘Duplex’ feature of the Google Assistant was shown calling a hair salon to book a woman’s hair cut, and ringing a restaurant to try to book a table — only to be told it did not accept bookings for less than five people.

At which point the AI changed tack and asked about wait times, earning its owner and controller, Google, the reassuring intel that there wouldn’t be a long wait at the elected time. Job done.

The voice system deployed human-sounding vocal cues, such as ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ — to make the “conversational experience more comfortable“, as Google couches it in a blog about its intentions for the tech.

The voices Google used for the AI in the demos were not synthesized robotic tones but distinctly human-sounding, in both the female and male flavors it showcased.

Indeed, the AI pantomime was apparently realistic enough to convince some of the genuine humans on the other end of the line that they were speaking to people.

At one point the bot’s ‘mm-hmm’ response even drew appreciative laughs from a techie audience that clearly felt in on the ‘joke’.

But while the home crowd cheered enthusiastically at how capable Google had seemingly made its prototype robot caller — with Pichai going on to sketch a grand vision of the AI saving people and businesses time — the episode is worryingly suggestive of a company that views ethics as an after-the-fact consideration.

One it does not allow to trouble the trajectory of its engineering ingenuity.

A consideration which only seems to get a look in years into the AI dev process, at the cusp of a real-world rollout — which Pichai said would be coming shortly.

Deception by design

“Google’s experiments do appear to have been designed to deceive,” agreed Dr Thomas King, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab, discussing the Duplex demo. “Because their main hypothesis was ‘can you distinguish this from a real person?’. In this case it’s unclear why their hypothesis was about deception and not the user experience… You don’t necessarily need to deceive someone to give them a better user experience by sounding naturally. And if they had instead tested the hypothesis ‘is this technology better than preceding versions or just as good as a human caller’ they would not have had to deceive people in the experiment.

“As for whether the technology itself is deceptive, I can’t really say what their intention is — but… even if they don’t intend it to deceive you can say they’ve been negligent in not making sure it doesn’t deceive… So I can’t say it’s definitely deceptive, but there should be some kind of mechanism there to let people know what it is they are speaking to.”

“I’m at a university and if you’re going to do something which involves deception you have to really demonstrate there’s a scientific value in doing this,” he added, agreeing that, as a general principle, humans should always be able to know that an AI they’re interacting with is not a person.

Because who — or what — you’re interacting with “shapes how we interact”, as he put it. “And if you start blurring the lines… then this can sew mistrust into all kinds of interactions — where we would become more suspicious as well as needlessly replacing people with meaningless agents.”

No such ethical conversations troubled the I/O stage, however.

Yet Pichai said Google had been working on the Duplex technology for “many years”, and went so far as to claim the AI can “understand the nuances of conversation” — albeit still evidently in very narrow scenarios, such as booking an appointment or reserving a table or asking a business for its opening hours on a specific date.

“It brings together all our investments over the years in natural language understanding, deep learning, text to speech,” he said.

What was yawningly absent from that list, and seemingly also lacking from the design of the tricksy Duplex experiment, was any sense that Google has a deep and nuanced appreciation of the ethical concerns at play around AI technologies that are powerful and capable enough of passing off as human — thereby playing lots of real people in the process.

The Duplex demos were pre-recorded, rather than live phone calls, but Pichai described the calls as “real” — suggesting Google representatives had not in fact called the businesses ahead of time to warn them its robots might be calling in.

“We have many of these examples where the calls quite don’t go as expected but our assistant understands the context, the nuance… and handled the interaction gracefully,” he added after airing the restaurant unable-to-book example.

So Google appears to have trained Duplex to be robustly deceptive — i.e. to be able to reroute around derailed conversational expectations and still pass itself off as human — a feature Pichai lauded as ‘graceful’.

And even if the AI’s performance was more patchy in the wild than Google’s demo suggested it’s clearly the CEO’s goal for the tech.

While trickster AIs might bring to mind the iconic Turing Test — where chatbot developers compete to develop conversational software capable of convincing human judges it’s not artificial — it should not.

Because the application of the Duplex technology does not sit within the context of a high profile and well understood competition. Nor was there a set of rules that everyone was shown and agreed to beforehand (at least so far as we know — if there were any rules Google wasn’t publicizing them). Rather it seems to have unleashed the AI onto unsuspecting business staff who were just going about their day jobs. Can you see the ethical disconnect?

“The Turing Test has come to be a bellwether of testing whether your AI software is good or not, based on whether you can tell it apart from a human being,” is King’s suggestion on why Google might have chosen a similar trick as an experimental showcase for Duplex.

“It’s very easy to say look how great our software is, people cannot tell it apart from a real human being — and perhaps that’s a much stronger selling point than if you say 90% of users preferred this software to the previous software,” he posits. “Facebook does A/B testing but that’s probably less exciting — it’s not going to wow anyone to say well consumers prefer this slightly deeper shade of blue to a lighter shade of blue.”

Had Duplex been deployed within Turing Test conditions, King also makes the point that it’s rather less likely it would have taken in so many people — because, well, those slightly jarringly timed ums and ahs would soon have been spotted, uncanny valley style.

Ergo, Google’s PR flavored ‘AI test’ for Duplex is also rigged in its favor — to further supercharge a one-way promotional marketing message around artificial intelligence. So, in other words, say hello to yet another layer of fakery.

How could Google introduce Duplex in a way that would be ethical? King reckons it would need to state up front that it’s a robot and/or use an appropriately synthetic voice so it’s immediately clear to anyone picking up the phone the caller is not human.

“If you were to use a robotic voice there would also be less of a risk that all of your voices that you’re synthesizing only represent a small minority of the population speaking in ‘BBC English’ and so, perhaps in a sense, using a robotic voice would even be less biased as well,” he adds.

And of course, not being up front that Duplex is artificial embeds all sorts of other knock-on risks, as King explained.

“If it’s not obvious that it’s a robot voice there’s a risk that people come to expect that most of these phone calls are not genuine. Now experiments have shown that many people do interact with AI software that is conversational just as they would another person but at the same time there is also evidence showing that some people do the exact opposite — and they become a lot ruder. Sometimes even abusive towards conversational software. So if you’re constantly interacting with these bots you’re not going to be as polite, maybe, as you normally would, and that could potentially have effects for when you get a genuine caller that you do not know is real or not. Or even if you know they’re real perhaps the way you interact with people has changed a bit.”

Safe to say, as autonomous systems get more powerful and capable of performing tasks that we would normally expect a human to be doing, the ethical considerations around those systems scale as exponentially large as the potential applications. We’re really just getting started.

But if the world’s biggest and most powerful AI developers believe it’s totally fine to put ethics on the backburner then risks are going to spiral up and out and things could go very badly indeed.

We’ve seen, for example, how microtargeted advertising platforms have been hijacked at scale by would-be election fiddlers. But the overarching risk where AI and automation technologies are concerned is that humans become second class citizens vs the tools that are being claimed to be here to help us.

Pichai said the first — and still, as he put it, experimental — use of Duplex will be to supplement Google’s search services by filling in information about businesses’ opening times during periods when hours might inconveniently vary, such as public holidays.

Though for a company on a general mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ what’s to stop Google from — down the line — deploying vast phalanx of phone bots to ring and ask humans (and their associated businesses and institutions) for all sorts of expertise which the company can then liberally extract and inject into its multitude of connected services — monetizing the freebie human-augmented intel via our extra-engaged attention and the ads it serves alongside?

During the course of writing this article we reached out to Google’s press line several times to ask to discuss the ethics of Duplex with a relevant company spokesperson. But ironically — or perhaps fittingly enough — our hand-typed emails received only automated responses.

Pichai did emphasize that the technology is still in development, and said Google wants to “work hard to get this right, get the user experience and the expectation right for both businesses and users”.

But that’s still ethics as a tacked on afterthought — not where it should be: Locked in place as the keystone of AI system design.

And this at a time when platform-fueled AI problems, such as algorithmically fenced fake news, have snowballed into huge and ugly global scandals with very far reaching societal implications indeed — be it election interference or ethnic violence.

You really have to wonder what it would take to shake the ‘first break it, later fix it’ ethos of some of the tech industry’s major players…

Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only without disclosing that it's a bot, but adding "ummm" and "aaah" to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it… horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 9, 2018

Ethical guidance relating to what Google is doing here with the Duplex AI is actually pretty clear if you bother to read it — to the point where even politicians are agreed on foundational basics, such as that AI needs to operate on “principles of intelligibility and fairness”, to borrow phrasing from just one of several political reports that have been published on the topic in recent years.

In short, deception is not cool. Not in humans. And absolutely not in the AIs that are supposed to be helping us.

Transparency as AI standard

The IEEE technical professional association put out a first draft of a framework to guide ethically designed AI systems at the back end of 2016 — which included general principles such as the need to ensure AI respects human rights, operates transparently and that automated decisions are accountable.

In the same year the UK’s BSI standards body developed a specific standard — BS 8611 Ethics design and application robots — which explicitly names identity deception (intentional or unintentional) as a societal risk, and warns that such an approach will eventually erode trust in the technology.  

“Avoid deception due to the behaviour and/or appearance of the robot and ensure transparency of robotic nature,” the BSI’s standard advises.

It also warns against anthropomorphization due to the associated risk of misinterpretation — so Duplex’s ums and ahs don’t just suck because they’re fake but because they are misleading and so deceptive, and also therefore carry the knock-on risk of undermining people’s trust in your service but also more widely still, in other people generally.

“Avoid unnecessary anthropomorphization,” is the standard’s general guidance, with the further steer that the technique be reserved “only for well-defined, limited and socially-accepted purposes”. (Tricking workers into remotely conversing with robots probably wasn’t what they were thinking of.)

The standard also urges “clarification of intent to simulate human or not, or intended or expected behaviour”. So, yet again, don’t try and pass your bot off as human; you need to make it really clear it’s a robot.

For Duplex the transparency that Pichai said Google now intends to think about, at this late stage in the AI development process, would have been trivially easy to achieve: It could just have programmed the assistant to say up front: ‘Hi, I’m a robot calling on behalf of Google — are you happy to talk to me?’

Instead, Google chose to prioritize a demo ‘wow’ factor — of showing Duplex pulling the wool over busy and trusting humans’ eyes — and by doing so showed itself tonedeaf on the topic of ethical AI design.

Not a good look for Google. Nor indeed a good outlook for the rest of us who are subject to the algorithmic whims of tech giants as they flick the control switches on their society-sized platforms.

“As the development of AI systems grows and more research is carried out, it is important that ethical hazards associated with their use are highlighted and considered as part of the design,” Dan Palmer, head of manufacturing at BSI, told us. “BS 8611 was developed… alongside ​scientists, academics, ethicists, philosophers and users​. It explains that any autonomous system or robot should be accountable, truthful and unprejudiced.

“The standard raises a number of potential ethical hazards that are relevant to the Google Duplex; one of these is the risk of AI machines becoming sexist or racist due to a biased data feed. This surfaced prominently when ​Twitter users influenced Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay, to spew out offensive messages.

​”Another contentious subject is whether forming an emotional bond with a robot is desirable, especially if the voice assistant interacts with the elderly or children. Other guidelines on new hazards that should be considered include: robot deception, robot addiction and the potential for a learning system to exceed its remit.

“Ultimately, it must always be transparent who is responsible for the behavior of any voice assistant or robot, even if it behaves autonomously.”

Yet despite all the thoughtful ethical guidance and research that’s already been produced, and is out there for the reading, here we are again being shown the same tired tech industry playbook applauding engineering capabilities in a shiny bubble, stripped of human context and societal consideration, and dangled in front of an uncritical audience to see how loud they’ll cheer.

Leaving important questions — over the ethics of Google’s AI experiments and also, more broadly, over the mainstream vision of AI assistance it’s so keenly trying to sell us — to hang and hang.

Questions like how much genuine utility there might be for the sorts of AI applications it’s telling us we’ll all want to use, even as it prepares to push these apps on us, because it can — as a consequence of its great platform power and reach.

A core ‘uncanny valley-ish’ paradox may explain Google’s choice of deception for its Duplex demo: Humans don’t necessarily like speaking to machines. Indeed, oftentimes they prefer to speak to other humans. It’s just more meaningful to have your existence registered by a fellow pulse-carrier. So if an AI reveals itself to be a robot the human who picked up the phone might well just put it straight back down again.

“Going back to the deception, it’s fine if it��s replacing meaningless interactions but not if it’s intending to replace meaningful interactions,” King told us. “So if it’s clear that it’s synthetic and you can’t necessarily use it in a context where people really want a human to do that job. I think that’s the right approach to take.

“It matters not just that your hairdresser appears to be listening to you but that they are actually listening to you and that they are mirroring some of your emotions. And to replace that kind of work with something synthetic — I don’t think it makes much sense.

“But at the same time if you reveal it’s synthetic it’s not likely to replace that kind of work.”

So really Google’s Duplex sleight of hand may be trying to conceal the fact AIs won’t be able to replace as many human tasks as technologists like to think they will. Not unless lots of currently meaningful interactions are rendered meaningless. Which would be a massive human cost that societies would have to — at very least — debate long and hard.

Trying to avoid such a debate from taking place by pretending there’s nothing ethical to see here is, hopefully, not Google’s designed intention.

King also makes the point that the Duplex system is (at least for now) computationally costly. “Which means that Google cannot and should not just release this as software that anyone can run on their home computers.

“Which means they can also control how it is used, and in what contexts — and they can also guarantee it will only be used with certain safeguards built in. So I think the experiments are maybe not the best of signs but the real test will be how they release it — and will they build the safeguards that people demand into the software,” he adds.

As well as a lack of visible safeguards in the Duplex demo, there’s also — I would argue — a curious lack of imagination on display.

Had Google been bold enough to reveal its robot interlocutor it might have thought more about how it could have designed that experience to be both clearly not human but also fun or even funny. Think of how much life can be injected into animated cartoon characters, for example, which are very clearly not human yet are hugely popular because people find them entertaining and feel they come alive in their own way.

It really makes you wonder whether, at some foundational level, Google lacks trust in both what AI technology can do and in its own creative abilities to breath new life into these emergent synthetic experiences.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

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  Duplex shows Google failing at ethical and creative AI design was originally posted by A 18 MOA Top News from around

[abckidstvyara]

Google CEO Sundar Pichai milked the woos from a clappy, home-turf developer crowd at its I/O conference in Mountain View this week with a demo of an in-the-works voice assistant feature that will enable the AI to make telephone calls on behalf of its human owner.

The so-called ‘Duplex’ feature of the Google Assistant was shown calling a hair salon to book a woman’s hair cut, and ringing a restaurant to try to book a table — only to be told it did not accept bookings for less than five people.

At which point the AI changed tack and asked about wait times, earning its owner and controller, Google, the reassuring intel that there wouldn’t be a long wait at the elected time. Job done.

The voice system deployed human-sounding vocal cues, such as ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ — to make the “conversational experience more comfortable“, as Google couches it in a blog about its intentions for the tech.

The voices Google used for the AI in the demos were not synthesized robotic tones but distinctly human-sounding, in both the female and male flavors it showcased.

Indeed, the AI pantomime was apparently realistic enough to convince some of the genuine humans on the other end of the line that they were speaking to people.

At one point the bot’s ‘mm-hmm’ response even drew appreciative laughs from a techie audience that clearly felt in on the ‘joke’.

But while the home crowd cheered enthusiastically at how capable Google had seemingly made its prototype robot caller — with Pichai going on to sketch a grand vision of the AI saving people and businesses time — the episode is worryingly suggestive of a company that views ethics as an after-the-fact consideration.

One it does not allow to trouble the trajectory of its engineering ingenuity.

A consideration which only seems to get a look in years into the AI dev process, at the cusp of a real-world rollout — which Pichai said would be coming shortly.

Deception by design

“Google’s experiments do appear to have been designed to deceive,” agreed Dr Thomas King, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab, discussing the Duplex demo. “Because their main hypothesis was ‘can you distinguish this from a real person?’. In this case it’s unclear why their hypothesis was about deception and not the user experience… You don’t necessarily need to deceive someone to give them a better user experience by sounding naturally. And if they had instead tested the hypothesis ‘is this technology better than preceding versions or just as good as a human caller’ they would not have had to deceive people in the experiment.

“As for whether the technology itself is deceptive, I can’t really say what their intention is — but… even if they don’t intend it to deceive you can say they’ve been negligent in not making sure it doesn’t deceive… So I can’t say it’s definitely deceptive, but there should be some kind of mechanism there to let people know what it is they are speaking to.”

“I’m at a university and if you’re going to do something which involves deception you have to really demonstrate there’s a scientific value in doing this,” he added, agreeing that, as a general principle, humans should always be able to know that an AI they’re interacting with is not a person.

Because who — or what — you’re interacting with “shapes how we interact”, as he put it. “And if you start blurring the lines… then this can sew mistrust into all kinds of interactions — where we would become more suspicious as well as needlessly replacing people with meaningless agents.”

No such ethical conversations troubled the I/O stage, however.

Yet Pichai said Google had been working on the Duplex technology for “many years”, and went so far as to claim the AI can “understand the nuances of conversation” — albeit still evidently in very narrow scenarios, such as booking an appointment or reserving a table or asking a business for its opening hours on a specific date.

“It brings together all our investments over the years in natural language understanding, deep learning, text to speech,” he said.

What was yawningly absent from that list, and seemingly also lacking from the design of the tricksy Duplex experiment, was any sense that Google has a deep and nuanced appreciation of the ethical concerns at play around AI technologies that are powerful and capable enough of passing off as human — thereby playing lots of real people in the process.

The Duplex demos were pre-recorded, rather than live phone calls, but Pichai described the calls as “real” — suggesting Google representatives had not in fact called the businesses ahead of time to warn them its robots might be calling in.

“We have many of these examples where the calls quite don’t go as expected but our assistant understands the context, the nuance… and handled the interaction gracefully,” he added after airing the restaurant unable-to-book example.

So Google appears to have trained Duplex to be robustly deceptive — i.e. to be able to reroute around derailed conversational expectations and still pass itself off as human — a feature Pichai lauded as ‘graceful’. And even if the performance was more patchy than Google’s demo suggested it’s clearly the CEO’s goal for the tech.

While trickster AIs might bring to mind the iconic Turing Test — where chatbot developers compete to develop conversational software capable of convincing human judges it’s not artificial — it should not.

Because the application of the Duplex technology does not sit within the context of a high profile and well understood competition. Nor was there a set of rules that everyone was shown and agreed to beforehand (at least so far as we know — if there were any rules Google wasn’t publicizing them). Rather it seems to have unleashed the AI onto unsuspecting business staff who were just going about their day jobs. Can you see the ethical disconnect?

“The Turing Test has come to be a bellwether of testing whether your AI software is good or not, based on whether you can tell it apart from a human being,” is King’s suggestion on why Google might have chosen a similar trick as an experimental showcase for Duplex.

“It’s very easy to say look how great our software is, people cannot tell it apart from a real human being — and perhaps that’s a much stronger selling point than if you say 90% of users preferred this software to the previous software,” he posits. “Facebook does A/B testing but that’s probably less exciting — it’s not going to wow anyone to say well consumers prefer this slightly deeper shade of blue to a lighter shade of blue.”

Had Duplex been deployed within Turing Test conditions, King also makes the point that it’s rather less likely it would have taken in so many people — because, well, those slightly jarringly timed ums and ahs would soon have been spotted, uncanny valley style.

Ergo, Google’s PR flavored ‘AI test’ for Duplex is also rigged in its favor — to further supercharge a one-way promotional marketing message it’s pushing around artificial intelligence. So, in other words, say hello to yet another layer of fakery.

How could Google introduce Duplex in a way that would be ethical? King reckons it would need to state up front that it’s a robot and/or use an appropriately synthetic voice so it’s immediately clear to anyone picking up the phone the caller is not human.

“If you were to use a robotic voice there would also be less of a risk that all of your voices that you’re synthesizing only represent a small minority of the population speaking in ‘BBC English’ and so, perhaps in a sense, using a robotic voice would even be less biased as well,” he adds.

And of course, not being up front that Duplex is artificial embeds all sorts of other knock-on risks, as King explained.

“If it’s not obvious that it’s a robot voice there’s a risk that people come to expect that most of these phone calls are not genuine. Now experiments have shown that many people do interact with AI software that is conversational just as they would another person but at the same time there is also evidence showing that some people do the exact opposite — and they become a lot ruder. Sometimes even abusive towards conversational software. So if you’re constantly interacting with these bots you’re not going to be as polite, maybe, as you normally would, and that could potentially have effects for when you get a genuine caller that you do not know is real or not. Or even if you know they’re real perhaps the way you interact with people has changed a bit.”

Safe to say, as autonomous systems get more powerful and capable of performing tasks that we would normally expect a human to be doing, the ethical considerations around those systems scale as exponentially large as the potential applications. We’re really just getting started.

But if the world’s biggest and most powerful AI developers believe it’s totally fine to put ethics on the backburner then risks are going to spiral up and out and things could go very badly indeed.

We’ve seen, for example, how microtargeted advertising platforms have been hijacked at scale by would-be election fiddlers. But the overarching risk where AI and automation technologies are concerned is that humans become second class citizens vs the tools that are being claimed to be here to help us.

Pichai said the first — and still, as he put it, experimental — use of Duplex will be to supplement Google’s search services by filling in information about businesses’ opening times during periods when hours might inconveniently vary, such as public holidays.

Though for a company on a general mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ what’s to stop Google from — down the line — deploying vast phalanx of phone bots to ring and ask humans (and their associated businesses and institutions) for all sorts of expertise which the company can then liberally extract and inject into its multitude of connected services — monetizing the freebie human-augmented intel via our extra-engaged attention and the ads it serves alongside?

During the course of writing this article we reached out to Google’s press line several times to ask to discuss the ethics of Duplex with a relevant company spokesperson. But ironically — or perhaps fittingly enough — our hand-typed emails received only automated responses.

Pichai did emphasize that the technology is still in development, and said Google wants to “work hard to get this right, get the user experience and the expectation right for both businesses and users”.

But that’s still ethics as a tacked on afterthought — not where it should be: Locked in place as the keystone of AI system design.

And this at a time when platform-fueled AI problems, such as algorithmically fenced fake news, have snowballed into huge and ugly global scandals with very far reaching societal implications indeed — be it election interference or ethnic violence.

You really have to wonder what it would take to shake the ‘first break it, later fix it’ ethos of some of the tech industry’s major players…

Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only without disclosing that it's a bot, but adding "ummm" and "aaah" to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it… horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 9, 2018

Ethical guidance relating to what Google is doing here with the Duplex AI is actually pretty clear if you bother to read it — to the point where even politicians are agreed on foundational basics, such as that AI needs to operate on “principles of intelligibility and fairness”, to borrow phrasing from just one of several political reports that have been published on the topic in recent years.

In short, deception is not cool. Not in humans. And absolutely not in the AIs that are supposed to be helping us.

Transparency as AI standard

The IEEE technical professional association put out a first draft of a framework to guide ethically designed AI systems at the back end of 2016 — which included general principles such as the need to ensure AI respects human rights, operates transparently and that automated decisions are accountable. 

In the same year the UK’s BSI standards body developed a specific standard — BS 8611 Ethics design and application robots — which explicitly names identity deception (intentional or unintentional) as a societal risk, and warns that such an approach will eventually erode trust in the technology.  

“Avoid deception due to the behaviour and/or appearance of the robot and ensure transparency of robotic nature,” the BSI’s standard advises.

It also warns against anthropomorphization due to the associated risk of misinterpretation — so Duplex’s ums and ahs don’t just suck because they’re fake but because they are misleading and so deceptive, and also therefore carry the knock-on risk of undermining people’s trust in your service but also more widely still, in other people generally.

“Avoid unnecessary anthropomorphization,” is the standard’s general guidance, with the further steer that the technique be reserved “only for well-defined, limited and socially-accepted purposes”. (Tricking workers into remotely conversing with robots probably wasn’t what they were thinking of.)

The standard also urges “clarification of intent to simulate human or not, or intended or expected behaviour”. So, yet again, don’t try and pass your bot off as human; you need to make it really clear it’s a robot.

For Duplex the transparency that Pichai said Google now intends to think about, at this late stage in the AI development process, would have been trivially easy to achieve: It could just have programmed the assistant to say up front: ‘Hi, I’m a robot calling on behalf of Google — are you happy to talk to me?’

Instead, Google chose to prioritize a demo ‘wow’ factor — of showing Duplex pulling the wool over busy and trusting humans’ eyes — and by doing so showed itself tonedeaf on the topic of ethical AI design.

Not a good look for Google. Nor indeed a good outlook for the rest of us who are subject to the algorithmic whims of tech giants as they flick the control switches on their society-sized platforms.

“As the development of AI systems grows and more research is carried out, it is important that ethical hazards associated with their use are highlighted and considered as part of the design,” Dan Palmer, head of manufacturing at BSI, told us. “BS 8611 was developed… alongside ​scientists, academics, ethicists, philosophers and users​. It explains that any autonomous system or robot should be accountable, truthful and unprejudiced.

“The standard raises a number of potential ethical hazards that are relevant to the Google Duplex; one of these is the risk of AI machines becoming sexist or racist due to a biased data feed. This surfaced prominently when ​Twitter users influenced Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay, to spew out offensive messages.

​”Another contentious subject is whether forming an emotional bond with a robot is desirable, especially if the voice assistant interacts with the elderly or children. Other guidelines on new hazards that should be considered include: robot deception, robot addiction and the potential for a learning system to exceed its remit.

“Ultimately, it must always be transparent who is responsible for the behavior of any voice assistant or robot, even if it behaves autonomously.”

Yet despite all this thoughtful ethical guidance and research, out there for the reading, here we are again being shown the same tired tech industry playbook applauding engineering capabilities in a shiny bubble, stripped of human context and societal consideration, and dangled in front of an uncritical audience to see how loud they’ll cheer.

Leaving important questions — over the ethics of Google’s AI experiments and also, more broadly, over the mainstream vision of AI assistance it’s so keenly trying to sell us — to hang and hang.

Questions like how much genuine utility there might be for the sorts of AI applications it’s telling us we’ll all want to use, even as it prepares to push these apps on us, because it can — as a consequence of great power and great reach.

A core ‘uncanny valley-ish’ paradox may explain Google’s choice of deception for its Duplex demo: Humans don’t necessarily like speaking to machines. Indeed, oftentimes they prefer to speak to other humans. It’s just more meaningful to have your existence registered by a fellow pulse-carrier. So if an AI reveals itself to be a robot the human who picked up the phone might well just put it straight back down again.

“Going back to the deception, it’s fine if it’s replacing meaningless interactions but not if it’s intending to replace meaningful interactions,” King told us. “So if it’s clear that it’s synthetic and you can’t necessarily use it in a context where people really want a human to do that job. I think that’s the right approach to take.

“It matters not just that your hairdresser appears to be listening to you but that they are actually listening to you and that they are mirroring some of your emotions. And to replace that kind of work with something synthetic — I don’t think it makes much sense.

“But at the same time if you reveal it’s synthetic it’s not likely to replace that kind of work.”

So really Google’s Duplex sleight of hand may be trying to conceal the fact AIs won’t be able to replace as many human tasks as technologists like to think they will. Not unless lots of currently meaningful interactions are rendered meaningless. Which would be a massive human cost that societies would have to — at very least — debate long and hard.

Trying to avoid such a debate from taking place by pretending there’s nothing ethical to see here is, hopefully, not Google’s designed intention.

King also makes the point that the Duplex system is (at least for now) computationally costly. “Which means that Google cannot and should not just release this as software that anyone can run on their home computers.

“Which means they can also control how it is used, and in what contexts — and they can also guarantee it will only be used with certain safeguards built in. So I think the experiments are maybe not the best of signs but the real test will be how they release it — and will they build the safeguards that people demand into the software,” he adds.

As well as a lack of visible safeguards in the Duplex demo, there’s also — I would argue — a curious lack of imagination on display.

Had Google been bold enough to reveal its robot interlocutor it might have thought more about how it could have designed that experience to be both clearly not human but also fun or even funny. Think of how much life can be injected into animated cartoon characters, for example, which are very clearly not human yet are hugely popular because people find them entertaining and feel they come alive in their own way.

It really makes you wonder whether, at some foundational level, Google lacks trust in both what AI technology can do and in its own creative abilities to breath new life into these emergent synthetic experiences.

[thesportssoundoff]

“Pretend it’s August and enjoy a damn good show” UFC 213 Preview

Joey

July 6th

The UFC's annual post 4th of July big PPV has arrived and it's...pretty good. UFC 213 is more or less a victim of immeeasurable expectations. Every year regardless of the drama and the stupidity which dominates MMA, you can always count on the 4th of July show to deliver the goods. This year? Well not quite. It's a fine show, don't get me wrong. The main card features two very good title fights, a pretty damn good HW fight which could easily be a #1 contender fight if we are to believe that Cain Velasquez is on another back injury fueled hiatus plus a really intriguing lightweight fight designed almost entirely to determine if Anthony Pettis is broken or not. The prelims are certainly fine even if a few of the fights hoarding undercard space are questionable in their merits of being on a card like this. At the same time, it's still a pretty solid event that can't be punished for not being post 4th of July worthy or for not being the show that UFC 214 seems set to be. View it on its own and its a fine enough show.

Fights: 12

Debuts: 4 (Cody Stamman, Terrion Ware, Trevin Giles and James Bochnovic)

Fight Changes/Injury Cancellations: 3 (TJ Dillashaw/Cody Garbrandt cancelled, Donald Cerrone/Robbie Lawler cancelled, Alan Jouban out, Chad Laprise IN vs Brian Camozzi)

Headliners (fighters who have either main evented or co-main evented shows in the UFC): (Valentina Shevchenko, Amanda Nunes, Yoel Romero, Robert Whittaker, Jim Miller, Fabricio Werdum, Alistair Overeem, Anthony Pettis, Travis Browne)

Fighters On Losing Streaks in the UFC: 3 (Daniel Omiealnczuk, Travis Browne, Jordan Mein)

Fighters On Winning Streaks in the UFC: 6 (Valentina Shevchenko, Amanda Nunes, Yoel Romero, Robert Whittaker, Gerald Meerschaert, Douglas Silva da Andrade)

Stat Monitor for 2017 (with an event the night before, these will have to be cleaned up come fight time):

Debuting Fighters (Current number: 16-18)- 4 (Terrion Ware, James Bochnovic, Trevin Giles, Cody Stamman)

Short Notice Fighters (Current number: 10-17)- 1 (Chad Laprise)

Second Fight (Current number: 19-18)- 1 (Brian Camozzi)

Cage Corrosion (2-2)- 0

Twelve Precarious Ponderings

1- Much has and will be made about the first fight between Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevechenko. While I'm not going to say to throw it out (because that'd be idiotic), I do think there's reason to not expect a repeat of the 1st fight with two more rounds tacked on. For starters, Amanda Nunes has improved in every fight she's been in even if you throw out the Ronda fight for obvious reasons. If cardio isn't something you can improve then cardio maintenance is something you can. She does to her credit seem way more patience and less bullish, opting to instead swarm with patience and precision over aggression. Similarly people are talking like Shevhchenko is going to decision Nunes but Valentina was very honest that the decision loss to Nunes made her more aggressive. As such, it's entirely possible she'll come out with more urgency off the chute especially when she knows her cardio can hold up. Lastly this has become a bit of a bad blood fight and those tend to involve a level of "throw the book out the window" to them.

2- So seriously, who is next for the winner? Shevchenko vs Nunes III would be an....interesting decision to take the division. If she wins, Shevchenko's got some cred in Latin America (Peru and all) so maybe if you're really looking to pop a market out in South America, you can have her headline on free TV vs a Sara McMann/Ketlen Vieira? It's crazy to even fathom this but Holly Holm might be the one best equipped to fight for the title at 135 lbs. Unless you're ready for that Rocky Pennington title shot. I mean I know I am.

3- Would another win over Valentina Shevchenko give Amanda Nunes the greatest WMMA resume of all time?

4- Lost in the discussion of Whittaker vs Romero is the fact that Yoel Romero tends to finish people late in fights. For all of the discussion about cardio and how he applies it, Romero's not a guy who shuts it down late in a fight. There's only been one fight where he simply didn't have anything left and that was vs Jacare in a fight where he dominated the first round and comfortably won the second round.

5- Another point of contention; Yoel's TDD is amazing but his offensive wrestling at times is rather clunky and shuntsy. Robert Whittaker's takedown defense is very good but his scrambling game is absolutely fantastic. Now the argument could (and maybe should) be made that Romero on top of you is different than Jacare or anybody else but Whittaker is not a guy who is bothered by wrestlers. The fighters who have given him problems are the sort of   guys who can pop his so-so striking defense frequently enough to give him pause while also forcing him to fight going backwards (Brunson and Thompson).

6- Speaking JUST in an MMA context, I would almost make the argument that Fabricio Werdum's striking is better than Alistair Overeem's striking. Obviously in a K1/Glory setting, Overeem would work Werdum but  Werdum's combinations, aggression and versatility are backed by his always outstanding grappling and sub game. That in my estimation actually works to amplify his striking chops. Overeem's wrestling has come a very long way and the last time out it was his ability to wrestle which helped him take a decision over Werdum. But let's not talk about the 2nd Werdum/Overeem fight, k?

7- The UFC picked a rather perfect opponent to find out if Anthony Pettis is truly washed up as an elite level mixed martial artist. Jim Miller is NOT the sort of guy who is going to test Pettis from an athletic standpoint but few men in the UFC have Miller's guts, toughness, adaptability and grappling chops. Miller's been on the upswing recently; having beaten up on Thiago Alves, finishing Takanori Gomi and giving Joe Lauzon fits in a very good fight. Throw in a Dustin Poirier war and a half and there's plenty to be giddy about for Miller's recent career trajectory. On the other hand, Pettis simply hasn't been the same since his fight vs Rafael Dos Anjos all those moons ago. The book on Pettis is out; pressure him so that he can't throw any of his flashy stuff, dare him to hurt you with his hands and if the heat gets too much, take him down and defend subs because he's not going to rush back up to his feet. Curious to see if Pettis still has the skills to use his athletic gifts vs a quality opponent or if he's been broken completely.

8- Speaking of broken completely, Travis Browne is in a weird spot isn't he? Remember that he's still younger than every HW in the top 6 sans Stipe and Ngannou.

9- Belal Muhammad vs Jordan Mein is a really interesting fight on paper, primarily because both guys are at very pivotal points in their careers. For Mein; he's still ONLY 27 even if his time pre-Strikeforce almost borders on abuse. He's taken a crazy amount of punishment and in his last three or four fights, he's looked and fought like a guy who is having a tough time pulling the trigger and a tougher time sticking in when shit starts getting hairy. At 28 years old, Belal Muhammad has the talent to fight with the top of the 170 lb division but his chin seems to have a serious dent in it. He's relied more and more on his wrestling and his workrate to get him by. The loser of this fight takes a serious backwards step in the division.

10- Has Alistair Overeem officially hit that point in his UFC career where every major fight he's going to have is a rematch of some kind?

11- Thiago Santos vs Gerald Meerschaert is a really good intriguing fight on paper. Santos' loss to Mousasi was just a case of one guy being great and another guy being good---but the Spicely fight was a tough pill to swallow. He was outwrestled and submitted by a guy who they were trying to serve up as a can to him. Since then he had an amazing war with Jack Marshmann and NOW Santos gets another Spicely-type in Meerschaert. Gerald's one of those long time crafty veteran types who are murderous on the ground for novices or overenthusiastic fighters. Good test for both guys.

12- Last time Rob Font fought an aggressive Brazilian he essentially broke down and did dick all. Andrade is a similar type to Lineker minus the amazing chin, cardio. Same love of endless pressure and a pursuit of violence though.

Must Win

Yoel Romero

At 40 years old, there HAS to be a day where Yoel Romero finally turns old and he'll be just like everybody else at 185 lbs. The clock is ticking though and Romero has to know that the big fights with Bisping and Silva and company are on the line with this fight. Romero has to beat Robert Whittaker because otherwise you're going to be left out in the cold.

Anthony Pettis

I mean...duh? Pettis cannot lose this fight. They've found him the perfect opponent with a name to test him. If he loses to Jim Miller, I'm not even sure what you can do with him. He's barely 30, he's a name, he's lost 4 of his last 5 fights and hasn't improved since his days of subbing Benson Henderson.

Travis Browne

Yeah, look, I know Travis Browne is a bit of an undesirable kind of guy. I get it. This is still pro sports and sports are a microcosm of society where undesirable folks with talent will always get sheltered. Browne is still young for the UFC's heavyweight division at 34 years of age and chances are that if he can put his athletic gifts together with a MODICUM of "give a shit", he can still be a factor in the HW division. Oleksiy Olynik is a decent challenge for him, primarily because Olynik's grappling chops and his surprising pop make for a competent solid heavyweight.

Five Fights Not To Miss:

1- Yoel Romero vs Robert Whittaker

Robert Whittaker has never had a boring fight and stylistically, this is an awesome matchup. Two competent strikers; one an unorthodox throw it all to the wind brawler and the other a fantastic boxer. One is an amazing wrestler, the other has amazing takedown defense. Guys who can finish a fight at any moment's notice. Five rounds for them to work. It's a special fight and not one to miss.

2- Valentina Shevchenko vs Amanda Nunes

There's a decent chance that come late in the fight, things could get messy. It's a risk you have to be willing to take because rounds 1-3 could be really fun. I'm not counting Nunes out until she eventually loses, whenever that may be. Until it happens, I'm going to believe she's a more than live dog in this fight.

3- Jim Miller vs Anthony Pettis

It's been a long and peculiar fall from grace for Anthony Pettis but he's still very much a fun fighter to watch. Even if he's not quite the finish machine he used to be, he's still a special guy who, when on, can dazzle folks. Jim Miller is never in a boring fight and you know he's looking to be ultra impressive in this one.

4- Rob Font vs Douglas Silva da Andrade

Rob Font's offense is always a lot of fun and he took it to another level vs Matt Schnell. He gets a big challenge in Douglas Silva de Andrade who had a war and a half vs Henry Briiones. Think of this as a poor man's Lineker vs a poor man's Donald Cerrone in terms of fighting styles.

5- Trevin Giles vs Cody Bochnovic

Trevin Giles is one of those guys who is an utter wacko of a fighter and the sort of dude who is likely to rack up bonuses by virtue of how he almost always seems to be flirting with disaster each fight out. In the limited stuff I've seen of Bochnovic, I see a guy who might follow a similar path.