#it's not perfectly linear and it depends on how much effort i put into a piece

[hopefulqueer]

i rly like that i'm at a place with my art where i can literally see the improvement from one piece to the next

[voltimer]

'The Magic of Johto's Level Curve'

(or, 'a leisurely analysis of the singleplayer balance of Pokemon GSC and HGSS')

The Johto games - especially HeartGold and SoulSilver - seem to have a very good reputation. Some often put the aforementioned HGSS into their top 3 or describe it as the core Pokemon experience. I personally agree with this sentiment and HGSS is either #2 or #1 depending on my mood (it usually competes with Black 2 and White 2).

Despite all its praise though, there seems to be an incredibly consistent point raised against it: the level curve. I see it described as unbalanced, janky, and generally bad.

There are two main problems people tend to cite. First is the level progression in Johto itself, with Gyms 5, 6, and 7 not exactly being a smooth progression upwards and then Team Rocket's Archer and the 8th Gym having a notable level spike compared to those last three. Wild Pokemon levels are also usually a lot lower than the major boss fights they are ahead of, making raising new 'mons harder and grinding for boss fights longer. The other problem is Kanto, whose problems can essentially be said to take Johto's levelling issues and ramp them up. The jump from fighting Blue to the Elite Four rematches and Red is also very significant.

What I'm not going to do here is refute that the above isn't true - these level scaling inconsistencies are certainly present. It's also very different to the vast majority of main series entries, whose level curves are more linear and gradual. Gens 5 and 7 even have a feature which multiplies exp gain based on how much lower or higher you are than the Pokemon you defeat which in a way acts like a rubber band around each game's level curve, ensuring you can catch up easily but not go too overlevelled either. Playing GSC and HGSS when the rest of those entries are like that is a bit jarring. Pokemon is so well-known for having quite a formulaic design across its main series and when compared to that formula with regards to level progression and the like, the Johto games do seem a bit off-colour.

What I am going to do though is try to explain why this so-called bad level curve is at the very least not actually that bad, or, if I can convince you well enough, that the Johto games actually have a unique and (what I call) magical singleplayer game design not properly replicated in any other entry. It goes to the core essence of Pokemon's theming, and it fits with the fact that Johto's narrative also happens to put the most focus on those themes than the rest of the series.

When I say the core essence of theming, I mean the very basics of every Pokemon adventure: you, the player, leave home to go on a journey around your region, meeting various people and overcoming various challenges along the way together with your partner Pokemon. Challenges you overcome are all thanks to the bonds you share with your partners and how you raise them with love and care. As you get older, this is the sort of thing in Pokemon that you probably end up taking for granted. It's typical "power of friendship" stuff, and most people will tend to come to conclude through learning about the game mechanics that this sort of thing is superficial and that stats are all that matter in the end. The more modern Pokemon games also have such a big focus on larger-than-life stories with big climaxes featuring the box Legendaries that it's easy to lose this basic level, down-to-earth narrative theming.

Johto is significant for not having any larger-than-life aspects overshadowing its core. Instead, the core takes centre stage. There is no real overarching story besides your adventure. Team Rocket's antics take a sub-plot role but in the end act as a foil to your story, being one of the more major obstacles you overcome. Catching Ho-oh or Lugia is no cataclysm either, but rather a reward for your achievements throughout the game and thanks to your good and pure heart - recognised by the Legendary in question. Moments throughout the game like how you deal with the situation at the Lake of Rage, or the Dragon's Den trial where you're asked questions to test your ideals as a trainer (which, of course, you pass with flying colours) all contribute to this core as well.

The way Professor Oak congratulates you after defeating Lance ties the knot perfectly on the main campaign:

"Ah, <player>! It's been a long while. You certainly look more impressive. Your conquest of the League is just fantastic! Your dedication, love, and trust for your Pokémon made this happen. Your Pokémon were outstanding, too. Because they believed in you as a Trainer, they persevered. Congratulations, <player>!"

These are just examples of the main story events, though,and Johto has a lot more than that. The region is filled with things to do beside the main campaign - Berries/Apricorns, Pokegear calls, the Ruins of Alph and other optional caves, the Bug Catching Contest, and (in HGSS) the Pokeathlon and Safari Zone, just to name a few of the more notable ones. Tama Hero's review of Pokemon GSC talks a lot about this and it's well-worth a watch even beyond the section describing the games' breadth of side content.

Tama Hero also touches upon the supposed level scaling issue, and her response to the complaints is that there is a "sprinkling" of opportunities for small bits of exp gain throughout the game which should help you stay on track in most cases, and where you can't match levels, you can outplay your opponent.

I certainly agree with the latter. It always feels entirely possible to beat bosses at a level deficit throughout Johto. The Johto League is one of the key cases where you'll probably end up at level disadvantage, but I've consistently been able to defeat it with a team of lv 40s on average (so nearly 10 levels behind Lance's peak), and I'm pretty certain that my not-even-10-year-old self did so as well, even though it took me many, many attempts. From various people I've talked to and bits of let's plays I've seen over the years, this seems to be the common experience too. I think only a minority of people have had to grind to match Lance's levels in order to beat him at all. Granted, it might take you a couple of tries at that level disadvantage (or a great couple of tries more, like little ol' me), but that's surely not an unreasonable expectation. The concept of getting stuck at a difficult stage in a game could be called a universal one, and I think most people agree that it's always pretty satisfying to finally surmount a challenge like that. This can even be said about other Pokemon games - Kanto, Hoenn and Sinnoh also all have large level spikes at the end. In fact, at least when it comes to the end of the maingame, I'd argue Hoenn and Sinnoh have a larger level spike than Johto, but they're not considered impossible or anything

Regardless, though: it's certainly possible to win difficult battles in Pokemon at a level disadvantage. Tama Hero argues that the strategy required to do so isn't something the game teaches you very well, but I think this is a tad pessimistic. In the end I think that most wins will just come down to understanding of more fundamental skills that you've probably learned through the course of the game naturally - using type matchups (gyms are all type themed), using moves with stat changes (the earlygame is full of moves like Growl and Tail Whip), using status moves (no doubt you're going to see the effects of Paralysis and Burns throughout the game at least), and apt use of items (bosses always use potions and often use held items). Players also have more control over the battle than the enemy, with the default Switch mode and a huge amount more items available. It's true that the games don't teach you the deeper, untold mechanics very well, but learning about those only unlock even more ways to succeed for the numbers-minded veterans.

On the topic of those deeper, untold mechanics I also want to talk about something which Tama Hero doesn't mention at all - Effort Values, or EVs. Most of you reading will probably know about these by now, but for those who don't, EVs are hidden values which can increase a Pokemon's raw stats by a certain amount based on the other Pokemon they defeat. They were present in a slightly different form in Gens 1 and 2 in the form of "stat exp" but the premise was the same: your Pokemon grow twofold when you defeat Pokemon, by gaining visible exp for levelling up and visibly gaining stats every time that exp bar fills, but also by gaining stats little by little every time they defeat any Pokemon. Your Pokemon's EVs weren't visible to you in-game until Gen 6 with the Super Training graphic, and numerically weren't until Gen 7 where you can press X on the Pokemon's stat screen to show what are called "base stats".

EV optimisation is crucial to competitive play because the stat boosts they give are quite significant. Competitive players will "min-max" spreads, putting as much as possible into 2 stats to maximise strengths and not wasting any on stats they aren't making use of. In maingame playthroughs, though, EVs will usually end up being a balanced spread because you'll invetivably be facing a variety of Pokemon with different EV yields throughout the game. EVs can also be increased with the Vitamin items (Protein, Calcium, etc.) which you find a handful of throughout the game (and can buy at a premium) and can be used to manually raise EVs, though only to a certain point.

In Gens 3 and onward, a Pokemon can have up to 252 EVs in 1 stat, and 510 in total. At Lv 100, 4 EVs in a stat grant 1 point extra to it. For the singleplayer campaign the conditions are a bit different, but if we assume as a standard that by the Elite Four your EV total is maxed out and you have an even spread, your stats will all be up to 10 points higher than they would be without EVs. In Gens 1 and 2, you can actually max out all of a Pokemon's stat exp values but you're unlikely to cap them all for a good while beyond the maingame so we can consider them about the same as in the later gens for this.

But why is this important?

Firstly, the difference EVs make in the above scenario account for what is usually about 5 levels' worth of stats. Depending on your exact distribution, it could be a couple more or less levels' worth in each stat but the bottom line is that they make your Pokemon's strength higher than it may seem based on level alone.

This means that the wild Pokemon grinding that is criticised for being too tedious in Johto as a result of low levels is also better than it seems because even when you don't level up, you're gaining EVs for every one of those you defeat. The stagnant levels in the midgame of Johto also contribute more to your Pokemon's growth than it may seem from the slow level gain. The Pokegear rematches which you gain access to after defeating Team Rocket before Gym 8 may also be a little infrequent, but they also very often give you Vitamins afterwards to add to all of this.

Secondly is what seems to be a fairly unknown fact: in-game trainers do not have any EV spreads. Thanks to the work of speedrunners, we have exact data of enemy trainers' Pokemon to show this. Trainers do have IV spreads based on their "AI level" (more 'advanced' AI levels will have up to 30 IVs across the board) but the difference near-perfect IVs will have on their Pokemon is not as great as the combination of random IV spreads and relatively balanced EV spreads yours.

That 10 level deficit vs Lance is suddenly more like 5 in practice. Some of his Pokemon also happen to have pretty high stats naturally in Gyarados and the Dragonites, and the level deficit will still be slightly present, but once we factor in strategy again, you can abuse their type weaknesses and make good use of items, status and whatever else have you to swing the odds in your favour.

The only way you can find out anything about EVs in Johto is from a NPC in Blackthorn City who gives your Pokemon the Effort Ribbon if they have reached their total of 510, and the only practical way for a player without the technical knowledge to have achieved this is to have spent time throughout the game doing lots of little bits of training - in other words, putting in the effort - to have incidentally capped their Pokemon's EV total. It's only fitting that you find this NPC towards the end of the Johto campaign because it's likely that by this point a couple of your team members will be eligible for the ribbon.

This finally ties back to the point of core theming. EVs are an invisible stat giving your Pokemon an extra edge over their in-game opponents, or, at worst, one closing a gap in strength between them, as a result of all of the time you've spent raising those Pokemon throughout the game. In other words, EVs are essentially the statistical representation of the "dedication, love, and trust" you have for your Pokemon which gets you through seemingly difficult challenges. Levels, then, are only a surface representation of your Pokemon's strength: they create the feeling of an uphill battle, but you can win against the odds by believing in yourself and your partners. It's probably exactly what you thought as the naive and uncynical child playing through a Pokemon game for the first time, and probably one of the ways you made such fond memories of it. In hindsight, this is definitely how it was for me. It is a sort of magic, really.

There is still a big Red elephant in the room, and I do think that the level gap between the end of the Kanto Gyms and Red is maybe too hard to go and beat immediately after even with the power of EVs and such, but Red is by all means a superboss and final challenge of the Johto games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to have to grind for a while to build up for and to finally be able to take his team of Lv 80s on. The same can be said about the Elite Four Rematches in this game and others, Steven in Emerald, or that one Barry fight in Platinum if you do decide to beat the E4 rematches 20 times to make his levels nearly match Red's. If you're setting out to fight a superboss like this, the grind is part of the prerequesites. It's definitely still possible to beat someone like Red with a 10 or even 20 level deficit if you play well, though. I admit, I haven't beaten Red in a long time, but I have beaten Emerald Steven with a ~15 level gap before. Tama Hero also said she has beaten Red with a team of level 50s in Crystal in the review.

I said before that the other games in the series haven't replicated this sort of thing as well. Gen 5 was the beginning of a marked shift away from this design, with its overarching story-driven style and a change to exp gain which would honestly be incompatible with the level curve in Johto. Gen 6, whilst returning to the exp system without level deficit multipliers, saw different means of statistical representations of the 'dedication, love and trust' trio in Pokemon Amie, which can break the game almost as much as the Exp Share when enough Affection is built up. Gen 7 brings back Gen 5's exp system whilst retaining the Exp Share and Affection systems, and actually ends up even diverging from the EV design which went before by having in-game trainers and Totem Pokemon with competitive, min-maxed EV spreads from as early as the Trainer's School. Whilst I am yet to play Let's Go and Sword and Shield, their Exp system with a 'permanent Exp Share' of sorts makes it a huge amount different and from what I've seen and heard, overlevelling is quite easy despite the game being designed around the feature. I really hope that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl at least return to Gen 6's exp mechanics, or better, reunite us with the held-item version of the Exp Share which doesn't make me feel like I'm cheating whenever I use it.

Before I go too off-topic, though, I should probably return to the original thread of this post to make some concluding remarks. What can't be denied that the way GSC and HGSS are designed may not be for everyone. I know for sure that a lot of people prefer to be able to breeze through a Pokemon game at a brisk pace without many roadblocks, but as someone who in recent years has come to appreciate much slower-paced and immersive singleplayer Pokemon playthroughs, I can't help but love the way GSC and HGSS are designed in the way I've explained, or appreciate their unique identity amongst the rest of the series. Coming to think about this has also shed light on why I adored HeartGold as much as I did when I first played it way back 11 years ago. I poured hours and hours into the game, and as a result, its magical design put me under its spell.

_____________________________________________________________

Though I linked to the references I did use when they appeared, here they are again. Do check them out if they're of interest to you!

Tama Hero's GSC review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgtMVKP2T6Y

speedrun.com trainer data for HGSS: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnhgss/guide/k2zij

speedrun.com trainer data for SuMo: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnsunmoon/guide/d2683

Tama Hero (YT) is one of the few people I know who actually makes longer-form Pokemon analysis content besides Aleczandxr (also YT), who whilst not being a 'PokeTuber' has made some brilliant analyses of storytelling through setting in Sinnoh, Hoenn, Johto, and just recently, Unova. I did not refer to them here but I can highly recommend their content, at least.

Thank you very much for reading to the very bottom here. This is my first time writing something like this and I appreciate it.

[wonderr-woman]

21 things I’ve learned at 21!

Hey people of tumblr, it just so happens that I’m turning 21 in exactly 1 week! (which is slightly scary... but shit happens). I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately and I wanted to put together a list of lessons I’ve learned so far in life, things I would want my younger self to know, and things I generally want to continue to remember as I grow older. 

So! Below is my list of 21 things I have learned in 21 years (definitely not an exhaustive list or a perfect list by any means, remember that these are just the things relevant to my life and experiences so take it with a grain of salt. enjoy!)

Friendships and relationships do not have to be linear, and that’s okay. Sometimes, there will be high points, and other times there will be dips. And that’s perfectly natural and okay.

Dependency is not healthy!! Your life is composed of multiple people, friends, family members, etc. so make sure you don’t rely on just one person to feel validated or to seek out support!

You can’t control another’s actions, no matter how wrong they are or how much you love them. People are going to do what they want, and the most you can do is be there for them, support them, and decide how you’re going to react to their choices. Will you react with judgement and coldness, or with forgiveness and kindness? (Sidenote, I feel as though forgiveness is really not promoted in our current culture of callouts and cutting ties. Yes of course there are times when that’s necessary, but sometimes it’s more constructive to forgive and work through your issues with people).

Sometimes, a friend going through a hard time doesn’t want your unsolicited advice or recommendations, they just want to feel listened to and validated.

You have nothing to lose by going after the things you want. Even if you are slightly underqualified, even if you do not have the most experience, go for it anyway! The worst they can say is no.

Exercise is the best medicine (if you’re physically able to exercise of course).

The first step to getting better at something is taking the time to realize you’re not perfect and there are areas you can actively improve in. Be humble and don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes!

In that same vein, learning how to take constructive criticism is really important! Criticism is not inherently a bad thing, yes it can be difficult to receive, but sometimes it’s necessary for you to improve as a person.

Friendships/Relationships are a two way street, and if one side is consistently putting in more effort than the other, a conversation is warranted.

Even if you’re not the best at comforting others, even if you don’t always have the exact right words to say, it goes such a long way to just make an effort, so don’t let your uncertainty stop you from reaching out. If people know you care, oftentimes that’s all they need.

Jealousy, while it is a natural reaction, is not healthy and can be very destructive. Instead, try turning that jealousy into admiration and try befriending the person! Maybe you can learn a thing or two from them! And if someone in your life is doing well, be supportive of them instead of jealous!

Sometimes things just don’t work out in life, and that’s okay. Not everything is going to work out for you. You’ve just gotta keep going forward in life, keep trying and never give up! For every setback you encounter, if you keep trying the end result will be well worth it and it will get better!

Growing up and becoming more emotionally mature does not have to mean giving up your inner child. In fact, Dodie says it best in her video “just a few nostalgic tears”: there’s an idea that as you grow up, your younger self is still living inside you and judging everything you do (which I totally believe). So, go play on that playground, watch that tv show you used to love, take the time to reminisce about old memories! And if someone makes you feel shitty for that, don’t be around them!

If you find someone who you just feel really happy around, someone who just gets your sense of humour and is on your wavelength and you can truly be yourself around… cherish them! These people are so important!

Feeling out your emotions is so healthy!!! You feel a cry coming on? Don’t suppress it, let it out! That’s you processing your emotions, and it’s such a better way of dealing with them than bottling them up and refusing to feel anything.

A good leader is one who does not look out for themselves, but for others. They put others’ needs at or above their own. They’re someone who provides opportunities to those around them and builds others up.

(This one was one of the hardest for me to learn): Not everyone is going to like you in life, and that’s okay. It’s pointless to waste energy on trying to get people to like you. Just accept it and move on and keep trying to be your best self!

If you’re finding it really difficult to get along with someone you have to work with, instead of focusing on all the things you dislike about them, try focusing on one or two of their more positive qualities! It really helps. Also, try being more empathetic!

Introspection is really important. Taking a little time each day to reflect on yourself, your actions, why you felt/acted a certain way can really help you learn about yourself and seek out areas for self-improvement. (But also don’t overdo it like I usually do and overthink everything).

Be honest with others. Be honest about how you feel about them, and be honest about how they make you feel. If something in the relationship changes, tell them. You’ll be doing both you and them a favour.

You, and only you, are allowed to decide when you’re comfortable and ready to do certain things. If others are pressuring you or making you feel shitty for not wanting to do something you’re not comfortable with, they don’t have your best interests in mind.

[pinkipie100]

On Keith Leaving Voltron and the Validity of His Decision

*deep breath*

Here we go... So, it couldn’t be more clear that a lot of the fandom is upset or dissatisfied or confused at Keith giving up the Black Lion and instead joining the Blade of Marmora. I admit, it does seem like a step backwards from Keith’s character development as a leader of Voltron from the previous season... But I think that’s the point.

Let’s take a step back and think about this; first, let’s start by asking some basic questions: What is Voltron: Legendary Defender? [Yes we’re getting that fundamental; get back here, take some time to read an actual intellectual argument about a family show for once.] That’s right, Voltron: Legendary Defender is a TV show! Now, what are TV shows, really? Well, they’re basically expressive visual media stories meant to shed light on the human condition and entertain us while doing so; the alternative to the written word doing so, yes? Meaning, they’re a kind of art. And the best art/stories challenge us to think in a new or creative perspective. This is why I love how Keith’s story has been unfolding.

Last season was spent exploring Keith’s attempt to fill Shiro’s shoes as Voltron’s leader. He wasn’t the best at it, surely, and he blatantly expressed hesitance to even take up the mantle. Even up until the end of the season, Keith told Shiro he didn’t believe in his ability to lead the team. This doubt in Keith’s mind culminates as he makes the decision to yield the Black Lion to Shiro and leave the team altogether for the Blade of Marmora. This is a good thing. Keith’s undeveloped leadership skills and his cognizance of his skill set poignantly validate his abdication as Team Voltron’s leader.

Keith, try as he might, just doesn’t have the right traits to be a fully functional leader to the team, as we all know, because of his lone-wolf mentality, impulsiveness, and lack of self-control. From the very first mission the new Team Voltron goes on, Keith demonstrates the opposite of leadership; he full-on yells at his teammates to stay out of his way when they seek guidance from him:

Lance obviously calls Keith out on this, and most of the fandom would agree that Keith needed that from Lance to help the former realize his mistake and correct it. That is true, but there’s an implication from this aggressive line that many may miss. I feel this line perfectly exposes Keith’s discomfort when people look to him for advice or guidance. He’s been suddenly put under a lot of pressure, and everyone is depending on him. As a result, he lashes out when the battle is going so drastically downhill and the other paladins keep pressuring him for a solution.

Even by the end of the third season, Keith struggles to operate as the leader of the team. Granted, Shiro is back, and this causes a power struggle between them, but ultimately, Keith had to rely on Shiro’s advice in order to defeat Lotor’s generals and destroy the Galra cargo vessel:

Keith is the one who came up with the plan to trick the generals into shooting their own ship, but if Shiro had not called Keith out on the limited time they had before the cargo vessel escaped, it probably would have gotten away. Now, this is to no fault of Keith, necessarily. Again, this was a tense situation, and Keith has a very one-track mind. Notice how Lance asks Keith what to do, but Shiro is the one who answers. Keith just stays silent and sticks to his initial plan to take on the generals’ ship first.

Taking these two scenes into account, Keith is not very comfortable being an authority figure to his team. He tends to defer to someone he views as an authority figure in high-pressure situations when it comes to a team dynamic, otherwise he reverts to his impulse-driven instincts without thought to the consequences affecting others. There’s no doubt he gives leadership an honest try, and those skills are vastly improved by the end of the third season, but ultimately, he is still disinclined to become Voltron’s permanent leader- he is still better suited as a temporary replacement.

Having discussed Keith’s abilities in his leader role, something else that is equally important to consider when addressing Keith as leader of team Voltron is his own desire to be the leader. It doesn’t take much to see that he doesn’t want the position. We’ve touched on it in the previous points, but there are moments when Keith explicitly delineates his preference in position, such as when Shiro first makes his return:

Keith jumps right on the opportunity for Shiro to retake his role as leader, so he wants the latter to recover as soon as possible. He acknowledges Shiro’s importance to the team, and the implied words here are, ‘They need you, not me.’ That may sound like he doesn’t have much confidence in his leadership position, and that’s exactly the case. Worry not, however, because this will be addressed later.

Meanwhile, shall we take a look at the actual season in question?

Season 4 really solidifies Keith’s inclination towards following as opposed to leading. The season opens with Keith operating under the Blade of Marmora, following [well, sort of] Kolivan’s orders:

While he may not have done this well, his poor rule-following was more due to, once again, his independent thinking than him actually wanting to be in charge of the mission. He was not trying to be insubordinate. One thing is still clear, however, and that is that Keith is still loyally subordinate to Shiro when it comes to Voltron:

Keith and Shiro are still very insistent on their respective views, Shiro’s being that Keith is the chosen leader of Voltron, and Keith’s being that Shiro is. The most damning evidence here to support Keith being unfit as leader is that he so stalwartly holds to Shiro being a better leader than Keith overall. Note well that Keith does not feel any remorse from stepping down from a leadership role- a paladin role, certainly, but Keith always felt that Shiro is better suited as leader, and, in fact, lights up at the very thought:

I had to capture a few screens of the same line just to emphasize Keith’s movement in describing the ‘bright side’ of the team’s situation. Though it pains Keith to leave, he would rather have Team Voltron under the rightful leader, even if that means he must leave the team.

My point here is that Keith recognizes where his talents and abilities lie, and that is not as Team Voltron’s leader. A majority of fans who prefer Keith as the Black Paladin, or even feel it makes more narrative sense for him to be Black Paladin, think thusly because every narrative element and character has pointed towards this being the direction the story is going:

Every sign in the universe is pointing Keith towards piloting the Black Lion- all because it chose him. But Keith still gives it up in the end, because he knows where his strength lie. Keith may be headstrong, but he is not a leader. He is ultimately still a follower. He is self-sufficient, but that does not translate well to helping a team be the same way. And Keith knows this. It’s not that Keith is not confident in his ability to be a leader- it’s that he recognizes it’s not his place, and certainly not what he wants.

So what are the implications of all of this?

Well, firstly, Keith is a masterful example of subverting a painfully common trope in hero stories and, typically, action-oriented and male audience-targeted TV and movies: The Chosen One. Keith had literally been chosen by not only Shiro, but the Black Lion itself to be the leader of Voltron, despite his hesitance and minimal qualifications. In falling under the Chosen One trope, Keith would have hesitantly grown into his own as a leader, and, in the end, wholeheartedly come to embrace his role appointed to him by what is essentially Fate. While this is a trope as old as time, and comes with a well-intentioned message, the problem with the Chosen One trope is that it’s so linear. Yes, there are struggles on the way to fulfilling the Chosen One role, but we all already know how it ends. The hero accepts their role and fulfills their destiny, now matter how unsure they are.

Keith turns this trope on its head by allowing him to do what heroic, broody anime-protagonist archetypes like him rarely ever do: Keith defies Fate. He refuses the call to be a leader and pilot the Black Lion, having determined that he truly is not fit for it, and there is a better fit for said position. This is an especially important message for young boys, because they are often taught to never show weakness or admit defeat, particularly to other men; they are supposed to be men and suck it up, man up, even. Keith, a passionate, conventionally masculine character that many a young male viewer may admire, sets a fantastic example of unashamed deference to a more skilled man than he. To be fair, Keith did give himself a chance to fulfill his Chosen One role, and he gave it his best effort, but recognized that his talents were better spent in another way. Keith is unafraid of staring Destiny in the face and firmly and rightly saying, ‘No.’

I want to wrap up with what this indicates in tandem with the fandom’s vastly negative reception of Keith’s stepping down.

There is an aspect of this fandom that is particularly poisonous not because of its tendency to cause discourse, but because of the toxic rationale of the topic as a whole. The fandom has collectively accepted that a leadership position correlates directly to character worth. Remember pre-season 3 and the Lion Swap Debates? Ungodly amounts of discourse arose from it, and continued to do so after the season aired. Keith stans and Lance stans argued over why their respective advocate should be/would make an infinitely better Black Paladin, while others felt Allura was most qualified, and yet, still others felt infuriated that fans were already so eager to replace Shiro as Black Paladin so quickly. 

Interestingly enough, no one [except myself and a handful of elite intellectuals] argued very strongly for Hunk to be Black Paladin, let alone Pidge [forget about poor Coran]. The reasoning for this is that those three characters were already accepted in the lions that they were [or weren’t] in. The other four characters, however, were not. Fans felt that in order for the character of their preference to receive development, they had to fill the power vacuum and prove themselves as a capable leader, or in Shiro’s case, retake that position of leadership. The named characters do, indeed, each have leadership potential, there is no question. That does not mean it is vital to their character development that they be in such position.

The fandom has really started to think like Zarkon- the Black Lion, to them, represents power and influence. If a character is not in that position, then they are not at their full character potential, and they are not important- That character is losing.

This could not be farther from the truth. Just like Keith, no character needs to be a leader to develop into a three-dimensional character, even if they have such traits- Likewise, not everyone in the real world needs to be a go-getter or business owner or entrepreneur to be a valid person. Linking success or validity primarily to leadership is an incredibly toxic and incorrect viewpoint, regardless of whether it’s in the fandom setting or reality. The world needs followers just as much as it needs leaders, and that is the lesson of Keith’s story arc so far.

And that is an important and unique message- a challenging, new, and creative perspective.

This got extremely broad and long-winded, and I apologize, but I hope you took they time to closely analyze and comprehend it all. What the writers did with Keith was masterful, in my opinion, and it breaks my heart that a story that so strongly resonates with me is being so misconstrued and poorly received by fans.

You have my utmost gratitude if you read the entire essay to the end!

[haught0pocket]

We'll Break Till It Gets Better (fic review)

THIS IS A REVIEW (& showering of praise to the author, @thewaywedo33 )! THEREFORE, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Go read THIS before continuing. Or just go read that. Because that’s really the most important part.

I’m going to be doing this for multiple fics/authors that I adore. Don’t ask how I chose this one to be first. Just happened.

Writers deserve SO MUCH praise for the amount of time and effort they put into their work, especially when it is quality work. So here is my thank you to these authors. Not sure how often I’ll get these out. Hopefully not incredibly spread apart. I have lots of love for lots of authors.

We’ll Break is about the absence of Waverly, and the toll that has on the Wynonna crew. Cuffs (as I’ll be referring to the author, bc it’s easier) asked the question: “what would happen if Waverly was taken away?” And what a beautiful question to ask. Because Waverly is so very much the heart of this group.

The story is written non-linear. It goes from present to past, the past scenes going further and further into Waverly’s absence. It’s perfect and painful. With more passing weeks, the “family” feels this loss more and more heavily. Time is supposed to heal wounds, but with this one, it sits, it festers. And it speaks to the importance that Waverly is in all of their lives.

If there’s one thing I love (like maybe more than mildly obsessed with), it’s structure. I’ve written stories backward before because it’s just so damn interesting. If a certain structure adds to your story - write it that way. And damn does this structure add to the story.

Upon Waverly’s return, everything has obviously changed. Her niece is two years old. Nicole lives at the Homestead - in her room. Wynonna depends on Nicole. She, of course, has to be reintroduced to everyone.

Listen, if you’re breaking my heart, you’re doing a great fucking job. BREAK it. THROW it across the room. MAKE ME CURL INTO A USELESS BALL OF FEELINGS. And then take my heart and put it back together. Because that is a mark of a great author. (yes, this broke my heart and then put it back together)

One of the most touching reunions, for me, was Waverly and Doc:

“His face goes through a complex series of emotion, heart break and a glimmer of hope clear in his eyes as a smile spreads on his face. He takes his hat off to press it to his chest. (...) His chest rises and falls with a deep breath, and Nicole can see the way he fights back tears.”

I mean. Godamn. Doc has always fiercely loved Waverly. In a protective big brother way (I have 3 big brothers, so this really kills me). A lot of times it’s smudged and covered by who Doc thinks he should be or who he was in the past. But his love for Waverly remains. And shines so bright in this description.

Nicole, for the most part, keeps her distance. (Because she’s Nicole Haught and fucking PERFECT) She watches and gauges Waverly’s reactions and how she is settling after being gone for so long, and makes her decisions based on that. It’s tension building from the start. As soon as you start reading, obviously, you’re crying out “JUST KISS HER!” But it’s not realistic or what either of these characters would do. Because Nicole waits, it’s what she does. She never pressures Waverly, ever...

Especially when she’s been gone in another dimension for two years. Which - another point. Where has Waverly been? I’m not even really sure. But it doesn’t even matter. She’s been gone. That’s the point. Cuffs created a believable option for Waverly’s disappearance, one that didn’t need to be explained or talked about in depth during the story, and then focused on Waverly. The loss of her. Her return and healing. The tension between her and Nicole.

Great suspense is when the author builds up tension, tiny piece by tiny piece. A slow, subtle building with the smallest hints of the release to come. And then a release of the tension in one stunning, beautiful moment. The release isn’t dragged on, it’s not dangled in front of our eyes and then taken away. It’s slowly worked toward and then everything we’ve been holding onto and taking in has this beautiful crescendo of a finale. (I’m aware that this was one giant “that’s what she said”)

Which is what Cuffs always does. Cuffs, in my opinion, is one of the greatest writers of tension and release. It’s such a tricky balance. You can drag on, forever, or not build the tension enough and that finale moment just falls short. But it’s always a beautiful journey with Cuffs. Perfectly timed. Beautifully executed.

Everything, every word, in this fic is like a meticulously placed gear in a watch.

Another mark of a great author is if I (or any reader who writes) am learning about writing from them. Cuffs, you teach me. Much. Thank you for contributing to this community and writing beautiful work.

[homeopathicservices-blog]

BY PIERRE FONTAINE RSHOM CCH

Welcome to Homeopathic Services the only practice near you in NYC specializing in autism. 

 While the practice is located in NYC we are truly word wide with patients in Hong Kong, South Africa, Nigeria, Italy, Sweden and throughout the USA.

Autism is obviously an extremely serious and complex condition to treat. The number one responsibility is the child but it must be kept in mind that parents are in a very vulnerable situation. Parents are turned away from the medical establishment because it doesn’t have any solution, the latest I have heard from parents is that doctors are trying medication originally designed for Alzheimer’s disease! Given the latest research on this disease tells us those meds are absolutely useless!

Another situation is one parent far more trustful of homeopathy than the other. I have dealt with this situation many times, everybody must be acknowledged, by explaining that no harm can be done with homeopathy the wish of one parent should be granted. Skepticism is meant to lead to an educated conclusion if the skeptic remains simply that, I don’t have time for that.

By the time parents call me, they have tried the GFCF diet, many of them have done chelation therapy, ABA various different methods of rewards when accomplishing a task. My experience with these programs is that they have their limits. Often, the children get used to the exercises and become bored. Of course ABA and other programs are far more sophisticated than this caricature but the end result do not seem to vary widely. All of these therapies including speech therapy bring about some improvements at making the child deal with his environment rather than bring about a reversal of the whole.

Chelation Therapy is the big kid on the block, everybody wants to do it because of the heavy metal and adjuvant seemingly apparent connection. The linear thinking of getting rid of heavy metal and function will return is deeply flawed but appeals to parents. The only alternative I have seen be effective in cases is the GFCF diet. Any alternative is made more effective when the child is under homeopathic treatment.

Autistic children exhibit sensibilities, sometimes extreme, to a wide array of products. I recall a child who had a seizure following a massage with primrose oil. Likewise, any product with aspartame, I am told, may trigger seizures in these children.

Autism is an ailment unlike any other. When a neuro-typical child feels pain, he speaks to the parents who in turn feel the child’s description through understanding. With autism the parents are largely deprived of these basics that are an integral part of the parenting experience. In fact, particularly for the mother, the pain of not feeling the child is another traumatic circumstance that should be addressed with Autism Treatment in Homeopathy. Imagine, not being able to caress your child’s back because the child walks away oblivious to emotions. Parenting with these conditions is like flying blind. Considering this, the unique qualities of the child are difficult to uncover yet it is fabulously important to find them.

We often speak of people on the spectrum as being over sensitive, that is true but I also think that over perception is also true. That explains why an autistic person can remember an enormous amount of information such as cards sequence, what day of the week was June 14th 1934 or cover the ears when hearing certain sounds. The perception comes in the way of pictures much like a squirrel remembers exactly where it buried the nut six months earlier. The picture is “taken” with an extreme amount of precision and far more details than neuro-typical people do. They remember perfectly what they did and how it looked in far greater details than we can imagine because “seeing” is a series of image much like a movie reel. These extra ordinary qualities of hyper perception can give us a deeper understanding.

An example of how this might translate in the consultation room. A child refused to enter my office whereas he didn’t have problems coming in fifteen minutes earlier. The room had been darkened to try to put him to sleep. The darkness impaired his “picture taking” and so he was refusing. As soon as the light was raised he didn’t have a problem coming back in. This is an example Ms Grandin makes over and over again in her book and it translates perfectly in the consultation room. He did not have fear of the dark. He was fine at night, he feared the change. With all this “picture taking” it is no wonder that many of these children also think in pictures. It is global seeing, hearing, smelling etc. which is too much and simply control it all.

 Often I find a history of heavy antibiotic use for recurrent colds or ear infections. Perhaps the infectious recurrences reflect immune system issues, regardless the key to giving a deeply acting homeopathic remedy is the current and past TOTALITY.

I have talked at length about the children but we can’t forget that we have a population of adolescents and young adults with this problem. At first my results were dismal but with better understanding and more experience it appears as if there is some hope for them as well. The same requirements are necessary as previously mentioned, the results of complete re establishment of health less likely than in the younger population but nonetheless we can greatly improve their lives.

 I hope I have shed some light on this condition and raised a few of the most common pitfalls in the treatment of autism. It is not easy and very heart wrenching. 
Many of these children make me very emotional. Depending on where they are on the spectrum they seem to live extremely simple and yet extremely complicated lives. Seeing these children develop relationships, come out of their bubble and light up is astounding. In many ways, I believe many of these children were never meant, in the small sense of the word, to have such lives, they do they deserve our deepest effort. Remember the example of not being able to caress the child on the back, well, it is possible now, he is laughing and has joined the family in toto.

 Homeopathic Services

268 W 120th St 5th fl, New York, NY 10027

(212) 334-7360

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE FUTURE OF MY TODO LIST

When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. It's a straight text classifier, but such a stunningly effective one that it manages to filter spam almost perfectly without even knowing that's what it's doing. Performance Between December 10 2002 and January 10 2003 I got about 1750 spams. That's a filtering rate of about 99. This varies from person to person. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. That was not a natural move for Microsoft. Keep rewriting your program.

Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. The way to kill it is to load and keep in your head. It was kind of intimidating at first. In our startup, we erred on the ignoring side. Apparently even Google got a lot cheaper. In this case it was was from someone saying they had finally finished their homepage and would I go look at it. And the success of companies, and countries, will depend increasingly on how they deal with it. You can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them. You can start to treat parts as black boxes once you feel confident you've fully explored them.

Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers. But it wasn't just optimal in that sense. There were a lot of work. Fear the Right Things. Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified. I wanted to keep the problem neat. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. For example, if someone says they want to.

For example, the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. At least one hacker will have to be generated by software, so we wrote some. I understood how CRM114 worked, it seemed like a software company. The low points in a startup is too hard for one person. That will generally work unless you get trapped on a local maximum, like 1980s-style AI, or C. It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. You're alert, but there's nothing to distract you. The biggest startup ideas are not quite the same thing. But unfortunately Yahoo actually tried to be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next Microsoft. Why not? It seems like it violates some kind of progression.

So you won't attract good hackers in linear proportion to how well you understand the problem. The problem is compounded by the fact that hackers, despite their reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of effort into seeming smart. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company. So you won't attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. 9091 FREE 0. It was from someone saying they had finally finished their homepage and would I go look at it.

Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. Here I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you hear someone say the words we want to invest in you aren't. 7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The problem is, if you're not a programmer? We take it for granted most of the time you're doing product development on spec for some big company, and that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing. So what they do there than how much they get paid for it. So now there are two threshold values. When we were making the rounds of venture capital firms in the 1990s, several told us that software companies didn't win by writing great software, but through brand, and dominating channels, and doing the right deals.

[naivelocus]

Research summary - Predicting phenotypes of individuals based on missense variants and prior knowledge of gene function

I have been meaning to write blog posts summarising different aspects of the work from our group over the past 6 years, putting it into context with other works and describing also some future perspectives. I have just been at the CSHL Network Biology meeting with some interesting talks that prompted me to put some thoughts to words regarding the issue of mapping genotypes to phenotypes, making use of prior cell biology knowledge. Skip to the last section if you just want a more general take and perspective on the problem. 

Most of the work of our group over the past 6 years has been related to the study of kinase signalling. One smaller thread of research has been devoted to the relation between genotypes and phenotypes of individuals of the same species. My interest in this comes from the genetic and chemical genetic work in S. cerevisiae that I contributed while a postdoc (in Nevan Krogan’s lab). My introduction to genetics was from studies of gene deletion phenotypes in a single strain (i.e. individual) of a model organism. Going back to the works of Charlie Boone and Brenda Andrews, this research always emphasised that, despite rare, non-additive genetic and environment-gene interactions are numerous and constrained in predictable ways by cell biology. To me, this view of genetics still stands in contrast to genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that emphasise a simpler association model between genomic regions and phenotypes. In the GWAS world-view, genetic interactions are ignored and knowledge of cell biology is most often not considered as prior knowledge for associations (I know I am am exaggerating here). 

Predicting phenotypes of individuals from coding variants and gene deletion phenotypes

Over 7 years ago, some studies of strains (i.e. individuals) of S. cerevisiae made available genome and phenotypic traits. Given all that we knew about the genetics and cell biology of S. cerevisiae I thought it would not be crazy to take the genome sequences, predict the impact of the variants on proteins of these strains and then use the protein function information to predict fitness traits. I was brilliantly scooped on these ideas by Rob Jelier (Jelier et al. Nat Genetics 2011) while he was in Ben Lehner’s lab (see previous blog post). Nevertheless, I though this was an interesting direction to explore and when Marco Galardini (group profile, webpage)  joined our group as a postdoc he brought his own interests in microbial genotype-to-phenotype associations and which led to a fantastic collaboration with the Typas lab in Heidelberg pursuing this research line. 

Marco set out to scale up the initial results from Ben’s lab with an application to E. coli. This entailed finding a large collection of strains from diverse sources, by sending emails to the community begging them to send us their collections. We compiled publicly available genome sequences, sequence some more and performed large scale growth profiling of these strains in different conditions. From the genome sequences, Marco calculated the impact of variants, relative to the reference genome and used variant effect predictors to identify likely deleterious variants. Genomes, phenotypes and variant effect predictions are available online for reuse. For the lab reference strain of E. coli, we had also quantitative data of the growth defects caused by deleting each gene in a large panel of conditions. We then tested the hypothesis that the poor growth of a strain of E. coli (in a given condition) could be predicted from deleterious variants in genes known to be important in that same condition (Galardini et al. eLife 2017). While our growth predictions were significantly related to experimental observations the predictive power was very weak. We discuss the potential reasons in the paper but the most obvious would be errors in the variant effect predictions and differences in the impact of gene deletion phenotypes in different genomic contexts (see below). 

Around the same time Omar Wagih (group profile, twitter), a former PhD student, started the construction of a collection of variant effect predictors, expanding on the work that Marco was doing to try to generalise to multiple mechanisms of variant effects and to add predictors for S. cerevisiae and H. sapiens. The result of this effort was the www.mutfunc.com resource (Wagih et al. MSB 2018). Given a set of variants for a genome in one of the 3 species mutfunc will try to say which variants may have an impact on protein stability, protein interactions, conserved regions, PTMs, linear motifs and TF binding sites. There is a lot of work that went into getting all the methods together and a lot of computational time spent on pre-computing the potential consequence of every possible variant. We illustrate in the mutfunc paper some examples of how it can be used. 

Modes of failure – variant effect predictions and genetic background dependencies

One of the potential reasons why the growth phenotypes of individual stains may be hard to predict based on loss of function mutations could be that the variant effect predictors are simply not good enough. We have looked at recent data on deep mutational scanning experiments and we know there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, the predictors (e.g. FoldX, SIFT) can get the trends for single variants but really fail for more than one missense variant. We will try to work on this and the increase in mutational scanning experiments will provide a growing set of examples on which to derive better computational methods. 

A second potential reason why loss of function of genes may not cause predictable growth defects would be that the gene deletion phenotypes depends on the rest of the genetic background. Even if we were capable of predicting perfectly when a missense variant causes loss of function  we can’t really assume that the gene deletion phenotypes will be independent of the other variants in the genome. To test this we have recently measured gene deletion phenotypes in 4 different genetic backgrounds of S. cerevisiae. We observed 16% to 42% deletion phenotypes changing between pairs of strains and described the overall findings in this preprint that is currently under review. This  is consistent with other works, including RNAi studies in C. elegans where 20% of 1,400 genes tested had different phenotypes across two backgrounds. Understanding and taking into account these genetic background dependencies is not going to be trivial.

Perspectives and different directions on genotype-to-phenotype mapping

Where do we go from here ? How do make progress in mapping how genotype variants impact on phenotypes ? Of course, one research path that is being actively worked on is the idea that one can perform association studies between genotypes and phenotypes via “intermediate” traits such as gene expression and all other sorts of large scale measurements. The hope is that by jointly analysing such associations there can be a gain in power and mechanistic understanding. Going back to the Network Biology meeting this line of research was represented with a talk by Daifeng Wang describing the PsychENCODE Consortium with data for the adult brain across 1866 individuals with measurements across multiple different omics (Wang et al. Science 2018). My concern with this line of research is that it still focuses on fairly frequent variants and continues not to make full use of prior knowledge of biology. If combinations of rare or individual variants contribute significantly to the variance of phenotypes such association approaches will be inherently limited. 

A few talks at the meeting included deep mutational scanning experiments where the focus is mapping (exhaustively) genotype-to-phenotype on much simpler systems, sometimes only a single protein. This included work from Fritz Roth and Ben Lehner labs. For example, Guillaume Diss (now a PI at FMI), described his work in Ben’s lab where they studied the impact of  >120,000 pairs of mutations on an protein interaction (Diss & Lehner eLife 2018). Ben’s lab has several other examples where they have look in high detail and these fitness maps for specific functions (e.g. splicing code, tRNA function). From these, one can imagine slowly increasing the system complexity including for example pathway models. This is illustrated in a study of natural variants of the GAL3 gene in yeast (Richard et al. MSB 2018). This path forward is slower than QTL everything but the hope would be that some models will start to generalise well enough to apply them computationally at a larger scale. 

Yet another take on this problem was represented by Trey Ideker at the meeting. He covered a lot of ground on his keynote but he showed how we can take the current large scale (unbiased) protein-protein functional association networks to create a hierarchical view of the cellular functions, or a cellular ontology (Dutkowski et al. Nat Biotech 2013 , www.nexontology.org). Then this hierarchical ontology can be used to learn how perturbations of gene functions combine in unexpected ways and at different levels of the hierarchy (Ma et al. Nat Methods 2018). The notion being that higher levels in the hierarchy could represent the true cellular cause of a phenotype. In other words, DNA damage repair deficiency could be underlying cause of a given disease and there are multiple ways by which such deficiency can be caused by mutations. Instead of performing linear associations between DNA variants and the disease, the variants can be interpreted at the level of this hierarchical view of gene function to predict the DNA damage repair deficiency and then associate that deficiency with the phenotype. The advantages of this line of research would be to be able to make use of prior cell biology knowledge and in a framework that explicitly considers genetic interactions and can interpret rare variants.  

I think these represent different directions to address the same problem. Although they are all viable, as usual, I don't think they are equally funded and explored.

— Evolution of Cellular Networks