#more like just blather on about relevant information

[pertinax--loculos]

ITSOS: Some Notes on Worldbuilding

so I very purposely assigned this story the "science fantasy" genre, because from what I've read science fiction revolves around the actual science, and I'm just not that sciency. However, what I did not account for was the fuckton of research I'm going to have to do just to make things internally consistent. Fantasy, yes, but I'd like it to have some basis in loose 'fact'

take the planets/countries/colonies for example:

my idea is that in the Future (2500 or so?) the human race leaves Earth on a series of generational ships. These ships are huge, and although technology has been shared, are created largely by global superpowers. As such, one ship is from the USA, one is from China, one is a Saudi Arabia-United Arab Emirates alliance, etc.

I did not account for the fact that I'd have to research both global superpowers and current political alliances/affiliations

it's also set 500 years in the future so who the fuck knows what could've happened in the meantime

BUT I kinda want even that to make sense

THEN when they find the galaxy they end up settling in, they largely settle planets/continents with a specific ship

(obviously there is some crossover, and the Stone Road is much more an amalgamation of different heritages than the Inner Circle, but still)

this is a bit of a pain when describing appearances. First draft I'm probably just gonna use current-day terminology for heritage etc, ie Hispanic, Chinese, European

but there will be a time where I have to clarify where people come from and why others would identify them as coming from that place using appearance

which means I have to name all the planets and continents

and I researched how places have been named in the past but a lot of them come from native words

or words for landmarks

problem the first: this means I'd likely have to make up names for landmarks anyway

problem the second: there is no sign of alien life in this universe. Most people believe that sentient life hasn't managed to evolve outside of Earth, and the most they're ever going to find are single-celled organisms and the like

and those that still believe there are aliens out there are primarily seen as crazy conspiracy theorists

(which is kinda fair, given humankind has travelled huge, huge distances and colonised half a galaxy without any sign of nonhuman life)

speaking of colonising: the research re: habitable planets

essentially so far I have the idea that the Inner Circle is a series of moons orbiting a gas giant

(how many moons, exactly? Who knows! Certainly not the author, ahahah... ha. -.-)

then the Stone Road is a decent distance away, and is a series of smaller, rocky planets

originally my thought was it would be an asteroid belt

it still may be! And the entire civilisations living there cannot set foot outside their buildings because there is no atmosphere!

but the final word on that requires much more

(you guessed it)

research

anyway this has been fun

but I sincerely doubt many people have read this far anyway

if you have: welcome to my literal planning process! Stream of consciousness. Except it's normally handwritten because I prefer that for some reason

hopefully there are some ideas about the world that have come through and give you some idea of the sort of place the ITSOS guys hail from

it's getting clearer in my head but it is definitely still a work in progress

[derangedhyena-zoids]

I guess now that I featured The Kids in something I can elaborate on them and everything related slightly without seeming completely insane.  BIG HEADCANON BLATHER TIME: Raven and Ryss had 2 kids, both boys. 

Ryss wasn’t a terribly good mother. She loved her kids but was a little panicked about them at all times, and didn’t really like the distraction they were. Specula was a good mother and did the majority of keeping them out of trouble. 

They were also psychic as fuck, but that didn’t show up until they were hitting puberty. I’m sure that was an entire Time.  

Ryss literally didn’t think she could get pregnant by Raven. She based this off of both what she’d been taught by Hiltz (humans=/=Zoidians) and the fact that Fiona had never been pregnant despite sleeping with Van for years*.  So, once Ryss figured out she was pregnant**, telling Raven was a bit of an event because Raven was under the impression that such a thing wasn’t possible. He also had little interest in being a parent. Ryss also had no idea what pregnancy even entailed for a Zoidian, and neither did Fiona. Again, all she knew was what she’d learned from Hiltz, and it wasn’t as if he went out of his way to teach her the finer points of anything. (Knowledge is power after all, and he wanted wanted to hold as much power over her as possible. What she didn’t know to begin with, she couldn’t know was being withheld. All she knew from Hiltz on the topic was Zoidian pregnancies are of a greater duration than human pregnancies - mainly because he’d irritably snapped about how ‘the vermin’ reproduce faster.)  Raven’s main reluctance about parenting had to do with... you know, his massive unresolved parental trauma. Which after some extreme stress he and Ryss managed to work through, largely because they had a lot in common in this department. Afterwards Raven warmed up to the idea of being a father, and was... well, Okay.jpg at it. Let’s just say he had Shadow helping Specula with the kids a lot. ...the kids were raised by Organoids. SO.

An attempt was made to keep track of Ryss and her offspring, especially after Raven’s death and she began to make herself scarce. But nobody expected the kids to be psychic af, and they quickly sussed out that something was up and followed their mom’s lead, making themselves and their families impossible to find.  ....

The Guardian Force pretty quickly lost tabs on them, but did know what to “look for”, so to speak. 

However, this attempt was never linked up with the information the Empire had on Ryss, mainly because too much time had passed and no one knew to bridge the info.

Anyways. All three Zoidians were aware there were differences between themselves and humans, Hiltz more than most. Hiltz was the only one of them that had an adult level of knowledge from Zoidian times. Fiona and Ryss were literal children and were only ever, at best, taught the very basics about things. Part and parcel of subscribing wholesale to the we’re-the-best group’s newsletter, Hiltz also a keen interest in biology/related, obviously interested in scholars of that group’s discussion on what amounted to Zoidian eugenics. ‘we’re the best, and here’s why.’ Hiltz didn’t even remotely consider that humans and Zoidians could hybridize, nor was he interested in finding out. (though he had well-established to Prozen and the Imperial scientists his “ownership” of Ryss and the fact she was not to be messed with, I’m sure he had to mindfuck and/or sic Ambient on a swath of folks to get them to stop bothering him about jizzing in a cup.)***

Joke’s on him because he fathered *at least* these three: 

while living in the small colony with the scholar. 

because he, Hiltz, the weird guy, was hot, amazing in bed, and quite DTF.   scholar: ...   Hiltz:  (ツ) scholar: ... Hiltz:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  scholar: ...sure, whatever, what could it hurt anyways ^^^THESE FOLKS HAD A TIME. Unlike with Ryss’s kids, who at least had a slight understanding they were different and some guidance on the situation, any and all of Hiltz’s offspring HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON. And not that any of the fertility restrictions were enacted at this point in time (there’s wars, you live in the wild west, please have kids), but the addition of Zoidian into the mix fucks the inbuilt population-control-genetic-engineering-bullshit straight up, which resulted later in a lot of confusing surprises for people annnnnd is part of why miscarriages became common later down the line. 

Nobody expected the spanish inquisition weird side-species fuckery. Nobody even knows to look! By NC0 times there’s just starting to be coherent, unified inquiry into the various vanilla-human mutations running around.

WHOOPS THO: Backdraft & Co have been at this shit for a while and already know a lot about this. Because they have a hard-on for the Empire and a lot of OG Backdraft are basically really rich, bitter offspring from Imperial families who think they’re better in just about every way. Including genetically. When Backdraft became predominantly a moneymaking, black-market, illegal-battling underground enterprise, a rift began and never stopped growing. Backdraft has a strong preference for recruiting folks of Guylos descent (hi, Bit), but in recent memory had stopped turning people away for not being so. Because money.  It did kinda...  go in peoples’ file though.  In the game of historical telephone, Ryss (and Raven’s) bloodline were more or less demoted to the same: ‘from Guylos.’  Alteil was in range of figuring a few important things out. Unfortunately, HE DED. His successor with this information is Layon.  Surely nothing can go wrong there. ANYWAYS. A massive and valid concern Ryss had was what would happen with hybrid offspring, since to her knowledge her kid would be the first. Hiltz’s were already adults, they were fine. They were better than fine, they just needed a lot more water and salt than everyone else. So, as we all know, Hiltz uh, actually succeeded in removing a sizable chunk of the human population on Zi. Once everyone had scraped semi-functional society back together, the powers that-were-to-be basically prioritized secure settlements and making everyone feel safe so... you know, they’d have kids. Important for the whole rebuilding society thing.   The Zoidian offspring became slightly more statistically relevant during this time, because them and potentially even their kids had all been scared shitless and fled into the hills from the Death Stinger bullshit long before anyone else had. Once there they were good at Not Dying In General, because they had a variety of inexplicable abilities and were just WELL I’M A FREAK BUT I’M ALIVE SO, YOU KNOW, WE’RE COOL. 

Greater than zero chance that someone started a cult. Very, very obviously: these folks knew to keep to themselves. Though the original offspring and their mother had NO idea what was going on, over time any kids at least had fair warning, and knew to keep oddity to themselves. When the most blatant expressions of things were bred out, only the subtle but strongly expressed items remained, discussion of familial strangeness subsided.  Then you’re left with people like Brad who can basically see in the dark, but thinks everyone can see in the dark, it’s no big deal right?    RELATED, BUT NOT: This is technically a spoiler, but not really, because I’m not sure this actually “plays into the plot” so much as it is just “a fact of the plot” annnnnd I sort of want/need to explain this a little because it’s related to all of this.  In this hc, the Zoid Eve is a metaphorical hyper-simplification of ‘resources.’

Back in Zoidian times, some scholars - namely those aligned with the group(s) Hiltz was eventually born into - theorized that the Zoid Eve’s power was not an infinite resource as many believed, but actually an incredibly finite one. Not in the sense of it being used up, but the sense of “there are only ‘100′ of these, there will only ever be ‘100′ of these, we cannot add to or take away from this”  (sidenote: I subscribe to the idea that the Zoid Eve was some kind of supernaturally-occurring power source that the Zoidians shaped into what everyone now calls the Zoid Eve. They did this so long ago that its origins became unclear; beliefs from various groups ran the gamut from “LITERALLY GOD” to “it was built by us”)   The power of it gave life and longevity not only to all Zoids but them too. And it seemed that the more individuals there were, the smaller the “slice of the pie” they received. They began to project apocalyptic futures in which the “slices” were so small that death ran rampant, and Big War would be inevitable. Obviously, nobody wanted this. But unfortunately the group who theorized this also started a huge, lengthy campaign to reduce the population, which - after many years, a lot of societal sabotage and and many smaller conflicts between groups - eventually culminated in ongoing, wholesale slaughter, which led to the big Zoidian-apocalypse nonsense that we’re all familiar with. Cool story bro, right? Well, y’see, those ancient scholars weren’t wrong, though. To an extent that’s actually what led to the hyper-concentration of strength in the DSaurer/DScorpion battle, and why Zero and One are functionally god-tier Organoids. But what this means in modern times, is that the remaining Zoidians - and to a proportionately-relevant extent, the hybrid offspring - are the only remaining folks (besides the Organoids and Zoids) benefiting from the pie anymore. Ryss is the last Zoidian; she’s basically non-aging at this point. 

First-gen hybrids? Aging at a complete snail’s pace.  Second gen? Still having a very strange time. So on and so forth... Can they die? Absolutely, but it’s pretty hard to kill them.  Basically only complete destruction of vital parts works. Does this also apply to Organoids and Zoids? Absolutely. “then why’s Fiona dead” Because the double-bond with Zeke seriously fucked her up. Van dragged her down, hard. “but-”  Zeke could’ve pulled away from her at any time and she would’ve lived. Been a nutcase probably, but lived. She suspected it, Zeke was outright in denial; she never called him on it because she cared about him too much and didn’t want him blaming himself for whatever happened. This is what Ryss suspected/understood as well, and likewise didn’t want to break Zeke. “wait, what about zeke?” HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM IN CLOSING: I don’t have names for any of the offspring discussed here, but I have thought about the appearances/other stuff. Obviously. I’ve never specified how many original offspring(s) were running around. But it couldn’t have been too many. So anyone in NC0 times related to either Ryss or Hiltz can trace back to ^^^the folks pictured above, most likely.  I actually have no idea how to properly calculate the amount of population vs how much impact a handful of reproducing individuals would have over x generations. So please excuse vagueness there, as I’m both open to adjusting that number when/if it becomes feasible to do so, and also don’t think it’s terribly necessary to have this information nailed down because let’s be real nobody cares and that’s a lot of work. Also as I’ve mentioned before, there’s several serious confounding factors here: -these people can LIVE A LONG TIME. The original hybrids and their kids ARE POTENTIALLY STILL ALIVE. They mature relatively rapidly, but then coast into a very slow aging process. That means that - especially the males - could still technically be producing offspring.  -that makes my head hurt and makes figuring out lineages stupid nightmare mode. so don’t expect me to actually do that because I’m not sure how to. The main Facts(tm) you need are:  Sara is 4th gen. Vega is 5th gen x2. Brad is 5th gen. Stoller is 7th gen.

that’s the important part, okay.  (*’s from earlier: )  *tl;dr the bizarre situation they’d inadvertently created with Zeke wreaked havoc on Fiona’s ability to reproduce. Conversely, Raven and Ryss *almost* had a ‘proper’ setup, so Ryss was fine. Nobody knew this. **Ryss figured this out with Fiona’s help - and who did they both go to, to ask in confidence?

Yep. ”isn’t he-” YEP. ***The Empire knows next to nothing about Hiltz. The Republic, however has AN OBSCENE AMOUNT of information about him. Difficulty level? The data was both classified, and never really tied back to him. Because Hiltz murdered the scholar and burned down his house/lab, the connecting information was all lost. The scholar had moved the material to his house in secret, due to fears of an Imperial spy in their research facility - he was telling Hiltz the truth.   The most that the Empire ever learned at that time was that the Republic had “captured” a Zoidian (Hiltz), and that was about it. This drove the fervor which led to them grabbing at the Republic’s continued excavations - eg what happened with Shadow, and presumably them attacking (and IMO, overpowering) the Republic group that’d also seized Ryss.   Before Hiltz became involved, Imperial scientists gleaned a lot about Ryss, but as I’ve mentioned before, she wasn’t treated anywhere nearly as poorly as Hiltz had been. She also had Specula, which helped a lot.  So, the Empire knew nothing of Hiltz, but a lot about Ryss.  Thanks to Alteil and his predecessor’s longstanding obsession with the Imperial military, Backdraft has almost all of the Imperial military’s data from the past few centuries.  Ergo...

[starkrevolution]

Detroit: Become Human

Detroit: Become Human is absolutely brilliant, and frankly it deserves to be buried in mountains of awards. I'm not even going to get started on the environments, the scores, the costumes, the acting, or the way the gameplay begins very restrictive and becomes freer as your characters do. 

I’ve just been dying to make a list of SOME of the many, many, many references to historical/political/social events established in the game. I threw them all under the cut because it’s basically just a long list of me incoherently rambling. It’s in no particular order, and it’s lacking in research or cited sources. This is just the list of things I picked up on when I was playing. There’s definitely far more referenced in the game than what I’ve observed so far.

French Revolutionary Wars — Markus and the androids marching, planting the flag

Detroit's post-Motor City drug epidemic — Todd and red ice use

The Holocaust markings — androids wearing band and triangle

The demand to surrender a state, usually Texas — Markus' speech

Most dictatorships do it in some form, but the Soviet Union had a real penchant for killing its own agents when their job was done as it made them a liability — Connor RK800 replaced by RK900

Media bias — one-sided news narrative in support of the State

African American Spiritual — Luther singing Hold On

Mass graves — Markus climbing out of the pit

Corrupt political state - President Warren manipulating the narrative

Police state — androids violently attacked even when they try to march and demonstrate peacefully, non-violently

Black Lives Matter — like, close your eyes, throw a dart, and whatever you land on will probably be relevant to the BLM movement, but especially the CyberLife store break-in scene

Domestic abuse — Kara doing anything necessary to protect her child, Alice, from an abuser

Fleeing to Canada to escape slavery — Kara, Alice, Luther

Slavers posing as allies to capture slaves — Zlatko

Labeling Theory — criminalizing the self-aware androids by labeling them as deviants

The Industrial Revolution, job loss — over-arching theme of replacing skilled workers with machines

Depression, grief, suicide — Hank

Turing test/Uncanny Valley — Chloe

"The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in their control..." — Kamski

The "better treatment" of the house slave versus the field slave — Markus' life with Carl when compared to the lives of the other members of Jericho

"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." — The over-arching themes behind the bonds each of the main android characters make throughout the game.

Peter the apostle of Christ, the rock — Simon

Joshua, the assistant to Moses — Josh

Polaris, the guiding star — North

Sex trafficking, criminalization and devaluation of sex work — Eden Club

Underground Railroad — Rose and Adam

Honour suicides — androids killing themselves to protect Jericho

Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who led a revolt (who was in fact a real person, but is often symbolized and best remembered by the fictional "I Am Spartacus" line from the 1960 film) — Markus/RA9, Everyone who fights for freedom is RA9. They are all RA9.

Religion, salvation, saviour — RA9, Markus, Connor, etc

Tearing down Confederate/Columbus statues (or statues in general) — Markus destroying the android statue outside CyberLife

The preacher near the paint store reminds me of someone but I can't pin down who so feel free to throw your thoughts out there.

The sociological implications and moral decisions you encounter while playing are heart-breaking and challenging. DBH will definitely make you reflect on yourself and your beliefs, regardless of your existing stance.

There are a million other magnificent references and nuances, but these are the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. I may add more as I continue to play and replay this game. Forgive the barely coherent information dump, but I want to yell about this game from the top of a building somewhere and I don't think QuanticDream has enough time on their hands to listen to me blather on.

I'm not being even remotely facetious when I say that this video game is an absolute masterpiece, and a great way to start discussions about really serious topics. I play it on SharePlay one-on-one with a friend two to three times a week in two-hour sessions, and she's gone from saying "Oh, the Holocaust markings are cringy" to "Wait, when you said Luther was singing a Spiritual, what do you mean? What's a Spiritual? Kamski just said something about a Turing test—what's that? Why is everyone on red ice? What do you mean it's like Detroit in the 70s? What happened in the 70s?"

Detroit: Become Human should be required homework for gamers everywhere.

[quintessence-sentimentalist]

Kind of related to cartoon Will and Matt, but I was wondering if you had an opinion on the decision the show made to have Matt be the one to turn into Shagon and then stick around with the girls afterward helping to fight evil? (I honestly thought it was pretty cool, but also really weird at the same time, like where the heck did that idea come from?)

Give me reasons to blather about cartoon WxM

Hey anon? I appreciate you for bringing up my favorite adaptational change in the animated series. As such, things are going to get long. Unfortunately, my Read More STILL doesn’t seem to be working, so it’s going to take up a lot of space.

EDIT: Looks like it’s finally working! Remainder of the reply is below.

We’ll go more in-depth into my feelings in a moment, but first, I actually have something of an answer as to how Matt-Shagon even became a thing! I asked this very question of Greg Weisman a couple years ago, and he responded. The answer is linked, but I’m still adding it below:

It’s all very vague now, but as I recall, there seemed to be some mystery over who Shagon really was in the comics, mystery that never was revealed nor paid off. So I slotted Matt into that role, to make the mystery pay off and to give Will the maximum amount of turbulence.

I can see where he’s coming from - comics Shagon, though he had a much smaller role, was still the strongest of Nerissa’s Knights and pretty intimidating, perhaps because of his nature as the only human-based minion (twisted far beyond his humanity). We do briefly see human Shagon both pre-transformation and when Nerissa drains him of her power, but we never actually see his face, which is obscured by his snow gear or just not at the right angle to be captured on-page. All we know is he’s a geologist out looking for his dog in a snowstorm, who’s about to unknowingly stumble into a story of revenge.

I’d understand the anonymity if they were trying to go for more of a “Shagon represents the dark side of humanity and could be anyone” feel, but the narrative tells us just enough about him (and shows us his coworkers - whose faces can clearly be seen, thus presenting a jarring comparison) that it feels like there’s more to that story. Why make such a big deal about concealing his face and name if he’s not going to show up in human form and try to get close to the unknowing girls and unsuspecting readers? 

(And OH. Now that I just got onto this train of thought, do you know what happens in issue #18, subsequent to Shagon’s first appearance? 

Enter Eric Lyndon.

And wouldn’t that have been a prime storyline. I’m not saying we should have had Eric-Shagon, but Red Herring Eric would have been fascinating. Because really, new guy comes to town and wins over Hay Lin just like that - when she’s never shown any interest in a relationship in the previous 17 issues - combined with the increasing threat of Nerissa and her most important minion in the girls’ everyday lives? You’d think that Eric’s appearance might raise some eyebrows, within the story or with the readers alone. I love Eric and HL x E, but seriously… this goes up there with New Power Eric on the “Massive Missed Opportunities” shelf.)

But! Back to the animated series and Matt-Shagon. For real, this decision is a major reason why I love the cartoon as much as I do. So let’s delve into the why.

First, I think it was a really intriguing spin that made sense with cartoon Matt’s characterization, because he’s notably different from even early comics Matt. He’s not the cool older rocker boy that Will kind of puts on a pedestal and who seems to like her too (though those feelings are largely developed off-screen); cartoon Matt is more of a peer - still something of a cool rocker boy, but one who turns into an endearingly awkward dork when faced with the equally-cool-and-dorky girl he likes. Even when he finds out about the Guardians - much earlier than in the comics - it’s more on his own terms. Cartoon Matt doesn’t find out because he’s been duped into a trap and caught in the crossfire, but because he actively chooses to run screaming through a portal after the girls. Similarly, he chooses to stay with Will despite her duties, chooses to help in the (original) final battle against Phobos even though he’s completely untrained, chooses to go to Caleb for said training and join in on missions, etc.

It was only a matter of time for consequences from his decisions to help and be involved in Guardian work to catch up to him. Not even his best intentions could protect Matt from others’ worst forever.

That brings me to my second point, which is relevant to Greg’s explanation: this storyline is part of why I so vehemently love animated WxM, because of the impact on their relationship. Matt only becomes Shagon because Nerissa knows what he means to Will (I mean, she lures him into her trap by disguising herself as Will). She’s not looking to convert Matt to her side, to get any information about the Guardians out of him or even just send him back as her (enthralled or even completely unwitting) eyes and ears. Instead, she takes this boy and twists him into the terrifying antithesis of what he once was: the Keeper of the Heart’s love interest is now the object of (and fueled by) her hatred.

And really, the Shagon and Will dynamic is a thing of eerie beauty. I’m going to need to rewatch “M is for Mercy” after this, seriously. Shagon fights the other Guardians, much like Will fights the other Knights of Destruction, but they still very much only have eyes for each other, like a distorted and dangerous reflection of WxM’s connection. While we as viewers know that Shagon = Matt, we don’t find out until later on that Shagon exists as a separate entity and Matt’s just trapped in his own mind, so this dynamic reads in two ways, depending on this knowledge. From a rewatch/post-”S is for Self” reveal standpoint, this is Shagon’s way of toying with both Will and Matt. He’s making a mockery of their relationship, openly acknowledging that he’s “disguised” as Matt (rather than concealing his identity) and telling Will that he’s done something to Matt to needle into her protectiveness; meanwhile, Matt can only watch as his girlfriend directs intense emotion towards him, but it’s not love. When Will shows mercy and offers to help Shagon reach the goodness she can see in him, he balks because this presents a veritable threat to his existence.

But if we decide to look at this without the knowledge from “S” (or consider that maybe Matt and Shagon were initially fused and only split into separate beings as time went on), the dynamic comes across as an unconscious recreation of their existing relationship, just turned darkly upside-down. That moment of weakness at Will’s mercy might have been Matt breaking through the magic just a bit. 

All the pain amounts to something in the end, which makes these two an infinitely stronger, epic couple. By the time “S” rolls around, Will is still deeply entrenched in her hatred of Shagon and we learn the consequences of this continuing, as Shagon is fueling up to wipe out both Will and Matt entirely. But the moment Matt breaks through enough to sing out to Will, her hatred immediately shuts off in order to call Matt back to her - her, ahem, will to love is far greater than her motive to hate.

(I’ve mentioned this before, but this is beautifully paralleled in “Z is for Zenith,” with Matt instead being the one to call Will back to her humanity. I am a sap.)

I do very much love that Matt got to re-power and claim Shagon’s form as his own by becoming a Regent of Earth, though I do have a couple quibbles - first of which being really, couldn’t he have at least had some modifications to the Shagon form, to truly call the transformation his own? I do think it would have been fun to see more of powerless Matt joining up on missions again, now armed with new skills and battle knowledge. We only got one episode between him being freed of Shagon and ascending to Regency - this being the ever-amazing “T is for Trauma” - which to me is hardly any time at all to readjust to being back in control before regaining those powers. Granted, we were at season’s end and it was unlikely that they’d show Matt trying to cope with what happened, but still…

I’m going to stop here because I’ve already talked much too long for one sitting, but in short: Matt-Shagon is fantastic and I am always down to ramble on it even more that I already have.

[peachdoxie]

Saw your dragon prince ask the other day and it got me wondering. Do you think binge-watching culture (via streaming, e.g. Netflix) has changed the way people get emotionally invested in TV series?

My gut answer was to say yes.

HOWEVER

The issue with an answer of “yes, binge watching has changed emotional investment” is that the rise of streaming does not exist in a vacuum. It coincides with a lot of other things that makes isolating any specific thing as the “cause” of a given change literally impossible and incredibly reductive to do.

Please know that I am NOT a historian of television, so there are certain points where I have to speculate and generalize. I'm basing this answer on my knowledge of the film industry and the general principle that technology, media, and culture all exist in a symbiotic relationship and change in one has an impact on the other two.

Also, when I talk about “accessibility” I am not using it in the context of disability, but instead in the context of large populations, ie, not the elites who can afford anything. While changes in  disabled accessibility do impact technology and media developments, it's not part of this response and I'm not the right person to talk about it.

It is true that online streaming has radically changed how accessible media is for basically everyone. It's cheaper and easier, in general, to watch TV shows and movies. People are no longer restricted to watching stuff just in a theater or when it's on the TV, but can access it anywhere they have an internet connection. Watching whatever media is no longer strained by either schedule or physical location. It is far easier than literally any other time in history to binge TV shows.

However, the ability to binge watch and the bingeability of TV shows has not always been possible, and the two have evolved together. TV shows of the distant past, recent past, and present often follow a non-continuous storyline from episode to episode so that it's easier to watch any random episode and understand generally what's going on without having to have watched every single episode. Hence the “monster of the week” narrative form, and why there are discussions about Steven Universe filler episodes vs seasonal narrative arc episodes. It's also why, if you get an episode starting with the “previously on” prologue, you know shit's about to go down. It's mostly so that the casual viewer to pick the show up on reruns instead of the fan who knows the release schedule and watches every episode when it premieres, though their impact is important too. I know that TV viewership numbers on premieres are really important in the television industry and have an impact on what gets made and what doesn't and what kind of ads are shown and on and on.

Again, I'm not a TV historian, so I can't give you exact specifics, and it's important to know that changes in media follow trends, not linear cause-and-effect lines. What I'm giving is a generalization of these trends as I know of them, but there's a lot of overlap in how industries change over time and none of it happens at once. Keep this in mind when reading what I say next.

The addition of season/series narratives to TV is related to changes in technology and accessibility. As TV units became cheaper to buy, more people bought them, which meant more development into their technology by the industry. And as TV became easier to produce and distribute, production companies had to come up with new ways to draw in audiences. All of these things and a thousand other factors in technology, media, and culture changed how people watched TV and thus changed how it was made. This is likely part of the reason why seasonal/series narrative arcs in TV developed and became popular. Granted, people have been sluts for long media sagas since like, ever, so that's relevant as well. Producers know that's popular, so they start making it, it's kind of a chicken and egg thing.

The thing is, though, is that the growth of large-scale streaming sites didn't just suddenly cause the rise in binge watching. While I don't think it was called “binge watching” until very recently, I'd argue that people have been able to binge things before the rise of streaming sites. In my experience, it used to be a “marathon” of TV watching. Home entertainment has existed for decades in the forms of DVD and VHS and various other formats before streaming became popular. TV channels had and still have lengthy marathons of shows in chronological order for people to watch, and that's been around for a long time. And while I know very little about the specifics of underground fandom distribution networks, I do know that pirating and sharing has always been a concern for official distributors. If there were underground fanfiction networks sharing fics on thumbdrives and on obscure websites, which I do know existed, certainly similar networks existed for pirated TV shows. And online streaming existed for a while before it became really popular.

So it's not like people haven't been able to “binge” TV before the rise of online streaming. For a while now, it's been possible to binge watch TV shows. It's just way easier now. This is where I do know a little bit more about the television industry because online streaming is something discussed in depth in my Master's program because the same things that Netflix, etc, are doing with TV they're doing with film, and I've also lived through these changes and experienced them personally. I'm going to talk mostly about Netflix because they're the most well-known and prolific online streaming service at the moment, and they've also been around since the 90s, but most of this applies to all streaming services as well.

Netflix began as an online rental company for DVDs in the late 90s, following a similar model to Blockbuster and the fledgling Amazon, but only online and only for DVDs, which were a very new technology. Over time, they acquired more and more content and grew in usership. The company has been pretty aggressive at staying at the top of collection and technology, and so when streaming began to come into popularity, largely because of YouTube, they followed that route quickly. And because Netflix is always looking for new business opportunities to grow their popularity, the company also moved into the distribution sector of entertainment. Instead of just being based in home entertainment, they began becoming the primary distributors of certain titles.

A bit of background: I don't know exactly how the TV industry works when it comes to distribution, but I do know well how the movie industry works in that respect, and I am guessing that there are a lot of similarities between the two. The lifetime of a movie roughly follows the pattern of Production -> Acquisition -> Theatrical Exhibition -> Home Entertainment Exhibition. Distribution companies are the liaisons between the production companies and theatrical exhibition companies, with “acquisition” being the step where distribution companies fight over who gets to purchase the rights to distribute the film in theaters. Home entertainment mostly refers to physical copies of the film in the form of DVD, Blu-ray, and Video on Demand, though it also can sometimes include online streaming if a movie is added to an online streaming service at some point after its theatrical exhibition window is over. (Terminology is shifting a lot in the chaos of the film industry because of companies like Netflix, so definitions are muddled a lot.) It's likely that TV is very similar, except that instead of a theatrical distribution, it has a television distribution instead.

Netflix becoming the primary distributor of TV shows is where the single biggest change happened in relation to the question of “Do you think binge-watching culture has changed the way people get emotionally invested in TV series?” because it impacted how production companies made TV shows. As streaming grew more popular, production companies made distribution deals with Netflix so that original content would be distributed solely through Netflix. And this is where all of my background information and blathering about technology, media, and culture being interrelated comes into play. Making shows whose original mode of exhibition is online, on-demand streaming means that it no longer needs to be understandable from anyone who random turns it on, because it's only going to be watched in chronological order. It is designed to be binge watched, which changes the way the narrative flows. Shows that are designed for streaming tend to have very tight narratives without a lot of filler. The narratives can and do focus more on in-depth character building, world building, conflict, all that type of stuff that's downplayed in TV shows designed for reruns on an actual television channel.

In truth, shows made for streaming are actually designed to maximize emotional investment because it keeps people watching. In the age of the internet, there's so much content for people to choose between that getting and keeping someone's attention has to involve their investment somehow. And creating emotional investment is one of the easiest ways to do that.

It is extremely difficult to give a yes or no answer to the question at hand because identifying cause and effect is nearly if not completely impossible. Has there been a change in how people get emotionally invested in TV series? That, I believe, is true. Is binge watching culture the catalyst for that change? That's much more difficult to say. I'd almost go so far as to argue that high emotional investment is an intrinsic part of binge watching culture, but the truth is that I'm not knowledgeable enough to defend that statement entirely. And did binge watching culture come from changes in emotional investment that the industry reacted to, or did the industry notice emerging trends and adjust their shows accordingly? It's highly likely, actually, that it's both working alongside each other, and alongside a bunch of other factors as well.

Now, there are a few other things that I need to add to this answer to address the entire situation. I discussed mostly shows that are designed for online streaming and therefore binge watching. I don't know for sure how emotional investment would be different watching a show like The Office, for example, live/on reruns vs in a binge session. Obviously, there's a degree of emotional investment in any given TV show shown on a TV channel. Why else would people keep choosing to watch the same show, out of all the options being played at the same time and out of all the possible things to be doing? Emotional investment works alongside curiosity, but humans are also creatures of habit. That likely plays some role as well. But how that differs when someone's binging it instead of watching weekly or on reruns? Or how habits of binging Netflix originals impact how we watch non-streaming-designed shows? I don't know for sure. I think to answer those questions would involve a far larger evaluation of people's viewing preferences than I'm capable of. Someone may have done it. It's quite possible that relevant data exists and just needs to be compiled. Granted, the people who have that data are production and distribution companies, and they are notoriously bad at sharing that data with anyone who's not in the need-to-know.

It also depends on what type of TV show is being watched. Rachael Ray's cooking show is very different from NCIS which is very different from Teen Mom in terms of viewership populations and viewership patterns, just like the Dragon Prince is very different from Daredevil which is very different from the Ted Bundy Tapes. It's not a one-size-fits-all situation, and the things that draw people to different shows are going to be for different reasons.

And, of course, there's the impact of social media to consider. While fandoms - or, at the very least, groups of people devoted to a piece of media - have existed for millennia, the internet and massive social media sites have made it so much easier to connect with other fans of content, which certainly impacts the level of emotional investment when you're able to build up the hype with other people instead of by yourself. The rise of streaming has been fairly contiguous with the rise of massive social media websites because of the technological developments that enabled them to exist. It's likely that there's a large overlap between people who use social media a lot and people who stream things a lot. I think it's impossible to ignore the role that social media plays in encouraging people to stream a show on Netflix because of fandom culture. And also because of marketing on social media. We can't ignore the impact that marketing plays, which again is days that production and distribution companies have but won't release outside of their company.

I hope this has answered your question, anon, or at least given you an insight to how complicated studying the entertainment industry is.

Sources: I didn't actually do any research on this topic, but instead pulled from things I've learned in my undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as things learned personal experience. Specifically, from an anthropology class on the entertainment industry where I wrote a research paper on YouTube and its effects on franchised movie trailers; my three-class film history sequence; various topics from media theory; several presentations I've heard at conferences regarding the history of television; a course on the intersection between art, media, and technology; every class I've taken in my Master's program, which is about film distribution and marketing; articles and comments I've read on Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Wikipedia, and news sources that talk about media history; and lots and lots of practice in making connections between culture, media, and technology.

[businessinstantmessaging-blog]

10 Ideas For Using Instant Messaging For Business

An occasional laugh stresses the silence. Yet nobody is chatting. They are interacting with each other practically solely with instant messaging (IM).

A modern technology designed initially for individually personal chats has gotten to the work environment. Several business individuals are choosing text-based Instant Messaging over call and email. They like its immediacy and efficiency in getting real-time info from companions, suppliers and also associates working from another location.

Instant messaging is essentially the message version of a call. At businesses huge as well as little, a growing number of individuals are using it to connect. For numerous, it serves as a backstop for e-mail issues and also other emergency situations-- witness the spikes in usage after the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults.

The Wall Street Journal keeps in mind that even more than 100 million people are now sending instant messages. In a record, "IM: The Resting Titan," innovation specialist Gartner Group forecasts that by 2005, instant messaging will exceed email as the key online interactions tool.

That said, IM will certainly benefit services that operate in teams or on jobs greater than it will certainly many stores, independent experts and others. That's because IM improves partnership, however does not provide itself to opening new relationships. Nonetheless, in addition to the possibilities for time as well as cost financial savings, there are risks as well as disadvantages to its usage.

Do adopt an individual policy for business instant messaging. If you're a proprietor, your workers require to know whether you view instant messaging as a proper vehicle to connect with, claim, customers or business partners. Any plan needs to include at the very least general standards for its usage. You may not think this is very important-- unless you understand the tale regarding the hedge fund supervisor that created a significant commotion by purportedly making use of IM to spread unreliable rumours concerning a publicly traded software company. (Word obtained out, the software program company's supply plunged, and the bush fund manager and his firm entered some serious problem.).

Do not utilize instant messaging to connect personal or sensitive info. Take a lesson from the above example. If your business is in business of giving professional recommendations regarding stocks, finances, medicine or regulation, possibilities are it's not smart to do so through instant messaging. IM is much better suited to fast details concerning project status, meeting times, or a person's location.

Do organise your call checklists to separate business get in touches with from family and good friends. Make certain your employees do the same. Get rid of even the remote opportunity that a social contact could be included in a business conversation with a companion or customer-- or vice versa. MSN Carrier [link] lets you arrange your calls very carefully.

Do not allow extreme personal messaging at the workplace. Yes, you make individual telephone call at the workplace, send personal emails, and also enable your staff members to do the very same. Yet you urge them to keep it to a minimum as well as (with any luck) do the exact same yourself. For instant messaging go even additionally. Prompt that personal chats be done throughout breaks or the lunch hr-- or that the chats generate new clients or revenue to business.

Do realize that instantaneous messages can be conserved. You might think IM is great due to the fact that you can allow your guard down, make vibrant declarations, upbraid an employer, employee or associate, as well as have everything wiped far from the record when you are done. What you aren't realising is that one of the celebrations to your discussion can copy and also paste the whole conversation onto a note pad or Word document. Some IM services enable you to archive whole messages. Be cautious what you claim, much like you would certainly in an email.

Don't jeopardize your firm's responsibility, or your very own track record. The courts may still be figuring out where instant messages stand in terms of libel, libel and other lawful considerations. It's most likely that any kind of declarations you make about other individuals, your firm or various other firms probably aren't mosting likely to land you in court. But they might damage your credibility or integrity. Be mindful what you claim.

Do understand virus infections and also relevant safety and security risks. The majority of IM solutions permit you to move files with your messages. Alexis D. Gutzman, a writer and also eBusiness specialist, says her current study for a book located that IM data accessories bring infections pass through firewall programs much more conveniently than e-mail accessories. "Immediate messages [carrying viruses] will run and also dip right into a firewall program till they locate an opening," she states. You would certainly be smart to discover even more concerning the high quality of your very own firewall security, to choose whether or not to limit transferring data with IM.

Do not share personal data or information with IM. Even if you have the utmost trust in the person or individuals you are messaging, including individual information you prefer to keep confidential (like a contact number) is not a great suggestion. That's due to the fact that the text of your chat is relayed via a server en course to your contact. "If any individual is on the connection and also can see that web traffic, they can see the individual information," claims Chris Mitchell, lead program supervisor with MSN Messenger. Not likely, perhaps. Yet it's much better to send out such info through an encrypted e-mail, or not in any way.

Do maintain your instant messages simple and also to the factor, as well as know when to say goodbye. Just how you ought to make use of IM is hard to specify. Kneko Burney, supervisor of eBusiness study at Cahners In-Stat Team, favors it merely for seeing if an associate is at his/her desk, readily available for an in-person or phone call. "It resembles looking into somebody's office." Gutzman, on the other hand, sees IM as a method to do fast research and also obtain fast information from consultants and also lawyers. She recently used IM in looking into a book, conserving whole messages in her individual archives. Both concur, however, that you need to restrict your questions, specify as soon as possible, and also prevent unneeded blather. "With instant messaging, you do not require a great deal of pleasantries," Gutzman claims. "I virtually can claim, 'Exactly how's it going?' and afterwards get on with my inquiry.".

Don't confuse your contacts with a misleading customer name or status. IM individual names, like email individual names, should be regular throughout your business. As well as individuals ought to do the thanks to updating their standing throughout the day, so get in touches with know whether they are readily available for messages.

[destiny-smasher]

Kingdom Hearts 3 impressions

So, uh, I will ONLY be talking about stuff up until the very start of the second World, and only AFTER the break. Kingdom Hearts 1 was an incredibly important and influential piece of media when I was growing up. I was writing fic based on Smash Bros. just before KH rolled onto the scene was like, “Yo, Disney and Final Fantasy, BAM, fuckin’ random? fucking RADDDD” and I was all about it. You had FF characters remixed with OCs remixed with Disney characters, and the villains were all crossing over to form the League of Bad Cartoons, it was a great time. And then Nomura realized his gamble was a win and decided to waste the next 15 years of everyone’s time shoving in every trope he liked, every IDEA that felt “cool” together into a mish mash of whatever the hell this “narrative” has become. Suffice it to say, I’ve got beef with Kingdom Hearts as a “story.” It just occurred to me today that a big part of this is thematic/tonal.

But it’s also VERY rare, maybe even unprecedented, for a piece of media like Kingdom Hearts 3 to come around. For years, then months, then weeks, then days, I told myself, “It’s not real, that game doesn’t exist, I won’t believe it until I’m literally playing it” and just could not be bothered to be hype or interested, if only because Nomura’s “vision”, from my perspective, warped something I admired in my youth into a fucking train wreck, leaving me very little to feel emotionally invested in outside of Aqua and by proxy the two lads she is trying to protect. (also I GUESS I’m slightly invested in Axel/Xion/Roxas.../Namine? for similar reasons now that I think about it?) Well, guess what? Kingdom Hearts VERY WELL might be real, and I very well might be about three hours into it. And for all of the beef I have with the plot, I am fucking relieved that those three hours have felt/sounded good, as a video game. NOW we’re gonna talk about the first World. --

When I first heard that Olympus was gonna be the first World in KH3 I was disappointed and BAFFLED. We’re visiting that place a THIRD time? And why THAT World? Turns out, there’s actually some substantial thematic relevance and that’s actually A-OK, not to mention that starting with a familiar world after ALL OF THIS TIME is not such a bad way to kick things off. First off, structurally, I actually really enjoyed the way this world played out. Two of my biggest problems with KH as a video game series have been that worlds feel like empty, vacant, haunted houses, and that said worlds are usually small and linear with a lot of pointless backtracking. Olympus fixes all of this. There are NPCs. Actual fucking PEOPLE in this world. Sure, they’re just people in danger, calling for help, but they’re THERE for once! And they have vocies! EVERY line of dialogue (except for like one “plot” moment) has actually been voiced so far! About time. Also. This World is not as linear as most KH Worlds. In fact, it help more open and dynamic than ANY World in any KH game so far, not to mention it featured three, THREE (wtf) unique and distinct types of settings. The city, the mountain, and Olympus. Nice. ALSO also. The music. We’ve been here before. We KNOW that Olympus theme from earlier games. And as you traverse the city, up the mountain, you hear this more sweeping, movie-like version, and it’s like “oh whoa nice” aaaaand then you get TO Olympus and it KICKS in, the old song, up to modern snuff. That was great. That was a thing that really helped convey “Kingdom Hearts is back, baby.” The World was big, compared to typical KH worlds. It had multiple nooks and crannies to explore, side-paths to go down, treasure to find hidden away. There is a LOT of verticality. Running up walls and seamlessly hopping over things in the environment makes traversal more enjoyable than it ever has been. Even though a lot of the World is technically a linear path it’s not structured like a path. Going off and exploring rewards you with items and the like, and the World is big enough to actually feel like you have places to poke around in. Having said this, WHY is there no...map? Like. You literally COLLECT Maps from Chests like you used to. But near as I can tell, there’s no way to pull up an actual MAP, to seer where the main path is, to see where the side paths are. It’s boggling. Maybe the game has the option hidden away somewhere but if so, that’s just silly. And if there’s just no actual map option at ALL that’s just...baffling. There were barely any load times for how much SPACE there was to navigate, and things looked very shiny and pretty, and ran at a smooth 60 fps MOST of the time. Tech specs aren’t everything, but when your brand is built on “looking pretty” it sure af helps when you bring scale AND a smooth framerate to match. It’s weird, and a bit jarring, sometimes in a good way, to see all of this stuff rendered in modern tech. Stuff looks...a little too plasticy a lot of the time, (which actually ought to pay off when we get to Toy Story?) but the environments so far feel rich and vast and detailed all at once in a way we just have never seen the series, because we’re basically jumping from PS2-level tech to PS4. So that difference in production is more noticeable for the wait -- I just wish things looked a bit more...I guess cel-shaded? Like the original trailer. Things (specifically, characters) look a little too flat/plasticy at times, for how pretty things are. Combat seems to be as flashy as ever and I’m sure I’ll feel differently as I get further in and unlock more options but it’s still too easy, simple, and mashy for my tastes. I am HOPING we get more moments that require quick reflexes and specific tactics like the harder moments of older KH games. The amusement rides mechanic is...weird. It’s given NO context in universe. And they last a little too long/feel too overpowered for how easy they are to utilize. Similarly, there are frequently seemingly random party-member tag-team attacks that...just seem like “press triangle to win” moves. I wish they entailed more interaction, and/or felt less common/random. I like the IDEA of these kinds of moves, especially ones that change your controls/method of attack for a few seconds (like Hercules’ team attack) but the execution makes them feel too cheap and easy to abuse, with combat that’s ALREADY skewing on the “too easy” side for the genre. I like the “form change” for keyblades, and that you can swap keyblades in the middle of a fight. Really hoping this allows for some good tactical stuff later -- buuuuut that would also require the game to ASK OF ME to do more than “mash X,” which KH as a brand typically does not do... Characters SPEAK in reaction to gameplay moments, when you initiate things in the environment, etc. It’s a nice touch that makes them feel more like characters in an RPG. Donald and Goofy are ALWAYS in the party, alongside the Disney member(s). NICE. Maybe KH3 is putting its best foot forward, but overall, I was pleasantly surprised with Olympus. It single-handedly corrected MOST of the issues I’ve ever had with Kingdom Hearts level design. I only hope the momentum keeps going. Moving on, Gummi Ships. What little I played is easily the best they have every been. I love having an open world with optional places/fights to explore, while still giving me those shmup-like bursts of action. The Gummi Phone seems like a fun mechanic, and taking selfies/photos makes SENSE for this game because of how visually detailed it is -- but the pleasant surprise was how I took selfies with Donald and Goofy and they REACTED to it, starting to pose and commenting on it. On the other hand, the loading screen being nonsensical “social media” posts from KH characters...I don’t like it thanks go away. x’D I’ve spent only a few minutes in Twilight Town and INSTANTLY I am so much more enamored than I ever was in previous games. Not just due to the bump up in visual fidelity, but also because -- GASP -- NPCs??? Are you trying to tell me this is an actual TOWN that people LIVE IN?? Holy shit, Kingdom Hearts, I never knew! For all of this stuff I liked, though, KH3 is still...a KH game. Which means after you get through the intro, after you gear up to land in Olympus, the game flashes the title: “Kingdom Hearts II.9″ ...no. Just no. Fuck. Stop doing this shit. Whenever an Organization 13 member (or EX member) shows up and starts speaking all cocky in riddles like the flamboyant anime jackass they are, whenever Mickey starts dead-ass blathering about weird nonsense whenever the plot HAS to acknowledge “oh right Sora golly gawrsh ya FURRGOT this random bullshit a-FYUCK better shove this expository throwaway dialogue right in here before we go n’ furrget again!” whenever Kairi continues to be irrelevant and invisible after ALL THIS TIME whenever Rikku has to say some obligatory thing about his darkness or his copy of himself or Ansem or whatever whenever the plot informs Sorta/Dornold/Goffy about another convoluted ridiculous THING that we already know about and they MAYBE already know about because it is OBLIGATED to because this game’s entire purpose has become to “wrap things up already Nomura” I am reminded of the freshly opened scar on my heart from how much SHIT this series has dragged itself through for...what? Nothing worth all of this, IMO. Thankfully, these moments feel less and less pressing in KH3′s opening hours than they certainly could be, though I’m sure the closing hours of the game -- once they’ve tidily gotten all of that silly, inconsequential DISNEY CONTENT out of the way (even though that’s the BULK of the game environments and HALF of the series’ identity/purpose) -- those closing hours will surely be packed to the gills with all of this crazy crap. Maybe by then I might finally care enough to finally get the catharsis I’ve waited over a decade for. I dunno. I’m just relieved the game looks, plays, sounds, and feels as good as it does so far. EDIT: almost forgot to mention this since it hasn’t actually come up yet BUT I picked up a BUNCH of “ingredients”??? Like. FOR COOKING??? Which is one of my all-time favorite mechanics in a video game?? (thanks Paper Mario) So I’m at LEAST excited to see what THAT is all about.

[livewellnews]

ELON MUSK REVEALS JAW-DROPPING IGNORANCE ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY

Musk’s blathering illustrates how the people at the top of U.S. society just repeat what are essentially billionaire urban legends.

ON THURSDAY, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and — at current stock prices — the richest person in history, made the below pronouncement on Twitter. To most people it probably sounded alarming; however, the reality behind Musk’s words is not alarming at all. And the fact that Musk does not understand this makes it clear that he’s stupendously ignorant about the U.S. economy and entitlement programs:

Where did Musk get this $60 trillion number? What does it mean?

The first question can’t be answered definitively, since Musk didn’t say and didn’t respond when asked on Twitter. But you can be pretty sure that it originated from the government’s 2021 report on the status of Social Security, which stated that the program’s “unfunded obligation through the infinite horizon” in present-day dollars is $59.8 trillion.

That doesn’t mean Musk discovered this himself while thumbing through the report’s 270 pages. It’s more likely that he picked it up from the dozens of news stories that mentioned Social Security’s unfunded obligations when the report came out, or something like this blog post from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. Most likely of all is that he just heard it from somebody at a party.

In any case, the $60 trillion number is correct, and it certainly sounds scary. Sixty trillion dollars is a lot of money! As Musk says, that’s roughly three times the size of the U.S. economy, which was $23 trillion in 2021.

But if you understand what’s going on here, it’s not scary at all.

“Unfunded obligations” is the difference between Social Security’s current projected income and its current projected promised benefits. If these projections are correct, taxes will have to be raised by $60 trillion or benefits will have to be cut by that amount, or some combination of the two.

But then there’s the “through the infinite horizon” part. This means that $60 trillion is Social Security’s unfunded obligations between now and the end of time.

In other words, we don’t have to come up with $60 trillion right this second, as implied by Musk’s comparison to the present-day U.S. economy. We have an infinite amount of time to pay for this — or more conservatively, 5 billion years, when the sun will turn into a red giant and consume the Earth, at which point we’ll have bigger problems than Social Security.

The same government report that provides the $60 trillion number also gives us, on the same page, the cumulative projected gross domestic product for the U.S. through the infinite horizon. It’s $4,237 trillion. This means, as the report says, that $60 trillion is 1.4 percent of the U.S. GDP during the relevant time frame.

That’s it. That’s what Musk is saying, even though he surely doesn’t understand it himself: We will have to come up with a tiny fraction of the U.S. economy to fully pay for Social Security’s benefits. Once you understand this, your reaction will be exactly the opposite of what Musk hopes: Who cares?

That’s most of the story, although not all of it.

A reasonable person might ask whether humans can accurately predict the future over the next hundred, thousand, or million years. The answer, of course, is that we can’t.

So why does the Social Security report do it? The infinite horizon number was first included in the annual Social Security report in 2003, thanks to pressure from right-wing wonks who hoped to see the program cut or dismantled. At the time, the head of what was then called the Social Insurance Committee of the American Academy of Actuaries wrote to Social Security’s trustees that “the new measures of OASDI’s” — an abbreviation for the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program — “unfunded obligations included in the 2003 report provide little if any useful information about the program’s long-range finances and indeed are likely to mislead anyone lacking technical expertise.”

That’s the answer: The infinite horizon projections are there to fool regular people.

Even funnier is that Social Security isn’t the only entitlement program with unfunded obligations. Medicare has even more: $103 trillion. That means Musk should have tweeted about $163 trillion in unfunded obligations. In other words, he knows so little about this that he can’t even put his best propaganda foot forward.

In any case, Musk’s ignorant blathering illustrates how the people at the top of U.S. society just repeat what are essentially billionaire urban legends while having absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. That’s how they got us into a gigantic war with Iraq based on a fantasy, almost destroyed the world economy in 2008, and let nearly a million of us so far die from the coronavirus. (Musk himself sagely tweeted in March 2020 that there would be “probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.”) If we allow them to continue operating in their dream world, they will, brimming with self-confidence, walk us into even more terrifying catastrophes.

[merigreenleaf]

Short Story: “A Glimpse of the Past”

(This is the story I was talking about this week, where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share it or not. This started as a flashback scene in an early draft of book 2 that I discarded in the next draft, so it’s no longer canon to the series, but I think it’s cute and sweet and romantic and I’m glad I edited it to turn it into a story. :) You can find the masterpost with links to read all of the short stories in this series here.)

————————————— 

Blythe scrubbed at the soil caught under her nails until they were as clean and neat as she could get them in the poor light. She hadn’t intended to work in her window garden, but she needed the familiar comfort of cool dirt and growing life beneath her hands. Etri had left to do… something tonight, something he’d kept vague, and she was alternating between annoyance at being told just enough to make her fret and aggravation that if it was that important, he should have taken her with him. If Etri wasn’t telling her, it was because it was dangerous, and if it was dangerous, it was her job to watch his back. He’d done his horribly annoying vanishing thing where she looked away for five seconds to check her watch and when she turned back to ask him a question, he was out of sight. One of these days she was going to tie a length of string around his wrist and keep him near her like he was an ill-trained puppy. Try to see him slip away when he was connected to her! 

Gardening had calmed her as it always did, yet a strange feeling still fogged her mind. She could have sworn she’d been somewhere different a moment ago. At the same time it was so right to be repotting her aloe in the new yellow pot Sol had bought her to replace the cracked one he’d accidentally knocked over. As she reached for a towel to dry her hands, she glanced out the window above the sink. Lantern light glimmered off a thin layer of freshly-fallen snow. It was pretty and it probably brightened up the wagon considering she’d been too stupid to remember to light a lamp. 

Snow… that couldn’t be right. There hadn't been snow for months...

A knock on her door echoed loudly in the dark even though it was hardly louder than a tap. Everything always seemed so muffled and quiet in winter… or was it spring? She tried to ignore the lingering disorientation and walked over to see who needed her at this hour. Etri stood on her doorstep, his head bowed as he wrung his hands together. “I need your help, Blade. I have been poisoned.”

Blythe was about to chew him out for disappearing earlier when his words stopped her cold, half out of fear and half out of recognition. She’d heard this before. She could remember standing here with fear eating at her heart, she could remember taking him by the arm and tugging him inside out of weather, she could remember the way he looked at her with faith in his pale eyes when she began to heal him. She tried to take a few deep breaths to clear her mind and found her body wouldn’t listen. Instead she watched herself lead Etri into the wagon and hang his wet coat to dry by the stove, just as she knew she would. She knew she would because she already had.

She had no idea how it happened, but somehow she’d inadvertently managed to read her own memories. Wonderful. She knew from her training that she could only sit back and let this play out until she snapped out of it or the memory ran its course, so she hunkered down in her own head to watch. When she was back in her current time, she was going to give herself a stern talking to because this was not okay for a fully trained healer to do. This was an amateur mistake. She hadn’t screwed up telepathy and memory reading in years and never her own.

“What do you mean you've been poisoned?” past-Blythe asked, oblivious to her later self being carried along for the ride.

“I touched a trapped window while I was attempting to break into the home of a merchant. Normally I avoid such things, but this was a type I had not previously come across. It contained two kinds of needles instead of one. I caught sight of the other and disabled that which I recognized. Too late I realized it had a secondary mechanism. It was not the paralyzing type, which was the one I disabled. I believe that one was intended to incapacitate a thief long enough for the authorities to arrive, in which case the needle which pricked me would have allowed the thief to give away why they were there. I did not spring the first trap, so I was able to get in and then out again with the information I needed. The house did in fact belong to-”

Past-Blythe interrupted him mid-sentence. “I thought you didn't do that kind of thing anymore.”

Blythe, both past and present, could have immediately guessed something was wrong even without his reveal about triggering a rigged window. Etri never chattered, even to her. On occasion he would get talkative about books he'd recently read, but not about something that was supposed to be a secret, and never in a way that was an unceasing string of sentences spoken in one breath. Rambling was something Adair did. At the time they hadn’t known Adair, so past-Blythe didn’t make a comment about the two of them rubbing off on each other. Pity, because now-Etri would have calmed and smiled at the mention of his boyfriend.

If this memory was going where she thought it was going, though, Adair definitely hadn’t been in the picture. All the more a pity because he would have liked this.

As Etri spoke he strode back and forth across the floor, his long legs only managing to squeeze in four strides before he was forced to turn around again. This, at least, was familiar to both Blythes. He always paced when he was agitated and it was something she was sure he’d picked up from her, unless it was the other way around. “I usually do not, but I acquired information of a potential member of the syndicate living in this town. I wished to investigate so I could send word to Sapphire in order to alert her of merchants in this location who could pose a problem.”

“Uhh... great.” Past-Blythe’s only concern was Etri getting to the point so he would stop pacing and chattering. “Can you stand still for a minute so I can check about this poison?”

Etri did as he was instructed and stood still in front of her, but he continued to chatter. “It is a toxicant, not truly a poison… It is silly for me to say this, of course you would be able to determine that as you are a healer. Are you going to see if it remains inside me to determine the exact type? I know you can deduce this, because you are very good at healing. I did not wish to go to Wysta because I prefer you as a healer. I do not like other people touching me, but your touch I do not mind. I also did not wish to tell Wysta this information, so you were the better choice for that, as well.

“If this was supposed to be a secret, you do realize you’re still blathering all this to me.” Past-Blythe ignored the first part of his reason considering she had already unbuttoned Etri's shirt so she could slide her hand inside to place it on his chest. Obviously she was going to check him. Under the layer of soft hair, his chest was cold, as his body always was, but his heartbeat ran faster than usual. Past-Blythe found this worrisome while Blythe possessed hindsight and wondered if it truly was the toxicant causing it-- or if it was something else entirely. She would place her bet on the something else. 

“That is different. You are my best friend and I trust you. You do not cause me fear or discomfort. The opposite, perhaps. I enjoy being near you. You care for me. You may act gruff on occasion, but you are quite sweet.”

Etri was normally nothing like this and it was disconcerting to hear him voice every thought crossing his mind. It was making past-Blythe uncomfortable and Blythe wasn’t exactly put at ease by it, either.

To Blythe's relief, which was dumb because a memory could only play out one way, her past self did what she herself had done and distracted Etri with a question. “What's the syndicate you were talking about?”

As he began to blather, past-Blythe listened with half an ear. Most of her attention was spent on focusing her thoughts on Etri so she could determine how thoroughly he was affected by the toxicant and what kind of healing pattern would be needed to eliminate it. The real Blythe, however, realized Etri had said more than she previously remembered. Likely now it had more relevancy since she had met Sapphire and some of Etri's previous carnival troupe-slash-thieving crew. She also lacked the worry of her past self. She knew Etri was going to be fine, although she kind of wished she could move this body so she could smack him in the back of the head. It wouldn’t be a hard hit, just enough to make her feel better about the five months of stress he’d caused her before he finally made another move.

“You are aware that merchants are the people responsible for buying and selling art created by the artists, yes?” Past-Blythe rolled her eyes, which was good because Blythe wanted to do exactly the same thing. It wasn’t like she’d spent her life living under a rock. For Petra’s sake, she was the Concordian here, not Etri. He didn’t seem to notice her reaction and continued, “Under normal circumstances this works properly and the sentinels have a selection of merchants to whom they can sell in order to attain a reasonable price for their artists’ creations. A portion of the merchants have banded together to form a group under the leadership of a few corrupt individuals. The members of this group all offer the sentinels less than acceptable values and force them to sell only to this group or not at all. The corrupt merchants then turn around and sell this art to buyers, usually foreign, who pay their regular price for it. This means the artists earn less while the merchants are padding their own pockets with ill gained profits.”

This, though, Blythe hadn’t known-- or at least hadn’t remembered-- and she was interested in hearing more about it now that it was relevant to her current situation with Adair. Unfortunately her past self hadn’t cared and stayed true to her memory by speaking when Etri stopped to catch his breath. “There’s definitely a toxicant still inside you. I think I know what to do to nullify it, but I've never done this on my own before. You'd do better seeing Wysta.”

Blythe mentally winced, the only way of wincing she could do at the moment. Had she really been so unsure of herself? Removing a foreign substance was easy-peasy compared to when she’d removed harmful weaving from Adair’s mind. That had been difficult and even then she’d managed it.

Etri shook his head so rapidly that both Blythes hoped dizziness wasn’t a symptom of his poisoning. “I cannot tell her this! I have faith that you can help me. You have healed me many times before without complication.”

Past-Blythe fought to keep herself from pacing, which amused her later self. She and Etri really were pretty damn compatible. “Those were colds and stuff. This is poison!”

“As I have said, this is not poison in the true sense of the word since in my experience it is made simply to incapacitate and not leave long-lasting harm.”

“Tomayto, tomahto, this is a foreign chemical in your body, Etch! You need more help than an assistant healer.”

Blythe silently scoffed at herself as Etri took her hands and stared into her eyes. That shut her up, even if it was directed at a different version of her. His pupils were tiny, a result of what was coursing through his body, and in the lamplight his blue eyes seemed almost amber. Blythe felt a rush of affection her past self hadn’t experienced. Amber was Adair’s eye color. “And I know you can do this. Trust me that I trust you.”

Past-Blythe, who didn’t know Adair and certainly didn’t go soft at that intense yet tender look he and Etri had both perfected, simply nodded. Blythe could remember her mind racing as she’d struggled to remember the antidote. While she could feel this body moving and listen to it speak, she couldn't hear her own original thoughts, which was probably for the best. Her head was crowded enough with her own thoughts. 

After a few moments, her past self recalled what she needed to do to clear away something like poison. “Okay. Let me mix together a paste and I'll try.”

Etri smiled at her with a grin full of dimples that had once been few and far between. Now his smile was as familiar as those eyes and the cool touch of his hands in hers. He gave her hands a squeeze and let go so he could return to pacing across the narrow wagon. Blythe allowed herself a few moments of fond later memories about his touch while her past self began sorting through her herbs. 

Blythe brought her attention back to this moment when Etri began to speak again. “The corrupt merchants are running an illicit scheme where artists are no longer making a proper income off their creations. My previous troupe works to help the artists in such a situation. Often we will steal back the ill-gained art and clandestinely return it to the home of the original artist. Most of the time, however, we sneak into the homes and offices of the merchants to attempt to locate records of who is responsible. Once we have proof a merchant has joined the syndicate, we set it up so they are caught by the authorities. As a result they have put more effort into guarding their homes and offices. The troupe must avoid the sentinels to return their art, but generally their homes are not trapped in any way. The merchants, on the other hand, occasionally have hired guards and inevitably have traps, especially since they are beginning to suspect that someone is working against them and that it is no longer coincidence when they are caught.”

Past-Blythe still wasn’t paying much attention since art-related issues had nothing to do with her. Blythe wished she could shake her by the shoulders because this was important. Past-Blythe was going to end up in a relationship with an artist and this would have been something useful to know in advance. 

With no way to communicate with her former self, she could only watch as her hands finished mixing the paste she had no contribution in concocting. If she had, she would have added more tarragon. What was past her thinking? “I'm ready. I'll need you to lie down for this. There's another reason Wysta would have made more sense, you know. She’s got low cots in her wagon specifically for patients.”

“I am not an invalid. The bed is fine even though it is high.”

Etri was so tall he was able to hoist himself up into the loft without needing to use the rungs built into the cabinet below. Past-Blythe used the ladder and climbed up after him. Her bed was a kind of alcove built into the wall and she had to squeeze in to get past Etri. This was the one and only time she ever shared this space with someone else because later they’d moved to the floor. Adair’s fear of heights apparently included beds, but she loved him too much to complain that a loft really wasn’t that high off the ground.

Past-Blythe positioned herself with her back to the wall so she could place the bowl of healing paste she held on the shelf. Later it would be claimed by Adair’s cat who liked looking out the tiny window. For now it held only a book and the bowl. “Take off your shirt.

As she dipped her fingers into the bowl to stir the contents, Etri obeyed without comment. This was another sign that he was under the influence of something. Normally he delayed removing articles of clothing by complaining about the cold, although she knew it was also because his upbringing left him terribly self-conscious about showing skin. 

...which he wasn't this time. When past-Blythe looked over again, he was sprawled on his back with his arms behind his head, his dark hair in disarray against her pillow. In the lamplight his pale skin seemed to shine with a deceptive inner fire, as though he had gained his twin's lightweaving. The glow on his skin shifted into a new pattern every time the lamp's flame danced.

Blythe felt her past self's heart skip a beat as she stared at her friend laying in front of her. Past-Blythe quickly looked away and back at the bowl, much to the annoyance of the person reliving this who appreciated the view, thank you very much.

Past-Blythe brought her fingertips to Etri's chest and begun tracing a pattern onto his skin. She was only as far as the first vertical line when he reached up to touch her braid. It had fallen over her shoulder and Blythe remembered thinking at the time that he was going to push it back for her, but this wasn't his intention. Instead he tugged away the ribbon securing the bottom and started to unbraid it with his deft fingers. “You would look pretty with your hair down. I mean, your hair would look nice framing your face. You are already very pretty.”

Past-Blythe's breath hitched and only partly from the affectionate words he spoke. At the time he had no idea of the intimacy he was implying with that deceptively simple action. She caught his wrist before he could finish freeing her hair. Blythe wished she hadn’t been so keen to follow tradition because she loved when Etri played with her hair. Her past self was missing out. “Please stop. Protectorates don't go out in public with their hair loose. Only their muses and immediate family can see them with their hair unbraided.”

Etri slid his hand into hers and entwined their fingers so she was holding this instead of his wrist. “I would be your muse if you asked.”

“You're delirious, Etch. This is the toxicant talking.” Past-Blythe's voice came out little more than a whisper. This was something she’d half-wanted for a very long time, although in hindsight Blythe knew she’d always wanted it entirely. Being neck-deep in denial really hadn’t done her any favors.

With his free hand, Etri reached up to bury his fingers in her loosened hair before letting go to gently pull her down to him. Past-Blythe didn’t resist and when Etri lifted his shoulders off the bed, she met him halfway. His kiss was everything her past self had hoped for. Even her current self, who, along with the help of a certain artist, had given Etri a lot more practice, couldn’t find any fault with it. Etri was gentle yet passionate. Firm, then letting her lead, then pulling her closer as he deepened the kiss. It was as they were in their relationship and in their role as sentinels: equal, balanced, and ever in tune with each other. While his lips and mouth were cold, his chill was something she had long grown accustomed to even back then and experiencing it in this unfamiliar way had only made her crave more of it. Her current self certainly wanted more.

Except past-Blythe came to her senses and realized it wasn't something that was hers to take. As Etri nuzzled against her neck, she pulled away. “No, Etch. We can't. The toxicant-”

Etri’s face went even more ashen than its usual pale hue. “Please tell me I did not cause it to harm you. I do not wish to hurt you. I never wish to hurt you.”

His concern, even while under the influence of something other than himself, tugged at Blythe's heart both in the past and in the present. Creators, she loved him so much. “No, it’s not that. Something like this can usually only be transferred by injection into the blood and my body could probably nullify it anyway. Healer, remember? What I meant was we can't do this. It wouldn't be right. I'm not going to take advantage of you.”

Etri’s disappointment was all but tangible and Blythe wished she could assure him that things would work out fine. Better than fine. Still, he was her friend and even in this state knew she wanted to protect him. He nodded and brushed her cheek with his hand, then tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. When he spoke, it was with a small, kind smile that both past and present Blythe found comforting. “Do as you think is best. I trust you. I always will.”

Past-Blythe smiled with relief and went back to tracing the healing pattern on his chest. Blythe, meanwhile, was caught between affection and the returning urge to smack him with the book sitting under the bowl of paste. The toxicant driving his actions had left Etri with no memory of this day and he’d waited months to make any kind of move again. Blythe had been too embarrassed to do this herself and if it hadn’t been for Adair blundering his way into their lives, they’d likely still be ignoring the elephant in the room. Granted it would have been a rather small elephant because the wagon could barely hold three people and a cat, and it was possible she might have just given in and kissed Etri senseless one day regardless of said elephant, but all-in-all, Blythe was quite thankful for Adair’s inadvertent nudging of the situation.

Whenever she landed in her own time again, she was going to show him how thankful she was. Then she would probably hit Etri with a book. Five months. Sheesh.

————— 

I’m going to tag people who expressed interest in being tagged in stories. If you don’t want to be on this list, let me know. And if you do want to be on this list, also let me know and I’ll add you. It’s all good. :) @ageekyreader @lynnafred @the-gay-hufflepuff @firewritten @joshuaorrizonte @writtenhastily @writerlydays @ava-burton-writing @josephmxa @megan-cutler @dragonscanbeplantstoo @alittle-writer @elliot-orion @perringcentral @an-author-in-progress @aceduchessdragoness @madmooninc @thatwriternamedvolk

[shark-myths]

Folie A Deux

I promised to write FAD meta like, forever ago. It took longer than I planned. Here it is, at last.

Folie is anthemic, artistic; it’s cynicism and heartbreak all layered up in failing hope. It’s Pete saying goodbye to his band and embarking on a new life as a husband and a father. It’s Patrick finding his confidence as a showman just in time for it to turn to ash on his tongue and prompt him to remake himself utterly. It’s Joe finally feeling like he has a role in FOB and creative ownership of his own band. It’s Andy, um, drumming. Super well. Without any particular emotional interpretation on my part because Andy’s, you know, pretty content to just play with his friends.

Without further blathering, allow me to present, at long last: a rambling, tear-filled, official Tryst Theory ™ interpretation of FOB’s fourth-and-almost-final studio album.

I am always struck most by the quality of obstruction in the albums produced during the Commercial Success/’Sell Out’ era. Pete begins obscuring himself for the first time during Infinity on High and especially Folie A Deux: the lyrics become increasingly senseless, more about cleverness and sound that saying things plainly. But he’s so honest during this era too. He tells us exactly what it feels like to be him, to be so pulled apart and scrutinized and sad, to be sick on his own hope. To be sick and fuzzy, made of stuffing, and far away on way-too-many anxiety meds. We get lines that don’t make much sense on the surface, like ‘I’m not a chance, put a heat wave in your pants,’ and we get the self-aware aggression of bops like I Don’t Care.

In the previous era, Pete didn’t really know what it meant, yet—being Pete Wentz. Being so public. Being the face of the band, being the bad guy and the heel. What it would cost. Now he understands that anything he touches, or looks at, or says at loud is going to change. Once he does it, says it, thinks it, feels it, it’s out of his control. It’s owned by someone else. Even his private body, his private phone. Even his decision to defend his friend from an aggressive bouncer onstage. The brand of phone he carries, the girls he texts, who he stands next to in photos, the cities where he plays shows and the cities he does not. Now he understands that his life is not his, but something the public will use to hurt him if we get bored. This is drugstore cowboy Pete. This is a Pete grown so heavy under the weight of his own misery and bullshit that he can barely go on. This is a Pete preparing to say goodbye.

Which is a long way of saying: Folie A Deux fucks me up.

 A little history (sourced heavily from Wikipedia):

The album was recorded from July-September 2008, beginning two months after Pete and Ashlee were married, and released in December 2008, shortly after Bronx was born. They started recording ahead of schedule, without telling the label, and deliberately limited their studio time. They wanted to recapture what they had felt during Grave, when they were racing against their drained back accounts to get the album set down. They wanted that simplicity and rawness, the feeling of being mixed-up kids half living out of a van and making music that felt vibrant and essential. Patrick told AP, “There was something really interesting about that creative process when we were starting out. The more time you have, the more potential you have for excess.” (He thought he dominated Infinity and wanted to pare himself back, reign himself in, for Folir.) They tried to emulate the process and feeling of Grave as much as possible: “first-thought, best-thought.” Joe pushed to be included more in collaboration and felt like he “owned the songs a lot more. It made me really excited about contributing to Fall Out Boy and made me find my role in the band.” Pete made an effort (this is him making an effort, okay) to keep his personal life more sequestered from the writing and use more metaphor and the conceit characters speaking lines, more like a stage musical. And, perhaps true to the feeling of Grave, Pete and Patrick fought painfully and violently over the record. It was personal and artistic for everyone. They felt it was their best work.

Fans tore them apart, of course. Booing anytime they played anything off the new record. The album undersold and public reception did not match the glowing critical reviews. They tried to say something important, to talk about society and convey real messages in their music. They were publicly rebuffed. Joe told Rolling Stone, “Some of us were miserable on stage. Others were just drunk.” The reception, the struggle, cemented what Pete had already decided to do: leave the band.

(Let’s not talk about the last song of what he thought would be their last show ever during which, instead of playing Saturday with his best friends and his me-and-Pat, he had the man who named the band in the first place shave off his signature Pete Wentz hair in a symbolic ritual of fucking morning, let’s not let’s not)

(but in case you want to)

 A little cover art:

I just want you to know that Pete Wentz has the original painting of that cover in his home. IN CASE YOU THINK THAT’S RELEVANT.

This image. With Pete’s furry history. With the costumes and feeling like a zoo animal and playing the role of the heel, with the way he said in the Folie Making Of video that being perceived in media is “like wearing a costume, you’re not who you are.” With his interest especially in bears, the talk of stitches and stuffing and seams, with the Lullabye track and ‘honey is for bees silly bear’ (and Black Cards’ ‘you’re my best friend, honeycomb head’) and the whole Winnie the Pooh vibe. With the devoted companionship and singular love exhibited by Winnie the Pooh and the way he turns back into inert, lifeless stuffing when you grow too old and you forget what he really is and see him as just a toy, empty and pliable, and the way only childhood wonder and innocence can return him to life. How the cover has not just one person on it, but a bear-boy plus one: a madness shared by two. A real bear, and someone who’s just pretending, or just trying to be. What a match, what a catch.

WHAT A PETERICK MASTERPIECE THIS FUCKING ALBUM IS

The liner notes are empty, by the way. For the physical CD. The liner notes are just pictures and names of band members, then production information and thanks to ‘fans, friends, and loves.’ Nothing else. No lyrics. No record. If that’s not foreshadowing—

 And now said masterpiece itself:

1. Disloyal Order of the Water Buffaloes

Okay, so let’s take a step back and imagine for a second the decision-making process that went into writing a magnum fucking opus Peterick anthem to open the album with. Are we all on the same page here? WHAT THE FUCK, were they TRYING to kill me

This album is the fucking Holy Grail of the drug use = Patrick metaphor, and we dive right into it with this one. Boycott love. Detox just to retox. DRAW YOUR OWN HOLD ME TIGHT OR DON’T PARALLELS. #trysttheory

For all that Pete tried to move away from autobiographical lyrics on this album, his view of himself is plain in this song: ‘perfect boys with their perfect lives, no one wants to hear you sing about tragedy.’

The line ‘fell out of bed, butterfly bandage, but don’t worry’ brings up my theories about what dreams mean. Falling out of bed and getting hurt is a clear consequence of dreaming so hard you forgot it was just a dream (or trysting with your best friend and forgetting there could be consequences, real people you can hurt and yourself included). ‘You’ll never remember, your head is far too blurry’ ties into w.a.m.s as well as Cooperstown and the idea of being blurry-headed, impaired because you’re fucked up on love or some other drug, and making choices you’d regret, if you could remember them. Making mistakes you’ll have to live with whether you remember them or not.

(Romantically speaking, water buffaloes are disloyal: Google suggests a single male water buffalo can sire as many as 100 baby buffs in a single mating season. It seems pretty obvious throughout this album that issues of infidelity were large in Pete’s mind while writing these lyrics.)

2. I Don’t Care

This song makes me think of Wilson (Expensive Mistakes) so much. Starting over again in Mexico, friends who don’t care about you, the blues-pop bounce to it and repeating riff? Sonically, they have a lot in common.

Pete may be playing on his previous reference to Closer (‘he tastes like you only sweeter’) with the opening line here—‘say my name and his in the same breath, I dare you to say they taste the same’—which is the saddest and most painful movie about heterosexuals you will ever watch, but writing that line and putting it on Patrick’s tongue? That may be the gayest thing that happens to me all night, guys, and I’m a queer girl with a bottle of wine and a long, long Friday evening ahead of me.

This song is so much a conversation Pete is having with the world about his fame and notoriety, imo. He calls it a narcissist’s anthem but I don’t think that’s it, exactly. I think—and the music video backs me up on this—it’s a coy wink at their own reputation, all the shit people are slinging about them and Pete specifically. We get a drug reference here, too: ‘take a chance, let your body get a tolerance.’

Also, Patrick is a nun in the video. Pete put Patrick in a literal fucking habit. What more do you need to me to say to prove definitely that Pete is desperately in love with him? This. Kid. In. A. Nun’s. Habit.

3. She’s My Winona

IF THIS SONG ISN’T A DISCUSSION OF HOW PETE HAD TO REVISE HIS PETERICK AMBITIONS WHEN HE FOUND OUT ASHLEE WAS PREGNANT

(There are so many suicide references in this song I want to join Pete and the band’s manager in cheering and celebrating all over again that our boy lived to 28. You can physically feel him resigning himself to living a long life in these verses.)

‘Hell or glory, I don’t want anything in between.’ I take this line as pretty directly about him and Patrick: he doesn’t care if they go to hell and it ruins the band, he wants to take the risk, because he thinks together they could be—glory. He wants to roll the dice. (Take a chance—I’m not a chance.) And ‘then came a baby boy with long eyelashes, and daddy said “you gotta show the world the thunder.”’ In other words, he wanted hell or glory, ruination or Patrick, but then along came his son. And his priorities changed. Of course they did. True love is one thing; raising your child is another.

‘We had a good run, even I have to admit.’

(And—here’s the thing—people ask me sometimes, what I think about Pete marrying Ashlee. “Do you think he married her just because it was the right thing to do?” No. I think he believed in love and family and forever. I think Pete believed it would work. I think he wanted it to. I think that’s why the trysting, and eventually the band, stopped: because Pete tried his fucking best. I think he loved her and loved the idea of a future for himself—the first time he’s ever really imagined that. The idea of somewhere to belong, a real family, one that he felt part of. I think he wanted more than anything for it to work precisely because it was so different from what he, or anyone else, ever expected for him. He said ‘I want to marry this girl’ and he meant it. He really did intend to love her forever, as best he could, and not love anyone else if he could help it.

But those aren’t good reasons to build a whole relationship on, a marriage on. And he was a mess, and in love with Patrick too, and hated and famous and fucked. He had no privacy, limited emotional maturity, a burgeoning substance problem and no sense of himself that wasn’t dependent on what the culture and the media and his fans and his friends reflected back to him and said was true. There was no way they could be happy together under those circumstances, and he’d have stayed forever anyway, I think. His interviews about that time—when he stopped shaving, then stopped showering; when he was a drugstore cowboy stay-at-home dad, depressed and giving up—he doesn’t blame Ashlee for wanting to leave. He hated himself enough to be miserable forever, but she didn’t. So of course it fell apart.)

4. America’s Suitehearts

This commercial headfuck of a song. Jerry christ, guys, someone throw me an anchor so I can drown myself. This caricature, the monstrosity and performance of celebrity, the way the band is reduced to wrestling alter egos, painted and pretend. No one’s being subtle with this song, this video. They are showing us exactly what they mean.

‘I must confess, I’m in love with my own sins.’

DO YOU MEAN LIKE BEING IN GAY LOVE WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND

DO YOU MEAN THAT SIN?

And this verse, though ostensibly about the vagaries of fame, sounds so much like him falling in love with Patrick while Patrick is oblivious:

‘You can bow and pretend you don’t know you’re a legend. Time just hasn’t told anyone else yet. I’m sorry, I just let my love loose again.’

For so many years, Pete believed his love was something he had to apologize for. 😭 😭 😭 😭

5. Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet

Okay, fuck this, I’m done

This fucking

This

UGH

Remember the paternity rumors at the time of Ashlee’s pregnancy? Look at this whole complicated, tangled-up song about infidelity and paternity and the idea of Ashlee cheating while Pete’s cheating too. ‘Keep a calendar, this way you will always know’ [who impregnated you]. ‘I will never end up like him. behind my back, I already am.’ I literally cannot

‘Does he know the way I worship our love’

6. The (Shipped) Gold Standard

do I even need to keep writing this or is the album now, itself, independently writing the tryst theory

my notes for this song just say ‘come the fuck on’

This song is about: living in LA and missing Chicago (and what it felt like in Chicago, who you were and who you were with); taking accountability for your own actions even when it does not satisfy your hedonistic urges (e.g., marrying your pregnant girlfriend and breaking off your illicit love affair with Patrick Stump), trying to remake your identity and change yourself like those are the same thing and you can get a new heart as easily as a new name; losing your luck and breaking up (‘tell that boy I’ll leave you alone now, like a stove, I’ll turn my love down); horseshoe crabs; and of course, that good ol’ famous-in-the-closet feel:

‘I wanna scream I love you from the top of my lungs, but I’m afraid that someone else will hear me.’

7. Coffee’s For Closers

I’m just crying by now I can’t type anymore

He’s using this whole album to break up with Patrick, to explain, to say goodbye

‘I want everything to change and stay the same. Time doesn’t care about anyone or anything. Come together, come apart.’

‘We will never believe again’

And: ‘kick drum beating in my chest again’ and that feeling, the one we’ve all felt in the pit at any show, any good one with that golden-vibe in the air, the one that makes your heart feel connected to the hearts of everyone around you, like you could be lifted on light and floating around the room, like the love is pouring out of you and rising like heat and linking up to the network of love flowing into and out of everyone else, when you feel it and know they do too and your whole body vibrates with the impossible imperceptible hum of your very atoms, your constituent fucking molecules lit up and stitched together by this, this, this. The feeling like you don’t need lungs because singing in breath and bellows enough, the feeling like the only reason you ever had a heart was so the drummer could pump it with their sticks. ‘Preach electric to the microphone stand,’ Patrick the conductor, Patrick the evangelist, Patrick the gospel of his fucking love. Pete’s saying goodbye to that feeling. Pete knows, he knows already, what he is planning to do.

Pete’s lying. Pete’s saying ‘I love the mayhem more than the love’ like all he’s really been out to do is make a mess, break hearts, take names. Like he is no more and no less than what all the tabloids say about him. (Never watch the Fresh Only Bakery videos on youtube. They are boring, for one, and also the saddest fucking Pete you will ever see.) Pete’s saying ‘I will never believe in anything again’ and he’s making Patrick say it too, because true-blue love was supposed to last forever, and then Pete got married to someone else.

‘Oh, change will come.’

8. What A Catch, Donnie

NO. NO

how the fuck dare this song even exist

So this is it. This is the goodbye. Pete has talked about how he wrote this song from Patrick’s perspective, and he recruited some of Patrick’s favorite artists and friends of the band to sing different lines in a medley of the band’s hits up to this point. This is like, the FOB song equivalent of a suicide note. (To follow this with a greatest hits album—! G O D)

The reference to Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway—their collaboration, his ultimate suicide, and the way Miss Flack looked on all his destruction and said ‘I still want you back’ is absolutely a testament to the way Patrick, and the rest of the band, forgave him and took him back in after the notorious Best Buy Incident. The gratitude for the whole band and what the band has done for Pete is tied up in this song. ‘You’ll never catch us’ smacks of trysting, and there’s something to the line ‘I’m the one who charmed the one who gave up on you,’ as the speaker in the sentence in meant to be Patrick and the ‘you’ is presumed to be Pete.

‘They say the captain goes down with the ship, so when the world ends, will God go down with it?’ is both Pete’s intention to go down with the band (which he’s planning to sink, or sees unraveling already in the painful writing process—we don’t know at what point he made his decision to destroy yet another thing he loved in penance for some deep, unknowable conviction of sin) and his gesture of setting them free. The Video of Which We Will Not Speak shows this pretty clearly. Pete saves everyone and everything he’s ever loved at the bargain price of drowning himself. He does it without ever even appearing in the aired version of the video. *broken sobbing*

(The links for the full version are not currently on Youtube, but you can read about it here: http://www.mtv.com/news/1618609/fall-out-boy-release-wrong-version-of-what-a-catch-donnie-video/)

What a match, what a catch. If I say anything else about this song, and how basically everyone who heard it knew it meant the band was going to break up, I will absolutely fall apart

9. 27

OH GOOD A SONG I CAN MAKE IT THROUGH WITHOUT CHOKING ON MY OWN TEARS

NOT

So here’s a lovely little ditty about how Pete Wentz did not kill himself and die at age 27 as he always thought he would! Hahahahahaha I’m fine it’s fine I’m so glad this album exists I’m so glad I’m TALKING ABOUT IT

‘If home is where the heart is, then we’re all just fucked.’ All three of them: Pete, Patrick, and Ashlee. And every FOB fan out there. Ahahaha. GUYS I’M NOT OKAY

We’ve got Peterick drug metaphors to rival the punch of Hold Me Tight Or Don’t: ‘I want it so bad, I’d shoot the sunshine into my veins… Doing lines of dust and sweat off of last’s night stage just to feel like you. Milligrams in my head, burning tobacco in my wind, chasing the direction you went.’

We’ve got desperation about growing and changing and losing that which they so valued in their sound and collaboration on Grave: ‘I can’t remember the good old days. Are all the good times getting gone? They come and go and come and go.’

We’ve got the pressure of keeping your love affair with your lead singer a secret lest you risk your fame, label representation, and fortune: ‘My mind is a safe, and if I keep it in we all get rich’ right next to the dirty, hollow feeling of having images of your body stolen and used to drag your name and reputation like you had no more heart than any other empty doll and losing the value of yourself in that process: ‘My body is an orphanage, we take everyone in.’

We’ve got the romantic comparison to cosmic entities, just like in Real Ones: ‘you’re a bottled star, the planets align. You’re just like Mars, you shine in the sky.��� And that tinge of disparagement and lonesomeness: ‘I’ve got a lot of friends who are stars but some are just black holes.’

10. Tiffany Blews

This song plays with a lot of fun moth/flame metaphors that I really enjoy, while also really amplifying the isolation and quick-burning nature of fame. I think that Pete gets a sick satisfaction from having Patrick sing out the worst things he thinks about himself, that he thinks everyone else thinks about him. (Pete, I think, is the little black dress that will be faded soon.)

Interestingly, we have ‘a roman candle heart keeps us far apart,’ which is a pretty direct link to the later Fourth of July. A heart that flares, explodes, and then burns out quickly certainly would be an obstacle to building a lasting relationship, no matter how much you loved someone…

‘Hate me, baby. Maybe I’m a piece of art.’

‘Dear gravity, you held me down in this starless city’ makes me think of the Moonrise Kingdom quote in Wilson (Expensive Mistakes): ‘I hope the roof flies off and we all get sucked into space.’ It’s the opposite, basically. Hoping to fall in love and get thrown up among the glittering cosmos rather than anchored someplace dark and starless. (Aside: I love how susceptible Pete is to grand, cheesy quotes? Like when, a few days after the release of The Last Jedi, he tweeted the heavy-handed noir line ‘I want to put my fist through this whole lousy, beautiful town.’ Like, look for that in a FOB song someday.)

11. w.a.m.s.

For the curious, Andy confirmed on Twitter that the title stands for waitress/actress/model/singer, a reference to the stereotype of people who run away to Hollywood to make it big but end up washing out and struggling as the starving artist/waitstaff type. If this idea of our boys citing bankrupt ambition does not make you emotional, you may not have a heart.

This song is incredibly relevant to the dreams meta linked earlier—‘when all the others were just stirring awake, I’m trying to trick myself to fall asleep again’ is very evocative of being in denial over the jarring reality of the end of the tryst. I think this song is about one of the last times Pete and Patrick slept together before breaking up.

‘My head’s in heaven, my soles are in hell’ again highlights that Pete’s wildest Patrick dreams are very different than where he actually finds himself; ‘let’s meet in the purgatory of my hips and get well’ is a pretty transparent request, isn’t it? Especially since pre-hiatus Pete really loved to use ‘hips’ as a signifier for sexual desire/activity. Let’s just fuck and pretend it’s all okay. Let’s lose ourselves in each other and pretend we can have it. Tell me I’m the only one, even if it’s not true. Let me get high on this memory one last time.

‘Hurry, hurry. You put my head in such a flurry, flurry’ is the urgency and compromised judgment of the tryst. ‘Oh freckle freckle’ can be read as Patrick’s forehead mole. ‘What makes you so special? I’m gonna leave you’ tells us what makes the last time so good: Pete knows it’s the last time. Pete knows he has to end it. But he’s so addicted-sick, ((stray-dog sick,)) he can’t stop. ‘I’m gonna teach you how we’re all alone’ doesn’t really sound like something a newlywed and soon-to-be-dad should be saying, does it? But there it is. How can he let go when he knows ‘how heartwarming it is inside your skin’?

The final nail in my coffin: ‘I’m a sunshine machine. I want to get stuck and be golden in your memory.’

We’ve talked about how Patrick = sunshine = gold, right. r i g h t

12. 20 Dollar Nose Bleed

Fun fact: this song is basically erotica to me ever since I wrote that recording booth smut about it! I can’t even listen to it without blushing and becoming uncomfortable. So there’s something you didn’t need to know about me that you… now know about me.

‘Permanent jet lag, please take me back. I’m stray dog sick, please let me in. The mad key’s tripping, singing vows before we exchange smoke rings.’ It is OBVIOUSLY my prerogative to interpret this as slightly depraved sexual longing, but I especially like the bit about singing vows without ever exchanging anything lasting or visible that implies commitment—this can be heard as a comment on the fickleness of commitment, or it can be heard as a comment about how deeply he is/was committed to Patrick even though they never had anything to show for it. Anything they could show for it. Even to each other.

Benzedrine is, of course, the very first pharmaceutical amphetamine (read about it here!). Many great artists and thinkers were influenced by the impossible energy it gives you, which is obviously relatable to someone who experiences natural mania, peddling his own prescription like a ‘medicine man’ (Wilson lyrics). I think the verse about Benzedrine and not letting the doctor in not-so-obliquely references the issue with medication compliance that Pete experienced and many people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder also do: the meds for this disorder are really unpleasant. They dull you out, they give you tremors, they have really strong side effects, and they take away that amazing manic spark that so many artists credit with their success. Don’t let the doctor in. They’ll take away the only thing he really likes about being himself.

‘Have you ever wanted to disappear?’ is, I think, a glimpse of the unadorned real.

The spoken word bit at the end of this song really hammers together a lot of the themes of the whole album, the whole band, personal and political both. ‘You said you’re not listening and I said I’m wishing…’, only we don’t ever find out what’s really being said.

13. West Coast Smoker

I love the hell out of this song because there are few things in life that are hotter than Patrick singing the chorus. And fuck. Patrick saying curse words. I die every time. I think this is a kink I share with Pete Wentz. I think one day Pete Wentz and I will share a circle of hell. It will be called the ‘Underage Stump Mouth Rotunda,’ and we will all be very ashamed.

We’ve got a lot of the same themes: the ease of suicide and the conviction to live, the way shows feel and how it was when they were kids, drug use and overmedicated ennui. Pete was once the son, is becoming the father, is resolving not to become the holy ghost.

‘I’m the last of my kind’ and ‘when they made me they broke the mold’ and the finality of it all. (Contrasted with the modern era: ‘you’re the last of a dying breed.’ Pete has grown up and away from his recursive self-obsession, from his own myth. Pete learning to look inside others and stop dismissing himself, and everyone else, as fool’s gold.)

‘Your eyes are blocking my starlight’ to me really speaks to the person who is keeping him from Patrick, or the people—the fans, the Public, with their eyes on his every action.

14. Pavlove

I LOVE THIS SONG

Once again, we have a drug use metaphor: ‘she’s back to the bathroom for one more,’ ‘get addicted to this,’ and of course, the endless seeking for something to make ‘my chest stir/my head blur.’ And: ‘I’m not ready for a handshake with death, I’m just such a happy mess’ shows us, for once, what Pete has to live for—not just that he’s resigned to life, but the reason for it. This song is all tied up with the heady swell of live music and self-medication, and there’s no line more representative of my experience as a bisexual person than ‘I’m the invisible man who can’t stop staring at the mirror.’

‘I want to make you as lonely as me so you can get addicted to this’ seems very directed at Patrick, doesn’t it? Because this is a Pete who needs Patrick too much, thinks Patrick doesn’t need him back, is terrified. Doesn’t know how to solve his problems except to flee them. So: he flees them.

 I MADE IT. I BARELY FUCKING MADE IT BUT I DID.

To sum up: Folie is an incredible, sweeping, beautiful album about the glory of Peterick and the band’s impending end, and it will break your heart. Hit me up with questions and requests, and as always, thank you for reading!

shark-myths out *mic drop*

[wazafam]

Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons has over 390 villagers that gamers can search for an invite to their island, but there are only a handful of major characters that come to islands occasionally for the benefit of the gamer and themselves. Characters like Redd, the con-ARTist, and Gulliver, the shipwrecked captain, test their own intelligence when they visit islands and they prove whether or not they are the smartest of all the visitors.

RELATED: Animal Crossing: New Horizons: 10 Most Hilarious Things Islanders Say, Ranked

Intelligence in ACNH can be based on anything from the ability to scam the gamer into buying something they don't need to simply having more information about a fish or fossil. Some visitors are not as smart and unfortunately earn a lower rank even if the activities or insight they bring to the island are still fun or beneficial.

10 Wisp

Players can find Wisp between the hours of 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM or 8:00 PM and 5:00 AM. He's not necessarily there to provide them with any helpful items and most of the time not even cool or rare items, just new or expensive gifts.

He asks the player to find 5 spirits around the island and return them back to him for the gifts he has. Not only does he not provide any relevant island or game information but he also gets scared every time the player talks to him. Poor thing should eventually start to recognize the player at some point, but doesn't and unfortunately, that earns him the spot of least intelligent.

9 Gulliver

Gulliver is a seagull with special, worldwide, furniture items in exchange for help finding his communicator parts. He's not necessarily unintelligent but he falls overboard constantly, ending up on various secluded islands.

RELATED: Animal Crossing: 5 New Special Characters (& 5 That Are Missing)

As a seagull and shipmate, he should find his sea legs and maybe hold on a bit tighter in the future, or at least pack some extra parts. And to be fair, at least he can reassemble his communicator efficiently.

8 Isabelle

One of the most notable characters on any island is Isabelle, the Town Hall secretary. She's a dog that debuted in New Leaf and is polite, helpful, and usually excited to talk about the news or what she did on her weekend. While she is one of the nicest characters gamers encounter, her intelligence is never really tested.

She gets pretty distracted during morning announcements and when gamers get annoyed with a villager and talk to her about them in an attempt to get them to leave the island, she just tries to help them change their outfit or their speech pattern when that is usually not the problem. Isabelle is sweet but not always bright.

7 K.K. Slider

Quite possibly the most loved of the major island visitors in the Animal Crossing franchise, K.K. Slider only comes to the island once a week to play a campfire-style gig for the villagers. K.K. is a dog of renowned musical talent.

It's not a bad talent to have but it lends no information as to his intellect outside of that. But for his musical genius, he is still allowed a ranking amongst the most intelligent.

6 Tom Nook

It's supposed to be the gamer's island but everyone knows it really belongs to Tom Nook. Tom shows his cruelty when he charges gamers for every little change when it comes to construction on the island.

He's very smart when it comes to economics but with no time limit on paying back those enormous loans, he played himself and gamers definitely take advantage of that feature.

5 Saharah

Tom Nook is one heck of a salesman, bank teller, and loan shark but Sahrarah, the carpet-selling camel, has him slightly one-upped with her wit when it comes to a coupon deal. Or rather, Saharah tickets.

RELATED: 10 Main Animal Crossing Characters, Ranked By Likability

When gamers purchase enough carpets they receive the coupon to use later for a "free" mystery wallpaper or flooring, but not both. And is it really free if she just charged 5,000 Bells before getting the coupons and it can only be used on one item?

4 Flick

Flick is a chameleon, bug enthusiast, and the local Bug-Off host, constantly in search of his next creepy-crawly treasure. He stops by to buy bugs from the players for 150% of their normal value that gamers get from Timmy and Tommy at Nook's Cranny.

His intelligence is specifically aimed at bug knowledge but it is intelligence nonetheless. He's also a skilled craftsman, able to create bug models. Gamers will find most of his intellectual moments are in his rants about bugs like when he says, "Larva, pupa, adulthood, final transcendence... They become more exalted with every metamorphosis."

3 Redd

At the earlier mention of scam artists, gamers cannot forget about Redd, also known as Crazy Redd or Jolly Redd. He is a fox based on the Japenese folklore character, a kitsune. It is said that they have supernatural abilities that increase as they get wiser.

As for Redd, he is constantly collecting and selling new art and market items on his visits to islands. Not only is he successful in sales but also in selling fake art to those that will not fact-check his collection or even those just in need of some art for decoration whether it is real or fake, he makes money.

2 Celeste

Being Blathers' sister and an owl definitely lends to the idea that Celeste is the second most intelligent in ACNH. She also earns this spot by knowing when meteor showers will come, having a ton of Zodiac and other celestial crafting recipes at her disposal, and information and tales about constellations.

In other Animal Crossing games, she also works in the Observatory deck of the museum. She typically visits islands on clear nights after 7:00 PM.

1 Blathers

He may be afraid of bugs but he still holds the most knowledge about them, as well as sea creatures, fossils, and art, out of anyone on Animal Crossing islands. Blathers, as museum director, knows who donates what, everything about the donations, and every time the gamer sees him, he's reading, probably for more knowledge to pass on to the gamer.

Blathers' background is actually revealed in Animal Crossing: Wild World, where gamers learn he has multiple degrees, and instead of pursuing a doctorate, he became museum director. Not only is he intelligent, but he is also passionate. Blathers is the obvious choice for the most intelligent major islander.

NEXT: Animal Crossing: 5 Villagers We'd Love To Be Friends With (& 5 We'd Rather Avoid)

10 Major Animal Crossing Characters, Ranked By Intelligence from https://ift.tt/3ecZdYx

[theadzone-blog]

How Digital Media Strategy is a lot like Hunting Monsters 

Why am I blathering about video games again on a digital media blog? Well, believe it or not, Monster Hunter (a game about, you guessed it, hunting monsters) is surprisingly relevant to this week’s topic - strategy. 

A wise man once told me that strategy is the absence of a clear-cut solution - when there’s no easy way to do it, we have to make a plan. If you rush into a monster’s nest without a plan, there’s a pretty good chance you’re gonna die.  It sounds straightforward enough, but in my experience strategy is an often neglected part of the advertising process. But without an effective digital strategy, your campaign is much more likely to fail.

So when it comes to hunting monsters and creating an effective digital media plan, there are a few things you should keep in mind: 

1. You can’t go it alone. 

The reason I chose Monster Hunter and not a classic strategy game like chess or checkers is that taking down a tough monster requires teamwork. Communication and a variety of skill sets are vital to success on the hunt, and just as vital to success in a digital marketing campaign. Teams are able to brainstorm ideas, collaborate on projects, and share information with one another. 

2. Look before you leap.

Before you set out on the hunt, you need to prepare. That means upgrading your weapons and crafting health potions for when you’re in a pinch. Before you start a digital marketing campaign, you need to research your client, size up the competition, and understand your target audiences before you can even begin to think about creative executions. 

Using the Communications Framework

Of course, planning a digital media plan is a bit more complex than taking down a virtual dinosaur. That’s why we have the communications framework - a handy little tool to guide our strategic planning process. It’s a series of questions advertisers should ask themselves before deciding on specific tactics. Before you ask how, ask:

Why are we doing this? What’s our objective?

Who are we targeting?

What is our proposition?

Where are we advertising?

When should we do it?

At the end of the day, your digital marketing strategy boils down to three key parts - your campaign objectives, your target audience, and your media mix. If you understand these three elements inside and out, you have the framework for a successful digital campaign. Whether you’re creating a marketing strategy or a monster hunting strategy, it certainly pays to be prepared.

[forlawfirmsonlymarketing]

How to Use Podcasts for Link Building via @jeremyknauff

Podcasts have gone from relative obscurity less than a decade ago to one of the fastest-growing marketing channels available today. But the power of podcasts isn’t limited to reaching people who are listening. When properly leveraged, podcasts can have a powerful impact on organic search, too. There are two main reasons for this.

Podcasts can drive people to search for a person’s or company’s name. This type of branded search can send positive signals to Google that can influence search suggestions, as well as improve ranking overall.

Most podcasts are also available outside of aggregators like iTunes and Stitcher – most often, on someone’s website.

This typically leads to links in both directions. The website hosting the podcast will usually link to their guest’s website from the post for that episode. The guest, and in some cases, their fans, will link to that episode on the podcast website. In other words, both having a podcast and being a guest on other podcasts can be an effective way to earn quality links. Often, these links will also drive valuable referral traffic, too.

Hosting Your Own Podcast

Hosting a podcast is a great way to get your name out there while building a loyal audience. It’s also a great way to develop meaningful relationships with people in your industry. I speak from first-hand experience. I launched my podcast about a year ago and quickly realized that it made reaching out to strangers a lot easier and significantly more effective. We aren’t going to get into how to launch a podcast. That goes far beyond the scope of this article, and frankly, even though I launched my own, I don’t consider myself an expert on the topic. If you need guidance on that, I encourage you to check out John Lee Dumas’s guide to starting a podcast. Our focus in this article will be on how to use your own podcast to earn high-quality links. The first step, once you have all of the technical details sorted out, is to create something people actually want to listen to. This means sharing useful information, rather than blathering on about how awesome you are. You might employ a monologue format, or as most people seem to do, it an interview format. The choice is yours, but interviewing others is generally a more effective path to earning links. It’s also a lot easier. My very first podcast episode was a monologue. It was just me talking about the importance of differentiating your company from competitors. The topic was useful, but I was alone in my office basically talking to myself – and I felt like a complete jackass. On the other hand, interviewing someone or having a co-host makes it a lot easier and more natural. It’s just a conversation, rather than a weirdo alone in a room talking to themselves. Some great examples of this format in our industry are: Whichever format you choose, the key is to consistently put out original and valuable information. From here, it’s a relatively simple matter of reaching out to people you’d like to interview. People who have something useful to say that other people want to hear. In many cases, if you interview someone, they’ll link to their episode as soon as it goes live without any prompting. But you can avoid the uncertainty and simply ask them to do so. A good time to do this is right after you’ve finished interviewing them, while they’re still on an emotional high. Obviously they won’t be able to do so until it goes live, but you’ll have set the seed, making it more likely when the time comes. You can also ask them to encourage their audience to link to it.

Be a Guest on Other Podcasts

Being a guest on other podcasts is a great way to create publicity for both for you and for your company, but it can also be a great way to earn links. That’s because most hosts will link to your website from the episode post. Most podcasters who follow an interview format are always looking for interesting and knowledgeable guests. This means that if you have a particular skill set, unique knowledge, or an interesting opinion, it should be relatively easy to be a guest on relevant podcasts. That’s assuming that you can pitch your story in a way that makes the host care what you have to say. Popular podcasters typically receive a barrage of emails asking them to interview people. Many of those emails are ignored because they are purely self-serving. The key here is to pitch from the perspective of their audience, rather than your own interests. You need to figure out what their audience really cares about, and then send a pitch that explains why your story will appeal to them. And while you’re at it, skip the fake compliments and fluff about how you happened to stumble across their podcast. Everyone knows the compliments are fake and they don’t care how you found their podcast. Instead, just keep the pitch short and to the point. And don’t waste your time with constant email follow-ups. If they’re interested, they’ll reply. The only thing you’ll accomplish by harassing them is making sure they never interview you. And if you’re particularly aggressive, they might even tell other people, hurting your chances of getting on other podcasts. If you have a large audience of your own, maybe from social media, a column at a large publication, or a podcast of your own, it may help to mention that, but don’t go overboard – a brief mention is enough. When you ramble on endlessly about yourself, you’ll turn the host off and kill your chances of getting on the podcast.

Which Podcasts Should You Target?

It may be tempting to compile a list of podcasts, and sort their websites based on one of the myriads of SEO metrics. Don’t. While there may be some merit to targeting high-traffic websites, you’re far better off sorting them by relevance because the hosts will be more likely to interview you. Beyond that, you may want to sort them based on engagement, which you can identify based on reviews and social media activity. An added benefit is that their audiences will be more interested in what you have to say. This means they’ll be more likely to listen, click through, link to your website, and even buy your products or services.

Summary

Timeframe: This is a fairly simple and straightforward process – compile a list of relevant podcasts and pitch them on you (or your client) being a guest. This could take as little as an hour depending on the niche and how many podcasts you want to pitch. Some niches may have only a few Results detected: You could begin earning links within a few weeks, but some podcasts are booked out months in advance, so it may take a lot longer. They may begin impacting ranking just as quickly, depending on the topics you want to rank for, and the authority and relevance of the websites the links are on, but in most cases, you should expect to see a lag time of several months. Average links sent per month: This will depend entirely on how many podcasts are in your niche, and how many you can fit into your schedule. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and you can’t spend them all being interviewed on podcasts. Most niches will have at least a dozen or so podcasts, but certain niches, like business or digital marketing, could have hundreds. Tools needed:

Google or Bing

Email

Thick skin (You’ll probably be told “no” a lot.)

Benefits:

This can be an effective way to earn the kind of high-quality, relevant links that can dramatically improve ranking. Often, these are links that your competitors may not have considered, giving you an advantage over them in search.

Podcasts tend to have highly-engaged audiences, which means that these links are more likely to generate referral traffic.

This tactic goes beyond SEO by creating positive publicity. And as more people hear about your brand, branded search will also increase, which can be a positive signal to Google.

Image Credits Featured Image: Paulo Bobita

https://www.businesscreatorplus.com/how-to-use-podcasts-for-link-building-via-jeremyknauff/

[flauntpage]

A Mysterious Union Source With Accurate Information

Sources are strange.

Sometimes the most reliable people just disappear entirely. They get new jobs or their flow of information is cut off. Maybe a situation changes and there’s no reason to continue the knowledge trade. Somebody sniffs them out and they need to lay low for a bit.

Then someone else will pop up out of nowhere with relevant info and nail two or three things with 95% accuracy.

A few weeks ago, one of those folks showed up, sliding into my email with the following:

Bethlehem Steel will leave Lehigh University next season

Jim Curtin will be the head coach in 2019

Ernst Tanner wants to scrap the 4-2-3-1 and play with two strikers

Sure enough, all three of those things came true. Tim McDermott announced the Steel move a few days later, Jim Curtin signed a one-year contract extension, and Tanner touched on the idea of two forwards while talking about the predictability of the 4-2-3-1 in his season-ending press conference.

Strange? Maybe.

Accurate? Pretty much.

I talked to the same person again on Tuesday, who offered up the following, after the jump:

Ernst Tanner is not high on Haris Medunjanin, David Accam, and C.J. Sapong and would not be opposed to moving one or more of those players.

He highly rates Brenden Aaronson, who will “soon pass Anthony Fontana on the depth chart.”

The top offseason priority is a DP striker and he’s willing to sign a big name European player like Mario Balotelli. Tanner has been “heavily” scouting the forward market.

Let’s go down that list in order.

I heard the Medunjanin thing from another source, and it makes sense. Haris is a unique talent who kind of needs specific pieces around him. What I’m trying to say is that he’s a defensive midfielder who doesn’t defend.

If the Union scrap the 4-2-3-1, I don’t know where you stick him on the field. I do think he would be a really nice fit in a 3-5-2, which I’ve blathered on about for something like three years on social media.

Think of something like this:

No, it’s not perfect, but I’ll explain:

When you stick Haris in that kind of shape, in front of three center backs, you mitigate his defensive liabilities. This is how Juventus used Andrea Pirlo in 2012, then New York City tried to play him as a #6 in MLS and he was a turnstile in transition. Medunjanin is slow, he can’t tackle, and he puts stress on the Union’s young center backs because he’s a deep-lying facilitator and not a traditional ball-winning midfielder. He’d rather point and pass off attackers instead of actually marking somebody himself.

As far as Sapong and Accam, a second source told me that they “would not be surprised at all” if the Union looked to move one or both players. C.J. had a down year after a breakout 2017 campaign and Accam was mostly ineffective while apparently playing with a sports hernia. The problem with Accam is that he earns seven-figures and the Union reportedly forfeit more than half of his transfer fee should he be sold this season, so I think they’re stuck with him. Sapong was given a one-year extension in March that will keep him here through 2019. The Union hold a club option for 2020 but they’re on the hook for half a million dollars for a guy who scored four goals in 32 games this season and was moved out to the wing after losing his starting job at center forward.

I don’t know much about Aaronson since I’m off the beat now, but Fontana didn’t get much run this season after showing a few early glimpses while Borek Dockal was being worked in. I think Fontana also had some injury stuff he was dealing with. Aaronson played 18 games for Steel this season and scored one goal while adding five assists. He’s 18 years old and signed a homegrown contract in September.

As far as a striker, it seems as though the Union aren’t going to make an effort to re-sign Dockal and instead want to focus on bringing in an elite goal scorer. Balotelli’s name was specifically mentioned in the email, but mystery source made it seem like this was more of a “kicking the tires” vs. any sort of real pursuit or contact with the agent. Jay Sugarman won’t pony up for that kind of player anyway.

I think the plan is that they’d like to replace their DP #10 with a DP forward and get on with life in a 4-4-2 or 3-5-2 while leaning on the academy kids as significant contributors. Tanner also talked about the idea of playing Fafa Picault as a striker instead of a winger, and while Fafa has good goal-scoring instincts, he’s not exactly Major League Soccer’s most clinical finisher. He might be a really nice complement for a DP forward as a smaller guy who can slash and get through the lines, but he would likely have troubling tangling with bigger center backs if he’s asked to play as a lone striker. I could definitely see him up top in a 1-2 punch playing off a “proper” CF.

I personally am not too high on Cory Burke, who is basically a younger and more aggressive Sapong at this point in his career. You’re probably going to have a much easier time moving Burke than Sapong, but I don’t think either ends up going anywhere. You do have the Dockal and Jay Simpson money that you can use to find a DP striker, so I think they just try to look for a $1m to $2m forward and see what happens.

That’s what I’ve got. Mystery source came out of nowhere, but “this person” is three for three so far.

The post A Mysterious Union Source With Accurate Information appeared first on Crossing Broad.

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[junker-town]

Here is the only correct NCAA Tournament Selection Sunday show format

It honestly shouldn’t be this hard.

This Sunday is one of the best days in sports: Selection Sunday. On Tuesday, CBS Sports and Turner Sports announced they would be changing up the NCAA March Madness Selection show again.

This year, the 2018 NCAA March Madness Selection Show will be aired on TBS, and instead of just giving us the information we want, they’re going to make us sit through a dramatic reading of the 68 teams that are selected for the tournament.

On Selection Sunday, CBS/Turner say they will reveal all 68 teams ‘followed’ by the brackets pic.twitter.com/3IaSVI3IJG

— Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) March 6, 2018

I have questions.

My first question was in how these teams would be announced. Apparently, that’s going to be alphabetically, grouped by auto-bids and then at-large teams.

Brace yourself for a very different Selection Show on Sunday. All teams will be unveiled in alpha order (grouped by Auto-Bid and At-Large) in first 5-10 mins. Than matchups will be slotted into seeds/bracket. Also in front of a live studio audience. (from Turner's Craig Barry)

— Brandon Costa (@SVG_Brandon) March 6, 2018

But mainly, my question is why? Like, really, why?

Also, a live studio audience? Unless Jim Boeheim is in that live studio audience when Syracuse isn’t announced, it’s so extra.

Revealing a list of the 68 teams selected in some other fashion than the announcing of the bracket is messing with something that didn’t need to be messed with. This has been CBS’s M.O. for years now.

Remember two years ago? CBS got cute, announcing one region in the bracket, then going immediately to their analysts to break down that section of the bracket. Well, this is the age of the internet, and that shit doesn’t fly. The 2016 bracket was leaked to Twitter with the quickness of Chris Lykes, and everyone rejoiced.

Except CBS, of course, whose ratings sucked. Their ratings dropped 5% from the year before and were the lowest since 1995, per the NY Daily News.

So last year, they changed things up, going back to the old standard of announcing the whole bracket before forcing Barkley to struggle with a touch screen. At least they cut a half hour off the affair, making it a manageable hour-and-a-half instead of the two hour disaster from 2016.

Well, now it’s going to be two hours and have a pointless reveal of the 68 teams making the tournament without any context as to where they’ll be playing and against whom. Even if it only takes 5-10 minutes, you can guess they’ll probably throw in a commercial break. It’s just so unnecessary. The most frustrating thing is that this isn’t that hard. Let me help you, CBS.

Announce the bracket, region by region

Start with the four No. 1 seeds and the region they will head up. Then go in order. Any order really, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, but South, West, East, Midwest will keep teams matched up with how they’ll pair up in the Final Four.

Once you go through one region, top to bottom, you move to the next one. Do two, go to commercial, do the other two.

Talk to the Selection Committee chair

Bruce Rasmussen is the 2017-18 Committee chair and director of Athletics at Creighton. Bring him on via Skype to chat about why Syracuse was left out again. Ask him why Michigan State was put in Virginia’s bracket for the fourth time in five years. Talk about whether this year’s bubble actually was historically weak. Anything. Just get Bruce out there to chat for a hot second to answer for their selections.

Analyze each region

Now that everyone knows who is playing whom, get back to the bracket and do some analyzing. Which matchups stand out? How super-easy of a path did the committee give Duke this time? Which 12 seed is going to get that 12-5 upset? Any coaches playing mentors or mentees? Which team will be most affected by travel? Which pod is the best in terms of entertainment value?

Really, the options are limitless.

Use actual college basketball analysts

I know, this seems insane. Look, I love Charles Barkley. I think he’s hysterical, and he’s fun to watch. What I don’t need is Chuck blathering on about how he thinks Oklahoma is under-seeded at 10 seed because he has literally no idea that Trae Young and the Sooners are 8-10 in the Big 12 and lost seven of 10 to close the regular season.

I do love Ernie Johnson though. He should be on everything.

Make it one hour

You don’t need more than 60 minutes to do the things listed above. By all means, continue into a second hour of analysis and bringing coaches on for interviews and what not, but you should self-contain all of the relevant bracket info into the first hour. There’s absolutely no need for that to go any longer.

Honestly, this isn’t hard. It shouldn’t be hard. Ratings are the name of the game, but these tricks and unnecessary additions are not only annoying, but they invite Bracket Leak II: the redux.

Do us all a favor and just stop with this nonsense.