#moreso within my own commentary . whatever

[w0rmsprite]

isnt it so cute that trickster roxys scarf is janes colors... its called subliminal yuri messaging

[gffa]

Hi!  Of course it’s all right, I’m always delighted to get even half a chance to talk about this stuff that I love so much!I will say, of course, there are few true concrete answers to any of this, even if word of god commentary lays out a direct answer, because several of the creators have spoken about how it’s important to maintain the sense of speculation and theorizing, as that was one of the things that was such a joy to them before they started making SW, too.  As well as, you know, just the basic fact that everyone’s going to interpret things differently and that doesn’t make one more inherently valuable than another, as well as word of god commentary and, hell, even canon is only as meaningful to you as a fan as you want it to be!That said, I like the case I make for the things I’m passionate about, so I’ll make my case again because I enjoy doing it! We‘re always told that the Dark Side is evil and Light is good. But if you divide it like that, what does true balance mean? Fundamentally, light is good and dark is evil, that’s absolutely true, but the thing is that it’s never meant to be about a purity thing, but instead being about what you embrace as a worldview.  Each one of us has both good and bad in us, the way you keep balance isn’t by exorcising the bad and then you’re good forever, but to every day keep making the choice to embrace the good. George Lucas explains the Force in, at its most basic terms, that the light is selfless (love, compassion, caring) and the dark is selfishness (greed, anger, hate, suffering).  The only way to rise above the dark side is to discipline yourself against it.  (George Lucas Explains The Force in a The Clone Wars writers meeting + transcription here) On the dark side specifically, how the Force works: “Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living.” How Yoda explains how the dark side/the Force works in The Phantom Menace:“ Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.“ These are literally the same exact explanation, which shows us that, yes, Yoda and the Jedi are absolutely correct about how the dark side of the Force works! Another example: “In the end, it’s about fundamentally becoming selfless moreso than selfish.  It seems so simple, but it’s so hard to do.  And when you’re tempted by the dark side, you don’t overcome it once in life and then you’re good.  It’s a constant. And that’s what, really, Star Wars is about and what I think George wanted people to know.  That to be a good person and to really feel better about your life and experience life fully you have to let go of everything you fear to lose. Because then you can’t be controlled.  [….]  These are the core things of Star Wars.”  –Dave Filoni, Celebration Chicago 2019, Rebels Remembered Panel “Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is. [What must I do, Master Yoda?] Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”  –Yoda, Revenge of the Sith “[Anakin] turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.” –George Lucas, Time Magazine These are also echoes of each other and the themes of how the dark side works in Star Wars, again showing us that the Jedi are correct in their understanding of how the Force works. And this is also what the Jedi teach:  That you must face your inner darkness (your fears, your hate, your guilt, your anger) because it comes from within and it’s a lifelong thing.  It starts with them designing their tests for younglings to move forward in their training by going to Ilum, where they will face the things they fear, the things they must overcome, to not become trapped in their mind.

It goes hand in hand with the Jedi’s bigger philosophy of understanding yourself and controlling yourself, that these things aren’t bad, but you need to get a grip on yourself (especially when you have these tremendous psychic powers and connections and can be influenced by outside emotions that you don’t even realize aren’t your own, as happens more than once in canon). Which is why one of the earliest lessons we see baby Jedi being taught is about meditation and understanding yourself, looking within to know who you are:

One more example: “All of my movies are about one thing.  Which is the fact that the only prison you’re in is the prison of your mind.  And if you decide to open the door and get out, you can.  There’s nothing stopping you.“ –George Lucas (American Voices, 2015) “You-you said we would be trapped.” “Not by the cave you were, but by your mind. Lessons, you have learned. Find courage, you did– Hope, patience Trust, confidence, and selflessness.”  –Jedi younglings + Yoda on Ilum, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “The Gathering” The Jedi teach that this is what they must guard against, must discipline themselves against: “Qui-Gon whispered, ‘The dark side?’ He knew it was a thing all beings carried within them, a part of himself he would learn to guard against—the crèche masters had taught him all that.“  –Master & Apprentice, Claudia Gray “[The] only way to overcome the dark side is through discipline.”  –George Lucas What do the Jedi mean, when they say „Trust in the Force“, and „May the Force be with you“? They’re blessings, basically!  “Trust in the Force” is that the Jedi believe the Force will guide them, that if you can quiet your mind enough to hear its whispers, it will guide them into the moment and direction they’re meant to be in.  Many times, they cannot possibly know the Force’s plans, so they kind of just have to shrug and go, “Well, we’re limited mortal beings who cannot possibly have an omniscient point of view like the mystical energy field that we can tap into a small fraction, so if you don’t know which direction to go, all you can do is trust the Force to guide you.” And “May the Force be with you” is the similar, that they’re saying “good luck” and that they hope the person has good fortune in whatever they’re going to go do. Are they always just talking about the Light and totally disregard the Dark? I would say they’re definitely not disregarding it, because the dark is part of everyone, it’s a lifelong challenge to overcome it, it’s not a one-and-done thing, but that doesn’t mean they embrace it.  Nor does it mean that temporary, momentary emotions are the same thing as embracing the dark side–we see Jedi having darker emotions all the time and nobody’s like OH SHIT I HAD A NEGATIVE FEELING, I’M A BAD JEDI.  No, they just don’t let it control them and don’t act based on those feelings. For example:

Negative emotions!  Worry, anger, sorrow!  All from “perfect” Jedi characters!  Characters who are Jedi Masters and who believe incredibly strongly in Jedi principles and teachings! And not once do any of them say, oh, shit, no, I’m not allowed to feel that–instead they express their feelings, but do not let those feelings control them. They do not embrace the darker emotions, but instead face them and then let them go. What would be the fundamental difference between how a Sith like Sidious, a sort of grey Jedi, like Ahsoka, and someone who tries to be the perfect ideal of a Jedi, like Obi-Wan, use and see the Force? It’s all about how you approach it, basically.  The dark side is not sustainable, the dark side corrupts, it cannot be balanced with the light, Matt Martin of the LFL story group explained that that’s one of the things George Lucas was very clear on and thus why “Gray Jedi” can’t really be a thing!  If someone tries to embrace the dark along side the light, eventually they will fall into the dark.  (Mystical, immortal creatures don’t count.) But momentary anger and upset and fear and selfish impulses are normal, so the goal Jedi strive towards isn’t the eradication of these things, but the honing of the skill to let go of them.  (As “letting go” is a theme that’s rewarded in the word of god commentary and in the narrative, such as Anakin letting go of his hate and rage and doing something selfless is what allows him to become a Force Ghost, the only way to achieve that is through selflessness, the dark side cannot do it.) Ahsoka, for all that she isn’t a Jedi later on, who probably allows herself more darker impulses before she lets go of them, because she doesn’t have the same weight of granted authority over others placed on her, is still very much a light side user, she’s not gray at all!  Same for Qui-Gon, while he’s something of a maverick, he very much adheres to the light side of the Force. As for Sidious and other dark siders, the Force is the Force is the Force, it’s all about how you use it.  While there’s a certain element of how this can manifest in external ways (ie, certain places are stronger in the dark or the light) that press down on the person from the outside, in using the dark side or the light side, it’s about how you approach it.  Do you do so with selfless intent?  Then you’re on the light side.  Do you do so with selfish intent?  Intending to hurt people, embracing the pain and suffering you can psychically or internally feel?  Then you’re on the dark side. It’s about how you choose to act on the things inside you, what you choose to hold onto and what you choose to work towards letting go. "Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side.  You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.” –George Lucas The light is about how your feelings should be cherished, but you cannot let them rule over you, because you’ll hurt people.  Like Ezra getting so afraid when the Grand Inquisitor threatened Kanan, that he caused the fyrnocks around him to attack and could have really hurt someone.  Like Padawan Dooku cannot tell his own feelings from what he thinks is an external source of the dark side in Dooku: Jedi Lost.  Like Anakin gets so angry in a training session that he literally brings the training room’s ceiling down on them before Yoda saves them, because he couldn’t control himself in Choose Your Destiny: An Obi-Wan & Anakin Adventure.  Like Obi-Wan says in The Clone Wars, it’s not like (romantic) feelings aren’t allowed, they’re natural.  But he senses a deep well of rage in Anakin and he needs to face that and deal with it. The Jedi are about, “Get your shit together because, when you have level 100 psychic abilities, you can hurt people, so you have to get a grip on that.  Because the dark side lies, it twists things, it lingers in your head and poisons your thoughts, it’s not a reliable narrator.”

[cargopantsman]

Norse Read-A-Long

Week 1

So the prompt I'll roll with is

5.     Why do you think Hallstein Thorolfsson was so adamant about not accepting any land granted by his father?

though... I'm going to ramble about a bit.

I want to riff a little on Harald Finehair, aka Fairhair in some translations, because he shows up as a sort of Lex Luthor character in many of the Icelandic Sagas. While the sagas will typically deal with the trials and tribulations of people and communities within Iceland itself, Harald is a shorthand for the big, bad enemy that is Norway.

Of course, with all things Old Norse, there is debate as to whether Harald Finehair actually existed or was a literary amalgamation for the sake of a cohesive oral tradition. I'll continue on as though he were real, since as far as the sagas-as-stories go, he's as real as Lex Luthor is in the DC Universe.

So what does this have to do with Hallstein? The "historical" backdrop of the settlement of Iceland gives us a good framework to build profiles of the mindset of the characters presented to us in this prologue to Eyrbyggja Saga. Having an understanding of what was culturally, morally, and socially acceptable and commendable helps to put context to a [SPOILER] upcoming battle spurred on by Dritsker for instance (which, if translated with an eye to connotation, is better understood as "shit-reef" but I'll take a page from the Saga Thing guys and refer to it as Poop Rock as it comes up).

So what kind of people can engage in battle over something called Poop Rock?

Much of the drama in the sagas tends to be a commentary on the flaws of the rules, laws, and norms that structure Icelandic society. While the conflicts in Eyrbyggja saga are more subtle in how a small issue can erupt into brutal violence, other sagas will more visibly display how laws and social expectations can gridlock people into a vicious cycle of feuding.

The Old Norse world was driven primarily by honor and reputation, as illustrated in Hávamál stanzas 76-77

[76] Cows die, family die, you will die the same way. But a good reputation never dies for the one who earns it well.

[77] Cows die, family die, you will die the same way. I know only one thing that never dies; the reputation of the one who's died

(trans. Jackson Crawford, The Poetic Edda. 2015)

Self-sufficiency, responsibility, and keeping oaths were the core mores that could hold a community together while allowing individual freedoms. Holding court, or a thing, could be a bit of an ordeal, and while Icelanders loved litigation, problems were often solved on a one-on-one, or family-on-family, basis, sometimes with lethal resolutions. The law was typically an "after-the-fact" event, due to travel and seasonal constraints, and was usually a matter of damage control moreso than damage prevention. As such, much of the functioning of society was up to individuals, for the most part, behaving civilly.

This is why there's a certain attention to detail in the passage

On this platform lay a solid ring weighing twenty ounces, upon which people had to swear all their oaths. It was the business of the temple priest to wear this ring on his arm at every public meeting.

(trans. Pálsson and Edwards, Eyrbyggja Saga. 1972)

in the description of Thorolf's temple to Thor at Hofsvág. Oath rings pop up consistently enough in the mythology and the sagas that we can be pretty certain they were a Big Deal and that oaths were taken very seriously, and being sworn in public assemblies, whether at a temple or a thing or, eventually, the Althing, kept the oath-sworn accountable in society.

The wrench in the gears comes mostly from the cultural heritage of Iceland's initial settlers.

Norway, back in the 8th to 10th centuries, was a collection of scattered, independent kingdoms, or chieftainships, governed by very locally minded chieftains, jarls, goði, or other such self-determined titles. Harald, as the stories usually go, had his eye on a woman, Gyða Eiríksdóttir of Sweden, but she refused to marry him unless he had united all of Norway. He swore to this, and part of that being he wouldn't cut his hair until all of Norway was under his control, and so got the nickname hárfagri (fair, fine, or beautiful hair).

There are political arguments offered for this mission, aside from marrying the popular girl, in some sources. Since most of Northern Europe was being Christianized, and Christian kingdoms had this pesky tendency for organization, cooperation, and concerted military endeavors due their new-fangled literacy, a unified Norway stood a better chance of surviving incursions from the continent. (And if I recall correctly, even Sweden was semi-unified at this point.)

The problem is that many of the jarls, goðar, etc. were not keen on giving up their own independence and authority. There are stories that display a certain irony in many separate lordships allying in order to better fight off Harald's advances (which, really, just proves Harald's point), but highlights that the mentality of Norwegian nobility was that cooperation could be advantageous, but should be temporary. Debts are paid as needed and independence is maintained. Eventually, as Harald began to gather more supporters under his banner, his campaign snowballed until the hold-out nobility couldn't fend him off neither individually nor as small alliances, and many chose to flee with whatever assets they could carry than bend to the will of an overlord.

While the story of the settling of Iceland is that of a predominantly Norwegian diaspora we shouldn't imagine these settlers as poor, dispossessed pilgrims, but of a noble elite loading up ships with riches and family and staffing. These are people that are accustomed to power, authority, and self-determinism.

So Hallstein Thorolfsson, while being offered land from his father, struck out to stake his own claim for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they were in a new land that was mostly unsettled. Hallstein didn't have to be confined to what he could inherit from his father. There were no neighbors to constrain his borders, and by claiming his own stake, no one could say of him that he only succeeded because of what he was given. He carved out his own home, his own destiny, and could rightfully say he was a self-made man.

Secondly, much of what kept people, especially the nobility, in check was a sense of debt, both financial and abstract. It's not far-fetched to overlay a Godfather-like stereotype over the goðar ("Someday - and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter's wedding day."). The sense of not owing anyone anything for your success was a key part of the honor system that kept people accountable. The same logic that drives Hallstein to forge his own territory; to not piggyback on his father's power, to not owe his father anything for his own success, is that need to be neither beholdened nor indebted to an overlord king.

[destiny-smasher]

12, 23, 45, and 50. Also, you're pretty cool and All Wounds is amazing. Hope you have a good day! Also-also sorry if I picked too many, I'm just curious.

Also, you're pretty cool and All Wounds is amazing. Hope you have a good day!

12. Have you ever written a fic and decided never to publish it? Why?

Hm, actually, yea, I think so. I wrote a ‘test’ fic in short story format about characters from the indie game Freedom Planet. See, the creator of that game was my first fan, back in 2001 when I was writing Smash Bros. fic (which is where my username comes from, actually, I’ve been using it ever since), and years later after we’d reconnected through FP, he wanted to bring me on board for the sequel to help with writing, as I guess they want to go with a more dialogue-heavy story with less cinematic flair and more straight-up character interaction and such.

Given how the original game starts with three cutesy cartoony misfit teenagers cracking jokes about cooties and ends up involving a protagonist being tortured to the point parts of her body get torn off I mean, yea, that’s a world that’s willing to go in different directions.

So I wrote a test fic taking place right after the first game, the creator seemed to like it OK.

Problem was, this all happened like, last spring, when the drama with the LiS fandom went down and I was struggling with matters of gender identity, wanting to come out but not feeling safe or comfortable to do so, hating my day job (which I still do but I was full time back then and that made a world of difference for my stress), lost a friendship that I saw a lot of potential in (hell, lost a handful of those within a short span, online and off)...Basically, I was in the worst place I’ve been in since my senior year of college. And I was supposed to be getting brought onto a team of people who were already friends, already familiar with each other, who got paid for their work as actual staff members of the team who made the first game.

And I was just some other person, getting squeezed in without any actual role or title or specific duties or assignments, getting drunk to cope with all of my stress, already struggling with feelings of inadequacy (of “I’m not good enough on my own”) and it all just did not jive with the new team. Plus, I just didn’t know why the game’s creator wanted me in -- my style of writing wasn’t compatible with the more Saturday Morning approach they were trying to go for. They wanted to have my best friend Aivi (who does music for Steven Universe) join in on the project, and I think when she realized I was off the team it sapped her interest, as well (she still wants to work with me on an indie game team together somehow, just hasn’t lined up yet).

Anyway, this isn’t at all to say that the team at Galaxy Trail doesn’t make great work, Freedom Planet is one of the best Sonic games that exists and it’s not even a Sonic game (I mean, Sonic Mania only just came out but before that I would’ve easilly said FP was the best Sonic style game). It was all just another example of me being at my worst and feeling ‘not enough’ and getting rejected as a result of that self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who was once a fan of my work has been able to convert and adapt his own fancontent successfully and succeed and get paid for it and I’m...still stuck in retail. And so the shortfic in turn only reminded me of all these things, and I just never felt quite comfortable posting it.

23. What’s the nicest review you’ve ever gotten?

That’s hard to say, actually. I’ve gotten a number of really inspiring ones over the past few years, mostly about What I Learned at SRU. Mainly, the nicest reviews tend to have a recurring theme of expressing how the story I created helped influence how they decided to approach real life. All Wounds has gotten some similar comments, too, though that story is inherently less pleasant.

45. If you had to call yourself an author of a single genre (besides fanfic) what label would you give yourself?

I like to use the phrase, ‘In-between The Panels.’ It’s a term I got from the movie Super (which is a batshit crazy movie that does some weird stuff with the comic-super-hero genre).

While I wrote a Teen Titans fic in high school that literally followed this concept (taking place inbetween episodes of an alternate reality Season 2 and we’ll just leave it at that), it wasn’t until I started becoming familiar with certain anime series that I became self-aware of what I was really seeking -- slice-of-life storytelling. While anime as a general medium features stories full of cliches I dislike (and let’s be real, so do western cartoons) there was a MUCH higher degree of consideration for the slower, thoughtful moments.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and its meta-commentary on genre storytelling was probably the moment I became fully self-aware. Since then, I’ve come to adore the slower paced, deliberate pacing of shows like Michiko and Hatchin, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, Mr. Robot. This taste has led me to be excited for video game experiences that capture a similar tone (which is exactly how I got into Life is Strange before it was even released).

I tend to gravitate toward slice of life moments about characters in-between the action. Whether that’s taking a break from said action, or coping with what’s already transpired, or simply trying to exist despite events, my stories typically center around those slower, down-to-earth moments.

In a lot of ways, Life is Strange: All Wounds is like a culmination of all of these types of scenes and stories I’ve written, tying it all around two protagonists across a span of years.

If you want a more traditional answer to that question, I’d probably say ‘slice-of-life’ or ‘drama,’ or whatever combines the two. The question itself is odd because ‘fanfic’ isn’t a genre at all, though.

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

Unequivocally yes, it has had a significant impact on my life. Moreso than anything else I’ve ever done. It has not always been positive. For example, my Walking Dead fic Versatility got me a few irrational haters who missed the entire point of Telltale’s second season of the game and tried to harass me for...writing about one ending of that season and not the other?

I also experienced a lot of drama in the Avatar fandom while Legend of Korra aired because...by and large that show’s storytelling was a goddamn mess (parts of it were fucking brilliant, which made it all the more frustrating when you had to wade through a bunch of lazy crap to get to the good stuff). And I don’t just mean that in comparison to its successor, I mean just in general as a show that wanted to be taken seriously. That’s a whole can of worms I’ve already opened multiple times. But suffice to say my opinions spurred a lot of drama. I anticipate something similar might happen with Before the Storm so I might not be active in that fandom for a while.

Oh, and this all sidesteps the biggest offender, the drama I experienced last spring in the Life is Strange fandom. I had the biggest negative impact on that, myself, as opposed to any other situation, but if I hadn’t been writing All Wounds none of it would’ve happened. Then again, I would never have met my girlfriend, either. Or any of the friends I’ve made in the past year since. Similarly, struggling with my dissatisfaction with Korra’s writing connected me with people in a unique way.

In the end, even the negative stuff -- even my worst mistakes -- in fan-creation culture have ultimately led toward great positives. While writing SRU I was essentially functioning as a Patreon creator for a couple of years (paying my bills with funds donated by an extremely generous fan).

My best friend I met because she made piano arrangements of Mario songs. That person who made Freedom Planet, met through fanfiction. My girlfriend I met through making PriceField content. And many of my online friends, some of whom I go on to video chat with and even meet in person eventually, they’ve basically all been connected to fan-content creation.

Even if the source material has problems, even if fan culture itself has problems, these characters and their stories still consistently connect us to each other, because that’s the entire purpose of a story -- to equip us with the motivation and inspiration to empathize.

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/karmic-tools-weekly-forecast-april-21-27-2019/

Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: April 21 – 27, 2019

Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast: April 21 – 27, 2019

By Kelly M. Beard

The video version of this forecast, as read by Kelly, is available here.

The Karmic Tools Weekly Forecast covers the current planetary transits which affect people in different ways and to various degrees of intensity. Take notice when it is a Personal planet (Sun / Moon / Mercury / Venus / Mars) interacting with a Social (Jupiter/Saturn) or Collective planet (Uranus / Neptune/Pluto). And pay extremely close attention when it is a Social planet interacting with a Collective planet because that means something *big* is brewing that will move large groups of people along their evolutionary paths. Tuning in to the energy and rhythm of the planets can serve as a useful *guide* as you move along your Individual Path. It also helps to understand your place within the context of the larger Social & Collective Story. Below, you will find out how these energies tend to manifest, as well as guidance and direction. 

*NOTE*  There are some days when there are NO CONTACTS (besides the Moon), please note that there are no missing entries, we just list the actual Activations of each week + the day they happen.

Weekly Forecast: April 21 – 27, 2019

4/22 ~ Sun (essential self & core drives) ~conjunct~ Uranus (disruption & liberation): This energy serves to provoke a radical shift within you, catalyzing the desire to breathe fresh, clean, new vital energy into your idea of who you are and what you came to contribute. It may not be comfortable, but it is necessary and even moreso for those of you who are rigid in your habits & thinking, or depend on others to validate who you are and what you contribute. Sometimes a little disruption serves to get you focused on what is really important to you. And at this time, change is in the air. It is far better to use the intensity of collective change to shift on personal levels, rather than try to go it alone or worse, play the martyr or the victim. It’s time for your most unique Self to contribute the piece only you can. This activation may bring the suddenly clarity you need and a refreshed attitude toward life, which can help tremendously as you fortify the connection to what makes you feel truly free & independent. If you resist the shift, you will manifest other disruptions that are far less productive, much more frustrating and significantly more costly.

4/24 ~ Pluto Retrograde @23* CAPRICORN: Pluto is in a long process of purification & transformation (2008-2024) and retrogrades annually, facilitating evolution on a more subtle level, although if your chart is activated, it may not *feel* subtle. On a personal level, Pluto helps you dig up any destructive unconscious patterns, strips you raw and confronts you with who you are and how you will survive when nothing and no one else is available to help or support you. I like to think of Pluto as our ‘buried treasures’ and like diamonds, it often requires a very special task to release from within and bring into the Light. Often, because Pluto rules death, rebirth & transformation, something is sacrificed for your own greater good. Although it may be sometimes painful and debilitating, it doesn’t have to be, but is almost always (a) necessary and (b) ultimately *liberating*!!

Pluto is traveling through the Capricorn sector of your chart, digging deep and activating any other planets you may have in Capricorn (and Cancer/Aries & Libra by default). So, it’s good to look at this as an on-going purification & transformation of this department in life (and, subsequently the other three areas too). Pluto moves generations and great numbers of people along their evolutionary path, however, every year when it retrogrades, it turns that energy inward, giving us unique access to our own depths, where our SoulSelf resides. When it goes forward, it is a very gradual awakening process that develops from there. Transformation happens behind the scenes and often out of the prying eyes of others, as well as your own conscious monkey-mind, this is deep Soul Work that only you can do. What have you really purified & transformed this year? or what would you like to?

Use this time to set intentions for purification in the sense that you are supported to strip away the non-essential and reconnect with your purest, original intent. Change is greatly supported at this time, so anything that you are really ready, truly willing & finally able to change, can be transformed forever. Capricorn gets everyone focused on choices & responsibilities, as well as the structure of your life that supports & protects you and the overall stability of whatever House it rules.

4/27 ~ Mars (action & desire) ~square~ Neptune (dreams & illusions): This can be an annoying energy, to say the least. Basically, you may be confronted with challenges which are a direct result of earlier choices. These are the kind of choices you eventually realized were wrong and “hoped” the consequences would somehow pass you by. Not. You may feel very discouraged, possibly depressed, and be filled with fear & doubt. The key to getting through this energy is to take a step back, reflect on your choices and what led you to this point and, as objectively as possible, evaluate what went wrong. The tendency with this energy is to want to give up completely on the path you have chosen when all that is probably necessary is a little tweaking. Try to identify the aspect that is causing the conflict. If you don’t feel that you can be objective enough or that you struggle with identifying this aspect, enlist two other people to give you their opinion and then follow your gut instinct on the direction to take from here. The other temptation with this energy is to be deceptive – either to your Self or others. Either way – don’t give in – it will only come back to bite you (harder) later. Your physical energy is likely to be low as well. Do not force your Self to do anything you are truly not “feeling” right now. Instead, meditate on what action may be necessary when your energy returns. Be still. Avoid confrontations with others as it is just the energy pushing you out of comfort zone, into new territory. This is a test of sorts and the best way to deal with it is to face your fears and clarify your desires. My personal two-cents about these two planets (Mars & Neptune) in a difficult angle, is to reflect on what actions (Mars) have been taken (and NOT worked) toward the fulfillment of your dreams (Neptune) – and start your “tweaking” there.

*****

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[project-two-five-zero-one]

Why the Apocalypse Now Kickstarter thing is (probably) a Fucking Terrible Idea

Even if the game weren't destined to disappoint on a purely conceptual level (more on that in a second) the Kickstarter pitch is full of massive red flags that should be apparent to anyone modestly familiar with the industry, like 

- a few key figures with impressive resumes leading a team of unknowns in a studio with no prior projects 

- ambitious, exciting-sounding design ideas with little to no specifics regarding how they might actually be implemented, described as an "experience" 

- fucking massive funding goal with an extremely vague development timetable 

- no mockup UI, demo trailer or any kind of proof-of-concept material whatsoever beyond concept art depicting sets from the film 

Other reasons: 

- this is a prospective project of staggering ambition and little proof of follow-through, based on an existing work which was ITSELF a project of staggering ambition that almost completely fell apart while spearheaded by one guy with an overwhelmingly huge budget 

- for all its ambition the notion of the "psychological horror war game", that mythical interactive experience based on harrowing guerilla conflicts like Vietnam or Iraq which will tackle the true horrors of war with a depth and sensitivity Call of Duty can only dream of, is not a new concept for the video gaming world. In fact it's been attempted several times before, with the results invariably being either vaporware (Six Days in Fallujah, the PREVIOUS attempt at an Apocalypse Now game that was briefly worked on by Tom Bissell) or crap (Shellshock: Nam '67 - anyone remember that?). If there's a way to represent the psychological aspect of guerilla warfare in a video game that's both commercially viable (i.e. something more than a half dozen people would actually want to play) and not cheap and exploitative, no one has yet unscrambled it and not for lack of effort. The only "successful" (and still widely maligned) example would be Spec Ops: The Line, which accomplishes its biting commentary by being exactly the same as every other post-Modern Warfare military shooter, only ironic. Not the most glowing precedent. I'm sure the guys at Erebus Games would lay the blame on meddling profit-minded creativity-squashing publishers, and as much as I'd like to join them in sticking it to the risk-averse AAA gaming elite they would need to provide something on their side a little more compelling than the promise of "Fallout on acid". 

- Remember that time Marlon Brando - very shortly before his death - refused to lend his voice or likeness to EA's Godfather video game because he thought video games were violent and dumb? I don't really have a specific point to make here with this, just: LOL. 

Actually I kind of do have a specific point. Perhaps more important than any of these practical concerns, the idea of trying to evoke Apocalypse Now in a video game is almost certainly doomed to failure, artistically if not commercially, because by invoking this work of fiction from another medium Erebus is setting expectations they cannot possibly meet. Unless audiences' and designers' conceptions of what constitutes a "video game" radically change at some point in the future, no video game attempting to summon the tonal heft of a film like Apocalypse Now will ever succeed because unlike cinema or prose, the core storytelling elements of video games are intrinsically absurd. Video games are about repetitive actions, about polygons and number values, about dying and respawning and dying again. Any game ever made with anything resembling a combat mechanic involves (or just as importantly, can involve) killing more humans or humanoid sentient beings in the span of 6-20 hours than just about any one person in all of history. Treated as cinema or as fiction or - above all - as any kind of direct reflection of life, the very narrative lifeblood of video games is self-evidently fucking ridiculous. 

This is not a knock on video games: calculated repetition is the heart and soul of game design, and precisely what separates an actual game with mechanics and craft from a nominally interactive screensaver. This is also not me making some curmudgeonly Roger Ebert argument that Games Are Not Art, or even that they can't convey worthwhile narratives: on the contrary, the best and most enjoyable of video game narratives (and there are honestly so many to choose from in so many different styles, I can't reasonably narrow it down to just one or two representative examples) embrace the inherent abstractions and absurdities of the medium and take them in stride, often combining the exaggerated language of video games with the similarly exaggerated tropes of genre fiction, comics and anime to produce results that are wildly successful on their own terms. Outside the realm of postmodernist absurdism, however, most "serious" works of fiction endeavor to have some kind of baseline representational correspondence with reality as human beings experience it. 

At the very least, this is true of Apocalypse Now. Conceived and produced while the trauma of Vietnam was still so raw in America's collective consciousness that it had barely even begun to scab over, the film was always intended to contextualize and electrify the images of the war that so many had seen play out TV screens, while also attaching this particular moment in history to John Milius's madly poetic, quasi-transcendental meditations on the insanity of war and the warrior spirit of man, as well as the brooding colonial reflections of Joseph Conrad. All of this is grounded via a certain degree of aesthetic realism, however stylized in composition and editing, and expanding from that a reach into weighty, socially significant pathos. Video games, at least as we understand them currently, will never truly reproduce either realism or pathos in the terms in which Apocalypse Now envisions them. Not for lack of effort or talent (though, narratively speaking, some number of AAA productions could certainly benefit from a bit of those) but because they're functionally incapable of doing so. You can't have an Apocalypse Now where Willard is dying and respawning every couple of minutes - at least not if you want to retain any of the film's narrative strength. The scene where Willard's traveling party has a tense, violent encounter with the Vietnamese civilians in their boat full of chickens is a memorable and disturbing episode within the sequence of the film, but as either a railroaded scripted game event that can be reloaded and repeated any number of times or a randomly generated encounter occurring dozens of times in slightly differing permutations throughout a 20+ hour game experience, it is incapable of holding the same power over an audience. 

A game that has famously tried to shoot for the kind of realism and pathos observed in many examples of "serious" "literary" fiction is Naughty Dog's beloved The Last of Us. Narratively, aesthetically, the game sought to be an equivalent to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and ended up being (functionally if not officially) an above average Walking Dead spinoff with some punchy network-TV-quality dialogue (which is more than the actual Walking Dead network TV series can say at this point, but anyway). This might be because creative director and writer Neil Druckmann is no Cormac McCarthy, but I suspect it's also because McCarthy's evocation of reality and acerbic existential pathos are simply not things you can transpose intact onto an interactive experience with checkpoints and a stealth kill mechanic. Note once again that I am not criticizing the game, or any game, for having qualities which make video games balanced and fun: what I am saying is that, given these entirely understandable and probably necessary concessions to The Concept of Video Games as We Understand Them, the developer's pretensions of comparison to McCarthy or the tragic works of the Coen brothers (protagonist Joel was named in honor of Coen the Elder) is at best foolhardy, and at worst indicative of a deeper misguidedness (is that a word? it is now) insofar as what video games can and should aspire to in terms of narrative. 

And as it was for the Coens and McCarthy, so it is for Coppola and Milius - moreso, now, because with this project they are being invoked by name and not just by innuendo. (The fact that Coppola has signed his name on the project means little - not because he's declined artistically since his heyday (I shall not judge) but because I seriously doubt he has any understanding or interest in video games beyond whatever demo reel these guys have shown him.) I'm sure the Kickstarter isn't some cynical enterprise, at least; I don't doubt that tbe dudes at Erebus all have hearts in the respective right places. But as someone who really likes both video games and Apocalypse Now, I'm not putting my money anywhere near this crowdfunding campaign and you probably shouldn't either.