#ok I admit I cheated a bit with the translation but not everyone has learned latin in a ditch like Guildford | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

steviedegrae · 5 years ago

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An excerpt from a blog post by Florian Harms, which I can fully subscribe to.

New year, new happiness: these days many people are looking ahead, making new resolutions, wanting to make a fresh start and leave the old behind. When I look around our country, I wish for exactly the opposite: a return to old virtues. One should actually consider them timeless, but they do not seem to be. Whether on the railway station, at the supermarket checkout, on many company boards or in ministries and in parliament: all too often there is a lack of morals, many people seem unable to master even the most banal rules of etiquette. They are no longer chic, they are supposedly no longer up to date. Instead, if you uphold traditional values, you are quickly considered a reactionary redneck. Therefore, this morning a small plea for three supposedly old, but in reality very modern virtues: First, I would like to see more decency. Those who are decent do not enrich themselves at the expense of others and do not exploit the misery of the weaker ones. They do not evade taxes and do not cheat their customers, for example by installing cheating software in cars or selling bad real estate loans. But decency also includes the style of how one presents oneself in public: respectful, polite, or even better, courteous. You let others finish speaking. One does not take the last piece of cake, but offers it to others. You hold the door open for others, even if you don't know each other. You dress decently. Tracksuits belong in the gym, not on the subway. One does not talk down about other people, especially not about whole social groups. "The migrants" or "the Muslims" or even "the women" are not dirty words. People are first and foremost individuals with individual origins, with desires, goals, good and bad characteristics. They are not "them". This does not change even if someone who is currently sitting in the Bundestag or in the White House and abuses his office to insult the weaker ones and claims the opposite. Secondly, I would like to see more sincerity. This beautiful virtue makes us shine everywhere: in everyday life, in the family, at work, in politics too. I don't know about you, but I have learned from experience that the best way to go forward is to be honest and to admit your own mistakes. Not everyone, but many people have a keen sense of when someone is acting authentically - and when you are fooling them. If, for example, a transport minister who has robbed taxpayers of half a billion euros were to take this virtue seriously, he would have resigned long ago instead of saving himself with excuses over the months. In this way, however, he not only damages his reputation and his party, but also the reputation of politics as a whole. Those up there do what they want, they are only interested in their career: that is the distorted image that Andreas Scheuer confirms anew with every day he spends in his ministerial chair. If, on the other hand, his party leader placed value on honesty, he would not shoot his old rival by demanding a rejuvenation of Merkel's cabinet - without daring to mention Horst Seehofer's name. Instead, he would seek an in-depth one-on-one conversation with Seehofer to explain to him that his best days are behind him and that Germany needs more drive and new ideas. Instead, Markus Söder once again focuses on tactical games. That is dishonest. Thirdly, I want moderation. I'm by no means the first, as Aristotle already counted it among the seven virtues. But today it is more necessary than ever: in world politics as well as in our everyday lives. When shopping (do we really need the fifth sweater or do we only buy it because we are bored?), when eating and drinking (everybody knows that, especially after Christmas), but why not also when it comes to CO2 consumption? Does the city trip to London really have to be? The holiday in America? Just for a single meeting with the plane from Berlin to Cologne? Do we have to drive to the supermarket every Saturday, because it's just more comfortable than riding a bike? Do we need meat on our plates every day, even though factory farming is at the expense of animals and the climate? Do we really need a new smartphone every two years, stuffed with expensive chips and rare metals, and the latest sneaker model, do we also need it because the advertising tells us that we need it badly, even though the two old pairs are still standing in the cupboard?

Would it not be here and now, at the beginning of 2020, when most people have finally understood that we have long since been living beyond our means and cannot go on like this if we do not want to ruin this planet completely, is it not time that we resolved to be moderate, at least a little bit, but just: each and every one of us? I can't take your answer. You have to give it to yourself. But what would be decent and moderate is not too difficult to see, I think. At least if you're honest and don't kid yourself.

I hope the translation is OK. And no, I will not discuss this.

#newspaper

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steve0discusses · 6 years ago

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Yugioh S3 Ep 19: Seto and Mokuba are Turned Into Inanimate Objects...Again

Last we left off on the world’s most awkward family reunion, Moki was being used to take advantage of Seto again, which happens at least 2 times a season.

What’s kind of wild about this, is that everyone jumps to the conclusion that Seto is absolutely going to murder his little brother. Seto. The guy who 2 seasons ago was willing to absolutely jump off a ledge for his little brother.

And then suddenly, Duke makes his feelings known about just life in general at this point.

Duke in the background just spiraling deeper and deeper into his IDGAF apathy. And to be honest, Duke might not be fully aware of who Mokuba even is. It’s not like they’ve ever had a conversation, other than maybe “ah, you work for Pegasus, he locked me in a tower for weeks and then killed me by turning me into a little paper card and then tried to seize control of my company. Nice. Nice that he isn’t in jail.”

In fact, since Duke does work with Pegasus who probably is still doing his best to compete with/work with the Kaiba business...Duke actually has a lot to gain, business wise, by killing Mokuba. Like, I’m pretty sure Duke isn’t a mole but he could be. He has...a lot of motive, actually.

If bro hadn’t straight up told me that Duke isn’t a mole like I suspected, than I’d still be waiting for that other shoe to drop. But it won’t. A shame.

Anyways this shows up:

All I’m saying is that a black hole is an astronomical region in space and a dark hole is very often a butthole, but youknow...maybe that’s just a very particular English language thing that no one will ever teach you from a textbook and it just didn’t quite get translated over correctly. But yeah, in my eye, Noah's just up there holding up a sphincter. It’s very fitting, he is an asshole. Congrats, Noah Kaiba, you’ve found your card.

Meanwhile, Yugi is doing his very best to try and backseat, even if Kaiba instinctively slaps it out of his hands at every opportunity.

So I figured that he’d mention that both of these boys carry these card lockets around their necks with a little picture of the other brother inside--a little thing they carry for no other reason than to remember eachother. Which makes sense, because Kaiba forgets things SO OFTEN. The necklace around their necks is almost like those bracelets you wear to let police and medics know if you’re prone to narcolepsy--it even has a nice picture inside to indicate “please return this boy to this pictured person in case you find him wandering about completely lost.”

I kinda figured that necklace would be used at some point but nah, we’re gonna talk about cards. Which is fine, because we get to see this good drawing Mokuba made once.

Which, PS, it was sort of hard to pick up on the first time Kaiba talked about this period of his life, but this time when he talked about this incident it like...left quite a bit highly implied there by what Seto meant when he said Mokuba “saved me.” It’s some pretty heavy stuff that kind of gets blown over by the massive magic dragon that shows up in the next scene and then just flies Mokuba, who is wearing very cute fuzzy socks, up into the sky and into the moon like ET.

Nowadays they do this by hanging off of Helicopters, but flying on dangerous things to escape their horrible childhood has been their Fantasy for a very long time. These kids and their obsession with heights and dangerous ledges.

And apparently it was this moment in his youth that Seto decided he wanted to be “worthy enough to hold a Blue Eyes.” And like...I remember S1 Seto. That was the worthy Seto?

I guess “worthy enough” doesn’t really imply any sort of moral code, just if you have enough money and can like play cards pretty OK.

Anyways, it was a lot of new stuff applied to this card that I just only recently accepted as a GF and so it was like “All right show, I see what you’re doing, I guess we’re going to walk slowly out of the paper romance realm and into...some sort of card-honor brother realm.”

So, using the Blue Eyes, Kaiba destroys a bunch of Gradius ships, which Noah was like “These Gradius ships represent our Father’s company!” in case you’re a child and didn’t see the symbolism. And, along the way, he destroys what he thinks is Noah’s Game Master card but like...it’s this show, so apparently inside the Boat was another dude and the game is going to keep on going, fml.

Ah buckle up this...this is going to be a long one. This is going to be a lot more cards, huh?

Anyway, when I saw this card that is clearly based on a couple of Gods I was like “so um...isn’t that a...God card?” so I looked it up, also because it was BS and I was frustrated that it was even here after the boat thing ended, and this card is a...get this...a Fairy card.

Cuz it has wings? Like a Seraphim? Everything about this looks like a conglomeration of different Gods but--I guess since God Cards can only have the 4 God Cards, this is a...Fairy card. Interesting. That is a huge ass Fairy. Yugioh biology really eludes me.

Anyway, First thing Noah does as a fairy is destroy his younger brother who is also older than him, don’tthinkaboutit. He’s again sporting the poorly photoshopped glowing romper that the dub gave us in order to spare us.

Hey!

Question!

So when Noah’s wearing the game Master outfit, he’s ass naked underneath--but the Big 5 weren’t? Like wouldn’t the Big 5 have had the same issue of Noah here where they have no body, so whatever they’re wearing is just whatever they’re in?

Meaning that when they were all shoved in Tristan’s body wouldn’t they have just been 5 naked fat old guys hanging out like a European sauna?

Or is this just Noah’s preference? To be ass naked when no one’s looking? Because he’s been here all alone for 6 years, so why the hell not? Like, no one cares. No one’s looking. You can’t get splinters or whatever. Just let it all hang loose, man, it’s not even a real body.

Like, if you look closely, Noah only has ... one outfit he’s had here for 6 years. I’ve noticed this maybe more than most because...it’s not a great outfit. He had that same suit and shorts combo right after he woke up and got out of his jammies from the accident all those years ago. He also wore a space suit once, but that was a Birthday present from Dad and I haven't seen the suit since.

Did Noah recognize that People Are Coming and was like “oh dammit, dammit, I have to cover the goods” and just throw on literally the only thing in his closet? The office shorts combo from 6 years ago? Is that why? Is that the big secret of the baby boy suit shorts? That he, in reality, never really wears them?

Questions about nudity aside, out of freakin no where Noah just turns the Kaibas into this:

Noah spent like 20 episodes saying no one is ever allowed to cheat and then just flippin does this and is like “What? It’s almost legal enough.”

I mean, it’s not like there’s any official rules for Duel Monsters anyway but apparently you can just turn each other into statuary and it’s like...fine. That’s fine.

Also, fun fact, about Yugioh statues, they come with eyeliner built in.

So much dedication to the guyliner in this show, mad respect.

And yes, I have sort of thought that Moki’s been sporting a teeny tiny Adam Lambert line this whole time. Like most our cast, honestly. But not Joey. I feel like Joey would never have the patience to learn how to waterline.

I mean the Kaiba’s are essentially brain dead, yes? Their brain functions have been removed and uploaded to the cloud to never be downloaded back into their vegetable bodies? That counts enough for me.

Seto Kaiba just 2 corpses away from 169ing the Hell out of that death scene. A shame.

Bro was like “well at least this crying statue stuff is more like something that normally happens in a kid’s show.” and I was like “THIS? So this ever happened in Pokemon?” and bro was like “It did actually, Ash Ketchum was turned into stone and then cried as a rock statue, and then Pikachu hugged him to make him all better” And as you may be aware my bro is full of spicy headcanons so I’m not sure if that’s actually true but it was like

“Bro, was Ash Ketchum ever turned to stone because his abusive Father’s secret son, who has been turned into an evil computer, wants to kill his brother and then take over his body to run the Patriots from Metal Gear? That happened on Pokemon?” And Bro admitted “Ok, maybe not so much.”

Anyway, Pharaoh awakens to put a stop to this nonsense by bringing up the long list of things that Noah did just now that is absolutely cheating.

Anyway, this is Noah now.

He’s just this...huge 100 story tall person with very bored judgy eyes just floating in the sky with vaguely religious iconography going on and bunch of wings like that one character design that we all have in our portfolio. Yeah, you know the one. It’s this guy. We’ve all drawn this guy. Anyway, it’s going to be very hard to take him seriously when this guy has Noah’s voice.

Again, he is not, he is ass naked in there, though the dub did try and cover it up.

Anyway, next episode we get to basically start this entire duel over.

That’s nice. That’s nice of them to do to me. At least these kids finally got a chance to do some duel prep for the actual tourney they’re supposed to be doing later this season. Yeah. Remember that apocalypse? That’s still going on somehow. Maybe by the time they’ll get to it, most of the competitors will be dead?

Here’s a link to read the recaps in order from S1 Ep1

#yugioh #yu gi oh #episode recap #photo recap #S3 Ep19 #tw suicide #seto kaiba #noah kaiba #yugi muto #joey wheeler #duke devlin #Noah is now a giant 6 winged angel #The Kaibas are rock statues #unfortunately this time they are in a much harder to transport state #you can't put a statue into your pants pocket so rip

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script101 · 8 years ago

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An alternate hypothesis of Clara and Twelve's relationship.

I know that Clara and The Doctor loved each other profoundly.

I think he remembers what Clara would have wanted him to remember.

I think The Doctor loved Clara more than he had ever loved anyone.

Clara was The Impossible Girl.

I think their love and their perception of each other was, appropriately, IMPOSSIBLE.

I don’t think their perception of their relationship was planned from day one, but I do give Steven Moffat quite a bit of credit in terms of remembering what has happened and understanding what will and won’t work.

They loved each other. Profoundly. Painfully.

I do NOT think they were IN love, though.

Fellow Clara stans, tell me if I’m crazy:

___________________

(I will preface this by admitting that I thought they were heading towards romantic love when it was Eleven and Clara, and I now I have to edit this because I remember that I felt cheated that we didn’t see more of those two actors together after Clara saved him from himself. But, after both Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi were adamant about there not being any romance between them, I can only guess that perhaps Matt Smith had a little crush on JC. And crucially, since Heaven Sent and Hell Bent show how much The Doctor loved Clara, Clara would have had to have been wildly out of established explicitly stated character, and have been a mindbogglingly shallow hypocrite for 4/5ths of her run, if she permanently fell OUT of love with The Doctor and dumped him for handsome Danny simply because Twelve didn’t look like he was in his late twenties/early thirties anymore. Jenny hung the lampshade on that in episode 8x01. Appearances don’t matter if you’re IN ROMANTIC LOVE. No. Romantic love doesn’t really work. Yes, they flirted. He was cute, he saved her life, and he followed her around like a puppy ostensibly finding new ways to entertain her. But instead he was actually trying to figure out what in the universe she was. He was sweet and cuddly and genuinely concerned for her safety, but Eleven’s interest in Clara was NOT pure. Clara was Eleven’s new shiny Rubik’s Cube, not his partner. He was Amy’s friend. He wasn’t really Clara’s. She fancied him, she adored him, she risked her life for him and then chose to DIE for him. But if we think about how Mme Vastra described The Doctor to Victorian Clara, he was cruel and almost dead inside. In HIDE, the kindest woman on earth, a true empathic psychic made no secret of her deep dislike and mistrust of Eleven even though “Eleven” is how high he had turned up the charm! She told Clara “He has ice in his heart”. This has a second meaning in terms of “The Impossible Girl” puzzle, but Emma Greyling wasn’t reading Eleven’s thoughts, she was reading his EMOTIONS. In the context she stated it, her meaning was unambiguous. Imho, until Clara walked into his Time Stream, Clara was no more then a pretty entertaining puzzle for the emotionally wounded Eleven to solve.)

“Romantic love” is also almost too easy.

It doesn’t explain why Twelve HAD to have his specific memories of Clara erased.

“In love” dismisses, denies, and insults both River and Rose, not to mention The Doctor’s first wife. Dismissing Rose makes Ten’s treatment of Martha inexcusable.

It undermines his friendships with Amy and Rory and Donna.

The Doctor is 2000 years old. He’s lost… everyone.

You can survive losing a love. You can survive losing a spouse.

There is one relationship, so rare that we don’t think about it, where the loss of one FOR ANY REASON AT ANY AGE, has (per Psychology Today) predicted the death of the other within two years at a horrifying rate of 50%. I read that and found it so disturbing I can’t bear to believe it. The idea that there is one person, and that if you have that person in your life, and they die, or worse you see them murdered in front of you, the chance that you will be dead within 2 years is a coin toss? THAT WOULD justify and REQUIRE a memory wipe.

______

I’m operating on the assumption that everyone reading this has seen seasons 7-9. I’m only pointing out a few episodes as reference.

Eleven met a doomed Clara in the first episode of season seven. That Clara was the same as all the Claras: so insanely smart that the Daleks wanted her, but so devoid of anything resembling a cruel thought that they were unable to make her a Dalek. Subtract love, add hate. You can’t subtract love if love IS what you are (please google the translation of La Habanera and note how it fits Clara’s arc down to the bird), you can’t add hate if you aren’t a hate filled person.

In The Snowmen, we meet Clara again. She’s so much like Eleven I remember thinking they were separated at birth! Just like The Doctor, she was running around with a fake name that we never learn. She was NOT calling herself “Alice Montague”. The closing credits, Amazon Prime, and IMDb confirm that Alice was the name of the housekeeper. We NEVER learned the pseudonym of the Governess*.

We finally meet Clara Prime. She and Eleven seem to flirt and he follows her around like a puppy. They hug, but never kiss. He isn’t interested in Clara, he is interested in trying to figure out what Clara is and how she continues to exist. There are no longing gazes. The one time that Eleven comments on Clara’s appearance in a sexual way, he immediately shudders. The shudder bothered me.

At the end of season 7, Clara, a human, walked into the Eleventh Doctor’s time stream (Name of the Doctor). While she was in his time stream, Eleven FINALLY kissed his wife like a man! Applause combined with me shouting “it’s about damn time!” After saying goodbye to River, Eleven was then able to pull Clara out safely. He found her a few feet from another version of himself (the War Doctor). We have two more episodes with Matt Smith and from then on it’s Clara and the Twelfth Doctor.

Then it starts getting bizarre.

After regenerating, Twelve describes Clara as “the NOT me one”. Huh? Seriously, what??? Because he thinks it’s hard to tell them apart?

The mystery is solved, but Twelve is more dependent on Clara than he was on anyone to date. Their relationship was odd, but now, for the first time, they were partners. They were EQUALS.

There are viewers who hate that Clara became arguably the most important person in The Doctor’s life. It logically really should be either Davros (the creator of the things that defined who the doctor wasn’t), or Missy/The Master (the only other member of his species still alive). Steven Moffat solidified Clara’s influence on The Doctor relatively early on in “Listen”.

From Twelve’s point of view, once Clara walked into his time stream Clara has been with him his entire life. In LISTEN the audience sees that she really has been with him his entire life. We also know from that script and the script to Dark Water that Clara never could have wound up in The Doctor’s bedroom to comfort him as a child if their time streams weren’t INTERTWINED and if they too didn’t share a profound emotional and psychic link.

Twelve is seemingly very rude to Clara, but he also still follows her around like a puppy. He insults her appearance by saying they look the same age.

So I have to wonder: what if he wasn’t insulting her? What if he actually thinks of her as being the same age as he is?

He clearly can’t live without her.

He is very troubled at the end of Flatline (a personal favorite of mine). He’s upset because Clara was way too good at being him. She should have been upset about the people who died. She wasn’t. He was. Quite a reversal of the previous week.

Clara WAS in romantic love with Danny Pink. They were both teachers. They both loved children. CLARA MET AND SPOKE TO THEIR GREAT-GRANDSON ORSON PINK. After Danny’s death (in a cruel irony, he died after being hit by a car. Clara’s parents met after her mother Ellie saved her father Dave from the same fate.)

Having met Orson, Clara wasn’t just grieving a boyfriend, she was grieving the man she believed was going to be her husband and CLARA WAS GRIEVING THEIR CHILDREN.

Clara believed, ever since Listen, that she and Danny were going to have at least one son, and at least one grandson who would be Orson’s father. She snapped. Who can blame her? We were never given proof that Missy murdered Danny. Clara is the type to blame herself. In her mind, because she was too afraid to tell Danny about all her lies to his face, she believed she had killed Danny, she believed she had killed their son, she believed had killed their grandson, and she believed she had killed her great-grandson Orson. Clara believed she had obliterated her entire family, and the weight of that was just too much for her. Again, who can blame her?

Clara threatens Twelve to try to make him save Danny, even though she knew it was impossible. Huh. Ok. Um… How DID human Clara know that it was impossible? Yes she’s very smart, but that’s a stretch. We in the audience knew. How did she? How much “Time Lord Wisdom” did she absorb while she was in Eleven’s time stream?

When did she learn his biography? He could have told her, but it doesn’t seem like something season 8’s Doctor would talk about.

The opening credits for Death in Heaven showed Clara’s eyes in the spot reserved for The Doctor. To play with the audience? Sure. To hint at The Hybrid? Why not.

We learn Missy put them together. Missy is insane, but she knows The Doctor. Out of all the people in the universe, she knew Clara was the perfect match for The Doctor. In her wacko mind, Clara was a gift.

On to season nine. Clara is becoming more and more reckless and more and more like The Doctor. Twelve is becoming increasingly worried about losing Clara.

Then he sees her murdered.

Stop. Back up. Why were we shown the Osgoods? >

Yes it was a brilliant two parter and I thought the political message was perfect and desperately needed.

But why did the Zygon story begin by showing us that when one Osgood died, her twin went insane? This element of the story was irrelevant. Moving, yes, but irrelevant to the larger narrative unless it wasn’t important to an even larger story arc. Grief was enough. Why madness?

In Heaven Sent, we KNOW The Doctor understands what is happening once he realizes the significance of the word “Bird”. But he keeps going. He wants to die. He is afraid to die but the thought of living without Clara is too much to bear. He is ready to give up. It’s only a pep talk from a hallucination of Clara that makes him continue through the most evil torture I can imagine.

He does it in order to cheat death. In order to cheat CLARA’S death. In order to try to attempt what Clara had tried a season earlier: rewrite a fixed point in time even though he KNEW damn well he couldn’t.

Once forced to accept that Clara’s heart will never beat again, we see that Twelve STILL refuses to accept it.

He’s still trying to cheat.

His logic makes no sense.

Ashildr (as the Voice of Moffat) is tasked with explaining “The Hybrid” to The Doctor and Clara (a human who has activated the monitor of the second TARDIS she’s ever been in, and who has been able to control THE TARDIS with a snap of her finger just like The Doctor since the 50th anniversary episode). Ashildr explains that she isn’t The Hybrid, the Hybrid is Twelve and Clara TOGETHER.

She’s right.

The two of them were The Hybrid. The hearts Twelve burned were his own.

_______

…I remember thinking they were separated at birth…

At the beginning of this essay, I mentioned that there is one death you can’t recover from. The death people can’t recover from is losing THEIR TWIN. Identical or fraternal, the surviving twin always feels that a piece of them is missing. If that surviving twin was a Time Lord with a Tardis, would he EVER give up trying to make his twin sister’s heart beat again? We saw evidence that 3.4 billion years of torture wouldn’t stop him. Twelve would never stop until the universe burned. THAT was why he had to lose his memory.

Somewhere Clara is still flying around in a TARDIS she shouldn’t be able to fly and she still loves Twelve. But once her murder was a fixed point, Twelve couldn’t handle remembering her anymore. The memory of her was too dangerous.

_______

So yes, I agree that they loved each other, but it wasn’t romantic love.

Clara and Twelve… their love was something else. Something, appropriately, completely IMPOSSIBLE.

I think that when Clara stepped into The Doctor’s time stream and splintered across it, she became psychologically more than a bit like him and he became psychologically more then a bit like her.

Danny recognized how close Clara was to The Doctor. Clara was worried about his reaction to her continued travels in the TARDIS, but Danny seemed as ok with their relationship as could he expected. Danny couldn’t stand Twelve, but even after Kill the Moon he had accepted that they were a set. If he loves one of them, he’s gonna be stuck with the other. He saw and stated that Clara and The Doctor very close and got along. He didn’t want her taking idiotic risks (he was right), but he had no problem at all with his girlfriend spending time with a man he hated (even when they had specifically gone somewhere that is inherently romantic like The Orient Express) as long as it was safe. He was amused by her concern about his reaction. As long as she was safe, she didn’t have to explain. Being the bait for a Skovox Blitzer? No. Hell No. Unacceptable. Running off with a man he hates to spend at least one night on one of the most romantic trains ever? Yeah, that’s fine. That was amusing and nothing he was going to try to stop.

Danny himself recognized that the only thing to do about his girlfriend running around with this “Time Lord” he hated was to accept it as long as she promised not to lie if he was going to put her in mortal peril. Danny seemed to know in Mummy on the Orient Express that if he wanted to date Clara, he was stuck with the pompous ass who would always demean and dismiss him as a PE teacher. They were a package.

__________

After Ashildr explained to how they TOGETHER were The Hybrid, Twelve tries to cheat Clara’s death with a memory wipe.

Clara won’t allow it.

Clara, a human, somehow manages to reverse the way the memory wipe device works. Instead of erasing her memory it erases his.

He knows something is wrong. He knows he’s forgotten someone. He still can’t remember Clara specifically.

Clara and Ashildr, in a TARDIS Clara should not be able to operate, leave. Just like in the lyrics to La Habanera, Clara beat her wings, broke the cage, and flew away.

Even though Twelve can’t remember Clara Oswald, he seems to still retain her humanity.

Eleven was at times terrifying. By the end, he was insincere more then he wasn’t. He was at times utterly terrifying in both Season 6 and in Season 7.

Twelve, in contrast, was ALWAYS not quite right. He was too human.

Does anyone really think Twelve could have done what Eleven did at the end of The Rebel Flesh? No. Even upon a second viewing knowing Eleven wasn’t trying to hurt Amy but was panicking and desperately trying to wake her up so he could rescue her, does anyone really think Twelve could have violently slammed a companion into a wall and hollered hostilely in her face? No.

Twelve couldn’t have done it because CLARA couldn’t have done it.

Look at Twelve in season 10. He’s a teacher. He didn’t need Clara’s “tact” cards when Bill asked him what was going on at the end of Extremis. He somehow REMEMBERED how to tell someone, ahem… very bad news. Clara would have been proud. He REMEMBERED how to comfort children in Thin Ice just like Clara would.

He has forgotten the specifics of Clara because he had to, but he couldn’t forget her personality, her kindness, her love of children. She is still a part of him.

So yes, I think Clara was the most important character in The Doctor’s entire existence.

I think they loved each other beyond what they could understand.

But I do NOT think they were EVER in romantic love.

She was The Impossible Girl.

I think their love was impossible.

When Clara walked into The Doctor’s Time Stream, I think she and he became Fraternal Twins.

Again, they never realized this. Ashildr had to explain how the two of them together were The Hybrid. But it fits the dynamic of their relationship. They would both die for each other. They bicker constantly. She bosses him around. There is NOTHING that one could do that could make the other leave.

I have lost count of the number of times their relationship was described as unhealthy or disfunctional. It reads quite differently if Twelve is Clara’s annoying bratty brother. Nearly every interaction going back to Deep Breath works if he perceives her as his sister and best friend and he’s always around annoying her because they used to do everything together but now she’s got a social life while he doesn’t.

I think they were The Hybrid because they were, on a deep psychological level, fraternal twins.

And I think they both perceived Clara as being the one who was a few minutes “older”.

Thoughts?

____________________ (*I like to imagine that Victorian Clara was calling herself “Becky Montague” because I find the reference to Vanity Fair funny. Victorian Clara and Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp were social climbers, and Victorian Clara wound up literally climbing stairs for a social reason. Victorian Clara was sharp as a tack, but unlike nanny Becky Sharp, she cared deeply for her charges. Plus, one of Becky Sharp’s charges was named “Amelia”. It’s just too on the nose.)

#nevermore #clara oswald #twelfth doctor #oswelve #doctor who #danny pink #12th doctor #doctor who meta #jenna coleman #peter capaldi

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dawnajaynes32 · 8 years ago

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HOW Design Live 2017: A Recap (Part 2)

Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a full recap of HOW Design Live by Maureen Adamo. Check out Part 1 here.

HOWies, as conference attendees call themselves, share a language designers really don’t get to use all that often. Creative folks can work a little to get some of the design-speak to rub off in client communications, or maybe help a significant other understand a frustration with the Google clip art they used to make the logo for their Meetup group. Though there’s always a ceiling there, and you can really only expect a fellow designer to dig into the conversation about why you never ever use that typeface.

The HOW Design Live 2017 conference presented designers with a chance to use that language in a dialogue largely focused on four themes: honesty or authenticity, seduction or the role that love plays in communication, change and the technologies that can revolutionize design in the coming years, and the boldness designers can bring to their work and life to create bigger impact in the areas that matter to them.

Thursday

Design Thinking is Bullsh*t

Natasha Jen, Pentagram

“The ultimate operating system will be our minds.”

OK, so, as someone who’s dabbled in work with startups and played around the think-speak that comes with the territory, I admit there have been aspects of the design thinking philosophy that felt pretty good on the surface. Like, finally, people are beginning to see design is more than a pretty face! But there’s always been this tiny bit of unease with it that I couldn’t really pin down, and Natasha Jen helped put that to rest.

Design thinking is not design. It sounds a lot like it, though, with the ‘d’ word right at the beginning, so the confusion is understandable. Have you ever tried to ferret out the actual definition? It’s incredibly self-referential and circular and Natasha Jen throws out all the cliches and bywords that never communicate anything concrete: solutions, alignment, co-creation, traction, ideation, deep design (???), radical innovation and user outcomes, among others. Design thinking, she says, is literally trying to think like a designer. “Design thinking packages a designer’s way of thinking for non-designers in a strict methodology so that anyone can solve design problems.”

Jen goes on to say that real designers surround themselves with evidence, since they’re always studying artifact and interaction. She says design is too complex to be distilled into a single methodology, and goes on to imagine some pretty radical futures for what design looks like when it’s actually designed, forecasting that the next great interface will be no interface.

5 Things Keeping You from Being a Great Creative Director

David Lesué, Workfront

“‘A’ players hire ‘A’ players; ‘B’ players hire ‘C’ players.”

David Lesué immediately apologized for the assumptions baked into his conference title. A) Who says you’re not already a great creative director? And who says he can tell you how to be a better one? B) It’s not really what he meant to say anyway. A more accurate description for his talk, he said, would be something like “Five misconceptions about being a creative director and five replacement beliefs.” It’s not as sexy, but it’s real.

With such a straightforward premise, the question begs to be answered. What are these misconceptions and beliefs?

Great work speaks for itself  Lesué says not so, that all work needs translation. Clients won’t naturally understand the work, because it wasn’t made for them, it was made for their audience. Concepts and ideas need to be explained so clients won’t pass on the best solution because it doesn’t feel right to them.

Process kills creativity  Think this instead: Just enough process unlocks creativity. You can figure out how to automate what he called the “roadie work,” the drudge production and organizational tasks, with good habits (like consistent file naming and project/task intake) and task management so that you have more time to pursue higher level thought.

It’s my job to the best  Nope, it’s your job to make your team better. You can’t be afraid to hire people who show more skill as a designer, or a whatever, than you have. The focus as a creative director is on building the best possible team.

The client is always right  High five, yeah? Instead of deferring to clients indiscriminately, Lesué says you get what you put up with and that you’re constantly training clients on how you’d like to be treated. An example: Lesue’s team works in a consistent cadence, so clients are familiar enough with the group’s flow to know any project requests have to be made ahead of their weekly planning session to make it into the schedule in a timely fashion.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right  Instead of sweating every last detail of every project that hits your desk, be uncompromising when it matters. Another example: Lesué doesn’t ask his team to hit home runs with they’re asked to clean up the company dodge ball team logos that have been designed by other departments.

How to Cheat: Creative Domination Through Villainy

Stefan Mumaw

“We’re given a box to work in. We must learn to circumvent the rules and cheat.”

Stefan Mumaw donned a black ensemble, complete with mustache and eye patch to teach designers how to be wickedly creative. He presented three steps, with exercises. First, you need to think like a villain. “Villains know the rules so well, they know how to get around them.” Second, you should live in the leading, which can be translated as, “What does the creative brief not say we can’t do?” And third, you need to understand the end game. A simple way to cut to the heart of a project’s goal is to ask “Why?” And Stefan suggests asking it three times. When you get to the third answer, you’re probably dealing with the really important objectives and the hows and whats you started with can then be bent to your evil designs.

Make What’s Important to You Important to Others

Jeff Greenspan

“We need to steal back, and we need to steal everything.”

Jeff Greenspan was tired of the media monotone and lack of good questions around the Edward Snowden issue. He decided to create a conversation the media could pick up on by installing a 400-pound bust of the outlaw on top of a park monument. We, too, can provoke debate over issues that matter to us. Though Greenspan highly recommends you have a lawyer on standby; the guerrilla installation almost landed the stunt’s co-creators in jail.

Using his training in advertising and communications, Greenspan launched other projects — some with less serious ramifications to his freedom — to continue to challenge assumptions prevalent in mainstream conversation, including issues of privacy and white-collar crime, with art. (Not all his work of such enormous gravity, he’s also the originator of the Hipster Trap.)

When attempting cultural subversion on your own, Greenspan says you need to be clear about your project’s goals and not be beholden to how you think events will unfold. Some things will fall into place in fortuitous happenstance, as he described in his Snowden project, that would have been impossible to plan for and can strengthen your statement if you’re able to go with the flow.

Friday

Speak to be Heard: Communicating Your Best Ideas

Eleanor Handley

“We come into the world knowing how to use ourselves, and somewhere along the way we constrict ourselves.”

You’re already good at communicating. You just forgot how to do it. Kind of like how we were born weird and open and passionate and creative, and then life happened and we pretended to be different people. To help us start using our voices again, Eleanor Handley reminds us that how we sound is more important than what we say — a concept any Eddie Izzard fan would be familiar with.

Spoken communication is more physical than we allow for and she offers three rules: It comes from using more of ourselves, not less (don’t confuse being authentic with being small), great communication comes from focusing more on the other person, and you do not need to feel confident to project confidence. So there’s no reason to delay your public speaking career until you feel like a big enough badass, ok?

Handley says since we have most control over what we do, more so than being able to stop a particular thought or feeling in the moment it happens, we can work to improve communication with specific actions and habits. Do some deep breathing exercises before a presentation, make sure to warm up your vocal cords (you can pretend you’re talking into a cell phone to sneak this into your schedule, if you need), and remember to pause anywhere there is a natural stop in your speech, like periods or commas between lengthy phrases. The silence isn’t as long as it feels like it is to you, and it gives you a moment to breathe and think about the words that come next.

Saturday

Master the Art of Seduction

Pum Lefebure, Design Army

“Pum, don’t think of yourself as a designer. Think like a seducer.”

As a perfectionist in recovery, it took me a while to realize how true it is that our vulnerability is what allows us to connect. So, I was immediately pulled into Pum Lebefure’s talk when she described a scene in which she was watching an H&M ad she created and acted in. She was gazing into her own giant face on the glowing screens in Times Square, then looked at everyone around her and realized, “Nobody cares!”

The market is beyond noisy, so she told herself she needed to launch an all-out campaign of seduction. She says the journey to purchase has now become the journey to fall in love and brands should learn how to flirt, romance and seduce, because consumers are looking for more than a happy transaction. When it’s done, she says, good design has to entice all the senses.

Change. Change. Change.

Alina Wheeler

“He was always leaving the earth, always going other places.”

An obsession with David Bowie is a unique kind of gift, especially when you’ve studied the man and the magician to the extent Alina Wheeler has. The session she presented was an electrifying homage to his genius and his legacy, imparting his life and art as one who has gone before to show us the way. The musically-punctuated presentation rocked through Bowie’s many personas, encouraging designers to become masters of their image, inviting the continual reinvention of identity and passions. Possibilities are endless, Wheeler and Bowie say, and nobody does it alone. Build creative collaborations, and use them as fuel for your own fires. Always keep moving and know when to come, know when it’s time to go. And because the legend made what he loved up until he knew it was time to go, he lived it well: “It’s never too late to become what you could have been.”

What Happens Next

David Carson

“If you want kid art, have a kid do it.”

I wish I knew for sure what David Carson thought was next. I heard his presentation went 45 minutes over time, and I had to duck out at the 15-minutes-over mark. Without having the benefit of that last half hour or so, it seems the thru-line of his commentary, as he playfully walked through slides on his extremely unorganized laptop, was about the honesty, transparency and humor with which he does his work — which is also the way he seems to view the world. He shared found art he had captured and unabashedly enjoyed (a wide array of visual puns and tomfoolery) as well as his advice on how designers might have careers as long and illustrious as his (comparison mine). Every image was perfectly captured with philosophical design epigrams:

“It’s important to put things where they don’t obviously want to go.”

“Just do it, but don’t always center it.”

“Never snap to guides.”

“My Helvetica poster was done in Franklin Gothic.”

And some of his direction was a little more … direct:

“Be open to things you’re not expecting while you’re working.”

“Don’t mistake legibility for communication.”

“The time you spend on the work is proportional to the time consumers will spend with it.”

It was especially amusing, as I listened to him describe his pieces, to remember all the conversations I’ve had in which the desired outcome was essentially the reverse-engineering of something David Carson has done. And when you hear Carson talk about his process and how he arrives at his destination, it’s just not possible to do what he does backwards, sideways, bent over or upside down. What he does is who he is, and that’s essentially what he’s asked us to do, too. Carson asks us to put ourselves in the work and get more personal. He says, “Nobody can pull from who you are like you can.”

Closing

This year was amazing and was again so much more than I could absorb with one set of eyes and ears. The Draplin pop-up shop returned to the exhibit hall mid-day Thursday to much fervor and excitement. The whole HOW community banded together to make sure Justin Ahren’s Wheels4Water fundraising campaign exceeded the week’s $10,000 goal, providing clean water for more than 250 Ugandans for life.

And when it comes to the big ideas, the message to take home, it seems like thoughts on strategy and technique, seats at the table (though we still want those, please), ROI, etc., were upstaged by a not-too-overwhelming, but sincere plea. At varying degrees of intensity, the experts, design leaders and visionaries I could cram into five exhilarating days of reconnection, was for more. Our design leaders and legends want more from us. They’re asking designers to be the more that we want to be. The more that has a voice, the more that gives and shares and grows, the more that boldly goes into the future designers are innately equipped to know how to get to when things get complicated. At the very least, it’s a vivid enough dream to wake us every day for the next year with the question, “What would be great? What would be amazing?”

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