#one of the versions i did for my degree it was just so badly executed i mean they made dracula come off as a middle aged creep with no | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

howtodownloadgta5installer8 · 3 years ago

Link

Grand Theft Auto 5 is re-released on Mobile phone, as well, such as Android as well as IOS. So GTA 5 Android is precisely similar to the PC/Consoles variation, and also the storyline as well as video game mechanics are simply made mobile with the very same gameplay, so it is ideal for the mobile gamers out there. Generally, the adjustments that are made in GTA V mobile is simply the control and also game mechanism. Riding the vehicles appears rather very easy due to the easy control mechanism developed by RAGE specifically for mobile phones.

After each unsafe battle, gamers can stop anywhere to see the views of the city. Each scene in this video game is carefully brightened in terms of the image. So it is not just a disorderly location however additionally consists of much poetic appeal. They when fell short, however after that they found each other as well as the distinction in their characters is what links them to ending up being a group. Since then, they have been associated with numerous significant missions, showing opposition to the federal government and also at the same time ruining other terrifying opponents in the underworld. Therefore, if you are a player who suches as to check out the criminal world.

Whenever a phone is seen on promotions, it constantly has a battery life with one segment missing out on (the battery degree seems at 69%, another referral to the 69 sex position). Nonetheless, personality's phones have unlimited battery life. In older editions of the video game, if the player has twin handguns possessed and also gets a telephone call, Carl will certainly pull out two phones. In the console variations of the video game, the phone can likewise be used as a type of "super handbrake", to immediately quit any lorry, regardless of the speed.

As an example, the police car chase in the game has actually been completely redone, and the financial institution heist goal. The enhanced variation of the game also includes the brand-new moped automobile, which can go across the countryside without excessive problem. The storyline is based on the famous book/poem 'We Are Older' created by William Christner.

As GTA V go back to Xbox's prominent Game Pass from Thursday, it has also been exposed that the game will certainly now be usable on smart phones also. Make an entrance directly right into the activity ofGTA 5 Mobileby downloading the records at this moment! You should merely get snap for Android catch and you're great to go. Try not to squander your time on remote recurring communications or emulators with different designs.

The video game is presently offered for consoles as well as Windows PC. It will be released for PlayStation 5 and also Xbox Collection X in late 2021. There is also an on the internet multiplayer mode where up to 30 gamers check out the open world where each gamer can engage into a cooperative or competitive communication in between themselves. This video game series is very well-known by players and reviewers for it having a flexible story and also packed with activity. This GTA 5 for Android has the very same feature as the COMPUTER variation and PS3/PS4 variation have. The only thing that differs in this variation is you can not play this video game on your android devices in the first-person setting. We are still attempting to make it possible on this variation.

Keep in mind, you'll be play the prominent video game just by means of Heavy steam Web link, which is the electronic distribution service. Superstar additionally stated that although it may shed some "functionality", it will get new functions also. Rockstar explained it as being a modern phone, with Dan Houser claiming that the player will utilize it for points like "accessing the internet",.

The other one is created apples iphone, iPads, as well as various iDevices that are suitabled for boosting the video game. GTA BOOM is the original source for all points Grand Theft Auto. We are the only web site committed to posting day-to-day GTA information and have the largest collection of GTA video game overviews available anywhere. Making use of the invincibility cellular phone cheat codePlease read our FAQ if you experience any concerns using these cheats, or if you have any type of questions.

More information was released on the internet site on 24 August, 6 September, and also 13 September. Superstar Gamings first confirmed the video game's existence on 25 October 2011 in a news on its main internet site as well as Twitter feed. Take-Two Interactive's share cost subsequently raised by 7 per cent. Journalists claimed the announcement ignited substantial anticipation within the gaming industry, which they owed to the series' social value. The game did not meet its original projected March-- May 2013 launch day. By 30 October 2012, advertising posters had spread to the Internet, as well as a listing by the store Video game had actually leaked the projected release date.

Superstar Games made their fortune from this highly popular along with questionable franchise. The whole series redefined the benchmark of open globe video gaming. Grand Theft Auto V is the most up to date entry in the schedule, initially released on PlayStation 3 as well as Xbox 360 in 2013.

If you bought the video game from one more Store, you would certainly need to include the executable data of the game to Heavy steam. The designer did an excellent job on their criteria and pictures. The programmer attempted to keep all the features as well as move the video game to Android phones and also tablet computers without shedding performance. If you have not attempted the video game yet, after that we advise that you do it today. This video game is not a main advancement of Rockstar Gamings. The game is badly enhanced, so it will be difficult to run it on the majority of mobile phones.

These two games are additionally quite prominent till now in the whole Grand Theft Auto collection as a result of a selection of factors. In this modern-day pc gaming age, Graphics decide how effective any type of game is. There is no contrast between the graphics of GTA 5 and GTA San Andreas, GTA 5 features superb and top quality graphics that look much more practical than GTA San Andreas. We understand there is a major distinction in between the release date of both of these video games, yet to be extremely truthful GTA 5 is a clear victor based on facts as well as logic. Thousands of individuals are now able to play this GTA 5 on their Android devices.

If you remember i have posted GTA 5 Lite 100MB variation prior to however this game is various. This video game is created by MikeGaming who has a working YouTube Network. You will reach play Its GTA5 mod apk Mission with nearly all main video game information on it Grand Theft Auto 5 was launched in 2013 as well as is still among one of the most played games, many thanks to its ever growing on-line mode called GTA Online. And also while the game does not have a mobile version, it's really possible to play on your Android phone if you want. The video game very first released on the Xbox 360 as well as PlayStation 3, after that made its means to PC.

We will certainly upgrade brand-new functioning download links immediately. Do not hesitate to ask your any kind of question pertaining to this tutorial with remark area, we will reply you shortly. After seeing lots of passion of Android users in the direction of GTA 5, Rockstar has determined to make this video game feasible to run on Android OS. SO they had developed as well as introduced GTA 5 Apk in beta variation.

Superstar really made it out of the park from the GTA franchise. With the introduction of mobile pc gaming, they have actually additionally launched several ready Android as well as iphone devices. Darrell is a blog owner that suches as to stay on par with the most up to date from the tech and finance world.

The video game invites you with wonderful affection to realize you for quite a long time or even months. If you have ever before play GTA 5 on your Computer after that I don't think there is any need to tell you features of this video game. But you are playing it for the first time after that let you recognize what amazing functions are added in this brand-new video game of Rockstar Gamings.

Yet is is time to take pleasure in GTA V for all Android Gamings enthusiasts. One of the most distinguishing characteristic of GTA 5 APK is an upgraded tale play consisting of 3 differed lead characters. Michael De Santa, an ex-con who escaped being incarcerated and also set himself in a spacious manor where he fights with locating a meaningful way of living. That intro of 3 separate personalities is most definitely something brand-new as we practically have different stories as opposed to one prolonged plot gone for one personality advancement. In this manner the gameplay of download GTA 5 is way extra appealing.

Substantial modifications have actually been made with the rise in the variety of tools modifiers and the capability to take turns. Consequently, you can proactively change guns and highly versatile resources whenever you go anywhere. This video game's new functions make it much more practical and challenging than previous Grand Theft Auto video games. And also like in other video games of this kind, you will be given several choices in terms of clothes, hairstyles, as well as faces.

The story contains weaves, and also it's quite incredible just how the whole video game plays out. I never ever get tired of skyrocketing mobsters, driving about in my personal Lamborghini, and viewing the residential property of the rich as well as famous refute around you-- all while making money for it. First PC variation development started in parallel with PlayStation 3 and also Xbox 360. PC growth later on paved the way as focus shifted to the console releases yet ultimately resumed. Due to the fact that the team had actually prepared a PC version from early on, they made technological choices ahead of time to help with later on advancement, like assistance for 64-bit computing and also DirectX 11.

The web sites declaring to supply you the mobile variation of GTA V are phony. We can only wait for Rockstar Games to ultimately re-release GTA V for mobile phones. Till after that, we can delight in the various other titles they have currently released. To get the full version of the video game, you need to obtain the OBB file along with the information file. The GTA V APK data alone is inadequate to enable you to play and take pleasure in the premium variation of the video game on your smart phone.

The initial point that you were mosting likely to require to do is confirm that your device hardware is established as well as effective enough to run the video game to begin with. If you would certainly love nothing greater than to have the possibility to play this groundbreaking game on your favored Android gadgets, you're going to require to get your hands on a correct GTA 5 APK. No, the GTA 5 APK is not established by the official GTA engineer. Some game engineers have actually created the mobile APK variation.

However, with the rising passion of players in GTA V, it projects to discover an option to download and install GTA V on smart phones. Before downloading as well as setting up, you need to guarantee that you have actually entirely gotten rid of the previous variation or totally free version of GTA5 from your Android device. If you missed this action, your installation will certainly be stopped working at any moment and also you will not able to set up as well as play the game properly. Pavlovich located that while Superstar designated the team objectives to create songs for, some of their arbitrary creations influenced other missions and also sparked motivation for further rating development. He reviewed a "stem-based" system utilized to make songs fit vibrant video game aspects where the team would certainly make up songs to highlight results gamers could make right away after finishing objectives.

That song is a streamlined version of the GTA I motif's history music. It was also the pager's ringtone in GTA III, as well as remained in the GTA Vice City introduction under the retro Rockstar Gamings logo design. If the gamer switches or discharges weapons after a call, the phone will certainly not disappear on CJ's hand. Switching to other weapons, or entering an auto would after that remove this technique. If Carl has his phone out as well as encounters water being splashed from a Firetruck, chances are that if he is simply completing a conversation as well as is about to put his phone away, he instead will keep it in his hand.

#download gta 5 apk installer for free

1 note · View note

dalekofchaos · 5 years ago

Text

The Fireflies’ vaccine wouldn’t have worked or why Joel did the right thing

In the last part of The Last of Us, Joel kills all the fireflies and saves Ellie but by doing so he may have doomed humanity by ending the possibility of a cure being made, making the ending bittersweet and morally ambiguous. The thing is, Joel didn't really do anything wrong, and saving Ellie was the right choice, here are my reasons:

The doctors would remove Ellie's brain to try to create a vaccine, but that's not how vaccines works, a vaccine is a tamed version of a pathogen that "teaches" your body to defend against it, to do a vaccine you need to use the pathogen in small quantities or a modified version of it, Ellie is immune to it, you don't create vaccines from the immune system, that's called a serum, and it works differently, a serum is used when someone comes in contact with a disease and it contains a series of antibodies that fight the infection, but it doesn't make anyone immune. So what they were trying to do was pointless;

Even if the doctors know what they were doing, it was a wild shot a with no guarantee that it would work;

Even if a vaccine was successfully made they wouldn't save the world, the world was destroyed 20 years ago, society collapsed and was rebuilt again on a new way, and everyone already new how to deal with it, also the greatest threat were not even the cordyceps fungus anymore, it was the infected (that the vaccine couldn't do nothing about) and the crooked humans that walked the earth. Besides that, the fireflies had no way to distribute the vaccine worldwide, not even in a national level.

If you listen to the tapes in the Colorado segment, it pretty much confirms that Ellie is not unique and they wouldn’t be able to make a vaccine anyway. The doctor has practically lost his mind and Ellie is just his white whale. Ellie was not the first subject and she most likely wouldn’t have been the last.

The doctor pretty much went against the common ethical code of all medical practitioners just for a CHANCE at a vaccine/cure.

And wouldn't it take a lot of time to study her? A day to do all the tests is outright impossible. Just look at the corona vaccine. With all the tech the world has the biotechnologists are going to take more than a year to make a vac.

Vaccines for Fungal infections are nearly impossible and are a logistical nightmare.Even in today’s world,they can only be treated with antibiotics and anti-fungal medicine. They didn’t even bother with thoroughly researching Ellie’s blood and trying to extract the fungal specimen without killing her. The tests were blood samples and samples from the area where she was bit and then only cutting her brain open as THE LAST POSSIBLE USE for her, then when their step 1 was "lol just kill this incredibly rare specimen" I was shocked.

BTW, PS4 version actually removed a piece of paper that's available in all the other forms of the game. What is this piece of paper? Just the one that describes how they've tried this process dozens of times before and how they've NEVER gotten any useful info.

The Fireflies are terrorists. The Fireflies are terrorists, and not even competent ones. Here we go. We first hear of the Fireflies in credits, where they are taking credit for attacking the Federal Disaster Response Agency. Not a good start.The next time we start to see hints of them is through graffiti in the quarantine zone. What does this graffiti say? Fireflies will take it all back. That sounds great! Burn it all down. ...oh. That’s, uh, a little less great. Fucking die, pig. Um… Uh, that’s uh, not a great look here guys.And that goes on and on. The graffiti does not exactly inspire. All it does is get angry.Next time we see them, it’s when they literally bomb a checkpoint and supply truck, then begin firing wildly all over the place. This is straight terrorism. They don’t care if there is collateral damage, in fact, Joel gets injured in this scene.Then we meet Marlene, the so-called Queen Firefly. Injured and on the run, the military is slowly wiping them out. This leads to a line of dialogue that is absolutely hilarious. Marlene starts to preach about “We’ve been quiet. Been planning on leaving the city, but they need a scapegoat. They’ve been trying to rile us up. We’re trying to defend ourselves”Those are big words from someone who just bombed a checkpoint.This clearly shows us that Marlene cannot be trusted as a narrator. She has an agenda and is lying to Joel and possibly herself. And that despite how effective guerrilla tactics usually are, her group is still managing to get absolutely devastated. They are failing so badly that they have to recruit smugglers just to try to get Ellie out of the city.So begins the trek showing dead Fireflies at every turn. Downtown subway station? Dead Fireflies. The Capitol building? Dead Fireflies. Pittsburgh? Oh, let’s talk about Pittsburgh.Pittsburgh is a monument to Firefly failure. Pittsburgh was originally another Quarantine zone held together by FEDRA. So what happened here? Well, times got hard, and the Fireflies instigated a civil war or insurrection. This fighting lasted for months, with Fireflies lynching soldiers that they caught alone, burning soldiers alive after dousing them in gasoline, and FEDRA retaliating by executing Fireflies. FEDRA finally gave up and retreated from Pittsburgh, putting the Fireflies in control- and then it all fell apart. The people of Pittsburgh discover that the Fireflies had planned to move right into the space FEDRA had previously occupied. And so, after this was discovered, the Fireflies were driven out just like FEDRA had been. Only much faster, and with less fight. And now Pittsburgh is nothing but anarchy. People gunned down in the streets for nothing. Rooms full of bodies, clothes and shoes. Almost looks like after images of Dachau. Bravo, Fireflies. Excellent revolution.Next up, we meet Tommy, Joel’s brother, and disenfranchised Firefly. He worked for them for years, going all the way to Colorado for them. Somewhere along the way, he lost faith in them and left their cause. He doesn’t specify exactly why, but it seems he might have lost faith in their methods.Then we come to the University. This is where we really discover how incompetent the Fireflies actually are. One of the first notes you see at University is about a guy who is angry he got yelled at for falling asleep on guard duty. Real professionals. This same note indicates that while they’re still getting some supplies, it’s not enough for what’s needed, with gasoline being particularly short. The next note comes from a recording, telling us that they’re losing more guards, with the doctor clearly concerned about how much equipment and data will be lost if they have to move. The doctor even calls the Fireflies incompetent in this note. And then we have this genius.. That’s right. Bitten by his own lab monkey. Because he just had to set it free, rather than putting it down humanely. Brilliant work sir. Brilliant. He kills himself before turning though, but not before informing us that they hadn’t accomplished anything for over five years. And even that small breakthrough was ultimately a failure. And now the entire lab is compromised, and abandoned.And then there’s a long break from Fireflies until Salt Lake. Ellie, having just gone underwater, isn’t breathing. Joel attempts to perform CPR on her when our hero Firefly shows up, and knocks Joel unconscious. Ah, violence. The first solution. Willing to forgive it, since it strongly mirrors the scene with Sarah, only the Firefly is in the soldier’s shoes this time. But still. Military was gentler.And now for the hospital. The final failure of the Fireflies. This is where so many people are convinced that Joel screws the world by preventing a vaccine. But somehow, I just don’t think so. This is one last desperate bid by the Fireflies for control. How do they intend to do this? Comprehensive bloodwork? No. Vigorous testing with laboratory animals, like, oh, maybe monkeys? No, someone let all their monkeys go. Crack open her head and hope for the best? Hell yeah! Does the fact that they’ve lost their biologist concern them? Nah, it’ll be fine! Does the fact that this is the only time they’ve seen immunity to this degree even give them pause? Pfft, crack her open! Does the fact that there has never been a successful vaccine against fungus give them pause? PASS THAT SCALPEL! No need to think this over, let’s blow our whole load on this once in a lifetime lucky strike as fast as possible. No, I’ve never heard the story about the goose who laid the golden eggs, tell it to me after I finish butchering surgery. Even if we make this vaccine, how will we deploy it? You're thinking too hard, hand me the saw!This is just bad science. Done by bad scientists. Cheered on by fools. Fools who wanted to murder Joel after he made that long trip.And for people who insist on government and democracy, it’s funny how they didn’t risk telling Ellie their “plan” and just sedated her and rushed her to the table.

Even by SOME MIRACLE they managed to make a vaccine, the world ain't gonna automatically return to what it was. It's a dog eat dog world and that is the new normal. Infected, cannibals, more psychos like David and raiders are still there and it ain't going away soon or maybe ever. On top of that, mass production and distribution of a vaccine is an absolute logistical nightmare in a post apocalyptic world- they simply don't have enough resources for that. And who's to say The Fireflies wouldn't use it to as a bargaining tool to put everyone, willing or not, under their new rule? And even given all that, they debated killing Joel after he delivered Ellie. He did the job and the payment he received was getting knocked out and being marched outside of the safe zone AT GUNPOINT WITHOUT HIS WEAPONS AND SUPPLIES! The Fireflies broke their deal and fucked Joel over. Joel had ever right to kill them and save Ellie.

So I believe what Joel did in the end was the right thing, the fireflies was an extremist group that was willing to do anything not to save the world, but to prove their point, even kill an innocent girl under a delusional precept.

#The Last Of Us #Joel Miller #Ellie Williams #The Fireflies #Marlene #Jerry Anderson

44 notes · View notes

yamithediaperdork · 4 years ago

Text

It’s a living (Ben 10 omiverse)

it was a nice and peaceful day in Bellwood for a change, though considering it wasn't the main stream universe's Bellwood that made a degree of sense. In fact even as the main verse Ben sat across from his counterpart, enjoying the Mr.smoothies of universe 23 they could both relax as Seven-seven and Tetrax had decided to stay on earth and work as a team with 23, so were out patrolling. "So, not that it's not awesome to see you from time to time..but usually you showing up means something about to go all fucky fucky...Sooo what brings you here?" 23 asked. "things don't ALWAYS go bad when i show up!" Ben protested, huffing a little. "Mmmhmmm..So you showed up and I get attacked by my future team mates..you show up and the Ben war..you show up and Mad Ben.." 23 said, counting off on his fingers. "..Damn uh.. well I promise, no world ending stuff this time." Ben said, sweat dropping. "I uh.. ok so i told you I recently moved out and got my own place right?" "And yet you haven't invited me back once." 23 said and blew a raspberry to show he wasn't really offended. "eheheh well fact of the matter is I mightttta gone a little beyond my means and kinda sorta..I'm like a week from getting kicked out." Ben said, poking his fingers together sheepishly. "Heh, and what, you want a place to crash?" "welll more thinking maybe since I've been helping you and all that jazz, you could spot me a couple of grand to get me in the clear and stuff?" Ben asked hopefully. "eh..I learned the hard way not to loan friends money Ben. it's why me and my Gwen aren't on speaking terms." 23 said, then took a big drink of his smoothie. "however, I AM willing to help you MAKE the money you need, and more." "...Doing what?" Ben asked, confused. "Cuz gotta say, I've tried the retail thing back home and when you have to stop doing stock to fight alien invaders, you don't keep your job for long." "Pffft as if I'd let you work retail! Nah man! You know I've leveraged my frame and endorsed a TON of things right? Part of how I'm rolling in dough? Well I got this one wanna be sponsor who I'm not big on the product, but they are offering a crazy amount of cash. I figure they'll settle for the Ben of anther universe, you do the gig, we split the money 50/50, and everybody wins." 23 said, taking out a note pad and a pen. "Look uh, not to sound ungrateful, but if I'm the one doing the modeling or whatever, shouldn't I get more then half? and what are you writing down?" Ben asked. "That's how much your half of the deal will be, and I think you'll find it more then fair." 23 said and smirked. Ben frowned and picked up the piece of paper, looking down, then did a double take as his eyes went wide. "Holy crap! what am i modeling off? Missiles?!" he asked, his voice going higher then normal. "nah, no weapons of mass destruction in that sense.. though bet you'll still clear rooms." 23 said and gave a impish grin. "You'll be working for huggies." "..Say what?"

After half a hour of back and forth, and Ben admitting he really didn't have a better option, the two took off, transforming into XCLER8 and Speedyquick instead of hailing a cab and made their way to the huggies headquarters. since 23 was used to this sort of thing Ben mostly let him talk over the contract and tried not to get boarded out of his mind as they talked returns and profit margins, only tuning in when the executive they were talking to (who if Ben didn't know better, he'd swear was this universes version of Charmcaster) brought up diaper usage. "Of course seeing your other self in our new line of Lil' stinkers would do wonders for our promotion of them, but if we could show them being used it would really help sell other points. we're taking photo shoots for magazine spreads and of course some tv and internet ad's. the more you and your client can promise us in terms of selling these diapers are for big babies who need to be put in their place, the more zero's we can add to your check." She said, smiling. "Wait..as in..you know.." Ben interrupted before 23 could talk, and unable to say what he was thinking, and blushing badly, he make fart noises with his mouth. "Heh, yes, we want you to go dooty in your diaper." Hope said, smirking and watching the two boys reactions. "N-No way! I mean I'll wear them and crawl around and stuff, but I'm NOT taking a dump in diapers!" Ben huffed and crossed his arms, shaking his head and well, looking just perfect for the target audience. "Maybe I should give you and your client a moment to talk this over. we can make a deal without the diaper usage but it's going to cut into the bottom line." Hope said and got up and left the room. "Can you BE anymore of a brat?" 23 hissed at Ben. "But..but..she wants me to-" "Yes, I know. I was there. Look Ben, I'm putting my neck on the line for you here, if my other sponsors hear about what a crabby brat your being here, it could affect me. Also your the one who came to me for help, so wouldn't like crapping yourself in huggies and making a boat load of cash once be better then doing a bunch more commercials to make the same amount? And who the hell from your universe is gonna see you doing this anyways?" 23 asked. "But I don't wanna poop in a diaper!" Ben whined and shook his head. "and you can't make me! so th-" he started to add, then suddenly he was yanked out of his chair and over 23's laps. "W-what are you doing?! and when the hell did you get so strong!?" "I've been working out since the mad Ben thing. and I'm gonna do what anyone does with a whinny brat.." 23 said and smirked, tugging down the back of Ben's pants. "I'm gonna spank you." Yanking Ben's skid marked stained briefs up and giving the bigger boy a wedgie and exposing those cheeks, 23 paused. "Last chance to be a good boy and let me handle this." he said. "Y-You don't have the balls!" Ben cried out, his voice carrying. "I gave you a chance." 23 said and shrugged, then brought down his hand on Ben's bubble butt over and over, turning the cheeks nice and red as Ben bawled like a baby.

Since the office wasn't sound proofed, and many people knew that both of the Ben's were in the office, it attracted A LOT of attention as the bigger Ben's voice filled the floor with the sounds of wails and there was the unmistakable sound of buns being tanned. Hope smirked as she listened, feeling she had pegged the relationship between the two boys right, and waited till there was just the sound of the bigger Ben sobbing before going back into her office, and fighting back a chuckle as she saw the bigger boy in the corner, his pants in his chair and his undies still hiked up. the boy had his nose to the corner and his hands on his head, and was whimpering and sobbing gently. "I'm sorry for that, somebody needed a attuide adjustment." 23 said. "oh don't be! I just wish we had recorded that! would of been perfect for the set up of a commercial!" Hope said and chuckled. "well I can always spank him again." 23 offered, chuckling to as Ben whined loudly from the corner. "So, may I assume that your both on board with widdle Benny making uh-ohs and tinkles in his diapers?" Hope asked. "I dunno, Ben, are you ok with messing your diapers?" 23 asked. "Y-Yes! No more spankies!" Ben cried out, his hands going from his head to covering his poor buns. "i think that answers your question." "excellent, then I'll draw up the contract, and if we hurry we can have Ben in the studio in about 2 hours. Make sure he gets LOTS to eat, we wanna show off how the Lil' stinkers hold up to even the biggest messes." Hope said. as 23 and Hope chuckled, Ben whimpered and found himself sucking on his thumb having ALL the regrets.

a hour and half later and a semi pot belly Ben was leaning back in his folding chair, in front of the set and belching off and on. He still hadn't been able to reclaim his pants though he'd been allowed to tug the wedgie out at least, though this just got loads of comments about how diapers might be a good full time choice for him. Ben had swallowed back any come backs or threats he had in mind as every time 23 was quick to pat his still sore booty. going on Hope's advice 23 had forced Ben to chow down, though while the catering table was set up with all sorts of awesome snack foods, including Ben's favorite, chilli fries, it was the large pyramid of at least 23 jar's of prune baby food that 23 had directed Ben to, helping the bigger boy and spoon feeding him as the crew setting up the large nursery chuckled. "Come on ben, one jar to go. you can do it." 23 was saying, grabbing the last jar and smirking at Ben's baby food covered face. "D-Dude..I'm not joking..if I eat one more bite I'ma hurl." Ben whined. "that's what you said two jars ago." "by all means, call my bluff, just when your wearing baby food on your shoes, remember i warned you." Ben said with a weak smile then a LOUD and nasty belch. 23 made a face and waved the air in front of him. "Man, if it smells that bad now.. Maybe i should excuse myself to the other room when you crap yourself." he teased. "N-no way..if I'm doing this..you're watching AND smelling!" Ben whined and Belched again. "Can i get something to drink?" he asked. instantly he realized he should of worded his request better as 23 got a large baby bottle filled with what was hopefully milk, and popped it in Ben's mouth. it only took a few sucks on the nipple to realize that of course, it was formula, and Ben scuched up his face. "Hehehe I have to say Ben, you are JUST too cute like this. I might have to try and lock you into a long term agreement here." 23 teased then winced at the glare Ben gave him. "Kidding! Kidding!" pushing the bottle out of his mouth, Ben went to say something but was cut off as Hope strolled onto the set. "Ok people, time to make some magic. baby Ben, we need you in wardore." she said then pasued. "Oh, Do you know how to put a diaper on?" she asked, suddenly looking sheepish. "N-No." ben whined and a loud toot came out his bottom. "Oh er..I don't think we have time to teach you before you unload." Hope said, holding her nose. "it's ok, I'll diaper the big baby." 23 said happily. "of course you will." Ben muttered, but let himself be lead off to a side room where there was star on the door, with his name on it. "great...I'm about to become famous as a diaper boy.." Ben whined. lead inside 23 just chuckled. "Mr.Devil, he's ready for his close up."

The diaper was MASSIVE, and for a second both boys just stared at it, wondering if Ben was gonna be able to even walk in the thing. it was easily the equal to 10 normal diapers layered together and was a soft baby blue (whether that was a marketing choice or just when they had been making these things expect 23 to model them, neither boy was sure) anther loud toot from Ben's back door which sadly filled the small dressing room had both boys holding their noses, and broke them out of their trance. "I..I don't wanna do this. I'm scared." Ben whined, looking at 23 with pleading eyes and starting to squirm in a way that told him their deadline was coming up fast. "Sorry buddy, we signed the contract. but I'll make sure this goes as fast as possible. all you have to do with whimper and cry, and act like you've been acting, and I'll be doing the voice over." 23 said and reached up, patting Ben's head. Ben whined but let himself be laid down on the teddy bear print changing mat on the floor and just lifted his arms to let 23 tug his shirt off. "we're gonna have to enroll you in a exercise program if we need to keep feeding you like this." 23 teased, noting that while Ben wasn't chubby, he had enough pudge on him to look a bit like baby fat, and the baby food in his tummy wasn't helping. Sliding Ben's undies off 23 tossed them in a trash can behind him, then unfolded the massive diaper as Ben whined. "W-why'd you toss out my undies? A-and were are my pants? F-For after?" he asked, feeling so small and helpless as 23 lifted Ben up but his legs to get the diaper under him. "hush, you let me worry about that..though..heh.." 23 paused the look down at Ben's exposed crotch. "Didn't know you shave." "I uh..haven't gotten my pubes yet.." the bigger in so many ways, but not where it counted boy said. "well that explains your cute widdl-" "Watch it!" Ben huffed and for the first time moved to use his Omimatrix. "Ok ok..Sorry." 23 said sweat dropping. "I've had THREE girls interested in me by the way, so it can't be THAT small!" Ben added and 23 smirked and powdered him lots. "And how many of them saw you down there?" 23 asked, as he tugged the diaper up. "and of those that saw, how many stayed interested?" with the diaper tapped up Ben sat up with a bit of effort, but was blushing and wouldn't look 23 in the eyes. "L-Let's just get this over with." Ben huffed and tried to get up on his own, only to keep falling back on his puffy butt. "That's what I thought." 23 chuckled and then held out his hands, Helping Ben get to his feet. the bigger boys BIG diaper had his legs spread and Ben was barley able to waddle, several times needing to stop and take 23's hands as they made their way out onto the set. 'If i make it though this I'm moving to a smaller apartment so i never have to ask this son of a bitch for a favor again.' Ben thought.

Hope grinned ear to ear and had some of the photographers snap shots of Ben needing help with walking, before coming over with a baby blue bonnet and bib that had white text in comic sans, that read BRAT. Ben would of argued about the add ons, since he was pretty sure that hadn't been in the original deal, if it wasn't for the fact he was using every ounce of control NOT to mess himself too soon and have to start all over. "There we go, don't you just look adorable~" Hope teased and tickled Ben's chin. "A-Ah.S-Stop that..w-we hafa hurry up..I..I can't.." Ben whined and rubbed his tummy, a muffled fart coming out and making hope take a step back. As they started to film, Ben for the most part blissfully blacked out, but of course got to watch the commercial after, with everyone praising him on what a good boy he had been.

"Hey everyone, Ben 23 here, and bringing you yet anther great product. So, brats, we all know one and we've all thought about putting them in their place, but where do you even start to get what you need for it?" Came 23's voice, on a screen of black. "Well the answer for that, Is huggies. That's right, the same company you've been trusting to look after your little bundles of joy is here to help you put those same bundles of joy turned into over sized brats back into little baby's." the screen came into focus and there was Ben, a glazed look in his eyes and holding his tummy, in all his big baby glory. "Most of you know about my other universe counterpart, but what you don't know is that he's a grade A BRAT. as a favor to his friends back in his verse, we're giving Baby Ben the punishment he deserves. isn't that right baby ben?" 23's voice asked as Ben whined and pouted. "Pwease, no wanna go poopies! I'm sowwy!" Ben cried out. "now now Ben, you don't want anther spanking do you?" 23's voice asked, and it was the yelp of fear that sold it as Ben totally lost control. the camera zoomed in as the back of Ben's diaper rapidly started to expand, and loud gross farts were heard. Ben for his part was face down ass up, and pounding a fist on the floor as he filled his diapers, crying and howling but really, it only made the shot better. "Lil stinkers is made with a new material that allows for up to 40 times the normal amounts of waste, which means even with 22 jars of baby food in baby Ben's tummy these diapers won't leak, or your money back." 23 said. the diaper only started to take on a dirty stain of brown in the back as the material reached down to Ben's knees. "with our new smell block guards in the diaper, you'll only get the faintest whiff of the the mess the big babies made. Sure it spares the brat but if your brat is anything widdle Benny here, you're gonna be punished enough changing him." with a few last sputtering farts Ben was apparently finished and sucking on his thumb as he got up on his knees, looking to the cameras. "C-Change pwease?" Ben whined. "Oh silly Ben, if we just changed you right away, where would the fun be in that? with added rash protection built into the diaper, along with bratty baby brand powder, Our little Benny can go 12 hours without a change!" hearing that Ben bawled again, both hands coming up to his eyes and there was just no two ways about it, he looked like a giant baby. "See you in 12 hours little guy! enjoy your poopie diaper." 23 said cheerfully. Ben's cries were muted as they went to the last of it. "Lil stinkers by huggies. put your brat back in diapers, and in their place. Available at a super market near you in two weeks."

Ben naturally wasn't actually kept in the poopie diaper for 12 hours, though they did take the chance to get all the pictures they needed for him in his poopie diapers, with 23 posing in some of them with him. Such as having Ben in his arms, Ben over his lap and pretending to give him a messy spanking, and of course 23 pulling the back of the diaper open as Ben sat on his ass, hugging a teddy bear and sucking on a pacifier and 23 holding his nose. If 23 was being truthfully though he was glad he was wearing his baggy pants as the site of Ben like this almost had little hearts in his eyes and he was tempted to try and keep Ben like this. Still a contract was a contract, and once they had enough footage they got Ben changed into a clean diaper but out of the bib and bonnet, and with his t-shirt back on. Ben was actually in the crib that was part of the set up when he came out of it, the staff and Hope and 23 where having a few drinks. "C-Can somebody come let me out? And.. get me big boy undies and pants?" Ben called, using the crib railing to haul himself to his feet but swaying dangerously if he let go, so knowing he couldn't get out. if the crew heard him, they ignored him and kept talking among themselves and laughing, annoying Ben. "I SAID, SOMEBODY LET ME OUT!" Ben yelled and stomped a foot, slipping and falling on his padded rear. "oh great, the baby is awake." 23 said, smirking and winking to the crew who all laughed. "Your not freaking funny! Let me outta here NOW or I'm going way big!" Ben growled and started to fiddle with his watch. "Way big?" a crew member asked. "as in he's gonna be a big boy?" "No! as in the alien who's 100 feet tall!" Ben huffed and got the watch ready to go. "-sigh- I'll handle this." 23 said and walked over, holding his hands up. "heyy heyy..it's OK Benny. we don't need to bring aliens into this. you're all done here and we'll cash your check at the first bank of Ben then you can go home. OK?" "i want outta this diaper, I want outta this crib! and i want big boy undies and pants!" Ben huffed, keeping his hand over his watch. "heh, your terms are agreeable. we only re-diapered you because you were out of it, and I don't really wanna change anther poopie diaper." 23 lied. He would of totally loved to keep changing Ben's diapers but clearly the little guy had been pushed to his limit.

As it turned out they couldn't find pants in the studio for Ben, or a pair of undies so the poor hero ended up standing in line with 23 at the bank in his t-shirt and diapers, which normally would of caused problems but with 23's technically owning the bank, it was brushed over. The first thing they did after getting the check cashed was go shopping and get Ben a pair of sumo slammer boxers, then off to the food court for him to get the taste of the baby food and formula out of his system, though he wasn't able to eat his full order. 23 joked about how they should of gotten him a happy meal as he wiped up the chilli stains off of Ben's face. after that it was time to go home and Ben gave 23's hand a shake. "..ok, you saved my ass from having to move back home..buttt don't expect me to come back here till this ad campaign is over and done." Ben said. "heh, come on, didn't a SMALL part of you have fun?" 23 asked. "hahahaha NO. Today was the most horrible day of my life, and with the shit I've been though, thats saying something. Maybe you can come over to MY universe sometime and be a diaper boy for me though." "heh. or just show up with a diaper bag." "..Shutting up." with that Ben went back to his home universe, very much richer. Or so he thought.

as it turned out their money while looking the same on the outside, was made differently and raised all sorts of flags when Ben went to go and deposit it in his universe. there was a public cry of outrage that a hero like Ben would try and destabilize a local economy like that, and there was talks of official charges of counterfeiting and maybe even jail time. Not even able to get his cash back, and the Plumbers having to give him the cold shoulder publicly to save face, Ben decided to take a little bit of a vacation (2-7 months while the plumbers legal team got him out of the mess) back in universe 23, figuring that 23 owned him, AND wanting to give him a piece of his mind.

"baby Ben! back so soon?" 23 asked, delighted as a red faced Ben made it to his pent house. on the way over Ben had been recognized, teased and scolded for not being in his diapers and had seen billboard with him in all his blacked out diaper baby glory. "ha.Ha. we have a problem." Ben said, and then nodded to 23's couch. "mind if I take a seat?" "Only if you promise not to make a puddle." 23 joked, but moved aside as Ben came in and flopped down. Ben spent the next 10 minutes explaining out what had happened, as 23 looked upset and shook his head. "Man, that sucks. I'm sorry, i didn't know!" 23 said. "well, I need a place to stay for a little while till i get the OK to go back..so I was wondering if y-" "would put you up here for a few months, heh,. that can be arranged. don't think you'll be able to get a place on your own here unless you just did more commercials though, rent in the city has gone up since i live here." "Not like i have a penny to my name anyways, and was gonna ask if you'd rent me a place..Buttt staying here I guess won't be so bad." Ben said with a little smile. "there is a small price I'd like you to pay..But in return for humoring me on this onnnne tiny little thing, I swear you'll want for nothing while staying with me. all the junk food you could want and any video games, the whole nine yards." 23 said, blushing a little now. "..why am i getting a bad feeling about this?" Ben asked. "well see.. they didn't need the stuff they used in your commercial after you left..so they gave it to me for free..and you were just SO god damn cute.." 23 said, getting up and leading Ben to yup, a recreation of the nursery from the set. "FUCK NO!" "oh come on Ben! i promise! no baby food this time and pop in your baby bottles! Pleasssse?" 23 asked, bringing his hands together. "why in the world would i agree to do that for a few months? I could just go do anther commercial, then get my own place here!?" Ben pointed out. "one, because as your agent I control whether you do anther shoot, it's actually part of the contract, two, if I tell my bank not to cash your check who else do you think will cover that much. three, and this is the kicker. where else can you go to with ease to hide out? you really think mad Ben is gonna welcome you with open arms?" "..Fuck my life!"

And so one week after promising himself he'd never be a big baby again, Ben found himself in two of the thick blue diaper's and in a t-shirt top, crawling behind behind 23 and pouting like crazy. "Don't you think top is over kill?" Ben whined. "I'm the one paying for them. so just shush and look adorable." "Not funny." Ben pouted and then realized it would be harder then hell to get off and on the couch's and just sat on his diaper butt in the living room. "So what d-" "I want chilli cheese fires, I want a two liter of coke, and I want the latest sumo slammer game five minutes ago!" Ben huffed then grinned. "..Demanding aren't we?" "and i quote: I swear you'll want for nothing. I want all of that." Ben said smugly. "you know, i could of just spanked you." 23 teased, going to grab the phone and make the food order. instead of Ben telling him off however, the threat had a amusing and smelly effect instead. Ben froze at the memory of that and then well, with him being double diapered it was a little hard to tell since there was no smell, but 23 could of sworn Ben just got a little taller. "heh, Did somebody just make me a present?" "NO!...yes." "Good boy. I'll change you after you eat, if your a good boy." 23 said and winked. "...this is gonna be a long 2 months."

the end?

6 notes · View notes

segersgia · 4 years ago

Text

Looking Back Part 6: Drukhari

Xenos got scraps when it came to releases, but if you’d ask me which race got it the worst this edition, then it would be the Dark Eldar.

Yes, Tyranids didn’t get anything this edition, and other races like the T’au and the Harlequins got like one new miniature, but at least the stuff they did get looked good.

The Dark Eldar have been a faction that I like aesthetically, yet I am constantly baffled at some of the design choices Games Workshop makes when making a new iteration of their models. For Example the Archon and the Succubus. Their 5th edition models looked absolutely gorgeous, with the Archon being an absolute badass helm and posture and the Succubus looking like an absolute Amazonian warrior. When they got redesigned in seventh, the Succubs gained a dynamic pose, but lost its buffness. The Archon became something even worse, instead of a helmet, he got a bare head that looks like a mixture between hugo weaving and Darth Maul, but without the charisma of both. It looks absolutely terrible.

Incubi:

Incubi are some of the most powerful Dark Eldar warriors that you could ever encounter on the battlefield. However, they aren’t part of the Drukhari military, for they do’t show any allegiance towards anyone save their shrine and their Dark Father. Instead, they sell their services as mercenaries towards anyone willing enough to pay for them. They mostly serve as bodyguards to Archons.

To become an Incubus is a very perilous and difficult task. The training that an Aeldari needs to do is very straining on their bodies and those that do not succeed are sacrificially executed at a Khainite Shrine. The trick to mastering Incubi training is to bassically be a prodigy that learns their teachings at a unnatural pace. One of the final parts of their training involves killing an Aspect Warrior and turning their Soulstone in a Psychic torture device.

Unlike most Drukhari, who want to backstab each other at every ripe opportunity, the Incubi show restraint and once paid for, will hold their end of the bargain up like a life-oath. This is why they are so sought after in Drukhari society, since you can trust your life upon an Incubus.

Incubi wield Klaives, which are Power Swords capable of cleaving through Space Marine armour. Their armour is also equal to that of Space Marine armour; the Incubus warsuit grants the same amount of protection without inhibiting the wearers dexterity.

While the overall design of the Incubi is good, and the amount of little details, such as trophies, is very nice, I don’t particularly like this iteration, because the posing is bland. It is fine, but not something I particularly find very interesting. My main problem with these models is the size of their heads, which are way too big. The Banshees didn’t have this problem and the older models didn’t either. I also wished the horns were way shorter, instead withholding the longer horns for Klaivexes.

I do once again like the little shrine object they have. It does however look like a striking scorpion (which might hint at their origins.)

6/10

Klaivex:

A Klaivex is the Incubi equivalent of the Archon. They are the leaders of their group and their skill with the Klaive is unparallelled. An Incubi becomes a Klaivex through a trial that proves their absolute mastery of the blade, often through some horrid ritual. Of course, failing this trial will result in the aspiring Klaivex to be killed.

They carry Demiklaives, which they weild in two hands and can be connected together to create a massive Klaive.

Once again they have an unhelmeted version that indicates the Klaivex being part of the Ynnari. If the masks of the incubi are similar to that of aspect warriors, than it would make sense that the ynnari didn’t wear them.

Almost everything about the Incubi can be applied to the Klaivex; a cool looking model with nice details made unflattering due to the size of the head and their posing. I really don’t like the pose on this.one, and I wish he had a way more stationary or restraint pose. The Bare head looks bad, because no Drukhari looks good when they have the same hairstyle as Abbadon.

5/10

Drazhar:

Drazhar is the champion of the Incubi Order. He is the executioner of the Incubi and his services are sought out by anyone willing to pay the fine. He, like the rest of the Incubi, wears the Incubus warsuit, and it is rumoured that he wears the original template of the gear. He goes into battle carrying Demiklaives and uses them like a whirlwind. He is taller than his brethren and way faster in both speed and in combat.

Much rumours surround Drazhar. It is said that he was once Ahra, the Phoenix Lord of the Striking Scorpions, and that within the suit is nothing but dust. This would become confirmed during the Psychic Awakening.

During Phoenix Rising, Drazhar was hired by Asdrubael Vect to kill Yvraine. He failed to do that, but he was able to kill Jain Zar in the process. However, Jain Zar got ressurected by Ynnead and Drazhar went back to try to kill her again. Instead, he got killed. Yet this wasn’t the end for Drazhar. A Klaivex found his armour and put it on, and as you would expect, the Klaivex got posessed by the spirit of Drazhar. Thus Drazhar was reborn again.

The model looks good. Yet I absolutely am dissapointed at how it looks.

Why?

Because I’ve seen what could’ve been. Look at this artwork of him in the early days.

He looks like a Tyranid Lictor and it looks absolutely awsome. I would’ve loved it if he still had those weapons and posing. He would’ve looked way more menacing and unique.

Instead, He is just a larger and more detailed Klaivex on a scenic base. He looks so boring and generic because of it.

I was so dissapointed with this. Give him the Lictor Look and he would look so much better.

3/10

——–

I was really dissapointed with the Drukhari releases. It didn’t help that they got hyped to a ridiculous degree. They teased us so badly that everyone was expecting more, and Games Workshop didn’t deliver.

I am cautiously excited though for what 9th edition might bring us. We have been teased a new and Improved Lelith Hesperax Model. One that also gives her some pants finally.

I’m hoping that it will look as good if not better than her previous iteration. I am a staunch believer that Lelith’s current model is one of the best looking sculpts that Games Workshop has done.

It will be a while before I’m posting again. I will be working at a summer camp, teaching children the basics of digital art and digital painting. So wish me luck on that.

Next up: Primaris vehicles and Walkers.

previous posts: Primaris Mainline Infantry, Death Guard Infantry, Craftworld Aeldari, Primaris Vanguard Infantry, Chaos Space Marine Infantry/terrain

#warhammer 40k #warhammer 40000 #Drukhari #Incubi #Drazhar #Klaivex #Range Overview #rating

5 notes · View notes

janiedean · 6 years ago

Note

Mood lightener ask, I am intrigued by book recs from you since you mentioned something about a dinosaur series a bit ago? Color me intrigued so top five books you'd recommend for people who enjoy ASoIaF?

OH GOD THANK YOU XDDD

okay so, I’m taking the dinosaurs out first because... well. hahah.

the dinosaur lords is ABSOLUTELY a thing you might wanna try out if you like asoiaf for reasons, BUT I’m warning you, the author died before finishing it (unless he wrote the last three but didn’t have publishing contract for the second part of the six-books plan but no one quite knows and no idea) so most likely you’ll never get a conclusion, warning you beforehand so that’s why I’m putting it outside the top five. BUT IF YOU LIKE ASOIAF YOU SHOULD STILL TRY IT because:

the author was a friend of grrm’s and it shows;

it’s literally asoiaf except people go around on dinosaurs;

NO, REALLY;

there’s at least a couple characters who are totally asoiaf homages (there’s a dude named jaume who’s basically jaime and loras’s lovechild I SWEAR HE IS HE’S EVEN THE HEAD OF THE LOCAL KINGSGUARD) but not in a way that makes it look like plagiarism;

admittedly it takes a bit to find its rhythm, but when it does it’s really good because the worldbuilding is amazing and like... it’s basically fictional medieval europe with dinosaurs but to a really good degree and the representation is a+++, in the sense that idk one of the main four is obv. irish romani (or what irish romani are in that universe), a few are def. catalan, the french guy is really so french you wanna die, the italian dude actually comes from the oldest university in the realm, there’s people from russia/greece and the protagonist is basically some three eastern europeans countries thrown in one character but not stereotypically, like the guy is obv. a mix of russian/polish/mongol and he’s really a good character in that sense, there’s germans too, spanish ofc, like it’s really good in that sense

DINOSAURS FIGHTING DINOSAURS WHILE THEIR KNIGHTS RIDE THEM

there’s an entire supernatural angle with ARCHANGELS WHO MIGHT BE ROBOTS which is honestly intriguing and a+ and I just wish the books hadn’t finished just before going deep into it

if you also want lgbt+ rep............. well, two out of the three supposedly straight characters are irish romani dude and the protagonist and I can 100% assure you that everyone I dragged into reading those books agreed with me that in each single scene they have together (ie: most of them) they’re gayer than Actual Gay People in these books, but other than them half of the cast is bi, the gay sex is better written than the straight sex (forreal there’s one of the few actually.... sexy m/m oral sex scenes I read in published fiction???), their sexuality is not the whole of their personality but it’s fairly stated that most of them are Really Not Straight and it’s really done well;

actually THE ENTIRE KINGSGUARD IS GUYS WHO FIGHT VERY WELL BUT LOVE ARTS AS WELL AND THEY ALL SLEEP WITH EACH OTHER EXCEPT THE TOKEN STRAIGHT FRENCH CHARACTER THAT THE JAIME AND LORAS LOVECHILD HAS A CRUSH ON and ngl I thought they would end up fucking at some point if the books went on so... XDDD anyway a+++ kingsguard >>> the one in asoiaf;

ngl at some points there’s some badly written sex scenes (the straight ones lmao I’m 99,9% sure milàn was not that straight himself) and it’s not half as complex as asoiaf and doesn’t have as many characters but it has the same scheme except with dinosaurs, archangels being robots and three people are straight and two of them are in love anyway;

so tldr I greatly recommend the dinosaur lords if you want something similar to asoiaf, don’t expect an ending, enjoy dinosaurs and a lot of nice rep for everyone. also Y’ALL HAVE TO SHIP ROB AND KARYL WITH ME BECAUSE THEY’RE RIDICULOUS.

.... wow, and you asked me the top five. lmaaaaao. anyway, given that the dinosaur lords will not be in the top five, I’ll go and advise you to read:

IAN TREGILLIS’S ALCHEMY WARS, which is not like **fantasy** but it’s alternate history where the netherlands win the colonial wars in the 16th century because they figure out how to make brass androids and they use it to basically destroy the british and drive the french to canada while they conquer the US instead of the british. it’s a trilogy, it’s completed, it’s flawless and features: FRENCH CATHOLICS VS DUTCH CALVINISTS WITH THE FRENCH WANTING TO TAKE BACK PARIS, PREDESTINATION VS FREE WILL IN THE ANDROIDS DISCOURSE, REHASH OF 16TH/17TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY DONE GREATLY, the greatest female character of genre literature since grrm (berenice GUYS BERENICE IS THE BEST GOD I LOVE HER SFM), the evil antagonist who’s a gal cersei wishes she was (like she’s terrible but she’s competent), the davos-like french general who knits in his spare time and the protagonist is the cinnamon roll-est android ever I love him sfm OH and the one time I cried because of a catholic fictional priest. guys tregillis is an a+++ top notch writer who has no time to waste with fillers and knows how to write a story even if HE HATES ME AND HE WANTS ME TO SUFFER and like... alchemy wars is really really good give it a go k?1,5. tregillis also wrote another alternate history trilogy, the milkweed tryptich, which is basically ‘the nazis create the x-men to win the war and so the british counteract by evoking ctuhulu and it goes exactly as it promises’. now: I have a love-hate rship with that one because the last book is narratively working but I hate everything it chose to be for reasons also i wanna punch the protagonist in the face, but thesuperevilgirl is totes the cersei of the situation and her brother has.... some srs jaime moments lmao he’s also my favorite ofc god klaus ily so much, and it has... some... well... ENGAGING choices lol I mean i loved book one and two and the third I did reluctantly but it could be an option? anyway ian tregillis is amazing and y’all should read him bye

the curse of chalion by lois mcmaster bujold has, as the amazing soul who recommended it to me pointed out, a protagonist that manages to be jaime and theon and partially sandor put into one. IT AMAZINGLY WORKS. the plot is kiiiinda more straightforward if you know spanish history bc the moment you figure out it’s the fantasy version of how castille and aragona united you know where it heads, but it has a lot of nice twists, also some a+ lgbt+ rep tho not as much as the dinosaur lords and the protagonist is.... really great I love him XD also ngl the fact that it ends fairly nicely is a balm so I’d try it, there’s other books in the same verse but I haven’t gotten around to read them yet

... guys stephen king’s dark tower is my fantasy favorite series EVER like ever, I love asoiaf and brienne is in my heart and she’s my true rep but nothing will top TDT for me ever for reasons and while it’s a completely different thing I still recommend it. caveat: I hate the last book with a vengeance and I think king fucked up the last two thirds real bad, but..... hey, it’s finished and the rest is 100% worth it. also jaime is totally the lovechild of the male protagonist and the other male-coprotagonist who are also my #1 ship ever in history so I’d give it a go ;) ;) ;) also while eddie’s my fave roland deschain is honestly the kind of character that you can only bow in front of like if I ever made an oc one hundredth as good as roland is in conception and execution and everything I’d feel like I accomplished everything I need in life. IT’S WORTH IT. TRY IT.

terry pratchett’s discworld: yes, it’s 41 books. yes it’s a lot. but you can read them by cycle which makes it a lot easier, they’re fun (the first three are a bit meh but the rest is all top notch I swear), they’re sarcastic and witty and delightful and it’s a++++ fantasy and I’ve been wanting to do the asoiaf au for ages sigh but anyway if you don’t want dark and grim but also want a+++ narrative, good satire about how our world sucks and a lot of fun at the expense of our pop culture (guys the book about their version of australia is a hoot and there’s a leonardo da vinci!!) GO FOR IT. IT’S AMAZING. also your life isn’t complete until you read about sam vimes and the local version of death speaking in capslock and being a cat person. also charles dance plays one of the mains in one of the tv adaptations and he was delightful xD

this is going to gain me rotten tomatoes, but....... grrm’s shared series wild cards. that he has going on with fifteen other writers including the aforementioned tregillis and milàn.yes, it’s like 28 books by now. no, it’s not perfect by all means and certain arcs are a total wtf and you don’t even have to read all of it, but especially grrm’s characters in it are obvious templates for asoiaf people (the powerful and amazing turtle is dark sam tarly and jay ackroyd is basically jaime without the incest and the extra good looks while lohengrin is brienne’s spiritual twin except for the looks), the shared worldbuilding is great, the alternate history story where buddy holly didn’t die and some of the protagonists organized a concert for him bc he was poor as hell was genius, and while a lot of the older stuff is dated and most likely was progressive for the eighties and would read a bit wonky now they always were super-inclusive, it has a bunch of nonwhite/nonstraight characters (esp. in the last books but there were also in the old ones, and the longest-standing gay dude since the eighties got a husband in the last trilogy!!! it was so ;_;), the alternate history is really good imvho and if you enjoy asoiaf you probably would like most of wild cards. if you want a reading order I made one here. xD

here you go sorry it took me one hour to answer it but IT GOT LONG XDD

#the dinosaur lords #alchemy wars #wild cards #discworld for ts #the dark tower for ts #book recs #john-childerass #ask post

21 notes · View notes

vanessakirbyfans · 6 years ago

Link

When I went to see Vanessa Kirby starring in Julie at the National Theatre, it turns out I picked “a really bad night. Oh God everything went wrong,” she says when we meet a few days later, in a café in Chelsea where she has just ordered scrambled eggs. In one climactic moment she has to kill a budgie on stage, but the blood capsule didn’t burst until well after she whizzed the fake bird up in the food processor. “That happened two nights in a row! But it was better than before, when we used to start the scene with a real budgie and then kill a fake one, because one night the real one started tweeting after the lights went down, when he was supposed to be dead. I was trying to shut him up. He was called Gordon. We had to get rid of Gordon. There have been letters to the theatre: ‘We need to know that Gordon has not been harmed.’”

Kirby is a 30-year-old actor from London, a galloping laugh a minute, and quite probably the future of British acting. You may know her as Princess Margaret from Netflix’s The Crown, a role she describes happily as “the gift that I was given”, and which turned what could have been a staid drama about duty and class into something much more delicious. She gave Margaret a youthful vulnerability – we saw the damns she had to give before she stopped giving any – and now, after two series and winning a Bafta, she is handing the role over to Helena Bonham Carter, who will play the older incarnation. And Kirby is gutted.

“The Crown was the best time of my life,” she says, in her quick voice. “Saying goodbye to it was awful, I really grieved it, actually.” Kirby kept a photo of Margaret on her bedroom wall and used to gaze at it, wondering What Would Margaret Do? “The easy route would have been for me to just play her as the version of her who comes later, the public persona of her that is so – I don’t know the right word – gauche?”

They could have sent you to Mustique!

“I know! Livid! But I wanted to try and find the person she was before she hardened, before she became bitter and self-loathing, which is what I sensed. I wanted to find the torment that’s underneath those things. That, for me, made a real woman, even though the circumstances were ridiculous.”

She played opposite Claire Foy as the Queen. Both of them have just been nominated for this year’s Emmy awards for The Crown. I ask what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the enigmatic, brooding looks that Foy’s Elizabeth so regularly deploys.

“Oh, she used to give me the look in our scenes together and I’d just be feeling, aaaargh – you’re so internal! You’re so good! You’re so subtle and I have to try so hard to rein it in! But Claire was much better about the show ending than I was. She said it was because I had such a personal synergy with Margaret, whereas the Queen remained a mystery to her.”

It transpires the real Queen is a fan, though. Kirby only knows this because a friend of hers was at a fancy party recently, “where he didn’t know a soul so when he heard some people discussing The Crown he was like: ‘Actually I know someone in that.’ They were like: ‘Cool.’ He goes: ‘No, but I really know someone in it,’ and, meanwhile, this girl says: ‘Well my granny likes it,’ and he suddenly realises her granny is the Queen. It was Princess Beatrice. Although, I told someone else recently it was Eugenie,” she laughs, “but I got that wrong.”

Kirby grew up in Wimbledon, south London, the middle child of three, and attended the private Lady Eleanor Holles School. Her mother, Jane, had been the editor of Country Living and her father, Roger, one of the country’s leading prostate surgeons, “always watched loads of films with me – totally inappropriate ones like Midnight Express when I was about six. He put all films on. I think my sister was five when he took us to the cinema to see A Perfect Murder.” They were also taken to a lot of plays, “and I got really bored until I was about 11 and then suddenly it clicked for me, like: oh, when theatre’s really good it can be transformative. More than anything, it made me understand people.”

At school, “It was always the drama side of things where I felt the most alive,” she says. “The most myself. I was quite badly bullied for a few years and I became self-conscious about everything I did in relation to the bullies. But drama was the place where I didn’t.”

Was it other girls?

“Yeah it was… systematic. Quite awful. A teacher said to my mum on my very last day of school: ‘She survived it. She’s done it,’ which means they knew it was happening.”

Strangely, Kirby doesn’t sound remotely bitter about it and mutters a half-finished thought about it perhaps being a useful experience now. She describes her childhood as very happy and she knows how socially and financially privileged she was, but she also suffered from giardia, an intestinal parasite, which went undiagnosed for a long time and made her feel permanently nauseous, as if she was about to vomit. “All these nightmare injections, pills up the bum, all of it. Prodded around from age nine to 11.”

At school there was a noticeboard with a picture of Ben Whishaw as Hamlet at the Old Vic on it. Kirby stole it for her bedroom wall, went to see the play three times and became obsessed with him, which was not helped by bumping into him on a London bus. She was in amateur local productions at the time, but after studying for an English degree at Exeter and then giving up a place at Lamda to go straight into work as an actor some years later, her first big chance was on The Hour – starring… Ben Whishaw.

The director was tough on her, which may have been because: “I wasn’t paying any attention to the scene. In my head it was just alarm bells going: ‘Oh my God that’s Ben Whishaw.’” Afterwards she had to tell him everything. “And it felt good to finally confess my infatuation. Of course, he was with his boyfriend.”

Hollywood came calling and she’s had to become better at dealing with famous men since being cast in the sixth instalment of the Mission: Impossible films, out this month and starring Tom Cruise. I ask what he was like. “Such a pro. Absolutely disciplined; super enthusiastic. Always wants everything executed at a super-high level, so you have to train really hard.”

With him?

“Oh God no, without him.” She laughs, groaning. “I think that would be… I did say to him at one point: ‘I am never getting on a running machine with you.’ But I learned a lot about work ethic from him. I never thought that stunts and action would be my genre, but I’m understanding now that you can transcend genre, as long as you try and find the real woman behind the part.”

It struck me, watching Julie – which is Polly Stenham’s rewrite of the Strindberg play Miss Julie, and set at 3am at a druggy party in a wealthy house in Hampstead – that Kirby could have played the heroine in a much sexier fashion. Instead, she chooses to drag her body around with her as if it brings her discomfort. The reviews have been kind to her, but not to the script or production, which tend to say it all lacks chemistry. Kirby diplomatically says the problem is: “It’s such a huge space, it’s not an intimate theatre and sometimes the space dictates the parameters.” I’m not convinced she’s enjoying it all that much.

Still, the current feminist awakening of Hollywood has had a real impact on Kirby, who has risen to fame at the perfect moment to seize it. She is working on her own ideas, too. The week after we meet she will fly off to work on an unnamed film project she’s developed with Adam Leon. “He’s the best New York film director, I think.” It’s inspired by an article in the New Yorker about a woman who entered a fugue state and went missing in the big city. They have cast a group of renegade, gender-fluid young Brooklynites to play her new friends, and Kirby scrolls through her phone to show me photos of these genderless kids she finds so mesmerisingly beautiful. She is also developing a film of her own with Ben Caron, who directed her in episodes of The Crown, and making “something about babies who are born addicted to drugs and how society treats those mothers”.

Partly this seems like an attempt to get away from the wealthy-woman-in-gilded-prison roles. “I feel like now, more than ever, it’s all of our responsibility to have other things represented on screen. There have been somany male stories on screen, or stories of women written by men, so she’s the wife of someone, the girlfriend of someone… It’s only now I realise that looking back, all the scripts I’ve read over time, unless they’re really small indie films, the women have always been fantasy figures, always viewed through the male lens, almost cartoony.”

Her boyfriend, Callum Turner, is also an actor, and recently they were on a plane together, both with a pile of about 10 scripts to read through. “In every single one he was the central protagonist and the women were helping the leads. Out of mine, about two of my parts were the leads – and then you knew that someone like Jennifer Lawrence would be doing it. So we women have got to be the generators of the material and, in order to do that, we have to understand the system we’re in, which I’m really trying to do.”

Kirby has a friend called Sarah, “who says it just pisses her off, all these Hollywood actresses getting on the red carpet and sounding off about #MeToo, etc. She says, what are they actually doing? I say I know, but these are the women who will be on the front pages of newspapers, for better or worse, and then it leads to real change in other industries, too. Media is the controller of everything.”

Another close friend is the writer Dolly Alderton. They even share the same therapist, which made Kirby very amused to read all about said therapist in Alderton’s recent bestselling memoir, Everything I Know About Love. Yet another friend is Anna, with whom Kirby and her sister share a flat in Tooting. “So we’re like three sisters. No idea why we live in Tooting, though. I think it was cheapest.” Their home has calmed down a lot since Kirby became so busy. “It used to be mad parties non-stop and the vibrations going through to the little old lady who lives next door – her house was constantly shaking at 4am.” I can’t imagine Kirby upsetting old ladies – she seems too sweet. Did the woman complain? “Sometimes, yes,” Kirby admits, with a shamefaced twinkle in her eye.

Still, she seems entirely unafraid to call the shots on the big guys now. “My only little area of change is to be in a big movie and say no, I’m not wearing a short skirt, I’m not showing any skin, I don’t want slapped-on make-up,” she says.

And if the action film wanted to give you robo-tits? “I would say absolutely not. I don’t care any more. I feel more able to say that now. I’m in a slightly luckier position, but also the times now support it. I don’t want an arse shot – well, not that they’d want one of my arse. But I don’t want to be shot through a lens of sexualisation. That’s not me. That’s the distorted feminine and the distorted masculine that is creating so much of the toxic energy in our society.”

It is unusual to hear an actor ask quite so many questions in an interview. As she says, she is fortunate to have risen to fame in a time that allows it, with other women having begun to push the boundaries. But Kirby is questioning everything. Still, you can only fight off so much of the culture. We say goodbye and she picks up her bag of M&S shopping and heads home to watch Love Island, during which, she says happily, she will “feel my brain turning into disgusting nothing”.

#Vanessa Kirby #The Crown #Mission Impossible Fallout #Articles

16 notes · View notes

staceyhcsrek17 · 6 years ago

Text

Thinking Over You

This is my message in a bottle - hoping the oceanic universe that crossed our paths will bring this to you. I’m too scared to tell you myself but I’m almost more scared of you never knowing what I was thinking the whole time.

It was a night in October that brought me here. I feel for as much as I think about it and consciously slip it into casual conversation that I should remember the exact day but I don’t. If I go back and look in the calendar I could probably figure out the exact date but is it really that important? It was a Saturday night in October. The night was almost unseasonably warm but not in an Indian summer type of way; in that way October has become in Pennsylvania - chilly and dewy in the morning and by the afternoon the sun has evaporated all the fog and mist into a hot sweat tickling under your sweater. I can’t remember if the leaves were changing or if it had been cool that morning. I just know it was a night early in October and it was a little warmer than usual and I was feeling unusually restless. I guess it was not that unusual for a twenty-three old, just a couple months fresh from college, a newly minted nurse with some money in my pocket for the first time. Nonetheless, I was itching to get out of my apartment and forget the gnashing feeling against my ribs that while I was making sure other people’s family members avoided the grave until at least 7:15, I myself wanted to die - at work at least. I think my friends, also nurses, felt similarly, but I don’t know if it was to the same degree that I did.

It was a Saturday night in October and I needed a drink. And to dance. I was debating even going out though; something about my makeup maybe? Having nothing to wear? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you.

“Come over. We have a friend staying over that I think you’ll really like ;).”

“Lol, probably.”

I guess I was going out; my hair and makeup be damned, it was already getting late. I touched up my face makeup, maybe added some eyeliner. Did it really matter to you? Did you even notice? I combed my fingers through my hair, which was locks of dark brown that almost fell to my waist a week ago, that I had chopped so short that I couldn’t even put it in a ponytail. I guess I just straightened it not knowing what to do with this new version of my hair - this new version of me. I chose a shirt that was somewhat low-cut, showing off my barely-there fabricated cleavage and a pair of denim shorts that were a little too short and tight for my chubby butt cheeks; perfect for a night at one of Bethlehem’s South Side dive bars.

I remember that I ubered there, knowing that I would imbibe far past the physical and legal capacities to drive home. I waited outside the the door hidden into the shops of Main Street, observing the trickling remnants of people finishing up their late dinners or night caps. The stairs to the apartment were narrow and dimly lit with a bits of dust settling into the wood of the building. I don’t remember how I felt before I walked into the door right before I met you. Did I feel indifferent? Was I nervous knowing that I was going to meet someone new? I know I had been feeling that I couldn’t believe in love anymore; it was pointless because even if it was so good - it would eventually come to an end. I had felt so good and then everything I thought I had crumbled into a million irreparable pieces that I had tried and tried to haphazardly put back together but they never fit quite the same again - and always ended up falling and shattering on the floor every time. You didn’t know that though. You didn’t know anything about me. I was just the girl that walked into your friend’s apartment in the short denim shorts and a black shirt.

……….

“I don’t mind being woken up at two in the morning if it meant you were able to fall in love again.” I remember my roommate telling me this the day after were first met. We apparently kept her up while we were talking and laughing in the living room after were came home from the bar. I can’t fully recollect that night in details; we were both incredibly drunk. I remember showing you my herb garden. I know that at first I didn’t want to like you. I asked you what you did and you told me that you were a cop. I thought that meant you were just like him. I thought that it meant that you couldn’t be fun or sexy and our lines of thinking would never intersect. I don’t know what flip switched in my brain or my heart to give you a chance, to open myself up to a possibility of you just a little bit. It was like a dam that was built up and you pulled out just the right part of it for the whole thing to break apart and be swept into the river.

Perhaps it was the true definition of a cosmic joke, the universe executing its most well-played trick on me. He was a cop who was a little too serious, a little too insecure, and a little too boring for me. Ironically, the first fight between him and me happened because I had asked about an open relationship. You did things that he would never do, even though you are a cop, which was always his excuse for the way he chose to be. You got drunk in a strange city, you made out with me in a bar with all of our friends watching, and you have a girlfriend back at home. The last part of that is so casual, isn’t it? So strange for everyone else but so normal for you and what I’m seeing as normal as well. Still, you talk about her to me, and I don’t know if you can tell sometimes that I don’t know what to say; it’s like breaking down the metaphorical fourth wall but in real life. Maybe I don’t like being reminded that even if I’m in love with you, it’s a kind of love that I’m unfamiliar with; it’s a kind of love knowing that there’s a huge possibility that it will never be reciprocated but choosing to let yourself feel it anyway. It’s seeing all the tarot cards laid out in front of you and knowing what they mean, but you shuffle them again just for that one spread that tells you that even if that chance is small, it’s still there.

The whole thing doesn’t sound very romantic. It most likely isn’t. Our first kiss was at a bar that I used to (still) go to for dollar drinks and throw up in their tiny, humid bathrooms. I don’t remember this detail exactly, but I had drank a lot of rum and Coke that night, so that’s what I must have tasted like to you when you kissed me. I do remember how you pulled me in with my chin cradled between your thumb and index finger, so gentle but commanding in the same way. You held my face and kissed me in a way that I don’t remember being kissed before. And then I couldn’t stop.

……….

Recently, you came here to see your friend and asked if I was free. You picked me up from my apartment and kissed me in that way that drives me crazy and makes me feel something other than sadness or indifference. When we were driving in the car to meet up at our friends’ new house, you put your hand on my leg; a subtle gesture that I’m not sure if you noticed or put much thought in to but it made me feel as if I had caught a gasp in my throat. I think most people would call that “butterflies”. As we were walking around Main Street, trying to intertwine ourselves amongst the hundreds of people there, I’m sure anyone that would have given us a thoughtless glance would have took us as just another couple there. There were times where the crowd grew thick with people moving at all different paces and you would put your hand on the small of my back - again, a gesture that made my throat feel like it was closing in on me. Later, we went back to our friend’s house and we were intermingling within the group at the dining table. You didn’t have to worry about me and I didn’t have to worry about you; we could carry on separate conversations with different people without being concerned that the other felt left out. You bought me mac and cheese at one in the morning and I was a little drunk. I saw you at one point starting to fall asleep on the couch and I, not wanting you to fall asleep before I could enjoy you mind and body, climbed into your lap, looking down over you to see your eyes flutter open and your mouth spread into a contented smile. I don’t know why, but kissing you that night felt especially good, like my mouth and lips just melded into yours perfectly. You were whispering dirty nothings into my ear as I kissed your neck, both of us seemingly ignoring the fact that two of our friends were standing in front of us talking about how her fiance had messed up mounting their television. When we came back to reality, realizing that we weren’t the only ones in the room, we laughed and kept on kissing, trying to see if they’d turn around to acknowledge us. I would burst into laughter the longer we could go without them noticing us, my arms flung loosely around your neck and my head buried into your shoulder.

The sex that night was different for us than it had been before; somehow more easy and natural. It felt like the kind of sex you have with your partner when you come home from a late night with friends; your bodies a little too tired to do anything other than sleep but you both still wanted it so badly even though you had gotten used to each other in the way that couples do. We didn’t use any type of protection, which made it feel more intimate maybe, since it was something you had absolutely insisted on in the past. The night had been warm and humid; absolutely miserable. We washed away all the sweat from the crowd and rolling around in the sheets in the shower. We laughed and kissed and we talked for a long time just standing in the warm water before we got out. After we had dried off, we snuck into my dark kitchen where I stole a pint of strawberry ice cream from the freezer and I fed it to you, and then me alternating, in spoonfuls at a time. I really loved that moment with you and wanted that moment of me feeding you ice cream or pot pie or mac and cheese or whatever and sneaking words and kisses in between all of those things to last for every night of forever.

……….

Sometimes I think, “you have to know. You have to know that I’m about to smack my head off the pavement, falling for you.” It has to be so apparent to you but then I remember that I’ve built these borders around me to keep people like you out of my mind; or maybe I have just perfected my poker face in all of this. I don’t even know if you have the capacity to feel the same way or how your brain works to compartmentalize the different aspects of your lifestyle or even how I process it myself sometimes. Regardless and despite how far all of this falls outside of the pre-made stencil of what love is supposed to look like, I choose to love you. I choose to let myself feel it; let myself just have it, even if it is just for me. I choose to let that feeling wash over me and ride it until it collapses into nothing and goes back to the sea from which it came. I hope that that same sea will take this message back to you in the little glass bottle that I’ve sealed it up in. I still have to ask, how could you not know? This message is sitting right next to you in the bed you’re sleeping in.

#love #romance #open relationship #literature #memoir #diary

2 notes · View notes

theresgloryforyou · 7 years ago

Link

This is an interesting read, and there’s truth in it, but oh, so much to unpack here. I’ll give this segment a shot, since it’s been awhile since my shot at Jacobin’s bullshit, and I see a similar self-serving strain here:

“As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need intersectional resistance,” [Charles] Derber said. “At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the ’60s, fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders. Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these issues within the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as siloed group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with gays.”

*cracks knuckles* Okay, first off, “The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed” is one of those sentences that should make everyone cringe. Accuracy would require you to write “Women realized their issues were not being addressed”, OR, better yet, “Women’s issues were not being addressed by the left.”

Also, white people slinging around the word white is fucking obnoxious. Stop doing that. We see you.

So this “Intersectional Leftist” proceeds to individuate a systemic problem and then structure his paragraph so he can blame WOMEN, and black folk and gays, for making an “intersectional”, “universalizing” movement fall apart? If it was so fucking intersectional and universal how did that happen then? Girls are irrational? We just got our little feels hurt?

The loss of this intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members within capitalist structures.

NO ONE WAS FOCUSING ON ALL OF THE OPPRESSED THAT WAS THE PROBLEM YOU WALNUT.

“Let’s take a modern version of this,” Derber said. “Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said ‘lean in.’ It captures this identity politics that has become toxic on the left. What does ‘lean in’ mean? It means women should lean in and go as far as they can in the corporation. They should become, as she has, a major, wealthy executive of a leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther] King. But all that got erased.”

Sheryl Sandberg is corporate America, not “the left”. She’s not engaged in “identity politics”, she wrote a successful pitch to non-leftist women, who are the majority because shits like you try to speak for “the left” and none of what you say applies to any of us. She’s no more a feminist than you are, and feminism is not what created identity politics. LIBERALS hijacking the conversations of various groups and pandering to them is what created identity politics. LIBERAL DUDES created identity politics.

And “But all that got erased” is insulting to every leftist woman and, again, is a stellar example of why women decided to organize without y’all. You’re writing from the position of The Imagined Leftist Default, thinking you call the shots and everyone else is supposed to go along with you, when really you and your kind were the cause of the problem, you didn’t go along with anyone else. You wanted to rule the roost, and being challenged by females, by lesbians and gays, by Black folk and Natives and Hispanics and Asians, none of that was anything you could handle. You kicked US out, and you’re still doing it. Let’s continue:

“The left became a kind of grab bag of discrete, siloed identity movements,” Derber said. “This is very connected to moral purity. You’re concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You’re competing against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You’re just concerned about getting your fair share.”

“People in movements are products of the system they’re fighting,” he continued. “We’re all raised in a capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it’s not surprising. And it has to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements has been brought up in systems they’re repulsed by. This has created a structural transformation of the left. The left offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It’s largely an identity-politics party. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn’t offer a contextual analysis within capitalism.”

I like the way you stuck “moral purity” in there but never followed up on it. It’s like a buzz word to signal to readers that not getting on board with your program is a mere prudishness, like there’s something wrong with aiming for morality.

Liberalism, which is a fundamentally capitalist and therefore oppressive ideology, seized on the failure of Leftist males, and in many cases the specific choice to refuse to include marginalized groups and women, in leadership, in organizing around our specific issues, in any way at all. Liberals saw an opportunity to peel off support from those groups. If the Left was so solid and really were fighting for the oppressed, the oppressed wouldn’t have split into groups both leftist and non in an attempt to survive.

The majority of Americans were never leftist in the first place. That non-leftist women, for example, saw themselves in the more liberal iteration of “feminism” but not at all in “Intersectional Leftism”, is not surprising, because y’all ain’t as “intersectional” as you claim to be. After all, you’ve casually co-opted the term “intersectional” without crediting the orgin of the idea behind it, and are using it to actually mean “Solidarity”. Which you do not feel or show towards women who don’t submit to your leadership.

All of this recapitulates Jacobin’s ignorant hit-job attempt on Radical Feminism: “come the revolution, men will magically become enlightened and” and there the sentence has to end because actually no, patriarchy pre-dates capitalism, capitalism is predicated upon patriarchy, and men, especially leftists, I mean, I can hear it now: “But we did so MUCH for you, babe! We supported birth control access and abortion, dollface!” Mmmmmm-hm. From the goodness of your darling hearts, I suppose, but to continue:

Derber, like North, argues that the left’s myopic, siloed politics paved the way for right-wing, nativist, protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of Trump.

“When you bring politics down to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you lose that systemic analysis,” he said. “You’re fragmented. You don’t have natural connections or solidarity with other groups. You don’t see the larger systemic context. By saying I want, as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you’re legitimating the American empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you say I want the right of a gay person to fight in combat with the Nazi soldiers?”

“I don’t want to say we should eliminate all identity politics,” he said. “But any identity politics has to be done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy. That’s been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep conversation about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It’s just been erased. That’s why Trump came in. He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing identity politics built around nationalism, militarism and the exceptionalism of the American empire.”

“Identity politics is to a large degree a right-wing discourse,” Derber said. Hold up Imma stop you there. Identity politics is NEOLIBERAL, or more simply LIBERAL discourse. Don’t go dragging the “right wing” into this. Right wingers don’t give a fuck about women or gays or most certainly anyone other than the Great White Race. So you are wrong.

But more to the point, hilariously in light of, again, Jacobin and pretty much every single leftist organization out there right now, Radical Feminism is the Feminism that focuses on the larger political economy and on systemic oppression and on class based oppression. An actual Radical Feminist, in her siloed identy-politcs clubhouse according to this article, would never frame lesbians joining the military as a victory for women. Yet Radical Feminism has been thrown under the bus by leftists for post modern identity politics. So when you attack women for rightfully organizing apart from broader leftist movements, because you can’t use our free labor and our numbers and all the heavy lifting in the background that women traditionally do in leftist movements, but you don’t actually support Radical Feminists as leftists who have analytical and philosophical similarities with Marxists and socialists of all stripes, I mean, I’m getting a pretty mixed message here. I’m getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to pitch in for the good of the whole and we’ll sort you girls and your problems out later, but right now everyone else is more important than you. And I’m also getting the typical patriarchal message that women need to shut up and embrace whatever we tell you to, including a movement based exclusively in individualism, identity, appearance, and gender, ie non-leftist non-materialist things we cannot analyze and that actively undermine you and your scant rights, or you’re not one of us.

“It focuses on tribalism tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as a whole. It’s scary.”

“How much of the left,” he asked, “is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that we’re fighting?”

ALL OF IT, pal. The entire left is reproducing patriarchy. Which I, as a leftist woman who is a radical feminist, am fighting. So how exactly do you, a leftist with a platform, propose this gets fixed? With women, yet again, agreeing to put our needs on the back burner for you? That’s worked so fucking well for exactly NO WOMEN, and we aren’t a little teeny siloed group. We’re half the fucking earth’s population. I’m not saying every woman is a Radfem, more’s the pity, I’m saying Radical Feminism is the only Leftist Feminism, because sure the fuck “Socialist Feminism” is just third wave feminism with the words “economic justice” and “praxis” thrown in for dramatic effect.

Leftists need to get their shit together. If Mr. Intersectional Leftist Man Chris Hedges had his shit together, for example, and other Intersectional Leftist Men had their shit together, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because Intersectional Leftist Men would organize with Radical Feminists, as our backup and labor. This would go a long way to creating functioning solidarity.

But what these guys actually want is to continue to be in charge and call the shots, and for women to obey them and quit thinking for ourselves. What else am I to take away from this self-serving shit?

I like Chris Hedges at times, he is capable of brilliant exposition and analysis-- this article is not an example of one of those times.

#capitalism #chris hedges #charles derber #radical feminism #L #an intellectual exercise in futility #I'd love to be able to go head to head with these guys #maybe I should mail hedges a leather glove and challenge him to a duel #parthian shots on this blog

15 notes · View notes

blindestspot · 7 years ago

Text

I think the problem with this particular theory stems from the fact that it is a litmus test on how you view Jon Snow’s current character arc.

Hyperbolically speaking, either Jon is a cruel cad or he is a faithless idiot. If you step away from the hyperbole, his pragmatism or naivety might actually make him less of a righteous cookie-cutter hero and more like a flawed human being. But it’s the internet and ideas are quickly distorted into their most hyperbolic versions of themselves. If Jon isn’t wholly good, he has got to be evil. If Jon isn’t smart, he eats crayons for breakfast.

Regardless of reception, has the theory itself some merit?

You know I keep ask myself one question over and over again while looking at all the dangling plots from Season Seven:

Is this bad writing or actual foreshadowing?

I mean when characters are doing stupid shit, are they gonna be punished for it like Ned did when he told Cersei all his plans?

Or are they gonna get away with it because the plot needs to move from point A to point B and the character doing a stupid thing is a great short cut? (Like the should-have-been-suicidal wight hunt storyline that was apparently conceived to get the Night King finally past the Wall.)

Or do the writers actually consider that stupid thing actually not stupid but rather brilliant and amazing? (“Mean Girls Winterfell” was their best idea for getting rid off Littlefinger.)

And it’s not just that characters make ambiguous choices or have ambiguous characterization beats. (Cersei – smartest woman in the room for forcing her antagonists to fight among themselves before fighting her or completely myopic for not fighting the Great War?)

It’s also ambiguous presentation where stuff gets lost in the direction (like those redshirts in the wight hunt whose number actually varies from scene to scene, making their deaths and the heroes’ survival feel even more unearned) or on the editing room floor. (When exactly did Sansa decide to move against Littlefinger? In the script it’s in episode 7.07, in the show the editing allows the interpretation that she and Arya decided it five seconds after their reunion.)

So every time I try to look at Season Seven for clues about Season Eight I ask myself if I look at foreshadowing, intentional misdirection or the show letting the audience down.

And I can never tell. And everyone who says they can… well, they are selling you something.

Jon pretending to be in love with Dany for the Greater Good is an interesting theory but if anyone thinks it’s sure and true and something-this-or-that is the proof, they are not operating in good faith because the show isn’t operating in good faith and they should have noticed.

Anyone who puts the show under enough scrutiny to judge characters’ microexpressions, should notice that Jon’s five miraculous survivals on the wight hunt alone (zombie bear, convenient ice breakage, Drogon ex machina, not drowning, Benjen ex machina) is bad faith writing.

It should be impossible to not acknowledge that this show is entirely capable of fucking up a storyline and character to the degree that a theory where it’s all a ruse looks like the better explanation than the intended reality.

In Season Seven the show’s writing had one Stark sister threatening to kill the other in all seriousness over an obviously planted letter written by a imprisoned, pre-pubescent child. The editing allowed for the kinder explanation that Arya was always faking this to mislead Littlefinger. But the original intention was for it to be real. Aside from being a bad plot, this also does something incredibly unkind to Arya’s characterization – and she is a major character and fan favorite.

It pains me to say this but there is no longer a baseline to what is possible and realistic to expect in GOT. Any character can survive being dumber than Ned. Any character can survive putting themselves into a tighter survival spot than Aerion Brightflame when he drank wildfire. Any character can turn stupid. And any character can turn so unexpectedly briliant and smart that they are defeating whole armies single-handedly.

Anything goes. It’s deus ex machina, handwaving and plot holes all the way down.

The problem with a theory like Undercover Lover is the same as any other theory which relies on the argument that the creators wouldn’t execute a core plot this badly. The counter argument is in the pudding.

I mean I really would like to talk about how the show tends to normalize and soften up romantic relationships from their book counterparts. How they alter female and male characterization in order to give characters a more appealing romantic storyline. And whether something like this can be currently observed. But I try to examine the evidence and all I end up with is the same old question:

Is this bad writing or actual foreshadowing? Misdirection or wobbly characterization? Is this shot meaningful or is there any meaningful shot at all if they don’t even have a consistent number of redshirts to sacrifice?

The real implication of this uncertainty, of knowing that “anything goes” goes unfortunately much farther than one theory or ship.

It means that every theory is built on quicksand. I still believe that Cersei will die and the Night King will be defeated but I am sticking to what I’ve written about book canon. I am washing my hands off speculation that is based on show-only stuff until further notice.

There is just one thing I do wanna say as a response to Season Seven.

It’s the conclusion I arrived at in 2013 about what a potential book canon Jon/Sansa endgame has to be in order to be meta-narratively satisfying. Namely, that it needs to be narratively dissatisfying:

“…no one, not the characters, not the readers, would consider the far away possibility of happiness a happy ending. [Jon/Sansa] would be merely the least terrible of all choices. No one’s gonna be happy with that - not even people who would actually like the idea of Jon/Sansa.“

It’s time to consider the possibility that getting the ending that you ship might significantly differ from getting the ship you like.

#A Song of Ice and Fire #game of thrones #Jon x Sansa #jonsa #meta #getting the ending you ship is not the same as getting the ship you like

338 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 7 years ago

Text

Two visions of the future

For comparison, two different Medium essays, one by the artist James Bridle, one by the World Economic Forum.

Bridle's essay is getting at several distinct but related things, and approaching them interrogatively, so there's some stuff to unpack here. We also have to separate, insofar as possible, our participation in the normal generational cycle of anxiety over new media ("Video games are corrupting the youth!" "TV is corrupting the youth!" "Comic books are corrupting the youth!" "Novels are corrupting the youth!") from legitimate and useful criticisms of what's going on. My own reaction is probably 50/50 to be honest. I'm keenly aware that this kind of thing didn't exist when I was a small child, and when I was a young teenager and first spending a lot of time on the internet, I was somehow fortunate enough to be able to develop a healthy understanding of how the internet functioned, of what did and did not deserve my attention on the internet, and how to separate online interactions from other kinds of interactions. But the internet is a very different thing now than it was in the noughties, and between Youtube as small children, games like Minecraft as prepubescent children, and the slate of online interactions like other video games and porn as adolescents, the internet as my children will experience it is very different from the internet as I experienced it. They will probably be fine; probably, the trick as with all media when you're a parent, is to try to consume it with your children as much as possible, and to talk to them about it. Bridle's handwringing may prove unnecessary. But I don't think it's misplaced.

I'll also note here he's using some terminology in a way I find consistent with how people on the political left talk, but idiosyncratic in a more general context. This carries over into assuming certain things that I think the left has yet to prove, like capitalism necessitating exploitation to a degree greater than any other system of social organization, but his broader point here is that the incentive structures of large websites like Youtube have created a little locus of grotesque horror that, unless we're careful, we'll let our children go toddling off toward. Now, maybe the outcome of this is merely leaving our kids with a few weird memories, or some things they have to work out with a therapist in twenty or thirty years. Bridle's anxieties about violence and sexuality in this medium seem to be continuous with anxieties about violence and sexuality in other media, and sure, these examples seem weirder and more disturbing. But I have yet to see strong evidence linking violence in media consumed with violence in society at large, and our terror as a society about any contact between the domains marked "sex" and the domains marked "children" is unfounded.

So does the phenomenon Bridle describes worry me? Yeah, it does. Less than it does him, but it's still weird, it's still likely to have strange, unknown consequences, and it's part and parcel of a model of internet content distribution that has selected a really terrible metric for deciding who sees what. We're at a really ugly point in the development of our online channels of information that prioritizes advertising and technologies optimized for advertising without much thought to the effect it's having on the rest of what we consume, the actual information we go online to seek people out. This is the same phenomenon that's driving the distribution of nearly uniquely terrible information ("fake news") on Facebook, contributing to political polarization and instability, and the worst part of it all is that the people responsible, the ones who run Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, and the like, refuse to take any kind of moral responsibility for the shape these systems have acquired. But more on that in a second.

The second essay presents another version of the future. In just thirteen years, it says, the world will be a technologically-facilitated wonderland. It's a nice vision! It's a cool, slick, Star Trek future, and not the fuddy duddy 60s version where we still had to use physical buttons. It's J.J. Abrams Star Trek, it's Star Trek Discovery! Naively, it seems hard to criticize. Even those of us who aren't perennially in love with the newest and niftiest devices can see the appeal of living in a genuine science fiction novel.

And yet... this is the same future we've been promised lies roughly ten to fifteen years from now, for ever. It executes that greatest of the futurological rug-sweeps, which is ignoring the details of implementation: the annoyance of getting all your devices to sync up, or alternatively of being locked into a single corporate device ecosystem, the frustrations when promising device concepts turn out to be substandard or half-baked, the real and deep failures of the Internet of Things already (which show no signs of abating), and, of course, the fact that unless global poverty is not only solved in thirteen years but everyone is propelled to the position of senior management in their own technology firm, the fact that this is a very narrow vision of the future indeed.

But of course, as William Gibson observed, the technology of the future is always unevenly distributed. And that's the other problem: this is a vision of the future that is concerned only with the future of a narrow slice of the human race. It's not a vision of the future, it's a vision of their future. The narrowness of this vision on the part of technology companies already produces frustrations in my life: assumptions that the rest of the world has about the budget for a data-heavy cell phone plan and the constant internet connectivity of an average tech/software employee in southern California means you have devices that update at inconvenient times, badly designed apps that chew up half a month's data in an afternoon, phone OSes that become obsolete and un-upgradeable in the expectation that you'll just buy a new phone when next year's iPhone comes out. Since internet connectivity is unlike previously existing luxury goods, and thus devices that enable it are not like previous luxury goods, this is a mild inconvenience for me, but a form of structural inequality for people much poorer than me. Narrowness of vision in the target audience for these technologies produces, or at least exacerbates, tangible social issues, which the producers of these technologies seem mostly unconcerned about.

Improvements in technology that mostly benefit the already well-off still have knock-on benefits for the global poor as well, much in the same way that growing the entire economy, in principle, still helps people who have a small share of the economy. But just as we never seem to get around to implementing policies that redistribute some of that wealth downward, we never seem to get around to really investing in the development of more stable, more dependable versions of existing technologies that have a different economic context in mind. I have no doubt that Moradi and Yang's future will come to pass, if not in 2030 then at some point (albeit with more cursing at incompatible devices and more spambots using your smart house to market penis enlargement pills). I also have no doubt that they're not really thinking of the world at large when they imagine this future. It troubles me that, at the very least, how these technologies might affect people who live very differently from them is not a topic of interest to them.

One of the things I agree with Maciej Ceglowski about is that the people who design software often aren't concerned with the moral implications of their design. It reminds me of a conversation I once had with an engineer friend in university who said he would be quite happy to design weapons of mass destruction, if he got a cushy job doing so--since it was not his responsibility how they were used. It's not that modern software is a weapon of mass destruction; but it is powerful, and I don't think we obviate our personal responsibility to consider the implications of what we create just because we're further down the hierarchy of decisionmaking that governs how these creations are actually used. Our guilt should be commensurate with our responsibility: Mark Zuckerberg has more responsibility for flooding people with lies and political propaganda than your average Facebook codeslinger. But the low-level employee still has some responsibility, and certainly the tech industry as a whole has a responsibility, which it is assiduously avoiding, of confronting the large-scale failures of its approach to business.

In an ideal world, content providers like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Reddit are amoral vehicles to facilitate communication, skimming a bit of your attention off the top in the form of advertising to make a profit. This is the world I suspect the leadership of these companies imagines that they inhabit. Unfortunately, this is not the case; the design of these platforms affects what information is transmitted, and how. The channel cannot be entirely divorced from the message. Content-distribution algorithms that aggravate preexisting failure modes of human communication can and do cause actual harm, up to and including loss of life. The algorithm that decides what shows up on your Facebook news feed is not amoral, and it's not apolitical, no matter how much the person who made it would like to think.

Bridle's Peppa Pig dental torture example is probably pretty low-key as far as these things go. There are way worse molochian outcomes than instilling in a small child a terror of the dentist, like flooding the culture with nonsense videos out of which it's impossible to pick useful or meaningful content, or training a generation on a short-attention-span instant-gratification media consumption, or lowering the effective level of national political discourse to the equivalent of what your drunk racist uncles shout at each other after dinner every Easter. Even at their worst these may not devour our culture, but they will make it a damn sight harder build the kind of world we actually want to live in, and it's not helping that everyone involved in this trend is happy to let it keep continuing, forever, so long as they get their driverless car, their genetically engineered pet, and their smart house.

Both these futures will come to pass, is what I'm saying. Both these futures are here already, more or less. They're not intentional creations. We're stumbling into them senselessly. But there is a better way, except I don't think you're going to like the answer.

Governments are not the danger.

These forces are non-governmental. No system of government in the world has the incentive to show your kids weird or horrifying Dadaist Youtube videos. Wealth redistribution, of the kind necessary to ensure that the owners of half-tiger CRISPR'd housecats don't find themselves on the wrong end of a bloody revolution, does not occur naturally under the normal operation of capitalism. The only institution capable of solving this particular coordination problem is one that has the authority to reach both broadly and deeply into the economic and social systems out of which these forces spring, and plug them at their source. This is pretty much the thing modern government was designed to do.

Yes, I know: the FDA proves government kills babies. Regulatory capture, professional licensing, the EPA, Donald Trump, whatever your favorite stand-in for the bugbears of government, this is sufficient evidence that the worst sentence in the English language is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But there exists a layer of technical policy creation in governments all over the world which is devoted to solving important social, economic, and scientific issues and which, believe it or not, mostly functions well, despite cynicism about government and high pay attracting many otherwise good administrators to the private sector. The trouble with this layer is that, when it works well, it is invisible. When the FDA does its job right, people do not die from tainted drugs. When professional licensing works correctly, people are not butchered by someone who was charismatic enough to convince the people around him he was a great surgeon when he did not know what he was doing. But the successes of government are often invisible. We do not praise occupational licensing every time our doctor doesn't kill us, because our doctor not killing us is the expected outcome, the bare minimum. The problem is, government (this layer of government, the most useful layer of government) mostly exists to prevent things falling below this threshold. We would notice it only by its absence, and the race to the bottom that would ensue. Sometimes, it does its job so well we think, "Okay, the FDA was useful in the past, but no longer; the literal snake-oil salesmen are all dead, and we can create Yelp for drugs now, so we'll be fine." If you think this, I implore you (besides looking closely at the failures of online rating systems like Yelp) to look at the Voting Rights Act and what has happened since the Supreme Court decided that it had done its job and we didn't need it any more. It may be that we don't need the FDA, but you will need a lot more evidence than "we have Yelp now" to convince me of that.

But concern about bad regulation (which does exist, and indeed abounds), and about the "series of tubes"/Andrea Leadsom types making policy that affects emerging technologies is not misplaced. I will suggest two things to you, though. First of all, the level at which this policy is often made is at a level below actual elected representatives: bills are written by staff, and implemented by civil servants. This is the level at which technical specialists are hired, because nobody is ever going to get elected to Congress on the basis of their ability to write code, and they shouldn't be. Writing good code is not a qualification for Congress; being able to advocate for the preferences of your constituents is. This requires social/political skills, not technical ones. So we don't want a legislature of technical types: we want a legislature that relies on technical types to accomplish technical functions of government, which is, in fact, how many government agencies are set up in practice. Second, the thing that would most improve the ability of government to create good policy in these areas is for government to have the services of capable interpreters, people with sufficient technical understanding and creative ability that government agencies are not only at the mercy of charismatic outside manipulators.

If you want a path forward, this is the admittedly difficult one I suggest. More people with deep understanding of technical issues, who are concerned about the interaction of new technologies in unintended ways, need to be willing to go into government. People who are libertarian enough to know that rules for the sake of rules are terrible, that inflexibility on things like nutritional formulae for babies with short-bowel syndrome literally kills babies, but who are not ideologically opposed to the existence of government in the first place. People who can act as facilitators and interpreters both to other civil servants, and to legislators and ministers. People working for technology companies, and on the development of new technologies, or the improvement of existing but so far underdeveloped technologies, need to take moral responsibility for the things they create. They need to have conversations about that responsibility with each other, and when they find themselves in leadership positions (or just talking to people already in leadership positions), they need to advocate for that responsibility forcefully.

Government could incentivize this, even by something as lame and noncommittal as a "Moral Leadership in Technology" award. Private industry or well-off private persons could probably also incentivize this. (Elon Musk or Bill Gates could definitely do it.) Media could in theory also do this, but I'm skeptical that it would result in anything other than hand-wringy outrage, which is one of the least useful things on the planet. Outrage alone rarely suffices to address structural issues.

There are probably other useful paths forward, and problems with this path that I haven't thought of. But I do think these are issues that need to be addressed if we want to reap the greatest benefits from the future, if we want a world more utopian than dystopian. And I think these are issues that are tractable, even if it won't be easy.

#i am the world's worst anarchist

5 notes · View notes

lunarmoonflowyr · 8 years ago

Text

So. RWBY.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while now, because I’ve wanted to get my feelings out but never really got to put words into it because it’s a difficult topic for me to untangle.

I’ve been watching RWBY since Red Trailer first dropped, and I fell in love with it immediately. It rapidly became my special interest and I fell in love with the world, the characters, and even the FNDM to a degree. I met so many wonderful people through this show, and it gave me a lot.

When Volume 3 ended, I was honestly really excited. The animation quality had jumped from 2, things were actually tense and there were real, tangible consequences at stake for once and the finale didn’t chicken out like Breach. Lest we forget.

I didn’t even have an issue with Pyrrha’s death oddly enough the way a lot of the fandom did. I had issues with how it was executed, but her death in it of itself made sense to me and I was glad that it looked like it wasn’t just going to fuel Jaune’s character development, but Ruby’s. I could talk for a while about how I think the negative reaction to Pyrrha’s death was hilariously overblown, because speaking as a writer, having a character exist purely to die to further the plot and other character’s growth is nothing new and completely acceptable, but I digress.

I liked Volume 3. As a whole, I enjoyed it. I had a few nitpicks, a few scenes in particular I felt could have been done without, but...anyway.

Volume 4 was...a disappointment.

It started out shaky in hindsight. I was blinded by excitement and optimism, seeing as RWBY is my special interest and all.

One thing that immediately struck a very, very wrong chord with me was Jaune, and Ruby.

It felt like all the established growth and, well, character of these two from the past two volumes was just undone. They didn’t feel like themselves. Or rather, they felt like stunted versions of themselves.

Jaune suddenly is the tactician? Excuse me?

Last time he tried that it failed miserably and resulted in him just telling Nora to go nuts.

Ruby on the other hand had consistently, throughout all the past volumes, shown that she has the innate capabilities of a leader and takes that role seriously. She’s shown to be competent, quick to adapt, and clever.

Remember the Nevermore fight from volume one? Remember that entire episode?

Remember this? I’m honestly never gonna forget this moment, and it surprises me how little it’s talked about when it comes to Ruby. This moment right here, after rallying seven people, six of which she barely knew, getting them to follow her, and turning back to look on them, was way powerful. It showed Ruby’s innate charisma and leadership, it showed that it came naturally to her.

And Yang saw it too. She’s staring at her little sister, so incredibly proud of her. She sees the little leader that could.

The Nevermore fight in it of itself was incredible, and I think for a lot of us, definitely myself, it was the moment where we actually started taking RWBY seriously. Up to that point, outside the trailers, it looked like RWBY would just be this quirky, funny little thing that wouldn’t really DO much. Especially since it was plagued with animation buggery and voice acting problems from the get-go, I don’t think anyone was really expecting much out of it.

After the Nevermore fight though, I realized this show had serious potential. And it all lay with Ruby.

That leadership is GONE in volume 4. That confidence that she showed in commanding her team, the natural charisma, the snap thinking and the dedication to which she took on that mantle. It’s just nonexistent, and suddenly Jaune steps up instead?

I don’t get it, it confuses me and upsets me honestly. Jaune apparently got a lot of character development offscreen, and Ruby regressed. And that’s just the first episode.

Another sticking point for me is the overarching plotline. It took three and a half seasons for the main character to even begin to understand what the flying fuck is going on. We, the viewer, know what’s going on, but the main character doesn’t.

This, in my opinion, is bad writing. The viewer should very rarely have this level of concrete knowledge above the main fucking protagonist. The audience and the protagonist(s) should be on equal levels or very slight variations leaning towards the audience.

I think part of this stems from the amount of characters RT seems to want to share the main character spotlight. Through the first three volumes, we had eight characters trying to share main character duties, so much so that the four girls we were assuming were the main characters got sidelined so hard in the first volume and a half that we knew more about Jaune than any of them.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked Jaune. I thought he was a wonderful character and he definitely deserved screentime, but RT did a terrible job of balancing the screentime between main characters.

We still don’t know that much about Ruby, and that infuriates me. Weiss and Blake got the most character development throughout all four volumes, Yang got a little bit in 2 and a lot more in 4, but we know jack fucking shit about Ruby aside from what we’ve already seen, which isn’t much.

Ruby in volume 4 felt like a little bit of a slap in the face. No on screen processing of Pyrrha’s death (Which she witnessed mind you. She literally saw someone die. That will fuck anybody up, and she saw one of her good friends die.) whereas Jaune gets his angst moment in the forest, he gets his rememberance with his upgraded gear, he gets to be mopey.

Volume 4 Ruby is the most one dimensional version of herself since early volume 1. And what irritates me even more is that all the other characters have gotten decent development at this point, even if it has taken four goddamn seasons.

But Ruby still feels bland and almost like a caricature of herself compared to the other characters.

I honestly have a lot less gripes about this show than a lot of people. My biggest issues come from Jaune and Ruby’s character in volume 4, but it’s such a glaring issue for me that I can’t really look past it. Ruby is my second favorite character in the show after Weiss.

But the writers are treating her badly and neglecting her greatly. In my personal opinion, she is being written horribly and without much real thought or care put into it. I’m not going to cry sexism because Jaune was essentially shoehorned into the role she previously filled, but I am going to say bullshit because in my opinion, it is.

I think the thing that hurts me the most, honestly, is that Jaune isn’t even written BADLY, per say. The offscreen character development turning him into the brains of the team is the one real gripe I have with how he’s been written, and I don’t have an issue with what he turned into, just....show us him getting there.

But Ruby, the main character, the character the show is NAMED after, is getting sidelined and with that, I’ve found my interest dwindling.

This isn’t the show I expected to watch, in short. At the beginning, we were promised a show that would center around these four girls. Red, White, Black, and Yellow.

But we haven’t gotten that. At all. The girls barely interact, they separated for an entire volume which I personally think was a terrible idea, and the show isn’t about them as a unit and I wouldn’t even say it’s about them as individuals anymore.

While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not what we were shown at the start.

To close out this massive, rambling mess, RWBY isn’t a bad show. It has a lot of questionable moments, it has a lot of shitty moments, but it also has a lot of good and even great moments. It created a living, breathing world with a cast of varied and wonderful characters.

But, it’s not...RWBY. It’s something else. RWBY is Monty Oum’s creation, his baby. These girls were like daughters to him, and RWBY was about them, as a unit. And whatever the show is now, it’s not that.

It’s just a disappointment. To me, at least.

#long post #rwby #rwde i guess #moonspeak

9 notes · View notes

elmozzosays · 5 years ago

Text

May 12 2020

I always wonder what people do after their work mode is off, this also include workaholics. Yep, especially them. They do not tend to take “time off” to rest, work keeps them going. I used to know a person like that (a woman to be specific). She was great though don’t get me wrong but work could not be everything. I believe she simmered down after becoming a mother -or so I think- but really... what do they do after work?

Before jumping into what I think they do (I’m going to assume here, since I really do not care what they do but this isn’t about that. Let’s pretend for a second. Since I’m writing this, this reality will play like that, let’s see if I guess... Let me start with this individual that I know pretty damn well -that will be me- I like keeping a mystery (and it’s part of the mystique) to keep almost everyone wondering and guessing what I do after I clock out or leave or whichever method places of work use to send people after they done with their shift. I personally prefer the clock out: Accurate, you know what you did, even the slightest second counts. Currently, for me is from “this specific time til I close the door” Like doctors, but without the degree and the respect. Let’s face it: no title, you are a nobody. That’s how America works.

Anyway, on every place I have work for the past 17 years (I took at summer job in 2000 at a McDonald’s -every kid’s fist job for the most part- for 3 months. Yep, the fast food chain industry. Pays little (back then) but as a teenager, having spare cash was all good. I could buy CD’s and clothes. Bought my first pair of Chucks (Converse), I also gained weight consuming all that greasy food. It took me several months to trim it. Oh, on the subject Jaime... focus please. (clears throat) I never let anyone know what I do on my free time. Again: FREE TIME EQUALS MY TIME. A piece of advice here (reject this if you like to gossip. Seems like every boss I have work with likes gossiping) Do not let anyone, unless you become close friends with a coworker, it happens, know what you do when you off work. I have never asked anyone -employees and bosses- what is that they do on their spare time. If they share, fine, I’m a good listener, bu that does not mean I shall tell you about mine. Nope, ain’t going to happen. After all this time, the only person who really knew me inside doors was my former girlfriend. She saw a side of me no one knew.

There are 2 sides of me: the one at work and the one off work. Do not get this mislead you: I am not faking anything here. You just cannot show your true colours all the time. Let’s say this: same person, different mode. There you go. Work mode: trying to keep it “professional”, do the task, show up on time (a virtue of mine) and get everything done. Off work: the total opposite, but the showing on time remains. The few people that know (or known) me, they see the character I often do not show on work mode. Now, I won’t describe it, let them be the judge but I’ll say this: I keep it real. No fake shit, you see what you get. Often described as shy, I can be really chatty, outspoken, outgoing, extrovert, fun, loud, sarcastic -which some think I’m being funny, especially the ladies think that way- That’s another thing: this is for the guys only: When you are being funny and trying to impress a lady, it does not work, right? but the complete opposite happens when you get sarcastic. Hmmmm, reverse psychology, I guess.

Alright, to the topic in hand (Sorry I got carried away) This is what I do when I press the off work bottom. This might be boring to some, interesting to a few. I rest. As fast, reliable, on time, accurate as I can be, I am not a machine. I get tired. Like a battery, it needs to be refueled, same with me. What does it take to get me recharged? This is when the hobbies come in play: Music. Since I do collect vinyl, this is the time to sit down, crack a beer and listen to my favourite albums. Depends what the mood calls for, doesn’t matter. As long as I am listening to music, I’m good. Headphones on, world is off. Music is another topic i will touch on future posts. Don’t worry, It will come and it’ll be a long one. Another hobby of mine: photography. As long as I can remember, I have been shooting since the iPhone 3Gs was out, to be accurate 2007 or so. I always wanted to get a professional camera to get serious about because let’s face it: you cannot call yourself a photographer if you use a phone for it. It’s way too easy for me. So, after someone was selling his beloved Pentax camera (one of my Instagram followers) I jumped in just in time for my trip to Mexico in 2018. Still shooting with it and still learning. Hanging out at home. My favourite place to be. I like going out but with the right people but I prefer to stay indoors (if you read my last post, key word: crowds. I avoid them) I have everything I need at home, why go anywhere? See? I am pretty simple. Oh, I forgot: sports! Preferably Football (or soccer as the Yanks call it) and Tennis. Big sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup get my devouted attention. I’m not much a TV guy, I do not care about shows or series. If in the future I have my own place, I’d get rid of cable. A pure waste of money. Just a TV screen and my music system.

Now, enough about me. The rest of you, Let’s see if I can guess on at least 3-4 things you guys do on your free time. This will be all based on what I have seen around people, or what they try to portray. If I’m mistaken, remember this: it’s my journal. My version of the following practices people execute when off work mode is as follows: Here i go. Disclaimer: Some of this content will be harsh. No apologies.

Very awful TV shows. All those reality TV that plague networks. Disgusting to watch, even worse when people get involved and talk about it. Small town minds. Spending countless hours in front of the screen watching badly scripted shows. Boring sports (yes, this include baseball, golf, and football the yanks knows known as the NFL) Look, I tried damn hard to get around it -especially on the Super Bowl- but it is just not for me. Let’s be real here: on that day, most of you go to eat, drink, catch up with your co-worker and watch all those damn commercials people fuzz about the very next minute they’re done. How about the halftime show? I’m not impressed. Unless it’s the Rolling Stones or AC/DC, put me on. Let’s continue.... The music they listen on their phones.... Neil Young wrote this lyric on “Hey, Hey. My, My” that says “rock and roll will never die”. No to disrespect Mr, Young here, but I seem to believe is coming true every day with that nonsense music you all listen. Uninspiring and repetitive. I will leave this open because a dedicated post about music will be written, just not now. Kids. Nothing wrong here, but I some of my lady friends are moms. They have to devote a massive amount of time to their kiddos and that’s fine with me, but I cannot resonate with that, since i am not a dad and It seems I won’t be. Never say never. Relationships. don’t get me started. Mostly all those are not even for real love but that’s not my problem so I won’t get there. The point is, Spending what you have left of your free time with that significant other can be a nightmare. Some of them eve told me they wish they’ll be with their friends instead of their couples. How boring and miserable that must be: loving with someone you are not compatible with. Working from home... this is where you all workaholics fall in this category. Even after you’re done working, still sending damn e-mails from home. UNLESS you own the company, this applies. A form of vice. We all have one. From drinking, eating, smoking -drugs or cigarettes- watching or reading pornography and sex. I will give you all a freeby here. I am okay with either vice. We are not perfect and to cope with wherever is going on in your life, you need a vice BUT -like they mention on alcohol commercials- enjoy responsibly. i still want you around. Don’t fuck it up okay? good.

To summarize this unplanned long post, keep your private time for yourself. Let people wonder what you do and if they ask you, come up with something creative. I can tell you what to say but then again, that’ll spoil the creativity and intellect of your own mind. Your free time is not part of a payroll they file in order to get you paid, so stop explaining to people -or your nosey boss- about it. Why are they so nosey anyway? are their lives so boring? It seems it is. Listen, it’s up to you at the end of the day. Some people need validation explaining and talking about their lives to strangers. I don’t care. Just don’t expect me to do the same. I might not speak much but man, do I observe. Like they say: Fear the quiet one, the others just bark but the quiet one, that one, is always thinking and planning his/her next move, so don’t under estimate them.

Do me a favour: today, after you’re done with work, reflect on what you did today, either if it was a good or not so good day. take a 5 or a 10 min room for that. Remember this: No one is essential and if you get fired, someone else will replace you. Don’t invest all your time working and use your free one to enjoy whatever you like doing. have a drink, it’s on me, just this round, though. Til next time.

-jaime

0 notes

topicprinter · 5 years ago

Link

When I was about 15 years old, I began collecting menus from local cafes to generate ideas for my future business. My dream was to open a coffee shop.When I moved to New York City from Israel and was juggling between school and work, coffee, as you can imagine, was a must! Unfortunately, I couldn't spend $4 on a Starbucks every time and also didn't have room in my tiny studio apartment for a coffee machine. In Israel, instant coffee is much more common and instead of using coffee makers, most people drink it at home or at the office.To satisfy my coffee needs, I turned to my old coffee habits and hoped to find a good instant coffee for home and on the go. I tried different local instant coffee brands, but didn't like any of them. The search also made me realize that people in America really think badly about instant coffee. I knew instant coffee was misrepresented here and decided to follow my entrepreneurial aspirations. I immediately started working on the idea of a better instant coffee brand. Better product, online, with a social mission and cause behind it.I started Waka Coffee with my own limited funds (we never raised money ever since) and without prior experience in the food and beverage industry. I listened to so many industry-specific podcasts and read professional blogs, which have taught me a lot about the CPG industry. I took bits of pieces of information from various success stories and tried to apply other entrepreneurs’ tips to my own business. The interesting part is that it works! I acted on some of their suggestions, such as reaching out to bloggers and journalists and sending them samples of our coffee and this is how we organically acquired most of our early customers.I had no experience in PR and had no money to pay for it, so I just sent different versions of my pitch to as many outlets as possible. I continued with the versions that worked and started getting coverage in influential coffee blogs, which boosted sales and brought new followers on social media.Who is your target demographic?Our customers are looking for an easier coffee experience and realizing that coffee doesn’t have to be complicated to make in order to taste great. Coffee should be easily available wherever they are, be it at home, in the office, or on a camping trip. We want to make coffee easy to purchase and make, without sacrificing the quality and taste. As a direct to consumer brand, we see how more people are going online to look for coffee products that fit these criteria. Our target demographic is naturally people that fall into this category.People that are buying Waka Coffee are also more conscious about health and wellness, and they are changing their diets accordingly. Coffee already has many antioxidants, but we also see how some customers are also using coffee as the base for other functional drinks. For example, people now mix MCT oil, collagen, vitamins, and even CBD into their coffee. Instant coffee is a great option if you like to mix different ingredients together, as they all simply dissolve in water and can be consumed on the go.While we understand where the question is coming from, we are still surprised by how many people ask us whether “instant coffee is real coffee?” Which the answer is obviously yes! Instant coffee is made from brewed coffee that was converted into powdered coffee by extracting the liquid of the coffee bean. This can be done in two ways: spray drying or freeze drying. The instant coffee granules are easily dissolved when mixed with water to create a great cup of coffee, instantly. Contradictory to some myths, instant coffee is made of pure coffee beans. Our instant coffee, for example, is made from 100% Arabica beans and freeze dried to preserve the original aroma and flavors of the beans, which makes it taste better than the traditional brands you are familiar with.What have you learned since creating the business?Being an entrepreneur is never easy. It was especially difficult because I did not have prior experience in the coffee industry. I had to navigate health permits, suppliers, packaging, and many more issues that I was encountering for the first time. In addition, like I mentioned instant coffee is often perceived as a low-quality product, which requires a lot of consumer education as well.As with regular coffee, the taste all depends on the beans’ quality and type. But because of this perception, we constantly have to explain to prospective customers why our instant coffee is different and why instant coffee can actually taste good! Fortunately, nowadays we have many professional reviewers and customers that love and support our brand.To overcome these challenges I use my marketing skills. I have a degree in Digital Marketing and worked in the marketing industry, which helped me understand the fundamentals of creating engaging content, acquiring customers, performing analytics, developing paid and owned marketing strategies. I also see social media marketing from both perspectives — as a brand and as an “influencer” that promote other brands’ products. While most of our traffic comes from organic SEO efforts, we also acquire many customers from social media, specifically Instagram. It requires a lot of work and persistence. I also have a personal Instagram account dedicated to food and lifestyle content, which I use to promote both Waka Coffee and other brands. We create new content almost everyday on our socials. In addition, we invest heavily on our robust Coffee Life blog and weekly coffee newsletter.My main advice to new entrepreneurs is to save more money. Most businesses require a good cash flow and intensive marketing spend. You need a lot of money to grow your company, develop new products, advertise, distribute, etc. We are trying to bootstrap as much as possible and minimize our expenses while maintaining our growth. Not an easy task, especially being fully self funded.How do you protect yourself from competition?Waka Coffee was created to change the perception of instant coffee and bring it back to its glory days. Yes, once upon a time it was popular in the US as well. We do this by offering a quality and easy to make coffee experience. Our instant coffee is made from 100% Arabica beans, which are the same coffee beans used to make your delicious latte at the coffee shop. The Arabica advantage gives our instant coffee a richer, more complex flavor. It is also processed differently. Traditional brands opt for a mass spray drying process that sacrifices taste for speed and cost. Our instant coffee is made using a freeze-drying method that preserves the coffee’s authentic aroma and depth of flavor.We don’t focus as much about the competition, but how we execute on our goals instead. Even if there are similar products out there, there are no similar companies out there. We believe that the assortment of our products, our vision, mission, customer focused approach and social goal is what makes us unique. We invest a lot in our brand and as another way to protect it, we have our brand name and slogan trademarked in addition to owning many high valuable domain names.What apps help you run your business efficiently?As a digital native brand, we of course need to have a good ecommerce platform. Like many other online brands, we chose to have our website on Shopify and very satisfied with this decision. With Shopify, we can easily manage various aspects of our business and integrate other platforms and services to it, which saves us valuable time. We also love reading feedback from our website and Amazon customers and use YotPo and Feedback Genius to collect these valuable reviews. These tools are very easy to launch and manage, so I highly recommend using them if you are just starting out.What are your goals for the future?Our goal is to expand our line of products and be the “go to” brand for quality instant coffee and tea. We are very particular about the quality of products we are choosing to sell, their packaging, and also always donating a portion of our profits to clean water initiatives, which makes us very different than the traditional brands out there.We are now working on introducing new coffee products, opening new online sales channels, investing more in our business wholesale accounts (quality instant coffee for your business program), and providing the best customer support for our valuable customers and subscribers. We hope to introduce at least one more type of instant coffee this year (single origin, Arabica, freeze dried), launch flavored instant coffee and additional instant tea options next year.I see the company focusing on online sales in the near future and once we have enough data and the financial means to support it, start exploring other physical sales outlets. Waka isn’t a fit for any retailer and we will be very cautious about our offline strategy when the time comes. If you ask me about the possibility of Waka being acquired in the future, I think it is highly likely if we continue in the same growth pace we have demonstrated in the past. The sales of traditional instant coffee brands are declining, while the category overall is increasing year over year. They will have to think of potential acquisitions to protect their place in the category. In addition, the fact that most of our sales are done online gives us so much insight into our customer base and allows us more easily introduce new products to fit their needs.If you enjoyed this interview, the original is here.

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

0 notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

Text

Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html

For those of us that are of the age to have experienced the 'Golden Age' of vinyl records, 'Rock N Roll' and coming of age during 'Woodstock' this is a must read article. It will bring back wonderful memories!!!

It also touches another heart ♥️string reaching those with disabilities through music!!! 🎵🎶

🔈🖤💜💙💚💛🧡❤️🎶🎼🎵🎷🎹🎺🥁🎻

"In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that."

Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music

He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?

By David Samuel's | Published August 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 20, 2019 1:31 PM ET |

Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. “I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ ” he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts’s house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles. The dial thermometer at the far end of the porch indicated that it was now upward of 110 degrees of some kind of heat. Maybe the dial was stuck.

When you hear real music, you get lost in it, he added, “because it sounds like God.” Spotify doesn’t sound like God. No one thinks that. It sounds like a rotating electric fan that someone bought at a hardware store.

No one in their right mind would choose to live in the canyons outside Los Angeles, especially in the summertime between noon and 5. There isn’t enough water or shade. After a few months of summer heat, the scrub on the mountainsides is baked dry. Then someone gets sloppy with a stray cigarette butt or a campfire or the power company fails to maintain a power line and a spark accelerates into a terrifying wildfire that sends up pillars of thick smoke that from a distance hovers over the canyons like an illustration from an old Bible. News crews record burning mansions, which are intercut with the winsome llamas of the rich and famous that have been safely removed to Zuma Beach. Stragglers are incinerated in their cars.

The view was incredible, though. Young has been living up here on and off for decades. At one point, he owned more than 1,000 acres of much-coveted Malibu real estate, where movie producers and actors and billionaire tech tycoons build mansions with supersize swimming pools, grotesque advertisements of corruption and hubris, which are some of the major sins that Young rails against.

I enjoyed listening to Young rant on about the modern condition. We were vibing. He is passionately opposed to global warming, genetically modified seeds, corporate greed-heads who are despoiling Mother Nature and an assortment of other sinners who interfere with our God-given right to happiness. His ire this afternoon, directed through me and my notebook and my Sony digital recorder, was focused on the engineers of Silicon Valley, against whom he has been zealously waging war for decades. Silicon Valley’s emphasis on compression and speed, he believes, comes at the expense of the notes as they were actually played and is doing something bad to music, which is supposed to make us feel good. It is doing something bad to our brains.

The same goes for everything else that Silicon Valley produces, of course: the culture of digital everything, which is basically a load of toxic, mind-destroying crap. It’s anti-human.

“I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” he continued, his voice taking a turn. “He knows where he [expletive] up. Just the look on his face,” he said, wagging his finger toward a television screen inside Roberts’s living room, where the Facebook chief executive was giving sworn testimony before a panel of lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You know, he came to me in a dream the other night, and I felt really sorry for him,” he said. “He was just sitting there sweating and kind of didn’t know how to talk, because he [expletive] up so badly.” There he was, Zuckerberg, on the large-screen TV, sweating bullets.

Young was no longer the righteous wandering hippie avatar of his early album covers. He’s an old man now at 73. He’s fleshy and jowly and red-faced, with long, stringy hair. He looked like a prosperous prairie farmer (hogs or cows, some form of livestock) minus the overalls. You can imagine Farmer Neil attending church every Sunday and preaching manic sermons from the pews. What’s still the same are his eyes, smoldering like two hot coals stuck beneath his overhanging brow that featured so prominently on the cover of “After the Gold Rush,” his third album, released in September 1970, back when young people, stoned on primitive weed, might plausibly spend an entire weekend listening to his visions of a lone wanderer adrift in a lost Eden.

As we went back and forth about the dynamics of digital sound-compression and the general evil of big tech, Young got mad about his Facebook user agreement, which not even his high-priced lawyers can untangle. “I’m pissed off about my user agreement,” he says. “I’m pissed off about my privacy policy.”

Yet I could tell that this wasn’t what he wanted to be talking about. Young doesn’t want to be a downer. He is passionate about music. The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go.

“I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said, seeming more downhearted than angry.

“I feel horrible,” I answered, and I did. I was hoping to soothe the old rock star, who spoke to me through the headphones of my Sony Walkman at the moments I felt most isolated and alone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel bad. It felt awful. What I wanted was to hear him play music and to write more songs. “I mean, the worst thing I could have done is to make you feel defeated,” I told him, “and now that’s what I’ve done.”

Neil Young has always been a little too hot to handle, so passionate and smart and always a little bit off his rocker, which might be part of the glory and also the downside of being Neil Young. Yet what weirds me out most about his emotional weather patterns, which are superfamiliar to me from my teenage Walkman years, is the new sense that each of his individual miniflights and tantrums was being processed by a tiny hyperaware control freak who lives inside Young’s personal control tower. The little man charts every little fragment of new meaning or awareness and what its trajectory might potentially signify on a giant whiteboard. Young hears you listening, and he is hip to that angle, and he incorporates that in his next riff. Polite conversation under such conditions can be a baffling and frustrating type of experience. After an hour, we agreed to turn the tape recorder off, and Roberts orders pizza. But the little man in the control tower was still up there, watching.

My diagnosis, after a lifetime of listening and an afternoon on Roberts’s porch and a couple of longer off-the-record interviews about his life and work, is this: Neil Young is trapped in a cycle of second- and third- and fourth-guessing, which is an affliction that is not unique to his brain. To escape from this cycle, he is continually forcing himself back into the moment and then trying to capture that feeling and energy, which is a specific kind of artistic choice. That larger cycle, combined with his magnificent control over his art, is what makes him such a uniquely vital and generative artist, at an age when peers like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have become skeletal holograms of their former selves. When he looks back, which is something he did often during our conversations, it is toward the specificity of what some younger version of Neil Young did in a particular moment when he really nailed it. The latest live album he released was recorded at a gig in 1973, in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama; it is part of an archival series, and they are all miracles. As Young once put it, “I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck or a rehearsal hall, a club or a basement.” What he is after is not some ideal sound but the sound of what happened. The missed notes and off-kilter sounds are part of his art, which is the promise of the real, but also, even mainly, of imperfection.

The idea that big technology companies are engineering all that back-and-forth out of his music just kills him. It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t want to write music anymore, he admitted. I tried once again to console him.

“The songs always came to you in bunches,” I said. It’s an encouraging thought. But Young was only willing to meet my optimism halfway.

“I’ve got great melodies, and the words are all profanities,” he answered. “I was just telling Elliot the other day, I’m not interested in making any more records,” he insisted, plunging us down once more into the void. “They sound like [expletive].”

Young’s belief in the saving power of music couldn’t be any more personal. In 1951, at age 5 in Ontario, he got sick with a fever, which turned out to be polio. His father, the hockey writer Scott Young, chronicled the Toronto Maple Leafs and wrote young-adult novels about stouthearted boys on ice that were a staple of Canadian boyhood. Neil was not meant for hockey. His mother, Rassy, was a sharp-witted panelist on the popular weekly Winnipeg television show “Twenty Questions”; she was always intensely protective of her son. When I asked him about what it felt like to be a sick child and to grow up lonely, he said: “I loved playing music, and I wasn’t that alone. You know that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do with my life, and that’s all I paid attention to.”

Maybe Young could have become a big rock star without that childhood illness, without being so complicated. His peers talent-wise, at 19, included genius musicians like Stephen Stills, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, the last of whom was the greatest American popular musical talent maybe ever. What set Young apart from that company was his sustained refusal to bend to anyone else’s idea of what audiences wanted to hear. His signature move was to accomplish something amazing and then blow it up, in the pursuit of something that would sound even more real.

“Neil Young,” his first solo album, recorded in 1968, at 22, after his departure from the supergroup Buffalo Springfield, showed off ageless melodies combined with clever, wised-up lyrics (“I used to be a folk singer/keeping managers alive”). The album failed to sell. The sound was too pretty and too clever at the same time. His second studio album — and first with his longtime band Crazy Horse — “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” is my personal favorite Neil Young record, and was also Elliot Roberts’s favorite (he died two months ago). It introduced what became Neil’s defining edge, i.e., the sound of his ruminations, distortions and mistakes. The album made it to No. 34 on the American charts, and included the hit “Cinnamon Girl.” He wrote much of the album while running a fever of 103.

Young joined with Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash (my personal ordering of talents) in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Young positioned as the defiant outsider against the gorgeous harmonies of the latter three. CSNY turned Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” (she watched the festival on TV) into a generational anthem, and then imploded. (Side note: The year after Neil Young got sick as a child, Mitchell — then a young girl living in Fort Macleod, Alberta — contracted polio during the same outbreak of that disease. She also found herself in writing songs. Maybe something about that childhood illness, which left both children weakened for several years, altered the way that Young and Mitchell processed the evidence of their senses. The dreamy harmonics both favored, and the way that the music and the words shade into each other, suggests both the wooziness and the emerging clarity that a child coming out of a fever might experience.)

Young’s fourth solo album, “Harvest,” distilled his songwriting gifts, which had been given broad exposure through the supernovalike appearance and implosion of CSNY, into a collection of Southern California-inflected hits like “Heart of Gold,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)”; it became the best-selling American album of 1972, despite critics labeling the raw vulnerability of the songs as off-putting, self-pitying or as one critic put it “embarrassing.” The AM radio success of “Harvest” cleared a path toward the stratospheric levels of commercial songwriting success and luxury-hotel-suite destruction enjoyed by the Eagles, a supergroup of superbrilliant songwriters who, unlike Young, preferred highway driving.

In response to the success of “Harvest,” Young switched up his style again, obliterating his hit radio melodies with epileptic seizures of dissonance and feedback. (Young himself suffered from epilepsy, to the point that he would have seizures and sometimes black out.) “Heart of Gold,” as he explained it in his liner notes, “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

For the time being, there would be no more pretty melodies and note-perfect guitar playing. Instead, Young’s music centered on a distinctive alternation of melodic beauty, earsplitting feedback and passages where he seemed to be playing his guitar with his fist. On a third or fourth listen, these passages often revealed themselves to be part of larger, deliberate, gorgeous patterns that bent the listener’s ear in the directions that he wanted it to go. You had to listen to the whole albums all the way through to really hear the songs. Young’s own guitar playing sounded too deliberate to express the fullness of his own sound, so he often featured the rhythm guitar playing of Frank Sampedro, who played loud rock ’n’ roll in his garage, which was the sound that Young was after in perfecting imperfection.

Within his own specific lineage of deeply melodic rock-guitar playing, incorporating infinite branching possibilities and a taste for soulful, aggressive dissonance, Young is great to listen to. But a better pure player than Young would be a guy like, say, John Frusciante, the former guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is wildly talented. Give both men 30 seconds to solo, and Frusciante would blow Young off the stage, just as Duane Allman would blow Frusciante off the stage. Young is something else, though. He’s a genius, a word that can be usefully defined as the ability to create and realize an original style that, in turn, can for decades generate its own genres of music containing the DNA of deeply original songs by other extremely talented, original songwriters and musicians, all of whom owe something to him. His music helped shape the melodic-depressive post-Beatles catalog of Pacific Northwest angst, which was brought to its songwriting peak by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Elliott Smith, the Irving Berlin and Cole Porter of suicidal ideation and addiction. Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994. Smith, who was an even more intimate songwriter, in the same catchy, brilliant, self-pitying vein, stabbed himself through the heart and bled to death on Oct. 21, 2003, in an apartment in Los Angeles. While the circumstances of both deaths are disputed by conspiracy theorists, Neil Young is indisputably still here.

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

I was surprised to find myself talking with Young at all. He only really agrees to speak with the press, or to the press, to publicize something new and weird, like his 3,000 square feet of miniature Lionel train track that he housed in his barn or the experimental film he recently made with his wife, Daryl Hannah. For years, Young also put on a benefit concert for the Bridge School, which educates children who have cognitive and sensory disorders. Young’s sons, Zeke and Ben, both have cerebral palsy.

That’s another thing about Young that rescues him from nihilism and self-pity: He does stuff, even if what he does sometimes seems loony. He made a documentary and a YouTube channel about converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental to operate on alternative fuels, and he has been known to distribute unlicensed non-G.M.O. seeds at his shows, from which his fans can grow their own, uncontaminated grains. A few years ago, he appeared on David Letterman’s show to introduce his PonoPlayer, which was his first attempt to right the wrongs that streaming music is doing to our brains. “It means righteous in Hawaiian,” he told Letterman, who seemed both impressed by the device and thoroughly perplexed by the need for it. “Is this a digital way of recording analogous sound?” Letterman asked. “I’m struggling here to find something I can understand.”

His next remedy, which is why he invited me out to Roberts’s home, is a website that he calls the Neil Young Archives: a digital repository of his recorded work that he introduced last summer at considerable personal expense. (“Let’s say, ‘Well over a million dollars,’ ” Roberts suggested to me later, with a sigh.) The interface for the Archive looks like a set of old file cabinets that might have been heisted from an old-time bail bondsman’s office. By clicking open the various cabinets, you can stream every song that Young ever released and a growing portion of his unreleased songs in information-rich file formats and play them back through a DAC, which is a digital-to-analog converter device that approximates the sound of good vinyl.

“What I do with my life now is I try and preserve what I did so that decades from now it will still be there,” Young said. “I wish I could do this for Frank Sinatra. I wish I could do it for Nelson Riddle. I wish I could do it for all of the great jazz players. I wish I could do it for all the great songwriters and musicians and everybody who recorded during the time and before the time that I did. But I can’t.”

There are audiophiles who mutter politely but approvingly about Neil’s crusades. And there are the non-gear-heads who remain passionate about American popular music and the miracles it contains. Ooooh-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. That’s the harmony on “Down by the River,” and it’s glorious, right? Your whole brain relaxes in a warm bath of sound. Now try to feel that pure glory and relaxation, that sense of wide-open spaces, the unique confluence of cultures and sounds that together make up America’s purest and least-expected gift to humanity and all the history and pain and loneliness and satisfaction behind it, in a lo-fi digital stream.

At the center of Young’s efforts are his own engineers, who are at least as important to him as Old Black, his favored Gibson Les Paul. “He wants the honesty of what went down, not some pasted-together overdubbed representation that’s not the truth,” Jon Hanlon, one of his favorite engineers, told me from the modest beach house where he takes breaks from recording and remastering miles of Young’s tapes. When we met, he had just completed mastering a 1973 live performance at the Roxy of “Tonight’s the Night,” which is one of Young’s finest and most harrowing records. The rawness of the anger and the sorrow and the joy that are all mixed up together on that record transcends any particular cut. “The truth is that the human condition is imperfect,” Hanlon says of that record. “He captures that imperfection. He wants to capture it in its birth, at the moment that it happens.”

Hanlon has spent years working his way up the Young recording hierarchy, at the topmost rung of which lived an engineer and producer named David Briggs, whose driving, funny, off-kilter personality is best captured in a photograph that shows him in a cowboy hat holding a long black rifle; the gleam in his eye suggests that he wouldn’t mind shooting someone. “That’s the guy that I wanted to find out about,” Hanlon recalls. When Briggs died, Tim Mulligan, who had been mixing Young’s live shows since the 1970s, inherited some part of Briggs’s mantle. Then came Hanlon, who was brought up to the ranch in 1990 to engineer “Ragged Glory.”

“He’s a control freak,” Hanlon says, in a tone of complete approval. “If he wants your opinion, he’ll ask for it. If he doesn’t, it’s foolhardy to wade in. He’s 10 steps ahead of you in his thought process.”

Young’s favorite place to listen to his own songs isn’t the studio, Hanlon says. It’s behind the wheel of his car. Consciously, you’re driving the car, which leaves your mind more open, which is a trick that Briggs taught Young. “We get on the two-lane blacktop,” Hanlon explains. “There’s something that happens when you drive, without trucks. You hear what comes to the top without focusing too hard.”

The physical condition of 40- and 50-year-old master tapes from the golden age of rock ’n’ roll depends on how they were recorded and stored and on what kind of tape, which is why remastering old recordings is such a pressing necessity and why digital-recording technology, as opposed to low-quality streaming services, can be a gift to musicians, properly deployed. While some types of tape, like Scotch 250 tape, are usually fine, even after decades in storage, other forms of analog tape haven’t fared as well. “Ampex 456 half-inch, quarter-inch tape,” Hanlon says, when I ask about the worst offender. Run it through a pinch roller to play it, and the backing comes off as an oily gunk. You need to bake it in an oven at low heat to reconstitute the backing and make the tape usable. With Young’s old Buffalo Springfield stuff, you could see right through the Mylar, Hanlon says, which means that the music on those tapes, or some of it, is simply gone.

Tim Mulligan has worked together with Neil since “Harvest,” in 1971. His first session was a remote in the old hay barn where Young recorded “Words,” along with “Alabama” and “Are You Ready for the Country.” The guy who knew how to bake Ampex tape, he tells me, was George Horn, a mastering engineer who worked at CBS San Francisco and later at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. “George had a crude setup using a hair dryer and cardboard box,” Mulligan recalls. “We then upgraded to a convection oven with a candy thermometer and timer.” The tapes were carefully rewound, then cleaned, lubricated and repaired until they were playable again and could be rerecorded. After a few precious days, the old tapes turned back into gunk.

The master tapes for “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” were in particularly bad condition, Mulligan recalls. So it’s important to get the work done right and get it done now.

Even engineers in Silicon Valley can hear a difference in the stuff they are selling and what Young’s team is so desperately trying to preserve. As Tim Cook, the head of Apple, recently told a reporter, without any evident trace of humor, “We worry that the humanity is being drained out of music.”

Steve Jobs, Cook’s predecessor, was also a big music fan. “He listened to vinyl in his living room because he could hear real music,” Young told me. “ And he loved music.” When I ask if he ever spoke directly to Jobs about turning Apple’s iTunes into a platform for music that didn’t sound bad, Young nodded.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “He said, ‘Send us your masters and I’ll have my guys do what they can with them to make them sound great.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s impossible, your iPod won’t play anything back.’ ”

Jobs disagreed. “He said, ‘Well, our guys can make it so that your music can play back through it.’ And you know he was right,” Young said. “It does play back, and you can recognize it.” He pauses. “But it’s not my music.”

When Jobs’s biographer asked him about Young’s offer, as related in the biography “Becoming Steve Jobs,” Jobs snapped, “[Expletive] Neil Young.”

All of my life, I had never rid myself of the preposterous idea that someday Young would vouchsafe to me some life-altering truth, until one day it happened. My younger son, Elijah, I told Young, has a great ear for music, but his ability to process sensory information is off, which means that he has been drowning since birth in an ocean of sound. This has led to problems with language and balance and nausea. From the time he was born, his hands were also clenched into tiny fists, and they remained that way for over a year. He seemed to be in some kind of pain.

Otherwise, he is a bright, intensely curious child, who is fascinated by the workings of cause and effect and understands language at a normal 5-year-old level but repeats words with great difficulty. To compensate for his deficits, Elijah was blessed with a rock-star smile that can light up a room — a smile so bright and warm that he learned to use it to distract people from his obvious physical discomfort, in a world that was always wobbling and flipping over, and from his inability first to talk and then to pick up small objects or insert a screw into a bolt. Instead, he smiled at people. When they asked him his name, his inability to produce intelligible sounds made him turn away quickly in frustration, which was usually interpreted as shyness. He would try to build a tower out of blocks, then knock down all the blocks. Then he would turn back to them, laugh and flash that smile.

A child in pain is a tragedy and a burden that can be all-consuming, but that’s not how I experience Elijah. He is my friend. He is a source of joy and love and warmth, who has also been the cause of several hundred sleepless nights, which can in turn be the source of soaring anxiety. Thanks to Elijah, I have become aware that speech is a conscious act that requires the coordination of 32 muscles in the mouth, 16 of which affect the shape and positioning of the tongue.

It could be cerebral palsy, a light case, perhaps, Young replied, in an oblique reference to his sons. It is something like that, but it’s not that, so I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. It’s not genetic. It’s not fatal. Something was inflaming his young brain, disrupting the formation of healthy neural connections; the cause might be historical, or ongoing. Either way, there were kinks in the channels through which sights and sounds flowed. Either those channels had to be ironed out or new ones had to be opened up.

I asked Young what it does to a marriage to have a child like that. Neil has been married three times. His ex-wife, Pegi, Ben’s mom, was a singer-songwriter and environmentalist but died on Jan. 1, 2019, of cancer. She had worked with Young, to whom she was married for 36 years, before divorcing in 2014, to establish the Bridge School.

“It’s good for the marriage,” he said firmly. “If it’s a good marriage, it brings the marriage even closer together. It’s one of life’s great experiences. It’s an enriching thing because it teaches you the value of love.”

Young’s immersion in a program of intensive therapy for his son Ben led him to become obsessed with new ways of hearing and modulating sound. His album “Trans” was a monument to his attempts to communicate with Ben and to find a musical language that could convey what Ben was hearing — and perhaps even serve some therapeutic purpose. As Neil put it to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, the album was “the beginning of my search for a way for a nonoral person, a severely physically handicapped nonoral person, to find some sort of interface for communication. The computers and the heartbeat all have to come together here — where chemistry and electronics meet.”

In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that.

It was this belief that led me to the work of a French doctor named Alfred Tomatis, who, in the late 1940s and ’50s, began manipulating sound in the hope of healing people. Among his patients were opera singers and fighter pilots, whose brains had stopped processing sound correctly as a result of work-induced auditory trauma. Because our fight-or-flight response is connected to our auditory system, any disturbances can cause a host of physical symptoms. Tomatis came up with a treatment that involved decreasing or emphasizing specific frequencies of what he believed to be particularly salient forms of music — including Gregorian chants and the music of Mozart, which is perhaps the most perfectly structured and at the same time most effortlessly fluid sound that human beings have ever made (at once the most human and the most perfect music on the planet). These interventions helped retune the muscles that control the auditory pathways through which sound makes its way to the brain.

In the 1950s, Tomatis successfully used his techniques to help opera singers whose prolonged and eventually traumatic exposure to their own vocal extremes left them unable hear high and midrange sounds. After graduating from medical school, he worked for the French Air Force, where he noticed that prolonged exposure to certain ranges of sound produced by factory machinery and jet engines produced a range of negative physiological and psychological effects, in addition to hearing loss.

But Tomatis’s methods languished in relative obscurity for the second half of the 20th century in part because they didn’t align with the then-dominant machine model of our brains, which suggested the organ contained a set of parts that performed specific functions. Once broken, those functions could not be restored.

The machine model of the brain “has been a disaster clinically,” says the psychiatrist Norman Doidge, who over the past decade has popularized much of the pioneering work in the science of neuroplasticity in two best-selling books. “We now know that mental and sensory experience and activity actually change the brain’s ‘wiring’ or connections,” Doidge told me. As Eric Kandel, one of Doidge’s teachers at Columbia, defined it, “Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its behavior as a result of experience.” In 2000, Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.

At dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Toronto, I told Doidge about Elijah. What particularly interested me, I said, was that his symptoms mirrored those of a child to whom Doidge had devoted a case history in his second book. Could he help us?

Maybe, he said. With proper reshaping of his auditory cortex, Elijah’s balance might get better and his nausea might stop, which would in turn make it possible for him to develop more normally. Doidge suggested that we take Elijah to the Listening Center in Toronto for an assessment. The center is run by Paul Madaule, who was first Tomatis’s patient in France, then his assistant.

Coincidentally, I added, Young experiments with masking and distorting sound contained some similar ideas. He had two sons with cerebral palsy. “He was probably on to something,” Doidge said.

Spending a day and a night in downtown Fresno, Calif., is like walking into the dreamscape of a midperiod Neil Young album, with once-glorious movie palaces taken over by churches that minister to addicts and drunks. The signs along the way advertise Aladdin Bail Bonds, the Mezcal Lounge and the Lucky You Tattoo parlor. One of the messages of Neil Young’s music has always been that flat spaces are lonely, and the people who inhabit them feel small.

In the next year, Young would announce that he was releasing a book about sound, “To Feel the Music,” written with Phil Baker, who helped developed the PonoPlayer. He also found enough new inspiration to record an album with Crazy Horse, his first in seven years, called “Colorado.” While I was in town, I was able to catch a show.

Fresno’s sizable vagrant population was distinguishable from the concertgoers clustered outside the Warnors Theater mainly by the amount of dust on their shoes. The concert had been announced only a week earlier, which meant that pretty much everyone there was a local — the kind of audience that Young likes best. The inside of the Warnors Theater has been perfectly restored, with a high gilded ceiling and gorgeous acoustics.

“I’m still living the dream we had/For me, it’s not over,” Young sang onstage, facing his band, Crazy Horse, with Nils Lofgren on guitar. There was something clumsy and vulnerable in the way that the men faced each other onstage, bowing back and forth as they soloed in a show of old-school male competitive affection.

“Thanks for coming out,” he told the crowd when he was done. “We appreciate it. Glad you could get those tickets. I like seeing you people here.” A cigar-store Indian hovered over his shoulder. I counted only four people in the audience who were holding up phones. He played “Tired Eyes,” then “Powderfinger,” flailing away at his big old guitar laid across his bouncy gut. “You are like a hurricane/There’s calm in your eye/I wanna love you but I’m getting blown away.”

“God bless you, Neil,” an old hippie lady in a blowzy floral dress shouted. Maybe he only looked cranky. He finished another song and gazed up at the ceiling in wonderment, admiring the great cathedral of sound in which he was standing.

I don’t know if the evils that Neil Young is warning us about will come to pass. I don’t know if G.M.O. seeds are truly killing us or if all the missing information that Silicon Valley is engineering out of music and the rest of our lives is doing something truly evil to our brains or whether these are simply the latest obsessions of a habitually cranky, inventive, restless man.

There are plenty of neurologists who remain skeptical of the idea that sound can help rewire people’s brains. What I can also tell you is this: I listen to rich audio files through a decent-quality DAC and I hear more, and it makes me feel better. Also: I don’t know when or how or if certain parts of my son’s brain will get unstuck. I don’t know whether he will learn to talk in a way that his friends or teachers or people besides me and my wife and his brother and sister can easily understand. I’m not even sure what degree of change is desirable. Some brains, like Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s, are just wired differently.

That said, I will never forget watching Elijah during the first week of his therapy in Toronto, as modified Mozart was piped into his brain and he just suddenly looked down at his little fist and started opening and closing his hand for the first time — because suddenly, he could. After the second session, six weeks later, his reflexes and fine-motor skills had markedly improved, to the point where he could catch a ball or slap his mother across the face when she says “no” to his request for another marshmallow. He isn’t nauseated anymore. He can walk and even run, while continuing to be a joy to be around. Just the other day, in the bath, waiting for his mother to come home, he looked at me and said, “Oh, me home, Mama!”

I listened to the tapes that Elijah was hearing, on which Mozart’s perfect sound was continuously interrupted by filtering that sounded like static, before it then reasserted itself — an effect that is familiar to any Neil Young fan. The filtering effects had helped in whatever way to heal Elijah’s brain. So what is the effect of engineering so much complexity out of the music we listen to, and replacing it with fake, jacked-up sounds, doing to my brain and to yours?

It’s strange to imagine that Young might be a prophet of sorts — but maybe not. His lesson is that everything human is shot through with imperfection. Filtering that out doesn’t make us more perfect; it is making us sick. He’s a great artist, which means that he sees and hears more, which may make him a loon, but is also why he is still worth listening to.

“These places are so great,” Young said onstage in Fresno. “We’re so lucky they’re still here.” He sang, in fine voice: “He came dancing across the waters/With his galleons and guns.” At 73, he is still a man walking through a hurricane, which begins inside a perfect melody that dissolves into dissonance and feedback, inside of which there is something wonderfully, miraculously whole.

David Samuels is the author of “The Runner” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” He last wrote for the magazine about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign-policy guru.

#tech #technology #musica #music #musicians #must reads #pop music #tech news #news #latest news #entertainers #arts and entertainment #entertainment #u.s. news #u.s. politics #woodstock

0 notes