#the single releases are just a medium big finish does so well & there's so many things you can use them for

[galacticlamps]

I can't believe Big Finish was so excited to tell me they had a new email address for their newsletter on Friday that they completely failed to use it to mention one of the #1 things I actually have been checking their newsletters for updates on, which incidentally they were already announcing on their website on Friday anyway.

(Honestly I'm rather ashamed of myself for taking this long to notice it, but also what do you expect? me to check twitter more regularly?)

Anyway, if you, like me, totally missed it, apparently June's Torchwood Monthly Range release is going to be a Norton & Andy one-off that seems to be inspired by Restoration-era Farce, of all things:

Which means in two months we're getting the first Torchwood Soho-adjacent standalone since Black Knight over two years ago (which I maintain is a very good audio, though I fully understand how it was bound to disappoint specifically as a replacement for Absent Friends), and the first Norton & Andy solo adventure since Goodbye Piccadilly in 2018 (which is borderline criminal)

[kuiperblog]

Deathloop sure is a video game

Every October, there's pop-up entertainment venues like "haunted houses" (or other haunted attractions) that attempt to artificially recreate the motifs common in horror movies, complete with live actors who are dressed as vampires or zombies or serial killers or whatever who leap out and scare the guests who squeal in delight, if only because it gives them an excuse to tightly cling to their partner.  It's more exciting than going to a horror movie, because it's a more tactile experience, so you're mostly just there to experience the various horror motifs without being concerned about a plot.

The thing is, there are actual horror movies that are set in haunted attractions.  And while this does make for some fun early reveals (like when the teenagers laugh at the knife-wielding man who they assume is an actor and part of the attraction, only to realize that he's actually a homicidal madman), the very idea of a horror movie set in a haunted house kind of feels like cheating.  Haunted attractions are, in a way, a simulacrum of a horror movie, which I suppose is an odd thing to say considering that haunted attractions are real and the events in horror movies are not, but I think that is the main level on which most haunted attractions are designed: a haunted attraction is a "horror movie IRL," so to then make that the setting of your horror movie “horror movie IRL but in a movie” is like a simulacrum of a simulacrum.  It’s shortcutting past the part where you would ordinarily come up with some kind of lore-based explanation for why the teenagers are hanging out in a creepy house and why there’s a demented killer or vampires or whatever who are trying to kill them.

I sort of feel this way about one of the first levels I played in Deathloop, which is a video game both in medium and form. It's a bit like Dishonored (one of Arkane's earlier titles) in the sense that the core objectives boil down to identifying an assassination target, and hunting them down in their mansion or laboratory or whatever.  The first target I assassinated was a fellow by the name of Charlie Montague, who is obsessed with games, and has populated a section of the world where you can speed-run an obstacle course to be rewarded with a gun, because this is a first-person shooter video game that is set on murder island, where everyone's favorite hobby is killing each other because they’re in a timeloop where everyone will revive the next day.  However, when I found Charlie Montague, he was in the middle of a LARP session.  This is literally how the game describes it: Charlie is hosting a game where he invites guests to participate in a game somewhat akin to a murder mystery, or maybe more like Among Us. When I arrived, Charlie announced over the loudspeaker to all of his guests that the killer monster (me) had arrived, and the objective was now for them to hunt me down.  (I, for my part, did my best to avoid the guests, but I had to gun down the entire party before finally getting to Charlie at the top floor.)

So, this is a video game level that felt very much like a video game level.  Which I don't really mean as a knock against it -- it was a fun environment, I had fun hunting down the game designer Charlie Montague and murdering his LARPing buddies, and the environment was set up in a way that made the confrontation with Charlie himself interesting, since Charlie possesses the blink power that lets him teleport across gaps and between floors.  But it kind of feels like cheating to have a video game level where the setting premise is, as explained by the game's fiction, literally a game created by a game designer (as opposed to trying to sell you on the idea that the level you're traipsing through is just some rich dude's mansion, or a military base, or whatever).  It is the video game equivalent of setting your horror movie in a haunted house attraction.

As an Arkane Studios fan (who started with 2006's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and counts Dishonored among my personal top 10 games of all time), I quite enjoyed Deathloop.  But it is by far the most video game video game that they've ever released.

Games like Dishonored and Prey (2017) exist in what is sometimes described as the "immersive sim" genre, where there's a big emphasis on player choice and giving the players a bunch of tools to approach objectives without giving them a prescribed route through the game.  Dishonored pushes you in the direction of being stealthy and quiet (with a "chaos" system that causes the world to become more desolate if you kill too many enemies in each level), but there are many routes through the levels -- and sometimes, you'll find your way to an objective through what feels like it isn't a prescribed "route" at all. The objectives are often quite simple -- "infiltrate, kill a dude, exfiltrate" -- but a level that could be completed in just a few minutes might take an hour to complete the first time you play it as you spend time scoping out the target, gradually getting a feel for the environment and learning which parts of the level have lots of enemies and which parts are safe and easy to stealth your way through.

The immersive sim's emphasis on carving your own way through levels leads to a phenomenon where a lot of the progression that you make is "meta" progression that exists entirely outside of your avatar -- you might spend an hour prowling around a level, and your character hasn't gotten any stronger (apart from maybe finding a few optional collectibles), but you as a player have "leveled up" to the point that you now know the level like the back of your hand, which is how you have people who spend hours exploring a level in Hitman so that they can do a perfect 5-minute speedrun of that level.

Sometimes, this sense of "meta-progression" is further emphasized by making some of the collectibles information that you as a player can store.  I remember a part in Dishonored where I found a locked safe, and I had to root around the game environment and find the code to the safe before I could come back and get the goodie inside.  But if I wanted to, I could write that number down so that on any subsequent playthrough, I could just go right to the safe and open it right away -- which feels a bit like cheating, but it's no less cheating than sprinting through a specific route through a level because I know from previous playthroughs that the path I'm taking has no guards.

Deathloop isn't quite like that: the game is filled with combinations and whatnot (in one "puzzle" I had to insert specifically-labeled tapes into a machine in a specific order), but all of these are generated randomly: you can't take that information with you across playthroughs, and you can't look the number up in a walkthrough like some older immersive sims would let you do. But Deathloop takes this meta progression and makes it actual progression: it's a time-loop story, and your character (Colt) remembers everything that he encounters across playthrough, so when you find the combination to a door, Colt will make a mental note of it (no need to bust out your pen and paper), and the next time you come to a locked door that requires that combination, you don't even have to punch in the numbers: just hold the triangle button on your Playstation controller and Colt will automatically punch in the numbers that he learned during an earlier loop.

Deathloop is full of little things like this that, on first glance, almost just feel like QoL improvements.  But there's something that feels very different about how things are done in Deathloop: in gameplay terms, it basically boils down to, "Go to this place and press square to read the password, then go to this other place and unlock the door," which is really not that different from "go to this place and press square to pick up the key, then go to this other place to unlock the door."  The "passwords" that exist throughout this game are basically just keys that Colt can store in his brain and take with him whenever you advance to the next loop.

And to be clear, that's not necessarily a *bad* thing.  In fact, immersive sims are kind of a niche genre that don't have a very big audience, so anything that helps streamline and make it more like, well, what you'd expect from a "video game," is probably going to make the game accessible to a lot more people.  And they streamline a *lot* in this game.  The game is all about planning the "perfect loop" where you manage to kill the 8 big baddies in a single day, and everything before that point is just preparing for that final loop.  Even though that seems like an abstract thing that might require you to hold a bunch of disparate information in your head, the game is actually *really* good at making it so that Colt is already mentally mapping out the game plan as you go, to the point where you can just go into the quest book, select a thread, and then just follow the waypoints.  Colt is planning for the "perfect loop" and collecting all the information he needs (including passwords, and memorizing information about how to get certain bosses to go to certain areas where they'll be vulnerable), and Colt is so good at remembering these things that the player never has to: you can play the entire game from start to finish just by traveling from waypoint to waypoint and stealthing or shooting your way past anything that stands in your way.

That is, of course, incredibly reductive.  The process of getting from point A to point B in Deathloop is fun for the same reason that getting from point A to point B is fun in any other game.  The guns feel good to shoot, the levels are interesting to navigate, and the game lets you earn the ability to take certain pieces of gear with you between loops so it always feels like there's forward progression.  But I think that there's a critical thing that's missing:

Immersive sims aren't just about getting from point A to point B.  Before you can get to point B, you have to discover where point B is.  *Where* in this mansion is the assassination target?  Better spend some time skulking around and listening to his staff gossip about his daily habits so you know which parts of the mansion he's likely to appear in.  Oh wait, I don't want to just get in the same room with this guy, I want to get myself in the same room with him *when he's not surrounded by his guards*.  How do I do that?  Better do some more snooping.  And in a sense, Deathloop *sort* of does this.  Before you can follow the waypoint objective marker to your target, you have to find out where they are.  But the "find out where they are" is often, "follow this *other* waypoint objective marker to find the slip of paper that tells you where they're going to be, at which point you can follow the waypoint objective marker to their exact location!"

And to be fair to Deathloop, it's not *all* like that.  There are some times where the game sort of just points you in the right direction and leaves you to figure it out, like one dude who has hosted a masquerade party where he and his guests are all wearing the same masks, and so you have to figure out a way to ferret him out.  (Or you can just murder everyone at the party to figure it out by process of elimination -- which is actually much easier said than done, because this is murder island and everybody is packing heat, and this is an exclusive party so his guests are the type of people who carry around heavy weapons.)

Another way that Deathloop takes the "meta progression" inherent to immersive sims and makes it explicit in-game progression is by having a time loop where you can encounter and kill the same targets over and over again.  That's the kind of thing that tends to happen in immersive sims across multiple playthroughs -- Hitman doesn't *require* you to play each level multiple times, but you generally want to, because each level is filled with tons of different routes to explore and different ways to deal with each of the targets.  But that's all on the player: it's not as if in the fiction of the Hitman universe, Agent 47 is repeatedly murdering a bunch of people who magically revive so that he can kill them again, whereas in Deathloop, that is very explicitly what is happening.

The thing is, because Deathloop is kind of designed with the assumption that you'll kill each target multiple times, the first time you encounter them and blow their head off, it doesn't feel like the grand emotional climax.  In fact, in a way, it feels like the *start* of a relationship.  "Goodbye, Charlie Montague.  I hardly knew ye.  But I'm sure I'll know you better by the third time I'm leaving your LARPing session with that slab upgrade you're carrying."  I feel like that robs the kills of some of their impact, and maybe that's just inherent to what kind of game this is: in Dishonored, you feel as though over the course of a level, you get to know your target as you snoop through their quarters, overhear what their staff have to say about them, read the journals of their rivals while looking for possible weaknesses, and so on.  Because it's a stealth game, it makes sense to hide in the background and learn about their life.  Stalking a character through a level while waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike can actually feel incredibly intimate, because as  the eponymous Visible Man in Chuck Klosterman’s novel says, to truly know who someone is, you have to see them when they’re alone at home; their behavior anywhere else is just a performance.

But when I'm chasing down Charlie Montague with an SMG in one hand and a pistol in the other, the only thing I really know about him is what he's announcing over the loudspeaker.  (I don't really remember exactly what he said, but the subtext is that he's mentally unstable, and he's obsessed with games.)  And even though Charlie Montague was shouting at me what kind of person he said, I feel like I never really got to *know* him like I got to know some targets in Dishonored.  In fact, the moments when I got to know Charlie best weren't when he was yelling at my over the loudspeaker as I ran through his level as Shooty McFPS guy, but the moments when I got to read his notes or chat correspondence (which is *entirely optional*, because even if I don't learn the relevant facts from Charlie Montague's notes, Cole will -- and he'll verbally narrate the cliffsnotes version of them as I'm headed to the next objective)

Despite feeling like a clear descendant of Arkane’s earlier titles, Deathloop feels neither "immersive" nor "sim."  It's constantly doing things that remind me that I'm playing a video game -- which, to be clear, is not a bad thing!  It’s fun to be Shooty McFPS guy without worrying about hiding guards bodies or making noise. More than any other Arkane Studios game, it does everything it can to minimize player frustration, whether that means feeling lost, or feeling like you're not making forward progress, or feeling like your progress is being gated by a huge spike in difficulty.

Dishonored is a game that rewards patience.  This is one of my favorite things about it, but the fact that it rewards patience so generously means that it also *asks* patience of the player in order to get its best moments, which means that some players will never experience them.  Deathloop asks very little from the player.  Deathloop is a very "even" and "smooth" experience, but that's both for better and for worse.  The lows aren't as low, but the highs aren't nearly as high. Deathloop is a good game.  And it will probably be a "good game" to a greater number of people than Arkane's previous titles, but it didn’t have nearly the same impact on me.

Anyway, more than anything, my time with Deathloop has convinced that I should go back and play Prey (2017).

[ozzdog12]

2020 Top 7 (and 1)

2020 am I right? We saw an insane amount of games come out and 2 brand new consoles. What a wild and weird year for gaming, and life in general. In case you are relatively new here, and to be honest that would be completely fair considering I don't post very often on Tumblr anymore, every year going on the last 4 years (on here) I have done a Top 7 (& 1) for my favorite videogames of the year. Check out 2019, 2018, & 2017. What’s wild, as I look back on my list of games that I’ve completed and played, only maybe 10 came out this year. 2020 was a huge backlog year. 

Lets get on with the ‘And 1!”

Favorite Game that Didn’t Come out in 2020: Control (PS4)

Control may very well have been my 2019 Game of the Year, had I played it in 2019. I LOVED Control. I wanted to play it in 2019, but initial reports that it was a little rough on base consoles put me off until it was fixed. And Holy smokes what an insanely fun and trippy game once I finally started it. I knew within the first 20 minutes this was going to be the shit when I went down a hall, walked into a room and talked to the “janitor” left out a door behind him and the entire building had shifted. I’ve always liked Remedy games, but from a distance. Max Payne 1&2 and Alan Wake all oozed with weirdness and intrigue, but never enough for me to finish them. I missed out on Quantum Break. The story is Control is just the right amount of mind f*!$ for me and builds a universe I didn’t know I needed. It take some time to piece everything together, then everything just clicks. The game does have a weird difficulty spike when fighting bosses and the checkpoints were too far apart at times, but those were later patched. I spent an insane amount of time within the Federal Bureau of Control building and even more time after that with the Foundation and AWE DLC and it STILL wasn’t enough. I wanted more. Outside of Prey, I can’t think of another game that stuck in my brain more after I’d finished it. Control is absolutely a MUST PLAY title. In a world where everything sort’ve feels similar, Control stands out of the crowd.

Number 7: Astro’s Playroom (PS5)

I never thought in my wildest dreams that a game I had almost zero interest in playing would end up on my list of favorite games this year. Astro’s Playroom is being labeled as a ‘Tech demo’ but that feels like an insult to what it is. It’s a full fledged game and its free! I’ve paid more for less. A charming little platformer that lives and breathes the history of the Playstation. So many cool Easter eggs and references. It certainly centers its gameplay around the DualSense controller and everything it can do, but at its core, its a completely approachable and forgiving 3D platformer. I played it just to see what it was about, next thing i knew I had completed all the levels and wanted to further explore all the nooks and crannies within the game. I wanted to see everything the game had to offer and I had an absolute blast doing so. Makes me kinda wish I’d played the previous game on PSVR (I’d have to have a PSVR too)

Number 6: Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5)

Another quality title, albeit a spin-off, from Insomniac to add to their Spider Man universe. Gameplay felt obviously like Spider-Man, but Miles has unique abilities that made the game feel different enough, especially the cloak and stealth. I enjoyed the fact that it was short and concise. The issue with most ‘open-world’ games is that they are entirely too bloated with unnecessary filler content (I’ll get to that in a later game), something I felt the first game suffered from, but I also understand why they are there. However I could’ve use one or two more story missions to help flesh out some characters, but it wasn’t required and didn’t change my opinion one way or the other. My one BIG gripe was with Miles himself. He is an extremely smart young kid, but so incredibly naïve. Peter Parker tells him the one thing he SHOULD NOT do is tell people he is Spider-Man. I get it, that’s part of his growth, but Miles thinks he can just solve his problems by revealing his identity and it almost certainly never works out. 

Number 5: The Last of Us: Part 2 (PS4)

The Last of Us Part 2 may be the most polarizing game in the history of the medium, but for the absolute wrong reasons. I’m in the minority that I very much enjoyed my experience with TLOU2, quite a bit actually. Its better in every single way over its predecessor, except the overall story. There are plenty of fair criticisms to be had about the story and various things within the game itself, but I thought the gameplay was so tight and crunchy. There were genuine moments of suspense and terror that I felt that no other game has ever given me. The entire hospital section (2nd time) was so susensful, I had to put my controller down to gther myself. Some of my favorite moments in the series I experienced with a character I wasn’t overly fond of. How many games can do that? The Last of Us Part 2 was meant to invoke emotion, not necessarily joy. I think that's what people lost along the way. Say what you will about the direction Naughty Dog has taken over the years, but you would be hard pressed to find a studio that makes games graphically better than they do. Yes, I know about their crunch culture, but this is not a place for that. I will say, the game was a tad bit too long, which is not something it typically say for a single player, narrative driven game. The pacing and the way the story was told wasn’t my favorite, but I respect what it was trying to do, even if it failed in some aspect of that, I finished the game within the week it was released. Something I RARELY ever do. I’m a father and I related with Joel a lot in TLOU, but I also recognized how wrong he was. There is a lesson to be learned. Your actions always have consequences and while he was doing what he thought was the right thing, it wasn’t his choice to make, and in doing so set up a series of events that were entirely avoidable, but again, that’s the point isn’t it?

Number 4: Grindstone (Switch)

I’m counting this as a 2020 game since it just came to the Switch this year ( less than a month ago) but its not the first time I’ve played it. Grindstone was the only reason I kept my Apple Arcade subscription and when I let it lapse, there was a void I just couldn’t fill. I bought Puzzle Quest on Switch but it just wasn't the same. Its THE perfect game for bite sized play, even though in its addictive nature, you’ll clear a few levels and an hour has passed before you know it. It has the perfect amount of depth that most ‘match’ games don't. You have different weapons, items, and outfits w/perks to use and experiment with to keep it fresh. I went months without playing my Switch and when this was announced in August, I couldn’t wait! Sadly, I had to wait 3 months, but since then I have spent so much time on the Switch. It gave me a reason to play it again. The art style and humour is great. The variety of enemies and challenge is just right. I can’t recommend it enough. Seriously, check this game out!

Number 3: Doom Eternal (Xbox One)

I will be the first to tell you, I did not like Doom (2016). I found it extremely boring and trite. I understood what Doom(2016) was doing and it succeeded, maybe too much. Nostalgia is a helluva thing. So in saying that, I was mildly interested in Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal is nothing like 2016 outside of it being a Doom game that connects to the rest of them (& also being a sequel to 2016). The mechanics are drastically different with more platforming (for better or worse). Eternal is challenging, at times very hard, especially early on. Eternal has no respect for its players, in a weirdly good way. It laughs at how you’ve played FPS before this one and WILL MAKE you play it its way, not your way. Yes, you point and shoot, but ammo is scare and you MUST use everything in your arsenal. No more using just 2 guns for the whole game. The enemies are relentless. Sometimes you have to pause and take a breath after a battle because you go a 100 mph for the whole fight. You have to continuously move or you die. There is an enticing rhythm to it. I categorize Eternal as ‘Blood Ballet’. Its a game where when your feeling it, much like a rhythm game, you get in the zone and there is no stopping demons from getting slayed. Surprisingly, unlike most games in the genre, it seemed to get easier (sans one extremely frustrating platforming section late in the game) the longer you played it. Was that a testament that I ‘learned’ the Eternal way or it truly did get easier? I don’t know, but the final Boss(es) were....easy.. I had more problems and deaths within the first 4 hours than I did the final 8-9 hours. The multiplayer was also surprisingly fun. The older I get, the less interested I am in multiplayer, but I found myself coming back for more for a good month or so. 

Number 2: Gears Tactics (Xbox One)

As 2020 comes to a close, I came to a stunning realization. I might be a bigger Gears of War fan than I had previously thought. Don’t get me wrong. I love Gears, but I seem to love Gears more than I thought. I'm way more invested into the lore than I recall. Anyways, Gears Tactics is everything XCOM 2 SHOULD’VE been. Not only does Gears Tactics utilize the Overwatch action, its makes it EXTREMELY important. The story revolves around the father of Kait Diaz, Gabe and a ragtag group of mostly random soldiers to take down Ukkon. Anyone who is remotely interested in the Gears universe will love the story and references. The gameplay is just so damn satisfying. The bosses are very challenging and different. I actually had to change my strategy to finish the final boss. I experimented with a totally different style of class and was rewarded for it. The post game stuff is also aplenty. This game scratched a VERY specific itch for me and I’m itchy to jump back in. I’m glad this came to Xbox One because I’m current computer could not run it.

Number 1: Ghost of Tsushima (PS4)

I have a very odd relationship with massive open world games. I love them, but I get very burnt out on them. They all have a relatively same-y formula and are often populated with bloat. GoT does have some of that but to its advantage, its not very populated, in a good way. One of the things that I really appreciated about GoT and its side quest is most of them felt meaningful. The thing that really stood out to me about GoT is the absolutely satisfying combat. It just feels SO GOOD. It requires timing and patience. There are different fighting styles for different enemies and even the armor you wear is more than just cosmetic. The combat is so fun and satisfying that I was immediately excited when they announced Legends, a multiplayer add on, for free. Its so much fun and is a blast to play with a group of friends. I’m sporadically still playing the Legends mode. I initially wanted to play the game in ‘Kurosawa’ mode but I am glad I didn’t because the game, even on the PS4 is stunning, and on the upgrade on PS5 is jaw-droppingly smooth. I did play the entire game in Japanese with English subtitles. I still don't know what Jin’s English voice sounds like. GoT does a good job a drip feeding you new abilities and things to keep things fresh. I love stealth and once I unlocked it, I spent the majority of every battle taking out as many enemies as I could while in stealth mode. Ghost of Tsushima does a lot of things very well, that the few things it doesn’t can be easily overlooked.

[dalegoldberg]

Will movie theaters be relevant in a post-pandemic world? It's now up to you.

On Monday, the beloved Arclight and Pacific Theaters announced they’re closing for good. ArcLight Cinemas is arguably Hollywood's most cherished theater and Pacific has been a mainstay in Los Angeles since 1946. The announcement of their closing shocked many as another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the company announcement, they said "This was not the outcome anyone wanted, but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward." One can understand how a movie theater might go under in the middle of a pandemic but I did find it interesting that they felt there was truly no way forward.

One might've expected some members of the Hollywood elite to come clamoring forward with a bucket of cash to at least front the company long enough to sustain it through the pandemic so that it could reopen when the time was right.

Back in 2014, Kodak faced a similarly dire situation (for different reasons, obviously) and was ready to close its doors. That was until J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow and other filmmakers banded together to save the floundering company. Their shared love of film compelled them to save the dying medium and, thanks to those filmmakers and their studio backers, the company is still alive today.

But that hasn’t happened with these theaters. I'm not saying that can't happen, of course. The announcement just came this week so time will tell. I will say, however, it sounds like the company may have already exhausted their options (in light of the no "viable way forward" statement).

The death of ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters may not just signify another casualty of the pandemic but may actually be a sign of the times. Even prior to the pandemic many were wondering, amongst cord cutting and increasing interest in streaming content, how much longer would movie theaters stay relevant?

The pandemic has shifted the world in general, of course, and one of those big changes coming post-pandemic may be a world where movie theaters have a drastically different business model. Perhaps, one that makes them unrecognizable to us as we know them today.

Does that seem like too bold a claim? Perhaps. Let's just look at the state of the business now.

The state of the business pre-Covid

Prior to the pandemic, movie studios were beholden to the theaters to release their movies in theaters for a certain period of time. So if Warner Brothers wanted to release "Godzilla vs Kong" in theaters, they would have had to wait 90 days before releasing the film on Blu-Ray or to a streaming platform. There was a bit of flexibility on this when it came to digital rentals but otherwise 90 days was the standard. Now, movie studios did have the option of by-passing the theatrical exhibition altogether if they wanted and just going straight to people's homes. Why didn't they?

One reason might've been the Paramount Consent Decrees. The Consent Decrees date back to 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios had to separate their distribution operations from their exhibition operations. Essentially, studios were barred from owning movie theaters as it was seen as a monopolistic practice and not fair to consumers. At the time, the only way you could see a movie was in a theater. Gradually, over time, of course, that changed and technology enabled us to watch movies at home. We got VHS, then DVD's, then Blu-Rays, then iTunes Movies, then Netflix and so on. But the theaters remained as a mainstay. Why?

I know many of my friends would argue it's because there's no better way to see a movie than in a theater. If you said that twenty years ago I would have agreed. But today, I'd say that's become largely subjective given the technology available at home. From a purely business oriented perspective, though, there's a host of little reasons theaters remained important such as films not being eligible for Oscar nominations without a theatrical release and, possibly, because studios worried that bypassing theaters would result in further regulations by the courts.

But mostly, it's because we, the audience, were accustomed to theaters. It gave a film legitimacy when it was presented in a theater. It used to be that if a movie went “straight to home video” it was considered cheap and probably low budget. Because of that, even though the studios were giving up 50% of their revenue to the theaters, their gross still was greater than what home distribution netted them in the initial release window.

Even after the invention of Blu-Rays and iTunes Movies, studios were still sending movies to theaters (1) because it was a huge source of revenue and (2) because it helped market the movie. The movie’s success at the box office gave us a reason to want that movie at home.

A shift in Public perceptions

There's a growing number of people that no longer think that way. If a movie goes to streaming now (the new home video), we no longer assume the movie is cheap or low budget. The content on streaming is just as good as the stuff we're seeing in theaters. There’s been a massive shift in our perception of what great “cinema” is. Yeah, you might still wanna' see some things in theaters but it doesn’t cheapen the movie for you if you don't.

And that’s a big problem for theaters. The leverage they’ve had over the studios up till now has been the Consent Decrees and our perception of what great cinema is. Significant, no doubt, but those two things have changed. In August of last year, the Paramount Consent Decrees were terminated with a two-year sunset period on certain aspects of the Decrees all but ensuring that studios could now vertically integrate if they wanted to. Or just bypass the theaters altogether - as some studios already have been experimenting with.

Even at the start of the pandemic, many movies were removed from theaters and sent straight to streaming with studios reporting that the revenue gained from VOD and online rentals rivaled the profit gained from theatrical distribution. As various studios like Paramount and Warner Brothers enter the streaming game alongside Disney (Disney Plus, Hulu) and Netflix, they too are experimenting. As you may have heard, Warner Bros. is releasing all their movies this year on their streaming platform HBOMax on the same day the films are released in theaters (a practice known as "day and date"). No doubt, the bean counters at Warner Bros. will be looking to see if this is a practice that should stay. It’d be fair to say that these experiments are not true representations of reality given the state of the world we’re testing this new distribution model with. But it is changing our perception of how important movie theaters are.

Studios are altering the deal

During the pandemic, theaters have been brought to their knees and have been forced to renegotiate certain terms with the studios including the release window between theatrical and home distribution. Most studios now have negotiated a home release date that comes just 17 days after the movie debuts in theaters - far shorter than the original 90 days.

This, of course, can be argued to just be a by-product of the pandemic. Theaters don't have leverage now but once the pandemic is over they will and they'll renegotiate. Right?

That really hinges on whether or not audiences still think a movie has more value if it was presented in a theater before they got to see it at home. Does it enhance the movie for me if it gets shown in a theater or am I just as interested (or maybe even more interested) in seeing it if it is sent straight to my home?

Other big changes are happening

There's other factors to consider as well. One might be the massive shift of homeowners into the suburbs and away from the city during the pandemic. Many employers are making it possible to work from home (a trend that will likely continue post-pandemic as the internet improves and more businesses see the benefits of a remote workforce) resulting in a mass exodus from cities to suburbs. Living in the suburbs means you don’t have the same pull of massive audiences in large gatherings the way you used to. We’re also investing more in our homes to make them enjoyable places to not only live but play as well. It’s a shift in our culture.

Another factor is that our perception of long form content has changed. Episodic television used to be where big movie stars went to end their careers after a career starring in movies. Now, it’s the reverse. A lot of stars are starting in television rather than finishing there because we (the audience) love binging on serialized content and when we’re not binging episodes we’re watching four hour movies (The Irishman, Zack Snyder's Justice League). Those experiences don’t work well in theaters where you’re stuck sitting in the same place and can’t hit the pause button.

Ultimately, the biggest factor might be what it usually comes down to - money. Before the pandemic audiences were already lamenting about the cost of movie tickets. A single afternoon of me taking my wife and kids to see the latest Disney movie in a theater could cost me $50 - $60 just for admission (not to mention the cost of food and drinks). But during the pandemic I was able to rent “Mulan” for $30 from comfort of my own home. Or, if I wanted, I could just wait three months and then see it as part of my regular Disney Plus subscription (which I was already paying for anyways so I could watch “The Mandalorian”).

As things open back up, many people are not necessarily swimming in money and, while I think the Covid relief packages have probably helped, a lot of people are still hurting and will be looking for any which way to save money. It seems unlikely that theaters will be able to lower their costs at this point given the need to recoup their losses from the pandemic and the probable need to make new investments in their facilities to stay competitive. They will need to get creative to show real value to audiences that might be reluctant to rush back in to theaters.

So what will happen to theaters post-pandemic?

For those of you worried I’m predicting doomsday for theaters - relax. I think theaters are probably here to stay regardless of what happens. They’re too much a part of what movies are to simply disappear. That said, they are a business and, currently, a failing one. What they look like post-pandemic doesn’t look great, from my perspective, unless the business model changes.

One possible scenario is that theaters become like playhouses or music festivals. In other words, they’ll still exist but in fewer quantities and will become more niche, featuring elevated experiences centered around tentpole movie properties which audiences are willing to pay a premium for (think “Top Gun: Maverick” or “Godzilla vs Kong”). I can see this form of adaptation working well in everyone’s favor.

Another possibility is that the studios buy out the movie theaters. The termination of the consent decrees has made that a real possibility. And then, once they’ve purchased them, build brand experiences centered around their properties. Something like miniature Disney Lands. They would most likely close a significant number of locations leaving only the flagships they felt would bring in a large audience and use them to promote the movies on their slate. A company like Disney with a large library of films could also use the theaters as a means of re-presenting old films from their library, borrowing a tactic from LucasFilm, and refresh old content to make it new again for theatrical. In essense, the net effect would be the same as in the first scenario: fewer theaters, more niche experiences.

I say this because it is somewhat unclear, to me at least, how the current model can persist if studios own theaters. Yes, they’d control theatrical distribution but they’d likely only be purchasing a theater to distribute their own movies. Would a company like Paramount, who’s only releasing seven movies this year, see the value of owning a theater chain? Even Disney’s slate only consists of 14 movies. To make the business viable (at least as it exists now), they would have to present movies from other studios. Would one studio trust that the studio in ownership of the theater was giving them a fair number of screens for presentation? It seems untenable under the current model.

What happens next is really up to you

The biggest change from the pandemic is that we as audiences have changed the way we look at movies. We’re ok with watching movies at home and, thus, the leverage theaters have to negotiate longer release windows between theatrical and home distribution has all but disappeared. The artificial pillars that made theaters a necessity are all but gone. And yes, the Oscars will likely still require that movies be released in theaters to be eligible for nomination but the standards of what a "theatrical release" means do not require as vast a distribution as you might think (see page 2, sub-section D of the General Entry rules). Plus, let's be honest - not all movies are meant to be Oscar contenders.

So really, the only thing to keep theaters relevant now is you - the audience. My prediction is that we’ll initially see some high demand for theaters as cities are re-opened and we try to return to our regular lives. But after we get back to a sense of normalcy (whatever that means in the future) we’ll see how much audiences really want to keep paying $20 per ticket to see a movie when they could just pay $30 once to rent it at home with the entire family or binge the new hot show on Netflix / Amazon / Apple TV/ Paramount Plus / Disney Plus / Hulu / Peacock / whatever else is out there.

At that point, the studios will do some math and if the profit they’re making from streaming outweighs the profit from the box office, theaters won’t have much of a leg to stand on. That is, unless audiences continue to demand theaters be a relevant part of the movie watching experience. Without considerable innovation on behalf of the theaters, though, I question how likely that is to happen.

[kpop-ruined-my-social-life]

Kihyun NS*W Alphabet

I would put this under the cut but I’m on mobile now so :( sorry loves

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Loves aftercare both for him and for you. Big on getting you into a bath, making sure you’re both hydrated, and that you both get to bed and sleep well. Just likes making sure you’re both taken care of.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

He really likes his lips, like he loves kissing you, both on your lips and anywhere else he can get them. On you he loves your neck, it may seem weird but your neck and collarbones are just so pretty to him, he likes to mark them.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

I see him as the type to wear a condom for the most part or he’ll cum in you. I don’t think he’s one for releasing on your chest or back, he just isn’t that into it. Especially cause it’s messy.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Wants to sub sometimes but like he wants you to hard dom. Like he’s a switch!leaning dom but he really wants to try and be like your pet or something you get me?

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

I think he’s def had a few partners but he isn’t super super super good at sex. Like he still messes up and is a bit awkward but he gets through it real fast and is able to just go with the flow after a few times.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

Like I said, even tho hes a switch!leaning dom he wants you to hard dom him sometimes so he loves when you’re on top. Even if he’s dom in the round.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

There are moment where you too have laughed super hard, almost so hard you had to legit stop for like 2 minutes and then finish with oral or something type hard. It was prob cause one of you made a weird noise and you both just looked at eachother and burst out laughing.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Trimmed, but not too much. Like sometimes it over grows but he tries to keep it clean.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Every moment with kihyun in intimate. Even the goofy ones. I don’t think there would be a single moment of you not feeling the most love and all of his attention on you.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Prob does it like 2 a week? I don’t really see him doing it much more unless it’s been a super hard week or he just has it built up from the week before.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

I said this earlier, marking. Even tho he doesn’t want to get caught with marks he likes knowing there are marks showing he’s yours and you are his in places no one else could see.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

Bathtub or your bed, doesnt looove studio sex but will do it

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Honestly anything, I don’t see him as having specific turn ons but def has specific turn offs, like sometimes you can just be doing some random domestic shit like cleaning or just drinking your drinking and sitting on the couch and he’ll be like “damn that’s my S/O” and he ready to fuck

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Nothing with blood or any other bodily fluids. Just finds it gross and nasty and messy. He’s a clean boy who doesn’t want to cause too much pain and is scared that blood means scars and pain.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Loves giving. Even tho he’s a switch!dom I see him as loving to give oral, mainly to edge you or just overstimulate. But also because sometimes he just needs the praise and to know he can pleasure you.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Mostly at like a medium???? Like he isn’t super fast but ISNT going so slow that it would be considered like love making.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Will do it but only occasionally like prob 1/10 of your sessions is a quickie and it’s mainly just cause one of you is running late or because it’s in the studio

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Likes to do it in the studio for the risk of it but he doesn’t do it much because one time you were making out in there and someone walked in. Luckily it was just one of the members so no one said anything but still.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Goes maybe one round of foreplay and one round of sex. I don’t see him as not having stamina but he def isn’t going a long time ya know? Like he’s not gonna go more than maybe 2 rounds of sex after 1 round of foreplay.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Likes toys but prefs to not use them. Sort of just wants to know you can pleasure each other on your own. Sometimes finds it fun though so he won’t deny them.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

I think he teases a good amount. Prob as much as you tease him. He’s a “revenge” teaser in my opinion.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Decently loud, not a screamer but he’s a moaner and whiner and def has the prettiest whimpers when he’s about to cum

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Wants to have someone watch you while you have sex, like have a member or something just sit to the side and masturbate to you both having sec (“don’t you love knowing someone else can see us? Huh? Love knowing that they want you but they can’t have what’s mine?”)

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

On the smaller side with a decent width. Around like 4.5-5in in length.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Pretty moderate sex drive. Most he would go in a week is 5 times a week and least would be like 3.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Usually won’t fall asleep until alllllll after care has been completed but sometimes he’ll get super super tired and pass out almost right away.

[mintchocohip]

pegging sub!bts︱all members

▬     𝙧𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙙 ➤ headcanons for pegging the OT7!

▬     pairing: member x reader ︱ rating: explicit ︱ genre​: smut

cr▹

┃ other kinks can be found with each member, when applicable.

        𝙏𝘼𝙀𝙃𝙔𝙐𝙉𝙂  

▬   A double-sided strap provides the connection Taehyung craves. He wants to work up to something the size of his own cock, or bigger━occasional bouts of humble-bragging insecurity over being too big means he wants to know what it’s like for his partners. The realization that he just loves feeling full up and filled deep follows naturally. 

▬   Aesthetics aren’t an afterthought. The material and colors of the harness and toys do need to suit Taehyung’s mood, and they do need to suit the aesthetics of his favorite immersive historical roleplays.

▬   Even when it’s a low-key session with a medium-sized, soft toy that can curve nice and gently, lube flows like a waterfall. The huge bottle of lube is there less because Taehyung needs it, and more because you both love the slick, crisp sounds. 

▬   Taehyung’s mood is crystal-clear in how he asks for a pegging. If he’s in a good mood, it’s silent body language. When he’s in a bad mood, it’s demands of “fuck me, fuck me, please, right now, just fuck me.” When he’s in a really bad mood, bending Taehyung over the nearest flat surface gets the job done in a few knee-shaking minutes━no lube necessary. Taehyung’s romantic moods means he can’t ask for it. He wants you to know. There’s a certain soft look in his eyes, though, and a certain way he licks his lips, that makes you cusp a hand against the side of his face and ask “Is that what you want?”

▬   Experimenting with the temperature of the toy in the harness gets surprisingly exhilarated results. A warmed-up ceramic dildo is especially popular.

        𝙔𝙊𝙊𝙉𝙂𝙄   other kinks: gangbang, sounding  

▬   When the harness comes out, the comfort of a prostate massager or the intimacy of fingers and tongues is abandoned. The cold, calculated and invasive make Yoongi’s heart patter, and flush him into the kind of mindlessness that can only be released through trust. 

▬   Big, thick, small, thin━what goes in the harness doesn’t matter, as long as it’s pushed into him rough. Yoongi’s mouth is especially eager to take the strap, but indulging his desire to get facefucked is usually reserved for a treat, or a little decompression during aftercare. Within the boundaries of a scene, not letting Yoongi get what he wants is key.

▬   When he’s getting fucked within an inch of passing out, Yoongi’s exhibitionist streak becomes a jetstream. There’s nothing intimate about these moments, so he’s not shy about sharing them. Play parties, clubs, and private shows with strangers make Yoongi woozy with pride over how well he can take it, and equally humiliate him until his cheeks are a beautiful cherry red. Sometimes you start the train; sometimes it’s a friend, and sometimes it’s whoever volunteers to buckle into the harness next to Yoongi’s bound and blindfolded body. 

▬   All of Yoongi’s holes are fuckable, in one way or another. Pale legs have been frogtied up with medical tape. His knees are in his armpits. A metal rod is slowly sliding down his lube-glistening cock, and the stainless steel dildo is slowly pushing up his slicked ass. Dueling sensations streaked through Yoongi’s body by your hand and your hips mean a sensitive prostate is getting squeezed from two sides━the blanked-out expression and utter motionlessness beneath you are relying on you to listen, and watch carefully for signs of a failed attempt to mouth the safeword. Yoongi is also relying on you to understand he’s far from delicate. There’s a muscle in Yoongi’s thigh you only ever see twitching when he’s about to have a shoved-all-the-way-in-there orgasm, and right now, it’s almost vibrating.    

▬   Yoongi doesn’t like the strap being treated as an extension of his partner’s self. The appeal of toys rests on their depersonalization. It’s a thing being put inside of him.

        𝙅𝙐𝙉𝙂𝙆𝙊𝙊𝙆   other kinks: sub training       

▬   Jungkook will try anything in the harness once. Once. The trusty masturbation egg he’s been using for years has survived thanks to regular, attentive cleaning. When it comes to dildos, though, Jungkook goes through them like tissues. Packages constantly show up in his mailbox containing the latest squishy squirting jelly dildo he saw online, or the glittery fuchsia piece shaped like a tentacle. Shyness about experimentation held Jungkook back in the past, and now, his curiosity is spilling out. 

▬   Mixing up unusual, surprising colors into faux-cum creampies keeps things fresh, but, ultimately, most of Jungkook’s rainbow-colored collection fall out of rotation and end up as stress toys for him to squeeze and pick at when he’s bored.

▬   Any position that makes Jungkook uncomfortable turns gears in his brain that pool drool into his mouth. Sucking something hard and tasteless often looks like foreplay, but it feels like a main event. Getting fucked in a piledriver sets those gears into overdrive. Jungkook loves being able to see the strap push into him, and he’ll stare between his legs wide-eyed, flutter his eyelids, squeeze his eyes shut, and wheel through such a beautiful series of expressions and keening, muscle-twitching whimpers that it looks and sounds like he’s going to come untouched at any second━when a rope of come does shoot down onto his shaking chest, it always means keep going. Hands in Jungkook’s hair, fingernails clawing at his legs until they’re pink and red; streaking and pinching come over his nipples, and pushing out a few more orgasms until Junkook’s running dry━it’s the only way to make sure he emerges from the other side of aftercare satisfied.

▬   The thought of his ass and mouth being available to you 24/7 makes Jungkook shiver. Practicality and boundaries mean fantasy stays fantasy. On one special day a week, though, you both get a slice of that dream. By the time you’ve trained him to keep the buttplug in all day, Jungkook can fall asleep with your fingers playfully turning the base.

▬   Building up tiers of length and thickness means switching toys out regularly during long, long pegging sessions. Giving memorable names to the collection of toys available to Jungkook means he can ask for a specific toy simply, or beg for it with a single word.

        𝙃𝙊𝙎𝙀𝙊𝙆   other kinks: roleplay, degredation, bondage, public/semi-public, filming

▬   He insists he can take more. Overwhelming Hoseok into spilling the safeword into his rolling, hiccuping moans is shockingly easy. Even if Hoseok wants to work up to bigger things, getting fucked is a precarious balance between accepting that it won’t all be luxury and trying to stop himself from teetering off a cliff he can’t climb back up on his own. For now, toys are average sized and simple shapes, and lube glistens on Hoseok’s ass like a second skin. 

▬   During gentler sessions, a reach-around with a fleshlight turns Hoseok’s moans into eye-fluttering silence.

▬   Roleplay loosens up Hoseok’s internal restraints. It doesn’t matter how hard he gets fucked, and it doesn’t matter if it hurts━he wants it to hurt. Punishment play, degradation, and your self-assured dirty talk about how much he just needed to get that attitude fucked out of him erase Hoseok’s thoughts, and replace them with sparks and blobs of blissful numbness. The roles are often classics, and the positions that accompany them are classics, too. The man caught jerking off in the library; and the frustrated librarian who’s had enough of his shit━it gets replay. Doggy style and fade down, ass up means he can just shut off his brain, and take it. Other times, faux-impromptu bondage ties him up in precariously exposed positions, and leaves him there when the deed is finished. Breaking Hoseok down is easy, and he’s so cheerful once the binds come off, it almost seems like he wasn’t just shaking like a leaf.

▬   Traveling with Hoseok means racking up unique, increasingly precarious places where he’s been pegged. Bringing him back down from the urge to take the strap in the middle of a bustling plaza means exploring that craving with a camera, some mood lighting, and constant refreshes to see how many hits the video has gotten so far.

▬   The visuals of the harness and toy don’t seem too important, at first. When you introduce a strappy black leather harness and a bright red dildo, Hoseok is swallowing and flushing so much he doesn’t even want to look at it directly. Again━the classics have their appeal.

        𝙅𝙄𝙈𝙄𝙉   ​other kinks: praise/degredation, filming  

▬   Long, thick, and hard. Knowing what Jimin wants is simple.

▬   Jimin’s ass is magical, and it deserves the praise of a good fuck. Praise laced with degradation heightens that fuck into an experience stripping Jimin to his core. Soft words in his ear fill Jimin up with that heady mixture as much as the reverent, demeaning movements of hips━”Perfect. All flushed and fucked like this. Do you understand, Jimin? The way you love it so much━ you’re made for this. As soon as it’s up in there, you’re amazing. You’re glowing. This is who you are.” Dirty talk in his ear while he’s fucked from behind and hands play with his nipples and grope his chest and abs and squeeze the head of his cute little cock means Jimin can curl up in the sheets and shake and squirm as much as he needs to. Ricocheting gasps, high-pitched squeals, and random bouts of stunned laughter mean Jimin loves it. 

▬   Jimin needs to love it. If he isn’t enjoying himself, he will let you know. Bitterness seeps into the vocal brattiness he shoots over his shoulder. If he can’t form those coherent sentences, you’re doing something right.

▬   Pegging Jimin often becomes an exercise in service topping. If you don’t get off, though, he takes it as a personal offense. When he’s not too blown out to need immediate aftercare, the reason Jimin prefers open-crotched harnesses becomes obvious in a flash of skilled fingers slipping into your cunt, and slicking you off the edge that’s been building since your fingers made those same motions in Jimin’s ass fifteen minutes prior.

▬   The simplistic USB necklace keys into whatever outfit you wear on dates with Jimin. If you slid out the compatible connector and pushed it into his phone, dozens of stills of Jimin getting fucked would tile up in neat rows. Some star you; some star whoever consented to recording. The reminder was your idea, but Jimin fell head over heels for it.

        𝙉𝘼𝙈𝙅𝙊𝙊𝙉   other kinks: crossdressing  

▬   Lacy harnesses match Namjoon’s jewel-toned lingerie. A sleek black harness compliments his mesh bodysuit, the matching black collar on his throat, and the jingling black harnesses on his wrists and ankles. You know how to choose outfits that compliment Namjoon’s tan skin and streamlined body━it always makes Namjoon almost giddy with attempts to mute his joy when you surprise him with some shopping, and choose what he’s going to wear tonight.

▬   Namjoon loves dressing up, and he loves getting fucked right. Simple, medium-sized toys or prostate massagers slot into the harness. When Namjoon takes something he can’t relax around instantly, discomfort stops him cold. Thirteen centimeters draw out nothing but delighted shivers and shakes. The gentle care and pleasure pushed in by ten centimeters make Namjoon flush into automatic gasps, and make him leak automatic drips of thick, glossy precome.

▬   One taste was all it took for Namjoon to become addicted. It means a lot to him. Feeling desirable for what his cock can do is fine, but knowing somebody wants him this way is deeply flattering, liberating, and relieving. It’s romantic.

▬   Namjoon wants to show you what his body can do. His stomach sucks in and twists; his shoulders pull back, his chest spreads out and his hips rotate and twist and press down on your lap━hard. Every time Namjoon pushes down hard, the buzz on your clit pushes down, hard. Lights tingle and sparkle over your eyes━keeping your eyes open through the stars Namjoon is putting in them means you must look in awe. You are in awe. When you can move, you’re stroking Namjoon all over, jerking him off, sucking on his chest, groping his ass, and whispering quiet words to the man giving you the best lapdance you’ve ever received━”You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful.”

▬   Letting Namjoon lead once the pegging session starts is vital. Otherwise, he becomes a little too flustered to properly function.

        𝙎𝙀𝙊𝙆𝙅𝙄𝙉   other kinks: bondage, degradation

        warning:  elements of rape roleplay

▬   Studded leather and an unforgiving strap make Seokjin almost sick with anticipation, on nights when a jockey whip taps against the wall on its way to his ass spread out over the spanking table. A lacy pink harness and a short, soft pastel pink cock put Seokjin at ease, on nights when he wants to be the little spoon, have one of his thighs pushed over the other, and get cuddlefucked into loving oblivion.

▬   “Please!” “No…” “please, stop, please, I can’t take anymore━” and babbling nonsense sounds are Seokjin’s leitmotifs. Getting a feel for Seokjin’s sounds means knowing what it means when the words are soft━faster, harder━and knowing what it means when there’s an edge to them━I’m serious, slow down, but… make it work in the scene. Condescend to me, make fun of me, tell me how pathetic I am for not being able to take more... A taste for hands on his throat and getting jostled around like he isn’t a tall, solid guy means Seokjin needs to trust his partner. While he can enjoy a pegging with somebody he doesn’t know very well, even a casual pegging means outlining parameters of play, and establishing his tics. The relief of a familiar pair of hips in the harness means Seokjin doesn’t have to hold back the things that flow naturally. 

▬   It isn’t a disappointment if Seokjin goes soft during a pegging. His senses have flown into his ass, and the rest of his body can’t keep up. A prostate orgasm while his nipples get a tad too much attention is far more intense than anything his cock could provide, anyways.

▬   Nothing matches the kick you and Seokjin get out of eating his elaborately prepared dinner with a dildo on the table. The second Seokjin tries to start washing the dishes, you're distracting him, until he’s conceding to getting bent over the sink and fucked with tender thankfulness for an amazing meal. 

[passionate-reply]

PET SHOP BOYS & PHIL OAKEY - “THIS USED TO BE THE FUTURE”

I love science fiction. It’s interesting to me how the notion of “science fiction” clearly exists across many different art media, and takes on a different connotation given the medium. The origins of science fiction lie with popular magazines and newspapers--in the 19th Century, serialized stories, later compiled into “novels,” and in the 20th Century, in so-called “pulp” magazines, named after the cheap and low-grade paper they were printed on. In the 50′s, science fiction became a popular medium for film, although it resided in a sort of artistic ghetto as it became associated with the schlocky “B-movie” format. SF kind of often gets a bad rap as lower tier of entertainment, it seems, although that does seem to be changing somewhat. Music is no stranger to engaging with science fictional topics, as well, although we’ve never had a cultural thread that doomed such music to the B-sides of records.

“This Used to Be the Future” is nothing short of a rumination on the worst ideas of the worst kinds of science fiction. I am sure that even though you may have never held a pulp magazine in your hands, you can imagine the silly worlds it conjured up, with their jetpacks, food pills, and flying cars. As someone who’s studied it in a bit more detail, I would be fully willing to argue that these sorts of ideas were never really taken seriously, and this entire sub-culture was usually aimed at little more than the brief amusement of children. And, on occasion, lascivious teenagers, leering at the busty alien heroes of such fare in spite of their green complexions. Consider that one of the greatest writers of such fiction, Isaac Asimov, became exposed to it as a child because his parents owned a candy store, which sold SF pulp right alongside the sweets. Empty of nutrition and long-term worth, but shiny and desirable, such indulgences beckoned to the brief attention of children, and parents acquiesced to them on occasion, taking relief at the fact that both of them were priced in cents. And to little more did such works generally aspire. Consumers of such tales didn’t necessarily believe their future would look that way, any more so than modern people literally believe the future will look like Black Mirror or anything of that nature just because they enjoy the diversion it creates.

Tennant, Lowe, and Oakey make a risible case in this track, apparently arguing that the problems of today are somehow related to the...excess optimism of pulp SF from the 50′s? Lord knows there was plenty of pessimism to go around, including in the world of science fiction, in literature of the Mid-Century. I mean, their countryman, George Orwell, penned 1984 in 1948, and it’s difficult to achieve more pessimism than that. I think their thesis is kind of interesting, but also so flawed that I have a hard time taking it seriously. But it is a cracking track. I adore the way those very harsh and metallic-sounding synths arrive right alongside Oakey’s voice part--they are very reminiscent of the earliest work he did as part of the Human League, before going fully pop and hitting it big with Dare! And that stupendous closing with his darkly meant “amen” gives me a chill. Musically speaking, it is every bit what we me expect from a collaboration between such illustrious artists.

Anyway, the real occasion for me to write about this particular track, today, is of course the fact that the Pet Shop Boys just released their latest album, Hotspot, this past week, and I’ve had some time to have a good, long couple of listens, and finalize my opinion on it. Here it is: Mediocre. About as mediocre as just about everything they have done this past decade, since the release of Yes in 2010. (”This Used to Be the Future” isn’t on the album, but was included with bonus editions of it, so it’s Yes-era, for our purposes.) They seem to descend further and further into “dull, soulless dance music” with every release, pushing fewer buttons and fewer boundaries. 

I love the Pet Shop Boys, and have since my age was in the single digits. They’re basically the first band I ever got very deeply “into,” and I would quickly and happily credit them with a lot of my love for music and my interest in sharing it and talking about it. But they should go their separate ways, in my opinion. It is nice to see that they are such good friends, evidently, but two people who know each other so well, finish each other’s sentences, and don’t seem to be challenging each other aren’t benefiting from this continuing artistic relationship. In their earlier work I think there is a kind of constant tension, a tug of war between Tennant’s “Che Guevara and Debussy,” and Lowe’s “disco beat.” In that tension lies art. But their recent projects tend to have a lot of one or the other, and it really isn’t the music I fell in love with anymore. 

That might be a bit of a controversial opinion, but it’s how I really feel. Perhaps they will at least consider more collaborations with other artists in the future, which might hopefully spark something new or create something more interesting. It’s certainly a lot of why I like “This Used to Be the Future” despite vehemently disagreeing with its message. And I also think that one of the few truly great things to come from them more recently is “Brick England,” their collaboration with the venerable electronic pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. (That’s another piece for me to write about here, someday). What the “future” holds in store for them, we’ll have to wait and see.

[salmankhanholics]

★ Barbaad ho rahe hai hum log”: Single-screen exhibitors DISAPPOINTED & ANGRY with Disney+ Hotstar’s 7 films announcement : Bollywood News!

June 30, 2020

Since more than a month, there have been speculations that Disney+ Hotstar, one of the biggest streaming platforms, has acquired more than a half-a-dozen films for a direct OTT release due to the Coronavirus-induced lockdown. Today, on June 29, the suspense was finally unveiled and it came to light that as many as 7 films will skip theatrical release and arrive straightaway on the internet. These films are Akshay Kumar’s horror comedy Laxmmi Bomb, Ajay Devgn’s war saga Bhuj – The Pride Of India, Sushant Singh Rajput’s last film Dil Bechara, Mahesh Bhatt’s directorial comeback Sadak 2, Abhishek Bachchan’s stock market drama The Big Bull, Kunal Kemmu’s comic caper Lootcase and Vidyut Jammwal’s action love story Khuda Hafiz.

As expected, the exhibitors are disappointed with this historic announcement. Already, they have been suffering since cinemas are shut since more than 3 months. And with the lockdown getting extended in most major states to July-end, they are all set to suffer more. In such a scenario, to see 7 films going straight to OTT, including few star-studded ventures which could have drawn audiences to cinemas in big numbers, have not just saddened them but also infuriated the exhibitors. While the representatives of multiplex chains were unavailable, the single-screen exhibitors have openly made their displeasure clear.

Akshaye Rathi, film exhibitor and distributor, says, “We all saw it coming since 1 ½ months. Hence, we were all prepared to see this happening. As an exhibitor, I’d say that it’s a bit disappointing because some of these films could have actually played a role in resurrecting the very medium that made them such big stars.” A very angry Vishek Chauhan, owner of Roopbani Cinema in Bihar, angrily tells, “I think Bollywood has jumped the gun and have pressed the panic button too early. This will have a very bad long-term impact on the Hindi film industry.” Raj Bansal, the owner of Entertainment Paradise theatre in Jaipur states, “I am not very happy with this announcement. They should have waited for some more time, at least two more months. I understand that they have invested heavily in these films and they must have had their reasons. But in this time of crisis, we should support each other.”

Vishek Chauhan makes it clear that “Bollywood is in danger, theatres are not” and also adds, “People feel that right now that the theatres will suffer if Hindi films will arrive on TV or OTT. Hollywood started this trend of releasing films on streaming platforms in the lockdown and the first film to do so was Trolls World Tour. But that film could be accessed through PVOD (Premium Video-On-Demand) and not SVOD (Subscription Video-On-Demand). So you have to pay $19.99 to buy the film and then you get to watch it. In our case, the accessibility is so easy for these new films that you’re films would be counted in the same breath as Aarya and Chaman Bahaar. Look at Gulabo Sitabo – it came and it went in no time. My point is that, what makes actors stars is when people take the trouble of heading to a cinema hall, standing in a queue and then watching them perform on the big screen. So if Akshay Kumar’s film will be accessible online without any effort at home, Akshay Kumar is then no longer that star! He and Ajay Devgn just killed their own stardom. Disney has kept its Hollywood film, Black Widow, ready. Even James Bond’s No Time To Die is ready for release. But these films are being held for theatrical release. Toh fir yeh log kyun apni film online release kar rahe hai?”

The thoughts of Sandeep Jain, an exhibitor from Indore and Bhopal, are in sync. He states, “What they are doing is wrong. They are trying to destroy the medium that made them such big stars. Has there been any star from OTT? Alia Bhatt became a craze because she debuted in Student Of The Year, which released in cinemas. Same goes for other actors.”

Vishek Chauhan further adds, “Suriya is not giving his away film to the internet. Vijay hasn’t given his finished film Master to an OTT platform. Same goes for Dhanush, Chiyaan Vikram and Mahesh Babu. They have all declined the offer from OTT because they know where their stardom comes from. And look at our Bollywood actors. They are killing their stardom which they painstakingly cultivated over the years. They are forgetting that stardom jaane mein time nahi lagta hai.”

Other exhibitors too agree that they’ll now give preference to films of other languages. Akshaye Rathi opines, “Theatres have survived a hundred years and will survive long enough. The only thing that might change is the content that reaches the theatrical medium. If you see, in every other industry, from Southern to Hollywood, all the tent pole films have been held back for theatrical. So if these Hindi films don’t release, there will be enough Hollywood and Southern films in dubbed Hindi versions and also regional films that will take that space and keep bringing people to cinemas so that they keep getting their share of entertainment.” Manoj Desai, executive director of G7 multiplex in Mumbai, popularly known as Gaiety-Galaxy cinema complex, agrees as he says, “We’ll now give preference to South films which are dubbed in Hindi. Also, we’ll show dubbed Hollywood flicks. And I am sure audiences will come to these films as these films have lot of entertainment. The action in Hollywood films is amazing. As for South films, their action too is a visual delight. Also, their songs make for a great watch.”

Vishek Chauhan also argues that OTT won’t give these films the desired and the deserved viewership. He says, “Uday Shankar (The Walt Disney Company [Asia Pacific] and Chairman, Star & Disney India) is claiming that there are 50 crore smartphones in India and hence the reach is tremendous for these 7 films. If that’s the case, then why does your platform have just 80 lakhs subscribers? At least, Akshay Kumar’s films in cinemas gets footfalls of 2 or 2.5 crore. Your subscriber base is less than half of that. Bollywood has to decide for whom they are making the film. If they give films on the internet, then Bollywood will become an OTT industry.”

Thankfully, not all is lost. There are still many big Bollywood films which will come directly to theatres. Akshaye Rathi exults, “There are quite a few Hindi films as well like Sooryavanshi, ’83, Coolie No 1, Radhe etc which will make it to cinemas.” Raj Bansal in agreement says, “Those who will hold their films will get more benefit. It’s a matter of time.”

However, the other industries are already all set to take advantage. Vishek Chauhan reveals, “The day Disney+ Hotstar announced and hinted about releasing 7 films on OTT, Warner Bros sent a mail to all the exhibitors in the country that their Hollywood films Tenet and Wonder Woman 1984 releasing only in theatres. Universal Pictures also regularly tells us that they are releasing No Time To Die only in theatres. The idea behind these messages is that if Bollywood steps aside, then Hollywood will have a free run in cinemas of India. Similarly, down South, producers have asked us to let their films release simultaneously in North and Western belt.”

As of now, exhibitors are suffering immensely and the Disney+ Hotstar announcement has added to their woes. Manoj Desai rues, “Barbaad ho rahe hai hum log aur digital platforms aabaad ho rahe hai. Aaj Maharashtra meinJuly 31 tak lockdown extend ho gaya lekin Uddhav Thackeray ji ne theatres ke baare mein ek lafz nahi bola hai.”

Sandeep Jain has the last word and he is confident that once the lockdown is lifted, exhibitors will benefit. “Once things get back to normal, viewers will forget OTT and will come to cinemas. Even when VCR technology had arrived, we had faced some problems. Right now, with theatres shut, these platforms are getting so much importance. But later on, audiences will flock to theatres just like old times.”

[yumeka36]

Frozen 2: the crossroads of a fandom

This post has been several days in the making but I felt it’s something I had to write now that the supposed final trailer for Frozen 2 has been released and, as stated in my previous post, we’re less than a week away from spoiler-filled merchandise becoming readily available. I’m of course beyond excited that we’ve made it this far after years of waiting…but at the same time, I’m apprehensive on a personal level because Frozen is not like any of the major fandoms I’ve been into. I apologize in advance for the length of this post – I just wanted to get all my thoughts out there so thanks for bearing with me!

While I’ve been a part of many fandoms throughout my life (mostly games and anime), there’s only been a handful that I’d say have been major ones – as in, they lasted for many years, a day never went by where I didn’t think of them, and they made up the majority of what I spent my time and money on. But thinking back, every major fandom I’ve been into was for a series. Probably my biggest three fandoms besides Frozen are/were Pokemon (game series), Inuyasha (anime and manga series), and Haruhi Suzumiya (anime and light novel series). Leaving Pokemon aside for the moment because I’m still very much into it, I was obsessed with Inuyasha during my high school and early college years (around 2003 to 2007) and Haruhi for some years after (around 2007 to 2013). I’d say a big part of the reason I was into them for so long (besides adoring the characters, story, and writing of course) is precisely because they were series: their stories were ongoing for the many years I was into them so I always had new content to look forward to and could indulge in thoughts of “I would love to see this scenario play out in future stories, maybe it will in the next chapter/novel release!”

So why am I not nearly as into them as I used to be? Inuyasha simply finished its story, with the manga finally ending in 2008 (and unfortunately the last year or so of chapters wasn’t all that great in my opinion), and Haruhi’s creator pretty much just abandoned the series, releasing a great 12th novel in 2011 and then never releasing another one since, leaving the series without a proper conclusion. So the reason I eventually left these fandoms is simple: there was no new content to look forward to and thus no hope that any story scenarios I wanted to see will eventually play out in future releases.

On the other hand, why have I been part of the Pokemon fandom for so long, never leaving it since I played the first games in 1999? Again, the answer is simple: Pokemon is a franchise that shows no signs of ever ending – in fact, its become the highest grossing media franchise, so of course Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and others who profit from it will never let it end. There will always be new games, new anime episodes and movies, new merchandise, and new gimmicks like Pokemon GO. It also helps that the games, anime, comics, etc., are only loosely connected to one another so it doesn’t involve a single narrative that will eventually have to end – each new game takes place in the same world but with a different story and characters, which I suppose has its advantages in terms of freshness and longevity over franchises that involve the same characters and plot dependent on the mind and motivation of a single author (like many manga and books series).

So why is Frozen so different from these other fandoms of mine? Firstly, as I mentioned before, it’s not a series and so doesn’t guarantee new content will be released at set intervals: it was originally just a single movie in Disney’s canon of (mostly) standalone stories. Probably the main reason I’ve been into it for so long despite this is because we did, eventually, get new content that continued the canon story (not just a spin-off like that lame Lego cartoon or a retelling of the original story like the Broadway show). In 2015 we got Frozen Fever, in 2017 we got Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, and of course, we got hints of a full-fledged sequel in 2015-2016 before the date was officially announced in 2017. But the difference is that none of this content was ever certain. Unlike a manga series that guarantees a new chapter every week or month, or a book or game series that gets a new release every 2-3 years, new content for Frozen was really just random and up to Disney as to whether they wanted to give it special treatment for being their highest grossing animated film. Thankfully for us fans they did, with an animated short every 2 years and now an official sequel. To be honest, the hope of a sequel is a big part of what’s kept me into Frozen for so many years despite there being such limited content (the original movie plus the shorts is only, like, 2 and a half hours of content!) The shorts helped but I knew they wouldn’t give me the kind of dramatic stories I wanted to see play out in the franchise. Before we knew of any content beyond the original movie, I wrote a post in 2014 about why I wanted to see a Frozen sequel so badly. And here we are, nearly 6 years later and that hope is finally becoming reality…

…I’ve been looking forward to it more than anything for so long, but now that we’re so close, I’m kinda sad and worried. After years of pondering and daydreaming about what Frozen 2 would be like and whether it would give me what I want to see with the characters I love, what if it ends up not being everything I hoped for? What if this movie that’s been on my mind everyday for years just doesn’t leave me satisfied in the end? Again, if this was a series we’re talking about, I’d just say “okay, so the most recent manga chapter, game release, etc, wasn’t very good, we’ll see what the next one brings!” But there is no “next one” for Frozen. Well, I can’t say for sure there won’t ever be a Frozen 3 or more animated shorts, but from the information I’ve heard/read, it really seems like Disney planned this as a closing point for the story that, as of now, has no plans to be opened again. My fear isn’t that I won’t like Frozen 2 – I’m 95% certain I’ll love it – but will it give me what I want to see in the story and characters to the extent that I won’t feel a constant yearning for more should it be the last canon installment for the franchise. I’m sure we’ll see a live-action remake somewhere down the line or other things Disney likes to do to revive their popular franchises here and there, but as far as continuing the canon story through animated shorts and sequels, that’s completely uncertain. And before anyone tells me “that’s what fanfiction is for,” I personally never had much interest. I’ve always strictly been into canon material and I don’t like stories that I feel are out-of-character, with scenarios that would definitely never happen in the official franchise, which is what a lot of fanfiction caters to. I’m sure there are fics out there that I’d like, but I don’t have the time and motivation to try and find them among many others I probably won’t care for. Also, another reason I love Frozen is the animated movie medium itself – near life-like animation, music, voice acting, colors, etc. – so going from that to just reading the stories is too much of a difference to satisfy me.

I know it’s silly of me to fret about this as only one of two possibilities will happen, neither of which are terrible: 1) we never get more canon Frozen movies, so regardless of whether I end up being satisfied with Frozen 2 or not, the lack of new content to look forward to causes me to lose interest and eventually move onto other fandoms, or 2) Disney does announce Frozen 3 and/or more canon animated shorts so that hope keeps my Frozen obsession going indefinitely! (as a side note, Disney seems to be creating more canon TV series for its movies like Tangled and Big Hero 6, but personally I’m not too keen on a TV series for Frozen – I can’t speak for Big Hero 6 but I’ve watched all of Tangled the Series and think it’s good, but it just doesn’t have the high-standards and consistent writing quality and characterization that a full-length animated film has, and I wouldn’t want anything but the best for Frozen!)

Well, whatever happens in the years to come, I’m sure I’ll still love Frozen even if it doesn’t stay among my top fandoms. Every anime, game, movie, etc., I’ve been a fan of has served its purpose in my life, inspiring my thoughts, leading me to great friends, enhancing my appreciation for creative stories, and bringing me many hours of joy, and Frozen will be no different, whether my obsession ends soon after Frozen 2 or continues on into the unknown (see what I did there :P)

*Crossposted from my main blog, Yume Dimension*

[docmurph12]

Okeydoke, review time!! As promised it isn't a Disney movie. I am really going to have a lot of fun with this one for a couple of reasons.

One, as many of you know I DEFINITELY drink the DC Comics Kool-Aid. I really enjoy this stuff and while I am definitely able to see its flaws, I have really been into what DC has been attempting in terms of building a cinematic universe, and I absolutely love that DC comic people are getting to play along and have some input instead of it being clueless Warner Brothers head shed dweebs entirely running the show. Now, they do yank the reins a bit, WB is known for being reactionary instead of just going with the plan (looking at you, Marvel Studios) but they have been allowing a bit more freedom than usual and it shows for the most part (looking at you Justice League. Thanks a lot Whedon. Asshole.) The actors have really been into the roles they recieve in the DCEU too, and seem to be doing their research and even taking on leadership roles early in their film making careers (looking at you Margot. Keep doing your thing, I love you)

Two (whew already?), this is going to be a challenge BECAUSE I am a fanboy. I'm really going to try to do my best to be objective on this one and look at the whole picture the first time around.

Three, this one has been sort of polarizing. I am really excited to be taking this one on early in my reviewing "career". My understanding on this one going in is as follows: BOP (c'mon I'm not writing it out folks) was well recieved, critically. I understand it to be largely positively reviewed, with a few perfectionists and blowhards having their say (ugh). It did NOT, however take in the bucks, but it did make a small profit. There have been a few takes on this: One, marketing wasn't great. It took a long time for them to put anything out, and when they FINALLY did it was minimal and confusing. Folks also took issue with the title, saying it was too long. WB reacted (c'mon assholes stop it already you are only proving me right) by changing the title. I dont even remember what it was changed to it was that silly and irrelevant. Two, there MAY be some genre fatigue. Marvel just finished the largest and most expansive cinematic work of all time. This was released just after an unbelievable Joker movie. The only character known by folks not already in the know is Joker's sidekick (originally) and there may not be a Joker in this film, and who would it be anyways, Leto or Phoenix? Plus all anyone wants to talk about at the time was Wonder Woman 84, and confusing news about a reboot (or something?) Batman movie and the state of the MCU. Three, this one takes us from the one shot Joker right back to the universe that Whedon and the Warners potentially destroyed (thanks assholes) with a SUPER botched cut of Justice League.

Enough context, I can't wait anymore for this. (Goddamn finally I thought he would never shut up) On with the show!!

First and most obvious. I love Margot Robbie so much. She clearly has nothing but unconditional and complete love for her character. She has clearly done her research and has the absolute best time becoming Harley. I dont care much for the trash rat aesthetic though. That seems to be something David Ayer and his design staff came up with for Suicide Squad, and everyone REALLY bit into it and I REALLY dont like it. If I HAD to say there was a redeeming factor to it it is that it helps to physically illustrate Harley's fucking nutso disorganized mess of a brain. Other than design it actually seems like everyone did their research, and had a great time, and presented deep, complex characters with solid developmental points, even with the hop around style of storytelling, which in and of itself serves as a great method of telling this story, and surprisingly never leaves you lost.

Callback cliches abound in this one. They dont exactly telegraph it in the set up but man the last 30 minutes are FULL of callbacks to things dropped into earlier parts of the film.

For a film so full of LONG shots, some of the action sequences are awfully cutty. It's really distracting and takes away from the fact that these women did so many of their own stunts and fight scenes.

I loved that this film showed a Gotham that was truly dragged through the dirt. It is violent, pulls no punches and really carries the scenery Zach Snyder set up for this shit town in BVS (I'm not typing out BOP, do you really thing I'm writing that one out?)

I like the setups at the end and the connective tissue throughout to the rest of the DCEU. Well executed without drowning you in it and sacrificing the story. I am, however SUPER disappointed in the absence of a Barbara Gordon. I held out hope there might have been a connection in spite of there not being one in the aforementioned "marketing" but there wasn't anything. It was a good team origin story but I dont much care for a Birds of Prey with no mention of Oracle or Batgirl (if you know who I'm talking about you know why it is important).

Not much in the way of an original score. I dont think the story suffers for it though. A story told by post-Joker Harley Quinn isn't necessarily served by an original score. Distortions of things that are familiar to you are a perfect way of punctuating this one. I dig it.

Not much in the way of effects of this one. Pretty lo-fi as far as medium-big budget comic book flick goes. Well executed. I think the only thing that threw me was Sionis' mask. It is supposed to be made of ebony from his father's casket. It jiggles a LOT for something made of ebony. That said I dont remember that detail being made known so I guess it is forgivable, even if it does look sort of silly in the face (lol see what I did?) of being menacing.

Overall Verdict-- I genuinely dont see the OVERALL hate for DC Comics films. I understand the occasional fuck-up, but Marvel has had missteps too, and dont get this level of hate. This should not have been as polarizing as it was. It is a fun movie. It's not horribly made, in fact quite the opposite. It's an all girl team up a la Deadpool. There was enough for fanboys of the film's, of the comics, and it was good even for those not in the know (just ask my wife, she loved it). Fuck the haters, this is a good one. I could see not only me but my wife rewatching this one.

Final Grade--Solid B+. Give me ALL the long single cut fight scenes and this is an easy A.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - 2018 Long Shows

It’s finally here! I’m so close to being done with 2018 (...mostly. We’ll get to it) that I can taste it, but in the meantime, this list is gonna be weird, because there will be things that were already on other lists since I revised my rules of what should be classified how. This post is specifically for any show that ended in 2018 and lasted longer than 13-ish episodes (including shows that aired a second season during the same year or within six months of finishing the previous one), which means that there’s about as much on it as a usual season of shows, but they all had more time to impress - or disappoint me. I’m doing a better job in recent seasons of getting to everything, but last year there were unfortunately things that I missed (I was burned out in the winter) and just have to leave aside for now because I can’t wait any longer for these lists.

Anyway! As usual, let’s start with what I skipped!

* The Seven Deadly Sins: Revival of the Commandments, The Disastrous Life of Saiki Kusuo S2, Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card, Garo: Vanishing Line, and Mr Tonegawa: Middle Management Blues because I haven’t seen their previous seasons or parent works. (Yes, even Cardcaptor Sakura. Y’all can shoot me later.)

* Hakyuu Hoshin Engi, Beatless, and Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls because by the time I was rounding things up, I hadn’t heard a single positive thing about any of them.

Next comes what I dropped -

WORST OF THE YEAR: Steins;Gate 0 (4/10)

What a fucking mess this show was. Aside from a very noticeable downgrade in production talent from its predecessor, the plot meanders and flirts with maybe actually happening this time before just dropping out again, over and over, to the point where I was perfectly willing to drop it two episodes from the finish line because it was such an insult to fans of the original. (Also, continued disgusting mistreatment of the transgender character.)

Gundam Build Divers (4/10)

Taking the Build series from being a well-written kids show to an averagely-written kids show that hides itself in decent mech designs.

Katana Maidens (4/10)

I remember so little about this show, and granted that I did drop it after one episode almost nine months ago, but what I did remember was that it gave me strong KanColle vibes with laughably inconsistent animation and flat characters. Meh.

Darling in the FRANXX (5/10)

This should probably be lower on the list, but I got out of Darling while the getting was good, sixteen episodes in. I understand that future episodes of the show cemented it as crappy right-wing nonsense in addition to pushing worldbuilding out of its fortieth-story window, but the moment it lost me was much sooner, when the crazy yandere female lead was reduced, almost instantly, to Good Anime Waifu as a reward to the protagonist for going against his friends with his selfish motives.

Persona 5 the Animation (5/10)

In addition to not actually finishing in 2018, Persona 5 just did not give me a single reason to watch it when I’d already finished the source game, with middling-to-bad visuals (thanks to the switch from Production I.G. to A-1 Pictures, and not even the team that created the much better-looking Day Breakers OVA before the game was released in the U.S.) and phoned-in music, which is especially unacceptable in a Persona adaptation. Also, we all absolutely called that the studio couldn’t tell the story of the entire game in just 26 episodes.

Record of Grancrest War (6/10)

There’s people that like this one a lot, but I didn’t see much that interested me in the first two episodes. I’ve heard better things about the manga.

Golden Kamuy (6/10)

I had problems with the first half of Golden Kamuy that the second half simply didn’t fix, and it became difficult for me to keep watching - the show still interrupted almost every fight scene with a dick joke, but still wanted to maintain a serious and occasionally frightening tone - and those things simply don’t go together. It needed to either spend more time being funny, or keep its lowest-common-denominator humor out of the fights.

Next, I have two shows that are (potentially permanently) On Hold, simply because it’s time for me to move on and I don’t have the time or energy to marathon them when the Winter shows are starting to wrap up:

Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, because even though I initially dropped it, I’ve heard a lot of good things since and I want to eventually give it another shot.

Yowamushi Pedal Glory Line, because despite the fact that I still enjoyed the previous season, this one started right in the middle of my burnout and I only heard bad things about it. I’ll get to it eventually, but it’s a shame that this series has been on a clear trend downwards since its revival.

And finally, the stuff I finished!

The Ancient Magus’ Bride (6/10)

Keep in mind that this is here entirely on the merits of its aesthetic and its side characters - in the end, Ancient Magus’ Bride is a Beauty and the Beast story where the beast gets what he wants without learning to be less of a dick or even apologizing for his clearly wrong actions.

Major 2nd (7/10)

Always pleased to have even just Good sports shows around, and this one is a very effective reboot of a classic series that’s never made its way stateside (man, the underperformance of Big Windup! really did a lot of damage to this genre in the West). With good character development and a decent second-generation premise, Major 2nd has the potential to be the beginning of a solid baseball story, assuming that it gets a needed followup.

IDOLiSH7 (7/10)

I dropped IDOLiSH7 when it first aired, and though I wound up enjoying it after I was very strongly urged to revisit it, the problems it started with never quite left it behind - that is, it has an okay cast of characters but doesn’t present even passable performance sequences, and if you’re going to include big song-and-dance numbers, they have to be good, or you may as well just be UtaPri.

ClassicaLoid Season 2 (8/10)

In 2017, I gave the first season of ClassicaLoid a near-perfect 9/10, and while this season gives us a satisfying conclusion to the story, it does things both a little better than the first, and also not quite as great. It’s story is much more well-integrated over the runtime so it doesn’t happen all at once in a few chunks, and the jokes that work are still absolute genius, but there’s simply too much that doesn’t quite land correctly, and a little too much immature humor, for it to reach the same lofty Hall of Fame heights as the first season. Still, one of the most underrated shows I’ve ever seen.

My Hero Academia Season 3 (8/10)

God, Izuku in that onesie is too damn cute.

My problems with Hero Academia are frustratingly persistent - the show is at its best when the students are competing with other students, because outside of last season’s Stain (a villain whose motivation is specifically related to the world of MHA), the villains are just not at all compelling and they all seem a little too generic for their own good. I just want Horikoshi to be a little bit less predictable of an author and do a little less reading of the Standard Shounen Playbook. Luckily, when it works, it works magnificently.

March Comes in Like a Lion S2 (8/10)

March remains director/auteur Akiyuki Shinbo’s most accessible work, and one of his masterpieces, as a well-paced and marvelously moody story of a depressed shogi prodigy learning to be a normal teenager before his youth completely passes him by, and the fantastic characters that surround him with their own complex problems and motivations. I just really, really hope it gets a third season eventually, because this one did not leave off on a satisfying conclusion.

Speaking of which...

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma S3 (9/10)

It’s almost a shame that My Hero Academia became hugely popular purely based on its accessibility to American audiences, because Food Wars pretty squarely deserves to be the reigning Shonen Jump king - each season has only improved on the previous one, and this one was based entirely on a continuing arc that could only have happened in the universe of this show, Fighting Food Fascism. That being said, it also leaves off right in the middle of the arc (because it had almost caught up to the manga), meaning that we have to hope that it can remain relevant long enough for there to be enough source material for another season. I’ll be crossing my fingers until they snap.

Banana Fish (9/10)

Yes, this has risen a point since my review, but Banana Fish still deserves to be thought of as both a complete masterwork of crime fiction, being fantastically paced and expertly plotted in the use of its many, many twists, and a work that disappointed the side of me that hoped that, in adapting it into the modern day, MAPPA could have managed to get the author to let them depict what is clearly a queer relationship with the authenticity and legitimacy that it deserved. It’s still amazing, though, and Amazon should be pushing it with their most lavishly-made originals. At least it was the last noitaminA show they’ll get to totally bury.

And, finally, the one you all saw coming.

BEST OF THE YEAR: Lupin the 3rd Part V (10/10)

Lupin is, quite simply, one of the pinnacles of the medium. A simple idea that can (and did) go in thousands of different directions, handled by highly creative writers and an animation staff that has been knocking it out of the park for years, despite the fact that it is criminally (heh) unrecognized in the West. To put it simply, there’s a very, very good reason that it’s been around since the 70′s.

Okay! All I have left to do is finish Dragon Pilot (waiting on a friend) and we can get the last two lists out of the way! We’re almost done...

[vgperson]

What Did I Translate in 2018?

[tacitcantos]

The Biggest Difference Between The Wolf Among Us and Fable Comic

More than just seeing how clever the writer can be in fitting the jigsaw pieces of fairy tale and modern day together, The Wolf Among Us is interested in the deeper thematic resonance to be mined in looking at the consequences of the original fairy tales: in what happens when you strip fairytales of their gravitas, in the complexities and nuances of how the Big Bad Wolf would deal with his past in the modern day.

The Wolf Among Us is a prequel videogame to the long running Fables comic series. The premise of both is simple: all of the fables of brother’s Grimm fame are refugees in our world after having to flee their own, and now live in hiding in an enclave in New York called Fabletown. The main character of both comic and game is Bigby Wolf, the big bad wolf of legend now reformed as the sheriff of Fabletown.

The Wolf Among Us has a dynamic storyline that shifts and reacts to the dialog choices you make for Bigby, and the game is easily one of the smartest takes on fairy tales you’ll find in any medium. One of the themes inherent in any modern day take on fairy tales is postmodernism, the fun in the premise seeing how fairytale characters slot into a modern world, of juxtaposing the mythos of the original stories with the mundane of everyday life. The Fables aren’t mythical characters anymore, no longer princes and damsels and monsters, they’re all just people now trying to get by.

But more than just seeing how clever the writer can be in fitting the jigsaw pieces of fairy tale modern day together, The Wolf Among Us is interested in the deeper thematic resonance to be mined in looking at the consequences of the original fairy tales: in what happens when you strip fairytales of their gravitas, in the complexities and nuances of how the Big Bad Wolf would deal with his past in the modern day.

Though the comic series was started back in 2002, twelve years before The Wolf Among Us was released, my introduction to the Fables universe came first through the game, and after finishing it I went on to read the comics… and was almost immediately disappointed.

The thing is, while The Wolf Among Us is a nuanced and complicated take on fairy tales, the Fables comics... aren’t. They’re not badly written, but they’re only interested in that fun surface level of draping fairy tales over the modern day without any real engagement with how that changes or complicates them. Every way The Wolf Among Us engages with the specifics of the original fairy tales, the comics don’t.

Now, the comic series does actually at first do some smart things: so Fabletown isn’t ripped apart from internal conflict all inhabitants are granted blanket immunity for past crimes in their old world. To protect from the outside mundane world they’re also forbidden from revealing their magical identities. While for the human fables this is easy enough, for inhuman fables like trolls or talking frogs it requires purchasing expensive spells, called glamours, to disguise themselves, or risk being shipped off to a farm outside the city.

These are a great example of taking advantage of the Fabletown premise: they’re logical extrapolations, and they set the stage for interesting conflicts. Both comic and game explore those conflicts, but do so in fundamentally different ways.

A few issues into the comics those inhuman fables on the farm rebel and try to take the reins of power for themselves. This is actually one of the few places the comics really engage with the original fairy tales and make full creative use of them: there’s an especially funny reference to Goldilocks having gone native with the three bears from her story and now works as a terrorist and freedom fighter for inhuman fables, but there’s very little long term value to the storyline. The rebellion is put down after a few chapters, but there’s no change to the Fabletown status quo, no growth for any of the characters involved, no examination or deconstruction of the themes of the story or original fairy tales.

Instead of being a fun little side story, the tension between human and non-human fables makes up the core of The Wolf Among Us. A deep trench of bitterness separates the have’s from the have-nots, with inhuman fables ignored by the Fabletown government and treated like second class citizens.

It’s actually remarkably similar to real life ethnic enclaves at the turn of the century. In trying to solve the first murder of a fable in years, Bigby has to navigate a Fabletown where Beauty and Beast, like a lot of refugees, were wealthy in their home country but now find themselves resorting to less than savory ways to pay for a lifestyle they can no longer afford; where racial resentment between those who can pass as the native population and those who can’t is high; where the weak institutions of the fabletown government have allowed an organized crime element to rise to power and take advantage of the vacuum in fabletown just as the mafia did in Italian ethnic enclaves in New York.

Bigby himself operates in a really interesting liminal space between the two classes of fables: viewed as a traitor and Uncle Tom by one side while also never fully accepted by the other. Despite the clemency granted to all fables for their crimes in the old world, no one’s forgotten just how many people Bigby ate in the homelands.

This is an aspect of Bigby that isn’t explored in the comics, and his reasons for taking on the office of sheriff aren’t either. It’s suggested at one point that he came to Fabletown and reformed from his old ways because of his interest in Snow White. And it’s not a bad motivation per se, it’s just that it isn’t explored more than that. There’s no character growth, no struggle in trying to refrain from violence despite his enjoyment and affinity for it, no conflict between his old ways and the new person he’s trying to be, no emotional toll in the suspicion the other fables view him with, no personal cost in what he’s doing.

The best example of this is the introduction of Red Riding Hood a dozen issues or so into the comics. With the Big Bad Wolf as a main character you might think one of his former victims showing up to be a complicated and thorny issue… but you’d be wrong.

There’s a single page where Red Riding Hood is upset by Bigby being the sheriff and forgiven for his crimes in the old world, but it’s quickly discovered that she’s not actually Red Riding Hood, and instead an evil witch in disguise. Narratively, her appearance is simply a ploy by the villains that once discovered isn’t commented on again. There’s no emotional or thematic conflict in it, no examination of the complicated relationship between former abuser and victim, of how to reconcile past wrongs, of the bitterness Red Riding Hood should feel over how the other fables have accepted the monster that once terrorized them all. The real Red Riding Hood does eventually show up later, but she has even less to do with Bigby than the fake one.

While Red Riding Hood doesn’t appear in The Wolf Among Us, the game does confront Bigby with an element from his original fairytale: the Woodsman.

And his relationship with Bigby is nuanced. Instead of the hero of the story as he was in the Homelands, in Fabletown he’s a drunk and abuser of women, and resents Bigby: he’s the hero of the story, not Bigby, so why is he a suspect in a murder case? Doesn’t anyone remember what Bigby is? What he’s done? These are interesting questions that spring from the original fairytale, and ones that go unasked in the comics. They’re also used for character growth: depending on your choices in the game there can be a distinct arc with Bigby and the Woodsman finally burying the hatchet and reaching an understanding with each other.

Bigby’s motivation in becoming sheriff in The Wolf Among Us is positioned as less about Snow, and more about reforming his image and identity as a whole. This motivation informs all his actions in the game: the constant friction between lapsing back into his old Big Bad Wolf persona to speed the investigation along, and the new order abiding and non-violent one he’s trying to forge. And despite his best efforts there’s a real undertone throughout the game that he may be needed because of his ability to inflict violence, but because of exactly that he’ll never be trusted.

It’s a really nuanced way of engaging with the consequences of the original fairytale and using it to inform character growth and theme.

Part of the reason the game is so much better at exploring these themes is down to both a difference in the medium and genre. The main game mechanic of The Wolf Among Us is decision making and dialog choices, and the more complex and multifaceted the characters and conflicts, the more interesting it is to play. And the noir detective genre is simply a better vehicle for exploring those small, personal tensions and conflicts than the superhero war story of the comics.

Moral relativism is a hallmark of noir which makes creating nuanced characters easier, and a murder mystery by its nature requires the detective to move through the different stratas of society and puzzle out the motivations and nuances of suspects and witnesses. There’s also just a hundred small ways the presentation of The Wolf Among Us reinforces the unglamorous nature of Fabletown: the neon lights that drench the world, the constant graffiti in the background, the thick atmosphere of the music, Bigby’s weariness in quiet moments, the way his fridge is empty.

Even the titles of the comics and game set them apart: Fables is a generic and vague title, The Wolf Among Us specific, intriguing, and hints at the liminal space Bigby occupies, the themes of fear and belonging.

None of this is to say that the original Fable comics are bad. They’re not: they’re well written and well drawn. But they’re not everything they could be, not as brilliant as their premise promises. The fairytale elements in them are just draped over a conventional plot, the connections only skin deep.

Found this interesting? Exciting? Sexy? Check out my other writing on my tumblr here, or check out my youtube video essay channel here.

[siliconwebx]

Matt Mullenweg Addresses Controversies Surrounding Gutenberg at WordCamp Portland Q&A

Matt Mullenweg joined attendees at WordCamp Portland, OR, for a Q&A session last weekend and the recording is now available on WordPress.tv.

The first question came from a user who tried Gutenberg and turned it off because of a plugin conflict. She asked if users will have to use Gutenberg when 5.0 is released. Mullenweg said one of the reasons Gutenberg has been tested so early is to give plugin developers time to get their products compatible. He also said that it has been the fastest growing plugin in WordPress’ history, with more than 600,000 installations since it was first made available.

In response to her question he said users will have the option to use the Classic Editor and that the team is considering updating it to include per-user controls and the possibility to turn it on/off for different post types.

Subsequent questions went deeper into recent controversies surrounding Gutenberg, which Mullenweg addressed more in depth.

“The tough part of any open source project – there’s kind of a crucible of open source development which can sometimes be more adversarial and sometimes even acrimonious,” he said. “Working within the same company, you can kind of assume everyone is rowing in the same direction. In a wide open source ecosystem, some people might actually want the opposite of what you’re doing, because it might be in their own economic self-interest, or for any number of reasons.

“I liken it much more to being a mayor of a city than being a CEO of a company. I’ve done WordPress now for 15 years so I’m pretty used to it. It might seem kind of controversial if you’re just coming in, but this is not the most controversial thing we have ever brought into WordPress. The last time we had a big fork of WordPress was actually when we brought in WYSIWYG the first time. Maybe there’s something about messing with the editor that sets people off.”

Mullenweg commented on how polarizing Twitter can be as a medium and how that can impact conversations in negatives ways. He said people tend to read the worst into things that have been said and that has been a new challenge during this particular time in WordPress’ history. WordPress tweets are sprinkled into timelines along with politics and current events in a way that can cause people to react differently than if the discussion was held in a trac ticket, for example.

One attendee asked, “With Gutenberg there’s a lot of uncertainty. Where do you see the tipping point where you see people become more favorable to Gutenberg than the Classic Editor?”

“Part of getting these two plugins, Gutenberg and Classic Editor, out early, was that it could remove uncertainty for people,” Mullenweg said. “Months before they were released you could kind of choose your path. The hope is that the 5.0 release day is the most anti-climactic thing ever. Because we have over a million sites that have either chosen to not use Gutenberg, which is totally ok, or have already opted in and have been getting these sometimes weekly updates. We have hosts that have been actually been pre-installing, pre-activating Gutenberg with all of their sites.”

Mullenweg said hosts that have pre-installed Gutenberg have not reported a higher than normal support load and that it has basically been “a non-event.” It’s the users who are updating to 5.0 after many years of using WordPress who will have the most to learn.

“Gutenberg does by some measures five or ten measures more than what you could really accomplish in the classic editor,” Mullenweg said. “That also means there’s more buttons, there’s more blocks. That is part of the idea – to open up people’s flexibility and creativity to do things they would either need code or a crazy theme to do in the past. And now we’re going to open that up to do WordPress’ mission, which is to democratize publishing and make it accessible to everyone.”

Gutenberg’s current state of accessibility has been a hot topic lately and one attendee asked for his thoughts about the recent discussions. Mullenweg said there is room for improvement in how this aspect of the project was handled and that WordPress can work better across teams in the future:

Accessibility has been core to WordPress from the very beginning. It’s part of why we started – adoption of web standards and accessibility things. We’ve been a member of the web standards project for many many years. We did kind of have some project management fails in this process where we had a team of volunteers that felt like they were disconnected from the rapid development that was happening with Gutenberg. Definitely there were some things we could do better there. In the future I think that we need – I don’t know if it makes sense to have separate accessibility as a separate kind of process from the core development. It really needs to be integrated at every single stage. We did do a lot, as Matias did a big long post on it. We’ve done a ton of keyboard accessibility stuff, there’s ARIA elements on everything. One of their feedbacks was that we did it wrong, but we did it the best that we knew how to and it’s been in there for awhile. There’s been over 200 closed issues from really the very beginning. We also took the opportunity to fix some things that had been poorly accessible in WordPress from the beginning. It’s not that WordPress is perfectly accessible and all WCAG AA and it’s reverting. It’s actually that huge swaths of WP are inaccessible – they just might not be considered core paths from the current accessibility team but I consider them core.

In response to a question about the future of React in WordPress, Mullenweg went more in depth on the vision he had when he urged the WordPress community to learn JavaScript deeply in 2015. At that time he said “it is the future of the web.” He described how each block can be a launching point for something else – via a modal, such as updating settings, doing advanced things with an e-commerce store, zooming in and out of those screens from the editor. This was perhaps the most inspirational part of the Q&A where the potential of Gutenberg shines as bright as it did in the early demos.

“The other beautiful thing is that because Gutenberg essentially allows for translation into many different formats,” Mullenweg said. “It can publish to your web page, your RSS feed, AMP, blocks can be translated into email for newsletters, there’s so much that the structured nature of Gutenberg and the semantic HTML it creates and the grammar that’s used to parse it, can enable for other applications. It becomes a little bit like a lingua franca that perhaps even crosses CMS’s. There’s now these new cross-CMS Gutenberg blocks will be possible. It’s not just WordPress anymore. It may be a JavaScript block that was written for Drupal that you install on your WordPress site. I mean, hot diggity! How would that have ever happened before? That’s why we took two years off; it’s why we’ve had everyone in the world working on this thing.”

JavaScript is what makes this cross-platform collaboration possible and it’s already evident in the work the Drupal Gutenberg contributors are doing, as well as the platform-agnostic Gutenberg Cloud project. When Gutenberg is released in 5.0, it will enable more for WordPress and the web than we can predict right now.

“This is not the finish line,” Mullenweg said. “5.0 is almost like the starting point. Expect just as much time invested into Gutenberg after the 5.0 release as before – to get it to that place where we don’t think it’s just better than what we have today but it’s actually like a world-class web-defining experience, which is what we want to create and what you all deserve.”

😉SiliconWebX | 🌐WPTavern

[abstractanalogue]

Ann Scott interview

I first came across Ann Scott’s music in 2018 and wrote about her Venus To The Sky (2013) album at that time here. She is a singer-songwriter but in the main she collaborates with what sounds like a full band at times so her sound can be vast when needed. Since then I have really gotten into what she has been doing and collected her other albums and none of them disappointed me in any way. I guess her main strength is the quality of the songs and she has a knack for finding the most suitable instrumentation and collaborators to really make them take-off. For me she is of the same calibre of an artist such as PJ Harvey and I wish she was as well known but such is the nature of life. Sometimes these things take time but her music is built to last. 

I have been posting about her regularly on the AA FB page and decided to make contact with her for an interview to tie-in with her outstanding new album Lily. I have many favourites from it but here I’ve selected ‘River’ and ‘One Step Fall’ as good examples to show the two sides of the album, from a full to a more sparse and minimal sound. For me, there were a few songs I instantly connected with but the whole album is a grower and worth the effort. While it hasn’t been such a long wait for me, older fans haven’t seen a new album in about eight years so I thought she’d have something interesting to say. It’s great to hear something of how the album came together and about her background, reactions to the pandemic and more. You can sample and purchase Lily on Bandcamp here.

How did you first get involved with music, were you always interested in singing and writing since you were very young? What were your early passions and influences (not just musical)?

Early on I just lived and breathed books. As a child, I remember the radio being on 24/7. I thought music was just an awful racket and associated it with detergent jingles and ranting talk show guests. I think I longed for silence really. That all changed in a positive way, in first class when our teacher encouraged us to dance on the tables along to Peter and the Wolf. Then came Top of the Pops as a weekly religion. In the eighties music had massive relevance, everybody was madly taping songs off the radio. There was a small selection of vinyl at our house and I spent many hours with a pound shop microphone stuck into the stereo – or was it the back of the VHS player ?- and even back then the big red button meant ‘record’. So, there were hours of fun overdubbing sci-fi movies and blasting along to Madonna long before the first 4 track arrived.

What was it like for you in those early days, what are your memories of starting out playing live etc? Did you get some recognition?

I first began busking around in the nineties and it was around about then I started writing songs, but I took a long time to finish and perform them. Initially I was just enthralled with that very primal thing of live singing. In Dublin the International Bar on Wicklow Street was the hub for songwriter talent, experienced and novice. There was a massive amount of it around and it was a magic time. Every Tuesday evening the upstairs venue there would be heaving with the motley crew of Dave Murphy’s songwriter guests. Dave curated an open mic ‘but with no mic’ kind of an evening and mentored, more or less, the whole singer songwriter scene at that time, which today accounts for many of Ireland’s household names. There was some A&R interest around but I didn’t have much of a knack for the schmooze and all that, I think I realized I was still developing a craft and probably wasn’t ready for committing to anything, whereas the industry was and is still obsessed with ‘new’ and ‘young’.

Even from your first album, in my opinion, you had very much developed a signature sound and voice. I guess this could just be you being yourself or is it something you really had to work on? Are you very self-critical, how easy is song writing for you? Going purely by your album covers, it appears you take on a different image/persona for each album. If I’m correct, is this part of your process for song writing as well?

You’re kind of born with the voice you have. All of your ideas and inspiration have to be influenced by the world around you. In my case, love of language slowly gave over to love of melody and expression of ideas but it was hard to marry the two. I am critical as hell and tend to do things slowly and mull over them and revise lots of times. Many songs are image heavy or take on personas, as you say, and I would throw in lots of characters and animals, maybe as metaphors for things, or sometimes not. I’ve always had a soft spot for odd tunings and gypsy sounding stringed instruments and gravitating to keys like C sharp or F sharp has not made me popular with fellow players. But in terms of a sound, in particular, the first few albums, my ideas were very much interpreted and realized by Karl Odlum.

Even though you are known as a solo artist there is a collaborative process for you to go through to get your music completed. Do you have regular people you work with or do they change with each project? How do you select your collaborators?

I’m happy to goof off on my own for a stint and write and record and layer music but you can’t beat that buzz of the idea exchange. Karl Odlum has a fantastic adaptable approach that he brings to everyone he works with, so I’ve been lucky to be able to tap into his expertise...and synth collection. He is a brilliant bass player, and a powerhouse of production ideas, and although I go at the Protools myself these days, Karl is still the linchpin I’d say. In terms of band, when budget allows the more the merrier. Touring with musicians you get to know people and give each other a dig out so I’m happy to barter with other songwriters when it comes to lending each other random ideas or vocals.

I felt things were really beginning to change for new artists around the very late 90s. The beginnings of MySpace and later YouTube and all of the promise (potential worldwide exposure!) that seemed to bring. As far as sales went, there was a kind of vacuum I felt from then until iTunes and digital sales became more firmly established with platforms like Bandcamp. Some of the traditional music print media also began to disappear or become unrecognisable from what it had once been. But live gigs and festivals became more popular (and good for selling music directly or so the theory goes). What was your experience as an artist that emerged right in those uncertain times of change?

Music has been a victim of its own success really. The technology which emancipated musicians (home studios, digital distribution etc) also kind of devoured them. There was suddenly a flood of independents all vying for the same shrinking media pie, and then the ‘subscribe a little and stream absolutely everything’ model (eg Spotify) came along and just about killed off album sales entirely. Back in the nineties an independent musician could be making a humble living and tour based on selling CDs at gigs, but that is all complicated now with the new medium. Additionally, many of the traditional opportunities such as the festival slots you mention are offered as unpaid promotional opportunities to up and coming artists. But if that is more and more the actual model, then you have to ask, what exactly is there to be up and coming to ?

You started a Patreon in the last year or so, what was your experience of that? I get the impression this helped the album along.

Patreon is the brand new world. It got me back into a discipline of finishing and releasing music, which for somebody who likes to spend months or years on single line lyrics, is a necessary thing. Also, it got me just back to connecting with people, and I was surprised by what subscription tiers worked or what people wanted to hear that I would not necessarily have thought of. Without listeners it is hard to make the music come alive. And that rabbit hole gets deeper. So, after a long gap between albums it was a great way to put the heartbeat back into things.

What can we expect from the new album, Lily, and what format will it take? Could you collaborate with different musicians this time around? What are your hopes for gigs, promotion etc. I suppose inevitably your new album (just like any album released this year) will be seen as a lockdown album, do you think the pandemic influenced your music or would it have still been more or less the same?

Lily is a digital only release, although I had a yearn for a vinyl pressing, I thought green is clean. The pandemic greatly paved the song selection, in that I couldn’t collaborate with other musicians last year even if I wanted to, so there is a lot of minimalism. There’s barely a click track anywhere on the album with many of the songs performed more or less as live takes. There are also fuller tunes with more featured artists which predated lockdown but overall, the lonely live intimate vibe is the prevailing wind. With everybody cooped up inside, it might sound counterintuitive, but it felt like the right time to release a live sounding record. When it does come to going back out to gig, I should have a selection that I can hopefully reproduce easily enough in a live context.

Due to the pandemic we are potentially in a very precarious time for music as we have known it. I know there is no crystal ball but how do you think things are going to work out for musicians and the industry itself?

Very odd times indeed, but the music industry is kind of eating itself anyway. In terms of gender and diversity balance, I hope that is one thing which can be addressed. I think the really obnoxious televised talent competitions have to go (or are they gone already?). Music had a very cringey tv moment for a while there. The keyword for the future music industry has to be - like all world industries at the moment - sustainability.

I read on your website that you moved to the countryside. What has your experience been?  

Moving to the countryside has been a major change for me and, also becoming a parent, so lots of things all fell into place and out of place, and lots of songs always fall out of change. I might miss being by the sea sometimes, but trade off in the deep countryside is the sky. All those thousands of super bright stars at night and those 360 degree sunsets. Plenty to space off to there...

Thanks for your time. You will find Ann’s website here and she is also on Facebook and Twitter.

[bloggerjoedoe]

I’ve been on a book reading binge this year like never before. That’s partly owing to the pandemic, I’m sure, but it’s also tied to reduced time spent reading articles and social media. In a normal year I read about a dozen books, and this year I’m on pace for five times that. As a result, it’s no surprise that one of my favorite app debuts of the year has been Book Track, from developer Simone Montalto.

Book Track launched at the beginning of the year as a promising 1.0, then followed with a big update mid-year that addressed my initial problems with the app and expanded its functionality in key ways. That update was a great setup for the launch of today’s version 2.0, which introduces support for some of the top features of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14: widgets and a new sidebar design. By getting the low-hanging fruit out of the way in previous updates, Montalto was able to keep Book Track current with all the latest OS technologies right from launch day. Not stopping there, however, he’s thrown in support for Shortcuts (the app) and keyboard shortcuts in today’s update too.

Widgets

Book Track’s widget offerings.

Book Track includes two types of widgets on iOS and iPadOS 14: Reading Progress and Quotes. The former is available in small and medium sizes, while the latter is medium-only.

The Reading Progress widget shows you how close you are to finishing the title you’re currently reading. New in today’s update, Book Track now lets you track your reading progress in a book by entering the last page you read. The widget, then, will show you how far along you are by displaying that last page read, as well as the total pages in the book, and a visual representation of your progress plus the book’s title, author, and cover art. I’m usually reading 10+ books at a time, so tracking progress for a single book isn’t as appealing to me personally, but for users who tend to focus on a single title while reading, seeing progress on their Home screen could be a great reminder to read more often.

The Quotes widget better suits my needs, integrating with the quotes you save for a given book. Every book in your Library can have quotes added to it as you read, and with this widget you can have Book Track randomly surface different quotes from the title you configure. Similar to Apple’s Photos widget, it’s nice being surprised throughout the day with an updated widget that sparks joy, or in this case may prove inspirational.

Sidebar Design

The new iPad sidebar exposes valuable menus and options.

One of the primary advantages of Apple’s Mac Catalyst technology, which first launched last year, is that it not only enables developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac, it’s also likely to make those iPad apps more Mac-like in the process. Sidebars are a perfect example of this two-way effect. macOS Big Sur introduces a fresh design for sidebars on the Mac, but before its arrival later this fall, iPadOS 14 is today pushing iPad apps to adopt sidebars rather than the traditional tab bar approach. Developers who use Mac Catalyst can support both changes at once with minimal additional effort, and that’s exactly what’s been done in Book Track.

On the iPad, the previous iPhone-like tab bar has been replaced by a sidebar that offers significantly more utility. All of the former tabs now live at the top of the sidebar, but they’re joined by three new sections which can be collapsed or expanded per your preferences: Reading Status, Tags, and Series. These additions make it much easier than before to access your To Read, Reading, or Read lists, or to filter your library by a tag or series. All of these controls were previously available in the app, but you had to jump through one or more different menus to get to them. Now they’re available right where they should be: in plain view.

Shortcuts

Building shortcuts for Book Track.

Not content with supporting the latest features of this fall’s OS releases, developer Montalto has also brought Shortcuts support to Book Track 2.0. There are five different actions you’ll find in the Shortcuts app:

Add New Quote

Book Selection

Get All Books

Modify Book Details

Update Book Progress

The first and last of these are the ones I want to highlight. One is better suited for readers of ebooks, while the other is ideal for paper book fans.

Of these groups, I’m 100% an ebook person. The only time I’ll buy a paper book is when a title simply doesn’t exist digitally. So for me, the Add New Quote action is ideal. My normal practice while reading is to highlight noteworthy quotes, but also save those quotes to a separate note in Apple Notes where all quotes from that book are compiled. Book Track’s quote feature has made me reconsider that practice, however. Each book in your Book Track Library can have quotes saved to it in a dedicated section of the title’s detail view. With the new shortcut, saving quotes to that detail view is easier than ever.

I’ve created a simple, one-action shortcut that grabs the contents of my clipboard and saves it to a book of my choosing under the quote field. Now, when I come across a quote I want to save while reading, I just copy it to my clipboard, run the Add New Quote shortcut, and the excerpt is saved as a new quote entry to that title in Book Track. It’s a smooth process that does what automation does best: speed up a frequent, repetitive process. The only thing that would make things faster is if Apple Books supported running shortcuts via the share sheet when text is selected, so I could skip the clipboard step, but unfortunately the app entirely disables share sheet shortcuts.

The second action I want to highlight, Update Book Progress, almost makes me wish I was into paper books. Since titles in Book Track are imported from Google Books’ database and include page count, the app knows how many total pages a book has already, so it can easily calculate your reading progress. And with an Update Book Progress shortcut, you can quickly enter the last page you read of a given book and instantly have its progress updated in Book Track. Here’s a video showing how simple it is.

Today I’ve played with Shortcuts. There are a lot of improvements with iOS 14! pic.twitter.com/nLbufwaP9T

— Simone Montalto (@SimoneMontalto) August 12, 2020

The reason this works great for paper books but not digital ones is that digital books usually don’t follow the page numbers of their analog equivalents. Sometimes they do, but it’s extremely hit or miss. I wish Apple and Amazon would make a greater effort to address this issue, which is especially problematic in the context of groups like book clubs, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. As a result, Update Book Progress is a great shortcut for paper books, but with most digital books the page number you see won’t line up with Book Track’s total page count for a title, making the shortcut – and the whole reading progress system – far less useful. If you’d like, however, you can always manually modify the total page count of a title to match what you’re seeing in your ebook app of choice, then track progress using ebook page numbers instead. It just requires one extra step per book.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Rounding out version 2.0 is the addition of keyboard shortcuts. You can’t navigate the app’s UI at all via a keyboard, but there are still a handful of nice shortcuts for doing things like initiating a search of either your Library or an online search, dismissing overlays, adding a new book, or opening settings. I’ve found that search shortcuts have been my most commonly used because they don’t immediately require tapping or clicking to interact with app UI elements, unlike most of the other shortcuts available.

Book Track continues to distinguish itself as one of the most native and modern app experiences for book lovers. Its widgets and new iPad design show off some of the hallmark features of iOS and iPadOS 14, and the new Shortcuts actions brings valuable utility in speeding up common actions in the app. This app has come a long way in the span of just a few months, and I’m excited to see where the future takes it.

Book Track 2 is now available on the App Store.

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