#the way i see it it's an arbitrary unit of time anyway -- basically just to create a measurable boundary for the experiment

[echthr0s]

EXPERIMENT RESULTS: actually, I just may not be a Dionysian, and that's okay. I think there's a lot of adjacencies (oh thank god, that is a word) -- a hilariously high amount of adjacencies, at that -- which muddled the waters for these past years (to say nothing of Grey's identification with the guy, which got us started on the path in the first place). Dionysos is like the earthly version of Me, but he is very much an earthly entity, and being Not From Here makes things difficult to navigate, I think. (V's [Carcosa remix] version of the prayer was a decent gap-bridge but ironically -- or uh. maybe not ironically? the opposite of ironically? -- that also might be what made me see the gap in the first place)

I think Dionysos was a signpost more than a destination, for me, and the fact that I've lingered here so long has probably hamstrung me a bit. been trying too hard to wriggle myself into the Dionysian box and now my shape is all warped and squozen.

the one thing I think he could have been good for is joyful embodiment -- learning to live in an earthly form with grace instead of resentment -- and I do still need that assistance. gonna have to workshop some other possible sources for that

ok adding in some clarifying edits before I tag OP in case they're interested in failed experiments as well as successful ones:

experimental method: lighting incense, invoking Mood by using this one lotion I have that is both decadently scented and shimmery + spritzing rose toner on my face (self-care seems to be a good centering device, particularly for this kind of entity, I think -- and I find scent is particularly evocative), recitation, a minute of quiet reflection

for the recitation I started out using the original prayer but a mutual lightly remixed it in a way that felt More (for me personally) so I used that towards the end, leading to the above revelation

by "Not From Here" I mean I am a walk-in. Grey was the person inhabiting this body before I got the job

we have about a 8? 9? year history with vibing with the concept of Dionysos and about a 4 year history in actually trying to form a relationship with him

@thegodwhocums

[lunarsilkscreen]

Hamas Covenant 1988

Both Israel, Palestine, and Hamas will hate me for this; but here we go.

Here's the verse raw-translations, which excludes minutia, slang, and multiple definitions of words:

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)." - Article 7

Here's how it might be translated based on my poor understanding of linguistics:

"It would be the end of days if the Muslims defeated the Jews.

The rocks and trees would have to take our side and hold them down and say 'here they are, come get them!'

Only the Gharqad tree (which isn't a real tree anyway) would not do that.

Because it is the *one* tree the Jews planted." - Not Article 7

"The Judgement" or "Judgement Day" or "Ragnarok" refers to what Christians call "Revelations" or the "End of times". Its use in this context suggests the same, considering the preface to this verse in the [covenant of 1988] is: "The injustices of family are harder to bear than the smite of the Scimitar."

As in; that same document consideres Palestinians and Israelies brothers. Or cousins. Or kin.

And then says; on a hypothetical day when Muslims are victorious against the Jews AND the *trees and rocks themselves* tell them to kill the Jews, that's the day judgement day has arrived.

The absurdity of waiting for the plants and rocks taking the side of the Muslims and convincing them to commit murder of their cousins should be clear.

And the joke is; The Gharkad are a type of Bonzai that Jews planted in Israel, and thus they would be the only plant not to turn on them. Because you don't "bite the hand that feeds you" or something.

The rest of the covenant references the Quran, and basically says that if they (the Muslims) must die because God wills it, then so be it. This is common rhetoric in nearly every modern religion starting with Judeism (in line of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths). And so, they should understand what is being said.

"Zionism" to them is the arbitrary definition of Territory which should not be crossed (land borders). Imagine if somebody drew a border right in front of your local Starbucks and said "you cannot go in there anymore" and you're like "But I get my coffee there..."

Both that Starbucks and you Suffer, because now you gotta go a mile out of your way to the other Starbucks. And you're not gonna do that, because that Starbucks sucks, AND it's out of your way.

Only in this case, it's more important things like work, and food and clean water. (Which they were denied access to). Which had an impact on *both* of their economies, which now Netanyahu is mad at Palestinians for. And Hamas is mad because of what I just said.

(I do not support baking anybody's babies in ovens.)

"We will not accept your money" means one of two things: "We are a service that would rather go bankrupt than serve you" -OR- it means: "We'd rather you die than serve you."

Depending entirely on the state of the local economy.

And sometimes, businesses don't understand which of the two positions they're taking. They often believe they are of the former, but they are often taking the latter. Like Hypocrits do.

And they don't see, that both stances will affect the entire local economy to the negative. Because the money stops changing hands.

And then, the United States is expected to put its *own* economy on hold to fix this "injustice".

[jonathankatwhatever]

I don’t have trouble asserting that grid squares generates the necessary units. They express in forms and units are forms.

How do I say this? When using the earth to determine a meter, they were doing the best they could to make the relationship, the rational connection between the properties being measured, as large as they could so they could measure it more precisely. I tend to get the impression people think the meter was dreamed up out of nowhere or that some ignorant people in the past picked a convenient method and we got stuck with the results. No, they were actually using the largest object they could actually measure so they could see the length of a second, so they could measure time over distance, a concept familiar to all. An example is the tortoise and the hare: you can see two forms of time compression, one being how fast they move and the other being how they approach the race, which are experiences these humans had recognized and put into words which expressed that they had become aware of these experiences, all to teach others what they saw. I hate that people denigrate what the past has achieved; there are always threads in which you can find positives.

In fact, that idea is a flip, right? Like take Nazi Germany: there are many things to study, even admire about their ability to wage war, so that’s a positive about a negative, and that flip has now been identified as occurring between the two gs sheets, or between 2 plates. And yes, you can press those together. That’s fascinating: just saw a process of fusion. It requires a huge amount of gs processing because there a lot of space is necessary to take apart and then reconnect, meaning the scale of Recombinance is enormous because each piece has to be reduced to its minimum, which means large amounts of waste, which eventually turns into heat in the processing. Waste is going to occur because not all pieces can fit together, either because they don’t fit or because they’re extras.

So, anyway, this happens in the space Between the plates, which connects the plates.

You can see that people can align themselves with positives and how that Pathway leads them in the wrong direction. That gets back to the very old conception of the devil being the one which leads you down the wrong path by appealing to that part of you which can be persuaded, bit by bit or all at once, to pick that 1. That’s 1+1=2 in which your Pathway choice lays out as a series which counts above that. Oh my God that is powerful. I’m seeing basic mathematical series laying out, and each layer contains the meanings which build into specificity in that direction and which become more abstract in the other. Each layer embodies this dimensional shifting, either toward a specific identity or toward generalization, with each layer representing the specific versus general potential.

I can see Recombinance occurring as each layer has an upper and a lower edge, and the threads of chains of grid squares stretch between, with the potential of their Recombinance mapping into complex space and beyond. I can finally see that beyond. Neat. Quaternions. Octonions. Then it gets weird because I think that doubling, that Bricking of 8 to 16 oh right it runs into the Quaternion expansion of 4. And 8 is not only by 2 but it’s a cube made of a Brick. That’s the level at which the 4 and 16 collide, that it’s a Brick and yet it’s IC.

Funny how you can see IC now: it’s literally the immediate context of the gs process which constructs a 4square. In other words, when that 1square forms and divides into 4 pieces or in the other ways the 4square form emerges, all those gs processes occur that to construct both a general and a specific 4square. It isn’t arbitrary. In fact, I think it visualizes as a series of potential states on a rope, and you start at one End, say the far end where the far end is obviously specified, and you move back along the rope until you reach the point where the far end from the far end can be specified, but what you don’t realize is that all that sliding back along the rope has been picking the rope that fits that path, that the pathway is a combination of all these ropes as they’ve stitched together along the way. So, to abstract that, imagine that something happens, doesn’t matter what, and the effects of that carry through the grid squares of your Thing. There can be physical effects, like actual contact or derived contact (like expressions of joy or sadness become something), and other less tangible effects like occupying portions of your thoughts, for good or bad. As this information Emanates, it spreads in various directions, and this enables sorting, which looks to me like the information chains reach this or that level where they fit into the Recombinance of abstraction, meaning they get fit into this or that form or type or box or kind which represents that bundle which becomes what is down toward the rope end.

I assume that will get clearer. I need to go back to bed. It’s 7 Apr 2023. About 6:30AM.

———-

And yet I. You see, I’m at the stage where threads construct on their own, flipping bits creatively, Recombinance gathers the threads to you to make Tractable Reality. I used to look at sentences like that, and think ‘That must be wrong. There is no way you could be that deep into this material, that you could actually be seeing the truth.’ And yet, here we are, and that sentence is the conclusion of a large amount of work which proves that Recombinance gathers the D4-3 threads or chains, which we need to label, Mabel, to the Things which are in the shared or related grid squares. Oh, this is going to be difficult to describe, or hard to say as it actually occurred in my head before being label flipped just because I flip labels like rocks to see what’s underneath.

The idea is the inversion process inherent in association across Triangular and grid squares sheets generates patterns which repeat and those patterns combine to form higher level patterns, like a gs prime represents that particular size of block which inverts from a value to 1 over all the included process. See? As I’m accepting that we’re correct about gs process, the connections form. The keystone of the construction has become the bridge that is not only the & in f&b, but the spaces between f, &, and b, meaning the concept of edges, which embody the boundary, which is where we connect to measures like Pi and e. Different forms of measures appear at different places.

I’m going to try to stop editing myself out of thoughts. I was thinking about bridges, thought of it as a Taylor bridge, and then as a wormhole, and I thought it must be all of those because the form is in Taylor, which gets to the inversion I experience, which is that of me as female inside a male with Taylor the opposite, and that confuses me in typing because there’s a space over which the gender identification inverts, as threads flip, as connections appear and disappear, which I can now explain as pieces fitting to an existing abstract structure which is within your perceptive field or experience.

[katytheinspiredworkaholic]

WIP Wednesday

Title: Extraordinary

Pairings: HotchReid (more to come)

Summary: League of Extraordinary Gentleman/Vampire AU;

Within the FBI there is a specialized team full of an elite selection of people. Unique individuals with very particular skill sets. And their job is to take the unusual cases: the ones that need to not only be solved, but are undetermined if the unsub is human, or something else entirely.

In a world filled with Vampires, non-human creatures, and subspecies unknown, there is only enough information to have them vaguely regulated. Rules that are so easily, and violently broken, all while hidden in plain sight among the unsuspecting public. Unrivaled for eons.

That’s where the BAU comes in.

Official Posting Date: October 2021

Links: (Masterpost) (Snippet 01) (Snippet 02) (Snippet 03) (Snippet 04)

(TW/CW: dead body/crime scene, blood and bite wounds talked about in detail, hypnosis/compelling someone to do something against their will, overall discussion of murder (basically what we see in every episode of the show))

(the story so far/what you need to know for this clip at least: Absolutely nothing you don’t already know, this is legit from the first chapter. Hotch is a Vampire (although the LEOs don’t really know that), Rossi is a priest, Morgan is so empathetically telepathic he can touch the auras in the air, and Reid is Reid. I know I’ve been giving you the juicy HotchReid stuff but here have some case stuff too, to see what you’re in for with the plot and everything. This is FIRST DRAFT so it’s terribly unpolished, first part is generalized POV (hence the more professional titles) and the second is within the team dynamics so they get more familiar. idk my first drafts are messy and indecisive, enjoy anyway. 💕)

–

They approach the body and Rainer shoos away his pestering, hovering officers and --- winces once again at the sight of the bloodied woman. “This is the third body in two days; a jogger found her about 6 am. Coroner says she thinks she’s been dead for about 6 hours; killed in the middle of the night, just like the others.” 

“Closer to five hours, I think,” Dr. Reid says, crouching down to look closer. All long legs and his gun looking too big on his belt next to his FBI badge. “Could still be within the Witching Hour, though.”

“Do you have accurate time of death estimates for the other two bodies?” Agent Morgan adds on, already picking up the train of thought Dr. Reid has started on. The detective pulls out an old-school flip notebook book and looks through it before answering.

“3:15am the first night, 9:30pm last night and now this.”

“Well that rules out hex, sacrifice, and spell gone wrong,” he concludes, as the other agents surround the body to inspect it from all angles. “So what are we thinking?”

“It’s a frenzied bite,” Agent Hotchner points out, looking from where he stands and not having to get as close as Dr. Reid to inspect it accurately. His eyesight is better than any microscope. “Shows multiple entries, it couldn’t get a good enough hold to rip her throat. Or she struggled, so it wasn’t strong enough to keep her pinned down.”

“The boys think it’s a Vamp,” Detective Rainer points out. “Maybe a baby one, still learning the ropes?”

“Vampire changes are regulated and no sire would allow whoever they turned to do this,” Agent Hotchner says, a colder flint to his voice that matches the way his dark stare cuts up to the detective. “No one has been turned in the United States in the past twelve years.”

“It’s not a Vampire bite,” Dr. Reid agrees, putting on latex gloves to further inspect the body and test the bite radius. “And it’s not a werewolf bite, either.”

“...Werewolf?” the detective says with a winded sound, eyes wide and looking to the three agents who didn’t even blink at the word. “There’s -- there’s such thing as werewolves?” 

“Detective, I think you should let my team and I work, we will come to you with our findings and then help you track down your killer.” Agent Hotchner doesn’t leave room for argument, his dark brown eyes looking pitch black in the early morning light, and Detective Rainer… suddenly feels the overwhelming urge to walk away. Like he can’t breathe if he doesn’t comply; he fights it, tries to fight it, and feels his will crumble beneath him like a sand bank giving way under his feet. He turns, even that small gesture lessening the pressure crushing his chest, and takes a step away from the group, air swept into his lungs like a riptide. He makes a hasty retreat after that, winded as if he just ran up a flight of stairs and the sweet taste of oxygen being his only reprieve. He doesn’t know what happened, and wouldn’t upon further inspection until much, much later.

-

“That wasn’t very nice, Hotch,” Rossi points out with a look of glib reprimand towards their team leader. “I thought compelling feeble minded beat cops was for those who have no skills to avoid it.”

“My patience was running thin, and we need to move faster on this case before our unsub kills again. He’s escalating.” That much is obvious, by the timeline alone, but Father Rossi still gives him a side-ways glance that says he finds far too much amusement in the undead’s antics. “Reid, are you sure it’s not a werewolf bite? It would explain the lack of control and precision.”

“I’m sure,” Reid says with finality, and no one makes a mention on why. He had done more research than any human possibly could in the past few months on werewolf transformation and the after effects of attacks. With what happened to one of their former agents mere months ago, no one doubted his newly learned expertise. “It’s also not a shifter, or a ghoul. We can rule out ghost and poltergeist as well, no residue or temperature shifts.” 

“Demon possession?” Morgan asks, looking to Rossi just as he does his customary Sign of the Cross at the mere mention. Can’t help the gesture, after his own past experiences. Giving anything the power of a name, even arbitrary, can be a dangerous thing. 

“We can’t rule it out,” he admits. “The teeth marks are human, someone possessed would still have a hard time biting that deep and doing that much damage. Cannibalism is only reserved for the amusements of level three demons, however they aren’t usually powerful enough to reach the mortal plane or take possession of someone’s body. They would need help.” 

“You really think someone would weaponize a demon like that?” 

“We’ve seen people do worse things, as has history, but I’d like to hope it wouldn’t happen in my lifetime.” 

“We need more information,” Hotch concludes, arms crossed and watching as Reid stands up and removes the blood stained gloves. “Morgan,” his gaze cuts to the tall man in his deep blue suit. “Can you walk the scene, tell us what you see?”

“Not with this many people around,” Morgan shakes his head, eyes glancing to every person within a twenty foot radius. “Too many readings, the aura field here looks like an oil spill. The only thing I can latch onto is…” his gaze is back on the ground, hovering over the dead woman, who would have no aura to speak of at all and therefore a blank canvas. He replaces Reid’s space, crouching down to touch the air over the bite wound. Fingers spread wide, less than a foot from her but not touching, palm suddenly curving as if over an invisible shoulder, the place where someone had once been not so long ago. It could have been the coroner, or the crime scene photographer, but with it being so close to the body -- chances were it was the unsub.

“They were crouched down, half on the ground, no… human thoughts that I can hear,” he says, closing his eyes and letting his hand glide through the air a little more, following the curve of someone’s spine and up their neck, resting where the head would be. “They have a fever burning them up, hot as a furnace--” he keeps his hand there too long, suddenly jerks it back as if it had physically burned him, then stands up again. Shaking off the aura reading still sticking to his fingers and the forefront of his mind. “Sound like anything you’ve heard of, pretty boy?” 

Reid shakes his head, sharing a glance with Father Rossi. “We might have to go through some of your demonology books.” The older man grins wide.

“You just want to get your hands on them, at this rate you’ll have them memorized by next week.” 

“Dave --” Hotch says slow, a reprimand of his own.

“Fine, fine, I’ll have Garcia send us some scans. If the Vatican knew I was putting a book like that in his hands they’d strip me of all my titles.”

“Didn’t they already do that?” Morgan teases with a grin.

“Ex-communicated. I got to keep the dog collar, the honorifics, bless the holy water, you know -- the party tricks.” 

–

((if you want to be apart of the taglist just hit me up via comment, reblog tag, DMs or asks 💕))

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #451

Top Ten British Films of My Lifetime

Here we are with another of my semi-regular “this has nothing to do with anything but I just thought about it” lists. Nothing to tie into, nothing to celebrate, just a moderately interesting topic. Hopefully.

I don’t feel like people talk about British films the way they did in the nineties. Maybe that’s just because I'm not a teenage wannabe film director reading Empire anymore so I'm not picking up on a meta-narrative or looking for ways into the industry, but I think it’s more the changing nature of the film “biz”. The nineties proved that there was a functioning film industry in Britain, and the subsequent rise (or return) of huge blockbusters filming here has meant that there’s always a lot of money flowing through British studios and companies. Star Wars, the Wizarding World, and James Bond are just three franchises where, whichever country owns the rights or the IP, there’s still a strong UK flavour to the productions, even if they have American actors and directors. Even indie films get money from all over the globe now, further muddying any attempt to define the nationality of a film. For a long time there, the Coens were making films for Working Title, so arguably they were British films too.

I'm going to insert a depressing caveat here and say that, with Covid shutting the cinemas and the government’s reluctance to offer ongoing support to the industry, there is a chance that our position as a great location or a destination for a raft of production and post-production services may be under serious threat. Like with Thatcherism, we could end up seeing a return to the bad old days of the eighties, when despite stone-cold gems emerging, the industry did struggle. But anyway.

Basically, I don’t always know if a British film is a British film these days, and their Britishness does not get ballyhooed as much as it did 25 years ago.  But all the same, for reasons undefinable (because Lord knows I’m not feeling very patriotic at the moment), I have here decided to list my Top Ten British Films. I’ve focused on “in my lifetime” because, well, it’s easier, and there are fewer huge films that I've missed. But like I always say, I'm not a journalist or a professional film critic, so there certainly are some huge films that I've missed. Off the top of my head, three very big films I've never seen are Naked, Sexy Beast and In God’s Country; maybe they would be on the list. Also, with the 2020 of it all, I've seen virtually nothing this year (Farmageddon and – is it British? – Cats are the only Brit-flicks I saw at the cinema before the Dark Times; if you’re after a review, well, Farmageddon is better). But, look, this is my list and It's utterly arbitrary, as always.

Rule Britannia, etc.

Paddington 2 (2017): yes, it’s utterly delightful, which we need more of in this day and age, but it’s also exquisitely constructed on a technical level. It's phenomenally well-shot, Paddington himself is an extremely good effect, the scripts are tight, the performances spot-on (give Grant an Oscar!)… honestly, this film is perfect. I try to be arch or cynical but I can’t. It's a masterpiece and it does not get enough love.

Withnail & I (1987): as sublime a piece of screenwriting as you’re likely to find, the film is also bolstered with two stand-out performances for the ages (three, really, if you include Uncle Monty). Simultaneously a hilarious character comedy, a gritty but nostalgic look at a lost decade, and an utterly tragic tale of self-destruction.

Brazil (1985): one of those films that’s disturbingly, increasingly prescient. A grim look at the future through a dirty lens, a visual tour-de-force, Michael Palin playing a delightful monster, pathos, romance, tragedy… almost certainly Gilliam’s best film.

Trainspotting (1996): utterly seminal; stands alongside Pulp Fiction as one of the definitive films of my youth. Boyle’s direction is so assured, Hodge’s screenplay distils an unfilmable novel into something utterly cinematic, and McGregor delivers an unforgettable performance. Cool, slick, funny, strange, tragic, and very, very British.

In Bruges (2008): another film with two people swearing a lot and just having terrific dialogue, this time against an ironically beautiful backdrop. A neat character study, great performances, devastatingly sad, just damn funny. Also inspired my wife and I to take a real holiday to Bruges, so top marks.

Hot Fuzz (2007): probably, on balance, the best of the Cornetto Trilogy, perfecting the intense montage-heavy style but giving us a bigger canvas, excellent action, a neat puzzle box of a plot (the forward-referencing is at its peak here), a series of increasingly amazing cameos, and arguably the best incarnation of the classic Pegg/Frost double act.

United 93 (2006): unlike many on the list, not one I’d relish watching again; a blisteringly tense, heartbreaking interpretation of the last moments of flight United 93 on 9/11. Taking something seemingly unfilmable, Greengrass gives us a thriller of the highest calibre, a director working at the top of his game to make something unbearable but unmissable.

Ex Machina (2014): it’s rare that a film can be a tense chamber piece and also a groundbreaking sci-fi and also a great special effects movie, but Ex Machina is that, as well as a directorial debut (Dredd rumours notwithstanding). Gleeson and Isaac are incredible in their cat-and-mouse relationship, Vikander is a revelation as Ava, and the whole thing is shot through with such assuredness, walking well-trod paths but absolutely giving us something new and interesting.

Notting Hill (1999): I kinda had to have a “traditional” romcom in here, of the kind popularised by the writing of Richard Curtis; I think common logic says Four Weddings is the best but I’ve always preferred Notting Hill as it’s simultaneously more focused (just dealing with Grant and Roberts) but also has a bigger canvas as it touches on celebrity and fame. As a piece of popular writing it’s exceptional; funny and genuinely romantic and moving, with a great central couple you’re always rooting for.

Brassed Off (1996): sneaking into my Top Ten, displacing the likes of The Descent, Richard III, and 12 Years a Slave, simply because its message of resilience in the face of governmental cruelty and its quiet depiction of nurturing northern socialism is striking a chord at the moment. Stephen Tompkinson should have been able to launch a Hollywood career off the back of this performance, and the late, great Pete Postlethwaite is a beacon of tragic, stoic heroism, especially in the climax of the film. The Fully Monty went into similar areas to greater financial success, but Brassed Off is the sadder film, the film that stays with you longer.

Right, there we are; a definitive list. Sorta. I’m kind of surprised there are so many relatively recent films up there; I thought it’d be full of stuff from the late eighties and mid-nineties (I’m note sure why I feel that “mid-nineties” needs a hyphen whilst “late eighties” doesn’t, but there you go). As I flicked through my mental album, however, I realised that a lot of films from that period I hadn’t seen in twenty years or more, and I just didn’t feel like I could justly rank them; A Fish Called Wanda, Time Bandits, The Company of Wolves, Educating Rita, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover, Secrets and Lies, Mona Lisa… all of these might have been included if either my memory was better or if I’d whacked a DVD on more recently.

Anyway, there you. Brits are good at some things. Obviously those things don’t include feeding hungry children or successfully negotiating international trade agreements, but there you go. Can’t have everything.

[lhs3020b]

Post Mortem

I promised some thoughts on the nightmarish debacle that has happened. Here they are.

TL;DR I am scathing about everything. Everyone who should have helped us, failed.

It's the morning after. They've won. Continuity Remain is dead; there isn't going to be any second referendum and Article 50 won't be revoked. You cannot imagine how I feel right now, typing those words. However, I have never sought to deny reality (however lovely denial might be) and reality is what it is. We've lost a referendum and two general elections; we're finished. There is no come-back from this. The country has made a sick, twisted, greedy, myopic and stupid decision - but that's the decision it's made. I have nothing good to say for what happened, except that it did happen.

Well, let's look at the one tiny silver lining: since the ship has now sailed, I can indulge my deep, seething pool of vitriol for our collection of useless opposition parties. I'd held back previously because I didn't want to add to the circular firing squad. But they've all shot each other now and the corpses have largely stopped twitching. So off we go. (Before we start, I won't be writing about CUK/TiG/Change-UK, because they were just annoying, and I can't be arsed. I think we've all spent enough time on that shower of idiots.)

Here's the core reason for why I'm so angry: all this was completely avoidable. The media will, of course, spin BoJo's victory as a paragonic triumph of political conservatism. Like that infamous Pravda article from the 30s, on the Soviet constitution, they'll fawn over BoJo and declare him a visionary and a victor, a veritable genius of the ages, dripping with lyricism and wit. He isn't. He's an over-promoted buffoon who lucked into the top office due to the self-destruction of his inept predecessor, aided and abetted by a lying and sycophantic media - and, by a collection of opposition parties whose sole interest was in fighting each other.

Here we have the real core problem. The people on our side only switch on for fighting each other. There's little sign that they actually really care about Brexit, or the wider state of the UK. But pursuing partisan vendettas against each other? Wheeeeeeeeeee!

Let's think back to the summer, when BoJo was faced with stalling polls and a hung parliament. He could have been ousted then - but, of course, the Lib Dems were adamant that they couldn't countenance the idea of Mr Corbyn as Prime Minister. They'd had this tendency for a while - it's not new - but it accelerated and was nurtured under Jo Swinson.

When she was elected as leader I was initially a bit sympathetic - it seemed reasonable to give her a chance. Unfortunately, it turned out that she might be the most rightwing leader they've ever had - I actually suspect now that she might be to the right of Clegg. And she went and turbocharged all of their most self-destructive tendencies. I think what she thought she was doing was clawing Tory Remainers off of the Tories. This ran into two problems; 1) there weren't that many Tory Remainers to begin with and b) most of them are more Tory than they are Remain. So they mostly stayed put, and they few who did leave (thank you, to those of you that did) just weren't enough. Meanwhile, the hard-right tilt scared off the Lib Dem's left-leaning supporters.

A while back I predicted they'd lose seats at this election; I'm sad to have been proved right. I am, however, grimly-amused that Swinson herself lost her seat. The other problem with Swinson's rampany anti-Corbynism was that it partially demobilised continuity!Remain. A lot of people sensed that she was more anti-Corbyn than anti-Brexit; that also implied no plausible chance of an anti-Brexit coalition. Hoenstly, given how overt and personal the vitriol between her and Corbyn got, it's hard to see how it could ever have worked. And there's no point voting for something that you know is impossible. I do wonder if maybe this switched some left-leaning people off, or perhaps even sent a few ditherers back to the Tories (under the assumption that any sort of government is better than no government, I suppose).

As for the Lib Dem campaign, it was a mess. At one point their leader went on air to deny killing squirrels (yes, seriously, this actually happened). She got all excited about thermonuclear genocide at one point, because that's not at all weird and creepy, amirite?! Then there was the bizzarity that was "skills wallets" (don't ask - basically, the sort of policy abortion that happens when a collection of wonks are locked in a room with a boxed set of the West Wing and too much cocaine).

[OK, I'll expand this one. Briefly, skills wallets were a weird continuing-adult-education idea, where you'd have a pot of money that you could access at certain ages, apparently to take some kind of training or re-education or something. Why the ages in question, why that amount of money, and why not just make adult-ed free at the point of use, were never really explained. Then there was the can of worms that was additional voluntary contributions - what I took away from this was it was the adult-ed version of pensions auto-enrollment. I spent the last four years fighting a corrupt auto-enrollment fund, so I have strong feelings here!]

As for general themes, really, the LD campaign didn't have one. There was a lot of "Corbyn, THE MONSTER, the monster, Corbyn!". And, kind of oddly, there wasn't actually that much about Brexit. It actually didn't figure very strongly in their campaign. You came away from watching it all with a) a bad taste in your mouth and b) a nagging feeling that these people didn't know what they were doing.

To be fair to them, their vote share did go up, a bit - from 7.4% in 2017 to 11.4% yesterday. Which is, uh, not exactly dizzying. And it seems to have happened in all the wrong places, so they still managed to lose seats overall.

OK, we've gawped at the piss-stained ashes of the old Liberal Party, lying in state where some eggregious family-member has dumped them, on a roadside verge in the middle of nowhere. (Perhaps some enterprising squirrel has buried a nut amongst them.) Let's move onto the other vast, soul-sucking black hole of despair, also know as the Labour and Co-operative Party.

Oh dear god. The Labour Party.

The Labour Party is Britain's perennial second party, and nothing that happened last night challenged its second-place status. Their vote share dropped by 7.8 percentage points on 2017; this is what produced the Tory landslide, essentially. The Tory vote went up a little, by about 1 point, but otherwise stayed largely flat on 2017. This time, though, Labour collapsed. They lost a swathe of seats across the country, including places like Bolsover and Blyth Valley, which were previously rock-solid.

What went wrong? Everything. Basically, the stars aligned against us, in every single way.

First of all, Labour's campaign was dogged by the antisemitism scandal. And you know what? It was bloody well right that it did. The leadership dealt with antisemitism by ... doing nothing. Anyone who tried to raise the issue instead would get "Corbyn outriders" dumping on them on Twitter. Apparently we're suddenly not allowed to be concerned about racism on the Left anymore? Frankly, fuck that.

What they should have done was a quick-and-brutal party purge, perhaps early in 2018, when there was still time. Take some initiative, get control of the narrative again, and get rid of people who are only going to shit all over your campaign. But, uh, no. That didn't happen. I'll note that the Chris Williamson show in particular went on far, far longer than it should have.

Then we come to Brexit itself. Corbyn spent three years equivocating on the issue. OK, I'll allow that in hindsight, perhaps strategic ambiguity made some sense back in 2017 (though note that they still lost that election too). It didn't by 2019. But Corbyn was still trying to stand in the middle of the road as late as the summer - and by doing so inadvertently opened up political space for the (brief) Lib Dem revival, which in turn shunted Labour onto the defensive. And as I believe Paddy Ashdown once said, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic.

Eventually, the Labour leadership reluctantly adopted a second referendum position, but by then the damage was done. Basically, Corbyn had convinced Leavers that he was a Remainer, and Remainers that he was a Leaver. Labour appears to have lost votes about evenly across both Remain/Leave areas(!). In a way, he actually did unite the country - just against him. Ooops.

The rest of Labour's prospectus was a mess this year. Home Office reform was de-emphasized (arbitrary deportation by the Home Office is a huge concern amongst ethnic minorities). Drugs-law reform seems to have fallen off the agenda. There was no obvious theme to the campaign - surprising given that 2017's "For the Many" theme did cut across. Instead the "offer", such as it was, appeared to be a largely-incoherent grab-bag of spending promises, some of them with very large headline numbers. (The £58 billion for the WASPI pensions thing stands out there.) A lot of people simply didn't believe the country could afford it. You don't vote for things that you fear will bankrupt you.

Also, in a way, there's a parallel to the skills wallets thing here. Labour would have been better off, I think, just doing something straightforward like saying, "If elected we'll raise disability, sickness and unemployment benefits by £x per week, and we'll get rid of the ATOS fit-for-work assesments". It would have the advantages of simplicity, clarity and a clear political theme. Instead we got this weird fiscal machine that would produce some of those effects, except via a complicated multi-part kludge (which probably wouldn't even work properly anyway). I don't know how this came about; presumably it was an after-effect of one of the party's unending internal power-struggles.

Corbyn himself is a controversial figure, from his past associations with the IRA (more vague than the press would have you believe, but still a drag on the doorstep) to the perception of socialist extremism. Again, let me note that the "but he's a Communist, because that starts with 'C' too!" stuff is disingenuous, but this perception exists, and the Party have not found any apparent way to challenge it. Honestly? If your candidate is a ship that's holed below the waterline, yes it is horribly-unfair and all the rest of it, but you do need to run someone else. (I see no point softening that punch ; while Corbyn's been leader, the whole UK has voted 4 times, at 2 general elections, 1 referendum and 1 EU Parliament election. Every time, Labour has bombed. It's hard not to see a pattern here.)

Finally, the Labour Party itself has failed to ever re-unite. It's effectively two political parties in one - or possibly three, depending on how you want to look at Momentum. On a fair day with a strong wind, the Parliamentary portion sometimes manages to move just-about-consistently, but nothing else seems to have that behaviour. Honestly I suspect a lot of people's real fear about a Labour government is not that it would be a socialist tyranny, but rather that it would implode within about six months. Labour has lost its way amongst a storm of factional infighting. To be fair to Corbyn, this isn't new. Ed Milliband's desperate tenure was derailed by internal struggles. Even the 1997-2010 period had the ongoing squabbles between Brownites and Blairites (remember them?).

So yeah, Labour's campaign was an absolute shambles this year, and the whole country is suffering now for that.

Lastly, let's have a quick look at the Green Party. Where were they this year? With Extinction Rebellion making headlines, the Amazon burning, Australia on fire and weather records being smashed everywhere - remember that day when we had summer back in February? - it should have been the Greens' year. Environmental concerns are going up in salience - people are starting to get genuinely worried. And, uh, where were they? I can't recall hearing a single peep from the Green Party during the election. Whatever it was they were doing, it seems to have completely failed to capitalise on the moment. Perhaps they should have been a bit more visible.

The only people who come out of this with any credit are the SNP. I haven't heard anything teeth-grinding about them - though, that might just be because I live in southern England.

Oh, and let's take a final kick in the teeth, shall we? If you add up the shares of the votes received by pro-second-referendum parties ... guess what it comes to? Yup: 52%, versus 48% for the pro-Brexit parties. 52/48 - aaaaargh! Yet, the 48% had a narrative that kept their vote all in one place, so they won an absolute majority at Westminster. Ours got scattered to the four winds by several separate inept campaigns and several useless party leaders. Had there been a second referendum, we could have won it. But we never got the chance, because everyone supposedly on our side were completely, perfectly, useless.

Sigh :(

[crystalelemental]

FE Fates Replay - Weapons

I decided to do this separately, instead of injecting it into the story parts.  I’m trying to leave the story and characters separate from gameplay stuff, but weapons in this game were handled really badly.

First thing’s first: weapons are now unbreakable.  Except healing staves, because fuck you I guess.  Seriously, why are they the ONE THING that breaks?  Complete and utter horseshit.  Anyway, this single change has a major ripple effect throughout the entire game, and it’s not a positive one.  It’s time for me to sit back in my rocking chair and ramble on to you kids about the good old days when your shit just broke all the fucking time.

To some of you, that statement may sound facetious or insane, depending on whether you think I’m serious.  I am serious, but that’s not the point.  The point is, I’m right about this.  See, breakable weapons had all sorts of benefits.  For instance, if you had a tank, you could break the weapon of the boss that sat on a throne, and have weaker units hit them repeatedly for minor damage to farm out some levels, without having to have random encounters, or risk your life in arena.  Breakable weapons also meant that you could bring a weapon with 1 hit left, guaranteeing that an enemy would barely survive so a weaker enemy could finish the job.  They weren’t substantial effects, but they were smaller and more helpful effects.

Now, the core weapons are still here.  Brass weapon, which is really light and very not strong.  Iron weapon, a bit stronger, but kinda your “standard” weapon type.  Steel, which is heavier and stronger.  And Silver, which is the strongest of all.  To really understand what I’m getting at, we’re gonna have to talk about old mechanics.  See, back in the day, characters had a stat called “constitution.”  Constitution determined essentially how much weight you could handle on your weapon.  So, let’s say an Iron Lance was 6 weight.  A Knight, who would have really high constitution, would be able to wield it no problem.  But a Pegasus Knight, which had, say, a constitution of 4, would struggle.  To account for this, you would take the difference between the weapon’s weight and your constitution, and subtract that from the unit’s speed.  Essentially, a Pegasus Knight would have high speed, but couldn’t afford to power up to Steel weapons without a severe speed penalty.  But, a character like a Mercenary, who tends to have higher constitution, would be able to wield a Steel weapon without said penalty.  It was another component of distinguishing units.  Some could easily use Steel without a drawback, some couldn’t and needed to use weaker weapons to play to their strengths with double-strikes and higher evasion.

Silver weapons, in these days, were invaluable.  They had higher might than even Steel weapons, but weight wasn’t as bad.  They were stronger and lighter than their steel counterparts, and were considered the ultimate in standard weaponry.  Their downsides, however, were two-fold.  One, they were expensive.  If you didn’t have a lot of money, you probably didn’t have many of them.  This was a more minor drawback, but it existed just the same.  Two, durability.  Steel weapons tended to have 30 durability.  Silver had 20.  They’d break fast, especially in the hands of faster units that didn’t have the best attack stat.  You basically got 10 rounds of combat out of them, and with only five inventory slots, you needed to be carrying more weapons, which meant less support items.

Now, consider what would happen if you kept those weapons, but removed durability.  Suddenly, such a system doesn’t work.  Cost is no longer a problem, because you only need to ever buy one, and durability is removed, both negating how many you need to carry and freeing up inventory space.  Clearly, the Silver weapons are now, maybe, a bit too good?  So, how do you balance this out?  Fates decided to fiddle with stats outright.  Much like with the hidden daggers, stat changes were kind of a fixation for this game, for better or worse.  I, personally, think it needlessly complicated a lot of things, but that’s not important.  What is important is how Fates handled this.

Steel Weapons universally give a -5 Speed penalty.  That’s enough that, if you had even speed, the enemy now double-strikes you.  Now, Steel was heavy enough in previous games that this feels pretty similar, but without the convolution of having to know how Constitution works.  I can respect the attempt.  But what we lost was the distinction for sturdier units that still had a speed stat.  Mercenaries can’t really use Steel anymore.  There’s a heavy stat penalty for that, and they use speed a lot.  Silver weapons got hit as well.  Now you lose attack and skill when you attack.  It’s less severe, at only two points of loss, but they recover only one point per turn.  So you’re still taking a hit to both damage, and likelihood of hitting in the first place.  Considering that skills exist and many activate off of your skill stat, that’s even more significant.

But here’s what really gets me.  S-rank weapons, the ultimate weapons of their type, the ones you can only wield effectively if you’ve spent the entire game mastering the weapon.  They have penalties as well.  For instance, the S-rank katana halves your strength stat through your next action.  The weapon itself has 18 might, which is pretty good, but if your Strength is capped, you probably lost as much damage as the weapon’s might.  At that point, you’re better off with Brass than you are this thing.  The sheer, overwhelming deficits inflicted on the player by these stronger weapons is outrageous, and it leads into my problem with forging.

Forging an Iron weapon is the smartest action you can take.  Why?  Because you buff up your weapon damage quite a lot, maybe not to the point of the Silver and certainly not to the level of the S-rank weapons.  But there’s no draw-backs on them.  So instead of hurting your ability to hit enemies or activate skills, you just have raw damage.  Instead of halving your strength stat, you just...get the damage.  It’s an outright better weapon than the ultimate S.  And so, the best weapon in Fates isn’t the thing you’ve been building toward getting that you only obtain in the final hour as you approach the ultimate boss of your route.  It’s the simple Iron weapon, upgraded through dozens of artificial stones you collected in My Castle and paid for with a dozen copies of the same weapon and hundreds of thousands of gold you farmed.

So that’s why I hate the weapons in Fates.  That is, without question, the thing that holds the gameplay back.  Because you didn’t really...need these deficits, you know?  You could’ve done just fine without them.  But no, if we did that, why would anyone need to collect resources?  If no one needed to collect resources, why would they visit other castles?  If you won’t visit other castles, then why even offer that?  Exactly, why even offer that?  My Castle was an arbitrary idea that they generated, and tied into core gameplay mechanics in a way that does nothing but drastically slow down progress through the plot.  It’s invasive and unnecessary, and it really, really bothers me.

BONUS ROUND

I’m also gonna complain about the weapon triangle!  In the olden times, by which I mean Awakening, the triangle was simple.  Swords beat Axe, Axe beat Lance, Lance beat Sword.  Easy.  Tomes have historically had some weapon triangle of their own.  In older times, Light beat Dark, Dark beat Anima, Anima beat Light.  In the Radiant games, it was Fire, Wind, and Lightning in a similar deal.  But tomes have always been outside of the weapon triangle.  Why is that?  Well, two reasons.  One is that tomes are problem solvers.  Got a physical wall in the way?  Blast it with magic.  The other is that, despite being said problem solver, mages are frail, and having no strength against a particular weapon means that they go down to about any physical fighter that gets in range.  Archers especially are devastating for mages, because they hit the weaker defensive stat and are also ranged fighters.

Now, though?  Now, tomes are included in the weapon triangle, as just a whole thing.  All tomes are good against bows now for some reason, while they’re weak to daggers.  This means that ninja, who tend to have pretty good resistance, become hard counters to mages.  Which is honestly okay.  I don’t really dislike the idea of having things be able to beat mages.  Apparently, in the times before I got into the series, magic was horrifically overpowered.  But now, we run into some problems.

Dagger users have range, weaken enemy defenses, and have high resistance and speed.  Unless your unit is physically sturdy, strong, and skilled, ninjas win out.  So personally?  I kinda felt like they were a bit much in this game the first time I played.  Maybe I’ll think differently as I go through now, but they really felt like the most powerful unit.  But the more devastating thing is that...Lance and Dagger occupy the same category.  Meaning lances have advantage over tome.  Meaning that Generals, the super physical tanks that can only really be handled by mages, have fucking weapon advantage over mages now.  Brilliant work, Fates, expertly done.

Bows being in the weapon triangle also bothers me.  Mages have advantage there too, so Bows have less of a chance.  Ninjas took their main niche.  Oh, except for dealing with flying units.  But flying units are mostly lance and axes, so no change there, at least.  It just feels arbitrary.

Honestly, I think Heroes did this concept a lot better.  Tomes come in different kinds, and they have advantage over one another, but also are strong against a particular melee weapon.�� Daggers and bows are considered outside of the weapon triangle, so the weird matchups no longer exist.  Now, if only the next game can confirm that healers can attack, we’ll be in real business...

[hydrus]

Version 324

windows

zip

exe

os x

app

tar.gz

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. The downloader overhaul is almost done.

pixiv

Just as Pixiv recently moved their art pages to a new phone-friendly, dynamically drawn format, they are now moving their regular artist gallery results to the same system. If your username isn't switched over yet, it likely will be in the coming week.

The change breaks our old html parser, so I have written a new downloader and json api parser. The way their internal api works is unusual and over-complicated, so I had to write a couple of small new tools to get it to work. However, it does seem to work again.

All of your subscriptions and downloaders will try to switch over to the new downloader automatically, but some might not handle it quite right, in which case you will have to go into edit subscriptions and update their gallery manually. You'll get a popup on updating to remind you of this, and if any don't line up right automatically, the subs will notify you when they next run. The api gives all content--illustrations, manga, ugoira, everything--so there unfortunately isn't a simple way to refine to just one content type as we previously could. But it does neatly deliver everything in just one request, so artist searching is now incredibly faster.

Let me know if pixiv gives any more trouble. Now we can parse their json, we might be able to reintroduce the arbitrary tag search, which broke some time ago due to the same move to javascript galleries.

twitter

In a similar theme, given our fully developed parser and pipeline, I have now wangled a twitter username search! It should be added to your downloader list on update. It is a bit hacky and may be ultimately fragile if they change something their end, but it otherwise works great. It discounts retweets and fetches 19/20 tweets per gallery 'page' fetch. You should be able to set up subscriptions and everything, although I generally recommend you go at it slowly until we know this new parser works well. BTW: I think twitter only 'browses' 3200 tweets in the past, anyway. Note that tweets with no images will be 'ignored', so any typical twitter search will end up with a lot of 'Ig' results--this is normal. Also, if the account ever retweets more than 20 times in a row, the search will stop there, due to how the clientside pipeline works (it'll think that page is empty).

Again, let me know how this works for you. This is some fun new stuff for hydrus, and I am interested to see where it does well and badly.

misc

In order to be less annoying, the 'do you want to run idle jobs?' on shutdown dialog will now only ask at most once per day! You can edit the time unit under options->maintenance and processing.

Under options->connection, you can now change max total network jobs globally and per domain. The defaults are 15 and 3. I don't recommend you increase them unless you know what you are doing, but if you want a slower/more cautious client, please do set them lower.

The new advanced downloader ui has a bunch of quality of life improvements, mostly related to the handling of example parseable data.

full list

downloaders:

after adding some small new parser tools, wrote a new pixiv downloader that should work with their new dynamic gallery's api. it fetches all an artist's work in one page. some existing pixiv download components will be renamed and detached from your existing subs and downloaders. your existing subs may switch over to the correct pixiv downloader automatically, or you may need to manually set them (you'll get a popup to remind you).

wrote a twitter username lookup downloader. it should skip retweets. it is a bit hacky, so it may collapse if they change something small with their internal javascript api. it fetches 19-20 tweets per 'page', so if the account has 20 rts in a row, it'll likely stop searching there. also, afaik, twitter browsing only works back 3200 tweets or so. I recommend proceeding slowly.

added a simple gelbooru 0.1.11 file page parser to the defaults. it won't link to anything by default, but it is there if you want to put together some booru.org stuff

you can now set your default/favourite download source under options->downloading

.

misc:

the 'do idle work on shutdown' system will now only ask/run once per x time units (including if you say no to the ask dialog). x is one day by default, but can be set in 'maintenance and processing'

added 'max jobs' and 'max jobs per domain' to options->connection. defaults remain 15 and 3

the colour selection buttons across the program now have a right-click menu to import/export #FF0000 hex codes from/to the clipboard

tag namespace colours and namespace rendering options are moved from 'colours' and 'tags' options pages to 'tag summaries', which is renamed to 'tag presentation'

the Lain import dropper now supports pngs with single gugs, url classes, or parsers--not just fully packaged downloaders

fixed an issue where trying to remove a selection of files from the duplicate system (through the advanced duplicates menu) would only apply to the first pair of files

improved some error reporting related to too-long filenames on import

improved error handling for the folder-scanning stage in import folders--now, when it runs into an error, it will preserve its details better, notify the user better, and safely auto-pause the import folder

png export auto-filenames will now be sanitized of \, /, :, *-type OS-path-invalid characters as appropriate as the dialog loads

the 'loading subs' popup message should appear more reliably (after 1s delay) if the first subs are big and loading slow

fixed the 'fullscreen switch' hover window button for the duplicate filter

deleted some old hydrus session management code and db table

some other things that I lost track of. I think it was mostly some little dialog fixes :/

.

advanced downloader stuff:

the test panel on pageparser edit panels now has a 'post pre-parsing conversion' notebook page that shows the given example data after the pre-parsing conversion has occurred, including error information if it failed. it has a summary size/guessed type description and copy and refresh buttons.

the 'raw data' copy/fetch/paste buttons and description are moved down to the raw data page

the pageparser now passes up this post-conversion example data to sub-objects, so they now start with the correctly converted example data

the subsidiarypageparser edit panel now also has a notebook page, also with brief description and copy/refresh buttons, that summarises the raw separated data

the subsidiary page parser now passes up the first post to its sub-objects, so they now start with a single post's example data

content parsers can now sort the strings their formulae get back. you can sort strict lexicographic or the new human-friendly sort that does numbers properly, and of course you can go ascending or descending--if you can get the ids of what you want but they are in the wrong order, you can now easily fix it!

some json dict parsing code now iterates through dict keys lexicographically ascending by default. unfortunately, due to how the python json parser I use works, there isn't a way to process dict items in the original order

the json parsing formula now uses a string match when searching for dictionary keys, so you can now match multiple keys here (as in the pixiv illusts|manga fix). existing dictionary key look-ups will be converted to 'fixed' string matches

the json parsing formula can now get the content type 'dictionary keys', which will fetch all the text keys in the dictionary/Object, if the api designer happens to have put useful data in there, wew

formulae now remove newlines from their parsed texts before they are sent to the StringMatch! so, if you are grabbing some multi-line html and want to test for 'Posted: ' somewhere in that mess, it is now easy.

next week

After slaughtering my downloader overhaul megajob of redundant and completed issues (bringing my total todo from 1568 down to 1471!), I only have 15 jobs left to go. It is mostly some quality of life stuff and refreshing some out of date help. I should be able to clear most of them out next week, and the last few can be folded into normal work.

So I am now planning the login manager. After talking with several users over the past few weeks, I think it will be fundamentally very simple, supporting any basic user/pass web form, and will relegate complicated situations to some kind of improved browser cookies.txt import workflow. I suspect it will take 3-4 weeks to hash out, and then I will be taking four weeks to update to python 3, and then I am a free agent again. So, absent any big problems, please expect the 'next big thing to work on poll' to go up around the end of October, and for me to get going on that next big thing at the end of November. I don't want to finalise what goes on the poll yet, but I'll open up a full discussion as the login manager finishes.

[vg-sanctuary]

One Piece Mansion

Capcom - PlayStation - 2001 (this has nothing to do with the other thing called One Piece!)

One Piece Mansion is an intense action puzzle game where you try to keep your mansion in the black for as long as possible by making sure tenants don't get too stressed. I'm a big fan! it's upsettingly underrated for how fun it is, especially considering it was directed by the same guy as Devil May Cry. it doesn't attempt the same simple elegance as Tetris, which is good to see, because other games that attempted that simplicity like Yoshi and Zoop never were as fun as Tetris in my opinion, but I'll easily take One Piece Mansion over Tetris. then again, I'm not much a fan of Tetris. has anyone gotten as good at One Piece Mansion as some are at that?

about the gameplay: you try to maintain a mansion of cube-shaped rooms to keep from going bankrupt for as long as possible. if a tenant gets too stressed, their room explodes and you lose a bunch of money. a red arrow means a tenant is giving stress in that direction, and a green one means they're removing it; during the game you can hold a button to show every stress arrow at once like in the screenshot. tenants can also be moved for a small amount of money. the game speed ebbs and flows over time and you lose more money per exploded room the longer you've lasted. great, right?

but, importantly, there are tenants from a criminal organization called Syndicate 5 that randomly move in, don't pay rent and go out of their way to stress out other tenants. those ones you want to overstress on purpose to make them go away, and the game keeps track of how many you forced out with each high score. every tenant's green and red arrows are double-edged swords: you want to keep your paying tenants stress-free but not accidentally keep around a criminal, and you want to overstress criminals without forcing out paying tenants. that's where the fun is: One Piece Mansion could have easily left out the criminals and just been about keeping everyone at low stress, but they create conflict and make the game about frantically managing which tenants are where to overstress a select few but keep all the others in balance.

the criminals are more varied than their stress patterns. each one wanders around and causes different problems in other tenants' rooms that you have to walk to and take care of. those little chases spice up the gameplay in a way I've never seen in other action puzzle games. these little flamey guys are especially annoying because if you leave a fire too long it'll burn rooms down and sometimes decides to spread.

also, certain tenants change depending on how stressed they are. for example, there's a student penguin that doesn't do anything until he's stressed, then he'll stress out the folks to his sides and bottom diagonals. probably strategically important but I'm not good enough for that. and the difficulty levels, instead of changing game speed or costs or rent, change the sets of tenants you can randomly get and the width of the play area, which is much more interesting.

anyway, there's also a story mode with some arbitrary goals and a really cute looking antagonist (everyone looks cute, actually, the art style is cute) that's basically meant to teach you the management skills you need for endless. it's a real shame it hasn't been remade or cloned, as I don't think there's anything like it and it seriously holds up. it would make a great mobile game — touch controls would suit it well — though it's not exactly the best for playing in short bursts since an endless game can easily go over 30 minutes. then again, Onion Games's Million Onion Hotel can somehow go for 20 when it feels more like 2. One Piece Mansion isn't especially expensive, around $15 for a complete copy when I last checked, and easy to find on eBay. the only reading is the simple menus, the simple story and the tenant lore blurbs so if you have a Japanese unit with no way to play US games you'll be able to play this just fine. I'm lucky to have found this game and some of the others I like on old, old episodes of Game Grumps when they played whatever they picked off the shelf. my high score on normal is 9y5m4w with 77 Syndicate 5 forced out! I got a much higher one on a 3DS emulator but it was running at about half speed so I don't think it counts.

[pcurrytravels]

Thoughts: New Orleans (Part III)

We first made our way across Rampart to Louis Armstrong Park. I was already excited as it was here where I laid eyes on the famed Congo Square. You see, under French and Spanish colonial policy, African slaves were allowed a day off. On this day, this was the place where they would gather to sing, dance, play music, make and sell wares and just keep in touch with their original cultural identity. A strange….happy feeling came over me as I walked around it. I would say hopeful even, and it’s not hard to see why. The Louisiana slaves were quite lucky to have a brief escape from their predicament such as this; you can’t quite say the same for slaves elsewhere in the south.

Anyway, after briefly stopping in Congo Square, we then walked over to the edge of Louis Armstrong Park……only to learn that said park was built over dead bodies. Apparently, the southern portion of it was originally the location of St. Peter Cemetery. In contrast to the above-ground tombs, crypts and vaults ubiquitous in the locale today, this was your run-of-the-mill, six feet underground-style cemetery. Given the region’s high water table, it was quite the morbid sight to behold when it was still in existence. Any time there was even just a little bit of flooding, the bodies would resurface, sometimes even floating down the street. Fed up, the residents of New Orleans insisted that they get a Catholic-style cemetery akin to the ones in France and Spain (being well-acquainted with the area’s disposition to flooding and hurricanes, you’d think they would have done this in the first place but I digress). So, in 1789, they got one, and it’s still in operation today. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1; the oldest continually-used cemetery in the entire United States.

A literal city of the dead, with 700 tombs, and over 100,000 burials. Okay, I’m sure you’ve gotten confused again, so here goes: The reason why there can be so many burials despite the limited amount of tombs is because the tombs double as cremation ovens. They never embalm anyone before burying them here; that way, the natural cremation process won’t be interrupted. Each vault is checked after an arbitrary period of a year and one day to see if the body has disintegrated into ash yet. If it has, then the ash is to be swept down a chute that has been installed into the back of each vault. Thanks to this process, each tomb can be reused an infinite amount of times. And let us be real here; this just makes SO much more sense than having large, sprawling fields of graves. After death, the human body will eventually decompose into dust anyway, and as the generations pass on, said person’s grave will likely have fewer and fewer visitors. At some point you’re just going to have empty coffins using up space. It’s a wonder why this technique isn’t utilized by more people; but there were some stubborn people who simply weren’t having it. More on that later.

Thanks to years of vandalism, grave robbery, gangbangers and drug dealers using the alleys to conduct business, and muggers attacking visitors (the now-demolished housing projects of Iberville used to be right next door if that says anything), you can now only enter this cemetery if you’re with a licensed tour guide or have been granted permission by NOLA’s Catholic diocese. It felt so odd having to show wristbands and identification to enter a cemetery of all places, but given all of the aforementioned issues, I can understand why. Then again, this was a strange and odd place. There was just something so simultaneously beautiful and eerie about weaving in and out of these pathways and alleys between tombs. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind the place is haunted AF.

One place where things get even creepier (or utterly hilarious, depending on your interpretation) is in this little corner deemed the “American Section.” Remember what I said about some people not being down with above-ground burials? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. The backstory goes a little something like this: After the Louisiana Purchase, Protestant Americans started flocking to New Orleans in droves, despite the fact that most of them detested Catholicism (again: what is this logic?). Naturally, they perceived the Catholic way of laying the dead to rest as an abomination and insisted on being buried underground. Even after receiving explanation of why that was a bad idea, they still didn’t care, so when the time came, they were buried in the Protestant fashion of six feet under, with heavy concrete slabs atop their graves to prevent the bodies from resurfacing.

The concrete slabs worked, but only to an extent. Whenever heavy rains and the associated flooding occurred, the underground water would still penetrate the grave. While the heavy concrete on top did prevent the coffins from resurfacing, said coffins would still rise up and loudly bump against the concrete (………could you even imagine hearing something like that in a CEMETERY?). Catholic parents used this to tell their frightened children to be good Catholics, lest they wish to be restless in death like the noisy Protestants in the corner. Eventually, Protestant burials were moved to Girod Street Cemetery, that cemetery now being underneath the Superdome (no wonder the New Orleans Saints are cursed). Interestingly, despite being designated as a Protestant/American cemetery, the former Girod cemetery also had above-ground tombs and vaults. I’m guessing the Americans learned their lesson after the fiasco at St. Louis. Anyways, moving on.

Something of note is how, eschewing Protestants/early American migrants, the cemetery was never really segregated. French, Black, Mixed-race, Italian and what have you were dispersed throughout the entire plot of land equally. It did have “sections” but they were never strictly enforced. Example: Marie Laveau (a free person of color in her life) was interned in the Glapion crypt (a prominent white Creole family). Oh yeah, that’s right, Marie Laveau!

Arguably the most famous tomb in all of St. Louis No. 1, for years upon years, people would leave offerings and write “XXX” before putting their hands on the vault and praying to it. It’s even long been alleged that her spirit inhabits a crow that can be seen perched atop said crypt at night. Because of that, this particular tomb used to look a mess with old candles, rotting flowers, Mardi Gras beads and other sorts of junk all over the place in addition to being covered in scribbles of XXX. That’s all been cleaned up in recent years, and the only thing anyone’s allowed to do these days is bring flowers. A necessary move, because not only was all of that disrespectful vandalism, but none of it actually worked anyway. This little ritual was not Voodoo of the Louisiana variety, but of the Hollywood variety……something Marie Laveau indirectly created herself.

In regards to Marie Laveau’s life, not much is known with certainty (though it must be said that American Horror Story: Coven wasn’t even close to accurate). It’s said she had fifteen children, but the only ones much of anything is known about are three daughters, also named Marie, who looked identical to her. General consensus is that her day job was hairdressing, but there’s also evidence that she worked as a liquor importer, in addition to claims that she was a matchmaker and/or the madam of a brothel. She was known as being a devout Catholic with a strong sense of justice and charity for her community, regularly nursing patients of the infamous yellow fever back to health and posting bail for jailed Blacks. Ironically (and disappointing if it was true), it’s alleged that she may have had a slave or two herself despite how much she championed for fair and equal treatment (sadly, it wasn’t uncommon at all for free people of color to own slaves back in those days, especially in Louisiana).

One has to wonder just how much of the mystery was intentionally created by Laveau herself. After all, when she divorced her first husband, a man by the name of Jacques Paris, she called herself his “widow” even though he was still very much alive. Apparently, she took the divorce quite hard and her reasoning was that he was dead to her. Coincidentally, several months later Paris DID turn up dead, and the circumstances surrounding his death were very mysterious (seeing a pattern here yet?). Everyone in town insisted that she must have predicted his death, even though she was shocked by the news herself. Her reaction? She just went along with it. And thus the legend was born.

During the early/mid-19th century, Laveau was probably the most popular woman in town. People came from far and wide to her home on the corner of St. Ann and Burgundy in the Quarter, in hopes of her using her powers for good fortune, be it in wealth, relationships, lawsuits, business or a number of other matters. Now, she was quite competent in Voodoo of course, or else she wouldn’t be officially sanctified as a Voodoo Queen, but as far as her practice with the Creole elite of New Orleans is concerned? She was basically a fortune teller. Being a hairdresser to upper-class women put her in a prime position to hear a LOT of gossip and rumors. If Miss Robichaux told her all about Mr. Delacroix having an illegitimate child with his Quadroon mistress over in Marigny, then she would know exactly what to tell Miss Delacroix when she stopped by to ask for marriage counseling.

Laveau had no qualms about passing the torch either. There was one daughter in particular who would regularly make a spectacle of her rituals on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, inviting all to stop by and watch. Interestingly enough, she wouldn’t address herself as Marie Laveau’s daughter, but as Marie Laveau herself. And in spite of her significantly younger appearance, it worked, leading some to allege that the OG Laveau was immortal. Whether this was part of her mother’s instructions or not is unclear, but the myth was only further amplified after her death. Mere days after her burial, either Marie II and/or another one of the alleged lookalike daughters would begin to regularly emerge from her home and go about town, dressed head-to-toe in the same manner as their mother, and claimed to be her. This explains the rumors that swirled around for years after her death that she was still alive.

Regardless of what’s fact and what’s fiction, one thing that’s for sure is that Laveau-Mania never died. Our tour guide, Dartanya for those who missed it in the first post, told us that the cemetery tours have long been plagued with people who were only there for Marie Laveau. In frustration, many tour guides would pick some random tomb and claim it was hers, and people would perform the phony ritual on it and everything. This has led to a number of tombs called “Faux-Laveaus,” with “XXX” scribbled on them. I spotted about five myself.

Aside from Marie Laveau, there’s a number of notable people also buried in this cemetery, including, but not limited to: Homer Plessy (of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame), Ernest N. Morial (the first black mayor of New Orleans), Barthelemy Lafon (noted architect in 18th/early 19th century New Orleans who was in cahoots with the pirate Jean Lafitte) and possibly Delphine LaLaurie (more on THAT woman later *shiver*).

Another thing of note is that the cemetery is slated to be the future resting home of Nicolas Cage (the cemetery is still in operation today, remember?). He has a large pyramid vault smack dab in the middle of the cemetery that’s impossible to miss. Strangely enough, before the recent crackdowns, just like Marie Laveau’s tomb, his future tomb had a little ritual of its own. Apparently, girls were kissing it for good luck which is weird because…….he’s still alive? And his religious background is Catholic? And he’s still alive? And he’s a has-been actor that’s been plagued with financial problems? And he’s still alive? And who on Earth told you to do that? And did I mention that he’s still alive?

One hour and enough sweat to fill a bucket later (for some reason the cemetery is ten degrees hotter than the rest of the city), it was time to go and I must give my compliments to our tour guide, Miss Dartanya. It was truly a pleasure listening to her talk, even making the heat slightly more bearable. She was very thorough and informative without ever being boring, backing up her facts with examples and adding lots of humor as well. If you do any tour through French Quarter Phantoms, I highly recommend requesting Dartanya as your guide. When I visit New Orleans again, I plan to do the same myself.

Of course, I had to ask about the second most famous burial site, St. Louis No. 2. A number of early Jazz and R&B musicians as well as slightly more recent notable figures in New Orleans history were entombed there. However, very few tours go through there because, in comparison to No. 1, it’s a longer walking distance from the French Quarter, hasn’t been kept up very well, with an even worse vandalism problem and has a rather unsafe location to boot. You see, as already stated above, both cemeteries were located on the fringes of a notorious public housing complex known as Iberville. Not even tourists visiting the cemeteries were safe from the rampant crime in the area; with No. 2 having it even worse due to having a somewhat more isolated and hidden location in comparison to No. 1.

In 2013, most of it was demolished in favor of a mixed-income development called Bienville Basin, and the neighborhood is much safer now as a result, although caution should still be exercised. Interestingly enough, I did see one building of the former complex which still stands, being protected by the National Register. Even more interesting is how, before Iberville came into being, this plot of land used to be Storyville.

The city’s official red-light district from the 1890’s to the 1910’s; in a locale already known for sin and debauchery, this was an interior island where the morals got even looser. Judicial loopholes were exposed that allowed prostitution and recreational drug use to be legal within the 38 blocks that made up the district. There were numerous brothels side by side, from fifty cent joints or “cribs” housed in Creole cottages to the lavish, high-rent mansions on Basin, all of which had white, black and quadroon/octoroon girls offering their services. The saloons and restaurants in the area were also early hotbeds for the then-burgeoning sound of Jazz.

Thanks to being a close neighbor with Basin St. Station (it’s been said that prostitutes would stand on their balconies to wave and blow kisses at train passengers……….while naked), many New Orleans residents began to protest the presence of Storyville. The then-heavy Navy presence in the area brought even more tension. The scandal that emerged when several servicemen from the local base turned up dead within the district definitely didn’t help matters in the slightest. Eventually, under intense federal pressure, Storyville was formally shut down as a red-light district in 1917. It still continued on in a more sanitized capacity well into the 1930’s however, with a small number of speakeasies, casinos and brothels still operating undercover until it was all razed in favor of Iberville. Very little of the district remains today aside from a few buildings which once operated as saloons, but operate today on more benign terms (Lulu White’s old saloon in particular is now currently occupied by a grocery store). Well, unless you count Basin Street Station.

Although its days as a train station have long since passed, the structure has found new life as a time capsule of New Orleans history. On the website it’s termed as a “welcome center” for New Orleans, and it definitely fulfills its purpose in that regard. Oh, it’s also free. Within, you’ll find small exhibits about Jazz, French and Spanish colonial history, Afro-Creole/African-American history, Pirates, Mardi Gras, Hurricane Katrina and several other topics in addition to a gift shop. After leaving the cemetery, we came in here to cool down from the humidity before requesting a shuttle to Mardi Gras World. Stay tuned.

[dedalvs]

Hey David! Have you read Arthur Clarke's Rama series? How feasable do you think the octospiders' language is?

I’ve never read anything by Arthur C. Clarke, but I found someone who collected everything they could find about the language here. Regarding your question, is it feasible for there to be a language for beings like this? Certainly. Would it work like the description? lol I hope not. Any conlanger worth their salt could create something better than what’s described here. For example, with the units listed here, we run into two common (and obvious to conlangers) problems:

This language doesn’t take advantage of the medium.

The morphology isn’t self-segrating, and there’s no obvious way to break up units.

So, my first question would be about the colored bands. Can they change from one color to another instantaneously, no matter what the two colors are? If not, there should be phonology happening, and we should see the result of that with the words/phrases listed. For example, in English, this is a fine word:

slacks

This is not a fine word:

aszsgtb

We can say each of those sounds individually, but a human can’t simply transition from [g] to [t] to [b] with no vowels in between. Even if there were a word of English that was phonologically “aszsgtb”, we’d find a way to pronounce it that fit English phonotactic patterns.

So back to our color language, transitioning from lemon yellow to saffron quickly? Piece of cake. Transitioning from lemon yellow to burnt sienna? Probably can’t happen as quickly, if this is a natural being. If this language were to naturally evolve, I’d expect that type of transition to happen less likely, or to not happen at all—or at least not in the same word.

Also, what do they look like when these things are “off”? Is there a neutral color, or are they always in some color? And if there is a neutral color, how quickly can they get back there? Will they do it between words (basically a space)? Because if there is no neutral color, and they can’t stop between words, how would you know that a word that’s Crimson-Aquamarine-Mauve is what’s intended if there’s also a word that’s Saffron-Crimson-Aquamarine and maybe another that’s Aquamarine-Mauve-Vermillion? Sure, there’s context, but in any language with lots of homophones there’s still pauses between words and phrases and sentences, and intonation to help you tell what’s what. There’s no information about how things break down into phrases in this language. Also, can they move the rest of their bodies in a particular way? Can they change the patterns the colors appear in, or how vibrantly they appear? Can they use their appendage for gesture that would serve as intonation? Too many questions! I mean, there’s a word that’s supposed to be Burnt Sienna-Mauve-Mauve. How?! If can you tell if it’s two mauves in a row?!

Also, the clarifier system just doesn’t make sense. Previously I talked about how ASL incorporate numerals in some of its signs, but that’s because it’s easy to do, on account of the medium. In this language, they’re voluntarily giving up some of their phonemes and turning them into grammatical bits. It’d be like if in English, all our sounds were just sounds, but fricatives were numbers, for some reason (so we wouldn’t use “f, v, s, z, sh, zh or h” as anything but intensifiers on certain words). That’s almost the opposite of what ASL is doing. In ASL, there are certain signs where the shape the hand is in isn’t particularly important (the way the hands move and where they’re placed is more important), so since a hand can be made it into a numeral, you use that and combine it with the meaning of the sign to get, e.g. 2 WEEKS, 3 WEEKS, 7 WEEKS, etc. It makes sense. It works with the system. This works against the system. It makes it a worse system for a seemingly arbitrary reason.

It’s also not clear exactly how these colors work. Are they presented one at a time? If so, for how long? If not, how does it work? Are they projected on their body in an order so it’s basically like reading a typewritten line, but with color rather than letters? If so, how many colors can they cram into a line? How well can the aliens “read” these colors (how big does a color have to be to be recognized)? How long does it take to do? How long does it take to read? How much of this can they hold in working memory? Do they have to plan out what they want to say because there’s only so much room on their foreheads? I mean, that’s not something that humans really do, because we can just breathe. There’s not usually a point where we say, “Well, I could say ‘incapacitated’, but I’ve only got like four letters worth of breath left, so I’ll just say ‘dead’.” Yet that seems like a real problem here! Like, “I’ve only got three colors worth of forehead room left here. Do I really want to use one of those colors as a hyphen…?”

Anyway, the short answer here is that there are a lot of unanswered questions I have, but provided the information on the page I linked to is accurate, there’s evidence that this was not done by a conlanger (which, of course, it wasn’t). I mean, if you’re creating a language, it’s got to make sense, given the medium and the beings. That’s rule #1—even before you get to the setting, the culture, the grammar, etc. This one seems like it needs to be taken back to the drawing board.

[tape-hiss]

Aetherian immigration

Hello! It's Tape Hiss time again. This month I'm covering another request: the immigration system in Aetheri! If you're curious as to what, exactly, Liya's legal status is--or Yoshi's, or Shinobu's--you might be interested in this post. Also, Aetherian immigration law is not nearly as uninteresting or complex to read about as, say, US immigration laws.

I do want to take this chance to say: immigration law in the US is already pretty brutal, and immigrants (undocumented or otherwise) are facing more and more threats from the collection of haunted fascist ventriloquist dummies currently in office here. If you can, please consider donating to an organization like MPower or United We Dream. 

Anyway, read on.

So, as mentioned--both in comic and outside it--the Cynn is the governmental figure in Aetheri that makes most of the immigration laws. Their powers cover mainly international and interworld issues, which cover immigration to a point. The part the Cynn's powers don't extend to (as much as Numair might like them to) is what laws govern immigrants after they get here. That largely lies with local governments, e.g. the Escalus 'mayor' and city council. That's where things start getting ugly.

The basic, intended process from entering the country to becoming a naturalized citizen goes like this:

 You apply at an Aetherian port-of-entry, in person.

 You must name a sponsor on your application. This has to be someone with Aetherian citizenship who will be essentially responsible for your behavior until you become a citizen.

 You then live in Aetheri; you must keep your address current with your city, and you must live within a certain distance of your sponsor.

 All you have to do then is a) not leave Aetheri for too long a time as that forfeits your visa, and b) live the equivalent of half your age at immigration in Aetheri, with a limit of 50 years, rounded to the nearest year.

 Then you're a citizen. This is still a separate category from native-born Aetherians legally, but you are a citizen.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Sure. Here's the catches, though.

There are very, very few permanent Aetherian ports-of-entry. One of them is in Enodia, in the Symphony Archipelago. There are two on Earth, one in the United States and one in China. There are lots of temporary ports set up all over several different worlds, but it's impossible to know where they are without being told, and they open and close without warning. Most of these temporary ports are Royal Order outposts, places to process slave trade refugees through, which is why they move. Some are just located in places where Aetheri technically has no legal right to set up any kind of permanent port.

You need to know someone in Aetheri well enough before moving there that they'll vouch for your entry. There are now networks in place to hook immigrants up with Aetherian volunteers for this, but there's definitely not enough Aetherian citizens to meet this demand. You can only sponsor one person at a time, although there's a couple ways to get around this (e.g. you can sponsor a whole family under certain conditions, or get away with sponsoring two people in different parts of Aetheri where the governments don't talk to each other, so long as you live near each person for half the year.)

Living within a certain distance of your sponsor can be difficult--in Escalus, most immigrants live on the south side of the city, away from where their (probably more affluent and well-established) sponsors would live. There's a lot of fighting in the city government over how far is close enough for this requirement.

If you leave Aetheri for a certain amount of time, you forfeit your visa (and the amount of time is arbitrary, controlled at the port of entry, and totally out of Numair’s hands) There's also a chance they may not let you back in no matter how long you were away, because you can't really do anything about it. There's a chance they'll just ignore your trying to get through the gate until you've been outside too long and your visa has been forfeited. This really just depends on what kind of assholes are staffing the port of entry.

The time requirement is ostensibly to make sure you're really acclimated to Aetheri before you become a citizen, but in practice it's sort of ridiculous. For example: Yoshi came to Aetheri at age 6, so she became a citizen three years later at age 9. Meanwhile, Shinobu came to Aetheri when she was already three hundred-something. She's now been in Aetheri for 65 years, and for 50 of those, she still wasn't a citizen. If you come to Aetheri as an 80-year-old human, you'd have to live another 40 years to be a citizen. Granted, this doesn't sound like a long time to spirits, but it is to a lot of other people.

Additionally, there are, on paper, a limited number of visas that can be allotted per year. This is in place because of legitimate concerns that too many people flooding in all at once would overwhelm Aetheri's infrastructure and ability to feed everyone; letting people in gradually allows food production to scale up, empty homes to be repaired or new ones to be built, new businesses and trades to get a foothold, and so on. This is a fair enough concern for Aetheri in particular, since their population is small and they don't produce a lot of surplus. It does shut people out, though, and the policy itself doesn't consider emergencies like crises going on right now in the Archipelago, for example.

There are a lot of ways to get around this, though. The most notable is that you can get an exemption from the requirement for a sponsor and get a visa even if the allotted number has been filled if you are coming into the country with an academic appointment, or if you're a healer with a unique ability/specific clientele. Shinobu got an exemption by doing the former; she had previously made the acquaintance of an instructor at the University at Escalus when they were on Earth, and they were able to nominate her for an academic appointment based on the fact that she was already collecting so much information for a bestiary by then. The University thought having a complete bestiary (or as complete as possible) would be a good addition to their wealth of knowledge, so they brought her on. In her case, the University was essentially her sponsor, and therefore would have to answer for any trouble she got into (which she didn't.)

Another way to get around this is if you are a magic-user with powers that would clearly pose a danger to yourself or others if they were left un-mastered. Aetherian law holds that magic users must be taught to use their magic, and it's a responsibility that if the community of magic teachers finds an inexperienced magic-user without a teacher no matter where they are from, they must find one or be one themselves. This is the loophole Numair mentions exploiting here--perhaps he noted that Captain Marinos mentioned that Liya's healing magic can be lethal if she chooses it to be, and so he used that to make the case that she should be granted this exemption. Helly ended up her sponsor because with this justification, by being contacted about her by Marinos ne was technically required to teach her or find someone who could.

Yoshi, meanwhile, was sponsored by Vlad. There's still a lot of fighting over whether or not a naturalized citizen should be able to sponsor another immigrant (legally right now yes, but actually being able to do so is another matter--more often than not their request is turned down because $ARBITRARY_REASON.) Shinobu chose to skip this headache altogether by asking Vlad to be Yoshi's sponsor. Vlad has no problem with this; honestly, the name 'du Russi' on a form gets it rubber-stamped, more or less, and Vlad uses that rather a lot to his advantage (specifically undermining his more conservative relatives.) Yoshi couldn't have gotten in much trouble during the three years Vlad sponsored her, and after that was up Vlad was free to sponsor someone else.

Yet another loophole to getting around the visa quota lies in Numair's specific powers as the Cynn. He can grant emergency visas personally as he sees fit, and technically this is an unlimited power, but he tries to avoid using it very often, because he wants to keep it for when it's really truly necessary. If he grants too many too fast, the Assembly is sure to notice, and abuse of power is a good way to draw their ire in a way that Numair wouldn't be able to escape. He's done this for a few people over the years (no one we know) for various reasons, but given the fact that most people don't see him, meet him, or even know how to contact him, he doesn't get a lot of requests for this. And when something does come to his attention, he can usually find another loophole for them to slip through.

So why is this so difficult, anyway? Why are some Aetherians making it so difficult to immigrate?

I touched on the source of Aetheri's deep-seated xenophobic psyche in my post on thyft: Aetherian fear of the unknown is rooted deep in being a former prey species. Those stories and that fear are so often repeated that it probably lies deeper within most Aetherians than they'd like to admit. Some don't find it hard to bridge the gap of cultures and appearances when it comes to offworlders--some do, or choose to, and they choose to react with vitriol.

The animosity towards offworlders in Aetheri hasn't always been like this, though. When Aetheri was just beginning to open its borders and establish diplomatic relations again with other nations, most Aetherians were pretty excited about it. Aetheri stagnated for a long time in its own little corner of its planet since the great war, and a lot of people were way into the prospect of new music, new goods, new ideas--anything to breathe some fresh air into their long lives. Even the first wave of immigration into Aetheri was met more with curiosity than anything else, even by spirits who are now thumping the table to restrict offworlders from entering. They found it quaint, if nothing else. There were not many offworlders, and those offworlders were beneath them anyway, so what was the harm?

As immigration increased, the attitudes of some started to change. Not because of any actual problem with the offworlders themselves--they were, as with real-life immigrant populations, less likely to commit crime, and most of them acclimated well in Aetheri. What a lot of older Aetherians began to see was that this new whirlwind of cultures coming in was, in their minds, destroying thousands of years of Aetherian tradition. Younger spirits were more and more making their chosen families with offworlders rather than with their own; they changed their clothes, their hair, their attitudes. The old guard viewed all this as a loss of Aetherian identity, and they started to realize that they were being outnumbered as more and more offworlders came in. Their biggest fear now would be a world in which Aetherian culture had been entirely subsumed into others, where spirits were a minority in their own lands, the lands that did in fact actually belong to them, lands that they'd had to burn down their predators to keep living on without fear. So they reacted more and more violently against this, as time went on.

On the flip side, most of the younger generation of spirits don't view it this way at all. In their minds, they're escaping from a culture in which fear is the driving factor, one that had stagnated and stifled for thousands of years, becoming only drier and heavier-handed as it went. They're leaving families that didn't consider them to be worth much anyways, and making their homes elsewhere, with people who are also outcasts or refugees, who are glad to have them. They're building a new culture with help from the outside--after all, they're Aetherian, so their culture is Aetherian culture. It just looks a bit different, is all.

[This feels like a good time to mention that WN isn’t meant to be a metaphor for any one specific thing. I definitely write WN based on things I observe in real life, but I stick to the mechanics rather than the whole. Less ‘X group is the Y of this world’ and more ‘the dynamics of this society work like this because some of the driving factors are the same as this other thing I see IRL.’ I actually really purposefully write it so that you’d have to do an awful lot of twisting to fit WN into an allegory for any one thing. WN definitely has its own slant, if you will, but this isn’t no Animal Farm.]

So that's the backdrop on which a big chunk of White Noise takes place. What's next? Well, probably a ramping up of animosity between traditionalists and everyone else who doesn't have a problem with Aetheri's new cultural landscape. Naturalized citizens are second class in practice even if not on paper. Immigrant populations have formed their own neighborhoods as they are wont to do based on similar cultures or other factors, building tightly-knit communities that are more and more looking out for themselves since the Aetherian police will often not (which is the sort of climate where mafias get their start, I believe.) There are immigrants in Aetheri that have been there since the 1920s--and there are generations of non-spirits who were born there, by now. But no matter how long they've been there, even naturalized citizens have a sort of tenuous status in Aetheri that, really, depends on the Cynn. The Cynn alone has the power to revoke visas and granted citizenship without prior criminal activity. As long as Numair is in the position, it's not necessarily a problem, but it's a terrible place to put all that power.

*Pretentious text alert*

One final topic, because I feel like it's sort of relevant here: one of White Noise's Big Themes is liminality. Everything and everyone is partway between one thing and another--not opposite things necessarily, but still on a precipice, or a threshold. Aetheri is partway between old and new. Hawk is partway between life and death, so to speak, and partway between human and whatever else. Liya is partway between her home world and her new home in Aetheri, emotionally and mentally. Yoshi is partway between her identity as Aetherian and her outsider-ness to that, and being trans itself is a kind of liminal space, if you ask me. Even Vlad, with his Classical Aetherian Phenotype, is partway between his old family lineage and his clearly non-traditional experiences outside Aetheri that shape who he is. No one is one thing, from one place, entrenched in one culture.

I realize now that this is sort of a problem representation-wise--there is a running theme in some works of PoC characters represented visually, while their perhaps culture is not. You could argue that's a problem with characters like Hawk (Indian and ethnically Russian) and Yoshi (Japanese and ???American), as they have these heritages that I really don't pay a lot of mind to, and that's a fair criticism I think. It wasn't something I thought of when I started White Noise, but I get it now. The purposeful liminal spaces I'm putting in this comic are more drawing from my own queerness, I think, than anything else. I'm investigating something about navigating a world in flux and an identity in flux and having it maybe all shake out okay in the end, or else being okay with the constant ambiguity. That's all, really.

*End pretentious text*

ONE LAST THING because I was delighted to see someone point this out in the comments on a recent page:

Why would you have this intimidating-ass statue of Russi right outside the building where the interworld gates are, where it would be the first thing every new visitor saw?

It’s super on purpose. The skulls are on Russi’s statue because they’re the skulls she used to make the constructs that brought sun and saved Aetheri from famine. To any Aetherian, it’s just a visual motif. You see this sort of thing a lot with Catholic saints, for example, who tend to always be pictured with a motif of whatever would identify them. Examples: Saint Hugh and his swan, or Saint Sebastian, who is always full of arrows (but in a sexy way.)

But Aetherians are aware that this probably looks intimidating, so they put the interworld gates there just to make themselves look big, really. Look at our big statue with skulls on it, we’re metal as fuck, don’t mess with us. A sort of...gentle threat to offworlders, just in case.

Anyway, thank you for reading! As always, my ask box is open for questions. I may not get to them right away because brain problems and real life Big Stress, but I do see them and think about them and will get to them at some point. See ya in January with the next post!

[davidbeam-blog1]

How To Select HR Payroll And Attendance System in Pakistan For You Company

PeopleQlik #1 Attendance System in Pakistan HR the officials is a key limit in any association, as laborers are the engine that drives the business. That is the explanation it's urgent to acknowledge how to pick a nonappearance and leave the load up programming to ensure that the machine reliably works at most noteworthy execution, and that not having one addresses a huge strain on your HR division. 

PeopleQlik #1 Attendance System in Pakistan 

Computing each delegate's yearly leave, nonattendance following, sickness of the load up, etc can end up being altogether overpowering without the best possible gadgets. Until starting late, honestly, most workplaces used a fundamental Excel agent time off tracker group. New innovations, in any case, help us to grow altogether additionally compelling and powerful models: unequivocally arranged nonappearance and leave the Attendance System in Pakistan. 

These ventures are intended to improve, quicken and streamline HR the board tasks. We ought to investigate the features offered by such an equipment and how to pick the one that best tends to your issues. 

Favorable circumstances of utilizing an attendance programming versus Excel 

Surpass desires spreadsheets are up 'til now the most notable procedure for nonattendance and leave the administrators. In any case, this program wasn't intended for this and thusly has its confinements: 

Surpass desires is an absolutely manual gadget. In that capacity, you should make the spreadsheet yourself and enter all the information, which infers a lot of time and effort. 

There's much higher threat of misstep and it's incredibly easy to type in a misguided number at some stage. Customary Excel spreadsheets don't think about joint effort as the report is taken care of on a PC, and not in the cloud. Only one out of every odd individual has the fundamental Excel information required either to manage the information or make the spreadsheet. Then again, there are nonappearance and leave the officials Attendance System in Pakistan that have been organized unequivocally for this limit. What inclinations do they offer? 

Task automation 

Task automation is one of the essential central points of utilizing a specific Attendance System in Pakistan as it enables you to develop a much smoother working strategy. Each delegate's get-away calendar will reliably be invigorated and you can check their openness initially. Furthermore, any event taken will be thus deducted with the objective that you can see what number of they have left at some arbitrary time. 

Accomplishing this in Excel is fairly increasingly confounded. You have to include every day from work a delegate requesting, individually, and truly update what number of they have left. Stumbles or oversights can happen too adequately with this structure and can be antagonistic to the agent being alluded to. 

Time hold reserves 

Non Appearance and leave the officials can be a dull, perpetual task. Indeed, insights show that HR bunches experience more than 90 days out of each year on legitimate tasks while utilizing customary systems, for instance, Excel. 

Anyway by utilizing innovation to manage your association's workforce engages you to redesign resources and achieve better results. At Kenjo, we've found that a specific Attendance System in Pakistan can save you up to 40% of the time spent on basically administrative tasks. 

The most clear model, and one which HR chiefs deal with every day, is overseeing yearly leave, especially as the pre-summer moves close. Agents would ordinarily create an email to the chief mentioning their days off, who by then checks their Excel event coordinator. The boss then answers the email and, in case those days are available, will by then need to enter them truly into the spreadsheet. This whole method possesses a huge amount of time and makes a tremendous volume of messages in your inbox. 

A specific administration stage, notwithstanding, requires substantially less effort. Delegates can request their excursion through the structure and the HR administrator can either underwrite or diminish them in just a single tick. This reductions the proportion of messages, manual information area, etc. The chief can in like manner imagine a united calendar of all working and missing agents, empowering them to ensure that all districts are made sure about at fitting working levels. 

Receptiveness and participation 

Non Appearance and leave the load up instruments are taken care of in the cloud and make participation much less difficult. Why? Every individual from the HR gathering can get to the phase by methods for the Internet and can guide all the information it holds. This, hence, is conferred to the remainder of the gathering, and is invigorated continuously. The complexity among this and Excel is that the last can't be shared. The main technique for doing this is sending a comparable record to the individual who needs it, every single time. 

Another ideal situation of working in the cloud is that the HR office can get to the phase from any contraption, and at whatever point. You not, at this point must be in the work environment to have the choice to work. Manage your gathering from wherever you need, at whatever point you need. 

Furthermore, as you won't need to download any Attendance System in Pakistan or store any records, you'll in like manner save space on your PC. 

Security 

The information set aside in the cloud is made sure about by a specific encryption, and infrequent reinforcements ensure that your information is reliably protected. An Excel record, on the other hand, can be eradicated or lost. 

In like manner, cloud Attendance System in Pakistan is typically completely informed regarding information insurance laws, for instance, GDPR, so you won't have to worry over including other security structures. Also, at whatever point there is a modification in current authorization, these instruments are thusly revived to ensure that your information is truly made sure about. This is certainly a huge preferred position as it suggests that you'll be consenting to guidelines without putting ceaselessly time and money. 

Critical information 

These contraptions offer critical information for your business, for example, nonappearance rates, specialist turnover, finance costs... They incorporate a fragment for "reports and examination" where you can find information, and even download foreordained reports or make your own. Get key information with just a few snaps, whether or not for inner use or for imparting to the board, for instance. This will in like manner help you with settling on the most ideal decisions, considering genuine information. 

In case you work with Excel you'll have to develop your own reports, separate the information, examine it and rehash it in another record. It's for this clarification that HR workplaces routinely don't play out this task and have no information accessible to them. 

Things to endure at the head of the need list 

So you've presumed that your association needs a nonattendance and leave Attendance System in Pakistan, and the inquiry is by and by: how might I pick one? There are various segments that will affect your choice among one and another, yet here are the most critical concentrations to consider. 

The market offers programs that are cloud based, and others that are downloaded to your PC. The past offer gigantic favorable circumstances: 

You can get to them from any device. 

You simply need a web relationship to direct the entirety of your association's information. 

The information can be shared among the whole gathering and revived dynamically. 

Work territory programs, on the other hand: 

Ought to be introduced, which implies they consume room on your PC or oblige the association to have their own worker. 

The HR gathering will reliably depend upon office-based working and the PC where the program is introduced. 

The information won't generally be sharable with the remainder of the division. 

Backing 

Do you have an assistance gathering to help you with setting up the program? Changing starting with one structure then onto the following is once in a while straightforward: first there's information movement, game plan on the aggregate of the PCs and staff preparing. In any case, in case you have an assistance bunch close to you, by then the whole system will run effectively and be continuously clear. Before choosing which Attendance System in Pakistan to pick, watch that the provider will in like manner help with its use and guarantee that everything is working perfectly. This is, undeniably, a fundamental factor to consider and one that could influence the concordance among one and another. 

Also, it's essential that the provider manages staff preparing, to adapt them with the gadget and tell them the best way to use it fittingly. New programming foundations normally end in disappointment considering the way that no underlying preparing process was done, and the instrument was underutilized accordingly. 

Ultimately, guarantee they offer extraordinary customer care that is open to response ordinary inquiries. 

Cost 

Cost is reliably a critical factor when purchasing another thing. A grant for a work region programming ordinarily comes at a fixed expense. 

On the other hand, the expense of cloud-set up programming ordinarily depends as for the amount of laborers to be managed by the stage. In this manner, the costs will reliably be significantly improved, adjusted and acclimated to your necessities. 

While picking an Attendance System in Pakistan and getting the worth right, a movement of features must be thought of to not get scenes later on. These are a part of the viewpoints that will influence the last expense and that you ought to consider while choosing a product: 

Number of delegates. 

Number of kinds of unfortunate inadequacies. 

Access to selection module. 

Number of automatisms included. 

Kinds of reports.

Here is the list of features which you can get by using PeopleQlik:

PeopleQlik Core

Core HR Software -HRMS

Cloud Payroll Management Software

Employee Self Services

HR Analytics Software

Corporate Wellness Platform

Performance Management Software

360 degree feedback form

Compensation Planning & Administration

Social Recognition

Workforce Administration

Leave Management Software

Time and Attendance Management Software

Shift & Scheduling

Claims & Reimbursements

Time-sheet Management Software

Contact Us On Email For Free Demo

Email:sales@bilytica.com

[arcadeidea]

The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warning: Cannibalism, Genocide.)

In these early days of gaming, it's hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over "firsts." Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it's exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of the past. It's almost a lie, though. Most firsts are mere trivia that can stand in the way of actually seeing the work. Most firsts are not self-consciously experimental ideas that caught on, but humble clear outgrowths of a prior tendency almost anachronistic to think of as a first, or are purpose-built innovations to serve a specific need (and sometimes you can point at The First and say that it understood what it was doing better than its successors because it knew best why it existed and then was mindlessly copied... but only sometimes.) If you're looking for some kind of great rupture to hang your hat on, the closer you look the less you see.

The Oregon Trail isn't actually first at much, besides. It's predated in most respects by The Sumerian Game [1964], lost to time, in which You are immersed in a narrative role within an existing historical gameworld and asked to manage resources, for purposes of educating children. It's plausible that our 1971 developers were totally ignorant of it, and thus the "first" as far as they're concerned, and instead drawing on, say, Milton-Bradley's The Game Of Life [1960], seeing as the original design was as a board game. The Sumerian Game is probably even more influential and important than The Oregon Trail, as it inspired Hamurabi [1968] [sic], which was then widely distributed in "learn to code BASIC games" books from 1973 on and from there inspired the whole strategy game genre. We, in the 21st century, recognize The Oregon Trail more though, because of the American Gen X ubiquity of The Oregon Trail [1985], which is as Doom [2016] is to Doom [1993], bringing us 2-for-2 on Id references for the geeks and gamers in the crowd.

It tops Wikipedia's list of the longest-running game franchises, and it's gonna stay there. Hamurabi isn't recognized as The Sumerian Game 2, but a bootleg with its own identity, and similarly you taking the reins of a hypothetical Spacewar 2 or a do-over with spiffy graphics would be a fangame or port or its own thing, not a sequel or remake. They wouldn't carry the imprint of legitimacy that comes from the all-important ownership of the intellectual property. It's the way Oregon Trail's original designer, Don Rawitsch, could take his source code offline in 1971, and then port it from paper as the 1975 version I played with only minor tweaks (one of which we'll address later.) It's the way one of its programmers, Bill Heinemann, can deny even his own son from taking stewardship of the code. It's in the way the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium can make the 1985 Oregon Trail with none of the original three creators, become a private entity with the money the property made them, then sell their legitimizing rights to The Learning Company, who can sell it to Mattel, who can sell it to Ubisoft, who can then bestow the power to make legitimate Oregon Trail successors to third parties. It's copyright, or even more broadly the conceptual scaffolding of ownership, that franchises can not live without, and it's not ridiculous at all.

The franchise all started with only the noblest of intentions, though, characteristic of that 20th Century digital optimism that necessarily colors early video games. They were going to use computers to educate children. A game is a spicy way to approach this, but not unprecedented; one could say most games are already educational, even if in a given instance all you learn is about the game. So what's its pedagogical approach to history, and how does it fare?

Well, it's unusually gamey for an "edutainment" title. There's no room for those "read some facts" sections divorced from the gameplay we're familiar with from later titles like the Carmen Sandiego series. Instead, like reportedly The Sumerian Game before it, it relies heavily on now-lost paratext (which ultimately functions much the same as the Carmen Sandiego model) for the delivery of historical fact: the 1971 Western Expansion unit curriculum The Oregon Trail game was originally only a small part of. It could have reasonably been implemented within the tight space constraints of a 1970s BASIC mainframe program as, say, a fact- and text-heavy quiz, but instead we got something very gameplay-heavy that was shortly thereafter shorn of that original contextualizing information. As-is, you can hardly poke at the game's factual inaccuracies, because what little is there is accurate. (For instance, the 1985 edition would make the prevalence of dysentery infamous, but on the real Trail, the #1 killer was cholera.) The game we have is a supplement... but if not hard facts, then what does it teach you? Reading, typing?

The game is turn-based, and at the top of every turn it displays your five resources: Food, Ammunition, Clothing, Cash, and Miscelaneous [sic] Supplies, which are things like axles and medicine. Your cash reserves (which always start at the same place) can be used at the nondescript forts you have the chance to stop at on some turns. Food, clothing, and supplies correspond not to any real values like pounds of food but one-to-one with the cash you spent on them. You just have "30 Clothes," which somehow depletes rapidly. It might be meant as the abstract monetary value, but since there's no selling, it's unclear. Run out of clothes or supplies, and you could die at any moment. Run out of food, and you die instantly. Like in The Sumerian Game, you're managing resources through the proxy of numerical abstraction, but unlike it, this is not a game meant to educate you on economics, this is the First Survival Game. In all this, we see the inverse of the priority motivation of Spacewar: managing finite, dwindling resource scarcity instead of pushing hard on the limits of the infinite.

Ammunition, on the other hand, is not directly vital but ridiculously cheap. Pun intended, it's the best bang for your buck. You're thus incentivized to play into the rugged outdoorsy individualist role (unlike later games, there's no indication that you are anything but alone) by hunting for your food, without the fiddly business of coding something like food that goes bad if you just let it sit. When you go to shoot something, be it animals on the hunt or hunting yourself, or hostile "riders," you are dropped from the methodical turn-based world into a real-time action-reflex one, which delivers a jolt of energy to the whole experience. In a stroke of ingenuity within the text-only limitations, you are tasked with typing the word "BANG" quickly and accurately. In the 1978 version, it also changes the word up on you (like it could be "POW") which makes the mechanic even more reminiscent of The Typing Of The Dead [1999]. The metaphor stands clear: your typing skill, quick and accurate, enacts corresponding quick and accurate violence on the computer. The computer will have its revenge, though.

No matter how skilled you are at hunting for your food and managing your resources, you are at the complete mercy of the gameworld. The random events at the end of every turn are perhaps the real star of the show here — definitely an evolution of Spacewar's star, anyway. The wrong random events can bring you from fine to dead in just one turn. It's not fair!

That's the point. The Oregon Trail is not about getting to Oregon. Sure, that's the goal that keeps you going both in and out of character, but really The Oregon Trail is about the losing. The death message is rendered with great ceremony, three separate command prompts on your funeral, just for flavor. Even when you make it to the promised land, you're haunted by the ghosts of your own failure, and the entire time you're on the journey is low-level tension and dread at the imagined fatality lurking under every rock. That's the pedagogical utility of the game that a book or a lecture just doesn't give you: by placing you in the middle of a world model and an unimportant role, it communicates an impression, a feeling of what it was like to live as an ordinary person in the time and place depicted, and that impression is one of a dangerous world, arbitrary enough that you can do everything right and still eat curb. There's a straight line from here to Cart Life [2011]. Why, Oregon Trail is the First Empathy Game! The terminology of the "Empathy Game," if you're unfamiliar or have forgotten, was a bit of a fad genre in mid-2010s among a handful of thinkpiece writers and social scientists, and notably not many actual game designers. It was a genre that post-hoc lumped together titles like the aforementioned Cart Life, Depression Quest [2013], That Dragon, Cancer [2016], and even Spec Ops: The Line [2012]! With the exception of the latter, the sales pitch of the genre was basically that in snubbing traditional concepts like "fun" and "violence" in favor of depicting a minimal-gameplay sad world drawn from the author's deeply personal (and often enough, marginalized) experience, these games would make you a better person; they were good for you, like eating your vegetables. Game designer Anna Anthropy was particularly enraged by cis allies patting themselves on the back in this way for playing her short title Dys4ia [2012], and in response to all this she exhibited The Road To Empathy [2015], which was a pair of her size 13 high heel boots with a pedometer attached, so that people could literally walk a mile in her shoes and try to get the high score. (A scathing Cinderella story.)

I myself am a cis white male living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, cause to worry that when I telnetted in to play the game it would instantly award me victory. I grew up here. I was born too late for Apple IIs preloaded with Oregon Trail in the classrom, but one year in elementary school the teacher put together her own longform, paper-based, team-play Oregon Trail game. My team died trapped by snow in the mountains, and then once I was checked-out and scorched about the loss, the whole class got to learn about the Donner Party, a group of settlers who went into the mountains, got snowed in, and ate each other. That's a harrowing, tragic situation about people at the furthest extremities of humanity, and we didn't get too deep into it, but it wasn't sanitized. Years later, don't know how many, I wondered: why? Not why did it happen, but why was I taught about that as history? Not even that it was gruesome, but it didn't square with my understanding of capital-h History at that time, that it was just such a small story that had immediate effect on nobody outside of the Donner Party themselves. It was just some fucked-up shit that happened once. Trivia. What was I meant to learn? Not to go through the mountains in a covered wagon during winter? No, no, it had to be one of those abstract moral Life Lessons... Was it solemn respect for the dead? The terror of nature, and the weakness of man and our society in the face of it? I've seen it used to make exactly the opposite point, that adversity builds morality and character, which is incredibly stupid but that doesn't mean that wasn't meant as the takeaway.

Writing this now, I think I have figured out that I was being taught about my heritage. It's odd to think of it that way, but it's not out of the ordinary in many cultures to pass down illustrative tales of suffering to the young so they and their example are not forgotten, though. I believe I was meant to associate myself in some continuity with The Donner Party, their inheritors as an Oregonian, as an American, as — to put it sharply — a white person, and truly, I am. The subtext is that the past of hardscrabble living and suffering we underwent to get here (in this case, a literal location, Oregon,) legitimizes our comfortable place now. Likewise, the intention of The Oregon Trail is to get us to identify and empathize with the settler. Both are virtual memory, simulated aggrievement.

Our second game has taken as its subject and theme perhaps one of the few darker and more harrowing subject matters than war: colonialism. Identifying colonialism in games is in vogue right now, but it's currently most commonly leveled as a criticism at let's-call-them-post-Minecraft games in which you are actively engaged in both extracting resources from and changing the environment to suit you, even where there is no colonization on the narrative end. The Oregon Trail is just the opposite, using its resource management purely to emphasize that we are at the whims of our environment, while its narrative framing is colonization. It flinches from the larger truth of what it is depicting in favor of an attempt at systematized monetary verisimilitude that absorbs us.

The Oregon Trail [c. 1847-1869] can be considered a mirror for its rough contemporary, The Trail Of Tears [c. 1830-1850]. Nobody wanted to be on The Trail Of Tears. People were being forcibly relocated from what prosperity they had managed to carve out for themselves into conditions of deliberate impovershment. The mass suffering and death they experienced on the way was, when not maliciously engineered, fully intended, and it did nothing to legitimize their claims to the land they now had. Conversely, the settlers moving far west were doing so entirely voluntarily.(The game starts you in St. Louis, 1847, coincidentally the exact time and place a legally-enforced Mormon exodus began, but this game isn't The Utah Trail.) There's a phrase for that hopeful dream that fundamentally motivated every last Oregonian settler to embark on their painful journey: Manifest Destiny. The land out west is already metaphysically yours, you just have to go out and take it in fact. In period records, what is done to the indigenous people across the continent is described in jarringly passive voice (such as "dying off",) as what are clearly active campaigns of hostility are waged with full intent to exterminate. The suffocating, violent racism of the 1800s United States can not be understated, and yet it is full-on swept under the rug, not just here, but almost everywhere you turn that's not the niche of a serious history for adults. This was an era when even some white slavery abolitionists were only that way because the thought of sharing a nation with any black people, even slaves, so offended their sensibilities.

The Oregon Trail game is, point blank and very straightforwardly, white nationalist propaganda. Now, it's not hate speech! It doesn't come out of the damp basement printing press of a Neo-Nazi, but the cleanliness of the omissions and assumptions and unwarranted romanticism of a standard grade school American History curriculum, and from the noblest of intentions. It's not Custer's Revenge [1982] or The Birth Of A Nation [1915]. In fact, the most major & germane difference (possibly) between the 1971 teletype version and the 1975 one I played is a modulation towards greater racial sensitivity: The random event of hostile "Indians" is scrubbed to "riders." This leaves only friendly Native Americans, which is actually, so I read, broadly historically accurate for what a trail-goer would encounter. The Cayuse War, for example, did start with an attack on a white civilian, but most of the engagement was between military forces. Not to form a bad habit of relying too heavily on author quotes, but here's what programmer Bill Heinemann had to say about it:

I heard from Paul [Dillenberger, fellow Oregon Trail coder] that we needed to eliminate any negative references to Native Americans. Since my generation had grown up on TV cowboy shows, my first reaction was that we were denying a piece of our own history.

Get a load of this honky. He instinctively thought the heritage he needed to pass on to Minnesota schoolchildren was the pulpy good-guy-bad-guy myth of the unrevised Western, masquerading as fact. The Oregon Trail is, in the end, just as much the flippant pop culture fantasia as Spacewar, despite the pretense of fact and education. Thankfully, Mr. Heinemann thoughtfully backtracked on that count, thinking of potential Native American children playing the game. In 2017, lead designer Don Rawitsch even said that he'd like to see a version of The Oregon Trail from the Native American perspective. In 2019, we got exactly that.

When Rivers Were Trails [2019] is the product of almost 50 more years in development in ludic story delivery and edutainment. It's marketed as the Native American response to The Oregon Trail, though it too takes place about 50 years later, in the 1890s. This places it after the end of most direct warfare, save with the Apaches, although Geronimo had already surrendered and you do not visit the American Southwest. Instead, when you are given the choice to resist, it takes the form not of, say, mass armed rebellion, but in community spiritualism and helping negotiate the crooked legal system.

In the story, you wander aimlessly west, away from the traditional lands in Minnesota you can now never return to. Along the way, you meet many Native Americans, who aren't typically so much characters as they are the medium by which facts about the land and history are summarized, ala the Carmen Sandiego model of edutainment referred to earlier. When Rivers Were Trails hews closer to something like a visual novel with minigames, and is nowhere near as interested in systematizing misery as The Oregon Trail. The worst things that directly happen to the player are rare harassment by the Indian Patrol, and there are resources as a nod to The Oregon Trail, here Willpower, Food, and Medicine, and, fittingly enough considering the direct equation of resource-to-cash in the 1970s game, they're used mostly as forms of currency for trading. Other than that, they don't "matter," in that they're super easy to come by living off the land and running out of food or medicine won't kill you. Only running out of spiritual Willpower will, which suggests to me that you're on some metaphoric level a ghost animated by your journey, bearing witness to vignettes of not so much the suffering itself, but the almost-post-apocalyptic aftershocks of great misfortunes and displacements and how various people are holding on or moving on. Don't mistake it for an Empathy Game — it's strictly educational.

[killapenguingaming-blog]

Fort Triumph impressions - Jesus Christ, game

I've played and completed a lot of strategy RPGs. We're talking several XCOMs, 17 mainline Fire Emblems, and countless unique takes on the genre. I consider it my strongest genre. Fort Triumph is the sloppiest, most haphazard and arbitrary sRPG I've ever played. Characters being replaced with new units for story missions when they die makes sense since having certain roles present is required for the dialog to work—which it doesn't, but I'll get to that—but randomly replacing units in my full squad for story missions? How does that make sense? Why did no one second-guess the decision to kill off a character in a cutscene, potentially undermining your strategy by removing one of the pieces you had to work with during that map? In what universe does it make sense to allow you to target rocks with non-physic attacks, wasting action points attacking the thing an enemy is standing on because your mouse or controller cursor didn't click in exactly the right position? Who implemented enemies who explode when defeated and thought, "You know what? I'm not going to tell the player that this is a thing that happens. Surprises are always a positive thing!" Fort Triumph recently came out of early access, and yet its current quality is more akin to what you'd expect from a game that just entered early access. Controller support is spotty; many tooltips either don't show up or get stuck on the screen and block any of the others from appearing. The audio levels are all over the place, with mage attack sounds being ear-piercingly loud compared to everything else (and the global volume sometimes dips for 5-10 seconds for some reason). In theory, Fort Triumph should be excellent. A humorous fantasy XCOM with an emphasis on using the environment to get the best of enemies sounds like a great idea. It doesn't take long for the cracks to begin to show, however. The header image shows off the time that I was successfully attacked with a melee attack through a solid wall (which feels especially wrong in a game where cover is such a big factor and archers can't land shots without a line of sight). Using physical attacks to stun enemies and drop things on their heads is fun, but it's never clear how these abilities will work. For example, using an arrow ability that pulls an opponent toward your character sometimes causes them to careen down a line a full 45 degrees off of the angle you shot them from. Sometimes, abilities can break through walls. Other times, you use an ability expecting that to happen and nothing happens, wasting your turn and leaving you in danger. If there's a way of telling which characters and abilities can and can't accomplish things like this, the tutorial never mentions it. There's also no undo button, so you have to live with misclicks. More than anything, though, Fort Triumph is endlessly dull. The dialog is written for three characters (maybe four—I honestly can't tell some of them apart), and new characters show up to fill these roles if someone is killed in combat, but the writing isn't interesting enough to justify the gymnastics. Like many indie games, Fort Triumph falls into the trap of being spectacularly wordy, with the result being that conversations drag and every character sounds identical. You can throw as many potentially humorous character misunderstandings into a conversation as you want, but when they all sound the same and no one has any actual character development, it just ends up being a lot of nothing. You can skip this, of course, but I can't bring myself to skip past anything I haven't already seen before because it feels like important information—such as "by the way, this enemy will explode when it dies, so maybe don't kill it with your low-HP melee unit"—might be hidden in there. Thus far, not so much. I don't understand why Fort Triumph refuses to explain how basic things work. Sometimes, using a character's AOE fire spell causes them to also catch on fire. Does that happen when they're standing on something flammable? How can you tell what is and isn't flammable? Another question I have: why are maps randomized? I've found it useful to restart maps over and over again until I get a better starting position, and even if you don't do that, you'll have seen all of the first chapter's map types after maybe 15 minutes. Leaving the player uncertain about so many things doesn't strike me as being a good fit for a game where character deaths disadvantage you. Then again, characters surviving and being replaced anyway disadvantages you. And where do those new characters come from, anyway? These aren't advanced concepts. Fort Triumph just isn't forthcoming. The first time I started playing, I lost all of my characters after missing something like 5 attacks in a row, all of which had a 80-90% chance to hit. That's possible, of course, but statistically improbable, and I don't trust Fort Triumph's programming much. This is, after all, the same game that suddenly added a map failure condition forcing me to keep a squishy mage character alive, only for her to be killed on the very next turn. She's supposed to be added to your party, but that never happened and she was helpless against her opponents. She was properly controllable the second time around, but long maps don't suit games where enemies can damage you through walls and a sudden bug can mean instant failure even if your units are still standing. Fort Triumph needed at least another year in the oven. Standard sRPG options such as being able to see what your hit percentages will be before committing to a move are nowhere to be seen. Given how strange some of the angles are here, that's borderline unforgivable. And I know I brought it up already, but seriously—I can't be the first person to recommend an "undo movement" button. Movement spends an action point even if you don't use a full space worth of movement, so correcting movement mistakes can leave you unable to attack. There's no earthly reason for Fort Triumph to be so overwhelmingly clunky considering that they've had years of feedback, but it is what it is. Read the full article

[rabbitindisguise]

Watercolors for Beginners (on a budget)

All these watercolor artists on YouTube have their favorite “expensive” brushes, meanwhile Jay Lee, who is an incredible artist, uses $4-5 dollar brushes. I’m not a fan of the cheapest ones still, like the $7 packs, because it’s hard for them to retain shape. The best brush for you- like writing software- is a brush you know well over a brush some artist in a fancy studio says Will Get Results. I think this is something that should have been obvious to me after learning photography equipment is more about skill than dollars once you get a DSLR or mirrorless, but enough about that. If you want to get into watercolor, here’s my advice a year in.

Materials

A standard round brush really is the most important brush- unless it isn’t. You can exclusively use flats, and it can add an interesting stylistic aspect to you work. But a round can do pretty much anything you ask from it. Generally, this brush is a size #8, #10, or a #12. If you splurge on anything at all, it should be your base brush, who will be with you for a very long time. Paint and paper are “consumables” so eventually they get used up, but a brush, even a ratty old one, is basically forever. Treat it well.

Some kind of large wash brush, like an oval brush, dagger brush, quill brush, or large flat brush. Or even thick, four inch wide, and slightly terrifying ones for wall sized large surfaces. Whichever one you pick, a large brush really does help give the smoothest washes and gradients for large areas.

Either a rigger brush, small round brush, small/medium flat brush, or even a fan brush. Riggers are good for detail and natural lines, fans for cool effects and lines, and flats for thick or thin lines. That said, these brushes do help certain styles. Riggers are excellent for naturalistic painters who like trees, and they’re also good for painting, well … rigging on ships. The fan is good for abstract, and the flat for geometric shapes specifically, but both of them have many more uses than just those. Rounds are the most multipurpose due to their influence on watercolor in the United States is, and a smaller size can be useful for detail work. All these different brushes fit into one category because they can do each other’s most important job, which is to make super thin lines.

Pans or tubes Don’t worry about cost because they’re about the same. Student grade is okay. I swear. If you’re not displaying your physical paper copies yet, relax. Lightfastness doesn’t exist on the internet. (Tip: learn Photoshop so that your watercolors will look good online, it will make a world of a difference.) If it helps to use the cheapest 7 pan set made by a crayon company so you actually paint, so be it. You’ll have to overcome your fear of using expensive materials eventually though, so student grade is a good medium between the two. Try and pick a brand that has both artist and student quality if you can afford it, so you can reuse pans if you pick that option.

Fluid, Canson, Arches, etc are some good name brands but explore your local art store or online options available cheaply (if you like goulash you can even use regular cardboard). Cold press is good for naturalistic subjects, absorbency, and texture. Hot press is smooth, less absorbent, and allows for re-wetting. Most people use coldpress, it has that classic watercolor look. There are also two main weights for paper, 140 lb which is often cheaper, and 300 lb which comes in higher qualities, often in large sheets. 140lb is best held down or in blocks, 300lb can be painted on its own, which is good for painting outdoors. You can also use the backside of both weights, 140 lb and 300 lb. Remember, this is LB as in pound. Some will say “300 series” or whatever. What’s really important is the weight, not the arbitrary classification by a company.

Fun stuff. Brushes that look weird. Metallic paints. Salt, water brush pens, saran wrap, natural sponges, and masking fluid. Water based ink. Complex mixing pallettes and jar systems to avoid having to get up mid-painting. Paint is supposed to be fun, or intellectually stimulating, or expressive, or whatever reasons you have for doing it in the first place. If making glorious paintings with three primaries in the woods using creek water in a cup sounds like a good time: ignore this next bit, and I respect you. If you’re trying to force yourself to do boring things because of online advice telling you to hammer the basics into your very soul before having fun, here’s the contradicting advice: have fun. It makes for better art, if nothing else.

TL;DR: moderately cheap paper is okay, to a point, which is the 140 lb minimum. Student grade paints are good for work you won’t display. You need three brushes, including a basic brush (#8 round is what I use), a detail brush (#4 rigger for me), and a wash brush (I have lots, even though I paint postcards, so definitely try to plan ahead for your standard paper size).

Extra information: having lots of brushes is really very fun- especially when you have some that you can mistreat. I don’t regret buying the other brushes at all. Go the cheap pack route if you haven’t figured out what “snappy” means, or shedding, or other qualities that makes good brushes good. Going cheap helps you appreciate the nuance of a better brush and gives you a good base, like downloading a basic texture pack for digital art, and something to scrub paint off pans with when they wear out.

I haven’t recommended any brands for a reason, which is there is a lot of brand loyalty among watercolor artists. Plus, I think you should do your own technical (lightfastness, qualities) and experiential (how does it Feel) judging. This is true of brushes, paper, and paint. If you’re totally lost on brushes, watch this video by witty gritty paper co, and this video by Liron, and this other video by Liron. For more research, there’s lots of science behind the quality of brushes, especially water uptake. ProArte is the only brand I know of using prolene synthetic material, which has better water uptake than standard synthetic, and you can find some packs online. I recommend the set with the rigger brush, because large wash brushes naturally hold a lot anyway. Oh, and synthetic is far cheaper than natural hair brushes. With paint and paper, sticking to name brands is a good guideline.

Again, one more time for emphasis. Take care of your brushes. Wet them a little while (Brush Experts™ recommend 30 minutes, I just do it at the same time I wet my pans) before you begin. Clean them thoroughly. Shape them to a point after use. Masking fluid can gunk up your brush, so be careful. Most importantly, don’t press too hard! Watercolor brushes are soft so that they can use the specific properties of water to carry pigment, and bending the bristles can disrupt that. Don’t drag them on the bottom of your water cups, don’t dig them down to the ferrules (the shiny metal or plastic bit) into your paper, and don’t scrape them along the paper unintentionally without enough water. Doing even a couple of these will drastically increase the lifespan of your brush.

Cost breakdown

About $15-20 on brushes, $35ish on paints, and as little as $7 on reasonably sized paper. It’s usually about .50¢ to $1 a sheet, and a pan set or set of tubes will last you a very, very long time. Many artists start using artist grade paints before they run out of student grade. This is about $62, which is a lot of money! So don’t be afraid of the absolute cheapest watercolors, but it’s important to fund your passions, too. You can absolutely start with one quality brush ($5 vs $20), tiny paper ($5), and decent student grade ($35) for $45 and still have everything you really need. Karia on YouTube should be coming out with more reviews, in addition to the ones already posted, on different cheaper materials that could help you save costs, too. Going to a store to avoid shipping helps on top of that, and gives you a chance to compare brush size vs your paper, and to see the different paint options next to each other.

A lot of this post was just me synthesizing information, so definitely check out the people below. These are free excellent watercolor tutorials, material reviews, advanced techniques, and more. I’m just starting in watercolor, but I remember being disappointed there wasn’t any guide on Tumblr on where to spend money and where you can save and still learn something. I hope this guide helps, in some way, to fill that gap, and it wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had access to videos like these online.

Channel Recommendations

Jay Lee has fantastic tutorials at many levels of skill, mostly works with flowers and brighter colors. This channel is a good option for visual learners, and combines basic exercises with complex brushwork well. Also, this artist freehands, which means no outlining beforehand.

Liron Yanconsky doesn’t traditionally work in watercolor so there are fewer videos than than other content. Still, there are a lot of material and technical discussion, which was incredibly helpful when I was just starting. Liron mostly works with a natural pallette with landscapes. A special aspect of Liron’s paintings are the use of perspective. On top of that, there are multiple speedpaints to help with figuring out how light to dark works. This channel in particular is good for auditory learners, because he talks about everything from technique to mental blocks common to artists. Very interesting stuff, definitely subscribe.

Karia has a similar background to Liron, and the channel is much more low key. I especially like the cat visitors during the videos. The channel doesn’t really discuss much art wise, but still offers good content. Also, you can donate directly to Karia from the links in the description! Definitely consider it, based off all the hard to find comparison videos of paints.

TheWittyGrittyPaperCo is actually a company channel, run by Meredith, who is a self taught (through YouTube) watercolor artist. The channel has a fantastic overview of the basics, including materials, exercises, and other tips. A few specialized aspects are portraits and lettering. It’s also the kind of channel that talks about things that even google has a hard time answering- how much water, how to use new watercolor materials, legal things like reference photos, etc. I have used these videos the most I think, especially small tips buried in the longer videos, to improve my work. Like Jay Lee’s channel, there are tutorials for visual learners. I almost don’t need to subscribe because I revisit the videos so often.

Susan Harrison-Tustain is a watercolor artist from New Zealand who has some incredible instructional videos. Many of them discuss techniques that just aren’t that common on youtube. Susan even has her own brush series. Considering the information is usually found on DVDs, it’s worth at least one watch to learn terms and see specific effects.

Ekaterina Smirnova is another incredible artist. This channel includes tutorials, techniques, materials, and more. Many of these tutorials are freehand, and include both auditory information and visual information. There’s also videos in Russian. The channel updates regularly, but not often, so it would beneficial to subscribe if you like he videos.

That’s it! My inbox is open for anyone that needs help, there’s so much info I just couldn’t include because it was getting long enough already.

EDIT: I waaay over estimated the money for the paints. Cotman watercolors (a half decent beginner 12 color set) is only $13, making the basics cost only $23! I also forgot to mention a hand towel and ceramic plate to sacrifice to the pigments. The hand towel is for drying your brush to control water flow, and the plate is for mixing and diluting. Bought new, it would only be around $5 at most, but I'm assuming you might already have them.