#the worst part is that I have so many ideas and concepts but zero motivation

[98luck]

[theopolis]

Extremely long, extremely salty Kindred criticism post

Yk the thing about the Kindred storyline is that it failed at being everything it was trying to be.

It wanted to be like DeMatteis' Goblin Junior arc while simultaneously inverting every concept from that arc. Harry is a gentle soul going down a dark path and hurting not only others but himself in the process? No, he's the comically evil mastermind who would throw his friends - Gwen and MJ, who even by his own standards have done him no wrong - under the bus to get revenge! Norman is the looming influence that follows Harry and motivates him to bend himself into who his father wanted him to be? No, he's the repentant, permanently dewey eyed reformed Norman who we're supposed to feel bad for when he gets dismissed and punched around by evil Harry/his demonic clone vessels/whatever the fuck. Peter is the best friend who, despite of course feeling angry and betrayed, believes in Harry's softness and their love and wants the best for him? No, he's immediately and with zero explanation ready to believe Harry is a literal demon all of a sudden and, I quote, "through with helping him". And I don't even think this (later clumsily backpedaled on) change of mind in Peter isn't justified in-universe - Kindred did uh, dig up the skeletons of Peter's loved ones and put party city wigs on them and also smash him with a big rock a couple of times, so there's that. But that's exactly the problem - Spencer set the stage for a story that doesn't actually involve Peter, or Harry, or Norman. He created mostly completely different dynamics between mostly completely different characters, and decided to project that on the the three of them. While also periodically inserting hamfisted callbacks to the DeMatteis stories, as if he didn't just take a giant dump on everything they established.

And here's the thing, even if I did enjoy the idea of Harry forgiving Norman, or the idea of Harry returning to villainy, or the idea of Norman becoming a character we're supposed to root for - which I cannot stress enough how much I don't - the execution of all these ideas was perhaps the worst it could have possibly been. Rushed, convoluted, and hollow.

Norman's sudden goodness is the result of a supernatural, vague process that apparently "freed him of his sin", whatever that means. Like, how do you quantify sin? How can you take it out of a person when it's their moral ideology and conscious choices that make them sinful/bad/evil? What happened to Norman simply reads like brainwashing to me. He is aware he's done something really bad, but he hasn't actually learned anything, and that impression is only backed by the way he talks about his past actions. It's always "oh it's my fault you're like this Harry" and "oh I can never make it up to you" etc etc but does he ever actually recognize his mistakes for what they were? Recognize where the errors of his past convictions lie? Of course not, because Spencer has zero reading comprehension and therefore no clue about the intricacies of Norman's character, his abuse of Harry, or what motivated it, or what he demanded of his son. It's funny how these four panels from a recent What If issue managed to paint a more compelling, if brief, picture of Norman as an apologetic father than Spencer has in a year worth of comics:

Harry's sudden villainy and the way it evolved throughout this story is just a train wreck. He has not had a substantial role in the comics for a long time now, but suddenly he's back AND he's evil! Who cares about complexity? Who cares about how Harry's feeling? Why he's doing what he does other than some extremely vague idea of revenge on apparently both Peter and Norman? Even though he was neck deep in denial about Norman being a horrible father and person at the time he supposedly launched the whole (checks notes) "create clones from Norman's and Gwen's DNA to stick it to his old man AND Peter in the future" plan, which he concocted because he somehow (????) knew his father wasn't gonna stay dead, which begs the question why he was so torn up about it in the first place, and- Look I could sit here all day trying to decipher the whole Gabriel and Sarah Stacy twist. It's impressive what an inconsistent, incomprehensible mess it is considering it was only introduced two issues ago. ASM 74 sort of hinted that Harry was being piloted by Mephisto when he created the clones so they could later become his hellish lackeys? I uhm, think? It's impossible to tell because no part of that retcon makes any sense to begin with. It doesn’t want to make sense because it was written - most likely on a whim - with the sole intent to garner good will for undoing Sins Past. Harry, for this entire arc, was not a character but merely a tool to bait us with an OMD reversal and ultimately do a Sins Past one. And of course, there's the fact that post OMD Harry - one of the only good things to come out of OMD in the first place - was just a clone all along, putting into question how valid all the amazing and inspiring development he went through since his revival was. Thanks a lot.

Lastly, I don't think I have to say how insulting it is to not just use Harry's character as a cheap plot device, but eventually force him to sacrifice his life for the very man who ruined it in every way. The man who abused him since birth, betrayed him on every level, attacked and murdered so many people Harry loves, including almost getting Harry's son killed. Why? Because he’s had a suspicious sudden onset of goodness that Harry has no context for? Norman and clone!Harry have not even interacted for this entire arc, but the sole act of Norman offering himself up to the rabid Kindred twins makes Harry instantly forgive everything he’s ever done. There was no build up to this whatsoever. It’s bad writing. And I don't think the abuse apologism implications of all this are intentional, I think Spencer just thought up the groundbreakingly subversive concept of "what if Norman good and Harry bad" and ran with that. But those implications are there nonetheless, because Harry and Norman's relationship has pretty much always been about abuse, about being mistreated by your parents, about not feeling good enough for them and eventually realizing that you were wronged and you don't owe them anything.

Spencer had Harry, a man who fought for years to rise to his best, most authentic self and fully turn his back on Norman and his legacy, die to save the father who never valued him for that self. And to add insult to injury, paralleled that with Harry dying after saving his best friend who loved him unconditionally. The latter mentioned death being a direct consequence of the actions Harry took to fit the expectations said abusive father had drilled into his head. I feel like that ending explains everything about this plotline.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Spock Grok Shock Squawk

Lemme get my main thesis out in the open first thing:

The search for intelligent life in space is a quasi-religious endeavor.

The unstated hidden hope is that we will find up in the sky people who are better and wiser than us, and who will prove they’re better by sharing that wisdom, ushering in, if not exactly a golden age, then one of shiny brass.

The unstated assumption is that they will be like the Vulcans in Star Trek, more advanced than we are, but impressed by our courage and our curiosity and our just plain ol’ fashioned humanness so that even though they are technologically and culturally far superior to us, they’ll toss the keys of the galactic federation in our lap, letting us run things for everybody’s betterment.

Snowflake, please…

(I mean let’s acknowledge this is a white and / or Anglo / European colonial fantasy from the gitgo, okay?  No sane species will let us anywhere near the torpedo room, capice?)

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a harmless enough exercise, and I’ll be honest, it would be cool if they actually found something, but at its core it’s no different from going into a place of worship and attempting to contact the divine.

(Mind you, I have absolutely no objection to that in principle, either, but I know how a lot of supposed spiritual searchers are actually searching for cudgels to batter their fellow humans into submission; and besides, as will be pointed out below, the search for the divine shares some similar issues with SETI, so read on, MacDuff…)

My next major thesis is this:

Nobody knows what they’re looking for, SETI or conventional religion.

They dress it up in fancy costumes but when you strip both groups’ sky beings naked, you find they’re looking for people just like us in every important way (i.e., we understand them, they understand us, and they don’t hold us accountable for our bullshit).

Here’s a few issues I have with the current state of SETI affairs:

We don’t know what alien life would look like.

We don’t know how alien life would think.

We don’t know what alien life can sense that we can’t sense.

We don’t know how alien life would process information.

We don’t know how alien life would adapt to its environment.

(There’s more -- much, much more -- but these will do for the moment.

Point 1: I’m not talking about green skinned Martians with six limbs, I mean we don’t even know if alien life would have a cell structure or pass along generational information via DNA.

Personally, I think there’s a remote possibility life on Earth did not evolve but is a product of panspermia, in which case any life we encounter on other planets in this solar system may indeed use cell structure, DNA, etc.

But that’s just “a chance greater than zero” not hard evidence.

We literally have no idea what other life would look like so we have no way of knowing where or what to look for.

Someone familiar only with North American forest insects might have a hard time identifying life found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench -- and that’s part of the planet we all share.

There’s a fringe science called shadow biology that wonders if there may be life on this planet that we can’t identify because it looks and behaves so differently from us.

That’s another one of those “greater than zero” speculations -- but the fact we can define right now what would constitute alien life means all we’re doing is looking for Vulcans.

Point 2: We don’t even know how we think; howda %#@& can we anticipate how alien intelligence would think.

I got into this discussion decades ago at a sci-fi con and the fan I was talking with blithely assumed we would recognize one another as intelligent based on whether we used mathematics and my question then and now is:  ”How would you know?!?!?”

Math is a symbolic language that (apparently) interprets basic underlying principles in a way that humans can grasp and apply.

The principles exist whether or not they are expressed, or how they are expressed.

We humans “see” 2 + 2 = 4 as “logical” because out symbolic language links the concept of two distinct objects added to another two distinct objects as being the equivalent of four distinct objects, but we have no way of knowing if an alien intelligence grasps the concept of distinct objects.

For them it may all be just part of a continuum.

There could be aliens desperately trying to contact us right now, using methods we can observe, and we just can’t grasp that there’s even a message to be grasped! 

Point 3: Holy cow (no, not a religious exclamation), this point is huge and we just keep glossing over it.

Humans possess better color vision than canines.

We see three primary colors, they see only two (blue and yellow).

There are other terrestrial species -- butterflies and mantis shrimp, to name two – who see colors far beyond human range, well into what Dr. Seuss would call the “on beyond zebra” range.

Even if we could talk to dogs, we couldn’t tell them what green looks like:  There is literally no place in their brain to process that color.

Or consider binocular vision, i.e., depth perception.

Most humans have depth perception but many -- for any number of reasons -- do not.

A lot of animals lack binocular vision (indeed, on Earth encountering a creature with binocular vision is fraught with danger because they’re almost always predators of some sort, using depth perception to attack prey).

Try explaining depth perception to someone who’s only had vision in one eye since birth.

“Well, it doesn’t have a color or a texture or anything like that, you really can’t ‘see’ it except…well…you actually can see it insofar as you can ‘see’ the actual space that exists between two objects instead of just guessing based on visual clues…”

Again, we may be bombarded with messages from space all the time that we simply lack the ability to sense.

Point 4: This is a lot like Point 2 but different enough to enjoy its own category. 

I mean a couple of things when I refer to processing information.

First off, there’s the actual processing time.

Remember the sloth DMV scene in Zootopia?

Imagine we contact a life form that takes a standard terrestrial year just to express “2 + 2 = 4”.

The entirety of human history would pass before it could get to basic trigonometry.

How do you communicate with that?

(And what would you talk about?) 

Conversely, we would be like ferrets on espresso, the worst form of cultural ADHD imaginable to them

And the script could be flipped!

We could be the ones taking forever to respond, their elaborate and erudite answers might flash by in less than a nanosecond.

We also don’t know what an alien species would value.  We have Maslow's familiar hierarchy of needs but there’s no guarantee these would motivate any other species.

Thigs that would be extremely vital to us might be wholly unimportant to aliens and vice versa.

The fact our sky is blue is just an interesting fact to us, to aliens it might be the single most important thing they’ve ever encountered.

We simply have no way of knowing!

Point 5: Europeans encountering North American native peoples dismissed them as “primitive savages” because they didn’t smelt ore, they didn’t use wheels, and most of their cultures lacked a written language.

Ignore the fact they had well traveled trade routes stretching from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, ignore the fact many of them governed and protected well organized territories the size of France or Germany, ignore the fact they lived in an environment not only abundant with easily available natural resources but also possessed the time to work those resources at a leisurely pace.

The European interlopers sure ignored those facts.

SETI looks for machine based physical communication from alien life (physical here including any form of energy used to convey information such as a telegraph or a laser beam).

Presuming alien life exists it may never have occurred to them to attempt to communicate in the manner humans do!

It would be like putting a mime on the radio.

The great unuttered chauvinism of the Drake equation and Fermi paradox is this: That there exists a basic template to intelligent life that’s so common the law of averages says we must find examples of it just like us wherever we look.

That’s an awfully big assumption, folks.

And we’re nowhere close to proving any of it.

  © Buzz Dixon 

[notoyax17]

I will NEVER not be bitter about how thoroughly the MCU ruined the concept of the Avengers as a team or a family for the sake of family.

I will never not be bitter about how the same people that made me love Steve Rogers when Whedon made him intolerable subsequently brought him back to being intolerable again.

I will never not be bitter about how they tried to treat a hero as an "unintentional villain" while simultaneously painting an actual villain as a misguided and redeemed hero while taking exactly ZERO steps to show her actual redemption.

I will never not be bitter about how they tried to pull the "The villain sort of has a point" with Thanos when his idea was literally the dumbest goddamn idea and the worst possible use of the reality warping stones.

I will never not be sad about the fact that I've just been worn down so much by all of the above that I can't even find the motivation to watch the shows that I've been waiting on for years (Loki and FATWS).

I hate the loss of so much potential.

I hate that I can't read all those "team as family" fics that I used to love (especially if they take place at ANY point after Age of Ultron) without feeling as if they're wildly out of character.

I hate the casual way the cruelty they treated each other with in many of these movies got glossed over or ignored.

I hate the realization that, when you look back on the MCU as a whole, it feels like, maybe, we were watching different people than we thought we were. Like, all of these traits that seemed out of character during this movie or that movie were... just part of who they are.

Like, maybe the selfishness of Steve Rogers choosing to stay in the past and ignore all of the tragedies that he knew were to come wasn't an out of character moment, but just an expression of the person he always was, that had been hidden under blinders. Like the selfishness that had him trying to join the army to prove himself despite being a possible carrier for TB. Like the selfishness of only thinking of deserting to save the prisoners of war when he realized Bucky was one of them. The selfishness of bringing Wanda onto the team despite the pain she had caused both to the world and to his own teammates. The selfishness of keeping the Starks murder a secret. The selfishness of prioritizing Bucky's safety over keeping Zemo from getting to Siberia on time.

Like Natasha's loyalty being conditional for the sake of pragmatism might just be a lack of loyalty at all. Like Bruce's unreliability being borne from indifference and wanting to forsake responsibility rather than guilt or fear.

And so on and so on.

I'm just so fucking mad, you know. At least with Supernatural, you knew that was amazingly/surprisingly entertaining trash going in. Their fuck ups led you to sigh and say you called it. Because there were no expectations there. And maybe I shouldn't have had any of the MCU either.

[3195c]

'Scars'

2020

QUAINTANCE: Where did the idea to approach The Joker from the perspective of his victims come from?

SNYDER: We’ve done so much with him over the years. It’s always been in relation to Batman. I haven’t really had a chance to do a Joker story where it focuses on him without any sort of Batman presence in it, or to just define him. I’ve had a clear vision in my head of how my take on The Joker — I’ve done it with multiple artists — has worked from Black Mirror all the way through Last Knight on Earth. For me, he’s literally The Joker card to Batman, where he takes on any kind of value he can given Batman’s worse fears. He makes himself those to be able to win or fight Batman, always making him as strong as possible.

It’s almost that he’s making it his duty to challenge Batman with the greatest nightmares of his soul, and through that trial by fire make Batman better or kill him — one or the other. So, I wanted to do something here that really focused on how scary that is as a concept, how wonderfully malleable as a concept, and it’s why I think he’s so enduring, why there are so many version, why he has so many faces, so many looks, and why so many great creators over the years have done so many incredible interpretations over the years.

QUAINTANCE: A lot of times when you write villains, they have really clear and easy to understand motivations, but The Joker maybe less so. How do you approach figuring out what The Joker wants in any given story and why he’s doing what he’s doing?

SNYDER: What I tried to do with each story I told with Batman and him was focus on something I was really afraid of either for my kids or myself, something that was difficult to admit, and then have Batman face off with that thing in its most terrifying form, which was The Joker’s version of it.

For example, Death of the Family was a very personal attempt at that. We were pregnant of our second kid when I came up with that story, and I was terrified of being a bad father, being too selfish to be a good parent. I was thinking to myself, Batman must be wrestling at certain moments with similar demons in the way he has developed that incredible family at that time in continuity with all of these allies. He cares about all of them, but isn’t there some part of him that worries they might be a weakness. That’s where Joker comes in and says, wouldn’t you be the best Batman possible without your family. So, I’ll just kill them for you.

Whereas something like Endgame was much less about my personal fears and more about my fears for the moment, some of the things we all worried about. I was worried for my kids at that time about the kind of violence that erupts out of nowhere, and I felt like it was always in the news, making your daily actions feeling meaningless. The Joker was there celebrating those things, saying whatever you do, it doesn’t matter. There’s no action you can take that’s going to mean anything. Everything is at best meaningless, and at worst cruelty and savagery. That’s it.

I try to take a personal fear of mine at that moment and have Joker extend it to its worst possible version and have Batman face off with that. That’s my approach to using him. I wanted to define that here with something that’s not epic and weird and over-the-top.

QUAINTANCE: Well, with all the different work you’ve done with Joker, what do you hope to have added to the legacy of the character?

SNYDER: That’s a tough question and it’s hard for me to answer that. It’s less about me and what I’ve added. I just hope that I’ve done it justice as an incredible antagonist, one of the best antagonists in all of literature, just by trying to use my own personal fears and be honest about what I find terrifying, and about human nature and the world, having him express those in ways that are celebratory and cruel and evil, making him the demon that really tests us with our own worst imaginings and fears.

I love writing him. I feel like I had him exist in one form or another in pretty much every story I’ve done on Batman, from Black Man even through Superheavy or the beginning of Zero Year. He was the one consistent thread to everything I’ve written, Batman-wise, outside of All-Star. The strain Joker represented through all of that was this underlying anxiety that Batman would succumb to his own worst fears, whether he was the main antagonist or in the background.

And there’s so many different versions. I love Grant [Morrison’s] version where he’s hyper-sane and so he’s always emerging as a new wild version of himself because he reinvents his own personality. I love the [Batman: The Animated Series] version where he’s slightly more sympathetic, more of a common criminal at times, all the way to the more obsessive Frank Miller version. There’s so many great stories too; I just wanted this story to be the definitive version of our take and the way I see him, a dictionary definition for The Joker that has haunted my whole run, regardless of artist.

[adoranymph]

That’s right! It’s been far too long, and I need to do another discussion of, what remains to this day, my #1 anime: Fate/Zero. Oh darling, how I’ve missed talking about you.

First off, I’m probably one of the few people on the planet who, for the most part, doesn’t take too much issue with the concept of prequels. I get why such stories are flawed and inherently so. Going into that kind of detail on something that was only mentioned in passing as a previous event in an original work can be detrimental to that work, punching in plot holes and whatnot. Plus, it takes away the mystery that some find more appealing about the “story before”: giving a detailed account of that takes away that mystery.

Speaking for me personally though, I kinda like it. I mean, I’m the kind of person who squees on the inside at stuff like Thranduil at the end of the third Hobbit film telling his son Legolas that he might want to look into finding a Dunedain ranger named “Strider”, a.k.a. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, a.k.a. the once and future king of Lord of the Rings, timeline consistency be damned! I love Easter Eggs in all their forms.

Which means perhaps I’m biased on this opinion, and to a degree, I am. But, I still think objectively as well as subjectively that Fate/Zero really does work well as a prequel.

Why?

A few reasons, but:

The short answer? It’s a tragedy.

In both the classical and the emotional gut-punching sense.

In the classical sense, we’re talking about actions that have consequences that are inevitable. In the emotional gut-punching sense, it’s that those consequences utterly destroy our heroes and heroines in their feels.

Anyone who’s experienced the original Fate/Stay Night, either in anime or visual novel form, or both, already knows that the consequences to many of the actions taken by the characters in Zero are inevitable. At the same time, for anyone who’s watching it before watching any of the other Fate material as a stepping off point for the franchise, it still works as a strong story of characters who sabotage their own goals through their own flaws, made tragic by how earnest they are in endeavoring to overcome them. Not to mention the sheer number of feels and brutal deaths and OMG this anime. (They didn’t give its original light novel writer, Gen Urobuchi, the sobriquet of “Urobutcher” for nothing.)

Sure, in the end, some plot threads are left frayed and fluttering in the breeze because the main Stay Night plot points are all set up here at Zero‘s conclusion (though that does produce the disadvantage of no longer making the story twists in Stay Night…well…twists). Despite that though, there is still a completeness to the ending.

Somehow the loose ends are written so they don’t feel loose. Sure we find out in the Heaven’s Feel route of Stay Night that Illya is Kiritsugu’s precious daughter that he was unable to save. Sure, in the Unlimited Blade Works route, Kirei gets his just-desserts for that little infraction of killing Rin’s father, Tokiomi Tohsaka. Sure, in the Fate route, the revelations that Saber was a gender-bent King Arthur and was Kiritsugu’s servant in the previous Grail War come to light.

And knowing those things, or lack thereof, can affect how you watch Zero. Knowing them can fill you with excitement when you see these addressed in the prequel (at least for me, since again, this is something I actually like about prequels). Not knowing them gives them their own fresh and engaging life in the flow of the narrative.

When watching Zero, we last see Illya waiting hopefully in the snowy Einzberns’ castle for her beloved father Kiritsugu to come back to her, only to learn that because he’d tried to destroy the Grail (because it’s corrupted), the Einzberns considered him a traitor and shut him out, preventing him from seeing her ever again.

We last see Rin at her father’s funeral. Kirei (who presided over that funeral no less) gives her the ceremonial dagger that her father himself had gifted to him for being his pupil in magic, only to immediately use it to literally stab him in the back. It’s only upon receiving the knife and learning that it was her father’s, that Rin finally allows herself to cry, Kirei secretly relishing her tears and the knowledge that he just gave her the weapon he’d used to murder her father as a present, and she’s none the wiser.

We see Sakura resigned to her fate as a future vessel for the Grail while carrying the weight of the Matou Family crestworms inside slowly killing her, despite her “uncle” Kariya Matou’s efforts to save her by winning the Grail for his wicked father. Efforts that were, for lack of better term, “ill-fated“.

We see Saber summoned at the conclusion of the first episode, with Kiritsugu believing that King Arthur was well a King, only to learn right off the bat that she was a woman in disguise the whole time (and that becomes a thing).

Regardless of knowing these things prior, the writing itself gives the scenes that are meant to allude to these later plot points a gravitas of their own worthy of praise. I am in a bit of a weird position where I started watching Fate/Stay Night (2006), which followed the first story route, the Fate route, with Saber (Arturia) as the heroine. Then I dropped it about a quarter of the way and bypassed straight to Zero. I was just too excited to wade through the lackluster production values of F/SN ’06. So I both knew and did not know things going into Zero. I had the opportunity to see certain things with a well-crafted setup in Zero, and still be engaged by both them and by things that were new to me in the sense that I wasn’t aware of their relevance not only to the Fate route, but to Unlimited Bladeworks, and Heaven’s Feel routes respectively.

Though I knew that it was going to come up that Kiritsugu was Saber Arturia’s Master in the Fourth War, I was still jarred by how frigid their relationship was pretty much from the word go. And it was interesting seeing someone as openly passionate about justice as Saber was getting stonewalled by someone like Kiritsugu, seeing as how his own passion for justice turned out to have been just as great. It’s just that he’s already let “reality” turn all that into a cold, calculating fire that’s compelling to watch burn so slowly, that struggle between that BBC Sherlockian sense of “Will caring about them [people] help save them?” and caring too much being the whole reason for what he does. That idea of wanting to bring the world salvation through an end to conflict, weighed movingly against how much he cares for his own family. It’s something that craftedly underpins his whole character. And anything like that will never be boring for me.

Rin meanwhile, even at a tender age, shows great potential as a mage, having started her education in magecraft in Zero. There’s an entire episode in there dedicated to how far she’s come and how far she still has to go. And it’s still exciting for those who already know that she’s going to be the capable Master of Archer in the Fifth Holy Grail War of Stay Night because of how well those parts showing such are executed in Zero, as equally exciting as it is to see it as someone going in blind.

Kariya Matou is motivated by the purest of things, love, to save Sakura Matou (formerly Tohsaka as Rin’s little sister) after she’s adopted into the Matou family simply to be used and abused in the worst ways. But for all that, it isn’t enough for him to succeed and failure is one of the most brutal things to watch.

Just about one of the most precious things I’ve seen in anything, never mind anime, is the scene of the walnut-finding game Kiritsugu and his daughter Illya would often play, because we see them play it one last time before Kiritsugu leaves for the Grail War at the beginning of the show. Even without being aware that this is the last time that they will ever see each other again, the hug goodbye that Kiritsugu gives Illya is still bittersweet because of how Kiritsugu’s character has been set up as this sober and reserved man carrying the heavy burden of his wife’s inevitable death, the cost for his wish to save the world, beautifully and poignantly juxtaposed against him acting playful, happy even, with their only child. (That, and well, there’s me who’s outed herself as a sucker for daddy-daughter relationships in fiction.)

Being a tragedy then, not only are all of the characters’ fates inevitable, and consequences of their own flaws, but they all end up spiraling apart into ultimate despair, with just the tiniest ray of hope at the end (which is the tease for Stay Night‘s continuation of the story, all three story routes accounted for). So what we’re left with is characters who either died broken, or survived broken, and for those who survived broken, we see that despite that, they find some reason to go on living (even if not for very much longer, and or even if not for the best of reasons). Just the same, it’s inspiring. Very Bluthian, actually. Despite all the trauma, it’s given worth of its own in that very last scene with Kiritsugu and his adopted son, Shirou, the protagonist of Stay Night, promising that things can be turned around for the better. That always gets me. From the very first time I watched it, I knew I had watched something incredible. An unduplicatable experience in the vein of finishing Harry Potter or Avatar: the Last Airbender.

It’s also something of a reset button where the anime adaptations of the Fate franchise are concerned. Somewhat ironically, the anime was produced so that the later adaptation of the Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel story routes from the visual novel would work as sequels. Sequels to the prequel, as it were.

Then there’s the bottom line. It’s just a damn good show. Beautiful animation, beautiful music, beautiful character writing. Of all of the adaptations, it’s the one that works best as a standalone as probably Fate fans are ever going to get, given the nature of the source material. And with it being so good, it also has considerable rewatch value, which means that those “twists” that get “spoiled” are worth watching in the same regard that anything that has a known twist going in it is still worth watching.

And that…is why Fate/Zero actually works as a prequel.

Keeping this link up!

Why Fate/Zero Works As A Prequel That's right! It's been far too long, and I need to do another discussion of, what remains to this day, my #1…

[forestwater87]

A moment to chat about “The Butterfinger Effect” (obv spoilers for S4e17)

Wow, so a lot of people fucking haaaaaated this episode. And since I’m addicted to That Discourse, I had to say something because I think they’re super wrong. (And this isn’t me just being a total Camp Camp fangirl here; like, the pee episode was bad. That was bad tv and bad for all the senses. There have been mediocre and even shitty episodes of this show; this just wasn’t one of them.)

There are a couple different points of criticism aimed at this episode, and while there’s one I’d like to take a deep dive into in particular I might as well take some shots at the others real fast:

The moral was too obvious: god, you guys whine all day and night that you wanna see Max show character growth and whenever he displays it you hate how it’s done. This show has never been one for subtlety. I mean, the climate change ep? This is how the show works; it’s part of its twisted-Saturday-morning-cartoons charm, it’s the most efficient way to get a point across in a short runtime, and it was the set up for the joke at the end of the episode.

It didn’t advance the plot: bitch what plot are you talking about???

Not enough dad//vid: listen I’ve made my thoughts about the fandom’s idea of dad//vid incredibly clear at this point, so let’s just:

The most common argument, though, is that it’s all so very “unrealistic” and “out of character.”

Considering the show’s concept of “realistic” involves squirrel armies (hey, another mediocre episode! See, I can call them when I see them) and a universe-destroying space octopus, I’m not sure how to rebut that without another Bianca del Rio gif. So, the out-of-character accusation. 

Listen, characterization is hard as balls. Everyone fucks it up sometimes, and not every characterization in every episode is gonna work for you. 

But you know who nailed it this time? Eddy Goddamn Rivas, the writer for this episode, that’s who.

In fact, I’d argue that the entire point of the episode is that it’s not Space/Race Kid’s new interest that caused the majority of the changes, or some sort of mystical “butterfly/finger effect,” but Nurf’s attempt to put things back to “normal.” He caused the thing he was trying to prevent -- which happens to dovetail perfectly with the moral of accepting change and not letting it freak you out.

This episode is brilliant, and plays with the canon characterizations of all our campers while staying true to them, and I’m gonna show you how.

Under a cut, because not everyone has time for that shit. But first, a juicy preview of the sexy discourse to come:

Space Kid

This one is the easiest to defend, because Space Kid is just . . . Race Kid. Aside from maybe having an idea that he’s cooler than he used to believe he was -- which makes sense, because why do people buy fancy sports cars except that they think it makes them look cool? -- we’ve seen his tendency to latch onto an interest and go 110%. 

Reasonable, hilarious, and adorable. I actually don’t think anyone has any problem with Race Kid, so this is a quickie. 

As for why he dropped it so fast: I mean, hasn’t everyone gotten really into something before deciding it wasn’t as fun as an old hyperfixation? I’ve been coming back to the Camp Camp well since 2016 because it’s just so much fun.

Nurf

Nurf is the one I think people are sleeping on. All the time, always, but especially in this episode. The summary hints that Max is the one unable to handle the idea of change -- something this entire season has been working towards, and I literally just realized change has been a thematic thread throughout several of the episodes and that’s really cool -- but it’s actually Nurf who can’t stand the thought of things being different.

And, in trying to prevent the “butterfinger effect,” he sets it in motion. The irony is delicious, and his head in a fishbowl makes me laugh every goddamn time.

(Also, “A battle of wits is not my strong suit” was just hysterical. Nurf is full of great lines and y’all need to stop ignoring what a comedic goldmine this kid is.)

Preston

Oh, I’m sorry, are we shocked that Preston would jump at the chance to be admired by people, even if it means doing something he doesn’t particularly enjoy?

Were we all in comas during the episode this very season that was literally only about this exact thing?

As to why he’d pick football: he’s a theater kid addicted to the corniest, most cliche tropes. When he got a taste of power by bullying Nurf -- which was also totally in character, because honestly, Preston is not a very nice kid -- of course he went to the thing that in every 80s teen movie meant “cool bully who’s super popular”: the sports jock.

Add to that getting positive recognition from Campbell -- who we’ll get to -- and this swap is totally in-character, and entirely kicked off by the power rush he got from finally getting to be the one who bullies instead of being bullied. 

Nurf created his own worst nightmare by being afraid of change. This episode is fucking brilliant.

Harrison

To nobody’s surprise, Harrison is a sadist who thinks he’s hot shit.

He’s emotionally traumatized Neil to win an argument, he’s made Max vomit up, just, like, so many things and shown zero remorse, and got an unflappable sense of self-worth that skates right off the edge into total egotism.

These are the things we love about him. (And yes, obviously his arrogance comes from a deep well of insecurity, but that only exacerbates why he’d absolutely refuse to help Nurf, because it gives him a chance to be better than someone.)

As for why he’d choose to model himself after goth!Max . . . 

Honestly, this one doesn’t entirely make sense to me. He’s never shown any particular interest in Max. The only thing I can assume is that . . . well, actually Max was right, and at least in Harrison’s eyes, he is at the top of the social hierarchy. And he got there by giving zero fucks about what anyone thinks of him.

Which is what Harrison did, by refusing to help Nurf. We come full circle!

(WAIT: When Max asks why he’s acting like . . . you know, him, Harrison’s response is, “Why? It’s not making you insecure, is it?” While we could take this as “I’m coming for your shtick,” it could also imply that Max’s general Maxyness makes Harrison feel insecure about who he is. Which explains why, as soon as he’s offered a chance to emulate someone who makes him feel insecure, he chooses Max.)

Ered

Nerris and Ered have established themselves as friends, and she at least has expressed a token interest in playing DnD before. She’s listened to Nerris talk about this stuff enough to repeat it at times -- albeit incorrectly -- and so, when there’s “nothing better to do,” she tries something her friend is super into and finds it really fun and embraces it.

I can attest that DnD totally turns you into a massive, shameless nerd. It’s just that awesome.

Plus, she’s too cool to give a shit if people think she’s being nerdy, so of course she’s not embarrassed about being seen dressed like a Viking; in ��Ered Loses Her Cool,” she had that moment of growth where she decided that her coolness comes from her happily choosing to be herself. 

Also, she gets to carry an axe around. So like, extra cool points for that.

Nerris

Nerris is gonna grow up to be a band geek, and she’ll especially enjoy the theatricality of marching around in parades while dressed like a Christmas Nutcracker. It’s like being a real-life bard.

This is the only one that really has a “supernatural” level to its change, except maybe the counselors (yes, I’ve come around on Neil; I’ll defend him at the end). While everyone else can be explained by psychological and in-character reasons, I have no idea what caused her to suddenly have this whole getup. I’d chalk it down to her seeing everyone else trying something new and being interested in upping her LARPing game, except she explicitly says she doesn’t know where it came from.

It’s one of the few that doesn’t make perfect sense, but I don’t really mind it because it’s such a top-tier episode otherwise.

Dolph

This is another one with questionable backing in the rest of the canon. However, I think it works less on a characterization basis than on an archetypical one. 

Hear me out: how many artists actually make it professionally? And how many of them end up falling back on something solid and lucrative and artistically unfulfilling to pay the bills? Some people are of course lucky enough to land their dream job, and others are lucky enough to find something close enough to that dream job to make money while still doing something creative and adjacent to their interests (becoming an art teacher, for example).

But in Hollywood, at least, the idea is that you’re either a professional artist who Makes It, a starving artist who’s sacrificing for their dream, or a total corporate sellout who abandons their soul for the sake of profit. A child, especially one with a father so unsupportive of his artistic interests, would only have the Hollywood idea of success to fall back on, which means if Dolph was tying to think of a way to “grow up” and stop wasting his time on being an artist, of course he’d jump straight into the most famously corrupt, artistically soulless type of job possible.

The problem here, of course, is that I don’t know what triggered it; like Nerris, I don’t really see a clear line from motivation to new hobby. However, it works really well at poking fun of the “artist to sellout” pipeline portrayed in popular media, so I certainly can’t be mad at it.

Also, look at these credit scores:

David’s score is either astoundingly good -- 825 out of 850 -- or astoundingly bad -- 325 out of 850 -- depending on what that first number is. Gwen’s credit is pretty bad, which isn’t surprising considering she’s working at Camp Campbell, but I’m still proud of her for being either the second- or third-highest person at the camp.

None of the campers should have credit, so these numbers are just goofy, but I’m as shocked by Nikki’s “exceptional” credit as I am by Nurf’s “literally not on the chart by 298 numbers” rating. Assuming Dolph made at least the campers’ scores up, and we know he’s pretty good friends with Nikki, I assume he gave her a higher score because he likes her, Max’s is trash because their relationship is rocky at best, and Nurf’s is just petty and spiteful because he bullies Dolph, and I just love it. 

(I assume Mr. Campbell’s credit is in negative numbers, and QM doesn’t exist on any official records.)

Counselors & Campbell

Campbell, I’m going to argue, makes sense.

This? Not so much.

I have no idea what Gwen’s talking about -- “I need her showing. We all agreed to it”???? -- and literally none of this makes sense in any understanding of characterization or anything, but my counterpoint would be:

Look how cute Gwen looks dressed up like David.

“Mumble, grumble, aliens!” and something about Mormons in David’s cheery voice adds 5 years to my life.

David’s floof is now beard.

David is wearing plaid.

QM. Just . . . QM.

Did I mention that Gwen looks so fucking good here? I swoon. So hot. Babe. Step on me, mommy.

Anyway. Campbell. 

He’s not what you’d call . . . nurturing, by any means, so at first this weird dad!swap is totally out of left field. However, he has proven himself to be . . . well, not a great caretaker, but someone who does put in the effort when he has to, and is surprisingly good at dealing with the kiddos when forced.

He’s also proven himself to be remarkably introspective, starting back in Season 3. He does to an extent feel bad about what he’s done, and to varying extents wants to make amends for it. So when he starts talking about legacy, and what a man leaves behind -- 

-- I can’t say I’d be all that surprised if he stumbled upon Preston trying to be “cool” with sports camp and decided (probably with the help of whatever supernatural strangeness came over the other counselors) that he wants to have a better impact on this camp than a bunch of broken-down equipment, a pile of debts, and a “son” who’s disappointed in him. 

Listen, what I’m trying to say is that I will die defending my Trash Grandpa and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. There’s good in him!!!! I CAN SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!

On a less “Campbell is my dad” note, as a rather stereotypical Manly Man(TM), he’d be best served helping some weedy little brat become more traditionally masculine. i’m saying Campbell was great at football in high school and is in part reliving his glory days, okay?

Nikki

Oh, come on. Nikki’s always shown an interest in science, and particularly in the mayhem it causes. When Neil is out of commission, and she sees that everyone else is doing major hobby swaps -- including Ered, who I believe she still sees as her idol -- why wouldn’t she want to join in on the fun in the most destructive way possible?

The show didn’t say she was a good scientist, after all. 

Neil

Remember when I said I couldn’t defend Neil? WELL SURPRISE BITCHES, TURNS OUT I CAN! 

(I didn’t realize it until halfway through writing this post, to be fair.)

But think about it: the boy does not respond well to his mind being freaked. We have observed this.

This is not a good reaction to an unsolvable logical problem.

I’m just saying, there’s not a huge difference between these pictures. Neil doesn’t do well when his brain is overloaded with things he doesn’t understand, and everyone around him turning into different people -- which is how it must look from their perspective, even if I can sit here and explain it in ways that make sense at least to me -- broke the poor boy’s brain.

He’s a very fragile ecosystem, our little Neil. You must protect him from thinking too many thinks and getting overheated.

So . . . yeah. This episode is rad, way more of it makes sense in terms of the characters’ motivations than people are giving it credit for, and the ones that don’t make a ton of sense are at least funny and clever enough to be overlooked, at least in this broad’s humble opinion.

[neoneidolon]

how is AvE going to vary from the blog timeline? i know this is probably going to be a long one so feel free to condense or not condense your answer however you'd like!

((yeah this was a long one but good to answer: ))

((the obvious departure from blog timeline is that AvE won’t be associated with Gravity Falls at all, although it will likely borrow some ideas in a broad sense-- for example the concept of the mindscape (not sure if I’ll actually call it that or not, I am not using capital-M name but lowercase-m might appear), uh, portals? and the Multiverse, and honestly if Hirsch is not going to do anything else with his inter-dimension chaos crawlspace ( a location we never visited in the show proper and barely saw outside of it), I’m happy to take it and give it a new paint job. I’m not pretending to be completely original here, so it’s prob. for the best I’m not planning on formally publishing!))

((the other big thing is that it’s going to be much longer and more detailed in general, have more characters and locations, that kind of thing. I actually don’t have the majority of AvE plotted out yet, but I do know where I want to go and broadly what should happen along the way, not quite how I will get there. I already know pretty much exactly how it will end, at least as the narrative arc stands now. It will be an ending similar to the one I’ve arrived at on this blog, except a bit more final, and going beyond what I plan on writing here by a couple/few decades. The story itself takes place mostly in 2016 (at least at the start of the action).))

((so, Bill’s not there, at least not in name. But Morph must necessarily have someone like him in their backstory. Right now that’s an entity called Zero. ...I don’t know anything about Zero. I don’t even know if he’s the actual antagonist (right now there are about four candidates for that position). I definitely don’t know what his motives are.

Interestingly, Triangle Guy’s motivations weren’t obvious at first to his creators either. Zero might surprise me yet. Anyway-- Weirdmageddon is off the table! So, while on these blogs, a lot of what happened was Morpho trying to run away from WM, they will have to motivated by something else in AvE. Right now, it looks to be shaping up as a “find the MacGuffins” type story, specifically trying to find parts of a book. Sound familiar? At least in AvE we already know who “the Author of the Journals” is and don’t have to track him down. lol. This is where U-Ki comes in, but unfortunately she’s in the dark about what finding the complete book is going to mean... I will say that the book does not open a universe-portal. It does something worse.))

((Finding the MacGuffins is only the plot, though, not necessarily the Story. People who read these blogs already know the story, about Morpho leaving what they thought they wanted behind and figuring out what they actually want instead. It’s just going to be tangled up with so many more people this time around.))

((The Hyperspaceland Event is going to be done over in a bigger and even more complicated way, oh boy. Morph’s birth dimension is going to have a bigger presence in general in the story, and a big origin mystery about Morpho I’ve alluded to during that event and following it, but never actually publicly revealed, is going to be explored in depth. And by god is learning the answer going to make Morph suffer ahaha. U-Ki, as it happens, has a pretty big origin mystery, too, and she’s not going to like the answer either.))

((Z will be in AvE, in pretty much the same role as he is here, although the history between him and Morph is going to get expanded on a lot. Beta will show up too, and get a stronger narrative of their own. (Beta voice, in the distance: “whoo, I get to be in this!”)

It’s going to have a lot more of Morph being a Bad Person. But even in their worst periods there’s space for their good side. It’s going to have even more of me writing shameless melodrama and gigantic break-everything type climaxes. But if I worry about making this high quality, I’ll never start. I hope people like it anyway, I know some people don’t mind that about my writing style. One thing is that, here Morpho keeps referencing stuff that happened on other worlds, but in AvE we’re going to see more of that play out, so that’s fun, hopefully! There will be more pictures, too... Inter-entity conflicts and politics will also show up more, I think?))

((I might edit this post as I think of other differences. One more that I can think of is that while here on Tumblr I write as “Tesser”, I’m going to be publishing Amos vs. Everything as “Fish”.))

[jira-chii]

Thoughts on the Shoumetsu Toshi Anime before it even airs

The Shoumetsu Toshi anime will air in April 2019, which fills me with both excitement and trepidation... 

Warning for long post. And a bit of language. I may have spoiled the bare minimum of the game in order to explain why it is awesome. There are no spoilers for the anime because it doesn't air until April 2019. 

NB: This whole post is my own personal opinion. I don’t claim to be an expert in anything anime or game related. In fact, I don't play many mobile games at all, and usually steer clear of anime adaptations of such games because I know how shit they can be. I sincerely hope Shoumetsu Toshi will be different because of the quality of the writing. Also yes I am very biased. And passionate. And this whole thing is written on the assumption the producers actually want to make this anime good and worthwhile, rather than just a quick money-grab. I just have a lot of feelings about this ok. 

During Shoumetsu Toshi’s fourth year anniversary, one of the projects announced was an anime! I'm sure everyone playing knew this was going to happen eventually. After all, the game has an all star cast of seiyuu, an amazing storyline, and has been marketing itself for quite a while now (collabs, live concerts, CDs, keychains and more). I have no doubt Shoumetsu Toshi has the potential to become an amazing anime if done correctly, but it will face many challenges on the path to adaptation. Here are some of them.

Too many tamashii

One of the game’s greatest strengths also becomes one of its greatest barriers to adaptation. Shoumetsu Toshi has done an amazing job at creating a huge community of characters (like, an actual city). We get to see their stories unfold and their characters develop bit by bit through various events and quest stages. Within the game, we meet characters that are strong and inspiring, characters with complex relationships, characters that are good-natured and goofy, characters with tragic pasts and so much more. There are characters with stories in this game that will tear your heart to shreds, stories with plot twists nobody saw coming until years later, and stories that were so impactful I had to write a 3000 word essay on it before I was satisfied.

Unfortunately, the anime cannot afford to invest the same amount of time and effort in its characters as the game does. Though we love them, including too many would be detrimental because 1. It wouldn’t fit the tone the anime is going for, 2. There's actually no point because the majority of these don't affect the main story whatsoever and 3. They won't be developed enough for first timers to become invested in them. Especially the ones with more serious stories.

The producers will need to carefully choose which characters to include: characters that are not only distinct and easy to invest in, but will actually contribute to the plot and make the time getting to know them worthwhile. Because one of the worst things an anime can do imo, is bring in a character nobody is invested in, who contributes nothing to the story, has zero character development (i.e. their character is based completely on cliches and tropes) but also gets about 200% more screen time than any other side character, because there is the assumption that they’ll be popular based on their character design alone. That is just lazy writing and is disrespectful not only to the audience, but also the character (I don’t care if they’re fictional, good characters deserve respect too).

I fear there is a very real danger SPR5 could become that. The in-game idol group got a real world debut, and, while I don’t mind seeing promotion in an anime (we live in a capitalist society after all), they shouldn’t contribute much to the overall story, and I will be very disappointed if the anime give them more screen time than they need purely for the sake of marketing.  

Complex storyline

If there is one thing I absolutely don't want this anime to get wrong, it’s the story. The Shoumetsu Toshi main storyline is frickin’ amazing. It is an epic quest that spans four worlds, involves characters literally jumping through space and time, and breaks the fourth wall in the creepiest way possible. The creativity that comes with that is my absolute favourite thing about the game, however I acknowledge some heavy changes would need to be made to make it fit the traditional anime format…

I have heard the anime will be an original story, however the PV suggests it will still retain key plot points from the game. Contrary to my general opinions regarding anime-original content, I think this is the right way to go. I think fans innately despise original stories in anime adaptations for one of two reasons: the story will either be too complex for non-fans to enjoy, ruining the reputation of the series, or the story will be too watered down in order to appeal to said non-fans and consequently lose much of what made the original actually great. Achieving harmony is an incredibly difficult balancing act, and part of this involves the series living up to its own greatness. Which very rarely happens. If Shoumetsu Toshi goes for a retelling of say, World 1, it is invariably going to be compared to the original. Also it becomes predictable for anyone far enough into the game. If the producers do want to go the extra mile and make it worthwhile for the OG fans (which is nice in theory but, admittedly, unlikely), they would need to add some meaningful original content that still retains the essence of what makes Shoumetsu Toshi, Shoumetsu Toshi. That is, it retains the same themes and atmosphere, conveys a similar message, keeps all the characters appropriately in character...basically anything that would not feel out of place if it were to be inserted into the original. Luckily for us, Shoumetsu Toshi writers have loads of experience with this. I am talking, of course, about the mountain of ranking quests, side stories and events.

I will admit not every single minor story in Shoumetsu Toshi is fantastic, particularly many of the ranking events, which usually only allow about three stages to tell a story focused on one character. However, what I think the game does do very well in respect to these short ranking stories (and many other events and side stories open to lower level players), is make them accommodating to both old and new players. This is usually achieved by including Easter eggs and hints to a greater plot for the former, while keeping the actual main story for that particular quest straightforward and accessible for the latter. This strategy avoids alienating newcomers and will be absolutely vital if the anime is aiming to appeal to a larger audience, namely the international one who are mostly not even aware of the game. Failure to adhere to this strategy is also partially why many anime adaptations of games have such a shitty track record. They try to pack in too much, usually by explaining multiple complex concepts without devoting enough time to see them properly work in action. The story might take a backburner in favour of the more technical stuff, leaving newcomers confused and bored. Then when it’s time for the climax, nobody actually understands what is happening on screen. “Just play the source material”, actual fans will say, but really, unless the premise or characters appealed to me, how likely am I to invest even more time into a game if I thought the anime was boring as hell?

I do not think Shoumetsu Toshi will be able to showcase its full potential in one anime season. But if the goal of the anime is just to promote the game, there is no need to. If the goal of the anime were to be an actual good anime though, I think the creators would need to take the same approach as the game does for its stories.

Shoumetsu Toshi’s most epic moments are its unpredictable and creative plot twists. The amazing thing is, they don’t just come out of nowhere. This game’s strongest stories are the long ones that build up gradually to spectacular and emotional climaxes, which are possible because characters are given ample time to establish their values and motivations. This helps us as an audience better understand important plot points without the story having to beat us over the head about it, allowing the game to weave a subtle yet sophisticated narrative that actually makes total sense by the end. This means the story needs to be planned out from the very beginning, and will need some time for setup. Which means it won’t truly shine until the metaphorical ‘late-game’.

Stories like these are at a disadvantage these days because, especially with the Internet giving us so much more choice, a lot of anime watchers now tend to drop a show if it fails to impress them from the very start. After about three episodes, the audience should have a good feel for the anime’s main characters, setting and a hint of the main plot. If by then, absolutely nothing about the series appeals to you, you would start to think there are better things you could be doing with your time. Unfortunately, sometimes a show just needs a long time to set up a good story (or sometimes producers dick around too much with filler episodes).  

On top of probably needing a slow start, the Shoumetsu Toshi anime is at another disadvantage in respect to one type of audience, because the game does not have an English version. Which means a lot of the Western anime audience will have had no prior interaction with it and don’t know what to expect. They have no idea who the characters are, what the story is, and why its fanbase considers it so much more than just another gacha game. We just have to hope the anime is compelling enough in the beginning to ‘hook’ these newcomers, and make them stay on board long enough to make their time worth it...

A good Shoumetsu Toshi story needs to take risks. I hope to God nobody at that studio makes the executive decision to ‘play it safe’, because the last thing any fan wants is a disappointing anime adaptation with a mundane story even a non-fan wouldn’t be able to enjoy.The writers need to be given complete autonomy and trust to fully realise their creative vision, because that is exactly what is needed if this adaptation wants to use Shoumetsu Toshi’s biggest drawcard to its full advantage.

Animating exposition

This is a pretty minor thing compared to the other two I mentioned previously, but the most iconic thing that sets an anime adaptation apart from the source material is, well, the animation. Visuals and animation are probably the biggest things influencing a new audience’s first impression. Unfortunately, the PV portrayed some pretty lacklustre animation for Madhouse standards and I don’t think people were that impressed.

Good animation is time-consuming and can actually take quite a lot of effort on the part of the director (not that I have that much experience to speak to). Where to place characters in the shot composition, when and how far to zoom in for a close-up, how to best direct movement for maximum impact, but also keeping the scene direction consistent enough that the audience can still understand what is happening on screen. Dynamic scenes are hard enough, but on the other end of the spectrum, how do you animate a static character reciting an information dump in an interesting way?

Shoumetsu Toshi has a lot of talking. It's just something that comes part and parcel with a game of this format. In the game it's alright because you can read at your own pace, and it's important information. Plus they usually keep you engaged by switching up characters’ facial expressions (Shoumetsu Toshi 0 does this in spades) or by distracting you with the stellar soundtrack. I expect the anime is also gonna have a heap of exposition. I mean, from the PV alone I already see at least three expositional characters: Geek, Eiji and Kikyou.

Personally I think expositions are the hardest things to animate. And I don't mean difficult to actually draw and turn into animation, but to actually direct something like that in a satisfying way takes brain power. There are an infinite number of ways to animate characters talking, ranging from the super boring still-image-with-moving-mouth-flap, to using dynamic camera angles to keep the composition interesting, or overlaying a montage of some sort to visually convey the message without having to look at a static character. The game provides only a generic idea of how the scene might play out when animated. While this opens the door to a heap of creative possibilities, I’m concerned that if it comes down to time and budget, or if someone gets lazy, it is very likely we could end up with one hella boring sequence of exposition. Which could be a serious problem if the action scenes aren’t able to impress.

Ahh, you guys have no idea how much I want this anime to do well. There's just so much potential there.

In my opinion, traditional anime can be seen as an incredibly limited medium that must, in the span of about 12 episodes, tell a good story to its audience, invest them in its characters, and keep them engaged for half an hour each episode through pretty visuals/cool animation. If they can’t do that the audience will probably drop the series because they a) get bored, b) don’t care, and/or c) fall asleep. This also means a good anime can’t afford to sacrifice story for character development or vice versa. They need to happen concurrently.

It is not easy to make a good anime, and even more difficult to make one that lives up to the hype of its very amazing source material. As a general rule of thumb, I keep my expectations of game adaptations low, and that is what I said to myself when the Shoumetsu Toshi anime was announced. But then one day I got linked a Shoumetsu Toshi drama CD, and I was blown away by how well they did it. The title is The Vanished Elephant, a literary reference to Murakami's short story of the same name. I'm trying not to spoil but basically, the CD fully utilised the fact we can't see the characters (but can hear them) to craft a mysterious original story with a wonderful plot twist. It works just as a stand alone story, but actual players who are familiar with the characters and motifs immediately get that sense of unease at the very beginning, which is finally paid off with the reveal at the end.

Thanks to that, I can't help but be excited for the anime. If they do fuck it up, I won't be surprised but I will be very, very, sad.

If you have read this far, thank you so much for your time. If you are unfamiliar with Shoumetsu Toshi, could I ask you to please give this anime a chance? And if after its run, it does turn out shit, by all means, complain to your heart’s content (because I will be doing the same).

[lolcat76]

WWSRD, Sharon Raydor, and a fangirl’s thoughts.

I just finished #WWSRD and I have a lot of thoughts, so bear with me. Or ignore me. Either is fine.

First, I totally understand Mary’s frustration with the fans’ reactions across the board, and now I feel bad for making her feel bad, because I know just how lucky we are to have someone who is so invested in her art and her fans to care about what we think. I am so grateful for WWSRD to give me a chance to breathe, understand the process of creating this character every week, and see the show from the perspective of the actor who lived the character, which is such a gift for someone like me who craves that insight into character development.

I also understand Mary’s protectiveness of the show and cast and crew, and I feel even worse that our outpouring of grief and rage diminishes what they’ve accomplished over the last 13 years. The two are not related, especially in terms of cast and crew. Everyone from the directors to the actors to the tape loggers and PAs have done a wonderful job with this show. Take a bow and please accept my gratitude for a job very well done.

As you all know, I write a lot of fanfic, but I also do graphic design and corporate communications for my day job, and in those instances, when the point I’m trying to get across falls flat or someone just doesn’t like my design, my first thought is, “Well, you’re an idiot.” (And usually my second and third thoughts as well.) (Mary is a lot more diplomatic than I am.) It’s never easy to hear that someone’s reaction to something you put your heart and soul into is that it sucks and they hate it. It doesn’t, however, mean that the work isn’t valid. It’s just not necessarily being read the way it’s written, and that’s a fact of life every creator of content has to accept.

There’s a big difference between creating content and consuming content. Once a piece is created, the creator has to relinquish control over how it’s consumed, because no two members of the audience internalize art or fiction or television in the same way. That’s the whole reason we have fandom wars on this godforsaken site. Not only that, but what is satisfying for a writer or an actor is very often vastly different than what is satisfying for the audience. I can and do support Mary’s playing Sharon’s end, acknowledging it as a valid creative plot point, and loving the choices that she made – and I’m also very grateful that this podcast helps me understand those choices – and still, I’m just so heartbroken about Sharon’s death. The first is because I have enormous respect for the actor and the writers and the creative process and, the second is because I’m a fan of the actor and the writers and creative process, and sometimes those two things just don’t mesh well together, because the audience isn’t in the same place in the creative process. We didn’t have several months to process this. We had a few weeks, and I’m not speaking for anyone else, but those few weeks were pretty sucky for me.

I think anyone who cares about their job – whether it be in the entertainment industry, or accounting, or making fancy lattes – wants to do it well and wants to be challenged, and for an actor, there’s no bigger challenge than trying to portray something as difficult and emotional as a death and do it justice. The disconnect here I think is that while Mary did a beautiful job with Sharon’s last two episodes, the fans were not ready for her story to end. I’m sure the general audience watched it and thought, “Oh, that’s sad,” and went about their business, but for those of us who are probably way too emotionally attached to the character, it’s hard to separate the craft and care that went into shooting those scenes from the gut-wrenching reaction we had to watching them. My anger at what happened to Sharon has pretty much zero to do with the cast and crew, who have been phenomenal, and everything to do with my own life. That’s on me, and it’s not a reflection of the work in general, but that’s the point of art – it does touch people, and you just can’t control HOW it’s going to touch them. To quote one of my favorite inappropriate songs from the ’90s, sometimes it’s a bad touch, and that’s where I am right now.

I will say, because it’s my blog and I can be salty if I want, that I don’t think the writing or editing clarified  Mary’s analysis of Sharon’s thought processes, and I wish it had. If it had, I don’t think we’d have had the visceral reaction that Sharon put herself directly in harm’s way. Having listened to WWSRD, I can go back and rewatch those two episodes with an entirely different mindset on Sharon’s motivations and decisions, but without hearing Mary’s thoughts, some of the things she brought up were just not clear in the writing. Too many things were open to interpretation, and there were too many moments of foreshadowing in the scripts and in the editing that just made it look like Sharon was preparing to die. And, from a completely personal standpoint, that was incredibly hard to watch. From her not wanting to be a burden to going to ask for last rites, it seemed a lot less like taking control of her story and a lot more like surrendering to her fate, and it wasn’t a fate that I would choose. Mainly because to me, I’ve always been afraid that my death would be far more of a burden to my loved ones than my life is. Andy is going to have to pack up her clothes and her office. He’s going to have to sort through her finances and make sure her children are taken care of, and ensure that Rusty has the means to make it through law school. He’s going to have to live in the condo she decorated without her, and you guys, the thought of that makes me so sad I can barely stand it. The idea that it would have been easier for her children and Andy if Sharon had just died the first time she went into cardiac arrest…Nope. Nothing about death is easy, but death that comes with no warning is the hardest thing in the world to go through for the people who love you.

Being again true to form, I’m going to bring up my beloved Laura Roslin. She was introduced to us as a character who was dying, and the concept of being the Dying Leader was 100% part of who she was. Her death was awful, and I’m still not over it, but it was also beautiful and meaningful, and those last moments in the Raptor with Adama were very much the culmination of their story. Sharon’s death was…not that. Laura died with Bill, him showing her the beautiful endpoint of everything they’d worked for over the last several years. Sharon died on a gurney, surrounded by strangers, in the ER. Laura found love in spite of her impending death; Sharon died in spite of her happy life. One has poetry and meaning, and the other is just…well, I’m going to reiterate it. It was just cruel. To me, it is the complete opposite of dying doing what you love, and that waiting room scene is probably the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever watched, with her husband and son and the friends she’s come to love over the years kept out of the room, just waiting and hoping, only to be devastated by the doctor coming out to break the news.

As I said in our Fans React podcast, Sharon’s dead. She doesn’t care. Her children and her husband, though, have to figure out how to go on without her. That’s the hardest part of this – that as much as I love Sharon and grieve the loss of this kickass character, I also love the rest of the cast, and they’re going to have to soldier on without her. Watching the last four episodes knowing that they’re going to be in that kind of pain – a pain I think all of us who have lost loved ones understand – it’s hard. It’s really hard. I don’t really want to go through that kind of pain while watching a TV show that I use to escape, because it opens up a lot of things that I don’t even want to think about. Which, frankly, is why I like the “safe spaces” of television – it gives me a little break from dealing with the daily car fires of the real world.

And, to dovetail into Mary’s point about feeling grief, I hope we’re going to be able to do that in the last four episodes, because I need to grieve not only for this character that I love so much, but also for her husband and children and friends, but I’m afraid that we won’t. At its heart, Major Crimes is a crime procedural show. I know the funeral next week is going to probably knock me flat, but I’m also afraid that it will be much like the wedding – overly hyped and then three minutes at the beginning of the episode, and then BAM right into the next plot, and the next plot being the final plot that ties the two series together and omits the two female leads is just so, so disappointing.

The next four episodes will be about Stroh and his backstory and his coming after Rusty, and I know that’s a plot point that has been something like 10 years in the making, but I can’t switch gears that quickly. Nor do I want to, because my involvement with the show over the last several years has absolutely nothing to do with the cases and everything to do with the characters. I knew the Stroh story would have to come to an explosive close, but I never thought it would happen without Brenda or Sharon, and to have neither of them figure in to it just makes me wonder…what’s the point? I know that it’s Rusty’s story, but it’s just as much Sharon’s and even more Brenda’s, and to leave them both out at this point feels like a dismissal of the last 13 years, and to shove it into two nights…so frustrating.

Obviously, TNT has done a huge disservice to Major Crimes, The Closer, and even Duff in the last few years, but ramming the last several episodes into the space of a few weeks might be the worst thing they’ve done. We still have so much left to process, and trying to cram it in over a couple of nights is just really unfair to the fans.

I know life is hard. I bet you all know life is hard as well, or we’d all be out living life and wouldn’t be here on Tumblr obsessing over TV characters. I don’t need to watch TV to be reminded that life is hard, because I have to wake up every day to the dumpster fire that is American politics. I watch TV to escape the idea that life is hard.

(Temporary word-vomiting break to say that yes, HALLMARK CHRISTMAS MOVIES ARE GOOD AND LEAD TO EVEN BETTER FANFIC PROMPTS.)

Now, going back to safe spaces. That phrase is fraught right now, because at the moment Tumblr is my safe space, and GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT THAT SAYS. To address Mary’s point about the safe space of TV recognizing the evil in the world and righting it, YES, that is one of the things about MC that I love – that these characters were so deeply flawed, and yet still so moral and ethical. Living in LA, I have to say that MC made me very sympathetic to the LAPD. Every time an old 90’s Crown Vic passes me on the 110 freeway, I think, aww, Provie and Andy still have their old shitty cars from the 90s, rather than panicking about whether or not I’m speeding on the freeway. (I’m never speeding on the freeway, because LA traffic sucks.) But, for a fan, a safe space is a totally different thing, and that’s the space where we have an hour each week to forget about all our worries. MC was that for me, and from this point on, it won’t be. And that, as much as Sharon Raydor, is the loss I’m grieving.

I wouldn’t be so torn up about it if MC had been a dark show from the start, but it wasn’t. Even the hardest episodes to watch – and there have been many – still had humor. There are so many episodes going back to The Closer that I watch again and again because in the midst of murder and chaos, the characters gave a breath of life into the stories. Even going back to the start of MC, with Rusty and Stroh, and Provenza and Sharon going head-to-head, I was so invested in how these interpersonal relationships were going to play out. I didn’t give a shit about the grocery store murderers in that first episode. I cared about how this cast of characters was going to come together, and through the first season they came together through a combination of wit, stubbornness, compassion and intelligence, and it’s those qualities that draw me to people in my own life.

Those characteristics also made me fall hard for Sharon. Most of the women my age on TV are moms who play secondary characters (two things that I’m not and don’t aspire to be), but Sharon Raydor was, from her introduction, a badass police captain who happened to be a mom and happened to be over the age of 40 and happened to be the unapologetic boss. She was important despite (and because of) being a mother and a woman over 40, and she wasn’t willing to be dismissed because she was a mother and a woman over 40. She was important because she was a high-ranking professional, completely at ease with being a woman in a male-dominated field and not afraid to tell men who outranked her to shut up and sit down, and to quote @dillydallyy, shove a feminist foot right up someone’s ass. I’ve worked in television and commercial real estate, both traditionally male-dominated fields, and being the only woman in a room full of men…that’s my life. Every damn day. And to see a woman, not just in the same position but in a leadership role, OMG. Yes, kick them in the ass with your feminist heels and stroll out of the room in your Armani suit.

This kind of character is so rare, especially on network TV and basic cable. I wish I had some statistics handy, but the reality is, it’s rare to find a show that features women in prominent leadership roles, and when we find them, yeah…we’re going to be pissed when they’re taken away. I’m pissed. I’M SO PISSED. I have very little representation to fall back on, especially since I’m a huge cheapskate and I ditched cable TV a year and a half ago.

Speaking of representation, I’d like to go off for about ten thousand words about Sharon Raydor and even Brenda Johnson as powerful role models cast as lead tv characters, the lack of women writers and directors in the media, and what it means to women like myself over the age of (cough) 40 to see a lead character in a highly-rated tv show, but…I just can’t. I’ve been living in a state of feminist rage for a long time now, but I will say that watching Sharon die killed off a little bit of myself that felt so hopeful, especially in a storyline that was so timely in portraying what a woman has to go through to be successful and recognized – or hell, even employed – in the world today. Again, not to pile on James Duff, but killing off the lead female character at the tail end of a story arc that kills off women…it really hurts. It may not have been his intention, but it was my perception as a woman who watches the show. And killing off the lead female character before delving into the last story arc that is going to be the culmination of several years of plot points…listen, I’m with Mary. I don’t like guns. I don’t like violence. I don’t watch this show to watch Sharon Raydor shoot a dirtbag between the eyes with a bb pellet (but HOT DAMN THAT WAS AWESOME), but I also don’t want to see the strong female lead drop dead from a deus ex machina plot point before the story reaches the crucial point that has been building for several seasons. For Sharon to be gone, that means the rest of the story will be told through the male gaze, and…you know, I’m trying to be respectful and trying to be on board with that, but it’s not what I, as a woman, hoped for. I didn’t need Sharon to go in guns a-blazing, but I did need her to be a part of the final chapter of this show and of this story that she was so heavily invested in, because otherwise, how is it not yet another example of the woman dying and the men living on to tell the story? Brenda first and Sharon second were so pivotal in putting Stroh in the crosshairs, and having both of them out of the story…it’s just another cop show with men outgunning men.

And finally, I will say, for the fans who love and live and breathe these characters, watching Sharon and Andy walk off hand-in-hand is exactly the ending that we wanted, because it means that, truly, Sharon Raydor lives on. In our imaginations, in our stories, in our funny banter back and forth while we argue on social media over whether Sharon drinks tea or coffee. Long after the writers and actors and crew members move on to other jobs, the fans will still be holding on to these characters. For Sharon to die, it kills a big part of what makes fandom so special, the part that takes these people we’ve known and loved for so long and lets us as fans breathe our own bits of life into them long after the network has shut them down. Holding on to that years after the show ends isn’t disrespecting the writers or the actors; doing that means that after TNT killed the show that we love, we can still believe that Sharon and Andy are out there, somewhere, solving crimes or cuddling on the couch or choosing new ballet artwork to hang in their condo. We can write it, we can joke about it, we can picture it so clearly. Killing Sharon killed that bit of infinity in the imagination that lingers after the show ends. I can, and have, and will rewatch the episodes that we have, but from a fan’s perspective, the idea that the character is never truly gone only exists when the character isn’t truly gone. Saying goodbye to Sharon as a character is about a thousand percent harder to saying goodbye to the show, because saying goodbye to Sharon as a character IS saying goodbye to the show. I’ll watch the next four episodes, but it’s going to be with a heavier heart than I ever imagined.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Orphan Black season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (ten of ten).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

55.17%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Nine.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-seven. Nineteen who appear in more than one episode, eleven who appear in at least half the episodes, and three who appear in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-seven. Seventeen who appear in more than one episode, seven who appear in at least half the episodes, and one who appears in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Not shining. While the number of dynamic female characters around is strong and refreshing, there are more male characters flying the flag for sexual assault this season than in any previous, and the show continues to revel in such content with only cursory acknowledgements that it might not be ok, and that’s not good enough at all (average rating of 2.9).

General Season Quality:

When it’s good, it’s arguably the best the show has done. When it’s bad, it’s bad. While the last few episodes end it on fairly good terms, the early/middle portions of the season are a big let-down.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Let’s talk about jumping the shark.

For starters, let me say this: I do not think they’ve jumped the shark yet on this show. As I’ve noted variously, I haven’t seen the whole series yet; I’ve also avoided spoilers successfully, so I have absolutely no idea how this is all gonna shake out in the end. The return-to-the-start feel that the revelation about Neolutionist involvement carries implies that, perhaps, the showrunners might actually have an idea where they’re taking things and that we might get a deftly-interwoven narrative that impresses and/or wows us on intellectual and entertainment levels, by the time all is said and done. Certainly, I hope for that. There are other revelations we’ve had, however, that instill me with a lot less confidence, and contribute to a concern that this show will turn out to be a lot of flash, and little real substance.

Another tv show which was heavily involved with mystery and revelation was the great LOST, which I have reviewed in the past, and which copped a lot of (I believe, undeserving) flack over whether or not the writers ‘had it all figured out’ from the very beginning. As I noted in relation to that show, I don’t actually think it’s important for the writers to have everything planned in advance (in fact, it can be detrimental when the show structure is rendered too rigid to allow for natural character or story growth over time); what’s important is that whatever new twists the story makes, they adhere to the internal logic of the show and don’t contradict previous elements. It doesn’t matter if the writers don’t have it figured years in advance, so long as what they write on the fly fits into the narrative in a sensible way. LOST was full of interlocking pieces by design, and so any surprise character connections were a deliberate part of the mythos, and since the story never accidentally looped around and contradicted itself, the mysteries were successfully rendered instead of becoming useless shock-value bullshit with no purpose. Orphan Black is...not doing great in that regard. The idea of secret Neolutionists in the mix all along was the one good ‘twist’ we got as this season pulled to a close, and the reason it’s a good twist is that it’s a pre-established part of the show’s fabric which the audience has had time to forget about, and so reintroducing it now feels clever, as if it were pre-planned, as if we were always building in this direction. It does seem kinda weird for it to be a shock revelation for the characters when obviously, openly-Neolutionist Aldous Leakie was running Dyad for most of two seasons, but I’m willing to run with the idea that their influence and numbers is more pervasive than anyone had realised; they’ve earned the twist well enough on logical grounds that my suspension of disbelief can carry the question. The whole original-genome-is-actually-Siobhan’s-mother thing? Not so good. It’s utterly convenient, doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny, and worst of all, it’s pointless. If you’re gonna ask for narrative concessions, they’ve gotta exist for more than shock value. The Siobhan connection is just a connection for the fun of it, and that would be fine if it also made sense, but it doesn’t. It asks too much, and gives too little in return, and the elements which allow it to exist on any grounds were only introduced this season, so convenience plotting abounds. Likewise, Rachel’s supposedly-dead mother being alive and involved in the Neolution business is, at present status, just a shock tactic. It contradicts Ethan Duncan’s assertion that she was killed, and Leakie’s apparent conviction that the same was true, and every time I think of a different potential explanation for what the different characters did or did not know in this situation, I think of a myriad of plot holes in the theory as well, so while they MAY have something up their sleeve that makes logical sense and that I just haven’t thought of, I’m not counting on it, nor does it change the fact that they set the scene for that revelation too poorly for it to feel like a real twist. Retroactive explanations don’t change misconceptions in the moment, and a good mystery should never rely on retroactively filling in gaps: you should always set the stage first so that an info dump later isn’t required to justify your twists. 

The Castor plot, meanwhile, was such a disaster of convenience plotting and illogicality I hardly know how to unravel it. I won’t get stuck railing against Paul Dierden’s existence again, but I am convinced that much of the useless Castor story existed only to try and justify Paul’s presence on the show, despite contradicting various aspects of his past behaviour by asserting his supposed complicity and knowledge of clones since the beginning as Beth’s handler. While the military being interested in the practical potential of raising clone armies (hello, Star Wars) makes plenty of sense, it has no actual baring on the narrative that ends up being told, and I suspect again that Paul’s pre-established military history is the sole reason Castor involves soldiers at all - certainly, we can’t pretend there’s any logic in Virginia Coady’s preposterous interest in pursuing the idea of a sexually transmitted neurological defect that causes infertility in women as a potential weapon of mass destruction (which, in its current form, would require her clone army to commit mass genocidal rape, which is a war crime as well as obviously horrific and completely impractical, but hey, this show loves sexual assault AND shock value, so, ok). The last four episodes of this season barely involved anything Castor related, and even then it was inconsequential leftovers masquerading as the backbone of the seasonal narrative; again, the Castor plot may still have somewhere to go, but as it stands it was a total waste of time, just filler and distraction and a lot of build-up at the beginning of the season which ultimately went nowhere. It leaves me seriously questioning how much of this season actually mattered in the long run, and that’s not a good place to be. 

As I have blathered in the past, I’ve been confused about why I’m weirdly nonplussed with this show, and how it is that I walked away from it the first time I tried to watch it, despite also feeling like I enjoyed it. We’re almost up to that same point at which the show and I parted ways last time, and I’m feeling the same detachment again, and I think the prospect of future shark-jumps is a big part of it. The final episodes of this season were pretty solid, which leaves one feeling like they watched something good, but reviewing the season as a whole exposes the more bitter failings, and the sense of a show directed more by dramatic reveals than by character motivations. I have also blathered in the past about feeling distanced from most of the characters, and finding the show more plot driven than character driven, and as it goes on that feels like more and more of an intractable problem. I don’t care if there’s a conspiracy a drama or intrigue or mystery, I only care about the people involved and what this means to them and how they’ll handle it. At least, I’m trying to care about them. But, if the show isn’t actually concerned about its characters and only keeps them for their narrative potential, it’s hard to make that character connection anyway. If the character’s motivations are made mysterious so that their allegiances can be used for ‘twists’, then their behaviour becomes nebulous and contingent upon the whims of the writer, rather than innate to their characterisation. They are rendered puppets, not people, and it’s hard to relate to puppets. From the very first episode, I flagged this show as having a motivation problem; characters reacting and behaving in ways that seem plot-convenient, just excuses to put them into certain situations that logical and consistent human behaviour might not have pushed them towards, and I think they’re still suffering from that. At midseason I noted that Helena is the real mover and shaker of the plot, arguably the only character who makes the plot obey her whims instead of the other way around, and I’m concerned that the lack of agency in the rest of the cast is drowning this show in its own attempted cleverness. I said the Neolutionists were the one good twist this season, but don’t let that suggest that I think the Neolutionist movement represents an interesting concept or direction for the show: I couldn’t care less about Neolutionists. It was a good twist because it obeyed internal narrative logic and felt like it was bringing us full-circle with part of the plot, which implies direction and purpose, but what it means moving forward is an unknown, and not a tantalising one. What does it mean for the CHARACTERS, the ones we’re trying to both know and love? Hopefully, it means something. I guess we’ll find out.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT ADVICE

Would it be so bad to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox. If you consider exclamation points as constituents, for example: after the founders graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000 from their friend's rich uncle, who they give 5% of the company in restricted stock, vesting over four years, and the living expenses of the founders quits. And I don't think there's any limit to the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it might have been.1 I'd sacrifice a large percentage of the income for the extra peace of mind. And it only does a fraction of them.2 9998 Subject free 0.3 Ask anyone who's done it. Their unconscious mind decides for them, it's a vote of no confidence. Some angel investors join together in syndicates.

An optimism shield has to be tuned just right. How do you learn it? The best way to explain how it all works is to follow the case of a hypothetical very fortunate startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds. And while startup hubs are as powerful magnets as ever, the increasing cheapness of web startups will if anything increase the importance of startup hubs, but the title of one: James Salter's Burning the Days. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. Fortunately there's someone you can ask each for advice about the other. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault but your own. 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter how finished you thought it was. The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Few legal documents are created from scratch.4 Err on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

The angel deal takes two weeks to close, so you start to lie to yourself. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely that it's longer. There are theoretical arguments for giving these two tokens substantially different probabilities Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, meaning they reduced e. Promising new startups are often discovered by developers. It's not what they originally set out to do—in the process of innovation. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. Of course, looking at multiple token sequences would catch it easily.5

So verbs with initial caps have higher spam probabilities than they would in all lowercase. No one proposes that there's some limit to the number of people who want to work for them. A month later, at the end of month six, the system is starting to have a new kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they were managing. If anything major is broken—if they sense you're ambivalent, they won't give you much attention. 7 uncle 50 4. What would be a good heuristic for product design, and others where it would help to be rapacious is when growth depends on that. 5 million from angels without ever accepting vesting, largely because we were so inexperienced that we were appalled at the idea.

Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you know you're making something at least one has to make money.6 The danger of the second paragraph is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. What's wrong with having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to be good, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side.7 Founders at Work. We have three general suggestions about hiring: a don't do it if you let them. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes—that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. But what if your manager was hit by a bus? You can no longer guess what will work; you have to take enough to get to the next step is.8 But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win. Then you'd automatically get your share of the returns of the whole economy.9

I wasn't paying attention, I didn't know what they'd be like.10 Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors.11 This is what real productivity looks like. And because this is what I call degeneration. Our ancestors were giants. We can of course counter by sending a crawler to look at the instruments. When they demo it, one of the motives on the FBI's list.

They would just look at you blankly. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea. And don't write the way they are because that is how things have to be smart too, right?12 It used to be aware of this problem.13 But you can't browse the web. There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

This may work in biotech, where a lot of pain and stress to do something that would otherwise seem too ambitious.14 I remember going through this realization myself. So if our group of founders have something they can launch.15 This is no accident. The spirit of resistance to government, Jefferson wrote, is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. This had two drawbacks: a an expert on literature need not himself be a good heuristic for product design, and others wouldn't.16

Notes

If an investor? Maybe that isn't the last round of funding rounds are bad news; it is very common for startups. If Ron Conway had angel funds starting in the US.

Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but if you hadn't written it?

Most of the fatal pinch where your idea is to be very hard and doesn't get paid to work not just the location of the reasons startups are ready to invest in your own time, because software takes longer to close than you expect.

This is an understatement. VCs aren't tech guys, the best approach is to be hidden from statistics too.

For example, the switch in the sense of the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art is not much to generalize. This technique wouldn't work for us! Their inexperience makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, overcomplicated agreements, and mostly in Perl.

Vision research may be overpaid. For the price of a running back doesn't translate to soccer. But try this thought experiment: If they were.

And since there are only doing angel deals to generate revenues they could attribute to malice what can be said to have moments of adversity before they ultimately choose not to make fundraising take less time, is a trap set by evil companies for the same work faster. Which is not so much on luck. This flattering distinction seems so natural to the home team, I've become a function of their predecessors and said in effect what the startup eventually becomes. The danger is that you decide the price of an official authority makes all the East Coast.

One-click ordering, however, you need to raise money on the spot, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth, because the danger of chasing large investments is not yet released. Some blue counties are false positives caused by blacklists, I was a refinement that made it possible to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.

Surely no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because some schools work hard to imagine how an investor seems very interested in us! Oddly enough, maybe they'll listen to God.

Don't be evil.

I was there when it was more rebellion which can vary a lot of startups where the richest of their upbringing in their closets. Perl. What they must do is leave them alone in the past, it's because other companies made all the potential magnitude of the most, it's shocking how much they liked the outdoors, was no great risk in doing something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and make a formal language for proofs in which you want to lead.

Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the quality of production. Because the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to give up, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. Actually, someone else to lend to, so we also give any startup that wants to the World Bank, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing badly and is doomed anyway.

The reason not to like uncapped notes, VCs who are weak in other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of a safe environment, but in practice money raised as convertible debt, so it's conceivable that the lies people told 100 years will be big successes but who are both. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than they have to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. This plan backfired with the bad idea the way they do on the software business.

Fortuna! Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian.

A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail. Currently the lowest rate seems to be delivering results.

You know what kind of protection is one you take out order.

[hunty-booboo]

Advanced Strategies: Card Counting Lesson Four

Wonging I already cited that during a really perfect scenario, a card counter could not need to play hands whilst the remember become under -three. While it is not usually possible to keep away from terrible decks whilst card counting, there are situations in which you are better off sitting out some arms or even leaving the desk totally. Any time you keep away from gambling hands in very poor counts you are doing what's referred to as "wonging out." Wonging may be an exceptionally beneficial method because it both increases your advantage and reduces your chance. For this next lesson we could pass over many of the most important facts approximately wonging  bat lo theo giai dac biet When to wong out.

I love this strategy, and admittedly in all likelihood use it too much. Even even though wonging helps you keep away from situations where the on line casino has the advantage, it isn't always a good concept to "wong". If you left a table each time the rely got even a bit bad, you'll in no way sit down around lengthy enough to play when the depend finally rose. For this reason maximum counters will wong handiest when the counts receives beneath a certain point. Because we're the usage of an unbalanced count number, this point will range relying on what number of decks you are playing with. So as opposed to wonging primarily based on the be counted, it will likely be less difficult to wong based totally on how a great deal the remember has dropped. I would individually propose wonging out of a shoe if the matter has dropped by means of a complete of 6. You can also want to paste round a bit longer if there are six or 8 decks, in addition to go away sooner in case you are gambling with only one or two decks. Always take into account that gambling in a poor remember will handiest hurt your bankroll.

When to wong in.

The flip aspect to sitting out when the matter goes down is to come right into a shoe when the count number goes up. This is referred to as "wonging in". Wonging in isn't always usually allowed, especially at two deck tables. This is due to the fact the on line casino knows that in case you handiest came into shoes that had proper counts, you'll constantly have an advantage over them.

So when need to you wong in? Well again it modifications a little primarily based at the quantity of decks. If you're gambling at a two or four deck shoe, it will commonly be worth it to come in at a rely of zero. At this factor you have a stable advantage and there may be a far higher threat that the be counted will increase to considerable tiers. If you are playing on a 6 or 8 deck shoe, you may come in at counts as low as -4. Again this will placed you in a very good position if the count number skyrockets, and allow you to avoid playing plenty of minimum bet arms.

The drawback to wonging in is that there may be best about a 25% threat that a shoe may be substantially high-quality. This way you may sit down and watch 4 or 5 shoes before playing a hand. While this could be boring, it's far the appropriate manner to play and could cause higher profit.

Now which you have heard of standards like wonging, lets test conditions that do not affect your counting. Apply your know-how shape this chapter to use these misconceptions on your benefit.

Heat When Card Counting

In counting circles, getting suspicion from the pit boss or camera surveillance is known as "warmth". Sometimes you may word warmth before it escalates into motion, however sometimes this just isn't feasible. In this phase we can communicate about the techniques on line casino's use to capture counters and the ways you may avoid those measures to play as a great deal as viable. One idea to keep in mind whilst discussing warmth is that casinos unfastened a lot greater from mistakenly throwing out those who are not counting. For this motive they may regularly no longer method you until they may be certain you are hiding some thing.

Pit bosses

Pit bosses have lots to deal with (no pun meant) and aren't actively trying to trap counters. They may know what counting is, however probably will not realize a counting gadget. Unless a scenario is extraordinarily atypical, a pit boss will not be the only that makes the selection to confront a counter. The one thing that pit boss can do is to alert the surveillance room. Pit bosses are instructed to search for precise situations and notify surveillance in the event that they occur. These occasions might encompass the following. Someone (usually a young male) who seems to be betting an awful lot higher than their appearance might advise. Someone who has been consistently making a bet the minimal after which spiking their guess, simplest to lower it once more soon after. Someone who's paying a long way to a lot interest to the cards on the desk (looking over the desk multiple times each hand). In the rare case that the pit boss definitely calls as much as the surveillance room, you may bet that they will be following you want a hawk.

Surveillance rooms

Most of the focal point of on line casino blackjack surveillance isn't clearly centered on locating card counters. For the maximum element they're watching the dealers. One corrupt dealer may want to fee the casino tons more then any counter could, and that they understand this. That being stated, there are still times wherein surveillance team of workers may be looking the tables for counters. How they are trying to seize counters commonly runs along these traces: They will pick a table, either at random or because they've a suspicion. They will count down the desk using Hi-Low and as they remember it down surveillance personnel will watch to peer if any players appear like "making a bet with the rely". Of direction it's far viable that a non-counter will take place to elevate and lower their wager with the depend, so that they may not take movement after handiest one shoe. However, in the event that they discover you following the count as soon as, they'll retain to monitor you. If after numerous shoes you've got continued to observe the be counted, on line casino surveillance can take certainly one of numerous moves.

In the worst case situation a surveillance supervisor will come immediately right down to your table and ask you to prevent gambling blackjack. If this takes place the nice route of action is to be well mannered and depart without delay. If they do not need to kick you out, they'll take a extra casual approach. This can encompass sending the pit boss over to speak to you, telling the dealer to begin dealing faster, or each. By doing this they're hoping to throw you off the depend and therefore put off your advantage. If you think this might be taking place to you I would once more suggest you to leave right now. If you're able to hold up with their distractions they'll handiest continue to position stress on you till you can not rely or are instructed to depart.

In maximum current casinos, once they assume you're a counter they will likely upload your face right into a facial popularity device. These structures are not ideal, but they can be very pesky. In my time playing I actually have every now and then been able to hide myself properly enough to evade these structures, however I've additionally failed a few instances as nicely. If the casino unearths you are counting after being requested to depart they may almost simply forcibly do away with you from the casino. This does now not mean you will lose any of your chips, but it's going to quite tons guarantee that any provider or bit boss at the casino could have a terrific study you and keep in mind you as a counter.

Methods to avoid suspicion while counting playing cards

There are numerous different strategies counters have come up with over the years to sidestep warmness. The first and simplest technique is to handiest play short classes. If you handiest play for approximately half an hour at a time, the danger that surveillance will even be counted down your desk is extremely small. If they do they may most in all likelihood only see you guess with the be counted for a part of a shoe and could no longer have sufficient evidence to take action. Pit bosses and sellers also are much less possibly to understand you if you play for quick durations of time, which helps plenty while the use of disguises later.

The second most important pass you can do to avoid warmth is called pocketing. As you would possibly have guessed, pocketing is the act of transferring chips from the desk for your wallet without everyone noticing. The reasons for this are easy. If you have got less chips at the desk, anyone from the supplier to the digital camera team will think you've got either gained less or misplaced more. Nothing is extra suspicious to a pit boss then someone with a thousand bucks at the table having a bet the ten dollar minimum.

Pocketing takes a while to master, but I will allow you to in on a touch alternate mystery. Say you've got a stack ten green chips ($250), if you take your hand and location it on top of the complete stack, you could elevate one or  chips off the top along with your palm. You can then casually move your hand under the table and switch the chips into your pocket. If executed properly, it is essentially impossible for every person to note this movement and over the years it may make your stacks appearance a lot smaller then they surely are.

One note of caution, if you pocket too much you can not have sufficient chips on the desk to double or cut up while you need to. If this happens, do no longer attain into your pocket to grab greater chips. You do now not need all of us understanding you have got been pocketing. Instead, simply whip out your wallet and placed down a few more bills. Not most effective will this save you humans shape knowing you are pocketing, however it's going to make you seem like a gambler who has run out of chips and needs to shop for in for greater.

Another way to avoid suspicion is to apply play variations. Dealers and pit bosses almost never recognise accurate basic approach, so play variations wont assist right here, however to surveillance personnel who probably recognize simple approach, these play variations will make you look like you do no longer realize what you're doing. Another step we have talked about earlier is to wong out. In some situations wonging can be suspicious, but most of the time wonging out will assist. If you've simply won a couple max bet hands, but the count number dropped, it is tons much less suspicious to go away the table then it's miles to live and min bet for the subsequent ten mins.

One final manner to avoid warmness is mechanically built into the Red Zen system. Imagine that plenty of black twos and sevens pop out. For the surveillance group of workers counting Hi-Low the remember has simply accelerated, however you are nonetheless betting the equal amount. Or consider the other state of affairs where an unusual amount of pink twos and sevens come out. The depend could very well have long gone down for the surveillance body of workers (if some tens come out as nicely) however for you the be counted remains about the identical. No matter how the state of affairs plays out, in case you are using Red Zen, it's far not going that the Hi-Low matter will in shape along with your count. This will add a huge quantity of doubt to all of us looking to seize counters. Remember, the ultimate component they want to do is kick out actual gamblers, so any doubt you could forged will move a protracted manner.

Card Counting: Heat vs Attention.

Heat is a bad shape of on line casino interest, however this doesn't imply all sorts of interest are heat. Often it's miles high-quality to move for one among  disguises. Either try to live as low at the radar as feasible, or actively purpose pit bosses and sellers to pay high quality interest to you. In the case of card counting, advantageous interest is basically anything that makes on line casino workforce suppose you are a "rich idiot". This can range from casually mentioning incorrect blackjack "facts" to appearing extraordinarily upset at the manner your game is going. Do not take it to this point which you harass the casino body of workers, but through all means lead them to feel a chunk uncomfortable.

Before going to the casino, learn greater approximately card counting. Everything a card counter wishes is within the ebook Modern Card Counting: Modern Card Counting. This ebook consists of lessons on the whole lot from basic approach to the usage of mathematical formulation to estimate your earnings and anticipated danger.

[feynites]

Can you do a top 10 assholes of Dragon age and give us the reasons why their on the list and why some are worse then others?

Hmm.

Okay. I thought about this, and I realized that it would be very hard to quantify a lot of this stuff, because most characters in this series are assholes in at least some way. And how anyone would rate their asshole tendencies is bound to vary a lot based on personal values and perspective. For example, someone might find Aveline’s tendency to kinkshame Isabela much more asshole-y than Oghren’s inappropriate sexual overtures. And someone else might just be like ‘okay but Sten killed an entire family for no good reason’. Which would then lead us straight to A List villains, basically, because if we’re getting into the really ugly stuff, that’s who we’ve got.

So, I’ve decided to try and rate this list by two major deciding factors.

One is consequence - i.e. how many people did they get killed, how much stuff was destroyed, how much suffering was created.

The other is remorse/motivation - i.e. why did they do things that led to pain and suffering, what (if any) regrets do they have, and do they go about attempting to atone for it?

On that note, the list is below the cut. To disclaim - obviously this is going to contain some character criticism. If you see a character on this list and don’t want to read about it, feel free to skip their entry. Or skip the whole list altogether. This is by no means an attempt to shame anybody for liking certain characters or anything along those lines.

10. There are too many assholes who could fill this bottom slot, honestly. Petty, individually horrific people whose only saving grace is that they were ultimately not that important. Vaughan Kendells, Quentin, Magister Erimond, Bartrand Tethras, Bhelen Aeducan, the Viddasala, etc. So this is actually just going to be a reserve slot to acknowledge that there are a lot of assholes in Thedas. You’re all Number Ten in my heart.

9. Loghain Mac Tyr

Turning away from a questionable battle situation is a debatable tactic. Not wanting to permit Orlesian forces across Ferelden borders? Also worthy of discussion. Selling alienage elves into slavery and framing and putting out a bounty on the only people who are capable of dealing with the darkspawn threat at your doorstep, on the other hand, are pretty hard actions to bounce back from. Especially when you are a man who is absolute shit at going ‘whoops, my bad’. Nearly causing the destruction of Ferelden gets Loghain to Number Nine, but no higher.

8. Rendon Howe

I mean… if someone were to distil ‘essence of asshole’ into its purest form and inject it into a mosquito, I’m pretty sure the end result would be something like Rendon Howe. Spiritually, he should be top of this list. Fortunately for the rest of Thedas, though, he ultimately lacked the power he’d need to get there.

7. Magister Danarius

Slave owning rapist who is entirely sane and acting of his own volition and cruelty? Why isn’t he higher on this list? Well, mostly because of scale. But scale’s also part of the reason why I wanted him on here. Danarius may not have had the opportunity or means that some people on this list have had to inflict his dickishness on vast swaths of people, but he embodies a certain irrefutable, personal kind of evil that is inextricably tied to such things. And, y’know, he did his best to be the worst kind of human he could be with the tools he had. Honestly, he is probably far worse, as a person, than a lot of people higher on this list. He would have been Corypheus if given half a chance. But he wasn’t given that chance. I knew he definitely needed to be on here, though.

6. Solas

Solas gets to a middle point on this list, and he is mostly here for his actions regarding Corypheus, Felassan, and Briala’s eluvian network, and the far-reaching scope of basically everything he does. His future actions are still up in the air, and his confirmed up-to-date actions contain a balance of significant good and bad, and he shows a lot of remorse (though it’s not always clear what for, precisely). Because of his mystery, it’s hard to rank the full consequences or asshole-ness of his character, yet. He’s the guy who put up the Veil in what was probably an act of desperation, he may have saved the world (possibly more than once), and he has also threatened to destroy it. So, he’s at Number Six for now, because man is this a steep competition.

5. Grand Cleric Elthina & Meredith Stannard

Posts five and four on this list are going to double-up, if only because a lot of the crimes, consequences, and attendant assholery were group efforts. Together, Elthina and Meredith both sought to seize control over Kirkwall, with Elthina’s eye likely towards being named Divine in the long run, and Meredith’s interest mostly veering more towards being able to kill and torment any and all mages as she pleased. Not only did an entire city suffer under their combined hubris and cruelty, but Meredith’s use of red lyrium and the subsequent social conflicts ignited by their actions have had negative ripple effects throughout Thedas, with neither of them showing the least bit of genuine repentance or remorse. 

4. Empress Celene & Gaspard de Chalons

There is something especially asshole-ish about people who will throw countless other lives to the winds for the sake of being the winner of a game, and Celene and Gaspard are pretty much this concept distilled and flavoured in ‘diplomacy’ and ‘military’ forms. Still, they only just beat out Elthina and Meredith, and in part because the both of them had much more power and influence to leverage in their actions, with an entire empire at their fingertips, rather than a city. The corruption of Orlais persists, and the plight of the elven people has worsened, thanks to these genocidal reprobates.

3. Mythal

Now, this is Mythal I am talking about - the ancient elven ‘goddess’, not Flemeth. Flemeth is surely an asshole, but the jury is largely still out on how much of an asshole. To some extent there are still a lot of questions about Mythal, too, so this entry is really more of a joint effort between Mythal and the other ancient elven gods of her crew. But she gets to hold the name slot until we know more about them, as well, because all evidence points to Mythal having established the ancient slave empire of the elves. And while she seems to have eventually come to regret it, the fact that she probably got the ball rolling on everything from slavery to darkspawn to magical corruption, puts her here for now.

2. Corypheus

Corypheus is an asshole in so many senses that, as a character, he’s almost dull. The dude has zero remorse, his actions have quite probably directly resulted in the current Blight situation in Thedas (though it’s doubtful he’s actually responsible for the taint), he’s a prick who owned slaves and murders people left and right, and even the other assholes in this list would probably think he was worth killing. The only reason he’s not number one is because, as much chaos and suffering as Corypheus has caused, there’s one other individual who has managed to have a worse impact on the world - though the jury’s still out on what his personality was actually like.

1. Emperor Kordillus Drakon I

One of the biggest fucking assholes in Thedosian history is the guy who founded the Orlesian Empire and the Chantry, and cemented nearly every reprehensible tendency of the current power structures of the world. Drakon is not technically even a minor character - he only exists in the lore - but I hate him. I hate him so much. In a post-Andraste world where slavery was out of fashion in most of Thedas and various faiths and tribes were making their way, Drakon rose up, and like most conquerors, immediately began murdering the shit out of people who couldn’t fight back, and creating institutions of slavery that used more tactful turns of phrase to disguise what they were. The consequences of Drakon’s rise to power, and how he went about it, are defining conflicts throughout Thedas even so long after his death. Thedas is, in no small part, a violent, war-torn nation thanks to the institutions which Drakon put in place, and he had no reason for doing any of it except that he really liked the idea of being God King of Everything.

[3195c]

Scott Snyder Talks Joker Anniversary

2020.6

QUAINTANCE: Where did the idea to approach The Joker from the perspective of his victims come from?

SNYDER: We’ve done so much with him over the years. It’s always been in relation to Batman. I haven’t really had a chance to do a Joker story where it focuses on him without any sort of Batman presence in it, or to just define him. I’ve had a clear vision in my head of how my take on The Joker — I’ve done it with multiple artists — has worked from Black Mirror all the way through Last Knight on Earth. For me, he’s literally The Joker card to Batman, where he takes on any kind of value he can given Batman’s worse fears. He makes himself those to be able to win or fight Batman, always making him as strong as possible.

It’s almost that he’s making it his duty to challenge Batman with the greatest nightmares of his soul, and through that trial by fire make Batman better or kill him — one or the other. So, I wanted to do something here that really focused on how scary that is as a concept, how wonderfully malleable as a concept, and it’s why I think he’s so enduring, why there are so many version, why he has so many faces, so many looks, and why so many great creators over the years have done so many incredible interpretations over the years.

QUAINTANCE: A lot of times when you write villains, they have really clear and easy to understand motivations, but The Joker maybe less so. How do you approach figuring out what The Joker wants in any given story and why he’s doing what he’s doing?

SNYDER: What I tried to do with each story I told with Batman and him was focus on something I was really afraid of either for my kids or myself, something that was difficult to admit, and then have Batman face off with that thing in its most terrifying form, which was The Joker’s version of it.

For example, Death of the Family was a very personal attempt at that. We were pregnant of our second kid when I came up with that story, and I was terrified of being a bad father, being too selfish to be a good parent. I was thinking to myself, Batman must be wrestling at certain moments with similar demons in the way he has developed that incredible family at that time in continuity with all of these allies. He cares about all of them, but isn’t there some part of him that worries they might be a weakness. That’s where Joker comes in and says, wouldn’t you be the best Batman possible without your family. So, I’ll just kill them for you.

Whereas something like Endgame was much less about my personal fears and more about my fears for the moment, some of the things we all worried about. I was worried for my kids at that time about the kind of violence that erupts out of nowhere, and I felt like it was always in the news, making your daily actions feeling meaningless. The Joker was there celebrating those things, saying whatever you do, it doesn’t matter. There’s no action you can take that’s going to mean anything. Everything is at best meaningless, and at worst cruelty and savagery. That’s it.

I try to take a personal fear of mine at that moment and have Joker extend it to its worst possible version and have Batman face off with that. That’s my approach to using him. I wanted to define that here with something that’s not epic and weird and over-the-top.

QUAINTANCE: Well, with all the different work you’ve done with Joker, what do you hope to have added to the legacy of the character?

SNYDER: That’s a tough question and it’s hard for me to answer that. It’s less about me and what I’ve added. I just hope that I’ve done it justice as an incredible antagonist, one of the best antagonists in all of literature, just by trying to use my own personal fears and be honest about what I find terrifying, and about human nature and the world, having him express those in ways that are celebratory and cruel and evil, making him the demon that really tests us with our own worst imaginings and fears.

I love writing him. I feel like I had him exist in one form or another in pretty much every story I’ve done on Batman, from Black Man even through Superheavy or the beginning of Zero Year. He was the one consistent thread to everything I’ve written, Batman-wise, outside of All-Star. The strain Joker represented through all of that was this underlying anxiety that Batman would succumb to his own worst fears, whether he was the main antagonist or in the background.

And there’s so many different versions. I love Grant [Morrison’s] version where he’s hyper-sane and so he’s always emerging as a new wild version of himself because he reinvents his own personality. I love the [Batman: The Animated Series] version where he’s slightly more sympathetic, more of a common criminal at times, all the way to the more obsessive Frank Miller version. There’s so many great stories too; I just wanted this story to be the definitive version of our take and the way I see him, a dictionary definition for The Joker that has haunted my whole run, regardless of artist.

QUAINTANCE: I thought it landed incredibly well with that last page, and I wanted to ask you how did you come to end on that last page and what did you think when you got the art back from Jock?

SNYDER: Jock is one of my best friends at this point. He was the first artist who was a big name to take a chance on me when I was nobody. I had American Vampire when I did Detective, but Rafael [Albuquerque] was new as well. Jock was well-know already. He’d done big series and had had movie success. I remember convincing him at San Diego to take a chance on me with Black Mirror.

He was such a great partner, and we’ve done so much together since. He was the first person I asked to do this one with me, because I knew I wanted it to be really dark and unsettling. What I love about his art so much is that it seems to magnify emotion. It’s like looking through the world through a skewed lens, but instead of looking at things based on light or anything objectively optical, it maginifies things based on the underyling emotions. So when things are more scary or intense in a scene, the shadows amplify and the angles are skewed…but it’s still realistic and grounded. Then when things are bright and super heroic, he has a lightness to his lines that magnifies that and underscores.

So, when you do something that’s psychological or really claustrophobic like this, it’s a perfect fit. I knew I wanted to do this with him. I don’t ever want to say, ‘I’m never writing The Joker again!’ I love getting invited back to do these kinds of projects, but I don’t see myself writing anything Batman or Joker-related for any long period of time. I wanted to make sure I was ending with the guy I started with.

I mean, Batman and Joker are in Death Metal, so it’s not like I’m never going to be writing them again, but I don’t have any plans to focus on them as a protagonist or antagonist going forward.

The Joker 80 Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 is out Tuesday, June 9, with the first story being Scars by Snyder and Jock.

https://www.comicsbeat.com/snyder-and-jock-bring-what-started-in-black-mirror-full-circle-with-the-joker-80-year-special/

[marymosley]

Guest Post: Against the Design-Seizure Bill

By Sarah Burstein, Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law

As previously covered here on Patently-O, a new design patent bill has been introduced in Congress. The so-called “Counterfeit Goods Seizure Act of 2019” would allow Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to seize goods accused of design patent infringement.

This is a bad idea.

This bill is not reasonably tailored to address its purported goal of “stem[ming] the flow of counterfeit goods.” Instead, it will allow design patent owners to foist their private enforcement costs onto taxpayers, under circumstances that are unlikely to result in accurate determinations of infringement. Moreover, this type of ex parte, non-public system of adjudication is ripe for abuse.

I have three major groups of concerns about this bill: substantive, procedural, and rhetorical. This post will address them in turn.

Substantive concerns

First, CBP will not be in a position to make accurate determinations of design patent infringement.

The test for design patent infringement, as set forth by the en banc Federal Circuit in Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa, involves two steps. (For more on the Egyptian Goddess test, see this short essay.)

The first step requires a comparison of the claimed design (i.e., what’s illustrated in the patent) and the accused product. If those designs look plainly dissimilar, the test is over; there is no infringement. If the designs look like they might be the same, then the factfinder must consider the designs in light of the closest prior art.

This second step is important. Often, two designs that look similar in the abstract look much less so when considered in light of the prior art. Consider this recently-litigated example. The patented design is shown below on the left; the accused design is below on the right:

These two designs might not look plainly dissimilar in the abstract. But when viewed in light of the prior art, a number of visual differences become apparent:

Ultimately, the judge correctly concluded that the patent owner was not likely to prove infringement (though the path to that decision was a bit more circuitous).

How would this have turned out under the design-seizure bill? Who would have collected the closest prior art? There are many things to like about the Egyptian Goddess test, but one downside is that step two requires an informed and motivated defendant to work well. In an ex parte CBP proceeding, there is no one to play that role. CPB officials are not trained (and one assumes, lack the resources) to conduct their own prior art searches. And patent owners have zero incentives to provide any—let alone the closest—prior art when they record their patents or when they give CBP information about “suspect inbound shipments.” See generally 5 McCarthy on Trademarks § 29:37 (“Trademark owners that see a higher success rate in Customs seizures are typically the ones that continuously and vigilantly provide Customs with information to use in identifying suspect inbound shipments. Such information could include the names of known foreign counterfeiters, countries of origin, suspect importers, and the like.”)

If CBP skips (or lacks sufficient information to properly conduct) Egyptian Goddess step two, competing products could seized even when they don’t infringe. CBP could seize products that merely practice the prior art or that resemble the claimed design solely in functional aspects (for all but the most pioneering products, one would expect to find any truly functional elements in the prior art).

Thus, ex parte assessments of design patent infringement are likely to lead to significant over-enforcement. At least one other commentator has voiced similar concerns. Over-enforcement would chill legitimate competition and ultimately raise prices for consumers—the very consumers who would be footing the bill through their tax dollars.

In any case, it is simply not correct—as some proponents of this bill have asserted—that all CBP would have to do is look at the design patent and the accused product and see if they look the same.

Some might argue that CBP could review the prior art cited on a particular design patent. But that’s by no means guaranteed to be the closest prior art. Some of it may not even be available at the time of enforcement; USPTO examiners often cite web pages using basic URLs and link rot is a very real concern.

One proponent of this bill has asserted that “Customs officers have already effectively demonstrated the ability to determine whether imported goods infringe a design patent, through its ongoing enforcement of design-patent exclusion orders.” But how do we know that is true? What kinds of orders are being issued by the ITC? How broad (or narrow) are they? How can we know whether CBP is enforcing them well? While we can assume CBP does the best it can in the restraints under which it operates, any assertion about what that actually looks like in practice requires something more that ipse dixit before it can have any persuasive weight.

Procedural concerns

This bill raises also raises serious due process concerns. What recourse is there for competitors whose goods are improperly seized? What accountability is there for design patent owners who direct CBP officials to competing products that don’t actually infringe? Based on my experience reviewing design patent complaints, it appears that many attorneys are under the mistaken impression that design patents cover design concepts, when they really only cover the specifically-claimed designs. I call this “the concept fallacy.” It’s remarkably common in federal court filings. If members of the bar feel comfortable making such allegations in federal court, where they are subject to both judicial sanctions and public scrutiny, what allegations will they feel comfortable making to the CBP?

The non-public nature of these seizures is also a concern. How can we know how well the system is (or is not) working? Based on the information Professor Rebecca Tushnet has been able to gather about trademark seizures, it appears that the agency does not keep good records and its substantive determinations are guided by materials provided by trademark owners. One would assume that if the design-seizure bill were passed, groups like INTA, AIPLA, and/or IPO would be happy to provide their own guidelines for CBP. If that happens, any such materials should be made public, to ensure accuracy. (Hopefully, it won’t take a FOIA lawsuit like the one Professor Tushnet had to file.)

Rhetorical concerns

Finally, the entire framing of this bill is based on conflating design patent infringement with “counterfeiting.” Those two things are not the same.

“Counterfeiting” is a term of art in U.S. IP law. The Lanham Act defines a “counterfeit” as “a spurious mark which is identical with, or substantially indistinguishable from, a registered mark.” 15 U.S.C. § 1127.

Actual counterfeiting (i.e., as that term is defined in the Lanham Act) is arguably the worst type of IP infringement. But it’s already illegal. Indeed, it’s subject to criminal penalties. If Congress thinks those remedies are not severe enough, it is free to increase them. But Congress should narrowly tailor any such efforts to acts that actually constitute counterfeiting. That’s not what’s going on here.

Proponents of this bill like to talk about “counterfeits without labels” (a strange concept in light of the relevant statutory definitions, but that’s an issue for another day) but the bill goes beyond anything that would seem to fall into that category.

Most design patents can be infringed by products that don’t replicate the entire appearance of the patent owner’s own product—if any. (Design patent owners, like other patent owners, aren’t required to produce products embodying their designs.) Even in the rare case where a design patent claims the entire shape and surface design of a product, that patent will still be infringed by a competitor who makes a product in that shape even if the color or material or some other non-shape attribute is so different that no one would mistake it for the original item.

Many (perhaps most) design patents claim just a small part of a larger design; the whole point of such patents is to capture competing products that don’t look the same overall. When an applicant claims a small part of a design, there is no requirement that it be an important or valuable part—let alone a part that would lead to serious consumer deception. (If you’re interested, I wrote more about these claiming techniques here and here.)

Over the years, I’ve heard many design patent attorneys say they want border enforcement. But it’s not because they’re worried about counterfeiting. They want it because it will make design patents more valuable—or at least seem more valuable—to their clients, which in turn makes it easier to sell their design patent prosecution services. (It’s perhaps not surprising that the push for CBP enforcement became more organized after the Supreme Court’s decision in Samsung v. Apple which, in the eyes of many, made design patents less valuable. The ultimate impact of that case, however, remains to be seen. For more on that case, see here; for more on the developments since then, see here.) While some proponents of this bill may truly, in their hearts of hearts, be worried about actual counterfeiting, the fact remains that many design patent attorneys want border enforcement for these other reasons.

We’ve seen this rhetorical technique before—in the past, proponents of broader copyright laws have used the word “counterfeiting” to conjure the specter of medicines laced with poisons and other horrors to scare legislators into enriching private rights holders. I hope Congress doesn’t fall for it.

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