#then it would be arguably far worse on the opposite coast

[tangentmusings]

While in conversation with my father in law tonight, I tried to look up whether there are lobsters in the Pacific Ocean (delightfully, there are!). But the first suggested search when typing "are lobsters…" was "are lobsters immortal?" (tragically, they are not)

[supersaiyanjedi14]

RWBY Versus Series: Adam Taurus vs. James Ironwood

"But fear itself isn't worthy of concern, it is who we become while in its clutches. Will you be proud of that person? Will you forgive them? Will you understand why they felt the need to do the things they did? Will you even recognize them? Or will the person staring back at you be the very thing you should have feared from the start?"

PHYSICAL

At first glance, this seems like a very simple conclusion to reach.  While Adam Taurus certainly has James Ironwood beat in terms of physical health and wellness (blind in one eye vs. triple amputee with half your chest gone, one is decidedly worse), Ironwood’s alterations and implants more than make up for his poor condition.  Though originally a run of the mill homo sapian, James Ironwood is now more machine than man, with superhumanly strong prosthetic limbs and built in armor turning him into a veritable juggernaut.  As a Faunus, Adam may have anatomical traits that put him beyond your typical human by way of his horns and likely night vision, but these traits are either vestigial or useless on neutral ground, and his is otherwise just another squishy meatbag.  Ironwood’s superior anatomy carries directly over to physical performance levels, boasting physical strength that is light years beyond anything Adam could muster up.  Yes, carving through military-grade robots like they were nothing is a testament to a heavy hitter, but it really doesn’t compare to being able to manhandle a Beowolf with only one hand.  Ironwood’s superior might is further supported by his agility, bringing every ounce of his weight and might to his target every time.  Adam may be able to brace himself to deflect a flying Blake, but Ironwood doing the same would be far beyond his ability to handle.  While Adam’s performance against Yang Xiao Long proves that he can contend with physically stronger opponents, this is all he can do, and jockeying in an arm-wrestling contest with Ironwood is well beyond his capabilities.  Quite simply, Ironwood’s body is 50% metal and he’s all the more dangerous for it.

However, despite the General’s overwhelming physical might, this is not a one-sided contest, as his Faunus opponent boasts some critical physical advantages of his own.  Adam may not have any anatomical advantages he can leverage over Ironwood, but he does enjoy a significant age gap, at minimum 20 years.  Additionally, much like Cinder Fall, Adam’s impaired eyesight is not a gamebreaker, as he has never been seen suffering from a physical blind spot, owed to either Aura-enhanced senses or simple muscle memory.  In terms of athletic ability, Ironwood’s titanic strength is matched and countered by Adam’s mind-numbing speed.  Simply put, if Adam can keep pace with Blake, casually run laps around Yang, and demonstrate blatantly superior acrobatic ability, then Ironwood is going to have his work cut out for him.  Dexterity and reflex also go to the High Leader, demonstrating greater precision and control in his sword style than the General’s simple pistol whips.  Ironwood’s ability to match and arguably defeat Winter Schnee, to whom Adam is easily comparable, is proof that he can deal with speed demons, but as with Adam and his strength, that’s the limit.  He can contend with Adam’s speed, but he can’t actually match or surpass him.  As far as health and athleticism is concerned, Adam Taurus and James Ironwood demonstrate a balance of opposites.  Both are stronger in areas the other is, while certainly not weak, comparatively lesser in, and either getting the opportunity to leverage that superiority could affect the tide of the whole battle.  If Yang can overpower Adam, so can Ironwood.  If Winter can outpace/fence Ironwood, so can Adam.  Both have proven they can engage such opponents without being overmatched, so neither will be able to coast by on strength or speed alone in this fight.

This dynamic of opposing strengths and weaknesses carries over to their respective endurance and tolerances.  Once again, Ironwood’s cybernetics afford him a clear and distinct advantage over Adam, his natural armor and displays of physical hardiness allowing him to work through hits that would leave the High Leader a burned-out husk.  Getting back up after getting punched into a crater is great and all, but it’s not the same as literally burning the skin off of your own arm, and that’s before we consider that Adam’s last bits of Aura were taking most of the damage.  But on the other hand, it is worth noting that Ironwood’s superior displays have been the direct result of him allowing himself to take the hits even when he doesn’t have to.  Combined with his visible fatigue against the subversive Watts and his brief clashes with JNR and Winter, Ironwood’s survivability in the long term has a distinct cap.  Conversely, Adam’s final confrontation with Blake and Yang was anywhere from double to triple the length of Ironwood’s fight with Watts, during which he was executing his own intense energetic fighting style the entire time and facing opponents whose offensive pressure slaps anything Watts could muster up. Despite that, Adam still had enough energy to keep fighting unaffected after losing his Aura, and considering just how much punishment Blake and Yang had to subject him to in order to finally get him to that point, I would say that Adam has the stamina advantage by quite a significant margin.  Mental health and discipline follow a similar pattern.  Adam is the more unstable of the two, his violent outbursts being far more pronounced, whereas Ironwood’s military discipline leaves his composure far stronger to the point of apathy.  Yet Ironwood’s ruthless determination still compels him to take unnecessary risks, while Adam, be it by either cowardice or pragmatism, has shown a willingness to pace himself and cut his losses if need be.

As overall physical specimens, Adam Taurus and James Ironwood display a balance of major advantages and disadvantages over the other that match up extremely well.  Adam is younger, faster, more sustainable, and better at staying alive, while Ironwood is tougher, stronger, better equipped, and better at keeping his cool.  Both are well optimized to take advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses, and both are ruthless enough to fight to the death if need be.  As such, this verdict is determined by the severity of the disparities in their respective performances, and it is here where Ironwood’s enhancements give him a leg up.  Adam may have been able to contend with Yang Xiao Long’s greater strength and fortitude, but Ironwood is very likely stronger and tougher than Yang, making his advantage over the Faunus that much more substantial.  By contrast, Adam merely matches Winter Schnee’s agility, he does not surpass it, so his speed advantage is not enough to put the general too far out of his comfort zone.  Adam can potentially turn this dynamic around through skill at arms, but he cannot overcome Ironwood on the back of raw physicality.  To be clear, Ironwood still has an uphill battle ahead of him, as Adam’s own strengths and displays mean that he cannot afford to coast by on strength and endurance.  It must be remembered that Ironwood’s superiority is wholly in the fact that his cybernetics expanding the strength and durability gap wider than the speed and stamina gap, the latter of which are still eggs in Adam’s basket.  I will go so far as to say that if we were examining a hypothetical non-cyborg Ironwood, then Adam would sweep the edge on the back of his youth.  As it stands, however, Adam’s only hope lies in skill and power, and a battle of the body is Ironwood’s to lose.

James Ironwood gets the edge for Physical Ability and Equipment.

MARTIAL

Starting from the top with a comparison of their weaponry, both Adam Taurus and James Ironwood carry one standard firearm as part of their primary arsenal, their respective standard performances being more or less comparable.  Where the weapon sets diverge from this point demonstrate the differences in each warrior’s approach.  With Blush’s ability to shoot Wilt as a projectile, its use as a close-quarters bludgeon, and the versatility Wilt boasts as a sword, Adam’s arsenal provides a wider range of options in battle, which his fighting style fully leverages.  With the secondary explosive rounds of Due Process’s silver half and the gravity Dust in the black half, Ironwood boasts an array of distinct yet extremely powerful attack modes which he then layered on top of each other.  While both combatants have experience contending with each other’s outliers, meaning there is no significant gamebreakers, Adam’s more diverse arsenal and superior melee options do make him overall better armed.

Carrying over from the differences in their weapons, the combatants’ fighting styles are worlds apart yet have similar emphases.  Adam Taurus’s technique is a sophisticated yet vicious method designed to overwhelm his targets with sheer speed and ferocity, while turning away any retaliation by way of evasive maneuvers and active defense and counters.  Meanwhile, James Ironwood’s style is the manifestation of strength and power, leveraging his overwhelming might for maximum effect to pound his opposition into submission, relying on his fortitude to soak up anything the enemy brings to bear before responding in kind.  One relies on a refined core technique that blends his diverse skill set into a singular, high performance fighting style, and the other relies on a much simpler technique that allows him to dominate the combat through the direct application of power.  Both emphasize heavy offense as their first response, defending when needed when that fails before quickly regaining their momentum, in keeping with their mutual objective of dominating and controlling the engagement.  Furthermore, both have shown great success at landing counters on overly aggressive opponents, while they themselves have both overextended when facing defensive opponents.  While I do consider Adam’s guerilla assassin style as more refined than Ironwood’s gritty boxing style, the skill gap is not substantial.  Between Adam’s repeated victories over Blake Belladonna and parity with Yang Xiao Long versus Ironwood overpowering Arthur Watts and fighting evenly with Winter Schnee, their developed skill levels are more or less on par.  Technical sophistication will not be enough to allow the Faunus to simply outfence the general, especially given how Ironwood’s power is something that Adam has come up short against in the past.  To be fair, though, the same can be said of Ironwood, as evasive duelists are well-optimized for staying out of his crosshairs.  Experience-wise, Ironwood certainly has a significant edge over Adam by way of his greater years, affording him training and fighting time that Adam simply didn’t live long enough to accumulate.  That being said, the value of Ironwood’s experience is undercut by the fact that he has spent the better part of his career behind a desk rather than on the battlefield, whereas nearly all of Adam’s comparatively shorter career was spent fighting, leading White Fang raids practically every other Tuesday.

With their skill sets and skill levels so closely matched, the most relevant factor in this verdict is going to be their respective tactical sensibilities, ironic given their mutual legacy of disastrous decision making.  Both Adam and Ironwood are ruthlessly domineering fighters whose primary strategies center around asserting their control over the situation, their differing methods being paths to roughly the same destination.  Adam’s strategy of active defense and counter allows him to turn any attack back on his opponent while he rushes in to eviscerate the target before they have time to recover, preventing his target from bringing their full might to bear against him.  Meanwhile, Ironwood’s approach of enduring and powering through allows him to blunt any spearthrust against him before coming crashing against the opponent’s guard with more force than most are reasonably prepared for.  Both frequently open as the aggressor, moving to overwhelm the enemy directly while refusing to give an inch of ground.  Failing that, though they don’t like doing so, both are able and willing to fall back on defense to wait for an opportunity to counterattack.  Due to his overwhelming offensive might, Ironwood would certainly dominate in a head-to-head engagement, bullying through Adam’s more refined technique with brute strength and pounding him into submission.  However, I do not believe that Adam would fall into this trap.  As a guerilla fighter, Adam has consistently been in a position where he does not have the strength to meet his opponents head-to-head.  Instead, he opted to use that strength against the opponent, taking advantage of their overextended attacks to rush in, get inside their guard, and cut them down, or simply relying on his Semblance to use their own energies against them.  Yang proved that the best way to defeat Adam is to play defense rather than offense, denying him the openings he needs to exploit, forcing him to come to you, and ultimately using his own tactics against him.  This is simply something Ironwood doesn’t do.  Whether barefisted or guns-ablazing, Ironwood is an offensive dervish, charging in and attempting to overpower his opponent directly with overwhelming might.  On the one hand, this makes Ironwood extremely vulnerable to Adam’s counters, as he will be forced to chase after the Faunus and meet him on his own terms.  But on the other hand, Ironwood’s sheer output is beyond anything Adam has encountered beforehand, meaning that if the general is able to get his adversary between a rock and a hard place, Adam could get into trouble very quickly.

As such, this is going to hinge heavily on Adam’s ability to contend with Ironwood’s offensive.  The practical benefits of Ironwood’s simpler, stronger fighting style are best expressed in a close-quarters engagement; as with Winter, Adam’s refined swordplay will merely allow him to contend in a pure hand-to-hand brawl.  However, Ironwood’s weapons of choice are firearms, meaning that he is just as likely, if not more so, to open with gunplay to strike his opponent at range.  Therefore, the big question is this; can Adam Taurus reliably defend himself against James Ironwood’s primary forms of attack?  Yes, he can.  Guns are exactly what he built his defensive technique to address, and advancing vanguards are exactly what his hit-and-run tactics are meant to subvert.  If he can deflect a firing squad’s worth of rifle fire, he can keep pace with Ironwood’s trigger speed.  And if he can endure Yang’s machine gun punching spree long enough to find an opening to evade, he can certainly work his way around Ironwood’s more sluggish advance.  Furthermore, Adam’s own marksmanship and unarmed skill, while outclassed by Ironwood’s, will still be adequate to interfere with the general and wear him down, whether by interfering with his focus in his normal state or chipping away at his Aura when he’s going full Mettle.  Where Winter was trying to whittle him down with precise cuts, Adam would be tearing into his exposed flank.  However, this isn’t to say that Adam will simply be able to dance circles around Ironwood and slice him to ribbons.  We’d still be experiencing something of a stalemate here, as Ironwood’s sheer output still eclipses what Adam has confirmed experience with, meaning he is still going to be a serious danger if he gets the chance to properly leverage his own offensive power.  Outside of Yang (who eventually killed him), all of Adam’s confirmed or implied opponents have been fellow skill-based warrior assassins like himself rather than domineering juggernauts.  If Ironwood is able to get his target between a rock and a hard place, Adam would ultimately get crushed underfoot.

Making Adam and Ironwood’s dynamic with each other even more significant is the fact that their weaknesses are centered around their inability to deviate from their chosen patterns.  Both combatants have come up short against each other’s fighter type in the past, Adam falling to a heavy-handed brawler in Yang Xiao Long, and Ironwood a dynamic speed fencer in Winter Schnee.  In both cases, their only recourse was to double down and escalate rather than adopt a more appropriate strategy, meaning they ultimately had nothing to fall back on when overwhelming force wasn’t enough against their more measured opponents.  And this approach would be equally ineffective against each other given they are both equally unyielding when their backs are to the wall.  A pure contest of martial skill between these two would be both a spectacular display of combative talent and a savage war of annihilation.  And given their shared mastery of contrasting fighting styles and tactics, their ruthless aggression, and the significant strengths and weaknesses they have over each other, I don’t see either combatant as having any sort of decisive advantage over the other.

I declare Adam Taurus and James Ironwood EQUAL as Martial Artists and Combat Strategists.

SPECIAL

Adam Taurus and James Ironwood are physical combat specialists who use their Semblances as a direct supplement to their martial techniques, and their applications of their abilities play directly into their respective strategies.  With Moonslice, Adam’s approach of defense and counter is given a whole new dimension, with each blow he blocks or deflects providing him with fuel to unleash a devastating counterattack.  Meanwhile, Mettle perfectly plays into Ironwood’s endurance strategy by giving him the means to leverage his strength and power without interference or distraction from even his conscious mind.  However, when efficiency and application are added to the mix, one power is easily more viable than the other.  While Mettle does reinforce and elevate Ironwood’s performance to a substantial degree, its nature as an inwardly directed power means that its ability to directly influence the combat is extremely limited.  Ironwood may be able to hyper-focus every single one of his punches and bullets to get the most bang for his buck, but his attack output is still restricted to how hard he can punch and nothing more.  By contrast, Moonslice is an ability that has direct offensive applications, affording Adam an additional attack vector to supplement his physical technique.  Furthermore, Mettle’s properties could potentially exacerbate Ironwood’s overextensions, leaving him blind to threats outside of Adam’s direct attacks.  Ironwood may have the means to power through injury, but Adam’s ability to absorb hits makes him the only one who can capitalize on injury.  In a battle of pure Semblances, Adam’s more versatile powers afford a critical advantage.

Ironwood is not entirely helpless as an ethereal combatant, however, as he is the only one here who incorporates Dust into his fighting style.  With the gravity bullets loaded into Due Process, Ironwood compensates for Mettle’s lack of offensive application by way of powerful shockwaves.  Not only do these blasts count as a decent match for Moonslices’s energy waves, but Ironwood’s use of them to support his movements and recoveries affords him a degree of versatility that Adam lacks.  The problem, however, arises when tactics are thrown into the mix.  Adam may be something of a one-trick pony when it comes to firing off Moonslices, but deflecting gunfire to build up energy for those slices is his go-to tactic in just about every situation.  Blake and Yang both proved that the best way to subvert this is to blindside Adam with shots he can’t see coming and can’t deflect, something Ironwood’s certainly capable of doing.  Problem is…he doesn’t.  While perfectly willing to sucker-shoot someone at point-blank range, Ironwood overwhelmingly favors long range gunfire to attack the target directly, which is the absolute last thing to do against this opponent.  Trying to gun down Adam Taurus at range, even with magic bullets, is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.  Not only has Adam proven that he can keep up with Ironwood’s trigger speed, but his performance against the spider drone in the Black Trailer shows that he can easily deal with the magnitude of Ironwood’s rounds and throw them back.  If a gigantic laser cannon couldn’t overwhelm Adam’s Semblance, comparatively dinky Dust bullets ain’t gonna do the job either.  The only piece of Ironwood’s arsenal that even comes close to the spider drone is the energy cannon he utilized at the end of Volume 8, which isn’t applicable here because the cannon is not part of Ironwood’s standard equipment; he only breaks it out for special occasions.

At the end of the day, James Ironwood’s special abilities either gain him nothing or they seal his fate, especially when contrasted with the far more flexible powers Adam Taurus has at his disposal.  Absorbing hits and throwing them back with a sword may seem like a very basic power, but not only has Adam made incredibly calculated uses of it, it is also perfectly optimized to use Ironwood’s own energies against him.  Ironwood’s typical use of Mettle will merely enable him to keep charging after Adam without a thought to what his opponent might attempt, playing into the Faunus’s guerrilla tactics.  Meanwhile, Adam will be able to capably nail the general with his own bursts of destructive power fluidly chained into his swordplay.  And between Ironwood’s overwhelming offensive focus, emphasis on gunfire at range, and the extra oomph of his Dust rounds, he's going to be giving Adam quite a lot to work with.  While Moonslice will not be enough to instantly one-shot Ironwood, it will still be more than enough for Adam to wear Ironwood down.  Furthermore, for all his instability, Adam is able to maintain a more complete situational awareness without sacrificing his focus and aggression, only failing to account for the unexpected when he is being actively distracted.  What Blake achieved with clever feints and flanking maneuvers, Team JNR achieved with an opponent with tactical tunnel vision.  Ironwood has certainly mastered his Semblance and his use of Dust, but he is overspecialized and relatively one-note.  Adam makes far more intelligent use of a Semblance that is more tactically viable and, dare I say, more powerful, and does so in a way that will make him the general’s worst nightmare.

Adam Taurus gets the edge for Special Abilities and Powers.

VERDICT

The name of the game here is Equal and Opposite.  When looking at these two on paper, Adam Taurus and James Ironwood appear to have nothing in common, and in fact appear to be exact opposites to each other.  One is a red and black garbed Faunus hailing from the dregs of society, leader of a smaller guerrilla force, and an openly malevolent, violent, and selfish young man who expressed his cruelty through both a terrorist campaign and a frighteningly abusive relationship.  The other is a blue and white clad human from the most prosperous Kingdom on the map, commander of a large, organized army, and an outwardly charming, friendly, and honorable man who is genuinely dedicated to serving and protecting the world.  However, when one observes the fine print and pushes aside the cosmetic details, the two are tragically far more similar that either would dare concede to.  Both were powerful leading figures within two dangerously controversial factions in the world of Remnant.  Both were initially driven by higher, nobler causes for the sake of their own people, only for those missions to become twisted and corrupted by their mutual preoccupation with power and control, itself heavily influenced by their severe physical and psychological trauma.  But more than anything else, both were the architects of their own destruction, their egos and fear gradually driving away whatever allies they had as they slowly spiraled down a path of madness and murder.  Both believed themselves to be the hero, but they merely lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.  Just as there are a plethora of ironic similarities and stark reversals between these two, so too are their diametrically opposed approaches to combat perfectly suited for engaging the other.  Physically, Adam Taurus has youth on his side and boasts superior agility and stamina, but James Ironwood’s cybernetic enhancements grant him vastly greater strength and durability.  One is optimized for an endurance run, the other dominates a slugging match.  With martial arts, Adam Taurus’s dynamic and counter-centric swordplay and James Ironwood’s domineering brawling and firepower are seamless foils to each other, perfectly optimized to hit the other where he is weakest.  And in the realm of special abilities, Adam Taurus holds the means to attack using his opponent’s own power against him while James Ironwood possesses the ability to deliver each of his devastating blows with laser-guided focus, both powers elevating their respective fighting styles into something greater than the sum of its parts.  This is nothing less than a contest of equals, and while both would be loath to concede to it, they are very much each other’s perfect adversary.

Given that both combatants predicate their success on controlling the engagement, the decisive factor in this matchup is going to be tactics and conduct, as he who can get the other to fight on his terms is he who controls.  This is especially ironic given how both combatants are known for having made extremely ill-informed, borderline foolish, strategic decisions, a failing that went a long way towards driving them to ruin.  However, neither Adam or Ironwood is truly incompetent, they simply lack forethought and tact, and it is worth noting that their blunders were often influenced by factors beyond their control.  When examining their baseline conduct and approaches, they are again well-suited to engage each other, but there is a noticeable disparity that finally tips the scales one way.  James Ironwood is the embodiment of the direct application of power, linear warfare.  Everything he is bringing to the table, body, weapon and soul, is specifically designed to be the strongest and most formidable piece on the board, capable of overcoming any adversary while being virtually impossible to assail himself.  He never deviated from this approach to combat simply because he never needed to 9 times out of 10, and the few times he did run into trouble, all he had to do was hit a little harder before the enemy finally broke.  Meanwhile, for all his ambitions and delusions of grandeur, Adam Taurus is a guerrilla assassin first and foremost, non-linear warfare.  He is operating from a position of lesser strength more often than not, so he works to avoid the head-on collision whenever possible.  He rushes in to cut the enemy down before they have time to respond then quickly move on to the next target, and should they try to fight back, he will defend before immediately countering.  Attacking Adam directly will either give him the opportunity to retaliate or provide fuel for his Semblance, and it is worth noting that most of his successes in battle were against opponents who actively resisted him.  Adam had plans to subjugate the world, which would naturally involve eventually crossing paths with stronger armies, namely Atlas itself, so everything about him is built with the goal of undermining that strength.  And because this is exactly the kind of approach to combat that James Ironwood specialized in, he is exactly the sort of opponent that Adam Taurus has optimized his skill set to combat.  Adam’s ironic tactical and defensive superiority makes his narrow advantages in all other areas decisive edges.  His greater speed and agility will keep him out of the general’s crosshairs, while his superior stamina will allow him to maintain his performance further into the fight.  His fighting style is perfectly suited to take advantage of Ironwood’s overcommitments and land critical blows to further wear him down, while his Semblance will take his enemy’s own consistent attacks and throw them right back at him.

However, I need to stress that Ironwood is merely at a disadvantage, he is not overmatched.  Adam’s advantages may be crucial, but Ironwood’s own are still guaranteed to give the Faunus problems.  If Adam makes a single mistake or Ironwood gets the change to bring his full power to bear, he is going down.  The only thing keeping Adam in this fight is his defensive technique, which he will only be able to execute so long as his head is in the game.  Psychological health is the bane of both combatants’ existence, and their final defeats owed greatly to their deteriorating mental states.  However, while Ironwood is outwardly more collected and stable than the disturbed Adam, his stubborn, borderline obstinate, determination was his greatest weakness, burning his candle from both ends by forcing his way through unnecessary risks, a factor that can lead him to either soldier his way to victory or completely burn him out.  Adam may be the more overtly explosive and volatile man, but his instability is specifically rooted in childhood trauma and his relationship with Blake, and he only lost his cool when specific buttons were pushed.  When Adam’s in the field, he is cold, focused, and all business.  Even accounting for Adam’s clear hatred of Ironwood, Ironwood’s lack of intimate familiarity with Adam means than exploiting his instability would be unlikely even if he were one for psychological warfare.  furthermore, Adam's conduct demonstrates that he is at least somewhat aware of his short fuse, operating in a way to prevent his composure from being tested. Both are extremely arrogant, yes, but Adam has displayed at least a small willingness to recognize his limitations and compensate for them, whereas Ironwood simply tries to be big enough to ignore them, damn the consequences.

In my view, if Adam Taurus and James Ironwood were pitted against each other in the context of the lore, they would no doubt approach each other the way they did Sienna Kahn and Ruby Rose respectively, the former playing it safe and assassinating him and the latter dispatching his forces to hunt him down.  But if dropped in cold, their battle would most likely play out as a combination of their respective final duels with Yang Xiao Long and Winter Schnee.  However, I also feel this would be a far more drawn out and vicious affair.  To take a cue from YouTuber Antione Bandele, I will be breaking my projection into three stages; the Early Fight, the Mid Fight, and the Late Fight.

The Early Fight would begin as a simple standoff before exploding into action, both combatants charging in for the initial exchange.  Despite their tendency for heavy offense, Adam and Ironwood typically open with a more controlled offensive, still aggressive but keeping their full might in reserve so they can assess and escalate as needed.  Ironwood’s heavier guns and unarmed combat would enable him to initially gain ground through sheer force, but Adam has a better recovery strategy, absorbing hits with his Semblance and evading anything else before instantly countering.  At the same time, Adam’s initial retaliation will be sure to knock Ironwood around a bit, but not in any way that would actually slow him down.  As such, this battle will not be decided in the early fight, instead functioning as more of a mutual assessment.

The Mid Fight is where things will begin to escalate.  Once Adam and Ironwood have each other’s measure, they would pull out all the stops, making more deliberate uses of their Semblances and powers while settling into an increasingly brutal rythem.  Blades and bullets flying, surges of energy exploding around them, punches and kicks thrown, both intent on burying the other where he stands.  It is here that Ironwood has his best chance of victory, as the increased intensity of his onslaught is certain to start putting Adam under serious pressure and potentially overpower him.  However, I do not consider this outcome likely, as Ironwood’s approach is too straightforward to push Adam out of his comfort zone.  It must be remembered that Yang defeated Adam by goading him into overextending, not by penetrating his defenses.  Adam’s greater mobility will be more than enough for him to stay out of Ironwood’s crosshairs, while the openings provided by Ironwood’s attacks will be too great for him to ignore.  This constant interruption will also undermine Ironwood’s own offensive, as he will be forced to respond to what Adam is doing rather than controlling the flow.  While Watts’s slippery retreat gave Ironwood the opportunity to marshal his strength and power through, Adam’s in-your-face hack and slash will be chipping away at him at every opportunity.  However, this will not be enough to seal the deal, as Ironwood’s greater durability and iron will will allow him to shrug off all but the most catastrophic hits and continue fighting.

As such, the final verdict hinges on what happens in the Late Fight.  By this point, both combatants will be utterly exhausted, their Auras either already broken or one hit away, though Adam will be better off thanks to his more controlled approach to the battle while Ironwood would be leaning on the native power of his prosthetics and otherwise running on fumes.  Both would be frustrated with not having ended their opponent yet, and would set aside grace to finish it once and for all. From here, I can see two potential outcomes.  Option A; Ironwood’s fatigue will leave him exposed to a series of attacks that he can no longer effectively defend against and endure, and Adam will be able to cut him down.  Option B; Ironwood goes all out and smashes into Adam with his full cyborg weight, willingly subjecting himself to any following injuries in order to bully through Adam's guard and beat him into a bloody pulp.

Of these two outcomes, I view a Faunus victory through attrition to be the more likely.  Ironwood may be capable and willing to accept a pyrrhic victory, but he will only be able to do so if he is able to successfully get the drop on his target, and the only example we have of such was against a distracted Arthur Watts.  Unlike Blake Belladonna, Adam has no reason to underestimate Ironwood outside of sheer stupidity, and would be on guard for any potential counterattack.  In fact, Ironwood’s extreme threat level would no doubt play into Adam’s hands, motivating him to skip gloating and dispatch his target at the earliest opportunity.  Compounding this outcome is the fact that Wilt and Blush are simply the superior option for such a takedown than Due Process; regardless of how powerful Ironwood's pistol whips are, battering someone into submission with blunt force trauma is not an efficient way of subduing your target quickly, especially when compared to a sword blade. Ironwood’s fierce resolve does him credit, but instead of pulling victory out of the fire, his final charge would merely prompt Adam to end it.  In a scarlet flash, the High Leader would narrowly avoid the general’s mauling fist, and Wilt would carve into what remained of his flesh and bone.  General James Ironwood’s body would fall to the ground dead, and the battered, bleeding, and exhausted Adam Taurus would use the last remnants of his strength to raise his bloody blade to the sky and roar in triumph.

I declare Adam Taurus the victor.

XX

Well guys, I hope you enjoyed this next installment of the RWBY Versus Series.  I’ve done my best to explain my position as completely as I can, but I understand if you disagree with me.  All I believe is that Adam is the more likely to end the fight on his terms.  If you disagree, that’s perfectly fine.  All I ask is that you keep your comments civil.

In the meantime, feel free to send me asks about future matchups, stay safe, and I’ll see you guys later!

*all images taken from the RWBY Wiki*

[kvetchlandia]

Richard Meltzer     Lester Bangs Passed Out on Meltzer’s “Highly Uncomfortable Living Rm. Chair,” 104 Perry St., Apt. 4, West Village, New York City     1972

On December 14th, this December 14th, Lester Conway Bangs, while probably not the greatest writer of his generation, arguably its most vital so far to die, would have been 36. Haunted and driven by demons, so- called, a cheerless many of whom/what/ which — or their kindred ilk — he directly sought, found cum stumbled upon, or was inadvertently ensnared by on the demon picnic grounds of Rock and Roll, he never made it to 34.

Following the lead of a handful of babes in the rock-critical woods, one of which I'll admit (if sometimes reluctantly) to having been. Bangs at the dawn of the seventies played as prominent a role as anyone in both expanding the expressive boundaries of rockwriting as a form and giving it a voice that played the newer, more mannered and cautious, mass-market rockmags like Rolling Stone and Creem — the latter of which he even edited for awhile — as on the dime as it had played the catch-as-catch-can, limited-edition fanzines whence it came. Though he also served as the burgeoning genre’s most prolific scribbler, a mission he sustained with relative ease for the bulk of his days, it is to the man’s lasting credit that he rarely delivered copy on anyone’s dotted line. In fact, he probably “got away with more’’ in major- publication print than all his rockwrite brethren combined, conceivably (however) because it merely simplified matters to have a single Designated Outlaw, one entrusted with a blanche enough carte — and unmonitored options galore — to spike with “authenticity ’’ a rock-media stew of bogus Freedom and ersatz Candor.

Retrospectively cliched or not, there was an existential purity to the sheer commitment evinced by Lester’s prolonged wallow in (and about) the rock- and-roll Thing-in-itself. It was, in many ways, the critical headbang to end all critical headbangs; it would be hard to even imagine, for instance, a professional art-film bozo, a jock-sniffing sports jerk, or a food-review lunatic more uninsulatedy gung-ho vis-a-vis x — either as primary experience or typewrite wankery. His patented shameless multipage gush, coupled with an unswerving advocacy of certain conspicuously over- the-top rock genera (Velvet Underground offshoots; Heavy Metal; Punk Rock), made him a must-read favorite with both cognoscenti and dipshits alike, and he came as close to encountering idolatry per se as any non-musician in R&R. A good deal of which — natch —could not help hitting the self-consciousness fan, but while a man’s life was ultimately undone in the process (“I’m Lester — buy me a drink! ’’), the integrity of his art/craft was essentially unaffected. For, while he might have been a tad too glib-messianic those last couple years, he was by no stretch of things an opportunist, never really giving a hoot for what in squaresville would be known as a career. (Or, perhaps, unlike his role model Kerouac, he simply didn’t live long enough for that, too, to be strenuously tested.)

In any event: dead, cremated, literal ashes. California born (Escondido ’48), bred (El Cajon, ages 9-23), and traveled (I first hung with him in San Francisco, last in L.A.), Lester bought the big one on the opposite coast — his final home, the fabled Apple — April 30/82, ostensibly from a hefty pull of darvon employed, in lieu of aspirin, to placate the flu. Since his death, variously interpreted as a mile-radius teardrop’s once-in-a- lifetime terminal burst, a joke and a half on both himself and his precious chosen whole damn Thing, and — by occasional uncouth louts — the final glorious triumph of his excess, the spectrum of Bangs-in-ongoing-print has dwindled from monochromatic /sparse to colorless/ nonexistent. Of the two books in his name which appeared during his lifetime, quasi-coffeetable numbers on Blondie and Rod Stewart, neither a particularly representative Lestorian effort (or even particularly good: the former admittedly hacked out “in two days on speed,’’ and looking it, i. e., ad hoc and forced; the latter disowned as a clumsy, if innocent, foray into “writing as whoring’’), both are either out of print — officially — or on the back burner of barely having ever been in same, at least as regards this coast, where I’ve yet to see either in bookstore one. Nor have two posthumous whatsems. Rock Gomorrah, cowritten (early ’82) with L.A.’s Michael Ochs, and a projected collection of unpublished fragments scrounged from Bangs’s apartment a day or two after his death, gotten more than inches off the publishing ground — the former for reasons which if herein revealed would get me sued but good, the latter because, in the words of editor Greil Marcus, “the stuff is less tractable than I thought at less than 5000 words or so.’’ Also stalled, and/or abandoned (and/ or nonspecific pipedreams to begin with) : all known plans to reissue out-of- print Live Wire LP Jook Savages on the Brazos, recorded, Austin, TX, Dec. ’80, by Lester Bangs & the Delinquents, lyrics and vocals by guess who. In fact, the only anything by L. C. Bangs readily available where availables are sold is his liner copy for The Fugs Greatest Hits Vol. I, released by PVC/Adelphi some months after he’d croaked, for which he (or rather his atoms) later copped a Grammy nomination, and for which, reliable word has it, he never was paid.

Well, I’ve been proven wrong; it hasn’t been easy recollecting Lester in even half a toto in so much tranquility. Didn’t seem like such a bad idea back when obits were appearing left & right and at least two- thirds of ’em smacked of revisionism at its well-intentioned worst; having ridden the range with the guy, having been as intimate with his daytime/nighttime revealed essence — I would bet my boots — as anyone in or out of various possible beds with him, I had fiery goddam galaxies to say in his behalf that were simply not being said, at least not in print by his designated peers; and, although my no longer living in New York couldn’t help but delay my shot, remote and after-the-fact seemed like the ticket, y’know anyway, for some major necessary rerevision.

But here it is two, two and a half years gone & more, and whuddaya know if all the raw goddam pain (at the loss of, yes, a brother) and jagged fucking anger (at a waste of life, life-force, and relative inconsequential like “talent” and “genius”), an unbeatable duo which for weeks, weeks, months gave the Lester totality so cosmic a shape, scale and intensity, have by their own inevitable burnout given way to the contemplation of standard-issue mere data, of the skeletal remains of a larger-than-life life which have come to make sense (or not) in too neat, too linear, a manner. Well — hey — fuggit: Even if grocery lists, chalk diagrams and hokey storytellin’ are the forms ongoing life-as-life has imposed on the mission, there’s still a heap of essential Lester information that could use, uh, exposure to printed-page light.

What too many write-biz intimates sought to do in the wake of his death was debunk the Lester Legend (solely) by reciting evidence that his bark was worse than his bite. While I’m sure he’d have “wanted it done” (i.e., have the saga-as- litany scraped of treacherous barnacles, or at least of their treacherous vogue), I can’t imagine the projected post-life intent of such a wish as in any way entailing cosmetic overhaul, especially in the service of moral/experiential object lessonhood. Lester’s day-to-day transaction with post-adolescent life-as- dealt was — let’s be conservative — 94 % anything but pretty. If he’d have wanted his entire whatsis to serve up viable scenarios for intimates and non-intimates alike (gee, would the Pope prefer to be Catholic?), there’s no way the deal’d come out even provisionally Lester-functional without interested non-intimates having retroactive access to as hefty an eyeful of the not-so-pretty — in all its hideous, non-Clearasiled blah blah blah — as intimates galore regularly managed to cop and, in their various personal ways, have already learned from. To deglorify an earlier incarnation of shit (which the man himself was clearly hellbent on doing in his waning days on earth) you’ve got to at least speak its name — loudly! — for the whole entire planet: c’mon now, one & all. A solemn responsibility (I call it) which, credibly/incredibly, the smelly sumbitch’s closest associates have, to this day, all but refused to consider.

To wit: For every time anyone saw the defanged, declawed Lester teddy bear rear its cuddly li’l head (see obits 2, 3, 5 & 7) the man was uncountable times the asshole, the buffoon, the sodden tyrant; been those things myself — in semi-prior lifetimes — so I know. Back in ’73, for inst, the soon-to-be-dead Lillian Roxon gushed shameless love for the s.o.b., in New York on Creem business, ordering up a Lester button and leaving it in his hotel box; response to this purest of offerings was “What’s that fat cunt want from me?” About a year later I get this call from Nick Tosches requesting that I please take Lester, who’d shown up at his door on acid, “off my hands”; took him to a party at John Wilcock’s place, during which he verbally brutalized Wilcock’s wife (in green Fingernails) for being a “hooker,” snapped at an affable Ed Sanders for being “the only alkie in the counter-culture,” and had nothing more to say to Les Levine’s Asian girlfriend (wife?) than “Yoko is a lousy gook”; further into the night, at Vincent’s Clam Bar in Little Italy, he literally bellowed ( more than twice), “There’s a lotta tackin’ wops in this joint.” And how can I forget the way he treated me and Nick, his closest approximate friends f'r crying out loud, as our wonderful editor while at Creem? He’d call us each up at 3 a.m. to urgently solicit various (rather specific) reams of pap, needed via Special D toot sweet; we’d climb outta bed, peck away bleary-eyed to whack out the closest possible takes on what he’d claimed he wanted, whereupon he’d reject ’em with a vengeance (“I won’t print beatnik shit”), then run thoroughly like-minded i. somethings — under his own byline — or with our words, usually verbatim, laced throughout. Just a few “examples,” dunno if they sound like big stuff or small, in any event typical Lester, with plenty, plenty more where they came from — y’know times n-plus-many.

In spite of such anticommunal upchuck, or quite possibly because of it — post-adolescent of a post-summer-of-love feather & all that — I did have deep affection for the bastard during my final years in New York; he could really piss me off (and I, I’m assuming, him) but bygones were always eventually ditto. In those days I generally shared his affection for The Edge, and might even’ve gone extreme slightly ahead of him; in January ’72, this is true, he actually dubbed me “the Neal Cassady of rock and roll.” But by fall ’75, when I split New York to at least simulate an escape from the Frantic and Hyper (and he subsequently arrived, ostensibly to embrace same), I was feeling the first stirrings of apprehension re my own prolonged massive intake of Edge Substances (emotional, cultural, but above all chemical) and was on the verge of an early series of attempts to, y’know, cut down, to maybe get off my collision course with all sorts of walls, both metaphoric and real. Lester, meantime, seemed on a rapid upswing in the intake dept.; what had so far served as mere horizon or frame for his trip, or at most been its semi-essential fuel, was now lunging headlong for the foreground of his life ... or should we call it the twin foregrounds (life as Mythic Construct; life as physical/emotional/cultural Hard Mundane Reality).

Hey, the guy was beginning to scare me. Certainly as an advanced — or rapidly advancing — version of what I no longer wanted to be and could (possibly) imagine once again becoming, but more as this vivid, palpable spectre of specialized human decomp not just out there but right there: a pal & a buddy headed (willy nilly?) for the sewer. From late ’75 immediately onward, on those unlikely occasions when separate coasts — underscored by far fewer rockwrite junkets — any longer allowed for it, I was usually unable to handle being in the same room with him, knowing I’d have to witness whole new increments of what could really no longer be passed off as anything but (gosh) misery and (dig it) horror. Where in the earlier ’70s it was almost cute — once in a while — the way Lester would stumble into classic self- directed drunk jokes (like the time he called me from the Detroit airport to tell me he was headed for an Alice Cooper show in London, presumably England, only he’d drunkenly got it wrong and was on his way to London, Ontario), there was this half-week in ’79, for inst, during which he hung out at Michael Ochs’s house in Venice with no daily design but to get skid-row-calibre gone and stay there, that was just fucking grim. Looking an unhealthy as I’d ever seen him, basic shit-warmed over with an ngly bump on his forehead (which he claimed he was “treating with Romilar”), he refused to eat without an Occasion. When, one evening, Michael and I pretty much dragged him to a Mexican restaurant, he refused to actually step inside until he’d fortified himself with the cottons from six Benzedrex inhalers — the local pharmacist was out of Romilar — busted open on the sidewalk with a shoe.

Washing down their remnants with a Dos Equis as his enchilada sat there staring at him, he quoted (or claimed he was quoting) Sid Vicious: “Food is boring.”

So, inevitably, when Billy Altman rang me up from N.Y.Clearly on a California morn, to let me hear it straight from a friend — “instead of from a creep” — my immediate response to no more Lester, steps ahead of all the pain & anger & whut, was holy fucking shit, the fucker finally did it; it’d been in the real-world cards for long-long times for Lester to cease to be. Though even on his gonest days he was no way a classic cornball suicide-romantic — heck, I don’t really think he was all that clinically suicidal (big-sleep fantasies never overtly/covertly lured him, not even metaphorically, from the darkest sub-basement of his World of Dread; nor was Danger, though he often nonstop lived it, itself the merest tickle of a ripple of a thrill for him, a context before the fact) — he’d sure staged more corny, frightful dress rehearsals than Jim Jones plus Judy Garland (squared) for simply ending up dead.

Biggest of which I ever saw was January ’81. I’m at Nick’s place in New York, en route back to L. A. from Montreal, when who should pay a surprise visite but Mr. Bangs, cassette in hand. It’s a tape of these tracks recorded during an Austin romp I’d heard about second or third hand (he’d planned to “live there forever,” it was said, ’til a night in the local drunk tank — on top of who knows what else — totally changed his mind), and in the course of the next 12-15 hours he played it, for us and at us, many times. Also during this stretch, after boasting, rather proudly, that he no longer drank, he managed to ingest at least 36 cough- suppressant tablets (three 12-packs of Ornical — we weren’t always watching) washed down with sizable slugs of bourbon, as there was nothing else but water to wash ’em down with.

All stages of this ordeal, in which Nick and I were little more than foils for surge upon surge of what we’d come to regard as typical Lestorian bathos, were hardly bearable in the state we were in (after far too many “nights with Lester,” going back to the days when we even could dig it, we’d opted for a change to take this one straight), but the morning-after phase was literally one for the books. On the umpteenth playback of what was soon to hit the racks as the Jook Savages LP, Lester insisted that one particular vocal was pure Richard Hell (in Lester’s cosmos an a priori yay); my dogtired no-big-deal of a response was it sounded existentially neater than that, more on the order of Tom Verlaine (a Lester nuh-nuh-no). Suddenly hair-trigger sensitive — in a performance-trigger vein — he tapdanced back with “Then I might as well go sell shoes in El Cajon.” Next cut he compared himself to somebody (very contempo) else, prompting me to comment, for non-pejorative, sleep- denied better or worse, that his vocals (across the board; in general) had the same basic flavor as those on such country-western parodies as Sanders' Truckstop or the Statler Brothers’ Johnny Mack Brown High School LP. Affecting grievous offense, as if any of his b.s. actually mattered (the Lester of ’73/’74 — in any chemical state — would merely’ve giggled), he took things up a full notch of indignant/sarcastic: “Well I guess I’m just no fucking good. ”

But he wouldn’t stop playing the crap, not with every cut looming as a supercharged occasion for kneejerk call- and-response, a challenge for him to goad Nick and/or me into goading him, in turn, into mock-self-deprecatory one-liners ad nauseum — a dress rehearsal, as it were — his puke-stained sweater seemed appropriate — for his triumphant appearance on Johnny Carson, which he had no doubt the worldwide success of his Blondie book would imminently require . . . along with a shot of his mug, cleanshaven, on the cover of People (over which he whined “fear” of besmirched personal image).

Ultimately Nick and I, weary of further compliance in so shoddy an interpersonal number, old buddy or not (and/or old bud in particular), found ourselves laughing in his face; enough was enough, and the sight of this bumbling mammal going gaga for an audience of two-who-knew- better was kind of otherworldly amusing. The object of our yuks, however, took it as us laughing with him: Great Moments in Standup/Audience Rapport! Swollen with illusory (or whatever) whacked-out self, Lester then proceeded to announce his program: (1) to save Rock & Roll; (2) to become president (presumably Oi the U.S. of A.); (3) to move to England and in turn save their Rock & Roll. As mere dipshit goals, nos. 1 and 3 meant topically little to either of us — geez, we’d all but buried the Anglo-Am mainstream as even an idle, y’know, sometime hobby or whatnot — but (2) hit us firmly, instantaneously, in the breastplate.

Lester’s neurons, no recent model of health to begin with, had made the short-circuit of Lester Bangs . . . [tenor saxophonist] Lester Young . . . (latter's nickname] Pres . . . Pres/U.S.A. per se!!!

Guffaw, guffaw — we guffawed — though I guess we could've gasped (or shuddered). Then: a heavy silence, as cosmic (or whatever) as it was awkward, filled presently by the man himself:

"Hey! I'm gonna buy some import albums! I'll get a whore I know to lend me her charge card! Cab fare too!" And he was off; no amiable nudging, no “Get the fuck out of here" could take the place of timeless vinyl hunger. Gone at last — and we gave him (in all solemn, empirical, non-jive reckoning) six months to live.

But of course he fooled us, by (nearly) a whole damn calendar year. Surprise, surprise: but an even bigger surprise was the extent to which he managed to actually turn things around — well, almost — during that extra annum, especially during its. and his. final months. Not only was he still among the living, not only did he no longer seem conspicuously earmarked for premature exit — the Lester with whom I spent a rather refreshing week in February '82 gave every indication of having already gone beyond mere survival (as an issue) and appeared, astonishingly, to be thriving on the theme.

In L.A. following his mother's eventually fatal stroke and staying with his 56-year-old half-brother in Studio City, he accompanied me one night to a low-stakes poker game attended by members of the Blasters, the perfect setup, you’d figure, for Lester to revert to type. But no, he just minimally fun-&- games'ed it like anyone else — no lookin' for opportunities to “be Lester," no showing off for rock-roll peers either verbally or intakewise. no diving for the evening's jugular and letting 'er rip — and after two beers (!). without so much as a grimace, he declared he’d had enough. Postgame he engaged Phil Alvin in a lively musical dialogue, but at no point did fightin' words fill the air, or were axes even poised for grinding. The pair agreed to exchange tapes — a wholesome friendship in the making — and next day Lester complained (true, true) that reefer had been smoked.

As the week wore on in consistent, low- key fashion. I was struck by the fuckload of inner capacities the guy was perceptibly calling on, left, right and center, to extend his defiance of Death to the domain of just plain living, capacities I hadn't caught sensory evidence of — all previously told — for more than 11 minutes total. A far cry from anything as cheaply benign as, let's say, more frequent eruptions of "Lester washes the dishes" (see obit 04), what I got to witness was kind of on the order of a whole new Lester, one who'd finally found a non-lethal, functionally less jagged (though in no way “benign") rhythm for his life. Engaging him in tight quarters with more open-heartedness per se than I*m sure I’d ever mustered (sharing an Edge does not always make for brotherhood-by-numbers. let alone by pure, unedited inclination), I willingly submitted to his rap/rant and bought its tenor if not its verbatim transcript; by the time he returned to New York, his mother still hanging on. I’d seen and heard a New Lester series pilot that could credibly have played — prime time — on the Pro- Life Network.

For starters, he’d learned to slow down, to proceed apace through a given experience without easy reliance on everpopular on-off switches. He'd gotten far more selective about the company he kept, seeking out, for the first time in his known adult life, social interactions stressing soulwarming interpersonal comfort over thrash-trigger me-you tribulation. A good deal less insistent upon strapping each day to an emotional chopping block (as recalled, for inst, in that old chestnut of his, “I need to be in love!"), he'd begun to let his life embrace emotional motifs of greater duration and resiliency. And. as stuff like this fed back to his theoretic apparatus, even Lester's ideas (as stated) began to display an unexpected day-to-day congruity; no longer, it seemed, would he write an anti-racist wowser for the Village Voice in one breath and scream, "Fuckin’ niggers!” at Village Oldies the next. Lester-as-flux had had its thoroughly engaging run. and for this to give way to a “maturer” unpredictability was not the worst of possible outcomes.

Even the drastic reduction in Lester’s intake of physical poisons bore little trace of on-the-wagon-or-bust — y'know, as if any day, minute, second the tension of it all would cause him to snap right back with equal vengeance — particularly with its status as but part of a whole-body package that included both eating at regular intervals and a radical olfactory modification: He now took baths. (One afternoon in ’74 Nick and I met Lester at some ritzy midtown hotel. Though he’d been in the room all of an hour, the smell was like a dog had died there, and been left to rot, weeks or months before. Consequently, we vetoed his offer to call down for drinks on Creem’s tab, suggesting, to his consternation, that any dump of a bar would be more, uh, whatever. Many of his heterosex liaisons had foundered on the rocks of precisely this issue.)

In terms of cultural orientation, no longer was he monomanically enslaved to rock & roll (-or-perish). For virtually the first time since the sixties he didn’t need, burningly, brand new Big Beat LP’s in his mail slot each (and every) day; the state of the Art, wobbling on a multi-year terminal gimp, no longer served as his external psychic barometer, his armband of first-person pride (or shame); having finally produced Music of his own, to severe personal specifications (regardless of the giggles it inspired in jerks like me), he no longer needed to prove anything with it or through it. Crucially, though some would probably like to deny it. he no longer saw Rock’em-Sock'em as a viable metaphor for his (or any, kindred or otherwise) state of being, viewing it as the all too easy — and ultimately, revoltingly, unsatisfactory — crystallization of (mega-numerous) blank and scattered lives. Lester's break with rock-roll mythos as his be-all/end-all of etc., which I have no doubt (had he lived) he’d've sooner rather than later made official, was as profound, and profoundly moving, as his break with the Myth of Lester. As one committed jackass who’d made the same painful transition — goodbye, Rock-Automated Self! — I knew how tough a bond the chronically intermingled personal/cultural can be to crack (and my heart went right out to him).

It also warmed my cockles, considering his record in the mere civility dept., to see him relate (graciously) to his half- brother’s wife, this unaffectedly pretty 21- year-old rural Mexican the macho blusterer, a stuntman by trade, had recently acquired, maritally, while on location Down South. Though she knew pun near zero English, my first sight of her she was watching some random English-language crap, while hubby rested for a shoot of the Fall Guy series, on the tiny TV in her fussy suburban kitchen; materially cozy for the first time in her life, she seemed lonely, disoriented, far from home. Silent and solemn, she visibly stiffened — shyly? menially? — at the intrusion of Lester, my girlfriend Irene and me. only to be put at ease by Lester introducing us, without missing a beat, as, well, friends of the family. Like it mattered to him that she feel like family — and thus shared in all aspects of etc. — and for a moment the loneliness left her face; she smiled broadly, shook (or at least took) our hands, went back to her tube.

But what came off as so genuine when he was dealing with his family, his friends, kind of sputtered into the ether when he tried to branch it to the family of Man. Whenever he got to talkin' Hard Humanism, which had all the earmarks of being his preoccupation of (Rock- replacement) record, he’d make these broad, lecture-ish, relatively flavorless statements which often didn't wash.

Never wholly credible 'cause once again he seemed to be performing — without booze/etc. but surely with a script — he’d say thus & such about human courage and folly that not only had an artificial ring, it tended to run in direct opposition to what had clearly been his experience. Even his word choice sounded stilted, alien, not his own; when he spoke of "women" he could easily have been reading straight from a column in Cosmo.

A lot of which suggested a Lester so hellbent on being a good boy once and for all that to merely work overtime cleaning up his own act was scarcely sufficient; he had to render a transpersonal commentary that made his good intentions “universal,” even if the topical universality he’d taken an option on was simply the first he found it comfortable song-&-dancing a provisional connection to. There were moments when his bill of particulars made me uneasy, realizing that to intellectually challenge any of this would be like kicking mud on some kid’s newest/truest pastime, 'specially when it was one so socially redeeming, so non- self-destructive. one which, for all intents and purposes, I basically shared with him anyway. What really counted was the miracle of Rock Tough Guy #1, after 15 years of rocknroll plug-in and little else, during which he'd come to thread that needle upside down (and asleep), to the point (even) of smugness, flipness, pomposity, out on a goddam limb over something else: a neophyte at last! (I could dig it.)

Anyway, finally, on the last night of Lester's stay — which worked out as our last time together, period — we did something we’d previously never found the appropriate nexus for: trading rants (in earnest) with blank tapes a-rolling.

For something like five-six hours we went apeshit re such topics as: the sellouts & prejudices of mutual colleagues; novels and novelists; New York as (quite possibly) the coldest outpost on Emotional Earth; the usual standard rockish garbidge (plus some un- and some non-). We also hit on shrinks-we- have-known, with Lester's rap on this rooty-toot of a subject being the single one, from the four-and-a-half hours I’ve so far transcribed, which most tellingly nutshells the excruciating self- examination he had to've undertaken — and undergone — just to be sitting around discoursing as fluidly as he was, to’ve transcended whatever the fuck en route thereto:

“Like I went to a psychoanalyst, one in New York and one in Detroit, for a total of, I dunno, three-and-a-half years. I finally concluded, I mean yeah I’m insane, I’ve got my problems, my sicknesses are fucking me, yeah, I’m sure they both probably helped me, y’know, I know the last guy in New York, it's like everybody I know was totally appalled by my drinking and drugging, well like you, right, and everybody else had the same reaction, y’know, except my shrink. He’d say, ‘No, that's alright.�� I went out to this, he had a country retreat, a whole bunch of us would go out there on weekends. And the first time I went there like I got drunk on Friday night, and Saturday morning I got up and washed down a bottle of Romilar with a bottle of beer while sitting on a slick rock by the stream. I got this great idea for something I wanted to write, I stood up on the rock in boots like these and whoosh, went like that and smashed, see it, the scar on my nose? That's how I got it, smashed my face open.

“And he thought my druggin' and drinkin' was great, y'know? He said, in fact he kind of told me I'd be not as great of a writer if I gave all this stuff up. And I said, 'Yeah, but look at all these people, they rot away, they end up like self- parodies like Kerouac and Burroughs and all that sort of shit.' And he said. 'No. no, not everybody's like that.' I said, How could I someday be 55 years old and have to take a handful of speed to sit down at the typewriter?' Well he said, 'People do it. heh heh heh!' Well both my shrinks, especially this guy, they had real great humanist compassion and empathy and all that, but I know what both of 'em did, and in the long run in essence they were no good for me, because they were getting off on me being there. It’s like they’re so bored, one housewife alter another, 'I don’t love my husband, I don't know why.’ Then they get someone like you or I that's actually interesting, that has ideas, and so it's fun time for 'em. I mean if I hadda follow this guy’s advice I’d be dead, uh, pretty soon.”

Hmm: one effing eery end-of-quote as, alas, all is now dust — reactively acquired caution or no. Possibly possibly possibly, any tonnage of prudence would inevitably have proven insufficient for the autopilot courses he was still, evidently, all too capable of flying. Or, reversing horses and carts, maybe his tortured shell was already jus’ too beat-to-shit, with even a radical lessening in his scale of abuse being too little — archetypally — too late. And then there’s this pharmacological biz about purified cells succumbing to doses they’d have been more than up for when poison was all they knew. (And can we ignore the Wrath of Influenza?)

Even if, to some bitter-enders, his death remains as shrouded in formal “mystery” as those of Eric Dolphy and Warren G. Harding, all-of-the-above can't help but provide a not-unlikely profile of how Lester came to die. Throw in a few more mainline Causalities (cultural: rock-roll glut, esp. coupled w/ too literal an intoxication with Kerouac, Celine, et al; primalpsychological: a childhood more woeful than most, his Jehovah's Witness mom — pushing 50 when she had him — mind-setting, almost singlehandedly. a chronic “inability to cope"; geographic: the Apple, even when it wasn't absolute Edge Central, affording him. given his makeup, scant opportunity for inner peace) and you'd easily have an explanation that 'd hold up in a court of his cronies/cohorts/camp followers.

But if Lester was the pawn, victim, and (indeed) fellow traveler of such easy- Aristotelian a-implies-b, he was also, in those last fitful months, a scatterer of all such shit to the winds, a man who showed his true destiny muscle by throwing all the elements out of on-the-head mythopoetic sync just when they threatened, conspiratorily, to reduce him to merely another Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Mr. Kerouac. Screamingly, courageously, he committed himself, as wholly (really) as possible, to a counter-causal gameplan which even if flawed — and accidents, y’know, happen — did actually manage to defuse (at least where I live & breathe) the mythic oompah of any time-delayed rat-trap he may subsequently (or previously) have fallen in. If there's anything almost pleasing about the timing, the anti-drama, of Lester's death, it's the monumental Mythic Disjuncture factors he'd set in motion were thereby — implicitly, explicitly — to forever effect.

LESTER’S (WRITERLY) LEGACY — “One of rock’s most colorful characters, Bangs made his reputation as a pugnacious, participatory journalist who was not above picking fights with rock stars in pursuit of a good interview." So wrote one voice of prevailing wisdom, Patrick Goldstein, in the May 9/82 L.A. Times; nothing — latter part — could be farther from the truth. If Lester (the writer) more than once battled Lou Reed into (and beyond) the wee hours of etc., it was not to get a story, it was to live a story: to encounter all the rock-related being his writerly credentials (as a wedge) were able to afford him (as a person)'. Nor was he in any way enthralled by the sickening spectacle of stars being stars; artists, maybe, but stars, fug 'em. When he as mere citizen found himself face-to-face with the pose, pretense, and professional guardedness of such gaudy, extraneous creatures, Lester could not (for the life of him) deal with such crap but to cut right through and speak, directly, to the mere citizen in them, or (failing that) force the situation into functional self-destruct — before the fact of anything so dispassionate as actually “writing it up."

That his eventual write-ups tended to display utter contempt for the entire food chain of music-corporate life, often biting, intentionally, a grimy hand that could not’ve been more willing — his mighty Credentials & all — to feed him, heck, fatten him, was but half the take-no-shit of Lester's essential statement as a writer de rock; forcefeeding the stuff, his stuff, the stuff-as-writ, to the only marginally less corporate (or grimy) running dogs of rockwrite publishing was at least as pugnacious a gesture of this-is-what-I-am/this-is-what-I-do/take-it-or-be-fucked. Since the extent of his success in shoving it down so many otherwise unyielding editorial throats may have had less to do with his willful intent than theirs — camouflage, for inst, for their being life-deep in major-label record company pockets — its significance at this juncture is, at most, merely ironic; the reciprocal influence, in any event, of his ease at getting published upon subsequent moments of raw critical-expressive spew was procedurally nil. In fact, what may most enduringly matter about Lester's approach to his chosen profession, way ahead of dandy journalistic touchstones — "courage," “integrity,” “pride in craft" — that he ate for breakfast like so much broken glass (but which, really, you can still get from Nat Hentoff and Howard Cosell), is the “anti-professional," forcibly non-dehumanized square-one struggle he by design submitted to — and could not. with any kernel of his humanity, avoid - in order to pump out critical prose of any scale of note. (Pugnacity with form; with ritual creative context; even — especially — with roleplaying writerly/critical self.)

That he was ofttimes a great writer/critic, so-called, was but icing on the cake. That scant few others, on the hottest days of their lives, have even approached him — or particularly cared to, considering the requisite gravity and passion of the chore he’d set — probably says as much about their investment in lesser quals of cake as it does about the relative inadequacy of their writerly follow-through. Rockwriting is, and nearly always has been, the trade of simps, wimps, displaced machos, brats and saps; of, in Lester's own words, “ass-kissers of the ruling class”; of fuddy-duddy archivists with cobwebs on their specs; of pathetic idealizers of a lost youth no one has ever (even approximately) experienced or possessed; of sycophantic apologists for chi-chi trends, musical and extramusical alike, without which (so they've always claimed) “rock is dead”; of binary yes/no cheeses with the cognitive wherewithal of vinyl, shrinkwrap, the physical column- inch. Rockwritin' Lester, like anyone else in the trade, was certainly each of these things from time to time, though (probably) none of 'em, singly or in tandem, for longer than the odd off review. Sadly, though his untradelike comportment surely tantalized mere tradefolk while he lived — at least in terms of Style — and even begat a not-half-bad (early-’70s) clone in “Metal Mike" Saunders, his actual abiding sway among such clowns, beyond the occasional liftable riff, was — as it continues to be — infinitesimal.

Finally: the twin silly questions (1) where a still-living Lester might hypothetically've taken it (i.e., beyond the rockwrite fishpond) and (2) what such imaginary newstuff could/would conceivably’ve meant to his basic audience. Second one first. Okay, that Lester's rockstuff generally read so hot as personal testimony is one thing; for it to have been perceived by so many as being eminently, genuinely about something — something rather specific, in fact something "rear’ — is something else. When you get down to it, the gospel of Lester's radical about-ness rested largely on a big hunk of readerly illusion, the illusion of a functional one-on-one between the guy’s fertile imaginings and the psychic infrastructure of rock & roll as dealt; there could be harsh discordance, of course, but as long as a firm relationship could (for whatever readerly vested interest) be consistently inferred between Lester’s mindgames and rock’s g-g-games per se, you at least had the stamp of a viable — if totally simulated — one-on-one. But, really/truly, while Lester’s psychic playground may surely have been one drastically twisted maze, its actual correspondence (sympathetic, hostile, whatever) to rock's own labyrinth, one so airtight and dank as to make his seem like wide open etc., was far too often naught but a matter of readerly convenience. Everyone loves a cipher, a living/ breathing anagram or two. even some — hey — with flaws more rampant than Lester’s, but for the man’s writerly service to’ve been gauged (almost solely) vis-a-vis his reliability as a stand-in cipher-of- x, y’know for readerfolk too lame — or lazy — to suss out x themselves, is the real tragedy of the trip, particularly when the first-&-final glue of most folks’ attachment to his writing was never much more than their own desperate attachment to an x they could, and should, have been accessing more independently (and less desperately) to begin with.

So, anyway, here's the rub. Had Lester lived long enough to both sever his own desperate rock connection — officially, in sheets read by his fuckheaded fans, simply by writing other stuff — and, furthermore, to back it up with an equally official rejection of the Fount of Neurosis from which he'd sung its tune (and they'd listened), it ain't really much of a longshot to imagine him losing a huge percent of the fuckheads — certainly the most gung-ho among 'em — in, well, no time flat. And, c’mon, how much of an immediate, uh, new audience was he likely to yank in writing up (as he insisted he would) such transcendently pivotal mere-humanistic trifles as the dearth of love (as we know it) in scene X or Y . . . how this set of new-age culture jerks uses that set of new-age culture jerks as props in regards to bluh . . . New York editors who pull rank (pshaw!) along collegiate lines [a hard-hitting exposé] . . . or, I dunno, something about shams and follies in clothes and/or grooming?

Plus, well, though, um — (even if) — then again: Aside from loss of ad hominem authority due to the fickle scumbait nature of the pop-world Beast, aside from the fact that many of his generic partisans would prob'ly now be targeted, topically and even personally, in scathing printed-page rants, aside from the limited run such goulash (Sensitive Ties His Laces, w/ Brass Knucks & Footnotes) has ever had — hey — can ever/will ever have . . . aside, aside, aside — the most glaring fact fact is how few times, as of his death, he'd as yet even aspired to the heights (or whats) or non- rock journalism. Four-five-six, some number like that, in the Voice and wherever else, all of ’em still pretty much rockwriterly appendices to the rockwrite “adventure," meaning he had a good ways to go before he'd’ve got the wings/chops/ legs for a total-pulp plunge (or at least a regular shift) at full oldtime capacity (but with newtime thrust and content). Which would’ve been no fall from grace no matter how you scope it — give the boy time (for fuck sake) to stumble and bumble and get it right — but how would any possible Lester have dealt with a (previously amenable) shithook book co. like Delilah telling him not now, sonny when he handed ’em a ream of copy on (let’s imagine) friends who’re fuckups? Personal persona limelight Lester had learned to live without — but writeperson limelight? (It would not’ve been easy.)

Okay, he's dead. All this brand new grief and hardship never befell him; never will. But words on pages remain: What is their lot? Lester's standard fare was so paradigmatically “of the moment" that he was the rockmag shootist. But books of the stuff? Nah; it’s kind of nebulous how even his best mag outings will wear when inevitably (??) anthologized. For someone so public in his orientation, both as input and output, he was — don't laugh or even smirk — one of rock’s more precious and fragile "private moments.” Private moments you can always document — coercively, of course — but try and play ’em back and. well . . . we'll all see, I reckon.

LESTER LEAPS IN — Y’all know all by now how Lester leapt out of New York; lemme just finish with how he leapt in. His first night in town, just a visit, fall "72, he stayed with me and my girlfriend Roni, West Village, 104 Perry St., apt. 4. Arriving semi-direct from JFK, he split pretty quick for the nearest grocer, returning with three six-packs of Colt 45. What he did for the next day and a half — all he did — was wade through 18 big ones, half quarts, as follows: start can, drink fast, get tired; fall out, dropping remainder; awaken following can’s impact with floor; stagger to fridge for fresh one; repeat cycle. What he mumbled or muttered during any of the 18 pre-fallout phases I simply do not recall.

So like hey y’know wo hey hey wo-wo hey, OLD SPORT: love ya, hope I didn’t cramp yer style, g’bye.

--Richard Meltzer, “Lester Bangs Recollected in Tranquility”  Dec. 6, 1984

[autumnblogs]

Day 4: You eat a weird bug and don’t even care.

Starting later than usual today because I’ve been absolutely swamped with work. Let’s get down to business to defeat the Huns.

https://homestuck.com/story/644

I’ve never really gotten why John falls asleep here. Seems an odd place to fall asleep, especially with the adrenaline rush that must have been. Maybe he’s passing out from exactly that? Alternatively, maybe Vriska is putting him to sleep.

 I also forgot that John Sleeps/Skaian Magicant is split between two flashes.

https://homestuck.com/story/651

Ah here we go. John has what are, if Jade is to be believed, lousy dreams. He dreams of his Dad, of clowns, of baked goods, of Fruit Gushers, of his own symbol, the weird knock-off slimer, and Harry Anderson, before finally Jade appears.

I am not a psychologist or therapist. I am not even anything more than an amateur literary critic. But let me give you my take on that. It’s clear that John is dreaming about all kinds of things that are giving him anxiety here, if Jade’s assessment about his dreams being lousy is true.

Harry Anderson is, as he’ll say later, kind of a weird mutual father figure for him and his Dad, and as a stage magician and comedian, he represents John’s aspirations.

John wants to grow up to be a great stage magician and comedian, and if there’s anything we’ve seen about the Heir of Breath so far, it’s how extremely self-critical he is of his abilities - he’s screwed up every disguise and magic trick he’s tried so far. 

The other things are pretty self-explanatory - he’s anxious about his relationship with his Dad, he’s anxious about his Dad’s identity, he’s anxious about his own identity - with the exception of the gushers. Are gushers just symbolizing Sburb for John? Does he have a premonition that the gushers are tainted by the hand of his archnemesis, Betty Crocker? Maybe that one’s just silly.

Maybe they’re all just silly!

https://homestuck.com/story/652

I promise I will have more to say about Jade’s conversations once she is actually introduced, but until then, she is too enigmatic for me to talk about :^)

I will say, if the fact that John is stressing out about everything in his life and just not vocalizing his anxiety, it’s probable that he thinks Jade is just as mysterious as his pals think she is, and is just not talking about it.

I think John, like Jake, is way more intelligent than he lets on, and probably just keeps a lot of things on a simmer, thinking about them without necessarily opening up about them. He talks a lot about surface level stuff for sure, but he seems a lot more hesitant to talk about emotions, theories, that sort of thing. It actually reminds me a lot of how Kim Kitsuragi from Disco Elysium, far from his highly imaginative partner the player character, writes his thoughts down in a notebook to keep track of his through processes, hunches, case details, etc, whereas the Detective organizes everything in an interactive Thought Cabinet that serves as one half of the game’s Inventory and Progression System.

For example, John’s ability to describe and his ability to theorize is on full display in the FAQs that he writes, but when he talks, he’s often just as disorganized as he is everywhere else. Maybe John needs to take up journalling.

Huh. I wonder if Kim is a Prospit Dreamer and the Detective is a Derse Dreamer? That would make a lot of sense. Once @bladekindeyewear finishes playing Disco Elysium (which he is playing at my behest), I’ll see if he’s interested in assigning Lunar Sway, Classes and Aspects to the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/665

Dave Owns. The Narrative switches between character perspectives often right before there’s a major climax so that lots of characters can all have climactic encounters in sync with one another.

Eye imagery is on full display here as Dave ascends to the highest point in the building. The Sun over Dave’s house is drawn differently from other abstractions of the Sun in Homestuck, and this particular drawing of the Sun will later be juxtaposed against Terezi’s eyes as Alternia’s Sun burns them out.

The Sun as the Symbol of Light is also juxtaposed with Rose’s eyes later when she uses her seer powers, strengthening the connection between the Sun and Eyes. Near the very beginning of the comic, Rose compares the Sun moving on from the east coast to the west as him casting his lurid gaze on younger parts of the world, or the country. I’m not recalling the exact phrasing at this time.

Lil Cal’s creepy eyes are also highlighted by the Camera here. Through the vehicle of Lil Cal, Lord English is watching and quietly giving approval to all of this.

I choose to interpret the camera’s focus in this flash as giving us a glimpse into what Dave is paying attention to. And boy does Dave notice all of these eyes on him. Between seeing the sun as a malevolent eye watching him, to Lil Cal’s glassy gaze, to the Cameras bro uses to surveil him 24/7, Dave feels like he’s constantly being watched, and I think it’s safe to say it gives him the creeps.

https://homestuck.com/story/673

WV’s self-estimation isn’t much better than John’s.

https://homestuck.com/story/678

I wonder if we can get some insight into the strange minds of the Carapacians in the way that before he’s even finished receiving the commands, WV acts on them. WV is even more impulsive than John.

https://homestuck.com/story/684

Oh yeah, WV’s self-worth is way worse than John’s.

https://homestuck.com/story/685

Luckily almost as soon as his thoughts come, they go. He doesn’t spend too much time brooding over his self-loathing and survivor’s guilt, so good for him.

https://homestuck.com/story/688

A whole bunch of things that are symbolically related to the cast!

While WV’s can town playtime functions as foreshadowing for us, it serves as a replay of the extremely recent past for him, at least in terms of events that we know about.

https://homestuck.com/story/694

The light on Serenity’s belly looks a bit like the Sun, and therefore, an eye.

https://homestuck.com/story/699

The Blue Trees of Can Town call forward to Terezi’s forest, but I don’t think this is probably more substantial than something fun Andrew decided to call back to when he was writing the trolls.

IDK. Maybe Blue Trees = Democracy = Justice?

But Terezi’s brand of justice has nothing to do with Democracy.

https://homestuck.com/story/709

Tab, like GameBro, is an artifact of a bygone age.

https://homestuck.com/story/711

It’s a lot easier to become a citizen of Can Town than it is to become a citizen of the United States!

https://homestuck.com/story/714

I wonder who input all those commands before WV got on board? Maybe whoever was in charge of building these contraptions in the first place - a Carapacian Lab Rat in the Veil.

Always felt like the unseen actors making Sburb run behind the scenes were one of the nicest touches, they lend an air of sinister mystery even beyond the Guardians.

https://homestuck.com/story/721

I am not good at chess.

Maybe sometime, I will have my friend who is good at Chess analyze this game, and see how he feels about it.

https://homestuck.com/story/735

WV’s Self Esteem is very, very bad.

https://homestuck.com/story/752

Our first introduction to the laws of time travel in Homestuck - the past is a place that materially exists, and in only one specific configuration that can be interacted with. You can only bring things forward from the past if nobody else got to them before you. You can’t go back and undo things that somebody else (or you) has already done according to the canonical configuration of events.

https://homestuck.com/story/757

This is ridiculously cool.

Homestuck’s huge climactic story events are arguably one of the things that makes it so special as a story. I can’t think of a story that does such a good job of building up tension in multiple storylines before having them all converge.

https://homestuck.com/story/760

:D

https://homestuck.com/story/765

I wonder what the exact mechanism is by which Jade is aware of the gaming abstractions and commands to the degree that she is? Is it just her Skaian dreams? This could be a one-off gag, but it could also be an indication of a degree of clairvoyance greater than that which I feel like the visions she has as the Prospitian Moon passes through Skaia.

https://homestuck.com/story/768

Jade loves to watch things grow.

It’s a Space Thing.

https://homestuck.com/story/777

According to BladeKindEyeWear’s Inversion Theory Jade’s complicated and carefully orchestrated time loops, which she uses to connect people with possibilities, is an example of her inverting under extreme stress, acting more like a Seer of Time, her opposite, than like a Witch of Space (in much the same way that Rose acts an awful lot like a Witch of Void for much of the comic’s first half!)

I expect a real Seer of Time wouldn’t need quite so many contrivances to keep track of everything going on in the past and future. Eventually, Jade stops using her colourful reminders, which is probably an indicator that she is no longer attempting to play outside of her lane.

https://homestuck.com/story/789

Pretty much all of Jade’s interests cast her immediately as someone with a pretty strong maternal instinct, something that she shares with other heroes of Space. Jade is a caretaker. 

Her playthings are dolls so she can roleplay the part of a Mom. She grows oodles of plants, and seems to have a knack for it. She likes animals, and though the only animal in her life takes care of her, she puts in some work to take care of him too.

Her interests definitely mark her as the more classically girly of the two between her and Rose, and like her brother is preoccupied with manhood and Dadliness, Jade seems to preoccupied with Momliness - which is odd, considering that she doesn’t have a maternal figure to aspire to! (Maybe the White Queen?)

https://homestuck.com/story/790

Jade is not of course, only girly. The same way that Dad’s culturally out-of-place baking hobby marks him as transgressively feminine to John’s dismay, Jade’s scientific and artillerist hobbies are transgressively masculine.

Although it’s tempting to say that Jade loves the sciences because Grandpa raised her to, or because she’s aping him after he died, she’s clearly born to it. I think about the question of nature and nurture a lot in Homestuck.

I think on the whole, it falls pretty far to the side of Nature. Characters who share a common ancestry also share common character traits more often than not, even in the absence of shared cultural touchstones, shared geography, shared timeline. The same character only has a limited number of possible choices that they could have made, as Aranea will later say.

On the other hand, some characters turn out very different in one life than they do in another. Dirk doesn’t turn out nearly the psychopath that Bro Strider is by the time that Homestuck Proper concludes.

https://homestuck.com/story/795

Squiddles are, as everyone knows by now, a manifestation of the Dark Gods of the Furthest Ring, but I think there’s more going on with them too - they have kind of a horny energy that I can’t quite place. I’m going to come back to that. Any case, they seem to be one of the symbols that Rose and Jade share in common, although Rose subverts the colorful and cute squiddles into icons more of the extradimensional beasties that they actually represent.

Maybe I think Squiddles are a symbol of horny for the same reason that snakes are lewd to Cherubs - there’s definitely something phallic about tentacles, and definitely something intimate about the idea of becoming someone’s tangle buddy. The very first time I read Rose’s handle, I thought it read Tentacle The Rapist, which I suspect is kinda the point, and some of Andrew’s other works have variously described the process of interacting with tentacles as being molested and so on and so on.

Rose and Jade actually share a huge number of symbols in common between the two of them, which I think is great, but also sad - Rose and Jade clearly actually have quite a lot in common, and the two of them don’t really interact very much.

https://homestuck.com/story/797

I’m going to eventually decode Jade’s fascination with animals too, but for now I want to remark that it’s not just the idea of looking like an animal that excites Jade - it’s the idea of being  like an animal that excites her. The exact same little poem is later reiterated by Serenity in WV’s nightmare, as he dreams of losing control of the power of the Ring of Orbs Fourfold and killing everyone he loves. What would be a nightmare for WV though is a fantasy for Jade. The idea of being out of control is thrilling for her.

Dave is also a furry.

https://homestuck.com/story/798

The trappings of a proper gentleman. Monocle. Pipe. Top Hat. Little White Gloves. A proper gentleman without these is a piss poor excuse for a proper gentleman indeed.

SYMBOLS.

https://homestuck.com/story/800

Another spot where Jade is able to interface directly with the audience, in some form or another.

https://homestuck.com/story/802

Jade may have fantasies of transforming into something more animalistic, but she’s not willing to indulge them.

https://homestuck.com/story/803

Jade completely rejects the symbols of witchcraft that Rose so readily embraces.

https://homestuck.com/story/804

Jade contemplates engaging in some Vriskaesque behavior. Is it just because Vriska is watching her? Maybe she’s picking up some Vriska-esque vibes through the feed as the Thief of Light practices her mind control. 

https://homestuck.com/story/808

I think it’s safe to say one of two things is going on here.

Jade is either literally cognizant of the audience and interacting with them, putting her on a layer of the story that is quite a lot closer to us than you would expect of someone as innocuous as Jade (maybe the immediate presence of the Fourth Wall upstairs could facilitate that relationship?)

Or Jade has an active imagination, is extremely lonely, and likes to interact with her imaginary audience as a way of projecting a friendly and hospitable demeanor onto the world around her in sort of the exact opposite way that Rose imagines the worst of everything and everyone?

Or, as it often is in Homestuck, it could be both motherfuckin’ things.

https://homestuck.com/story/829

Did I mention Dave is a furry? Dave is totally a furry.

If we read Squiddles as a symbol of intimate contact with living things, Jade’s computer having Squiddles front and center is appropriate - it’s her point of contact to all the people in her life.

Tune in on the morrow to watch Dave’s Bro beat the shit out of him.

Until then, this is Cam signing off, alive and not alone.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, July 22, 2021

U.S. and E.U. security officials wary of NSO links to Israeli intelligence (Washington Post) The Israeli company NSO Group has earned a reputation among national security experts around the world as a best-in-class manufacturer of surveillance technology capable of secretly gathering information from a target’s phone. But U.S. and European security officials regard the company with a degree of suspicion despite the ability of its technology to help combat terrorists and violent criminals. In interviews, several current and former officials said they presumed that the company, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, provides at least some information to the government in Jerusalem about who is using its spying products and what information they’re collecting. “It’s crazy to think that NSO wouldn’t share sensitive national security information with the government of Israel,” said one former senior U.S. national security official who has worked closely with the Israeli security services and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe intelligence operations. The founders of NSO are former members of Israel’s elite Unit 8200, which conducts electronic surveillance and is analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency. The company’s Pegasus surveillance tool can penetrate cellphones and steal emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact information, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories. All of this can happen without a user even touching her phone or knowing that she has received a mysterious message from an unfamiliar person.

Schools confront more polarization with mask rules for fall (AP) Students in Wichita, Kansas, public schools can ditch the masks when classes begin. Detroit public schools will probably require them unless everyone in a room is vaccinated. In Pittsburgh, masks will likely be required regardless of vaccination status. And in some states, schools cannot mandate face coverings under any circumstances. With COVID-19 cases soaring nationwide, school districts across the U.S. are yet again confronting the realities of a polarized country and the lingering pandemic as they navigate mask requirements, vaccine rules and social distancing requirements for the fast-approaching new school year. The spread of the delta variant and the deep political divisions over the outbreak have complicated decisions in districts from coast to coast. Schools are weighing a variety of plans to manage junior high and middle school classrooms filled with both vaccinated and unvaccinated students.

US life expectancy in 2020 saw biggest drop since WWII (AP) U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said Wednesday. The decrease for both Black Americans and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years. The drop spelled out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths. Black life expectancy has not fallen so much in one year since the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression. Health officials have not tracked Hispanic life expectancy for nearly as long, but the 2020 decline was the largest recorded one-year drop. Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for whites. And rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for Black Americans, said Elizabeth Arias, the report’s lead author.

Massive wildfires in US West bring haze to East Coast (AP) Wildfires in the American West, including one burning in Oregon that’s currently the largest in the U.S., are creating hazy skies as far away as New York as the massive infernos spew smoke and ash into the air in columns up to six miles high. Skies over New York City were hazy Tuesday as strong winds blew smoke east from California, Oregon, Montana and other states. Oregon’s Bootleg Fire grew to 606 square miles (1,569 square kilometers)—half the size of Rhode Island. Fires also grew on both sides of California’s Sierra Nevada. In Alpine County, the so-called California Alps, the Tamarack Fire caused evacuations of several communities and grew to 61 square miles (158 square kilometers) with no containment. The Dixie Fire, near the site of 2018′s deadly Paradise Fire, was more than 90 square miles (163 square kilometers) and threatened tiny communities in the Feather River Valley region.

In Peru, a rural schoolteacher rises from obscurity to the presidency (Washington Post) The rise of Pedro Castillo, a previously obscure leader of a rural teachers union, to Peru’s highest office is the most glaring example yet of the power of the pandemic to upend politics in Latin America. The ravages of the coronavirus, and the surges in poverty and inequality it has caused, have provoked nearly 1 million people to protest in Colombia and saw a communist elected mayor of Santiago, the capital of Chile, the region’s free-market model. Here in Peru, a what-more-have-we-got-to-lose mentality helped propel one of the most unusual candidates ever to win a Latin American presidency. A 51-year-old, straw-hat-wearing schoolteacher and farmer who reported an income last year of $16,600, Castillo has never held public office. After finally being declared the winner of the June 6 runoff election on Monday evening, he will now trade his adobe abode in the Andean highlands for the grandeur of the Presidential Palace, going from nurturing poor children in a multi-grade classroom to handling the weightiest matters of state. In a race that pitted Peru’s elites against a man they derided as a country bumpkin unfit to rule, Castillo edged out the right-wing political veteran Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori. After losing a six-week effort to challenge the results, the Peruvian right is now gnashing its collective teeth.

UK’s swan-uppers take to the Thames to check on queen’s birds (Reuters) Royal officials took to the River Thames on Tuesday to count the swans that belong to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth at the start of the “Swan Upping” ceremony which dates back to the 12th Century. “Swans were a very, very important food, and they were served up at banquets and feasts,” David Barber, the queen’s Swan Marker, said. ��Of course today swan upping is all about conservation and education.” The ceremony dates back 800 years to when the English crown first claimed ownership of all mute swans, which have long curved necks, orange beaks and white feathers. Barber and his team lift up the swans—which can weigh as much as 15 kg—to check for any injuries, typically caused by fishing tackle. Young cygnets are taken ashore to be weighed and measured.

Pegasus Highlights New World of Espionage (Foreign Policy) French authorities have vowed to investigate after it emerged that President Emmanuel Macron’s phone was recorded on a list of possible targets of government-led phone hacking using software, called Pegasus, licensed by a private Israeli spyware firm. According to an investigation by a global media consortium which includes the Washington Post, Le Monde, and the Guardian, ten prime ministers, three presidents, and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI were all potential targets. It’s not the first time world leaders have been targeted by spy agencies—the U.S. National Security Agency’s targeting of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is one high profile instance—but the Pegasus revelations highlight how sophisticated espionage programs are no longer limited to wealthy states, and can be purchased on the open market. In India, the investigation has caused a political scandal. The Indian National Congress—the largest opposition party—has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of spying on its leader Rahul Gandhi after his number appeared on NSO’s list. It would not be the Modi government’s first alleged offense: It was accused of using NSO software to hack 1,400 phones before India’s 2019 elections.

US and Germany compromise on natural gas pipeline (WSJ) The U.S. and Germany have reached an agreement allowing the completion of a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline, according to officials from Berlin and Washington, who expect to announce the deal as soon as Wednesday, bringing an end to years of tension between the two allies. The Biden administration will effectively waive Washington’s longstanding opposition to the pipeline, Nord Stream 2, a change in the U.S. stance, ending years of speculation over the fate of the project, which has come to dominate European energy-sector forecasts. Germany under the agreement will agree to assist Ukraine in energy-related projects and diplomacy.

India’s true COVID-19 death toll has likely surpassed 3 million, study finds (The Week) Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, official death tolls in many places have likely fallen short of the true figures, but a new study from the Center for Global Development suggests that the undercount in India may be particularly drastic, The New York Times reports. The Indian government’s official fatality count currently sits at more than 400,000, a grim figure in its own right. However, researchers estimate that between 3.4 million and 4.7 million more people than would normally be expected died between January 2020 and June 2021 in India. While the precise number of excess deaths that can be attributed to COVID-19 may never be known, the authors of the study believe it’s higher than 3 million. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,” the authors said.

Severe floods inundate parts of central China (Washington Post/Foreign Policy) Powerful floods in central China’s Henan province have submerged streets and prompted harrowing rescues amid what Chinese media called the region’s heaviest rainfall in decades. Precipitation in Zhengzhou, a city in the province, reached a high of roughly eight inches per hour Tuesday, breaking a 1975 record. At least 25 people have died and the number is likely to grow, and more than 100,000 people have been relocated.      Clips shared widely on social media show cars floating on the surface of a street that resembles a river. In another, rescuers pull a woman from a torrent of water rushing down what looks like a staircase. Other videos show inundated subway stations and commuters on a Zhengzhou subway car who were up to their shoulders in water. Flights and trains have been cancelled throughout cities in the region.      Damage from the floods is likely to run into the billions of dollars. Power is out in much of the city, and key components of supply chains, including Apple and Nissan factories, have been wrecked. Tens of thousands of cars were washed away by the flooding. Local dams are threatened by the waters: At least one has been deliberately breached as part of flood control, while others are in danger of collapse.

North Korea food shortage (Nikkei Asian Review) North Korea’s food shortages have reached crisis levels, and inequalities have sharply widened ever since the Covid-19 pandemic forced the country to close its borders in January last year. The reclusive nation will be short by about 860,000 tons of food this year, or about two months of normal demand, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a recent report. The government has been trying to get the population to supply their own food but with little success. News agencies with sources inside the country are reporting starvation deaths as well as an increase in the number of children and elderly who have resorted to begging. Jiro Ishimaru of AsiaPress said North Korea’s current food shortage is quickly shaping up to be the worst humanitarian crisis in Asia.

Police in Nigeria secure release of 100 kidnapping victims (Reuters) Police and government authorities have secured the release of 100 people, including women, children and nursing mothers, who were kidnapped from their village in northwestern Nigeria over a month ago, a local police spokesperson said. Nigeria is battling an increase in armed robberies and kidnappings for ransom, mainly in northwestern states, where thinly deployed security forces have struggled to contain the rise of armed gangs, commonly referred to as bandits. While northeastern Nigeria has faced a decade of insecurity, including attacks by Islamist militants including Islamic State-allied Boko Haram, the current wave of kidnappings is primarily financially motivated.

Teens around the world are lonelier than a decade ago (Washington Post) Loneliness among adolescents around the globe has skyrocketed since a decade ago—and it may be tied to smartphone use, a new study finds. In 36 out of 37 countries, feelings of loneliness among teenagers rose sharply between 2012 and 2018, with higher increases among girls, according to a report released Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers used data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a survey of over 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students. In the worldwide study, school loneliness was not correlated with factors such as income inequality, gross domestic product and family size, but it did correlate with increases in smartphone and Internet use. By 2012, most of the countries in the study had reached a point where at least half of teens had access to smartphones, and that is when teen loneliness levels began to rise, said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study’s lead author. Social media can create an exclusionary environment that increases school loneliness, especially for girls, the paper said; it can also enable cyberbullying. And even if an adolescent does not personally use social media and smartphones, they are so ubiquitous that they can have a negative effect regardless.

[attackingstarfish]

Just finished LoZ: Wind Waker...

I normally never post, but I recently wrapped up Wind Waker HD (Yes, I’m late to the party), and it is so far removed from the usual Zelda fare that I just had to compile my thoughts. And if I’m compiling my thoughts, I might as well yell them into the void.

You will have to show me physical proof that Wind Waker is not Ocarina of Time from the Opposite Dimension, where windows are the primary means of entering your house and people worship at the altar of Hello Games, because despite me being almost exactly as satisfied with Wind Waker HD as I was with Ocarina of Time 3D, the greatest sources of joy are flipped with the biggest annoyances between the two games.

Yay!

Breath of the Wild had won me over in part because the entire world felt cohesive; you could go anywhere on the map without having to encounter a single loading screen, and I had no idea Wind Waker did the same thing. The Great Sea is a vast trove of trees, pirates, and treasure, with the occasional giant squid attack or salutation from the Flying Dutchman. Each of the 49 segments contains an island that is often unique in purpose, and you’re very rarely sent to a specific island for a specific item by a specific character. Instead, the entire overworld becomes open to you as soon as you grab your sail on Windfall Island, and you have a literal sea of knowledge before you as the 49 fish that serve as your guidebook to the game take their places.

A couple of islands start off closed, unable to be reached until you get the Iron Boots or the Bow or the Hulk Hogan suplex manual, but that’s it as far as what you can’t reach, and the squares of ocean containing even these islands can be reached as early as any other zone, fish and all. The fish are easy to spot, splashing around near their respective region’s landmass, and to reward taking to initiative to explore, a surprising amount of what they tell you can be put to use immediately, like the location of the all-new extra-fast wind-changing sail the remake’s added to speed up travel. Good thing, too, because there’s a point where travel time stops being buildup and becomes padding, especially when you have to dance a round of Hands Up every time you want to change direction. Later in the game, when you’re better equipped, you could stop by one of those islands you couldn’t figure out earlier on, and figure out what to do with just one more trip around the border. Nothing pops up on your map to indicate that suddenly you’re able to access anything new, and your boat doesn’t  wonder whether the eastmost pillar on island A7 has met any nice hookshot targets lately. The game trusts that you can navigate the uses for your gear yourself, which I value. Fewer tutorials, more expectations.

Even the story serves the game’s hands-off attitude. Ocarina starts with Link going into the Deku Tree to purge it of some unspecified evil (What exactly does Gohma do in there, anyway?) before coming out to be told of his fate to kill a man he has never met before and become Hyrule’s savior. Link takes up the mantle in that game only because the gods who have not and will never make a proper appearance want him to do it. Meanwhile, Wind Waker opens with Link putting on the green tunic to make his grandmother happy for a day, right before his sister, who clearly adores him, gets kidnapped by a giant bird, and he teams up with pirates to sneak into a fortress and rescue her but instead gets bitch-slapped by Ganondorf, who turns out to own the place and the bird. In addition to being awesome because pirates kick ass, Link’s introduction to the man who wants him dead feels a lot more natural here, and Ganondorf doesn’t even come into the plot for real until the second half of the game. Link’s got a sister to save, and everything he’ll do to accomplish that goal will demonstrate him to be worthy of the Master Sword, which itself seems to prefer this organic sort of journey, seeing as the Link who set out to get the Master Sword from the beginning ended up locked in solitary confinement by the thing while it allowed the man it was created to kill to instead take over the world. Evidently the Master Sword is a strong, independent blade beholden to no one who can’t think for themselves, and anyone who disagrees can spend some quality time with the nice old man who loves to talk and talk and talk and talk.

The characters in Wind Waker feel more on the dynamic side than Ocarina’s. At first I was a bit surprised that i felt that way considering Ocarina had you view two very different versions of Hyrule, but Ocarina’s characters either don’t change in personality much between time periods or don’t make an appearance in one of the two at all. Talon’s still lazy in the future, the carpenters are still idiots, the Lake Hylia scientist is still mad, the Kokiri of course don’t change at all, you see none of the Zoras after their caves are frozen over, etc. Not to mention Ganondorf, who doesn’t get much beyond “evil Gerudo thief king who wants to take over the world because of reasons,” even if he gets a bit further than many movie/game villains and is able to demonstrate exactly what he’d do while in charge and why he’s so dangerous. Wind Waker, meanwhile, has even a fair few one-off characters with their own tiny arcs. Mila goes from stuck-up rich kid to poor as dirt and struggling to adapt, so out of her element that she resorts to stealing money from her new boss until Link catches her and helps her stay true to herself in the future. Maggie’s father starts out so desperate for Link to save his daughter that he will annoyingly stop you in your tracks every time he so much as glimpses you and repeat his pleas for help, but after Maggie is returned home and he strikes it rich through no deed of his own, he decides everyone else is beneath him and starts bitching at Link, the Rito postman, and anyone who thinks repeatedly boasting about your own fabulous wealth makes for poor dinner conversation. Even Ganondorf himself is given more than a simple desire to take over Hyrule this time around, as his belief that the rest of the kingdom deserves to suffer the way the Gerudo suffered in the desert is brought to light. 

Boo!

Part of the reason I liked the dungeons in Ocarina of Time so much is that they had a way of coming full circle at the end, or even a smaller full circle in the middle. You’d come across something at the beginning, go “Huh, that looks cool,” then move on. An hour later, BOOM, payoff, and likely in a way you didn’t even expect. The web serving as the floor in the Deku Tree and the blue stone head at the back of Dodongo’s Cavern come to mind. Plus, there were often open rooms that allowed you to get a handle on where everything else was relative to you, and gaze upon areas you’ll visit once you find the Hookshot or Hover Boots. Wind Waker’s dungeons are the antithesis of the rest of the game, they’re cramped and, for the first half of the game, overly linear. Dragon Roost never musters up much more challenge than “kill enemy in front of you, go through door in front of you, repeat,” a far cry from the wall-climbing around the first half of the Deku Tree. Re-hydrating the bombs to get into the place is arguably as clever as you get with it, which for me is the perfect representation of the amount of thought that went into everything surrounding the dungeons vs. the amount of thought that went into the dungeons. And aside from those spinning leaf wheels in Forbidden Woods that wouldn’t know what a wind was if they were fired for incompetence and forced to spend the rest of their lives at its mercy, this is best illustrated during the teamwork-based dungeons with Medli and Makar toward the end of the game .

Considering how often you have to switch between characters to set up a Mirror Shield reflect or to hit a switch or to plant a seed or because you got hit fucking once, it would’ve been nice not to have to do half the Macarena every time you want to switch to your companion’s viewpoint. It also would’ve been nice if the controls of your partners didn’t make me want to offer them to the Floormasters. That said, Medli wasn’t awful. Yes, her flight was a bit hard to direct, there was no way to halt her Link-bearing glide without throwing her, and the number of times you had to hop on the Wind Waker was a pain, but the irritation was diminished when lot of her roles involved standing still and shining light while you played as the character the game actually put work into handling. Plus, my wave of enthusiasm from the first moment I walked under a spotlight while carrying her and saw the light reflect lasted me quite a ways into the dungeon, so my memories of the Earth Temple are okay enough.

On the other hand, Makar. (I still call him Oaki, which should indicate how memorable Makar’s character is) When flying with Medli, all that was required was good aim when leaping off any ledge you were leaving, whether she was on her own or supporting Link. Makar has to fly in patterns more complex than straight lines, so naturally his controls are twice as stupid. You have to repeatedly press A to fly, speeding up or slowing down your button presses to increase or decrease the amount of lift as you go. Button mashing as a recurring mechanic, yay. Its imprecise nature becomes worse when the vertical nature of the dungeon’s biggest room has Makar rack up a ton of momentum from the amount of rising and falling he’ll be doing, leaving you struggling to adjust your frequency to keep up, with aerial endurance that makes you wonder how the Korok seed-spreading ritual has not led them to extinction by mass drowning. Fortunately, there’s a giant fan you can activate at the bottom of the room to blow yourself upward and kill any chance you have at forward progress. You’d think that being able to coast to the top of everything would be a good thing, but being in the fan’s range of “anywhere” causes Makar to eschew any direction that isn’t straight up (as his flight meter drains!), when running out of flight power has the same effect but downwards. If that wind catches you while you’re trying to cross the room, you’re left to watch as Makar is frozen in place while his energy drains to zero, wait for the fan to stop, fall several stories to the bottom of the room, and walk about two feet toward where you want to go before the fan activates again and restarts the cycle. And that’s assuming one of the many flying enemies doesn’t brush Makar and throw the camera back behind a Link who’s attempting to keep calm by doing the wave.

The combat took some getting used to. Ocarina’s combat was fine; it was easy to tell what you were in range to hit, and timing your swings properly could get shield-wielding enemies like Stalfos in a loop where continually accurate shots would finish them in seconds. In Wind Waker, Link’s attacks don’t reach quite as far as his sword would indicate; you’d think the gods would make sure their magical evil-smiting blade is most capable at the end that goes in the King of Evil, but I guess not. “Just The Tip” is a no-no with these monsters, so it’s either impale them in full or let them dominate you.

Meanwhile, you have two options for your targeting system, and they both suck. You either hold down L as long as you want to keep an enemy targeted, which before long will cause your left index finger to rebel against its draconian master, or press the button once to start targeting and press it again to target a different enemy, leaving you with no way to stop targeting the enemies and put an arrow in the switch. This wasn’t that big a deal in Ocarina, since Link had a wider vertical range with the bow and there were never many enemies hounding you  when there was another immediate objective to complete, but in Wind Waker, you can expect a rainbow of respawning Chu’s to ambush you around the clock. It sours a lot of dungeons and dungeon-themed areas for me. That’s why the Wind Waker experience was so surprising; the dungeons were a slog to get through and felt less like a collection of clever puzzle ideas suiting each region’s theme and more like an obligation to throw in because it’s Zelda, yet everything surrounding them felt engaging and intriguing enough to make me want to keep playing and find out what happened to everyone.

(Tower of the Gods was pretty cool, too.)

[silverscreenclassics2016]

Any industry has a code by which it operates. At its’ birth and during its’ infancy, any new industry or undertaking operates like a frontier town in the old West – laissez-faire and making and/or breaking rules as they go. At some point, however, any industry, for better or for worse, will regulate itself for a whole range of reasons. It could be to improve productivity, to regulate problems that have emerged, to establish some sense of order or because of pressure from government and society standards.

Hollywood, both literally and metaphorically, was like a frontier town in the old West. Ambitious men and women decided to determine their own paths in the world of entertainment, when they headed West from the U.S East Coast in the very early 20th century. The new film industry which emerged heralded a new type of entertainment which audiences clamoured to see in darkened theatres, not only in the U.S but across the world. But with success came a demand for change in how Hollywood operated. The reasons for that change include some of the reasons already mentioned.

Scandals and outrage in Hollywood emerged in the 1920s to shock people around the world and the studios’ concerns were not that their stars had engaged in pre-marital or same sex encounters, were gay or lesbian, used drugs, drank alcohol (think Prohibition) or had affairs. However, they were concerned that audiences would be outraged if they found out that their favourite stars were and turned away from the movie houses. More importantly, powerful conservative voices, including the Catholic Church, politicians and others were concerned that the subject matter in films would corrupt America’s youth, erode morals and values and cause civilisation to collapse. As Gregory Black points out, those conservative voices had managed to recruit millions in their cause and the threat of losing audiences, particularly in the midst of the Great Depression was all too much. Better that the industry regulate itself and keep control, then hand it over to someone else and lose autonomy.

As a result, a ‘film code’ was introduced which would tell the studios what they could and could not depict or infer on screen. From the sublime to the ridiculous, this Code was to assure that civilisation would not go off the deep end. However, it would not truly be enforced until 1934 when Joseph Breen came to the helm of regulating the film industry. Censorship perhaps but also the reality that Hollywood had to deal with.

Censorship can be an abhorrence and stifles, crushes and blunts creativity and freedom of thought. Yet the Breen Code did encourage a new creativity not because that was the key aim of the new Code but because film makers took the initiative. The fact is; they had to. What emerged was, as Thomas Doherty in Pre-Code Hollywood states, the ‘much vaunted golden age (which) began with the Code and ended with its’ demise’.

This article does not intend to outline what the Code was and how it operated. For the record, I am not an apologist for the Breen Code nor an expert on it. Nor am I a particular fan who believes the Breen Code was one of the best things that happened to cinema. However, it did create a platform for the studios – and writers, producers and directors in particular – to find new and other ways to tell their stories. To borrow a phrase from Martin Scorsese, some had to become ‘smugglers’, finding creative and interesting ways to make movies. In some ways, new genres, sub-genres and stylistic techniques were born from the enforcement of the Breen Code.

The screwball comedy was certainly born from the fallout of the Code’s enforcement. Sexual tensions, premarital sex and adult relationships were now under the microscope of the industry watchdog and had to be either avoided or be very carefully approached. However, the screwball comedy found a beautiful way around this; through the use of humour, sophistication and wit, and a chance for actors and actresses to broaden their appeal as well as their abilities. Actresses such as Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow broke the stereotypical roles they found themselves in up to that point (which arguably accentuated their physicality more than anything else) and gave them a chance to expand their repertoire and become some of the most loved stars of the 1930s. For Myrna Loy, it would be The Thin Man series, as well as some wonderful pairings with Clark Gable and William Powell. Lombard would display her talent for comedy and Jean Harlow likewise.

Recently, I reviewed Libeled Lady (1936) with the MGM powerhouse cast of Loy, Powell, Spencer Tracy and of course Jean Harlow. As I mentioned in the article, the plot is nonsensical and would be impossible to sustain, without the sharp dialogue, charismatic presence of the stars involved and high production values. At the end of the day, the film is much farce as it is screwball, and the whole point is to simply enjoy the comedy and watch glamorous people fall in love. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the screwball comedy would become an institution of the cinema, with stars such as Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Fred MacMurray and Rosalind Russell, leaving a new and indelible mark on screwball comedy. For Katherine Hepburn, who by the late 1930s was called ‘box office poison’, films like The Philadelphia Story gave her a chance for revival and a rebirth of her career.

Like the Thin Man films, Libeled Lady is as much about sexual roles as roped in sexuality. The couple can match each other in every way; sophistication, glamour, wit and panache. The earlier Pre-Code films were grittier and at times even cynical regarding sexual powerplays and dominance in sexual roles. Yes, the strong, feminist tropes that emerge in Pre-Code films are fascinating and perhaps the challenge to traditional roles and sexual dominance is what also scared stake-holders into pushing for a film code.

But strong women emerged after the Code as well. As time went on, there was the development of ‘women’s pictures’ for which artists such as Bette Davis would make their mark and assure their stardom. Interestingly, enough Joan Crawford – perhaps one of the most enduring stars who transformed successfully from flapper to the Pre-Code to the Breen Code – would survive being called ‘box office poison’ (like Hepburn) and re-emerge as a star in ‘women’s pictures’.

Actors such as Clark Gable cemented his stardom and showed his comedic chops in his Oscar winning performance in It Happened One Night, the film which established the screwball comedy and garnered in a new age of sophisticated comedy. The film still stands as one of Hollywood’s most loved films. It deftly dealt with sexual tension, the concept of ‘opposites attract’ and a host of other relationship obstacles with some unforgettable and hilarious moments. The two stars never even shared a kiss yet audiences had no problems with watching the couple fall in love, without an embrace. Getting back to Clark Gable, the role of Peter Warne also gave him a chance to break from the typecast tough-guy/heavy and ‘gigolo’ roles which had defined his career in the Pre-Code era.

There is a strong argument that none of this would have occurred without the establishment of the Breen Code.

To point, studios discovered and developed a new way of telling stories about love, romance and relationships – even illicit relationships. True, they had to be careful but it meant that a sophisticated and witty film genre was formed, which audiences fell in love with.

Additionally, the gangster film had truly taken form during the Pre-Code era, with tropes, characterisations and storylines firmly in place. But the Breen Code challenged those tales and auteurs who found new interpretations and channelled their efforts into expanding on the genre. Warner Bros, home studio to the best of the gangster pictures of the 1930s, were particularly adept at doing so, taking the gangster story far beyond the ‘rise and fall’ plot to looking at social issues that had shaped the gangster and the neighbourhood that they had arisen from. Indeed, the themes and plot that had defined the gangster film in the early 1930s were almost cliched before the Pre-Code days were over; so much so that even E.G Robinson parodied his Little Caesar role in The Little Giant (1933). Time, changing values and the events of history would see the end of the ‘classic gangster cycle’ by the end of the 1930s, not so much the establishment of the Code. Yet Hollywood used the gangster story to reveal social ills and the plight of the underprivileged in films such as Dead End (1937) and Angels With Dirty Faces (1939).

Considering social issues, the Breen Code certainly didn’t blunt the sharpness of how film portrayed those issues, particularly in films such as The Grapes Of Wrath (1940). Corruption and apathy in government and the concerns over the rise of fascism found a powerful and still poignant voice in the films of Frank Capra, such as Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941). Perhaps still one of the most films on politics, All The King’s Men (1949) seems just as relevant today as it did in the post-war period. The Breen Code in some ways had film-makers thinking beyond the scope prior to 1934.

Another interesting result of the Breen Code was that ‘wholesome’ family pictures began to boom at the box office. It becomes almost unfathomable that in the space of a year, Shirley Temple would take over from Mae West as the biggest star at Paramount. Yet family films lifted box office receipts and the impact of the Great Depression on the industry began to wane. Musicals became something the whole family could enjoy and their popularity would continue into the 1950s, expanding on the way that stories were told, as well as the stories themselves. The great literary classics of the past had always been appropriated and interpreted for the screen since the earliest days of film but now they became even more prominent. MGM were particularly adept at presenting the classics on film with top-notch production values and the use of their biggest stars in films such as David Copperfield (1935), A Tale Of Two Cities (1935) and Pride And Prejudice (1940). Other studios and producers would also bring literary classics to the screen such as Wuthering Heights (1938) and a remake of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939) that arguably outdoes the original 1925 version. True, some of the deeper and darker themes were sanitised but these great stories were brought to the screen.

  Historical events and figures, even the mythical ones would also become fodder for the studios and result in some of cinema’s most loved classics; The Charge Of The Light Brigade (1936) and The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938) are but two examples of such classics. The aforementioned Clark Gable would star as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny On The Bounty (1935), a huge hit for MGM and a further opportunity for Gable to extend his abilities and move beyond the roles he was caught in during the Pre-Code era.

The Breen Code would provide many challenges to the film industry in the stories that would be told, as well as how they would tell them. Eroticism had been heavily draped but could never be completely covered – instead it simmered. The horror film still sent shivers down the collective spine of its’ audience and indeed found greater depth and expression, particularly evident in the films produced in the 1940s at RKO in the Val Lewton unit. Despite the limitations of budget, Val Lewton was able to produce some of the most memorable supernatural thriller and horror films of the 1940s, with storylines and thematic concerns that went far beyond what was being told elsewhere. And eventually, crime and mystery would find a deeper expression in film noir, which again worked best with subtleties and richer subtexts than explicitness.

The Breen Code may have presented Hollywood with a whole range of problems and by no means was it a ‘godsend’ which ‘saved’ cinema nor ‘cleaned up’ Hollywood. There are certainly levels of hypocrisy and fault in the Code, which have been dealt with elsewhere. Yet the Breen Code did see, as Doherty describes, ‘an artistic flowering of incalculable cultural impact’. The industry was able to maintain some semblance of ownership over itself, even if it did have to succumb to the personal viewpoints of Joseph Breen. It gave Hollywood the boundaries in which it could express itself but it also gave opened up new possibilities in expression.

Paul Batters teaches secondary school History in the Illawarra region and also lectures at the University Of Wollongong. In a previous life, he was involved in community radio and independent publications. Looking to a career in writing, Paul also has a passion for film history.

  The Breen Code and its’ impact on Hollywood Any industry has a code by which it operates. At its’ birth and during its’ infancy, any new industry or undertaking operates like a frontier town in the old West – laissez-faire and making and/or breaking rules as they go.

[channelnewswire-blog]

Drying out: New Zealand farming faces its irrigation addiction

The federal government has actually pulled its support for huge irrigation tasks, but smaller ones are still getting monetary support. RNZ's Eric Frykberg looks at the balance in between keeping farmers and growers in business and enhancing the quality of water in streams and rivers.

This story initially operated on RNZ-- Listen to the complete Insight documentary here

Stu Wright's family belongs to the fabric of Selwyn district, inland from Christchurch. They've worked the land near Sheffield for 125 years. The murky drizzle hanging over the furrows of his farm in the foothills of the Southern Alps, near Sheffield are at chances with his on-going struggle to keep his crops well hydrated.Here he grows seed potatoes, garlic, radishes and rye. But the method his family have farmed for over a century is no longer working."We were the huge clover growers in Canterbury,

but now, there is hardly any clover grown here since the irrigated guys are improving crops,"Mr Wright says."If you are a dryland farmer, you are making money

on irrigated prices but you can't match the production." Image: RNZ/ Rebekah Parsons-King Not only does he earn less, in some cases he can't even sell his crop at all, since business that market and disperse crops typically will not even sign a purchase contract unless watering systems are in place.But an opportunity emerged which implied he would have the ability to sign up with those growers, that were able to water their land; but at a considerable cost.Mr Wright was conscious big scale watering projects were under examination and chose to act while he still had the chance and signed up with the Central Plains Water scheme in inner Canterbury, which takes water from Canterbury rivers and brings it via a canal and pipes to farmers."Central Plains was most likely the last option to get water on the Canterbury Plains, "he states."We had a family discussion, we decided we had actually been here for over a century, and if we wanted to be here for well over another a century, then we required water." Being part of the Central Plains plan costs him $8000 a hectare, and he has still to break even on his investment. Pricey, he states, but still worthwhile.Challenges for dryland farmers in the North Island Nearly 700km

north of Mr Wright are dry nation farmers on the East Coast. One of those is Hugh Ritchie, who grows crops on a property near the Central Hawke's Bay settlement of Ōtāne.The land has remained in his family since the 1960s, and he values it deeply; often tending his crops through the night when dew on the ground makes them easier to cut. He uses irrigation water from deep bores on his land and points out the crops that need to have irrigation water to make it through.

"This is a seed carrot and it requires water to survive. "He does not just indicate the things that falls naturally from the sky and soaks into its roots.By "water"he indicates irrigation water, which can be guaranteed to guarantee the crop grows throughout the parched summer season in central Hawke's Bay, where the rain can often be ensured to dry up.Without it, no carrot seeds to grow the next crop anticipated in the grocery stores down the line.New Zealand supplies 75 percent of the world's carrot seed, he describes, and the business that trade in this commodity requirement to understand they have a regular supply from growers to provide self-confidence in making handle their own clients.

"It's a professional company and they require absolute reliability of crop and controlling water is

an important part of that. We will not even get a contract to work the ground without having water on hand, and reputable water, that can be ensured throughout the summertime." It's the very same situation for the crop of carrots, rather than their seed;

it's a non-starter without watering. In Hawke's Bay, lots of farmers and growers are desperately attempting to exercise how they may make it through in the face of future water restrictions.Many had their hopes pinned on the multi-million dollar Ruataniwha dam proposal to provide them with more safe and secure water products, which that concept deserted they're afflicted with uncertainty.In addition there are brand-new guidelines that require more water to stream down the primary local river, the Tukituki. Plus a new suite of water drilling opportunities have been revealed, which might diminish the resource further.Because Mr Ritchie utilizes bore water, he hopes he might get away a few of the water limitations that other farmers might quickly be facing.But it's not simply Hawke's Bay and Canterbury; these issues also plague other provinces parched in

the summertime sun such as Central Otago, Marlborough, and Wairarapa, and the situation is anticipated to get worse with climate change.Irrigation plans"incorrect hope"Supporters of watering plans argue New Zealand need to be recording rainfall that normally ends up in the sea by developing water storage plans now, prior to it is too late. Annabeth Cohen of Forest and Bird Photo: RNZ Critics like Annabeth Cohen of Forest and Bird, states the opposite is true: farmers should have recognised the limitations of their land long earlier, and not make its overuse even worse by building watering schemes at this phase."It sounds like a dream come to life to have all that water readily available, however it is generally false hope, "she says.

"We are not farming the ideal thing in the best place,

given the ecological limitations."In New Zealand, we're handing out water rights for 35 years. That is promising resources that are not offered now and will certainly not be readily available in the future. If we can't live within the present ecological limits, how do you believe we are going to fare when climate change changes all that?" Government funding of watering Irrigation in New Zealand goes back to the 1880s, when water rights

acquired for sluicing during the gold hurries were converted into rights to water farmland.More than a century later and the area now being watered covers 794,440 hectares or three percent of New Zealand's overall land area, and about 8 percent of the nation's farmed land. At present, 47 percent of irrigated land in New Zealand is utilized for dairy farms

and 29 percent is for utilized for arable crops and horticulture.Last year, the federal government revealed it was unwinding irrigation financing, while honouring existing dedications. Wholesale state support of irrigation plans is a thing of the past.While knocking back state help for huge plans, the government is designating$ 80 million for smaller schemes through the Provincial Growth Fund(PGF ). About 20 people or organisations have so far used for state money.Several applications, worth less than$ 1m have actually been authorized by officials at the Ministry for Company, Innovation and Employment. One large scheme in Northland, costing$15m, has actually been authorized by the Minister

for Regional Development, Shane Jones and the Minister for Economic Advancement David Parker.Rules for these state-assisted plans were signed off by ministers in December in an effort to prevent the ecological expense of a few of the

increase that came with higher irrigation in the past.The brand-new plans will not be permitted to increase the variety of stock on an offered plot of land, they will have to be commercially practical and will likewise be aimed mostly at locations where Māori land is under developed.They will have to be little to medium in size. They will of limited usage in main Hawke's Bay. This location has always been dry in summertime, and this problem will worsen with environment change.

"height ="388"> The Tukituki River Picture: RNZ/ Claire Eastham-Farrelly The location deals with extra difficulties, with a loss of a water storage that farmers had actually hoped would assist, and requirement that more water must stream down

the Tukituki River, when arguably there is inadequate upstream.About 40 farmers, orchardists and entrepreneur are caught in a situation that the Mayor of Central Hawke's Bay, Alex Walker, states is deeply aggravating.

"Lifting of the river flows implies there is the potential for substantial water restrictions

for runs out 10 years. But there is no forecast regarding which of the 6 years are on ban and which are not." She states this makes it hard for individuals to choose which crops to plant and which ones to overlook.

[mvalleefootball-blog]

Ho-Hum Pats Win; Patriots Jaguars Preview

By Michael Vallee

Welcome to NFL groundhog day.  The Patriots win their division; the Patriots get a bye; the Patriots yawn their way to another easy breezy lopsided, barely-break-a-sweat home divisional blowout of yet another not-yet-ready-for-primetime team.  Raise your hand if you’ve heard this narrative before.  With their 35-14 win last week over the Tennessee Titans the Patriots, once again, kicked off their playoff season by dispatching an overwhelmed opponent that offered little in the way of talent or resistance as New England cruised to their record seventh consecutive AFC Championship.

It was every bit as effortless as the score suggests.

The Patriots are 11-1 under Belichick in the divisional round coming off a bye.  While this implies dominance, this divisional game wasn’t always as easy as that record suggests.  The closest of these games might have been the first, when the Patriots beat the Raiders in the now infamous “Tuck Game” in the ‘01 playoffs.  After that there was a close frigid win over the Titans, a matchup against Peyton Manning’s Colts and their record-setting offense, and even in the undefeated year of ‘07 the Patriots were locked in a one-score game in the 4th quarter against the Jaguars.

Then of course came the bloodbath in 2010 when the Patriots lost handedly to a Jets team they had beaten 45-3 just six weeks earlier.  It was one of the worst losses of the Belichick era as New England entered the ‘10 playoffs as prohibitive favorites to win it all.  It also ushered in the so-called “Tomato Can” era where the divisional game transformed from an early challenge to a glorified scrimmage.

Since 2011 the Patriots have played in seven consecutive divisional playoff games coming off a bye and they have coasted to a 7-0 record.  In those seven games the average point spread was -10 and the average margin of victory was 17.  The NFL lined‘em up and the Patriots knocked’em down.  Their opponents provided less resistance than Donald Trump’s nutritionist.  And nobody knew this more than Brady, who produced 21 touchdowns in these games to just four interceptions, posting a QB rating of 103.

The only test in that stretch came in 2014 when they twice had to rally from 14 down to beat the Ravens 35-31 in arguably the best game ever played at Gillette Stadium.  The rest of the time it was the Patriots toying with the likes of the overrated Andrew Luck and the overwhelmed Tim Tebow.  

However, those blowouts didn’t exactly serve the Patriots well going forward.  After that tough Ravens victory New England went on to win their 4th Super Bowl title, revealing a distinct pattern.  In the years when the Patriots faced a challenge in the divisional round (‘01 Raiders, ‘03 Titans, ‘04 Colts, ‘14 Ravens and ‘16 Texans) they would eventually win the Super Bowl.  In the years when they waltzed their way past some half-ass opponent (‘11 Broncos, ‘12 Texans, ‘13 Colts, ‘15 Chiefs) they inevitably came up short.

Coincidence?  Perhaps, but if sports history has taught us anything it’s that competition is a good thing for a team.  All of this reminds me of the 1991 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels who dominated college basketball and coasted into the Final Four undefeated.  Their Final Four opponent, the Duke Blue Devils, played in the most competitive conference in the country, the ACC.  On that day their prior competition served them well as Duke beat UNLV in a close game that they were simply better prepared for because of the schedule they played.  

Beating up on an inferior opponent teaches you very little about your team and in no way prepares you for a tough road ahead.  Sometimes it can even have an opposite effect, pumping a team full of overconfidence.  It’s in the close battles where you truly learn what your roster is made of.  A fighter reveals a lot more about himself in a 12-round brawl than he does in a first round knockout.

The Patriots will try to break that pattern this year as they attempt to win their 6th Super Bowl title.  They can take some solace in knowing that past dynasties have also cake-walked through the divisional round and gone on to win the championship.  The Cowboys dominated the league from 1992-1995, winning three championships in four years.  During those four years the Cowboys won their four divisional round games by an average of 20 points.  The 80s Niners also rolled through the divisional round in each of their four Super Bowl years, also winning by an average of 20 points.  Landslide wins in the divisional round obviously doesn’t preclude you from winning a Super Bowl, but so far for the Patriots it’s been a bad omen.

In the end was it a win last Sunday for the Patriots?  Yes.  Did we learn anything new about New England?  No.  Was it entertaining?  Barely.  Is it their fault that the best the NFL can muster for a second round playoff opponent is a crappy 9-7 Titans team lead by one of the lowest rated QBs in the NFL and a coach that was days away from being fired?  Absolutely not.  But now amateur hour is over and the real challenge begins: the challenge of beating a team that might actually put up some resistance.  A team led by such dynamic names as Blake Bortles and Doug Marrone.  On second thought, see you in Minnesota.  

Patriots Jaguars Preview:

How the Jaguars can win:  It’s not easy to make a case that Jacksonville will walk into Foxboro and beat the New England Patriots but if they pull off the upset here’s how it might happen:

The key to beating the Patriots in the Brady/Belichick era has always been the defense.  Unless your last name is Manning or Rodgers your just not winning a playoff shootout against Brady.  A quick scan of the Patriots worst playoff losses shows a relatively simple pattern - stop Brady and you have a shot.  In New England’s playoff losses to the Giants (‘07, ‘11), the Broncos (‘13, ‘15), the Jets (‘10) and the Ravens (‘09, ‘12) combined, Brady posted just a 73.6 QB rating and the Patriots averaged just 16.1 points.

Of course stopping New England is easier said than done, so how does Jacksonville pull it off?  For starters you need a team with the talent and stones to play a lot of tight man-to-man.  Brady abuses zone coverage, just ask the Steelers.  The good news for the Jaguars is they boast one of the best cornerback tandems in the league in Pro Bowlers Jalen Ramsey and A.J. Bouye.  If you can take away New England’s short to mid-range bread-and-butter, and prevent them from moving the chains on 3rd down, you can frustrate Brady and the offense.  Then it’s time to attack.

The Jaguars are loaded up front with Calais Campbell, Malik Jackson and Yannick Ngakoue combining for 34.5 sacks.  If Jacksonville can take away the Patriots short passes and force Brady to hold the ball longer the Jaguars defensive front could thrive.  And if Jacksonville is smart they will be aggressive and not just rely on the front four to generate pressure.  There is a misperception that you can’t blitz Brady but if you have the horses to cover on the back end, well-timed and well-disguised blitzes, particularly up the middle, can be effective against New England.

This is also essential for the psyche of the young Jaguars.  If Brady is carving them up early it will suck the life right out of them and demoralize their inexperienced roster.  By the third quarter they will be staring at the game clock waiting for the pain to end.  But if they can get some early three-and-outs, and end a couple of those drives with sacks, then things could go in the other direction.  The cocky aggressive Jaguars will see their confidence swell, and their are few things scarier in the NFL Playoffs than a talented defense that thinks it can’t be stopped.  If that happens then New England will find themselves in a rock fight and they better hope Matt Patricia’s defense is up to the challenge.

The X-factor for the Jaguars defense is Gronk.  I can’t recall watching a Patriots playoff game where Gronk is dominating the middle of the field and New England loses.  If he is ripping off 15 and 20-yard gains down the seam Jacksonville is in for long afternoon.  The Jaguars have to make stopping #87 their top priority, and they have to deploy any and all methods to do it.  Chip him at the line, double-cover him, disguise coverages, hold him, grab him, punch him - they must try anything and everything or he will bury them (again, ask the Steelers).  And if all else fails don’t be afraid to give all-world cornerback Jalen Ramsey the assignment of stopping Gronk.  He has the size, speed and confidence to take on the Eric Berry role that has been effective in the past.

A lot will be made of the importance of getting that physical bull, Leonard Fournette, cranking and crafting a game plan that mitigates Blake Bortles from screwing everything up.  But those are minor sub-plots.  This game comes down to one matchup: a 40-year old soon-to-be-MVP quarterback vs. the number one pass defense in the NFL, and if the Jaguars lose that matchup, it’s going to be a long day at Gillette.

Curb Your Enthusiasm:  There is no denying the talent that Jacksonville has on the defensive side of the ball but a closer look indicates their lofty status as a dominant top two defense was significantly aided by a soft schedule.  The Jaguars 18 games featured opponents with an offense ranked 20th or worse and in the six games where they faced an offense that wasn’t among the dregs of the league they allowed 27.1 points per game, including two 40+ games in the last month against Jimmy G’s niners and the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Additionally their 55 sacks were dramatically inflated by the 20 sacks the registered in two games started by Tom Savage and Jacoby Brissett.

The Phantom Menace:  Can someone explain to me why so much of the pregame coverage has been devoted to the mysterious “Coughlin Factor”.  Jaguars president, Tom Coughlin, was a great head coach and had a lot of success against Belichick and the Patriots, but this idea that he is Brady’s kryptonite has been wildly overblown.  Yeah, I get it, the Giants beat the Patriots twice in the Super Bowl but it wasn’t as if Coughlin devised some magic defensive riddle to stop Brady.  Much of this reputation is tied to the ‘07 Super Bowl when Coughlin’s Giants shocked the football world by ending the Patriots undefeated season.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that game come down to the simple fact that the Giants stout defensive line dominated a Patriots O-Line that had its worst game of the year?  Credit Coughlin for having his team ready to play but there wasn’t a lot of Xs and Os genius behind that win.

How they were built:  With the Jaguars pulling off a massive one-year turnaround, going from 3-13 to 10-6, it has a lot of people asking, “How did they do it?”  While the hiring of Doug Marrone and smart drafting helped, surprisingly it was free agency that keyed their success.  NFL free agency is usually fool’s gold.  For every success story there seems to be a dozen Albert Haynesworths and Adalius Thomases.  But Jacksonville bucked that trend the last two years and rebuilt their defense behind massive contracts to Campbell, Jackson and Bouye.

Attack Mode:  If the Patriots are smart they won’t make the mistake the Steelers made and allow Blake Bortles to get comfortable.  The Steelers registered zero sacks on Bortles last week and played the majority of the game on their heels, allowing Bortles and the Jaguars offense to dictate the action.  Jacksonville has no weapons in the passing game and Matt Patricia would be wise to unleash the dogs on the aerially-challenged Bortles and take the risk of Allen Hurns beating them.

Stupid is as stupid does:  Gotta love the stories surfacing from Pittsburgh that show just how unprepared mentally the Steelers were for the rematch against Jacksonville.  My favorite is Le’Veon Bell tweeting the following late Saturday night, “I love round 2s...We’ll have two round 2s in back-to-back weeks….”  Hey, why get a good night’s rest before your first playoff game when you can instead stay up late and piss off your opponent.  And this was after Bell had blown off Saturday’s walk-through, showing up with just five minutes left in practice.  Additional reports have multiple coaches and players showing up late the day of the actual game.  Is this the NFL playoffs or spring practice at Kent State?  And the disciplinary result of these   transgressions?  Nothing.  Zippo.  Do you think Dion Lewis would play if he blew off practice the day before a game and then trashed his opponent on Twitter later that night?  It amazes me Tomlin still has a job as he looks more and more like Marvin Lewis with a better roster. 

Perhaps most amazing is that the Jaguars curb-stomped the Steelers earlier in the year.  For normal teams that would be a wake up call but apparently there is nothing normal about the Tomlin Steelers.  Pittsburgh’s arrogance confounded their opponents who released these gems in response, “I was wondering why they were so confident,” said Ramsey.  “We stomped their ass last time and we knew we was going to do the same this time.”  Linebacker Myles Jack was equally puzzled by the Steelers bravado, “It was like they had...amnesia...or something.  I don’t know if they just forgot and thought that didn’t happen but it happened…”

Jacksonville Jag-offs:  Let’s end on a humorous note.  A few years ago an enterprising Jaguars fan devised Jacksonville’s own version of the steelers Terrible Towel and came up with the “Jag Rag”.  Yup, that actually happened.  I would love to watch YouTube videos of every guys reaction when they first heard the name Jag Rag.  Sadly, the Jag Rag is no longer available for purchase, providing the NFL with a big sigh of relief while disappointing anybody with a sense of humor.

[mediafocus-blog1]

JD Gaming racks up kills in win over DAN Gaming

New Post has been published on https://mediafocus.biz/jd-gaming-racks-up-kills-in-win-over-dan-gaming/

JD Gaming racks up kills in win over DAN Gaming

JD Gaming trumped DAN Gaming in an action-packed 2-0 sweep during Week 6, Day 3 of the League of Legends Pro League in Shanghai.

DAN Gaming (four-6, eleven-12 match file) had a strong beginning to Game 1 as its siege composition got in advance with first blood at six mines, however, JDG (three-8, 10-17 fit document) turned into quick to respond. JDG had drafted a robust team fighting composition with hyper carries in mid and AD brings, however, discovered uncommon early achievement with the late-recreation builds as a 4-for-zero went JDG’s way at 13 minutes.

The later the sport went, the easier it got for JDG to run via DAN, grouping up as a powerful death ball and walking over DAN participants that were out of function well into the mid-game. While it gave up a Baron that allowed DAN to break into its base, JDG nevertheless controlled to choose up a Baron of its personnel a few minutes later to push right back. At this point, JDG AD carries Lee “Loken” Dong-Wook’s Kog’Maw began tearing via DAN, which gave JDG the window to surge into DAN’s base to absolutely take down the Nexus at 36 mins.

While JD Gaming had to come again from at the back of in Game 1, its LPL-widespread draft gave it several types of equipment to dominate early and mid-game team fights, which it did with gusto. A 5-man dive in the top lane changed into a double kill as a part of first blood to go together with first tower gold on the aspect, setting JDG up with the aid of nearly 2,000 gold at just 9 minutes.

JD snowballed its early lead and received a 4-for-2 team fight around 17 minutes to blow the game wide open. With the gold lead growing to 7,000 at 20 mins, JDG turned into free to do because it pleased, chasing DAN across the map for an eventual five-for-zero ace and Baron kill rapidly later on. With mid-laner Kim “going” Hae-sung’s Galio leading the way with amazing front line play and a perfect five/zero/19 kDa (kills/deaths/assists), JDG swept via DAN with a 2d five-for-zero ace and closed out the series sweep in 27 mins.

JD Gaming will next take to the Rift at 5 a.M. ET on Aug. 4 towards Newbee, while DAN Gaming takes on Newbie at five a.M. ET on July 29.

Back-to-returned defending League of Legends International champion SK Telecom T1 is broken, and anyone wants to realize why.

Since losing to China’s 2017 spring champion Team WE on the final day of Rift Rivals in Taiwan (which Team South Korea subsequently misplaced in a first-rate upset), SKT T1 hasn’t gained a sport in its domestic country. U . S . A . That it has held domain over for an amazing majority of five years.

Including the Rift Rivals loss, SKT T1 is zero-nine in its past 9 outings. Europe’s worst team, Ninjas in Pyjamas, has won a map extra lately. North America’s favorite whipping boy, Team Liquid, is two-7 in its past nine-sport span. At the instant, not even TL should pay to get a win on the board for the reigning global champion, who gave little to no resistance in its closing match in opposition to surging Longzhu Gaming.

Is the sky falling? Is it time to panic? Can SKT even nonetheless make Worlds?

Why SKT T1 may be simply pleasant, people

Fionn’s first-rate in-intensity list of why SKT may be best:

Because it’s SKT T1

It has a few man named Lee “Faker” Sang-hook inside the center lane

We don’t need to list any extra motives. While this zero-9 stretch is distressing and it is one of the worst runs Faker and train Kim “karma” Jung-Hyun have continued collectively, performing like it’s far the end of the world might be too much of a warm take, even for me.

This is the identical membership that best a month ago ran away with the Mid-Season Invitational, the second one-largest event of the year. Remember, it changed into considered some form of first-rate worldwide fulfillment for G2 Esports whilst it took an unmarried sport off of SKT in a first-rate-of-5 and made it an exceptionally competitive collection.

This is the company with the first-rate coach, pleasant participant and quality infrastructure of any crew within the global. Yes, it is not possible to wave off 4 directly series losses, in particular with how flat the team has appeared as every fit has gone via, however, an upcoming patch change might be the restart that the crew desperately wishes. Whether that restart can be a jackpot or a bust nonetheless stays to be visible, but the crew virtually can not appear any worse than it did towards Longzhu on its last in shape day.

It’s smooth to pin the group’s woes at the sour interest it received returning from Taiwan. Team South Korea expectantly anticipated a quick 3-zero sweep over Team China within the finals and did not deliver, although that could be taking away credit wherein it’s deserved for a lot of SKT’s losses. SKT is not gambling at its quality, however, champions aren’t sharpened through their simple runs to the name. They’re tested and triumph over adversity.

Let’s no longer overlook that SKT T1 failed to cross into ultimate Worlds as the favorite; the team dropped an opposite-sweep to its rival KT Rolster in the semifinals of LCK summer and came into the global event as a 2d- or 0.33-favored at first-rate. All eyes have been at the flashy ROX Tigers to finally usurp it. We all understand how that performed out. New York City, SKT with its returned against the wall down 2-1 to the Tigers, and as it usually does, the best team of all time pulled it out in one of the quality League series ever produced in the front of a bought-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.

So relax, SKT fans. And don’t get too brief on that trigger finger, humans banking on the SKT dynasty eventually finishing. As long as SKT is alive, irrespective of where it ends up in the stacked LCK summer time playoff bracket, it is going to be the favorite till a person can truly position down the king. Even then, with a win within the spring and likely greater circuit points to return, a Worlds spot is all but assured barring any other stretch of lifeless losses.

And in my revel in, making a bet towards SKT is never a good concept.

SKT is in hassle

No, in reality even though, that is awful. SKT has not had a stretch this terrible since it did not qualify for the 2014 World Championships. And much like then, the crew is breaking down. Even Faker’s play is not what we would count on.

In 2015, SKT could break out with this. The league, whilst nearly veritably the strongest league within the global, became not as stacked as it’s miles now. The membership becomes the best one to preserve the maximum of its megastar players, and it becomes simplest a be counted of time until the team figured out the way to play collectively and laughed its manner to the Summoner’s Cup with a fifteen-1 ordinary file at Worlds. Even in 2016, while the league reinforced its electricity, SKT ought to still go with the flow through with a string of losses here and there; an excellent-of-3 loss to Africa wasn’t going to kill SKT.

SKT cannot coast in 2017. These are shark-infested waters in the LCK, and this is arguably the season with the most well-constructed groups inside the user’s records, with maybe simplest summer of 2015 also inside the communique — whilst you had the two Samsungs (Blue & White), NaJin White Shield, SK Telecom T1 and CJ Entus Blaze all able to being global winners on the day. This season, LCK has a top six of Samsung Galaxy, Longzhu Gaming, KT Rolster, SK Telecom T1, Afreeca Freecs or even Jin Air Green Wings hanging round after its 2-0 win over SKT in the course of the zero-9 streak.

Everyone predicted SKT, KT, and Samsung, however, the upward thrust of Afreeca and Longzhu, two teams that gambled on their lineups, is what makes this cut up so frightening for SKT. In its modern nation, SKT should land up inside the starting round of the playoffs, the wild-card level, wherein it might nearly assuredly play the Freecs in a single quality-of-3 (no longer quality-of-five) to see who movements on to the quarterfinals. The Freecs is the most effective membership in records with a nice file towards SKT, and with how the five contributors have grown over the route of the yr, led by using certainly one of SKT’s legends in Choi “glove box” Yun Sung, even a full-power SKT should not scare them.

Along with the depth in the LCK, the group’s play itself, from drafting to on Summoner’s Rift, has been, virtually, now not the best, even from the begin of the year. So in many instances this 12 months, because it has within the beyond, SKT has fallen at the back of and are available back through the “SKT Zone,” where it continues to fall returned till the opposite crew makes a mistake it capitalizes on. Now that teams are not making the ones identical errors, it is main to 1-sided wins for SKT’s fighters.

Throughout the 12 months, on every occasion starting jungle Han “Peanut” Wang-ho has stumbled, karma has been quick to turn to the bench and play Kang “Blank” Sun-gu. Did Peanut play poorly? Down 1-zero? Here comes Blank. After gambling the Blank trap card for the complete year, ensuring in Blank’s having a 20-zero document at one factor, the substitutions haven’t been working as of overdue. The steady switching of top and jungle comes off as relatively random at this factor; what aggregate can wreck the losing streak? Right now, it seems like none of them can, and with the bottom lane putting out little to no stress and frequently giving up early kills, there are not any more subs that karma can carry in to strive out something new.