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kryshka0908 · 4 years ago

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The ONLY introduction to MBTI that you ever have to read!

I’m Kryshka0908 aka MBTI edgelord. I am NOT a certified MBTI practicactioner, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know my stuff. There are a lot of theories out there and yeah they are great and beautiful and all, but you DO NOT need to waste your time studying studying all of them and being confused ‘cause I’m gonna teach you everything you need to know about MBTI! Yes, it’s literally EVERYTHING you need to understand so LISTEN to every single thing I say and I guarantee you WILL be smarter than the majority of people in MBTI community that are spewing bullshit that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! So grab your drink or whatever that keeps you focused and let’s get into it!!

“What is MBTI in simple words?”

Many morons assume that MBTI types are their identities.

“Oh yay! I’m an ENFP, so I’m a quirky weirdo unicorn girl that’s always dreamy! I’m basically the same person as Anna from Frozen!”

“Yeah ;) I’m an ESTP now. I’m so manly and cool. I love sports man! And I wanna smash hot chicks every single day of my frickin g life”

“I’m a calculative, evil genius INTJ! I hate everyone and everything in the world.. I love world domination, and I have not heart”

These stereotypes make me SICK!! They literally wanna make me throw the shit up okay??? People need to understand that the only thing that your MBTI types can tell you is your natural cognive processes. It does NOT who you are, not how good/unique of a person you are, what you like and dislike, your traits or statuses.

You can be an ENFP, and absolutely hate unicorns and people.

You can be an ESTP, and doesn’t have any interests in sports and sex.

You can be an INTJ, and be a humanitarian. And feel love towards someone deeply.

You know what? I’m an INTJ myself and I love Disney movies, and working out!!!

Some of you may think...

“But, but.. then MBTI edgelord must be INFP because he likes Disney. Oh wait but also he likes working out, he’s ESFP. But he’s also super annoying.. ESTJ?”

SHUT UP!! JUST SHUT THE F*CK UP!!! MY MBTI type can’t tell me who I am as a person!

“What do Congnitive Processes mean in MBTI?”

The kind of “cognive processes” that MBTI is describing is our attentional manners, which is our ways of paying attention.

We, humans, all pay attention.

When we listen to someone talking, we pay attention to what they are saying.

When we read newspapers, we pay attention to the articles in the newspapers.

MBTI categorizes our various ways of paying attention into into 8 basic modes. They are

Introverted Intuition(Ni),

Extraverted Intuition(Ne),

Introverted Sensing(Si),

Extraverted Sensing(Se),

Introverted Feeling(Fi),

Extraverted Feeling(Fe),

Introverted Thinking(Ti),

and

Extraverted Thinking(Te).

* Definitions of each functions are right below here. For some of them, I directly copied from my Reddit posts.

The difference between Ne and Ni

Ne seeks to look at things from different perspectives and generates/discusses possibilities that are previously unthought of for the sake of novelty. Ne is an abstract function that focuses on metaphysical actions, rather than physical ones, meaning Ne users prefer to “think” about the possible things that they could do in their head or by talking over actually doing stuff in reality. For example, an Ne user may enjoy exploring the possibilities of them being a doctor, a chef and a CEO, but they are less inclined to decide which one is a most likely possiblity and start working on it.

Ni is the opposite of Ne in a way that it likes to make a conclusion on what is the best path. Ni seeks to see linear patterns and connections that lead to one thing in the future. It prefers knowing singular truths over ideation basically. Ni users typically want their life to be aligned with a singular purpose. To simplify, they are more inclined to say “I WILL become a doctor!” than Ne users.

The difference between Se and Si

Se is focused on external sensory information, such as “that car looks cool.”, “This scenery is beautiful” a and so on. As opposed to Si, which is focused on one’s subjective sensory experience, which includes how comfortable your surroundings make you feel internally, and their past experiences. Si things to say would be “This blanket makes me feel warm”, and “This must be true because it already happened to me before”. Because Se is more directly engaged in the outside physical world, people with high Se are very good at making actions in reality. Despite the stereotype that Se doms are party animals, a lot of them can be quite successful because they excel in seizing opportunities in the present moment.

Fi vs.Fe + Ti vs. Te

Fi is about your internal feelings and values. People with high Fi tend to have a sense of what/who they like and dislike. They tend to form judgments about things based on their own ethical values. Fi users seek to be their “authentic selves” in social environments.

•“I love you”,

•“Killing animals feels wrong/immoral”

•“You’re not my friend if you don’t understand the real me”

These statements are all Fi related

Fe, in contrast, is focused on reading and affecting external emotional atmosphere. Fe users observe social cues, such as face expressions and tones of voice, to notice emotional states of others. And they affect the emotional states by words or actions, if they deem it to be necessary. Fe is not about internal/introverted values, but it is about external emotions basically.

• “Are you feeling okay? You seem quite tonight.”

•“You look amazing! Where’d you get that dress!?”

•“That sucks” as opposed to “I don’t like it”(Fi)

Ti is very similar to Fi in a way that it also makes decisions based on your internal judgement. Instead of your feelings, or values though, Ti seeks to make decisions based on what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense to you internally. Ti is about internal understanding of logic. Ti users form logical models that can help them understand why things are the way they are basically. MBTI is also pretty Ti-ish since it models human personality in a way that is logically sound.

Ti statements include

•”You’re contradicting yourself in your own argument. What you say makes no sense”

•”If all humans are mortal, and this individual is immortal, it is impossible that the individual is a human”

•”I don’t want to use math formulas, unless I fully understand why the formulas work”

Te is like Fe because it also sees external data and affect things in the external world. However, unlike Fe, Te pays attention to shared logical facts, instead of shared emotions. Te users like to look at objective statistics and data, and use them to maximize efficiency in order to get from point A to B. Te is not concerned with internal understanding of logic, but it only sees facts as they are, their focus is on how useful or beneficial something is.

Te statements are..

•”If I leave home at 10am, and take the bus that comes at 10:10am, I should be able to get to school by 11:00pm.”

•”I first need to enter my email address, and then my password to log in. Once I log into my account, all I need to do is to put the items I want to buy in my cart and purchase them!”

•”According to this study conducted by Scientist A, it is best to have, at least, 8 hours of sleep for adults to be most active during the day. So I’m going to start doing that!”

To summarize, Fi is about “internal feelings/values”, Fe is about “external emotions and application of them”, Ti is about “internal logical understanding”, and Te is about “external factual accuracy and application”

So now that you know how each function pays attention, let’s look at how the functions manifest in a type!

I use ISFJ as an example. ISFJ’s “function stack”, which describes the order of a type’s preference of cognitive functions, goes..

Si(1st/Dominant)-Fe(2nd/Auxillary)-Ti(3rd/Tertiary)-Ne(4th/Inferior)-Se(5th/Ignoring)-Fi (6th/Demonstrative)-Te(7th/PoLR)-Ni(8th/Balanced)

Look at this table I made that explains definitions of each slot..

This is the description of ISFJ I wrote..

These are the function stacks of other personality types...

Congratulations! Now you should be able to understand how each type uses the 8 cognitive functions. You basically know about how MBTI works more than most people.

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a-student-out-of-time · 4 years ago

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There's a good and a bad way to subvert expectations. Unfortunately what's been happening a lot lately is that many works go for twists for the sake of being twists, the Star Wars Sequels being a prime example of this. Or the later sessions of Game of Thrones. There is a fine balance between being able to surprise your audience and not being extremely predictable.

//I’ve absorbed more complaints and feelings from both those series through pop-culture osmosis than I have from watching them. I’m more of a casual observer, but I do have some feelings on both these points (which I will put under here if you’re interested.)

//tl;dr version: I think we should unbiasedly judge media on its own merits and look over what works internally within the story and what doesn’t, be willing to make our own judgements rather than jump on bandwagons and tell people what they should or shouldn’t like, and not treat opinions as straight facts.

//And also that I’m honestly tired of hearing about the sequels and GoT ^^;

//I disagree with a lot of people on the Star Wars sequels (aside from 9, fuck 9), but I’d rather not start a debate about it nor their quality overall. Only that I think people really overreacted to them and many others jumped on the hate bandwagon when emotions were running high.

//Frankly, many of the criticisms I saw about the films felt either wildly inconsistent about what they’re upset about or what they wanted it to be (7 was criticized for being too much like old Star Wars, 8 for not being enough like old Star Wars) and others felt like they came from bad faith and I can’t take them seriously.

//And yes, the last season of Game of Thrones is trash and wrecked everyone’s storylines for the sake of being shocking, but let’s also be real: GoT was never going to have a happy ending if it wanted to stick to its “realism.” Whoever got on the Iron Throne was inevitably going to have to purge all opposition to consolidate power. That’s just how real revolutions and coups work.

//To be clear, Daenerys’ turn to evil murderousness was stupidly executed, but it wasn’t necessarily unprecedented. What I frankly dislike about fantasy in general is its tendency toward the Divine Right of Kings. That only certain bloodlines have the right to rule and you just need to put the “rightful heir” on the throne. In other words, giving absolute power to a magically omnibenevolent person will fix everything. I may be an optimistic humanist, but I know that simply doesn’t happen.

//The entire point of GoT is that DRoK is stupid and royalty in general really kinda sucks. If you go back, you see most of the lords we follow, including “good king” Eddard Stark, are either totally indifferent to the masses or are completely sadistic and torture them for funsies since the legal system doesn’t protect peasants.

//The Starks are no better than the Lannisters simply by virtue of being overall “nicer” than them. Both sides start wars that get thousands of people killed. Also, everybody loved John Snow, but he also fucking hanged a kid and I’ve never heard anyone bring that up since.

//Most importantly, Daenerys was a likable character with a sympathetic backstory, but even before the last season, she was fully embracing being a Targaryen by blood and was openly murdering people who got in her way while she was conquering territory after territory.

//Yes, a lot of the people she killed were slaveholders, but let’s be real for a moment: not everyone who participates in an evil system is evil themselves. It’s easy for us as the audience to judge them for participating in a slavocracy, but living in one comes with being told slavery is okay. That doesn’t make them evil by nature, just subject to the biases of their culture.

//Also, slavery is evil but conquering people is fine? And burning people to death for opposing you is acceptable since you’re going to be better and free everyone, or because you had a sympathetic backstory? These are the kinds of things that get villains criticized for, but is treated as a necessary evil at worst for the protagonists.

//This is protagonist-centered morality. The show is framing it in a way where you’re being drawn in to see it that way, but also telling you not to see blatant hypocrisies for what they really are. Daenerys was even called as mad as her father by Tyrion. It wasn’t well-executed, but it was going to happen regardless of how much anyone liked her.

//Violence for a good cause is still violence. If you’re going to burn people for disagreeing with you, then say that other people shouldn’t and should listen to others, that’s full-on hypocrisy. That goes for most of the characters in the show, frankly, and the message is executed well for most of it.

//That being said, don’t think this means I think the last season of GoT is good, that the Star Wars sequels are perfect, or that I hate all fantasy books ever. That’s not what I’m saying. I try to enjoy what’s good about them and point out their flaws regardless.

//What I’m saying is it’s important to, when you want to be critical of media, put your feelings and biases aside and judge the media you’re criticizing on its own merits. In my opinion, the claims that the sequels only did things to subvert expectations is unfounded. They were going their own direction, which was admittedly controversial and not what many people wanted, but just because you don’t want it to happen doesn’t mean it’s a bad twist

//Just like how a character isn’t a Mary Sue just because they’re too OP or you don’t like them. That’s not what that term means and hearing people use it like that irritates me. While I do have my complaints about characters, people use that term as if it’s a form of literary criticism that has more use than is necessary.

//If a character is OP, they’re OP. If a character is flat, they’re flat. If a character is poorly written, they’re poorly written. If a character is at the center of the universe and literally everything else exists just to amplify them and their role in things, then they’re likely a Mary Sue/Gary Stu. It’s not a label to slap on a character you don’t like or to give a critique (or complaint) more weight.

//This is why I say DR3 Chiaki isn’t a Mary Sue, she’s just not a very well written character. All Mary Sues are poorly written characters, but not all poorly written characters are Mary Sues. She’s not terrible, but she’s not explored much and her only big roles are being the person who brings Class 77-B together and her death turns them to despair.

//While her death was tragic and brutal, we didn’t really get a good look at who she was as a person beyond just being nice and opening up to her friends. If they’d expanded on that a little more, maybe it would’ve been more effective, but the way she died felt...manipulative and shock baity in a lot of ways since it banked mostly on our familiarity with her despite it being a totally different person.

//DR3 honestly had a whole host of shocky and just plain gross scenes that I really don’t think needed to be there.

//But likewise, if a story has a plot twist that you don’t like, that doesn’t automatically make it purely shock bait or subverting expectations just for the sake of doing so. There’s a difference between “this character was evil all along and there were a lot of clues and we just didn’t want to believe it” and “this character was evil all along for reasons we’re dumping on you now.”

//Just so I don’t seem like a hypocrite, while I personally don’t like what happened with Mikan in chapter 3 of SDR2, it was an effective way of foreshadowing the truth of them being the remnants of despair. It was set up that every had lost their memories and this was a sign that getting them back wasn’t necessarily going to have a good outcome.

//And I’ll be real: I can’t take a lot of the complaints about the Sequels or GoT seriously because much of it carries overtones of racism, sexism and antisemitism. For those more into Star wars, I think you know what I mean already and that’s all I’ll say. As for GoT, I’ve seen reddit posts viscerally attacking the writers directly and even saying that we should’ve expected the ending to suck since it was “written by Jews.”

//Yeah, go figure I can’t read any of that. I know not all people who hated the show’s ending or the films are like that, but it’s impossible to deny that those attitudes are very real.

//In the end, if you want to be critical of media, the worst way to do that is to just watch a video of someone complaining about it for half an hour. Yes, those video essays can be fun, but the only way to be truly critical of media you enjoy is to examine it yourself and look closely at what’s in it and how it’s presented. That goes doubly for shows you like.

//I know not everyone will do that and all opinions are ultimately subjective, but don’t let someone else tell you that you should hate something or that something is bad just because they didn’t like how it ended. Watch or read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Don’t just follow the crowd and also be respectful of people who don’t agree with you. You can learn a lot when you talk to someone with a different opinion.

#mod talks #mod rambles #a student out of time #just giving my thoughts #Anonymous #cw: racism #cw: sexism #cw: antisemitism

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marshmallowprotection · 4 years ago

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For some reason I like to think of a lot different characters from various fandoms meeting the characters from my original story, Ever changing Fate. Especially V and Saeran meeting Kaya, goddess of life (cough* she’s not exactly a goddess, she’s more superhuman *cough) because whilst she is not in a abusive romantic relationship, she’s basically being abused verbally and mentally and sometimes physically by Nymeria, goddess of time (once again, shes more like a superhuman) who is more like a sister than anything to Kaya but is technically her daughter because she created her.

In a tldr sort of fashion because the post I made on reddit about her is pretty long, Kaya has continously gone through a cycle of creating a world and subsequently after several billion years she ends up going insane (her powers the nasty side effect of causing emotional numbness and eventually taking over you hence insanity ;) hence why she is not really a actual goddess, plus she can die if you destroy her soul) and destroying everything, only to appear once again in the white void she originally appeared in billions, maybe now trillions of years ago. So, yeah, shes really old but still looks like 26ish. Also she has had several different families in previous worlds which she destroyed which only makes her feel worse.

And another thing is that she has this sort of “other being/self” named Aya who is basically meant to balance her out: Kaya creates, Aya destroys. Aya lives in Kaya’s body and sort of acts like a voice in her head. But, Aya is also able to take control of Kaya’s body sometimes. And so, in the 12th world created by Kaya, the world of ECF, she created 11 new beings just like her, including Nymeria. She split up her power into 12 parts, keeping one part and giving the other 11 to each of the new “goddesses”. This was an attempt to delay the inevitable of Kaya destroying the world. She also split up Aya’s power and gave it to each of the goddesses, giving Aya’s conciousness to the youngest goddess, Xomura. This was to try and make Aya as weak as possible by splitting her power up between the goddesses who would eventually be very far apart from each other.

With the introduction of several humanoid sub species into the world and the first kingdoms, the religion surrounding the 12 goddesses ended up forming. Branches of the church were set up across all the continents and most of them were headed by the goddesses themselves. However, you see, the 11 goddesses besides Kaya had grown resentful of her, due to the fact that she 1. forced upon them power which slowly broke away at their sanity 2. forced them into being basically false deities to humans and other humanoid species alike. and 3. basically forced them all into lives they never wanted. The only Goddess who is still on good terms with Kaya is Xomura, only because Xomura volunteered into being the goddess to house Aya’s conciousness.

Nymeria especially hated Kaya and ended up taking out all her resentment and hatred for both Kaya and anything else on Kaya, and combined with having to appear like a perfect person to all of humanity, she grew depressed and became a people pleaser, always giving people what they wanted so she could avoid conflict.

Idk, just with the slight similarity between Kaya and V’s situation (being abused by a loved one, in V’s case his fiance and Kaya her sister/daughter) I would wonder what V would think or say to her. Of course I mean GE V because I honestly just wonder oof.

Sorry I just like ranting on about my story a lot. oof. Don’t have to answer if you don’t want to I just wanted to ramble oof.

Heres the reddit post about Kaya I made if you want to read it: Reddit Post About Kaya —SUBMISSION

Oh, goodness! You’ve spent a lot of time building the world of your OCs around this all and I admire how much thought and care you’ve put into it. I can really see the length of what you’ve tried to reason with and explore show with what you have. This is really going somewhere interesting! That’s a fantasy story that is just coming together and Oh, Boy.

I think V would empathize with the situation but he may not know what to say himself. He’s good when it comes to trying to do the right thing, though, in most cases, so I can see him offering to be a listening ear.

#oc #ask #mod kait #littleghostlyrose #submission

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purplesurveys · 5 years ago

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754

Does anyone know your bank pin number other than you? Who? I don’t even have one of those yet.

Have you ever had a boyfriend/girlfriend who was depressed? I'm not sure. I know she's told me before about being diagnosed with depression, but I’ve forgotten if it’s mild or severe, or if she has the whole thing or is just showing symptoms of it. She only mentioned it in passing so I figured it wasn’t something she wanted to touch on further.

Would you be able to climb out your bedroom window to sneak out? Probably but I’d have to be really careful to not end up shattering my legs or any other part of my body haha, but knowing me I’d probably land badly. I live on the second floor but the house isn’t that high, so I think I could give it a shot.

What would you do if you found out the last person you called was pregnant/got someone pregnant? I’d be very confused because she’s very gay and also because she’s only been staying at home since March.

Can you taste the difference between brand name food and store brand food? I wouldn’t be able to relate since store brand’s not really a thing here. Only SM makes their own stuff but they’re purposely cheaper because they’re meant to be of lower quality to begin with. Other than that, we don’t really have a choice but buy brand name.

Would you be embarrassed to buy pads/tampons/condoms? Which one more? Just the tampons, probably. I never need condoms so I have no reason to feel awkward buying them, and in fact I’ve volunteered to buy them for Angela whenever she feels shy haha; I definitely have no reason to be embarrassed buying pads because periods are a thing. I will likely feel most awkward getting tampons since I don’t know any one person who uses them where I live and it’ll most likely be seen as an unusual purchase since they’re quite uncommon.

If a stranger went in your room, would they be able to tell what gender you are from just looking at it? Probably. I have a poster of Nam Joo Hyuk, several Audrey Hepburn memorabilia, and a lot of pink stuff so it very much looks like a stereotypical girly room. I do think it’s kinda balanced out by the amount of WWE merch I own, but yeah otherwise my other stuff screams girly.

Are your parents gullible? When it comes to home stuff my mom is basically a witch; she can immediately tell if my dog peed somewhere, if I lost something, or if a dining chair isn’t positioned right. But when it comes to fake news on Facebook she will occasionally flock to them hahaha I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to remind her that phones DO NOT emit radiation from 12AM to 5AM and that it’s only a ploy to get people to sleep early lmfao. My dad is pretty intelligent and won’t be easily fooled about anything.

Do you still own a VCR? I know my parents owned one but I don’t know if they still brought it here when we moved 12 years ago or if they already threw it out.

About how much money have you spent on food in the past two weeks? :( Zero pesos. The only thing I’ve spent on this entire quarantine was a bottle of soju I asked my dad to buy and I paid him after.

If you were in a car accident would the last person you kissed care? Yes.

If you were looking for a new pair of shoes where would you go? UPTC since they have like ten shoe stores there.

How much was the last pair of shoes you bought? I haven’t had a new pair in like a year now, but the last one we bought cost arounddddd ₱4200, if I remember correctly.

What color is the computer/laptop you’re on? Did you buy it yourself? Gray. No, it was a gift from my parents.

Do you have a second home? I guess I count my childhood home my second home. My grandma and cousins remain in that house, so we visit from time to time and when we’re there I’ve noticed that I still retain the same tendencies and habits from when I still lived there.

Would you be surprised if you saw the last person you texted smoking? I’ll use the last person I chatted in this context since I haven’t texted in a hot minute, and that person would be Andrew. I’d be quite concerned since they’ve told me they’ve quit smoking, so there must be something extremely stressful going on for them to start smoking. I’d check up on them immediately.

Does the smell of cigarettes, weed and beer repulse you? I do super hate the smell of beer even though I have no other choice but to drink it sometimes; I still find the smell of cigarettes disgusting although my contempt for them has lessened over the last few years seeing as a lot of people I know are smokers so I’ve been around that smell a lot, and also because I’ve started too. I’ve never been around weed and I don’t know how it smells.

Was the last person you kissed younger or older than you? Younger by a month.

Do you think people have any misconceptions about you? Not really? What I get most frequently is people thinking I was grumpy at first, but tbh I am pretty grumpy so they aren’t far off from the truth. With me it’s usually a what you see is what you get thing whether someone’s meeting me for the first or the 78th time.

Have you ever purchased Girl Scout cookies? Nope, not a thing here. I’ve always found the variety of cookies so fascinating though and I’ve always wanted to try the Thin Mints and Samoas since they’re what I hear about the most :(

Do you like waffles? They’re okay, though I only ever eat waffles with fried chicken and never just by themselves. I prefer pancakes.

Do you watch birthing videos on a day-to-day basis? Nah man wtf? I have no reason to be doing that lmao.

Do you find piercings/tattoos attractive? I don’t find either attractive. I get curious when I see tattoo because I wonder what the story behind it is and what it means to the person who has it, that’s all. As for piercings, I don’t really like them < Pretty much. Like I don’t go looking around for tattoos on a person to find them attractive; I just like hearing the histories behind them. Same with piercings, I don’t need them to be attracted to someone.

Would you talk to someone you don’t know on the internet? Only on social media that I’m already familiar with and comfortable in, like on this Tumblr, or Twitter, sometimes Facebook. I wouldn’t go to like Quora to ask something or join forums or even post anything on Reddit.

How often do you drink Monster? Never. Energy drinks scare me lol.

Have you ever made totally pointless videos with your friends? I’ve made those for myself, but not with friends. I remember filming a house tour with my flip phone’s video camera back when I was like, 8 hahaha I was ahead of our time for sure.

Do you like to buy those Warped Tour compilations? I don’t even know those existed. I just knew of Warped Tour and that all the cool bands of the time would play there, but that’s it. I’m clueless about everything else that goes on in there.

Do you like sitting on the inside or outside of a restaurant booth? You mean just a restaurant? Inside, for sure. I would never agree to eating outside and am always willing to wait a few extra minutes. I hate having to contend with passersby while I eat my food as I feel that it ruins the experience as well as the time I have with the person/s I’m eating with.

Do you own a nightgown? No but I had duster dresses that I’d wear to bed as a kid, if that counts lol.

Have you ever made a house out of a giant cardboard box? Probably not. My mom wouldn’t allow us to play with those and she’d immediately view them as trash that needs to be thrown out.

Have you ever made a tent out of sheets in your bedroom? No. I usually used the sheets as a cape or robe, then I’d pretend to be a queen.

Do your grandparents know how to operate a cell phone? My paternal grandparents do. My maternal grandfather used to regularly use a phone before he passed. My maternal grandmother refuses to learn :(

Have you ever had sex or something like it? Hahahaha ‘something like it.’ Yeah, I’ve had sex.

Have you ever read a George Orwell book? I tried reading 1984 when I was like 13 but didn’t understand it from the get-go. I haven’t continued it since but honestly I’m very open to revisiting it one of these days.

Have you ever worn fishnets? I don’t remember ever doing so. I feel like it’d be so uncomfortable; I hate wearing stockings as it is.

How many piercings and tattoos do you have? I only have my ears pierced and no tattoos < Sameeee.

Is someone in your family affected by Asperger’s? Nope.

In a hotel do you always nose through all the drawers and cupboards? Hahahahaha yeah, just out of curiosity. I’ve never seen anything interesting, but I keep trying.

Would you rather go out to eat or be eaten out? Be eaten out right now. I’ve had too much abstinence from sexual activity for my own liking lol < Ok it’s 1 in the afternoon but SAME lol

Do you always wear your seat belt? Honestly, no and it’s a shitty habit that I need to correct ASAP. I never notice that I’m not wearing them until it’s one of my parents riding with me and they scold me for driving out of the village without a seatbelt. I do put it on when I enter bigger cities with more police patrolling the area like Ortigas and Makati, or when I drive out of town, but usually it stays off.

Have you ever liked someone much older than you? No. I’ve had a crush on a teacher, but I obviously didn’t legit like him haha.

Have you ever been in a play? Just the annual school plays we do that all students are required to be a part of. I forgot to mention this in a recent survey but I was in an acting club in Grade 1 and I played Cinderella’s prince in our culminating play, heheh.

Do you have any secrets that nobody knows about? Sure.

Is there ice cream in your freezer? Yeah. My parents love ice cream so we always have an ample supply of their favorite flavors. Sometimes we’ll also have a tub of cookies and cream since it’s our (the kids’) favorite flavor.

Have you ever started to laugh but played it off as a cough successfully? For sure. I always laugh at inappropriate moments so I do fake coughs a lot.

Have you ever liked the lyrics of a band but hated the music? I suppose so. Hate is a strong word and I’d rather not use it, but while the music my girlfriend listens to wouldn’t be what I’d tune into on a regular basis, the lyrics are admittedly very well-written and intelligent and reflective, and I don’t mind it when she shares her favorite songs with me :)

Does your bathroom have a window? Yes but they’re high up on the wall.

Do you go somewhere to get your eyebrows done? No, I’m really scared of threading :( Everyone always gets out of the salon with their eyebrow area all red and tingling and it’s enough to scare me off of threading forever lmao. I’m not very conscious about how my own eyebrows look, so I just let them grow out.

When you were younger did you read the A Series Of Unfortunate Events books? I’ve only seen snippets of the movie.

Who was the last band you saw live? Paramore. I miss them already.

Do you believe prayer really works? I’m not gonna invalidate the fact that it works for a lot of people. But it’s just not my cup of tea, and I honestly don’t know how to feel whenever someone says they pray for me since I don’t believe in it anyway. Of course I thank them, but on the inside I’m always a little puzzled.

Are you a fan of the band Gym Class Heroes? Never been. I know Stereo Hearts and that was always a fun song to sing, but it’s not my favorite either.

Frosted flakes or frosted mini wheats? I don’t really have either, but I’d go with frosted flakes I guess?

Have you been on a date in the park? I would love to have one of these if we actually had parks. How nice would it be to take a long stroll, have a picnic, and just sit on a bench talking for hours?

Ever dated someone you were best friends with first? Yes. At first I didn’t want to risk it since we were reeeeeally close, but I don’t regret asking her out.

Are there any diseases/health problems that run in your family? Thankfully no. Although my grandpa and his sister did pass from heart attacks and I’m starting to be scared that it might develop to be a pattern for some of us. But other than that, both sides of the family are relatively healthy.

Do you have asthma? No. But Gab does and I get really worried once her breathing becomes labored at night. I keep telling her to get a new nebulizer after her old one broke, but I dunno what’s become of that request of mine.

Are tongue piercings slutty? No, and it’s not like being slutty is a bad thing lol.

Is there anybody you think is hot over the age of 40? No one in real life but I do still have a crush on CM Punk who’s turning 42 this year hahah. I don’t think that crush is ever gonna go away.

Last person to take off your pants, besides you? Gab.

Do you remember those cool highlighters that smelled like popcorn? I knew about markers and ballpens, but not highlighters.

Might you enjoy hanging out in the woods for day or two? No thanks. I’d rather have somewhere to go home to or rest at by the end of the day, and if I was gonna do this I prefer to be with someone who knows a thing or two about surviving in the woods.

Have you ever written something on a bathroom stall? Nope. The worst thing I’ve done was write on one of the desks in grade school.

Least favorite alcoholic drink? Out of the ones I tried, I didn’t like whisky at all. Too bitter for me < Twins. I hated the ever living shit out of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels when I tried them.

Have you ever kissed someone named Paul or Luke? I haven’t. I have a cousin named Luke that I used to babysit and I kissed him a lot when he was a baby, if that counts lol.

How did you meet the last male you texted? I met them at the Marcos heroes’ burial protests. I have no idea how I started talking to them, but I think it was because they were wearing a Nexus shirt and I told them I like it, and we started talking from there.

Have you ever had an embarrassing email address? Yup. I wasn’t allowed to make an email address when I was young so I had to sneak around and make a fake Yahoo username so my parents would never find me. I don’t remember what it was anymore but it was for sure embarrassing so I’m just grateful my brain threw that memory out.

Do you put shampoo in your left or right hand? OMG this survey is so long. I put it on my left hand.

Do you have a bull ring through your nose? Nope, no piercings.

Do you and your dad get along? Better than my mom and I.

Can you see your purse right now? Nah, it’s in my room upstairs.

Are you wearing any perfume? What kind? I am not. I haven’t had a reason to in a while.

Are there products in your hair? Just shampoo and conditioner.

When you get colds, do you use nasal spray to help get your nose unstuffy? No. Whaaaat, those exist? I just blow my nose or just live through the stuffiness.

Do you actually like sneezing? I love it, it’s such an underrated sensation lmao. It feels better when you’ve actually been needing to sneeze for a while and it finally comes through.

Have you taken a shower yet today? Nope, I usually take them at night.

Do you have one best friend who is always there for you? I have two.

Do you wear skirts a lot? Not really, I don’t like skirts because I feel exposed wearing them. I prefer shorts.

Do you wear sweatpants a lot? Nope.

How many pairs of jeans do you think you have? I can remember five pairs right now, but I have many other kinds of bottoms in my closet like culottes and leggings.

Do you like hoodies? They’re okay. I find them more comfortable if they belong to someone else, hah.

Big ones or the form fitting kind? Form-fitting if I’m buying for myself; big ones if I’m borrowing from Gabie.

Do you wear polo shirts a lot? I never wear them. My mom made me wear them often as a kid and it made me feel like a boy, so I’ve kinda had a predisposition to be wary of them as I got older since I was teased frequently enough about being a tomboy as a kid as it is.

Did you ever actually have a rubber duck? I think we probably did.

Are you one of those people who claim to live with no regrets? I have one big regret and the rest of my ‘regrets’ are small and are stuff like “I regret not picking up food on my way home because I’m now hungry.” The way I’ve always thought is that I did the things I did before because I chose to do them and I was happy to do them, and I’ve honestly felt barely any regret even though things didn’t turn out the best. There’ve been mistakes but I’ve just chosen to learn from them instead of regretting them at the same time. Do you love your computer? Love it.

Do you drink coffee? Yeah. I’ve been doing it a lot this quarantine but I think it’s been giving me headaches, so I stopped for now.

Do you basically like all of your clothes? No. There are some at the bottom of the pile that I’m no longer crazy about anymore.

Do you shop mostly with your parents, your friends, or by yourself? My mom. She tends to know what looks best on me, and she also pays for the clothes hahaha.

#survey #surveys

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mannatea · 5 years ago

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Pokémon Shield: A Review

DISCLAIMER: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS HERE!

First, my credentials/gaming history, so you can see if my opinion is valuable to you or not. I would like to make it clear from the start that I do not consider myself a ‘gamer’ by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a filthy casual at best.

I’ve been playing video games since I was maybe eight or nine years old. I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in a variety of genres, and have a great appreciation for the work that goes into creating each and every game, no matter the intended audience. Some of my all-time favorite titles include Tales of Symphonia, Fire Emblem (7), Final Fantasy IX, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Project Gotham Racing, Ecco the Dolphin (PC,DC), Roller Coaster Tycoon, Harvest Moon (N64/PS1), World of Warcraft, and of course our beloved Pokemon!

I started with Pokemon Red, and enjoyed it immensely, but Silver stole my heart and my imagination. My brother and I used to sit at the kitchen table with guide books open and notebooks at the ready to craft and create new, extremely cool teams. I sank an unbelievable amount of hours into that game, and into Pokemon Stadium (1 & 2), Hey You! Pikachu, Pokemon Puzzle League, and even Pokemon Pinball. Unfortunately after Silver, my interest waned. I was an adult by the time Emerald debuted, and while I was initially charmed by it, found my interest waning quickly. I bought and played Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, SoulSilver, and Black & White, but didn’t beat any of them. I felt like the magic had…disappeared somehow.

But when X and Y released in 2013, I binged on Pokemon X, beat it, and for the first time since childhood started breeding a competitive team just for the heck of it. I also found myself really enjoying Pokemon Sun a couple of years later (though the post-game of breeding didn’t really do it for me this time).

They lost me with Ultra Sun/Moon. I wanted to like them, really, but it was too much of a rehash, and too much handholding (like the originals were, and I could only stand going through that once).

Now here we are with Pokemon Sword and Shield. They released just a few days ago (15 November, 2019) and the controversy has been wild. It seems to me that everyone has some kind of very strong opinion, and a lot of people are very angry.

Pokemon has always been one of my favorite franchises, but my history with the games is far from spotless so I like to think I can manage a mostly unbiased review, though of course everything in this post is my personal opinion.

Here’s what I’ve done in the game:

40 hours played.

200 pokemon in the pokedex.

Main story and post-game story completed.

I played with no specific self-imposed rules and was not spoiled for hardly anything before I started playing.

The Game’s Introductory Sequence [8/10]

As is standard for the franchise these days, the game flings you into the world with little fanfare regarding customization. Rather than the intro being a dialogue of sorts between your character and a professor, you are now instructed to choose what you look like (from a sparse few options) after typing in your name.

The first ‘cinematic’ is pretty boring, but I think the attempt at immersion is genuine enough (the idea being that your character is watching Leon’s broadcasted fight on your new smart phone). My character has a better house in-game than I do in real life. I’d kill for all that storage in the kitchen!

My biggest gripe with the introduction is that it reminded me too much of Sun & Moon’s introduction—in the worst of ways. I wouldn’t say it’s slow-paced, but the constant interruption by other characters is about enough to make a person rage-quit. Luckily I’ve been blessed with a lot of patience; it makes tedious content easy to bear (so long as it’s not difficult), but even I was feeling antsy before the first hour of the game was up, just because Hop and Leon never shut up and I was chomping at the bit to Explore.

Considering this is the first thing a player experiences…I really feel it could have been improved, especially the dialogue, but there were a few really positive things about it, too. The outdoor BBQ was a nice touch (considering everyone knew we’d be going off on Adventures in the morning and all), the game does let you avoid having to learn how to catch a pokemon (your mom slips a few pokeballs into your bag at one point without telling you and if you use them to catch pokemon, Leon will not teach you how to do it later), and I feel like as far as introductions go, this one was fairly short when compared to Sun and Moon’s introductory period.

While I’m being positive, the game plops you down into an idyllic little English countryside and not only do you get to enjoy that aesthetic, but the Slumbering Weald is probably one of the prettiest/most charming places in the game, and you get a peek at it early on!

The Starter Pokemon [5/10]

I’ve experienced worse? I wasn’t spoiled for any of the starter pokemon’s evolutions starting out, and while I didn’t exactly hate any of them, I sure didn’t love ‘em, either. I named my Scorbunny “Chad” on the assumption that he was likely to turn into a chad, though I’m not sure that accurately describes the pokemon I ended up with. Clearly modeled after soccer players, my Chad is a cocky all-star jock. They went all out on his Pyroball animation but Double Kick can see itself out of my house. No love in this club.

I just really wish I found any of these starters or their evolved forms to be charming, but they’re not. Rillaboom is basically George of the Jungle but 3% less of a himbo, and Inteleon is Greninja’s younger brother in accounting.

Gyms, Gym Challenges, & Game Balance [6/10]

This is probably one of, if not the, most debated topic over at Reddit. Is the game balanced? Are the gyms too easy? Are they making this game for 5-year-olds suddenly?

Eh. I do think the game is, perhaps, Too Easy, but a game being easy isn’t a shortcoming in and of itself. Check out my section on the story and characters for more on this topic, but I’ll post the short of it here, because it’s relevant: if the gameplay is going to be easy, we either need an option to make it more difficult, or the characters, story, and world have to carry the game in such a way that the easy gameplay still feels fun.

Shield had, uh, none of that going for it, unfortunately. The plot is lackluster (more about this later), and the gameplay wasn’t able to pick up the slack. In other words, the gameplay didn’t make the game feel Substantial in any way.

Which is kind of bad, considering Dynamaxing is a new feature!

The biggest issue for most people was the Experience Share. It’s turned on by default and there seems to be no way to turn it off. You get insane amounts of XP for defeating and catching pokemon, and your whole team seems to level pretty evenly even if you only occasionally use some pokemon in the party.

I personally played the game with the default battle option (where it asks if you want to switch out to a new pokemon when the enemy is going to send out a new one) because I barely remember half the pokemon in the game’s typing. Knowing the name of what’s coming next doesn’t always help me. (How’s that for an embarrassing truth?)

I personally liked the experience share, though I feel having the ability to toggle it on/off (or even on for certain pokemon and off for others) would have been ideal. The idea with having it on all the time is that your team will level fairly evenly so you’ll be able to switch in any of your six pokemon to battle without having to struggle through leveling some of the weaker ‘mons up individually. Additionally, it enables you to easily replace a pokemon on your team mid-game if you so desire. And I did (I replaced my shiny Orbeetle with regular cotton candy Rapidash).

My team at end-game was as follows:

Cinderace (Chad)

Greedent (Moriah)

Thievul (Penelope)

Liepard (My)

Corviknight (Octavia)

Rapidash (Calliope)

As you can see, I have no grass pokemon, no water pokemon, and no electric pokemon. I have two dark types. My move coverage mostly sucked throughout the game, because Thievul had 3 dark moves, and My had 3 normal moves. I’m an official idiot, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Usually I can struggle through no matter how garbage-tier my team is, and this game was…no exception.

I steamrolled the first few gyms and their challenges even though I wasn’t vastly overleveled for any of the content. After the ghost gym (which was easy for me with my dark types) I’d say the difficulty level went up slightly, mostly because my brain has refused to hold type advantages/weaknesses that came after Gen1. I feel like most original type weaknesses made some kind of sense to me and I was never able to incorporate dark and steel into that mix, let alone fairy.

At any rate, once you fight a pokemon once, the game will tell you if your moves are super effective against them or not. I remember people complaining about this feature when it was added (in Sun/Moon I think), but I like it. It doesn’t actually help a lot if you don’t know what the moves do/aren’t looking at move power/effects, but it’s useful for my sieve of a brain in a pinch.

Hop as a rival was almost never challenging. He always starts with the same pokemon, and his team is fairly easy to sweep. That might be kind of the point, but I wish you could have encouraged him to take the starter that’s strong against yours for a bit more of a challenge. Yeah, it’s not much, but it would have been something. Marnie is a better rival than Hop in the sense that she’s actually a better battler, but I swept her team pretty easily too, every single time we fought.

The only real challenges in the game were fighting Raihan (I only had one very weak fairy move and no ice to counter his dragons) and Leon (he definitely outleveled me). On Leon I had to use revives and potions!

The gym challenges started off as pretty cute (herding Wooloo, pipe puzzle maze) but quickly grew into lazy boring doldrums (basically gauntlet fighting of one kind or another). I guess I’d say ‘nice try’ for these and say I don’t really care if I see them again or not unless they’re going to actually give it a real go.

Overall, the story part of the game felt balanced enough for me personally but if I’m being completely unbiased: it was too easy to get levels. I could have wandered around less/caught fewer pokemon as I journeyed and enjoyed more of a challenge, but I just…gotta catch ‘em all, y’know? Most people do! GameFreak should have known this and designed accordingly.

The big issue with game balance feels like it comes…after the game, and I don’t mean the post-game so much as the Max Raid Battles that require other people, but the NPC trainers you can battle with are legit trash at what they do, which kind of forces you to find other trainers, but…

Online Compatibility & Features [3/10]

So I think the rating speaks for itself, here. The interface is confusing, the stamps are annoying, and the ability to see other players but not interact with them in any meaningful way is rage-inducing (and not just because of the FPS drops).

X/Y had a better online system!

Sun and Moon was better!

I don’t know why we regressed. I’m glad they kept the “wonder trade” (renamed to random trade, I think), because I always did enjoy doing that, but the GTS was the best idea they ever had and they abandoned it for random trading? I don’t want to trade with randoms? If I wanted to do that, I’d just do a random trade in the first place!!! The inability to put what you’re looking for into the stamp that people see? Oversight. Or just bad design. Probably both!

I’ve never hated a pokemon online experience more than this. I’m just astounded by how bad it is. I tried to join max raid battles last night and kept being told the event was over, but the stamps just…didn’t refresh? For HOW LONG? I can’t even tell you because I don’t know, and I couldn’t find a way to manually force them to refresh. It’s like they update every 15 minutes instead of every 15-30 seconds (which they should if I’m browsing for trades to make or battles to join). There are ways around this (according to Reddit) but the interface should be intuitive and easy to use by default.

C’mon, guys, you can do better. This is legitimately embarrassing in the year 2019.

Music [5/10]

There are some really magical tracks in this game, and there are some really terrible tracks. It doesn’t feel at all cohesive or thematic. I absolutely hated the gym battle remix; it was worse than the regular gym battle music. I feel like the gym battle theme would have really caught on if they didn’t have any other synth sounding tracks in the game, but they kind of do, so it blends in instead of sticking out as a bop.

Notable nice tracks were Hulbury, Glimwood Tangle, Slumbering Weald, and the desert route (which I can’t remember offhand). Some of the better music reminded me of the soundtrack for Tales of Symphonia, which is high praise coming from me. Unfortunately for every good track there were probably 3 forgettable ones.

There wasn’t anything particularly engaging when it comes to the music here, but it’s at least passable.

Graphics, Design, and Animation [6/10]

I should clarify that this is 6/10 for a pokemon game, not in general. I don’t expect flashy realism in a pokemon game and neither should you. The graphics are adequate most of the time, but the animation leaves a lot to desire when you look away from the pokemon that feel like they were Chosen Ones (and received a lot more attention).

Rapidash, for example, is using the same base model and animations it’s been using since it’s been in 3D. I’m not going to claim since Stadium, but holy cow the animations are for sure the same as they’ve been since at least X/Y for all the older moves. I’m not impressed.

The characters all have dopey expressions on their faces always. The models just use one talking animation loop and it almost never changes. The main character still looks on like a smiley face emoji when turmoil occurs, and though this isn’t as bad as it was in Sun/Moon, it’s still…kind of jarring?

The Wild Area looks kind of bad sometimes, and some areas in the actual game were lackluster compared to what they should have been. Ballonlea is the town you step into after walking through the (honestly) magical Glimwood Tangle, and it’s this charming fairy wonderland…with two houses and a stadium the size of two billion football fields. Uh. Okay? You’re telling me they destroyed how much natural habitat to make this gym? It just doesn’t jive with the scenery/theme out there, especially considering Opal’s theatre is tiny. And it’s not just that I think the game is lacking thematically (though it clearly is), but there’s this…laziness to the design when it comes to places like Ballonlea. It could have been SUCH an enchanting town to explore, but it was two houses with nothing important in them and a sports arena that feels completely at odds with its surroundings. (In this town you do learn that an NPC you spoke to earlier was a ghost, but it’s not as if this is very important information/goes anywhere, really.)

Spikemuth, for all its flaws, was at least memorable. I can’t say the same for most of the towns in this game. I really enjoyed the music in Hulbury but you best bet I had to look it up to remember the name of the town! Time is partly to blame. We don’t spend a lot of time in each town, and we have no real reason to go back to them aside from visiting the nearest Pokemon Center to heal and rest up. But I would argue that, beyond that, the individual designs just…don’t feel memorable because they’re not memorable. The names are mostly meh (every time I see Ballonlea I think of Bologna for some reason), but without anything else to connect to the place as more than just a place…there’s no reason to remember any of it.

Like the music, these are all passable, graphics more than animation, animation more than design, but that’s all there is to it.

Camping and Cooking, Feathers and Fetch! [4/10]

I don’t actually have a lot to say about this. It’s a cute idea, and it’s fun maybe the first ten times that you do it, but then it’s just really boring. The game is terrible at explaining how to create different curry dishes, but it’s almost idiot-proof. I’ve yet to fail at it.

But I’m not sure I care about it, either?

You get like 1/100th of the amount of berries you need to cook while you journey along, so it feels disproportionate. I dunno. Just not a fan.

Playing with your pokemon is the only real joy that comes from camping, but its fun is limited. When you’ve tossed the ball a few times, or watched Liepard smack the feather toy a while, it has that, “Okay, I’ve seen it!” kind of feeling to it. That doing well at cooking can heal your party/cure status conditions is incentive to do it, but it’s faster to just fly to a pokemon center and run back on your bike most of the time than to pitch a tent with your ‘mons.

I feel like there should just be…more you can do when you’re camping together. I’m glad Pokemon Amie is dead (it was cringey), but it felt more personal than this.

I wish I had more to say about this feature, but it felt tacked on and lackluster after I camped a few times.

Dynamaxing, Gigantamaxing, and Max Raid Battles [4/10]

The urge to give this a zero was high, but I am making an effort to be balanced.

That said, I hate dynamaxing. Gigantamaxing is almost the same thing, it’s just Worse Somehow. Until yesterday I thought they were basically the same thing (and that some pokemon just got extra cool dynamax forms). As it turns out, they’re not the same thing at all! Or rather, they are, but they’re also not?

Dynamaxing makes your pokemon grow large and gives it these generic MAX moves that it can use in combat (Max Knuckle, Max Flare, Max Strike). It lasts for three turns and then your pokemon reverts back to its regular ‘ol self.

Gigantamaxing is when your pokemon grows a little larger than large, gets a special Look, and gets the same generic MAX moves (but with special effects added to them). Oh, and better stats.

At least, that’s how I understand it.

Both are great for Max Raid Battles, where you team up with NPCs or other players and take down huge dynamaxed pokemon that are out in the wild.

Neither is a fun feature as part of the actual gameplay. I guess as a gimmick it works all right, but just like Z-moves it has a long annoying animation sequence, and like Mega Evolutions only some pokemon get to gigantamax (everyone else is just a pleb, I guess). I dunno. I just didn’t find the concept very engaging…maybe because it seems evil and wasteful in-universe, and this is more or less stated in the game itself, but what-the-hell-ever, we’re just going to keep doing it ‘cause it looks cool!

It’s just too goofy a concept for me. Maybe if Dynamaxing doubled or tripled their size, I’d find it more understandable and more aesthetically pleasing? I hate seeing my pokemon, or the opposing pokemon, grow 50+ feet tall and scream at three billion decibels.

(For the record I never liked Mega Evolutions or Z-moves as a concept, so it’s not like I’m nostalgic for a different gimmick. That said, at least I’d accepted Megas as a thing, and Z-moves were overall not too groundbreaking or gamebreaking.)

The design of dyna/gigamaxing is to connect it with specific places so that you can’t just max your pokemon in every battle and sweep every team you fight against, but it still feels like it gets used too much. I’m currently at a point where I find having to dynamax feels like a chore.

Considering this is what the game tried to sell itself on in the initial trailer…? Yikes? I don’t know. I think some people are more ‘okay’ with the concept of dyna/gigantimaxing than others, and I think I’d be fine with it if we only had dynamaxing. Introducing both just feels like overcomplicating things for no real reason, and maybe also poking a little hard at the hornets’ nest that is the competitive community.

Because now you have to go out and grind gigantamax pokemon to catch one, so it forces you to do the thing you might not like to get a pokemon that can do the thing you don’t like, because it’s objectively better in combat? But really, who knows? Maybe these overpowered phenomena will end up banned, anyway.

Despite my disdain for this release’s gimmick, I do think Max Raid Battles are pretty fun, at least…when I’m not getting my ass completely kicked while some NPC trainer’s Eevee is using Helping Hand… It’s actually pretty enjoyable when you can somehow find other people using the y-comm and take on a gigantamaxed pokemon with the help of actual human players. But y’know…good luck using that…lol.

Overall I think the biggest downfall of Dynamaxing/Gigantamaxing is that it doesn’t really add anything of substance to the game. I don’t think it makes it more fun. It’s also not necessary for max raid battles (this could be a phenomena we don’t understand yet that randomly seems to affect wild pokemon, just like with the UBs—hell, Anabel and Looker could return and claim this is all related to that stuff and I’d probably find that believable enough). So what does it add? Flavor? Culture? Nah. It’s just kind of there.

Post-Game: Is That All? [3/10]

Post-game in Sun and Moon was the Alola version of the Battle Maison, breeding, and a somewhat lengthy (for a post-game) story where you assist Interpol agents Anabel and Looker in hunting down and capturing Ultra Beasts. The plot was somewhat woven into not only Sun and Moon’s storyline (Lusamine’s shenanigans), but also borrowed from the Sapphire/Ruby reboots and X/Y. If you didn’t already know Looker from Ruby/Sapphire/X/Y, or Anabel from Pokemon Emerald, you’ll still probably find them somewhat compelling/interesting as characters. Also, they did a really good job in Sun of making circumstances seem dire—of showing instead of telling you how dangerous the UBs were and how important it was to protect the people of the towns and villages you’d visited throughout your adventure.

Shield has… Max raid battles, a battle tower, and…breeding. Oh, and a storyline about the legendary dogs that barely makes any sense and is plagued by really irritating new characters.

The terrible truth is that the post-game of Sword/Shield is embarrassingly bad. You’d think they’d want to outdo themselves with every release. Sun and Moon hit it out of the park with their post-game content. Most people enjoyed the hunt for UBs, or at least the characters of Anabel and Looker. Sword and Shield have…. Sordward and Shielbert. DID I STUTTER?

They’re terribly designed characters, and so insulting as to not really be any fun at all. The Pokeball Guy mascot is Actually Fun; these dudes aren’t. They’re barely even villains? It was an excuse to try and pull what Sun and Moon pulled, but it didn’t work. I never felt like anyone was in danger at any point, probably because magically everyone was evacuated before I even arrived on the scene to stop Sordward and Shielbert’s vile schemes. :U Oh, and because I felt little or no connection to any of the towns I visited along the way, let alone the gym leaders. Maybe if these guys had showed up partway through the game and we sort of knew who they were already, this wouldn’t seem so out-of-nowhere, but it was, and that made it even worse than it had to be.

When it’s all over, you get your legendary dog (I named mine Goodest Boy), but it wasn’t a fun storyline at all. Who are these guys? Why should I care about them? I cared about Looker and Anabel because they came onto the scene and showed that they cared about each other as people (and showed it, multiple times). These guys? They wreaked havoc and didn’t even go to jail. At least Rose went to jail!

I don’t think the post-game is terrible so much as I think it’s underwhelming, especially considering what it came on the heels of. I don’t expect More More More from every game, but I do expect improvements to be made. A decent post-game storyline is all I was asking for, and I didn’t even get that.

But there’s the tower and you can breed pokemon and train EVs and all that stuff more easily now, so…

Characters, Story, and Worldbuilding [4/10]

Let me put this as delicately as I can: I’m not a fan.

I could easily rant about bad character writing, bad stories, and weak worldbuilding for hours, but I’ll limit myself because 1) this is a pokemon game, and 2) nobody really looks for exceptional characters here.

As I said earlier, I feel like Sun and Moon did it Better. Most of the main characters in Su/Mo were likable, interesting, had a fun design, or were amusing. Not so in Shield.

Hop has a terrible name (literally a million names to choose from and they picked this?), but the biggest crime he commits is that he doesn’t get a satisfying story arc at all. When he got down about himself I had hope there would be some cool development, but there wasn’t. He ended up getting his crap together and making a Team and Picked a Strategy (which still involves sending the sheep out first I guess). And then randomly in the post-game decided he was going to be a professor…lol.

I felt like 20 different people wrote that plot, because it was terribly cobbled together and didn’t flow at all. Natural progression would have been nice.

Marnie barely has a story and barely develops. Piers seems to kind of have more ‘meat’ to his character but not a lot is done with it.

The gym leaders are otherwise really meh. Okay, so Nessa and Sonia are pals. Gal pals. Pals that are gals. Gals that are pals. Great. I don’t think we ever see them talk so it doesn’t matter. Melony has a son…and it’s just a nod to the other game where her son is the gym leader instead? Boring.

Bede is an asshole with a sob story who doesn’t really get redeemed but gets the redemption option anyway. They could have REALLY done something amazing with this guy but chose not to. His backstory is actually pretty interesting! But they didn’t utilize it worth a damn. And also he was right about the mural soooo…

Sonia was maybe the best character in the game, and that’s just from a technical standpoint. She had development, she developed, she grew as a character. Emotionally, though, I felt detached from her. Maybe it was being called a child all the time that did that? I’m not sure. I get that the protag is a child but I’m living independently and doing well for myself so maybe have a little respect idk… Especially when the first 2/3 of the game you’re told the adults will handle things, and then randomly you’re interrupted every fifty seconds to take care of other people’s nonsense. :|

In fact, I felt emotionally disconnected from pretty much every character. I didn’t really like or feel for anyone. Hop came the closest (feeling guilty about losing a battle cause it might make his brother look bad), but the bad dialogue options and inability to actually cheer him up was frustrating more than anything.

There are zones that are breathtakingly lovely (Slumbering Weald! Ballonlea! Glimwood Tangle!) but all the rest are more or less forgettable. The characters are connected to the world…sorta, but there are times it feels like they force-connected them through dynamaxing and dialogue accents instead of trying to make characters who naturally fit into the world. Like I talked about before, Opal’s gym felt completely disconnected from the reality of her environment. She lives there for a reason. Doesn’t the stadium’s presence jar her? How many fairy pokemon lost their homes when that thing took away tens of acres of forest? What’s the story here? Or anywhere for that matter?

Spikemuth was a waste of space but at least it felt like an attempt to show us a poverty-stricken area… Unfortunately it all fell flat the second they used two models for Team Yell! Team Yell could have been really cool, especially if they’d had different models with their names (challenged by Team Yell Grunt Sierra/Troy/Nellie/whatever), and the same team yell outfit/clothes/paint on. Then we could see these are just regular guys and gals from this poor area who want to cheer on their hometown girl!!!

But that was a weakness throughout the game, because Team Yell were all gym trainers, and all shared models…just like all the other gyms. It felt lazy to me. The outfits can be the same, but way to go making all the models literal clones. That’s just laziness.

The villains are all meh. Rose? Of course he was a villain. The problem is that he’s not a villain for being a capitalist pig or anything. He’s a villain for wanting to fix a power issue that’s 1,000 years from happening. Meh motivation. If it was 50 years away then we have a compelling villain! But no, not 50. A thousand years from happening. And he can’t wait five fucking minutes.

Oleana was boring.

Leon was exactly the person he was the entire game…

The taxi service is a cute idea, and a nice gameplay addition, but it doesn’t really add anything to the world because they didn’t make the effort to integrate it.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough.

The short of it is this: I walked away from this game not really caring about the world or any of the characters. I don’t even have a favorite character. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me. YIKES.

The Wild Area [8/10]

I don’t want to cover this for too long, because I feel it’s been done to death, but the Wild Area is what the whole game should have been. Or at least, more of the game. I don’t expect we’ll ever get a fully open-world pokemon game EVER, but this foray into the true 3D tells me that it could be a lot of fun, actually, even in somewhat constrained environments. (Oh, and with a good map.)

I enjoy the idea of the Wild Area, but I think its usefulness is limited without the appeal of having more pokemon patched into the game later. Until I get sick of it, though, it’s a pretty neat concept, and it makes hunting for new pokemon to catch a little more fun than it usually is. I like that they kept the overworld pokemon in this area as well as on the routes you have to travel; it feels like more of an adventure to dodge a huge Steelix and scoot closer to see what that yellow thing is in the grass you can’t quite make out. :)

Basically: fun concept that is enjoyable for now but has limited enjoyment. As far as negativity goes, I don’t have much to complain about here that I didn’t complain about in the Online Compatibility section above.

The Pokemon Themselves [6/10]

I was challenged by @hijauindah to list my top five favorite new pokemon from the game, so here we go!

Nickit (cute design!)

Boltund (smooth, well designed—not too cluttered)

Ponyta/Rapidash (MY LITTLE PONY… I think Rapidash could look better, but I’m just glad they cared enough to try something new with them…)

Frosmoth (Super pretty pokemon design.)

Dragapult (Nifty design.)

Most of the new designs are just…okay. There are a lot I don’t actually care for. But I’m biased; I just want more creature-based pokemon that look like they could exist and function in the world they live in. Some of these designs they come up with look like they’d have died out ten thousand years ago due to being Poorly Evolved lol.

Final Thoughts [6/10]

The worst part of the game for me personally was probably feeling like I was getting interrupted constantly by other characters. JUST LET ME PLAY. But the best part was definitely exploring the new areas, catching a shiny 2 hours into the game, and getting to the end more or less with the team I started with.

The individual scores don’t add up to a 6/10 (they actually add up to a 5.16/10) but I think it’s worth noting that I did have a fun time playing through the game, I intend to hop into the breeding stuff, and even though I don’t have to keep max raid battling and stuff, I probably will.

It’s far from the 9s that it was getting by certain people from certain places that won’t be named here, but it’s not as if it’s a dumpster fire game. I don’t regret the money I spent on it, and I hope to keep enjoying the game for a few more months (albeit more casually than I did over the weekend), but I hope GameFreak has learned from its follies and puts its best foot forward with the next game, because I will not manage to be this forgiving again.

#pokemon sword and shield #pokemon #pokemon spoilers #pokemon review #long post #really long post #pokemon swsh #i didn't really edit this so sorry if there are any typos

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alcida-auka · 6 years ago

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Rey Killed Her Parents

Rey Killed Her Parents — Just One of My Crazy Star Wars Theories

Hey everybody, I don’t do this too often, but I love the new Star Wars movies so much that I’m coming up with all kinds of crazy speculations for the trilogy and 9th movie, much like I did with X-files back in the 90s. Now I’m not the first person to have theorized that Rey killed her parents — which I find oddly reassuring–but I’d like to add my own process as to how I came to this fun little tinfoil theory with some visual cues from the films.

So how did I come to the theory that Rey is responsible for her nobody parents never coming back?

The Force Awakens

Well, it goes back to something I first noticed back on my second viewing of The Force Awakens a few years ago. I would not really come to the conclusion that Rey destroyed her parents at that time, but I did notice something that seemed too significant to ignore.

Namely it’s this:

In Rey’s force vision, in which she sees scenes from the past and future, she stands outside of herself as a young girl, arm held tightly by Unkar Plutt [likely why she has an aversion to having her hand held by the way]. As her family’s craft leaves her behind, ascending to the sky, she cries out pleading with them to come back.

But this particular vision of the craft ends strangely. As the ship ascends, the sky turns an ominous red. And take note of that, because in Star Wars red lighting is often used to denote something evil or dark afoot.

Later towards the end of the film, we will see this darkening of the sky and subsequent red lighting again. We will see it when Kylo Ren kills his father immediately after the Star Killer base planet begins to implode. From Abram’s commentary on this scene, Kylo Ren is entirely conflicted just prior to this darkening of the sky, and up untill that point he is truly thinking of leaving with his father. When the sky darkens, the lighting on Kylo Ren’s face changes from blue to red, and it signifies an abrupt change to evil/darkness. He immediately kills his father, an act he regrets intensely upon its conclusion.

Now, at the time, I only noted that the darkening sky in Rey’s vision was a parallel to the darkening sky above Star Killer base. I knew it was intended to be significant, but I was unclear as to how. It could have meant nothing more in Rey’s vision than a foreshadowing of Kylo’s patricidal act, a blending of timelines. But why cast that dark red shadow on both scenes? A dark red shadow that is specifically intended to symbolize the dark side?

This is where the Last Jedi comes in, and where I started drawing my theory.

The Last Jedi

In the throne room of the recently deceased Snoke, Kylo Ren makes his famous plea to Rey to join him in creating a New Order. Desperate to get her on his side, to “let go of the past”, he encourages her to remember her parents, something that she has been actively repressing for years.

Rey admits they were nobody. Kylo Ren, who so far has never been deceitful to Rey (and Rian Johnson the director backs this up), clarifies further her own memories that he saw back during their force bond in the hut. They were drunks, junk traders, who sold her for drinking money. Rey does not deny this and her face shows an unhappy acceptance.

But where it gets interesting is this: Kylo also says her parents are dead, buried in a pauper’s grave in the desert.

Now many fans have thought this a discrepancy from what Rey’s vision in the Force Awakens showed us.

But I don’t think that it is, and I certainly did not think it was in the movie as I watched it.

It’s entirely possible that Rey’s vision of her parents leaving were a fabrication in her mind. After all, Rey is an unreliable narrator of her own life, and created the fiction of her parents coming back as a way to rationalize her abandonment and the notion her parents did not want her. If she believed her parents were “somebody”, a great Jedi hero, a warrior, she could fantasize that they HAD to leave her for heroic reasons, and thus it would mean she was loved, and they would come back.

However, I find the idea that her vision of the abandoning ship being a fabrication to be unlikely. The Force does not create deceitful visions.

Thus, Rey’s parents did leave her.

But how did they wind up dead in graves on Jakku? Why are we told this?

This is where the Force Awakens vision and red sky comes back into play.

Just as the darkening sky and red light immediately preceded the violent action of Kylo Ren killing his father–a sudden, impulsive act–this image of the same red light symbolizes a dark act immediately after the ship’s ascension into the sky.

That act is Rey, a child powerful in the Force, unintentionally killing her parents by bringing down their ship, in a naive attempt to bring them back to her.

This is why she remembers being abandoned, and why Kylo Ren has seen their graves in her mind. Rey’s parents never got to leave, and furthermore, she remembers them being dead. I can imagine that this would be such a traumatic act that she blocks it out, and over time creates her comforting myth that someday they’ll return for her, that she was never a bad girl who hurts people, a girl that gets abandoned for being bad.

Now, obviously, this is just a theory of mine, and some other folks on Reddit and Tumblr. But it’s cool to see others have arrived at the same minor theory on their own as well.

There’s no telling if it is remotely true until the 9th movie comes out December 2019, but if it is, it has some interesting implications for her character.

It becomes yet another parallel to Kylo Ren. These characters are both mirrors of one another in several ways–they feel abandoned by everyone around them, they are intensely lonely (even Rey, when surrounded by her new Resistance friends, comes off to me as standing a part from them), and possibly, they have both killed parents.

Ben Solo is a character that has been described as “coming from the light [eg, has good, heroic parents]” but is putting on the dark persona of Kylo Ren. Nonetheless, he is drawn to the light, both in himself, and in the person of Rey.

If Rey is a mirror of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, we can surmise that she “comes from the dark” but wears a persona of light. She is drawn to the dark side, something that Luke Skywalker points out repeatedly. Of course, she is also drawn to the darkness of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.

How is Rey “from the dark”? Possibly this references her parents being good-for-nothing drunks, happy to sell their child. Going with my theory, though, it could also be that the “dark” is her darkside powers that she used to kill her parents.

Again, as much as Kylo/Ben is dark and light, so is Rey, their approaches to it are simply reversed.

And it’s not talked about much, but Rey wears a mask as much as Kylo Ren wears his metal one. It’s simply that Rey’s mask takes on the form of her la-di-dah, Pollyanna unbridled optimism. It’s a shame that people feel Rey is a dull character, because in reality she is as complex as he is, and is also fighting conflicts within herself. Through the Force bond conversations with Kylo Ren, the Last Jedi film was showing us the growing cracks in her ever-happy facade.

If Rey has killed her parents, not only will it bring about further conflict within her character for the last film, it may help to shatter some of her Jedi-like self righteousness that she tends to have. Granted, killing your parents when you are 5 years old cannot be compared to a young man in his 20s killing his father, but she will realize how intense the darkness in her can be. So far she has chosen the Light side of things easily, but I envision her having a crisis of faith in the next movie.

Ultimately, whether this theory is just tinfoil over-analyzation or something that could actually be realized, I suspect that the next film will have both Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey achieving balance of Light and Dark within themselves and between each other.

Side observation–one does wonder if Kylo Ren saw in Rey’s memory that she killed her parents and not just the graves on Jakku. If he did, it would mean he chose not to tell her, either hoping she remembers on her own, or not wanting to hurt her in that moment any more than she already is.

I could see the latter being a possibility–much of his suffering has been in the perception that people think he is a monster, and he is just stepping into the role he thinks everyone has driven him into.

While Kylo Ren certainly wants Rey to stop pining after her parents in the hopes that she’ll rely only on him and no one else (he is desperate not to be alone in this scene), he doesn’t exactly want her to become so utterly despondent to believe she is a monster incapable of being loved. Hence the “You’re nothing but not to me”, but no “And you’re a murderer just like me!”

Also, Unkar Plutt must know some shit, he’s the last guy aside from Rey to have seen her parents. I get that Rey hates Plutt and does not want to talk with him any more than she has to, but I wonder if she will ever consider asking him about that deal her parents made.

Anyways, that’s my crazy tinfoil Star Wars theory. I have no idea if Rey actually killed her parents, but it’ll be interesting to see if this one pans out or not! Have you got any zany wild Star Wars speculations or theories? Post them below!

#starwars thelastjedi rey reykilledherparents starwarstheories

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theodorasutton · 5 years ago

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Digital Anthropology and Formula 1

This blogpost starts with my entry to the DHL competition, which offers my own way into Formula 1, through the drama and personalities of the sport. After my entry, I’ve written my ideas for researching Formula 1 from the perspective of digital anthropology.

My Formula 1 Moment

A few months ago I entered a Formula 1 competition to describe my best F1 moment. I wrote a really heartfelt description and went to submit it, only to find out it was about 5 times too long. I cut it down, submitted, but knew it wasn’t any good. I decided to share the original version and describe my way into the sport which I absolutely never expected myself to like - here it is:

March, 2018. My boyfriend had been watching the Formula 1. The qualifying had ended, and now there was a press conference.

I had never been interested in sport, certainly not one that was so clinical and confusing as Formula 1. For me, all the drivers blurred into one, some seemed to wear red, others wore white, and all of them seemed strangely keen to wear logo embellished headgear. Here they were, three of them, herded behind some microphones, giving stilted answers to press questions. Distracted and on my phone, I was impatient for the end of the program so that we could watch something interesting. "I can assure you we don't have a party mode,” one of them was saying. "I used the same mode from Q2 to the end of Q3. There was no extra mode, no extra button I engaged in." "What were you doing before, then?” The guy in red asked him, taking a sip from his drink and smiling mischievously. "I was waiting to put a good lap in…” The guy in white said, “to wipe the smile off your face,” he added under his breath, with an extra dash of sass. Was he angry, or was he joking? It was hard to tell. The two of them seemed to be rigid with tension, but keen to put on a good show for the cameras. The guy in white patted the guy in red’s arm, insisting that he was only joking. The awkwardness was palpable, and the exchange had my full attention. The other guy in red, sitting on the right, however, seemed to be daydreaming. Who was this guy in white, who my boyfriend told me was winning everything? What planet had he landed from, that gave him the ability to win races with robotic precision? The guy in red with the mischievous smile seemed to be the underdog, and was endearing. The daydreaming one was pure comedy. “Do they have brawls in the bars after a race?” I asked. “I don’t know,” my boyfriend said. “I’m not sure they can drink. They have to maintain almost no body fat.” I frowned. “I hope the guy in red punches the guy in white,” I said. I envisioned him chucking TVs out of swanky hotel windows. I live for the drama. This was the moment that got me into Formula 1. For the first time I saw inside the machines that zoomed predictably around faraway racetracks. I started to realise that Formula 1 wasn’t just lap times, numbers on a screen, and a choice between hard or soft tyres; it was fundamentally about the people. There were egos, eye watering pay checks, glamorous locations, and a whole lot of pressure. There were feuds, confrontations, and tears. It wasn’t until much later that I realised the physical toll of driving a Formula 1 car, and the gym regime that accustomed drivers’ bodies to immense forces while going round the track. I had thought drivers were just pressing buttons inside a machine, but these were athletes putting their lives on the line. Lewis wasn’t always so sassy. He usually spoke with the measured words of a religious guru, emphasising gratitude and hard work. Meditating, praying, exercising, and listening to the right song before a race were apparently what helped him achieve his super-human results. We jubilantly listened to a Christina Aguilera where he was rumoured to perform a hilarious and cringeworthy rap. “Imagine all the other drivers teasing him with it,” I said. It took me a while to realise that Sebastian was a four-time world champion. His voice was low and disinterested while he gave clamouring journalists a run through of his race. In Bahrain, in 2019, Lewis seemed to make him spin on the track through pure intimidation. After races, we watched eagerly for the private moment when the top three drivers would meet in the break room, wipe the sweat off their faces, shake hands, and grimace after two hours of ruthless competition. Was the loser completely crushed? What would they say to one another now that they were face to face? But it was Kimi who became the most entertaining of the three from the press conference that day. Often giving nonsensical answers to journalists (that started with the sound “bwoah”) or pretending to not hear them, he, too, was mischievous and clearly hated any kind of ceremony that stopped him either driving very fast, or going home. His elusiveness made me increasingly curious, and I searched for entertaining stories, finding ones about him napping on piles of tyres, drunkenly diving off a stage with no crowd to catch him, or screaming “gloves and steering wheel!” to a bewildered pit crew. Since that moment in March 2018 I’ve learned more about what really makes Formula 1 tick. I’ll be honest, I still switch off when people start talking about technical specs. But I love to watch the drivers, team principles, and pundits, when they find a way to say everything with just a look in their eyes, or a quiet dig at a competitor. I love it when there’s gossip and wild predictions, and memes to be made. I never thought I would love a sport like I love Formula 1 now, but it was the people - and Lewis’ sass - that got me where I am now.

Digital Anthropology and Formula 1

Through getting my head around F1, I’ve unsurprisingly thought about it in terms of my own research into digital anthropology - or how technology is part of our social world today. I truly know nothing about sport, so I may be wrong, but it seems that F1 is the most technologically mediated sport there is. Rather than athletes who test their physical capabilities, the drivers’ abilities are mediated through a machine, which could be working well, or could be crawling round the track. That machine has been built from the ground up, bolt by bolt, by engineers constantly trying to improve on the vision of the four-wheeled vehicle. They don’t simply drive the same car at each race, it’s continuously evolving and being tinkered with by the team and its engineers in-between weekends.

F1 car aerodynamics Rather than watching the race directly, the teams themselves watch a row of television screens. For starters, the circuit is too big to see in one go, and the noises are too loud to expose your ears to. To experience F1, even for those participating, necessitates cameras and microphones and screens. But the teams are not only watching footage of the race, but endless numbers dancing in front of their eyes, listing speed for each sector, tyre wear, temperatures, and predictions. What secret software do they rely upon to give them an advantage over others - what algorithms are at work, invisibly measuring and shaping the race? Do they have the problem of too much data - data saturation or InfoObesity - where they can learn no more, or they struggle to store, protect, or analyse the information flying at them?

Renault’s Pit Wall, Singapore GP

Pit wall display screen, from Reddit

While the celebrity drivers of F1 plummet themselves around a track several centimetres away from the tarmac - sometimes losing up to 3 litres of water and 4kg in one race - F1 is equally a mathematical sport. This interplay of bodies and technology, personality and data, is fascinating. If I were to design a research project on F1, it would ask how these aspects of the sport are reconciled. What relationship do the teams have with their technology? Are strategies based more on digital information - “The computer says we should do this, so we’ll do it"? Or do they put their faith in people like Hamilton, knowing that his judgment in split seconds would prevail?

Masculinity and aggression would be important themes. Comparing Formula 1 to my limited knowledge of football or rugby, where frustration can be taken out with shouting, running, tumbling, or even brief fights, I wonder if F1 is more of a restrained, poised sport, played behind a veil of respectability, where resentment comes out not physically, but in catty, underhand plays, spies, cutting people out, or perhaps insistently pronouncing your name wrong. My suggestion that Hamilton might throw some TVs out of a window was an attempt to understand where that necessary frustration ends up. A clip of Ricciardo screaming with his helmet still on, Verstappen shoving Ocon, or Schumacher marching furiously up the pit lane towards Coulthard, pulls back the curtain. Behind the scenes, what dastardly behaviour lurks? I also wonder how the teams would take failure differently if they were all women. After both Red Bull cars were taken out of the same race, I remember saying to my boyfriend that “I wouldn’t want to be in a room full of those angry Red Bull workers.” When Haas repeatedly have outbursts on their radios, they seem to be transgressing an invisible rule of Formula 1, that anger is a private matter. What other invisible rules are there that shape team behaviour, and create friction between them?

Haas team principle Gunther Steiner’s outburst at Sochi, for which he was fined $7500

At the same time, while teams seem keen to control their presentation, moments of intense emotion, and authentic reactions of the drivers and pit crew, give fans something to go on. How does Formula 1 balance its primary purpose - the need to be entertaining, with the teams' clear desire to maintain professionalism and secrecy? In 2017, F1 released YouTube videos of the post race driver briefings, which featured drivers sat in rows like bored schoolboys. The videos are extremely entertaining, mostly due to the comedic camerawork and Grosjean attempting to get other drivers into trouble - but the uploads have since stopped, possibly because it was too much of an invasion into the meetings. Netflix’s 2019 series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” gave us a behind the scenes look, and helped us meet the personalities in F1 and empathise with their stories and struggles. In the recent On The Marbles podcast, Lee McKenzie explains that one reason why AutoSport is going out of print is the on-brand messages from the teams are too bland and repetitive for the price of the magazine. My own entry to the DHL competition displays my feeling that the sport needs drama to continue. This tension plays out everywhere. As the stewards continue to penalise small errors in driving, they curtail more of the scrappy, fight-y racing that the drivers seem to enjoy as much as the spectators, resulting in races that are “boring” and “processional.” Rather than relying on printed interviews, fans may be turning to social media to connect more closely with the characters in the sport. Through Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube, fans create memes based on the funniest moments on and off track, some of which endure for months.

Left: A fan’s take on Haas’ “I think Ericsson hit us”. Right: The radio message to Kimi Raikkonen when his drink was not connected The McLaren driver Lando Norris, only 19 years old, posts stories on his Instagram most days, and welcomes the playful Internet world of memes and ridiculousness in a way that breaks with the usual “robotic monotony” of drivers. It turns out that in his spare time, when he’s not racing in real life, he enjoys racing Verstappen on a video game. In this way, through following them on Instagram, fans can see relationships between the drivers - in a recent example, Ricciardo and Leclerc teased each other on their own respective Instagram accounts during a shared flight. Technology is playing a role, then, not only in the broadcasting of sport, but in the way that fans can relate to F1 and its personalities, by viewing mundane and everyday moments that span much further than the race weekend.

Left: Ricciardo’s selfie with sleeping teammate Verstappen Middle: Norris’ Instagram, teasing his teammate Sainz Right: Leclerc jokes about a misspelling of his name

Research Outline

Taking an academic view of Formula 1 Absolutely Totally Seriously, I would propose viewing it through the idea of Rationality. Rationality has come up in my work on digital detoxing, where in a “Disenchanted” modern world, we perceive that technological progress explains the world down to neat facts and figures. We can bend the world to our own ends, since everything becomes calculable. To act rationally would be to do things for the intended goal, without the need for guesswork or fate.

Interpreting Formula 1 in these terms, the sport splits into its Rational and Irrational aspects. On the one hand, teams design machines using cutting edge technology, and sensors and numbers tell them how to optimise the car to be more likely to win. On the other hand, the teams are made of people, who are emotional, or rather irrational - who might in fact be the key ingredient for winning (like the magical je ne sais quoi of Lewis Hamilton or Ayrton Senna), or who might require motivating, might cause problems, or make mistakes.

I would hypothesise that the teams themselves prefer a rational view of F1. They want everything to be predictable, structured, cool, calm and collected. However, in order to survive, in order to entertain, the sport requires Irrationality - drama, friction, emotion, personality. Also under this heading would be fate, luck, the driver’s own headspace and personal life. A research project of Formula 1 would look at how the teams manage tension between these two aspects - and I would aim to answer questions through an ethnography of team culture.

My research questions would be something like this.

How do the teams incorporate digital technology into their work, and do Formula 1 teams rely more on technology, or on human skill?

What norms are there around emotion in Formula 1, and how is emotion managed by the teams?

How do Formula 1 teams balance the need to be entertaining with the need to win, and how is social media changing their relationship to this?

I better get back to my thesis.

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notbecauseofvictories · 6 years ago

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Reading Recs

Because studying for the bar is terrible, all the time, I have been reading a lot of fic to make up for how terrible it is. So have some (completely random, no two fandoms alike, plus some journalism) recs!

AN EVER-FIXED MARK by AMarguerite [pride & prejudice, elizabeth/darcy, elizabeth/colonel fitzwilliam] \\\ One would think that having the name of one's soulmate appear on one's wrist on one's sixteenth birthday would make matrimony much less complicated. It mostly does not. And not at all for Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourne.

why you should read it: This is a full-fledged novel, clocking in at 190k, and delightful from start to finish. (I started reading at 11pm and didn’t stop until 6am---screwing up both my sleep and study schedules. It’s just that good.) The author calls it a deconstruction of the “soulmate mark” trope, but it’s more of an imaginative exploration, lovingly done. It deftly interweaves British history, Napoleonic politics, and a healthy dose of Austen-like humor, as well as a cast of characters from both the Austen canon and history. (Not to spoil anyone, but the appearance of the Duke of Wellington is fucking delightful.)

There are a couple places where it feels a little too postmodern (mostly dialogue in some of the later chapters) but overwhelmingly it’s a fantastic love letter to Elizabeth and Darcy, the era, Austen, and both friends-to-lovers and soulmarks.

THE LADY AND THE KNIGHT by Jack Hawksmoor [labyrinth, sarah/jareth] \\\ Sarah's made a great life for herself, but Jareth has a problem. Will Sarah help him? What will it cost her if she does?

why you should read it: I read one of this author’s other Labyrinth stories first---“Sanctuary” which is also very good---but this is the fic that came out of nowhere and roundly punched me in the teeth. The Jareth/Sarah dynamic is so fey, so distinctly fairytale, with all the strangeness and grasping connotations of that. (I’m a sucker for a love that is profoundly selfish.) It also balances perfectly with the worldbuilding, which is done so well. There’s absolutely no dull expositional explanation just....the world and the stories therein, the way Sarah interacts with it as a Hero.

It is a decade old now, and there are places where it reads very....00s-era fic, but since I was around reading fic back then it was a fun trip back into nostalgia.

HERMIONE GRANGER’S HOGWARTS CRAMMER FOR DELINQUENTS ON THE RUN by waspabi [harry potter, harry potter/draco malfoy, ensemble] \\\ ‘You're a wizard, Harry' is easier to hear from a half-giant when you're eleven, rather than from some kids on a tube platform when you're seventeen and late for work.

why you should read it: Another alternate universe novel, though this is more canon divergence than fusion. Honestly, the best part is how the author portrays the ensemble---Hermione, Ron, Malfoy, Neville, Ginny, and Luna, all interacting with each other and with a Harry they don’t know is fantastic, and the sense of warm humor is very much J.K. Rowling in her “schoolboy antics” prime. Obviously the stakes are considerably higher in this fic, since the gang has left Hogwarts and is on the run from the Death Eaters, but it still manages to be quippy, and intimate.

Also, Hermione is wonderful.

LET ME LOOK AT THE SUN by telanu [the good place, michael/eleanor shellstrop] \\\ They’re eleven months into attempt 801, and Michael thinks this might be the reboot that finally takes.

why you should read it: I freely admit to getting on the Eleanor/Michael train (trolley?) purely because Ted Danson and Kristen Bell act the crap out of their scenes together. Also because it amuses me, but that’s my reason for everything. Either way, this fic takes the dynamic of “human garbage fire, on the verge of redemption” Eleanor Shellstrop and “not human, but maybe not completely evil” Michael and dials it up to eleven, underscoring both how similar and how different they are.

It strikes completely the right balance between cruelty and kindness, and also there is discussion about monsters. My kind of thing.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE by MirasolAbeille [discworld/sound of music, susan sto helit/georg von trapp] \\\ Captain von Trapp and his children get rather more than they bargained for with the new governess.

why you should read it: Crossovers have never been my cup of tea, but I love a somewhat-ridiculous premise taken very seriously, and that’s what’s happening here. Half the fun of the fic is Susan’s internal narration, which imports all the uncompromising pragmatism and irony of the character, and neatly skewers some of the....more twee aspects of a very twee musical. It also brings out a much more interesting depiction of Captain von Trapp---with a more formidable governess, he’s allowed to be smarter and harder, enthralled with Susan’s will and cunning rather than innocence.

This is a work in progress, but I’m definitely keeping my eye on it. Mostly because I have to know how it ends.

LIVE IN THE QUESTION by valeris [marvel, darcy lewis, some darcy lewis/bucky barnes, ensemble] \\\ In which Darcy is the Alpha child of two famous Omega Rights activists.

why you should read it: I honestly just love the worldbuilding on this. Darcy’s mother and father, her friendships, the dynamics complicated by designation, are all extremely interesting---ironically, the best way to get me interested in A/B/O fic seems to be lots of discussion of fictional gender roles and gender politics! Who knew.

ARCANA by rosa_acicularis [sherlock, f!john watson/sherlock holmes] \\\ Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required – a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget. (In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.)

why you should read it: Hey, we were all there in 2013, okay. Sometimes, you just want to return to the warm bosom of fandoms-gone-by, and this is one of my favorite Sherlock fics for a reason. Rosa_acicularis has been doing fairytale fusions since the Doctor Who days, and they’re always effective and interesting. Joanna Watson is wonderful, and her witching is wonderful, and it’s just....good.

THE REAL BANISHMENT IS THE FAMILY WE MADE ALONG THE WAY by scioscribe [thor: ragnarok, loki & hela] \\\ Hela did not ask for company in her sealed-up world, but evidently Odin is economical in containment strategies for his misbegotten children.

why you should read it: Loki gets punted into whatever terrible pocket of space Odin kept Hela in. They kill each other, and awkwardly bond over being a murderous family disappointment. This fic nails the dynamic, and even when they’re getting along, Hela and Loki are mocking and prickly and hateful. It’s exquisite.

+PLUS

I’ve mentioned before how much I love the nosleep reddit, and I finally found the time to sit down and catch up with the last.....couple months. Has anyone heard of the Left/Right Game? has to be my favorite since the Search & Rescue story, or maybe the Florida Pill Mills. I’m just a sucker for a sense of “further up and further in” where our everyday awareness is a thin layer of normalcy laid over the profoundly weird and deeply horrific.

Finally, in journalism, Chicago Magazine’s Journey to America made me homesick like crazy. A really good depiction of the midwest, in all its wonderful small-town weirdness.

#there's no way I'm going to be able to tag all these fandoms so I won't #fic recs #I'm terrible at comments so @ all these authors pretend I left comments instead of raving about you randomly on the internet #from the bookshelf

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hauntinghilarity · 6 years ago

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(FICTION) The Cosmic Lord, Joelene

First off, I didn't realize I misspelled the name until I looked up what outfits Dolly wore while singing this song. Given I kept referencing lyrics in order to write the parody song... i don't know how that happened either.

Anyway, I had often had the urge to make a song that implied Jolene from Dolly Parton's song was an Eldritch horror ever since I saw a post somewhere on the internet (likely on Reddit in the tumblr subreddit, leading to my confusing uncertainty) that suggested doing just that. It had been in my mind ever since.

So, upon finally doing that... I just felt it wasn't enough to just have the lyrics. Especially as I just rewrote lyrics that already existed. No, no a PARTICULAR damn muse decided that this was not enough. This particular muse had to be brought into the party!

So here is Doc and the woman I made up to sing the song sealing some Cosmic Lord that Doc decided to name Jolene because its horrible, mouth splitting name couldn't otherwise be turned into a song that he could force a human haunted by the said creature to sing. Possibly purely for his own amusement.

Enjoy, I'll add the lyrics alone at the end for those interested.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

A hut deep in the middle of the swamps was certainly not where the average problem was solved, this was far from the average problem. Iris had, apparently, found herself in a cosmic love triangle. Not that it could be called that, her husband very clearly was just not that into her. This cosmic entity did not, apparently, take well to rejection.

A unique and maddening plight, Iris had never been one to back down so easily. She wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with that behavior, and her grandparents had taught her act in a far more civilized manner in such trying times. It was the only way to get anything done in these types of situations, especially the situations that one believed to be unique.

Lucky for her, while a strange case, it was not as unique as she believe. Similar instances seemed to be sprinkled through history. Easy to miss or shrug off as the superstition and legends of their more imaginative ancestors. Given the distressing nature of her comatose-yet-deliriously-screaming husband, she was forced to do her best to connect some dots.

To her delight, there seemed to be plenty of more in-depth entries on this and a number of other creatures sprinkled throughout different books she decided to look into. What one might find suspicious, should they not feel the time-ticking on the safety of their loved one, is that a number seemed to have been inserted. A modern book full of laminated pages did not often have a piece of parchment, with the script clearly having been handwritten, fused to the spine as if it had been manufactured in such a manner.

A desperate mind seeking desperate knowledge did not often have the perception to notice these details when time was an issue. Stress had a matter of forcing tunnel vision of even the most powerful of minds. Especially when, regardless of its origin, the details these entries gave her made far more sense compared to the superstition-laden legends she had previously been finding.

She did become rather disturbed when a note was clearly left for her. Just like the rest, it was implanted in the book in such a way that tearing it out would be noticeable, both visually and audibly.

‘Iris, yes YOU Iris,

‘This is getting rather tiresome, and you are reading plenty of notes that have been written for different eyes. This would be far less of an annoyance if you bothered to put the books back where they had been placed. Do you know how long it took for me to understand a dewey decimal system?

‘You meat-bodies have ENOUGh languages that are troublesome enough to learn. Maddening book math is not what I was signing up for. If I had signed up for anything.

‘The book YOU are, or were, supposed to read on your problem you just.. Kept avoiding. Now it is checked out, and I have to write ANOTHER one of these because my attempts to do this subtly and properly got thrown out of whack trying to understand the aforementioned book-math.

‘So, to save us on time and to get something out of this headache that highly benefits the both of us, reading to this point will have given you a sudden feeling.

‘Please do not fret over this. Merely some ink-based shenanigans. Nothing that’ll harm you, it merely saves me placing a map. It will lead you directly to me.

‘That is, if you want to get a particular cosmic parasite yanked from your husband’s dreams.’

Signed, much like the other letters, Doc Boots.

Iris wasn’t entirely certain what part of this bothered her more. The fact it was clearly, and pointedly, directed to her. The fact she was called a meat-body, or that fact that she DID have a very strong desire to take a walk down a particular path found on a particular street that would have her in a particular neck of the woods taking her into a peculiar neck of a swamp that had her find a particular hut.

Many would probably find coming to such a hut in the first place foolhardy, let alone irrational. Irrational problems required irrational solutions. This was far better than the option she was beginning to feel was the best, which involved finding books on Necromancy, deciding if Necromancy worked or not, and using this knowledge to bring a particular horror writer back from the dead to answer a series of pointed questions. This somehow seemed the better deal. If anything, the letter writer could deal with all this morally-gray-supernatural-foolishness.

Regardless, nothing could quite prepare her for what awaited her within the hut that the same odd feeling that lead her here told her was her destination.

The entirety of the inside seemed to be dedicated to the alignment of a single ritual sigil. A dizzying series of circular and fractal designs that weaved throughout the central floor of the hut. Various areas of the floor were raised or lowered with delicate precision to conform to the different areas of the sigil.

Dizzying as it might be, Iris could come to understand that there was a circular, flat area in the center of the entire design where every edge, curve, and rune converged on. The design was covered in runes and symbols that conformed to the shape like an artist obsessed with point-shading. A number of platforms, that took on a shape that vaguely made her note a solar system before all the strange details continued to keep her mind reeling, were raised and held a number of bundled objects. Given the darkened liquids of varying colors, though equally metallic smelling, she was certain she was comfortable being left in the dark.

Strangest of all, the structure was encircled by a number of... Vegetables. While the same size and shape of the numerous vegetables each individual entity made up, stubby stems sprouted from them in order to form the vague shape of limbs. Sunken pits in the shape of spiraling stems formed where they stared out into the world, and sharp cuts where their mouths opened.

The creatures swayed and bounced to a harmony they kept. Strange noises based on the vegetable they were grown from making up a unique melody. One she found oddly familiar. The gourds, such as the pumpkins and squashes, made up a range of deeper breathy tones while the smaller, stalk-like vegetables made increasingly higher pitches.

She was so taken aback by every eldritch detail she had to accept within the hut that it took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t alone, besides the strange sentient vegetables. An androgynous creature that, at first glance, was easily mistaken for a humanoid. The more she focused on him and more her mind allowed her to process, the more she began to second guess her decision. Especially thanks to the petals encircling one of the creature’s equally strange looking eyes.

Not so much out of fear, with her history Iris had become rather hard to spook. She was beginning to feel, at this point, that the supernatural shenanigans she had so rigidly attempted to avoid belief in, less out of a stubborn grip on pure material-sciences and more due to a brief understanding on the power belief held in such beings, were now becoming so… Silly in their abrupt in-your-face hijinks that it had long since plummeted past the point of ridiculousness and was spinning annoyingly around the pit that would send it going down to rock bottom.

Then the notable eye slid from the creature’s orbital cavity, connected by a series of spindly stems that spiraled into a rope that connected from the end of what turned out to be an actual flower and disappeared into the orbital cavity of the creature’s vine-infested skull. The eye that took the space that would normally hold the flowers pistil was intently focused on her, the vine connecting it to the creature’s eye extending outward. ‘Zooming’ in on her features while the other eye seemed to be keeping stock of what seemed to be his odd minions.

“Good. ‘ere I thought I’d been keepin’ de veggie cult practicing for an eternity. Ya meat-bodied creatures just neva’ seem capable on keepin’ a reasonable schedule dese millenia. Makes de plots I bake ta keep de balance HIGHLY difficult. I ‘ope ya know de ‘eadaches I take on ta keep ya bumbling evolved-baboons from killin’ yaselfs. Equally so de fumblin’ evolved-fools that make up what I think are my kind…” The strange creature piped up suddenly.

Iris had a bit of trouble following the creature’s words for a number of reasons. For one, the movement in the creature’s throat was highly distracting. Not only did it alert her to the slithering that seemed to happen under the creature’s skin with every movement, she was becoming increasingly aware that the vines seemed less like a strange quirk and more like an invader. One that was intent on talking to her.

She really hated fire-with-fire situations.

The second problem was that the creature’s voice was mildly off-putting. It snapped between sounding feminine and higher, to a raspy deep tone somewhere between a dying male smoker and a newborn banshee. The latter snapping briefly like the static of a rapidly tuning radio as the slithering vines beneath the creature’s skin worked to play and tune the creature’s larynx, vocal chords, and neck muscles in a complex dance it clearly only somewhat understood. It did not help it seemed to insist on trying its best to put on its best attempt at a Cajun Accent. She had to admit, it helped make the creature’s tone sound more melodic rather than like nails on a chalkboard run through autotune.

The final problem was the creature spoke at an annoyingly excited speed, which made it very hard to tell if the creature was complaining like he was being underpaid for a difficult service or impatient in his excitement to perform whatever service seemed to be on offer.

She finally had to hold up her hands in the hopes it would calm him a moment to interject. To her surprise and delight, he quieted immediately and seemed to be forcing himself to patiently wait for her to speak. She had a small suspicion as to what sort of creature she was dealing with. Her grandparents always told her that, in the case she was suspicious of, it was best to be polite. One catches more pixies with honey than vinegar, or whatever ‘nanaism’ it was.

“Not to disrespect the time and effort you clearly put into getting in touch with me…” Iris relaxed somewhat. The creature seemed to perk up when she spoke to him politely, it seemed it wasn’t the first impression he normally got. Strange as the situation seemed, it seem the perfect amount of lunacy to help her with the dream-whore currently lurking in her comatose husband’s mind. “What is it I may or may not be on time for?”

The flower extending from the creature’s eyesocket perked up a bit, as if it had been startled into remembering what it had been doing, before swiveling to look at the strange ritual that seemed to be waiting for her in the center of the hut.

“Right, right, dis. Well, long story short, I became aware of ya plight. Well, ta be honest, I became aware of de PREVIOUS couple’s plight. A hint too late, sadly. Life’s not to focus on our failures though, merely learn from dem. Dis gave me a startin’ point. It ‘as been a lil bit, but ya seem ta be de latest one bein’ bothered by dis particular problem. De stars merely aligned so dat I can assist. Merely assist thought. I can put all de pieces inta place. It is up ta you ta do de rest.” The previously annoyed sounding tone had been replaced with a far more excited, and somehow quicker, one.

The creature held out a rolled up piece of parchment, giggling to himself as he did. “As ya meat-bodied types seem ta ‘ave trouble wit’ de name dat rings ta mind for m’self, probably would ‘ave issues if anyone understanding dat type’a magic anyway, I been introducin’ myself as Doc Boots. A scholar, but goin’ by ya kind’s stories, I guess ya could call me a witch doctor? What some’a de ones I’d consider colleagues bein’ called. Dat’s besides de point. Dat.”

Doc pointed towards the parchment he had forced into Iris’ hand.

“Dat explains your part. As ya see, I been preparin’ for ya showin’ up. Just got de Veggie cult tuned.” He gestured to the group of sentient, singing, swaying vegetables.

As Iris eyed the scroll she was given, she had a sinking feeling. She recognized what tune the cult was singing. Something the freaky flower seemed to have noticed.

“Oh, good, ya familiar wit’ de song. It required some rewrites, but given de last one who got taken by dis problem it seemed de most fitting. Gotta honor a failed patient afta’ all.” Doc said with a simple, sweet smile. Even as Iris glared daggers at him.

“No, you are clearly messing with me. There is NO way this will work.” Iris protested. She didn’t consider herself much a karaoke singer. Nor a fan of parody, yet apparently, here she was. This could not be real, this had vto be an elaborate prank her husband had set in motion. He always talked about starting up a couple-prank youtube. Denial was hopeful in believing maybe, just maybe, Doc was just and elaborate costume.

Sadly, the creature followed her protested with a good point. “What about dis situation leads ya ta doubt me? Look at me. Would ya truly believe my concept’a a joke involves ya simply singin’ a song ta seal away a cosmic deity I may or may not have drawn de attention of?”

Iris narrowed her eyes. “Not until ya gave too many details.”

Before she could protest further, she found herself standing in the middle of the sigil. The creature returned to the outside of the sigil opposite of her. His hand being placed on a rune carved skull in front of him, placed on the outer ring of the sigil leaving Doc standing just outside of it. “Regardless of who did what, de point’a de matter is what do ya got ta lose from singin’ a song, when de certainty of not singin’ it is some cosmic boogun is gonna use ‘is soul ta decorate ‘er growing pocket dimension?”

Iris stared a moment, then looked at the paper. “Is that why this lyric here is..”

The freaky flower stomped the bundle of vegetable that had long since replaced his host’s foot. “Ya not ‘ere because I needed critique on my song lyrics! I personally think I did q-REGARDLESS of the origins of lyrics, ya must sing it wit’ conviction. Sing it wit’ anger and a need ta fight.”

Opening her mouth once more, Doc seemed to know immediately it wasn’t to sing. His hand snapped up, and with a snap of his fingers, a purplish green glow shot through the runes on the ground, lighting up any that the ‘pulse’ that radiated from the creature ran into on its way to the woman in the center.

Before she could react, the pulse interacted with her. She didn’t even have to look down. She knew in her gut and the immediate clear smart-ass nature of the creature she had to deal with what fate had been forced on her.

She found herself in a familiar white suit befitting a well-known country singer, with an elegant design created from what she assumed to be diamonds. It was magically created, it had to be diamonds. It had not been elegantly enchanted onto her. Instead of replacing her outfit, going by the bunched fabric of the outfit she had been wearing poofing from the open chest of the jacket. The creature had just shoved her into her and called it a day. As she lifted her head to protested, she was quieted by the fact the outfit included a well-secured wig. Going by how it shifted, she was certain she probably now looked like the singer of the song the ritual was clearly based off of.

Giving a deep sigh, her shoulders dropping, she figured she might as well. If anything, this entire damn experience had distracted her from her problems at hand. The vine riddled being would at least be useful to fling at a cosmic beast should all else fail.

“Should match de beat fairly well. De one writin’ it was mildly under duress. As I popped outta nowhere and demanded it. I always forget I need ta lead wit’ de money ‘n riches first. Otha’wise, for whateva’ reason, ya meat bodies just think Imma rob ya. If I am what I think I am, de place dat I draw power from wouldn’ take too kindly ta me stiffin’ someone on a deal. Especially not an artist. Now! De outfit should ‘elp inspire ya. Didn’ shove ya in it purely for shits ‘n giggles. As de beat starts, just get goin’ and ya should be fine.” The flower did its best to console her.

“De veggie cult is doin’ de work’a dancin’ ta keep de fabric’a reality around ya secure enough. Just keep singin’, me ‘n de sigil I built will do de work’a keepin’ ya protected. Oh, and before ya ask, no. De thing’s name ain’ exactly Joelene. Ain’ even spelled like de song, but I was able to put some loopholes inta de belief and understandin’ of de writer. None of us could pronounce it, and it’d make a rather poor song anyway. Luckily, de previous couple was rather obsessed wit’ de song ‘n de boogun decided ta roll wit’ dat. Dey really must learn ta stop leavin’ lil loop’oles. My kind’s king’a dem!” Doc giggled wildly and gestured to the singing vegetables.

The ‘cult’ of vegetables surrounding her stopped for a moment, before restarting the beat they had been practicing. Iris gave a heavy sigh and, otherwise without options, began to sing.

“Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

Invoke thy name because you took my man.

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

You won’t take him just because you can. “

To her surprise, as she began to sing the walls of the hut, illuminated by strategically placed candles, cast shadows that made it appear as if a group were dancing around them, based on how everything had been lined up. The flicker of the candle and sway of the cult must have been the cause.

From the back of her mind she felt an odd tug. The world at the end of her perception flickered and swayed like the illusion cast by heated air. She did her best to cast her concern and sing with conviction, with strength. Her dearest depended on it, and she would be damned if her husband would be taken by something Lovecraft should have vomited out.

“A form humans can’t come to bare,

With captured souls turned into hair,

Eldritch Skin,

And eyes countless,

it seems…”

She could have sworn she felt something behind her. At that very moment, Doc slammed his vegetation laden foot onto the beginning to the sigil’s runic circle. A more concentrated and steady glow, like before, began to spread throughout the sigil. As it made contact with each pedestal, the runes scribbled over the cloth covering the bundle would glow bright enough to cover the object in its blinding light, before bursting into a sea of glowing balls.

These wisps of light buzzed around the circle, and they seemed to be collecting behind her. Iris held back a flinch, as she swore she could sense something screaming. She did not know how to describe it, as the only noise she heard was crafted for the ritual. The screaming, however, felt like it was radiating from her very subconscious. Like it was somehow coming from somewhere far, far away and only its faintest echoes could be felt behind her.

Somehow, this replaced her uncertainty with hope. She began to sing with more confidence. The concern replaced by the fire of her rage, which she pumped into the words. It seemed to have an effect, as the glowing runes at her feet added an orange hue to the show of color which rippled out to the remaining runes.

“Your smile cracks across their dreams,

Your Presence warps reality,

And yet here I stand against you,

Joelene.”

Bit by bit the offerings were consumed. Her vision warped in lines around the sigil. Something her mind refused to admit was surrounding her was moving in rapid, frantic trails. The screaming, she felt in her gut, was originating from this strange anomaly in her vision. This must be the beast that was tormenting her husband. This had to be her prey.

“You’ve come to take him in his sleep,

But there’s nothing I can do to keep,

From trying, as he screams your name,

Jolene.

From what I’ve come to understand,

You’ve stolen the souls of countless men,

To shape your own destiny,

Joelene.“

As the anomaly continued to frantically flail through her vision, she felt there was power in the anger she had begun to harbor for this creature. The despair and trauma her relationship had undergone due to this horror, she felt, could be pumped into her words in order to give them more power.

As all the runes that covered the sigil found their glow and all the offerings had begun to consume, the area directly beneath the rapidly moving anomaly gained a brighter glow, tracking and following it as the light pulsed towards the skull Doc held, his mouth moving rapidly in a quiet chant.

“You forced my little talk with you,

This song I sing will capture you,

Not matter what you try to do,

Joelene.

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

The cosmic lord that tried to take my man,

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

Sealed away, she won’t try that again."

Doc joined her, backing up the repetition of the name they had forced upon the entity. The blurring anomaly in her vision was forced into the glow beneath it. The sigil, glow, and runes slid rapidly beneath her, encircling the glowing bundle she assumed was the newly captured ‘Joelene’.

"Joelene, Joelene."

The final runes that lead to the skull seemed to be sucked into the upper jaw of the skull. The entire strange scene finally got sucked into the skull, which kept an ethereal glow in its sockets and runes, but otherwise, held no clues towards what the entity with in was. It seemed to have even sucked up the outfit and wig that had been forced on her.

Doc picked up the skull, beaming in delight. “Well, should I be correct on our timin’, ya husband shouldn’ ‘ave been so deep in ‘er clutches dat dat would’a caused ‘im de slightest bit’a ‘arm. Should be makin’ ‘is way back ta ‘is body through de dreamlands as we speak! Might not be awake when ya get dere, but will be soon enough.”

Now clearly preoccupied with the skull in his hand, the strange creature gestured to the door. Clearly indicating it was time for her to make her leave. “De contents of dis skull is all de payment I need. No need ta concern ya’self otha’wise. De danger dat could ‘ave befallen you or your husband and my choice ta withhold dat knowledge from ya until now will be considered enough payment.”

Iris was rather overwhelmed. She wasn’t even certain she was even living out this experience and not dreaming of it in a fury of sleep deprivation. She couldn’t quite feel any relief. In fact, she felt rather numb. She was rather certain, thanks to the lunacy of this entire event, she would find herself waking with a start huddled in her husband’s hospital room.

The vegetables began to force a line and hop, one by one, into the mouth of a pumpkin whose mouth had opened wide enough to accommodate them. She could swear that, instead of the inside of a pumpkin, she saw a strange and horrifying orange world filled with the strange, sentient vegetables. Maybe she would prefer it be a dream after all.

Shaking this belief and concern off, Iris quickly took the opening given to her and immediately fled from the hut and the swamp it was in, content to be back with her beloved and as far from this lunacy as possible.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

Invoke thy name because you took my man.

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

You won’t take him just because you can.

A form humans can’t come to bare,

With captured souls turned into hair,

Eldritch Skin,

And eyes countless,

it seems…

Your smile cracks across their dreams,

Your Presence warps reality,

And yet here I stand against you,

Joelene.

You’ve come to take him in his sleep,

But there’s nothing I can do to keep,

From trying, as he screams your name,

Jolene.

From what I’ve come to understand,

You’ve stolen the souls of countless men,

To shape your own destiny,

Joelene.

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

You made a poor choice trying to take my man,

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

You won’t take him just because you can.

You could have had your choice of man,

But then you came into my den,

You can not keep him from me,

Joelene.

You forced my little talk with you,

This song I sing will capture you,

Not matter what you try to do,

Joelene.

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

The cosmic lord that tried to take my man,

Joelene, Joelene, Joelene, Joelene,

Sealed away, she won’t try that again.

Joelene. Joelene.

#fiction #country #music #lyrics #short story #humor #horror #doc boots #fae #lovecraft #lovecraftian

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Has McKinsey Lost Its Luster? What went wrong at McKinsey Partners at McKinsey yesterday voted out their leader, Kevin Sneader, as the company deals with blowback over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis. It was the latest tough headline for the consulting firm, which may face growing threats to its status as a trusted adviser to companies and governments — and as a magnet for top talent. Mr. Sneader was denied a second three-year term as global managing partner, weeks after McKinsey agreed to pay nearly $600 million to settle investigations by 49 states into sales advice it gave drug makers about opioid sales. It was the first time since 1976 that a McKinsey leader had failed to win a follow-on term. The candidates to replace Mr. Sneader are Bob Sternfels, based in San Francisco, and Sven Smit, based in Amsterdam. McKinsey’s reputation has taken a hit in recent years. Beyond the opioid crisis, the firm has been criticized for some high-profile missteps: Days after taking on the top role in July 2018, Mr. Sneader had to apologize for the consulting firm’s work with a state-owned power provider in South Africa, which was enmeshed in a corruption scandal that brought down the country’s president. That same month, he had to defend McKinsey over its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the Trump administration’s harsh deportation policies. (The firm ended its work soon after.) In 2019, McKinsey paid $15 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into its failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest in its corporate bankruptcy practice. One big question: Will graduates think twice about McKinsey? A huge challenge facing Mr. Sneader, and soon his successor, was rebuilding trust in the white-shoe firm. Concerns about the firm’s culture could hurt its status as a premier destination for elite M.B.A. graduates, just as more budding business tycoons are favoring tech companies — whether for money, prestige or more progressive social cultures — over consulting and banking. Mr. Sneader told The Financial Times, which first reported his election loss, that McKinsey was coming off its “best recruiting year ever.” It plans to to hire more new employees this year than ever before. There’s reason to think that McKinsey can recover. “Franchises such as McKinsey are incredibly robust,” the FT’s Lex column noted, while adding that the firm needed to make sure it was not seen as “representing an old elite order.” At Harvard Business School last year, 24 percent of graduates went into consulting, down from … 25 percent in 2016. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Corporate leaders urge Congress to pass President Biden’s stimulus proposal. More than 150 executives, including David Solomon of Goldman Sachs and Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, urged lawmakers to approve the $1.9 trillion bill, saying “more must be done” to help the economy. Promising new data on Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine. The shots provide strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19 and may reduce the spread of infection. The F.D.A. is set to vote on whether to approve the vaccine within days. Biden’s pick for U.S. trade representative faces scrutiny. Katherine Tai, a former House aide, is scheduled to testify before the Senate today. She’ll likely be questioned about how trade policy will shift from former President Donald Trump’s “America First” stance — and how it won’t. An analysis shows Texans paid more for their deregulated power market. Consumers who bought electricity from the state’s deregulated market, which suffered widespread outages during recent winter storms, paid $28 billion more than residents who relied on traditional utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Uber’s Chinese rival may roll out in Europe. Didi Chuxing plans to introduce ride-hailing service in European markets like Britain and France, Bloomberg reports. That could bring a tough new competitor in some of Uber’s big markets. The strategy at MicroStrategy Michael Saylor, the C.E.O. of the business intelligence software firm MicroStrategy, is a big believer in Bitcoin and urges companies to diversify their assets by shifting corporate cash into the cryptocurrency. That’s what MicroStrategy has been doing, in a big way: yesterday, it announced a billion-dollar Bitcoin purchase. The company has spent more than $2 billion on Bitcoin since the summer. MicroStrategy “remains focused on two corporate strategies,” Mr. Saylor said in a statement: growing its software business and “acquiring and holding Bitcoin.” Explaining the relationship between those two priorities, the company’s finance chief, Phong Le, said the “Bitcoin strategy” was “complementary to the software business, by enhancing awareness of our brand and providing opportunities to secure new customers.” The company’s purchases have been well timed: Bitcoin’s price is currently double the company’s cost basis, implying a gain of nearly $2.5 billion. Before it started buying Bitcoin in August, MicroStrategy’s market cap was just over $1 billion. It is now nearly $8 billion. “It’s amazing that a board of directors allowed this,” the financial adviser Marc Lichtenfeld said, citing Bitcoin’s extreme volatility and its tenuous link to the software business. Buying crypto in enormous amounts as a marketing tool will not impact the fundamental prospects of MicroStrategy’s business by adding to its earnings and cash flow, Mr. Lichtenfeld noted. “Regulators could have concerns,” Richard Levin, a fintech lawyer at Nelson Mullins, said. “Any publicly traded company bringing a digital asset onto its balance sheet needs to proceed with caution.” It’s fine to buy an asset because it is appreciating, Mr. Levin said, but companies need to tread carefully to avoid the appearance that they are acquiring it to generate hype. Companies that reoriented their businesses around cryptocurrency — beyond just buying a lot of it, like MicroStrategy — have run into trouble with the S.E.C. in the past, like Overstock, the retailer and token purveyor, and Long Blockchain, the rebranded iced-tea maker that was delisted this week. GameStop’s stock is doing that thing again. The video game retailer’s share price more than doubled yesterday, an echo of the meme-stock mania of last month. (After-hours trading implies that shares could rise again today.) Other stocks popular among online traders, like the theater chain AMC, also jumped for no discernible reason other than the unbowed enthusiasm of traders who gather on Reddit, which briefly crashed yesterday. Activists take old-school approach at Kohl’s A group of activist investors has taken a 9.5 percent stake in the department store retailer Kohl’s and are pushing for changes. The activists have lobbed a number of criticisms, like stagnant sales and declining gross margins, and offered suggestions: add executives with retail experience to the board and do a sale-and-leaseback of property. Shares of the retailer popped when the stake was disclosed this week, but can these activists succeed where Bill Ackman at J.C. Penney and Starboard at Macy’s struggled? This isn’t Bed Bath & Beyond, where the activist group taking on Kohl’s last had success. Bed Bath & Beyond didn’t own much real estate, but it had a number of underperforming divisions and low board turnover. Kohl’s has tried to navigate the department store downturn by partnering with grocers to fill space in its larger boxes, with Amazon to offer returns from its stores and with Sephora to attract new customers. And while the activist group wants Kohl’s to add more board members with retail experience, retailers have in recent years focused on hiring from outside the industry to bring in new skills, especially in technology. Kohl’s said it has added six new directors since 2016. Activists have pushed sale-and-leaseback deals on retailers before. The investors love them because they quickly generate cash that they hope will be returned to shareholders. Retailers hate them because they are left with less flexibility after those activists have gone. For years, Macy’s rejected Starboard’s push to monetize its real estate; when the pandemic hit last year, that property backed billions in much-needed loans. Even after the pandemic passes, the continued rise of e-commerce will force retailers to reassess their property portfolios. A sale-and-leaseback deal, which often entails long-term leases, could lock in retailers like Kohl’s at a time when they need to be nimble. Charlie Munger lets loose The 97-year-old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway is known for being Warren Buffett’s more brusque right-hand man. He lived up to his reputation yesterday at the annual meeting of the Daily Journal, the Los Angeles-based newspaper publisher that he chairs, during which he traditionally fields questions on a range of topics. Some of the highlights: “I think we’re crazy to allow it.” Mr. Munger said that the recent meme-stock mania was “fed by people getting commissions and other revenues out of this new bunch of gamblers,” apparently referring to online brokerages like Robinhood. He added, “It’s really stupid to have a culture which encourages as much gambling in stocks by people who have the mind-set of racetrack bettors.” “The world would be better off without them.” SPACs have been the hottest trend on Wall Street, but Mr. Munger finds the phenomenon another instance of irresponsible gambling. “This kind of crazy speculation in enterprises not even found or picked out yet is a sign of an irritating bubble,” he said, adding some profane words for the banks bringing these companies to market. “I don’t think Bitcoin is going to end up the medium of exchange for the world.” Mr. Munger said that digital tokens were too volatile to replace traditional currencies, and compared crypto to gold. “Since I never buy gold, I never buy any Bitcoin,” he said. Speaking of Berkshire, the conglomerate is set to report earnings on Saturday — and publish the latest annual investor letter from Mr. Buffett, required reading for the billionaire’s thoughts on the markets, the economy, politics and more. THE SPEED READ Deals The carmakers Volvo and Geely canceled plans to merge, and instead will collaborate on electric vehicle technology. (FT) ReNew Power, the biggest clean-energy provider in India, will go public by merging with a U.S.-based SPAC in a deal valued at $8 billion. (Reuters) The former House speaker Paul Ryan will join Solamere Capital, the investment firm co-founded by a son of Senator Mitt Romney. Solamere recently sponsored a SPAC Mr. Ryan founded. (WSJ) Politics and policy The Fed chair Jay Powell told House lawmakers that improving child care policies could help bring more women into the labor market. (NYT) The Manhattan district attorney’s office has reportedly begun taking a close look at Donald Trump Jr. as part of their investigation into the Trump family’s business. (Daily Beast) Tech ViacomCBS announced the rebranding of its streaming service as Paramount+, including a new “Godfather” series and a reboot of “Frasier.” (NYT) Relatedly: Why do so many streaming services have a + in their name? (NYT) Facebook pledged to pay news publishers at least $1 billion over the next three years. (FT) Best of the rest Workhorse is a small electric vehicle maker that was beloved by Wall Street until it lost out on a lucrative U.S. Postal Service contract. (NYT) The New York Times released an internal report calling for changes to make its workplace more diverse and inclusive. (NYT) “Podcasting Is Booming. Will Hollywood Help or Hurt Its Future?” (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #Lost #Luster #McKinsey

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thepricecaulfield · 7 years ago

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Some thoughts about the relationships between Chloe & Rachel and Chloe & Max - Part 2

I had this post about these relationships and characters a few days ago, and a discussion about it on Reddit and elsewhere.

I also promised that I would add a little more or correct or change things.

I will not post everything again, you can read the original post here: https://thepricecaulfield.tumblr.com/post/168146486640/some-thoughts-about-the-relationships-between

Now my thoughts, comments and possibly also changed views:

1. Max is also manipulative:

I understand this argument and I do not entirely agree with it. She uses her powers to help people (example Kate, Chloe) and doesn’t need to use them to have an advantage, but can do it (example Dana, Taylor, Warren, David’s garage.). There are some selfish goals behind it, but Chloe and Rachel are the bigger targets.

It’s up to us whether we use these manipulations or not, but I wouldn’t characterize Max if she would do it herself.

2. You’re just trying to demonize Rachel:

No. Absolutely not. She is a girl devoured by doubts and inner conflicts, who is very ambivalent simply because of her charm and her kind. She doesn’t always consciously try to manipulate or pull people around her, it sometimes happens unconsciously, sometimes it’s part of her game. She is also honest in some moments, but also conceals or hides parts.

She is very impulsive and very demanding. She seems to be interested in Chloe and trying to help her. Apparently. But I will think about it in section 6 or try to do so.

3. Chloe and Rachel: True love? Flirt? Best friends?

I need to immerse myself in some personal experiences, I had a “Rachel Amber” in my life. The relationship between the two of them starts pretty damn steep, with passion, crazy feelings. We don’t know the way of the two of them over the next years, we only see the first days and know the end and know what Rachel did towards the end. We know Chloe was emotionally very attached to her, but I doubt that Rachel was attached to her later.

Best friends? Yeah, definitely. Friends with benefits? Possibly at first, but unlikely towards the end.

They were definitely best friends, as LiS itself implied by dialogues.

Unfortunately, my personal experience has also been that at the beginning it was like a wild fire, hot, passionate, but with time it cooled down, distanced itself, and towards the end it ended up in cheating and betrayal. Some people may not see the Frank and Jefferson story as cheating and betrayal, but it was just that for Chloe, and for many people it is the same in real life.

4. Chloe’s fate without Rachel:

Chloe would have been in prison long ago, on hard drugs, an alcoholic or even dead without Rachel. That is something I did not emphasize enough at my first presentation. She was a lifeline for Chloe in a dark time, I don’t think there’s much to say.

5. Rachel is a natural actor:

It is pointed out again and again in LiS and BtS that Rachel is a kind of Chamelon, an actress who gets her will and can adjust very well. The point also becomes very clear in the play where she improvises. It’s her world. It is in her blood and seems to determine her life, she doesn’t really come out of the role of the actress, can’t escape her.

6. impulsiveness, traits of character and feelings:

Yes, that’s such a topic, on the one hand Rachel is absolutely enchanting, endearing and attractive. But then comes her impulsive side, she changes her mood rapidly, seems icy cold or mega pissed off. She’s just flirting and playing with Chloe, the next moment she pushes Chloe away real hard.

She seems to be interested in Chloe, caring for her. But this never really becomes so clear, she focuses on her own goal: to escape from Arcadia Bay. This is suggested and discussed several times, especially in the theater play and then on the way home afterwards.

Some people would now throw in a “yes, but…” over the school and Rachel took the blame: it was her idea and she “convinced"Chloe. Not that she needed much persuasion, Chloe was already under her grip.

Rachel doesn’t seem to be really worried, concerned or guilty about the fire she started. She doesn’t seem to have a remorse about it. She also has no qualms about drugging Victoria to play in the play.

With Rachel, it’s hard to tell the truth from fake. Owing to her acting talent and her personality it is sher difficult. She’s both an angel and a devil.

7. Chloe’s love for Max:

Hm, that’s very strange and rather theoretical or maybe not, but I think there are some if not many people who will agree with me: Chloe has always loved Max in one way or another and always had feelings for her. This is indicated by the letters in BtS and individual thoughts, the third dream points in this direction. It’s a subliminal message, her “hate” or dislike for Max, hinted at in BtS is exactly the opposite, because Chloe has very strong feelings for Max, whatever they may be at that time.

In LiS itself this is also taken up again, which she writes in BtS, that she would immediately take Max back if Max would be there again tomorrow.

Someone pointed out to me that the scene at the diner when Chloe learns that Max has powers and then says,“You could make a move on me and I wouldn’t even know! Chloe’s tendencies and attempts at flirting are already the first signs. I agree with this conditionally, the most obvious thing for me is still the pool scene.

There seems to be a thread here, though, because why would Chloe be flirting with Max? After one day and after five years of neither seeing nor writing? So it seems like there’s been more to Chloe before. And I don’t regard Chloe as a person who just digs up anyone who comes along.

8. Conclusion:

I stand by my opinion that Rachel was a lifeline for Chloe, and the relationship between the two of them was meaningful but not healthy. There are just too many negative things that strike me and open up for me.

The dependency that Chloe builds up very quickly is evident in BtS, she doesn’t want to be alone any more, she tries to fill the hole/the darkness (Max) in her heart at all costs and gives up a lot for it and puts herself in the hands of Rachel. I think the dream sequence about the fire and the darkness I don’t have to repeat?

I still see Max and Chloe as a healthier kind of relationship, since Chloe’s starting to get softer, more down-to-earth. She starts to reconsider her actions and lets herself be convinced. Max in turn gains self-confidence and strength.

Of course, this relationship has its price for Max and for Chloe (If you save Chloe, what I would do again and again.), but here I see a Yin-Yang relationship that balances out and which can give itself a lot of power and energy and which will heal these wounds with time.

#life is strange #pricefield #amberprice #max caulfield #chloe price #lis #lis bts #lifeisstrange #rachel amber #before the storm

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sinsiriuslyemo · 7 years ago

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SVU: episode 8, Intent

Okay so, I just watched the new episode. I know some people haven’t watched it yet, so I’m going to be leaving the spoiler commentary under the cut.

Initial Thoughts

This episode was fairly well done with respect to the balance between the case and the “extra” scenes, and by extra I mean the look into the personal live. I thought the pacing was done well; the case was the main attraction, which I’ve said time and time again should be the formula of this show, always. As far as the personal story lines, I have some thoughts, which will be under the cut like I said above to respect those who don’t want any spoilers. I will say this though, I’m failing to see the point anymore with respect to the Sheila/Liv/Noah story line. The Rollins/Carisi scene was awkward at best, and almost seemed like different characters we were watching in my opinion. So...on to the spoilers...

The Case

I thought the case was innovative, and fresh. We really haven’t had a case like this one before, so I very appreciated that. We’ve catfishing stories, but none quite like this where it was both sides being catfished. Steve Howey was amazing as “The Monster,” I really enjoyed his guest star role, and it was kind of refreshing to see a pro fighter portrayed this way because not all of them are ‘tough guys’ in and out of the ring.

I also very much loved that he took that plea deal, because he could see that even though he was led to believe one thing, he did end up violating someone.

“That’s a man!!” is legit what I yelled out as I was watching the episode.

I loved that we saw plenty of Barba in this episode as well, and that the case and it’s complexities were center stage.

As far as the actual perp goes, I wish we had seen just a little bit more of how this evidence that Carisi found had been discovered. Now, granted this may have made for a bit of a boring scene, and I loved the bar scene between Liv/Rafael/Carisi but if the perp only had 6 followers on Instagram, and with her mother’s illness and her having to care for her, this leads me to believe that she didn’t post very often.

Also, a bit of a plot hole with the police officer from West Virginia saying, “her voice sounded familiar” and then identifying her as the poster on Reddit, but later Barba only references text posts. Does this mean that the WA officer was referring to her ‘voice’ as a writer? Or was he referring to her actual voice, which would make more sense to me-- if she didn’t have many followers, how would he recognize her writer’s voice enough to be able to say, she’s this user?

In the end, as a whole, I did enjoy the case as catfishing happens all the time and to so many people. It is something that needs to be brought to light that most times this seemingly “innocent” thing can very much go wrong, too far, and have a lasting impact on the unsuspecting victims.

The Rollisi-almost-kissed-and-then-Sonny-was-butthurt Scene

This entire sequence was awkward. Awkward, awkward, awkward. From the scene where they almost kiss to Sonny’s behavior the next day, and what we can infer was a day or two later. I don’t enjoy that the writers are so quick to have Amanda hook up with her partners (except for Fin because, let’s be real, Fin wouldn’t go there ever). Honestly, she’s changed as a character after she had Jesse, and while this scene was away from home, away from her motherly duties and a time where she got to just be a cop again, it felt as though we were watching the old Amanda.

I definitely didn’t like that feeling of “taking two steps back” with regard to her demeanor during and after. Not so much during, but absolutely after, where as @missjennifercole pointed out to me last night while she was watching the episode, she basically suggested that she would in fact sleep with Sonny if given the opportunity. This just doesn’t sound like the Amanda that she as a character has grown into. It sounds like the just-got-here Amanda.

Let’s also not forget that she and Declan (which if you remember, is Jesse’s father) parted on good terms. Eventually his assignment will be over, and he may very well come back to New York in order to try and build a relationship with his daughter, and for all we know he may even want to try building one with Amanda as well. The writers really should be keeping that in mind when they write for her. This isn’t to say that she can’t sleep with someone if she wants to. She is, after all a single mother, but she’s a mother first and foremost, so this thing with Buck the bartender likely happened because she was away from home and there was no way they would ever see each other again.

Had this scene taken place in New York, it likely would have turned out differently.

I’m sorry to the Rollisi shippers (whom if I’m not mistaken are also upset about how this scene went) but that almost-kiss was so awkward. It was not natural or organic at all. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’d like to offer a fresh perspective on this scene...

If you really watch their movements before the almost-kiss, one could argue that it wasn’t an almost-kiss at all, and that they were just super drunk and close together. The reason Carisi was so butt-hurt afterward was because as far as he knew Amanda had turned a new leaf after having Jesse with regard to her love life. Meaning that she was more weary of having one night stands with strangers, and it wasn’t that he was butt-hurt at all, but that he was disappointed in her as a friend.

I’m not saying this is what I think, especially with the last scene where they acknowledge (don’t acknowledge) their time in West Virginia, but it’s possible. Also, while she was talking about ‘sometimes you sleep with someone you love, and sometimes you sleep with someone you don’t,’ you would think she would have brought up their ‘almost-kiss’ and either tell him that she wanted them to stay friends, or that she was interested in seeing if there was anything there.

All of that said, Carisi’s initial reaction was realistic, but the shortness in his attitude towards her in that last scene was absolutely out of character. This is someone he’s grown incredibly close with in the last couple of seasons, and it almost felt like this incident with Buck the bartender had him reevaluating their friendship. He’s seen other people in the past, so this doesn’t make sense for Sonny if he was jealous and it was making him want to back away from the friendship.

Hurt, yes maybe, because it’s pretty rude to decline sleeping with someone and say that you’re tired, and then go out and bring someone else home and sleep with them. Now, we don’t know the circumstances; maybe Buck came to the motel, and Amanda just let him in. We don’t know for sure that she went back out to find him, so...that’s just some food for thought.

Listen guys, I love all my Rollisi shippers, I truly do, but I maintain that these two are just better served as friends. One, because Rollins is the kind of character who has immensely benefited from having a platonic male friend in her life, that truly cares for both her well-being and that of her daughter’s. Secondly, I really want them to break away from having Amanda sleep with all of her partners. That was the old Amanda, she’s grown since then. If you’re going to give her a love-interest, have it be with someone that reflects her growth, not brings her back to old habits.

I’m sure some will argue that Sonny is no Nick, and they would be right, but we’ve seen that having relationships within the squad never works. And I would hate to lose the camaraderie that we all love between Sonny and Amanda.

The Liv/Noah/Sheila Trainwreck

I’m not gonna lie, this story line is not looking good. It seems to me that the writers simply wanted to give Olivia something interesting to work through this season, and thought, “Okay, let’s make Ellie’s mom actually be alive. That’ll cause some friction.”

The problem is that it hasn’t been handled very well at. Let’s start with the fact that Live seemed like she was against Sheila even being in Noah’s life in the first place. This could be explained by the fact that Sheila was coming at her sideways, and luckily that was resolved relatively quickly.

Now the whole, Noah asked about Ellie thing; he never said, my mom or my real mommy. He just said, “Ellie,” which would indicate to me that Sheila (as she later clarified) mentioned her in passing, but likely did not identify Ellie as his real mother. What is the problem if Noah gets to know Ellie as Ellie now while he’s young so that when he gets older and Liv decides to tell him the truth about his mother, he already has some kind of attachment to her? Honestly, what the hell would be so bad about that?

I don’t believe that Sheila slipped in the sense that she revealed to Noah that Ellie was his real mother because she is wanting to stay on Liv’s good side. Therefore, she would be cautious about saying things like that. Mentioning Ellie in passing, however, is more realistic and in my opinion totally harmless. Ellie could be anyone; she could be an aunt or a cousin as far as Noah is concerned. So Liv lowkey freaking out over Sheila mentioning Ellie is a little over the top.

Now the damn kidnapping. This is obviously and more than likely something that will tie back to Olivia, but what the hell is this show-runner trying to pull? Honestly. I suppose it could be someone that is somehow tied to Ellie, but who would possibly do that? And I swear if they’re trying to pull the, “Oh my Gosh! Ellie isn’t dead, she was just afraid of testifying against Johnny D! WHAAAAAAAATTTTTT?!” they are seriously going to fuck up with this fandom.

It was one thing that Ellie’s mother was still alive, but to put this baby, this child through hell and have it be for absolutely nothing at all would be a huge disservice both to the show and to the fandom. So I’m hoping this isn’t the case.

But then who else could it have been?

William Lewis is dead. So is Johnny D.

This leaves either a random perp whom Olivia convicted or investigated some time ago (we’ve seen that before) or someone who is connected to Ellie, but is not Ellie herself.

I suppose it’s also possible that there is no connection at all and this was just a random stranger/kidnapper. It does happen. Though, Noah didn’t make a sound, so this might be indicative to him either recognizing the person or being drugged, in which case, is there security footage available? We won’t know this until the show comes back.

Also, I just need to say this as a mother myself-- Did anyone else arch a brow at Liv’s reaction to the phone call, that likely went something like this:

Sheila: *hysterical voice* Liv, you need to come meet me right now. I can’t find Noah. I only took my eyes off him for a second as I was grabbing a coat off the rack, but he’s gone Liv! He’s gone! I can’t find him! Please come now!

Liv: *almost-facepalm*

Seriously? That’s it? You were just told that your son is missing, and that’s the reaction you have? Now, being frozen is one thing-- we saw that with Sheila. She froze, but slowly we saw the panic setting in as she looked around frantically, low-key hyperventalating while she looked for her grandson. We could see the thought process in her facial expression going from, “Please let this be a joke, and he’s just hiding somewhere,” to “Omg, where the fuck is he?! No, this can not be happening!”

Liv, however...she gave me the “not again” feels big time. Had she expressed facially similar emotions as Sheila, I wouldn’t be pointing this out, but if anyone has a screenshot or made a gif of that last shot in the episode, please reblog and leave it up and just look at that damn mug right now.

Are you for real?

Beyond that, they need to leave Noah alone. The story line is getting old already, and it’s not as though they don’t have other characters they could do story lines with, first of all. Secondly, if this shit keeps happening to Noah because Liv is his mother, how are we supposed to believe that child services won’t get involved at some point?

Why can’t we have parenting story lines that are relatable? I want to see Noah throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t get his way. How does Liv deal with that? I want to see Noah getting into trouble at school or Noah mouthing off, because it happens. He’s a kid. Give us kid troubles to grow the character and grow Liv as a mother. Don’t put a kid who’s already been through a lot of trauma through more trauma for the sake of making things interesting.

It isn’t fair to the Olivia Benson character and more over it isn’t fair to the viewers. Period.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, I enjoyed the episode but as far as the subplots are concerned, we’ll just have to see how they handle the aftermath/resolutions. It’s hard to gauge at this point, but both plot points had very rocky jump-starts. I did however love that the case took center stage, as that’s how all episodes should be formatted. And there was an acceptable amount of Barba in the episode, so there’s always that.

Let me know in the comments below what your thoughts were! Do you agree with the things I pointed out? Do you have different interpretations/views? I’d love to hear from you!!

#law and order svu #Law and Order: Special Victims Unit #my thoughts #s19e8 #Intent

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rossmallo · 7 years ago

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I'm going to start with the main point of my discussion, as a sort of pre-emptive TLDR. After 12 years of playing, I am now done with Runescape, and Menaphos was the straw that broke the camel's back. It has shown, in no uncertain terms, what the future is going to hold, and it is a future I do not want to pay to be a part of. Jagex needs to learn its limitations, not overwork their employees to the point it results in inferior, sloppy work, and focus on quality over quantity. Because if the current trend of updates continues, I won't be the last to quit over it.

So yeah, that's the TLDR – Be warned, I am going to go into total ramble / Purple Prose mode here, because this has been on my mind for a while and I just want to process it by getting it out in writing.

Runescape has been a game I have had an interesting past with, my interest and liking for it ebbing and flowing as time went on. I've loved it, I've hated it, and everything in between. But, after several things just repeatedly chipping away at me, my faith in the game has now completely evaporated. I want to like the game, I really do, but the truth of the matter is no longer ignorable – The game is floundering, partly in spite of – or possibly due to - Jagex's best intentions to give us as much content as possible, instead of focusing on realistic, achievable goals.

Now, anyone who knows me on the Official Forums will know that I am kind of infamous for being very vocal against microtransaction stuff (Don't click off. This isn't what this is about). This rather touchy subject had worn me down quite a bit, making me eventually feel very cynical and apathetic about the game, eventually causing me to drift away, only logging in once or twice a week to get a few daily things done or check in with people.

Eventually, though, I made a snap decision which caused me to play the game a whole lot more. Skip to about a month ago, and this increased play-time had paid off - I got my Max Cape. I also completed Sliske's Endgame – I used the lamps from that to utterly skip Magic 98-99.

I had wanted to do this to get closure on Runescape. It had devolved from a game I had loved to play, to a game that I only felt I had to... To a game that I felt I had to expunge from my consciousness in order to know peace. Every time I looked at my skills, I knew that Completion Principle would not let me go until I had finished what I had started. I wanted to finish the Sliske Questline and get Maxed, and be done with it all.

However...As I pushed on with the quests, I felt the old embers of love for the game spark back into a flame. The story I had grown up with, the feeling of progress, it all felt right again. And for just a week or so, I felt like there was hope for the game once more. Sure, there was a lot of patchiness with the updates recently, but it was going to get better, right?

...Nope. Menaphos happened, and it made me finally snap awake.

Something I had predicted from the very first day of expansions being announced had shown itself to be very, very true. Allow me to quote myself from back then.

“I'm looking at these expansions, and I'm worried. I'm going to straight up say this: When expansions come, the game is either going to fly, or going to die. There will be no middle ground.

Jagex is suggesting that they can do a normal weekly game update at the same time of doing a huge expansion-style update every three months. No. In their current situation, there is NO way they can do this. That is an unpaid increase in workload that is utterly untenable – Something has to give.”

And give, it did.

Let's not kid ourselves here. Almost all of the updates, from March onwards, have been shoddy, buggy, broken or otherwise substandard. Let's quickly run through them...

March 6th – Lumbridge Crater rework and wardrobe change. Simple graphical update, UI change which had mixed reception.

March 13th – Ninja Updates – Several good QOL updates.

March 20th – Agents of Fury, Runespan reward rework and Arc changes. Another Currency Event, and the cynic in me sees the releasing of the Runecrafter Robes via Runespan as an effective admission that they've given up on Great Orb Project entirely.

March 27th – Luck Rework – An incredibly confusing, ill-explained, convoluted and broken mess of a system that could have been done so, so much better.

April 3rd – Gemstone Dragons. Due to their huge cost for entry, difficulty, lack of justifiably good drops and the bizarre decisions around their slayer level, these were effectively dead on arrival due to bad planning.

April 10th – Easter Quest – This was the point I really began to notice the damage. The quest was as basic as it could possibly get, with no new graphics, no new areas or music, and effectively all done through text boxes and bare-bone fetchquests. The event looked like a project that had to be done for Monday morning but was only started on Sunday night, and just stunk of laziness and cost-cutting. Needless to say, the “They're working on Menaphos!!!1” people were out in full force this time. I'll get back to that later.

April 18th – The new Achievement system. A rework of a system nobody needed reworking, turning it into a broken, rickety, barely-functioning pile of warped coding that caused far more problems than it solved. This was a mess, pure and simple.

April 24th – The Spring Fayre - When I was complaining about the Easter event, I was usually shot down and told that this would be the actual Easter event. Interestingly, those people got very, VERY quiet when we saw what this actually was. Without wanting to go too far into detail, this was a carnival of MTX greed the likes of which we had never seen, with a massive air of open contempt wafting over the whole thing, due to unfairly balanced reward systems heavily weighted towards spending money. This was eventually improved somewhat, but the initial damage was just...staggering.

May 2nd – Shattered Worlds - This was an update I had been waiting for for years, and initially, it looked like this was something that made up for a lot of the pain the players had endured...But it soon became apparent that this was a terribly-balanced mess which is still very much not worth playing. Disillusionment set in very high for me here.

May 8th – Gilenorian Giving – Charity or no, this was still a Currency Event.

May 15th – Skyboxes. A lightweight update that effectively boiled down to giving us admin commands for changing skyboxes, but it was still pretty nice.

May 22nd – Patch notes, followed by a week of no update, presumably to polish Menaphos.

So all in all, we saw a massive downswing in the quality of updates, ranging from average at best to unusable or contemptuous at worst. But every single time anyone tried to complain, an echoing cry would be heard all through the forums and on Reddit.

“They're working on Menaphos! They have to direct resources from other areas to get Menaphos done! Menaphos will make this all worth it!”

Uh huh...Right. Here's the thing. Jagex has worked on big projects before. Prifddinas. Summoning. Dimension of Disaster. Mzcab. All of these are far bigger projects than this. But none of those crippled the quality of their weekly releases like Menaphos did. None of them ever needed to siphon resources like Menaphos apparently did. They allowed themselves the time to make big, intricate updates, while going along with smaller, more manageable projects. They didn't try to work on multiple big things at once. For instance, I get the feeling that if they shelved Shattered Worlds and the Achievement rework and done some smaller, more feasible updates, they would have been more able to work on Menaphos, to bring it up to a decent standard. But no - They tried to do a bunch of big projects at once, and, well, we can see the results.

Now, admittedly, the resource-siphoning may have been necessary this time...But even if it is, it's entirely Jagex's fault. They are the ones who put this demand upon themselves. If they couldn't hack it, they shouldn't have made that promise. Nobody was asking them to stretch themselves as thin as they did (Hell, the whole reason the poll went the way it did was because we wanted bigger, more polished, less rushed updates). But they did, and as a result the game suffered, and the players suffered. Call me a jerk if you want, but I feel that even if Menaphos was good, we shouldn't just brush all that under the carpet.

But in the end, we manage to get into Menaphos, and after all the bluster and hype, after all the poor updates justified by its very existence, what do we get?

A rainbow reflected in a puddle. Wonderful to look at, but when you get close and actually step inside, you find it's as shallow as it gets.

Menaphos has, when you get down to it, maybe about the same amount of utility as Falador. MAYBE Ardougne if you want to be generous. The only particularly interesting / noteworthy things added with the update – The Slayer Dungeon and Slayer Pyramid - aren't even in Menaphos themselves. Other than that, it's more than a little basic, and other than the appearances, doesn't really do much to actually set itself apart from other cities.

Well, I'm being unfair – I should have said “The only particularly interesting/noteworthy long-term pieces of content”. Because there IS interesting short-term, one-time-only content - four new quests!

…

...Yep, I'm bringing it up. The rep grind. For the uninitiated, in order to actually access the quests there, you need to do an arbitrary reputation grind. The only way to do this is by skilling on the below-average skill plots there. For hours. Some estimates put it at somewhere between 30-50 hours. I know this has been improved with the various patches...But let's face it, if someone's forcing you to eat a turd, but out of the “kindness of their heart” they cut some of it off and dispose of it, you're still having to eat it, you just need to eat less. A vast majority of people don't want to in the first place.

Because most of us can see what this boils down to. The needless rep-grind, the fact there's a passive EXP buff there, and the darkly hilarious Currency Event they have put in there as of this week...To me, it points to two things, clear as day.

Padding, and Desperation.

Rather than making the city somewhere we want to be, with interesting, engaging activities and sights, we are effectively being forced to be there in order to “enjoy” the city, to endure subpar exp, and to engage in constant, tedious grind in order to get to do the quests. No other city has had this treatment - New / Overhauled cities were allowed to just exist, and prove their own worth. All that will be achieved by forcing people to stay in a city when they could be doing other things, is simply breed enormous amounts of contempt.

Because look, you can argue that you are “Forced” to get levels in skills you don't want to for quests sometimes. You can argue you're “Forced” to get combat levels up to get to certain places. Yes, you are. But you can go about it in any way you want. You can go to all sorts of different locations to train skills. You have lots of options on how to train most of them. But with Menaphos, you ARE forced to do things as they want you to. Unless you want to go completely insane by doing bankstanding skills and getting tiny bits of rep, you are effectively stuck looking at a tree you're continually cutting until the game finally says you can do what you want, because they don't want you finishing the content you want and then moving on. To me, this whole combination of things totals up to one thing.

“Spend as much time as you possibly can in the new city. Justify the time it took us, the developers, to design. It doesn't matter how much you're enjoying it, just so long as it looks populated so we can say it's a job well done.

Because you're going to skill in Menaphos and appreciate every last crack in the pavement we textured, dammit.”

And I look at all of this, this sun bleached, shining city of cardboard, and think to myself - “This is going to keep happening. Weak, shallow expansions backed up by shoddy weekly updates. This is not going to get better. They're committed to this business model now, and backing out will damage them even worse. This is how things are now.”

I'm done.

I can't keep this up any more. If this is the normal standard of the updates now, I cannot justify paying for this any longer.

I have enough money for a few bonds. Perhaps several years in the future, I may check back in to see what's going on in the game, assuming the game is still running, and is still recognizable. Because I hate being a cynic, but...The way that this is going, if the quality of updates continues along these lines, and the depravity of the investors continues to balloon like it has been...I don't know how much longer RS will last.

…

I want to finish this ramble fest on a more positive note.

Runescape has changed my life for the better. I could honestly argue it's saved my life. I still remember back when my friends in school were talking about Shilo Village like it was the promised land. I fondly recall my first ever month when I was a Member – I distinctly remember exploring the Gnome Stronghold, getting a full set of the light blue robes and being surprised by the impressive-at-the-time Magic Trees. Hell, I even feel a slight twinge of twisted, bitter-sweet mirth at the fact that I got hacked very early on in my RS lifetime, and deemed too worthless to even get my password changed. (My only indication I'd been hacked was that I was in Falador without my 11k GP on my next login.)

It was a game that I took solace in. I live in a rather remote area of England – As I graduated, the amount of friends I had evaporated – all moving away from this place, looking for better places to go. I was very soon left with nobody but the people I met online. I am proud to admit that one of the best friends I have ever made, I know from Runescape. It's kind of staggering that if I hadn't been making Body Tiaras at the time I was, I would never have got to know him. Runescape was the rock upon which I managed to cling to, to help me keep my life in order, when everything else seemed to not make any sense.

This is honestly a reason why I get so utterly agitated about all that is going wrong with the game lately. It feels...almost disrespectful, the way that the game is just being defiled, broken and twisted the way it is now. Like watching some community club building from your childhood become ruined and dilapidated.

So...That's why I'm opting to quit now, as opposed to waiting for my membership to run out. I want to leave while I still have some respect for the game, and before the memories I have of the game become permanently tainted.

If there is indeed anyone that's still reading...Thank you for that. I know that this is just me letting out one final yell before I turn my back on this, but...I just wanted to speak from the heart for a while, about the game that I used to love – and on some level, still do. I understand if you feel my reasoning is flawed, and I don't mind if you want to tear me down about it. I know this could probably be an unpopular opinion.

I'll probably still lurk on Reddit and the forums here and there, but nowhere near as much as I used to.

To all the people who have better tolerance and restraint than I do, I hope Runescape improves for you once more. I hope with everything I have that the next expansion actually does live up to expectations this time. You deserve better than what you're getting.

#Rossmallo Posts #Runescape #Long post is long

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youngsurvival-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Reddit Wp Carryover #1: You're a 250 year old vampire. You've found that living as a recluse and faking your death every 70 years or so is actually fairly easy. You've consistently fooled everyone except for your mortal enemy - Keith from the IRS

I tore the pink letter to shreds with a frustrated shriek. The tattered bits whirled around my feet as I kicked at them petulantly, not satisfied until they were all out of sight. In all of my two hundred and fifty years of life, or rather undeath, I had been able to evade electrical bills, dodge utility payments, and siphon internet from unsuspecting neighbors. But then there was the IRS, actually, it was Kieth. My lips curled in a snarl at the thought of the doughy, bespectacled human, his hands forever damp with sweat and clutching a pristine black briefcase.

He was infuriating, every time I changed my name he found me, every time I moved I would get another bright pink letter. I knew eventually he would visit, the letter said as much, written in his swirling handwriting and signed with an unchanging, impeccable signature, simply Kieth. Though, how he found me wasn't the greatest mystery surrounding Kieth. It was the fact that he was most certainly human, but he never aged. It hadn't been various IRS agents over the years, it had always been Kieth.

I pondered this as I stalked to my kitchen to grab a drink, muttering curses under my breath as I went. My hand gripped the glass while I tore the plastic of the blood bag open, pouring the contents without really thinking about what I was doing.

Why doesn't he age? I sipped the blood and tossed the empty bag in the trash, moving through my house silently.

There had to be an explanation, humans aged and died. Was he a machine? A clone? An alien? I shook my head at the notion. Kieth was distinctly human, his scent didn't lie, neither did his heartbeat, or the warmth he gave off.

With an exasperated huff I fell onto my couch, mind still swirling with thoughts of the ever obnoxious Kieth. I was so lost in my thoughts that when the doorbell rang I let out an involuntary yelp.

That smell, peppermint, tweed, and sweat. It was Kieth. Snarling I walked to the door, pulling my brown hair away from my face and wiping my bloody lips with the back of my arm. A toothy smile planted itself on my mouth as I opened the door to my apartment.

"Kieth, I wasn't expecting you so soon." And there he was, in all of his soggy, soft glory, damp blue eyes blinking at me expectantly.

"I'm quite sure you weren't Miss Yvir, but we have quite a bit to discuss this time." I hated that he knew my original name, and insisted upon using it every time we spoke despite my ever changing identity.

"May I come in?" He looked up at me through his thick glasses, my chin easily an inch above his forehead.

I opened the door and swept my arm in an exaggerated bow and he slithered past me into my living room, where he plopped unceremoniously onto my couch. My smile twisted into a snarl as I took the chair, lifting my glass of O+ from the table. He squirmed uncomfortably as I sipped it and internally I purred with glee. Over the years he had never asked outright what I was, but he knew, he had to by now.

"So, Miss. You have not paid your taxes for the last three years. Not the longest you have evaded, but still a serious offense." He adjusted his glasses and tried to meet my eyes. "Would you like to instill a payment plan or would you like to go ahead and pay your entire balance?"

I took another long sip and licked my fangs. Kieth shifted a bit away from me as I leaned forward over the paperwork. At this point I had no interest in the numbers, I could easily pay whatever sum he wanted, but I was trying to find any clues as to what kept him ticking, and annoying.

From what I saw he wore no pieces of power, had no necromantic tattoos, or any indication of interference from another supernatural source. He didn't even have the wet dander smell werewolves seem to always have hanging around them. With a frustrated sigh i leaned back and pulled my checkbook from my purse, Keith's erratic pulse the only sound in the room other than that of a scribbling pen.

As I pulled the check from the spine a thought struck me, does he bleed? Can he die? Over the years I had never really considered killing him, was he a pain? Yes. Did I ever want to see him again? No. But he was only doing his job, as annoying as he was. However, at this point my curiosity was outweighing my benevolence and I set my snakelike green eyes on him.

I handed him the check in one hand, and as quick as lighting I had embedded his lovely fountain pen in his throat, ripping the doughy flesh of his neck open as I tore the pen free.

The smell of raw magic filled the room, overpowered by the scent I vomited blood onto the carpet and I was glad I hadn't tried to bite him instead. I would have been burned from the inside out by the sheer amount of energy in his veins.

He gurgled and clawed at his open neck, the dark blood sluggishly moving between his fingers. And as he scrabbled at the wound it began to close before my eyes.

Within moments his pale throat was unblemished, marked only by the smears of thick unnatural blood. All I could do was stare at him as he collected himself. He had undergone a blood ritual, an old one from the smell of it, and it had worked. The rituals were very rare, because of the risk, and even more rare were successes. Just who the FUCK was Kieth?

"Now." He cleared his throat and I jumped, startled from my even more confused thoughts. "Hopefully you have gotten that out of your system. I will need you to write another check, as this one has blood on it."

I dumbly stroked another check and handed it to him. With a satisfied grunt he placed it in his tidy briefcase and stood, straightening his dark tie. My legs lifted me from the chair and I moved to walk him out of my home.

As I opened the door he turned to me, offering his sweaty palm as if I had not just tried to kill him. I shook it, my mind not really present, still swirling with the thoughts of Kieth's real identity. Maybe a surname, his last name may give me a clue, but I remembered he had never told me. And he never signed it on his letters.

"Until next time Miss Yvir, and next time please don't wait so long to send us your payment." He moved to the top of the stairs and I found my voice.

"Hey Kieth." His wet blue eyes found mine and he cocked his head to the side in response.

"Since we've known each other so long, and you know me so well, isn't it strange that I don't even know your last name?" My voice was saccharine and he looked thoughtful for a moment before a slow grin spread on his paunchy face.

"I suppose that's fair." He winked at me and started down the stairs. "It's VanHellsing." His pale hand waved from above the railing, his footsteps silent. "Until next time, Miss Yvir."

#writing prompt #fiction #my writing

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derkastellan · 4 years ago

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Musings: Fanboys...

I hope I don’t come over as a negative nelly in general, I have to admit coming from a culture that likes to criticize. A minor sample maybe, but in the heady days Google+ (which was quite a boon for roleplayers in general) I was part of a discussion where a bunch of grumpy Germans complained that our American friends tended to hype even rather mediocre products over the moon - and would avidly defend their makers from criticism.

I even forgot the name of the product - a copy-cat imitation of the Forgotten Realms (themselves not the most original product at times) for Savage Worlds. Ah yes, Shaintar. Found it. I remember one reviewer quipping that the map only contained equidistant cities. A bit of a cardinal sin for making a varied map.

I come to this from two recent experiences - trying out Monte Cook’s Numenera and then reinstalling Torment: Tides of Numenera to play it after it sat there for two years or more, unfinished.

I like Numenera for its setting, but I think the game system is seriously overhyped among its fans. It tries to codify how the GM interacts with the story into meta-gaming with the players, and it does so poorly, and it at times tries to solve the wrong problems. Basically, “GM intrusions” are meant to make the game “more interesting” but the first thing they came up with in the original edition was to say “well, your sword breaks in the middle of combat.” And they have been struggling with finding a better way to express it since. Taking the Narrative by the Tail is another product failing to do so.

Now, over time “GM intrusions” (and now: “Player Intrusions”) have evolved by people using them. If you like the idea of giving the players a bit of a story choice the system is workable but frankly to me it just messes with the natural flow of GMing a game and pacing it well. Also, by now reddit provides many decent examples of GM intrusions and help for many other of Numenera’s issues. Of which there are plenty. The game tries to be not as crunchy (and definitely not as combat-oriented) but it only gets there halfway. It is neither a good/pure story game nor does it truly leave its d20 roots behind. It leaves many areas poorly defined - like what is an action, what is a saving throw/free roll? It’s wishy-washy language and omissions make several focus descriptors and powers in the game something the GM has to research online or figure out for themselves, when really these should have been properly game-designed given they made it into the core book of a game. (And 2nd edition, at that! Does all of this truly get play-tested?)

You wouldn’t know this from reading through the internet. Some people are over the moon about this game as if it set them free from some imaginary shackles. You would at times this is a gift from the gods to players and GMs alike. I guess if you only ever played D&D and clones before this might be true (somewhat), but there are so many other RPGs out there just as good or better. Don’t get me wrong: Numenera is a solid, enjoyable experience. But it’s also at times clunky and not exceptional as a game engine.

Its setting is exceptional , though. It sometimes relies a bit on fridge logic, but is interesting, fascinating, full of potential, and encourages many play styles from regular dungeon fantasy to horror and even to building your own settlement. The game is well-supported and there are some gems for it. (And what fridge logic you ask? You have had at least one galaxy-dominating previous culture on Earth but it just left the Numenera of these other civilizations untouched, even though it must have surpassed all these other civilizations? This does not compute... There are several of these in this game.)

And therein, I think, lies the rub. You see, when people tend to fall in love with something - the feeling of being freed from some rules-lawyering shackles maybe, or a great setting, they tend to view the whole thing through rose-tinted glasses. Even things worthy of critique.

There is another game where I experienced this, a game in comparison to which Numenera shines but has some similarities with. Shadow of the Demon Lord. It is another attempt at a lighter version of a D&D-like game that sells itself through its setting. What lured me in was them claiming they had a rich and varied set of classes customizable into 64 variations that was somehow similar to Warhammer Fantasy RPG (which I had not played at that point, but 4th edition I’ve discussed since...).

Numenera and SotDL have indeed something very much in common. They both allow you to select from a big set of character building options to build very narrowly defined, one-trick pony characters. Have a few powers from the same theme but not many, definitely too few to build a varied toolbox to solve problems with.

For Numenera I realized this when playing Torment: Tides of Numenera. You quickly realize how few powers and variations you have thereof in a computer game.Both the CRPG and the tabletop try to explain that limitation away by de-emphasizing combat, or claiming to do so. Fact is, tabletop Numenera has slews of interesting, captivating, and visually brilliantly depicted enemies that feature everywhere in the game, so combat, while not directly rewarded, is as much a feature of the game as in D&D almost. You don’t publish 350+ pages (Ninth World Bestiary 1 & 2, beautiful products!) worth of monster manual without intending the GM to use it... but as varied as these might be, your character is not.

The one-use cyphers and artifacts then serve to give you the missing problem-solving capabilities and to vary your approach, but think about it for a moment. If the GM hands out a cypher befitting your problem, how is that different from playing a point-and-click adventure on tabletop? Figure out where and how to apply the solution. A puzzle. Often in D&D your wizard, cleric, druid, etc powers can become tools expanding the ways in which you solve things your own way. Given the limits of your class builds items become their replacement in Numenera. And frankly, I’m quite okay with that! (Though it becomes very unconvincing in the generic Cypher System spun off from Numenera and The Strange.) By which I mean, at least you have something here to build a toolbox, albeit a temporary one, from. (And after all, didn’t most of the powers a character could really rely on in old-school D&D come from their gear?)

Shadows and Demons and... oh Lord, why?

In comparison, SotDL character feel ... just limited. I quickly discovered how poorly balanced the game was when running it for a few levels with my players. When you don’t optimize the build for the fighter type, you can’t get into the heavy gear early and the rogue became, by no special virtue of the player, the main damage dealer. The wizard and cleric types had very limited spell selections, and the wizard was the better healer by virtue of being able to get into additional spell schools. The wording of many powers was confusing and I had regular rules questions for the web community without satisfying answers.

The choices you make during character evolution hem you in, forcing you to live with your limiting choices, they do not expand your character, at least it doesn’t feel this way. There may be 64 variations, but they are all very limited in scope, making characters of very limited capability. The poor balancing between basic classes and the unsatisfying rules made me switch the group to 5th edition D&D, and we never regretted that in comparison.

But again other people reacted in general very differently to the game, and maybe that was due to liking the setting. You see, I didn’t like the setting and did have a very different game in mind. (And now they are releasing a version basically doing the same. A bit late for me, but maybe they want to expand away from their original buyer base.)

But people may have very well liked the dark fantasy, horror, grim vibe. And if you’re into that, maybe it delivers for you. I can’t tell. I honestly can’t. I do know however that the game was well-supported with a slew of expansion books and adventures, giving people plenty to chew on. And I think that combination of setting and support plus some hype gave many people reason to like the game. (And it is a lighter engine, no doubt, if you prefer that kind of thing. I usually do!)

Wherein I actually try to make the original point

And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s hard to put out your own view of these games without running into people who behave like fanboys. And I am actually happy I only was disagreed with emphatically, but not in a hateful way. It just annoys me that people want to ignore a game’s failings because it also has strengths. Do a few things right enough and you will attract people who will see no wrong.

Now, Steam’s binary rating system (recommend/do not recommend) doesn’t help with videogames for example, but when seeing that Torment: Tides of Numenera has by now a “Mostly Positive” rating one has to wonder. The game is mediocre at best, really buggy, and short. But I have to admit because of its setting and aspirations of living up to a much better game, people to tend to give it a lot of credit where little is due. Admittedly my opinion, but you can find many well-reasoned, well-written scathing reviews of the game.

Yet people have by now elevated it into “Most Positive” where “Mixed Ratings” would serve it just right. Neither good nor all bad. But somehow how people would like to feel about it, or people wanting to push the genre, or people getting it for less money erased over time all the controversy of unfulfilled promises, bugs, or its other failings. (I reviewed it here if you are interested. I will say no more.)

Criticize what is improvable, love what’s great. I might even give the new SotDL spin-off a try. I am sometimes very critical of games but I always hope for a lot. And I wish these games were fixed and improved upon, not left in the state they are. I wish there would be a better edition of Dungeon Crawl Classics because the game could benefit from a coherent feel and vision, right now it’s a mess, but a lovable one. I wish there were improved versions of both the games I discussed here at length because I like well-supported games, and these issues are fixable. (And sadly, you can criticize computer games all you want, but few are fixed. I’m happy that some publishers listen and Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, and a few others got better sequels.)

Frankly, I might like playing Numenera with 5th edition rules better, and they offer that. While this is another hype money train everybody wants to get on, if done right, it can work. 5e is a solid, robust system, and while delivering mostly one kind of experience, it does so very well.

What I’m saying is that all games are improvable. New editions can be made, compatible even with older ones. D&D had 3rd edition superseded with 3.5 for good reasons. Numenera: Discovery balanced the basic classes better in terms of powers, it was quite apparent that they tried to avoid players making un-hittable jacks or glaives spamming the same moves all the time. Games evolve and they should. By making Numenera: Discovery pregens for a Numenera 1st edition adventure I realized how subtle the changes were and started to appreciate them.

Just dare to call a horse a horse. While I prefer peaceful fanboys over the trolling kind, there’s no reason to spare improvable games criticism. And all games are improvable!

(And to be fair, Numenera does a lot of things right. It’s mechanic to reduce a roll’s difficulty to 0 and thereby avoiding it is a very worthy addition to the role-playing catalog. It rewards skillful stacking of advantages and makes players feel they have reliable competence at their hands like no d100, d20, or 3d6 system can imitate.)

#role-playing #rpg #tabletop #pen & paper #musings #numenera #shadow of the demon lord

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