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fellowstrangetownappreciator · 3 years

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Curious and autistic-coded

Hello there! April draws to an end and with that I think it’s high time to hurry up and write this. What does April have to do with anything, you ask? April is the Autism Acceptance Month. So what better month to do this?

Unfortunately I didn’t make it. I failed. It’s already 1. 5. when I’m posting this. But at least I tried to deliver on time.

In this mini essay I’ll present my case about why I think the Curious brothers from TS2 Strangetown display autistic-coded traits and my personal takes on it.

It’s basically your average headcanon post but with a funny top hat!

0: Preface: What do I mean by “autistic-coded”?

When a character is coded as something, it means that they have traits that are associated with the demographics in question to make the consumer knowingly or not link the character with the demographic, although the character's "label” is never explicitly disclosed.

In the nutshell, it means that there are canonical reasons to read the characters as autistic, although you won't find the word "autism" anywhere in the game nor in the developer's commentary.

In this particular case I do believe that the developer may not even be aware of the code, as there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. If there is, I’m not aware of it and I would be happy to learn.

So, let’s start!

1: “The white male who is very good at science”

Unfortunately autistic representation in pop-culture has a long history of being rather straightforward in which traits the characters often have. This stems from the belief that autism is “a boy’s disorder” (that’s why some autism charities to this day use blue in their symbols). Among popular examples of autistic-coded characters are Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper and Death Note’s L and Near. I’m sure you can think of more but you’ll find that most of them are men and either explicitly white or racially ambiguous white-passing. They also tend to be gifted in tech, logic or other science-y activities.

There’s nothing wrong with that! Nothing wrong with being an autistic with those “stereotypical” characteristics and there is nothing wrong with people being represented. What is wrong is the monotony and afab people/people of color being underrepresented which leads (among other factors) to harder access to diagnosis and resources for those people in real life. But! That’s a topic for a different day. (and not for a simbrl, mind you)

Back to the Curiouses! I just wanted to say that autism in media is traditionally associated with characters whose gender presentation, race and interests align with theirs. Those characteristic thus make a very convenient template for autistic-coding.

2: Inconsistent performance, huge gaps between strengths and weaknesses

Pascal, Vidcund and Lazlo are very skilled Sims by default, extraordinarily even for their age. Pascal has a skill maxed while his younger brothers both near maxing theirs.

But as you can see in Pascal’s default skill panel, apart from Creativity, all his other skills are extremely low, 0 points for Mechanical, Body and Charisma, 1 point for Cooking and Logic and his second best skill, Cleaning, has only 3 points. The same situation can be observed in Vidcund’s and Lazlo’s, except their strong suits are Logic and Cooking respectively.

Huge discrepancies within performance in different cognitive areas is a common trait found in those on the autism spectrum. We’re often talking extremes here and the scale of the difference is the defining factor. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, it’s just in neurodivergent people those tend to be unusually noticeable.

I think that skills, simplified as they are, are the closest The Sims has to possibly simulate that because they track the character’s performance and expertise in different areas and allow comparison. In real life, of course, this comparison is not nearly as possible and exact, nor desired, but for all our analysis-loving enthusiasm, here we’re still talking fictional characters.

3: Struggle with social cues

It is widely known that one of autistic traits are difficulties with processing social situations, picking social cues and successfully replicating socially desired behavioral patterns.

But these three are Sims, are they not? They cannot possibly display this trait, since they’re programmed the same way as others.

Yes and no.

It is true that there is no specific in-game feature that would allow Sims to behave with explicit neurodivergency in mind* but with the right combination of traits they can simulate behavior that really hits close to home for neurodivergent players.

*at least not in TS2, TS3 has traits that simulate some possible neurodivergencies but their names tend to be rather... ableist unfortunate and they’re not relevant to this post since they’re not autism related, and even if they were, we’re focusing on TS2 exclusively

Let’s take look at Lazlo here. He is, indeed, a playful soul. He likes to goof around, tell jokes, make others laugh. And since he’s very close to his brother Vidcund, close enough even to Tell Dirty Joke (an interaction that needs quite a high relationship to unlock), he autonomously does just that.

And oh boy, does Vidcund disapprove.

From my personal experience playing them, their relationship usually takes quite a hit from every cheeky joke Lazlo throws Vid’s way. They usually autonomously repair it very quick but it happens often.

But that’s a standard behavior. Vidcund’s very serious, he doesn’t take well to jokes.

No. I mean technically yes, Vid is definitely a grumpy old plant dad but, at least in my game, he tends to accept Lazlo’s jokes. All kinds of them, actually, except for the dirty ones. And Pascal, who technically has even lower Playful points (0 in comparison to Vidcund’s 4), doesn’t seem to mind Lazlo’s poor attempts at grown-up humor.

But! What is it that makes Lazlo try still? What drives him to attempt to make Vidcund laugh with a dirty joke over and over again? (and fail?)

I my interpretation, Lazlo doesn’t do that on purpose, he is just really poor at evaluating “dirtiness” of a given joke and frequently misinterprets Vidcund’s cues. The animation of a dirty joke being rejected even supports that as Vid doesn’t signal his discomfort with any exaggerated easy-to-read facial expression until Lazlo gets to his punchline.

No only that but as I mentioned, the invisible lines between spicy and too vulgar are often hard to thread. I can recall many times I thought I was saying a witty quip on an “adult” topic and was met with awkward silence or someone shushing me because “that’s not how you speak in public”. I can well imagine myself in Lazlo’s shoes.

A situation of social cues being misinterpreted or ignored can be observed also in Vidcund. Programming-wise, those are just his low Niceness and extreme Shyness showing but combined they again paint a picture of a very neurodivergent-looking behavioral pattern.

He often behaves like the concept of politeness or social rules doesn’t exist because the combination of the aforementioned traits makes him come off very blunt (lecturing and shoving telescope-peepers with no warning whatsoever) and distant (having a high chance of rejecting simple small-talk socials).

(That’s Jasmine Rai casting the “Summon Vidcund” spell.)

Yes, I am fully aware that it makes a stronger case for him being an a**hole than autistic but... there’s no reason he can’t be both. Not all autistic people are sweet cinnamon buns, all personalities you can think of can be neurodiverse and, for some their neurodiversity can even amplify their inconsiderate ways, as I believe it is the case with our dear grouch Vidcund.

4. Their bios

“No matter what happens, Pascal believes there is a logical explanation for everything. In his free time, he practices home psychoanalysis and collects conspiracy theories.”

(that’s how I imagine practicing psychoanalysis looks like, sorry Freud)

“Serious and exact, Vidcund strives to fit the universe into a nice tidy package. He has an unnatural fondness for African violets.”

(let’s collectively pretend those are African violets)

“Not as studious as his older brothers, Lazlo got his degree in Phrenology. He likes to call phone psychics and spends hours trying to bend forks with his mind.”

*error: screenshot of Lazlo bending forks not found*

(but here he is hanging out with Erin Beaker, the closest thing to “calling phone psychics” you can actually do in-game)

Both Pascal’s and Vidcund’s bios point to a pattern-focused worldview with a strong emphasis on rationality as the center-point that anchors the way they understand the world around them and build their principles on. This “pattern-ization” of thinking is a common autistic trait, with rationality being a popular theme because emotions tend to be difficult to access and asses for many of us.

Lazlo’s biography is an outlier. But it still has something significant in common with those of his brothers: All three of their bios allude to a potential special interest of sorts.

Special interests as an autism-related term are very specific, in-depth and long-term hobbies or areas of expertise that make an autistic person happy and they tend to go to seemingly exhausting lengths, often at the cost of other areas of knowledge and most likely the person’s ability to talk about anything else for a long enough time. (a loving hyperbole, no disrespect meant) Mine are my characters and cats. An even more intense but a short(er)-term passion is called a hyperfixation.

Them potentially having a special interest is yet another possible autistic-coded feature.

5. Wait. Why does it matter?

Right. What does it matter if a Sim (A SIM) (or two or three) is autistic? What do I hope to achieve, pushing my autistic Curiouses agenda down your throats?

I got to write a long rant-piece about some of my favorite TS characters and I feel like I can finally die satisfied.

Apart from that and me sharing my happiness of finding some good pixels I can relate to, it is a matter of representation.

Remember by the very beginning I wrote how most of the representation our community gets in media tends to be just a one specific type of character?

And how the Curious brothers seem to fit the stereotype to a point?

There is something I omitted, something I saved for the last on purpose.

The role. The role in their story, the role in the society the piece of media portrays.

We often see neurodiverse, autistic or autistic-coded character as children, students, villains, lone savants, victims in distress, comedic relief sidekicks, either very vulnerable and needing protection, or detached and having their role defined only by their academic prowess or their special interest/profession.

What we rarely get to see them as, are... parents.

That’s what many of us autistics are or plan to be someday in the future. The dogma around autism has started to dwindle relatively recently and there are little to no examples of autistic adults being the care-givers for once in the media around us.

The Curious brothers are just that. They are chaotic, they are eccentric, they can be a little too much... but they are dutiful and loving fathers/uncles to their little aliens they raise.

They make it work. Even if they face difficulties, even if they don’t exactly fit the standard.

“Sometimes, a family truly can be three brothers raising alien babies, and it’s beautiful.”

It encourages us to define family by love rather than traditional structures and it shows us that portrait of a functional neurodiverse family we need to see.

And goodness, is it a powerful sight.

#the sims 2 #the sims #ts2 #simbrl #pascal curious #vidcund curious #lazlo curious #autism acceptence month #headcanon #actuallyautistic #autistic curiouses agenda #please someone take tumbrl from me

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

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Video Game Review: Assassin’s Creed Unity (Ubisoft, 2014)

Genres: action-adventure, third person, open world

Premise: Blaming himself for the death of his adoptive father, Frenchman Arno Dorian joins the Assassins during the French Revolution in order to seek redemption. Learning that his adoptive father was a Templar Grandmaster looking to promote peace between the Templars and Assassins, and that his birth father was an Assassin (killed by Shay in Rogue), Arno must investigate the Grandmaster’s death and contend with a changing Templar Order, while also sorting out his romantic feelings for Elise, the Grandmaster’s daughter. In the present, the Assassins contact the unnamed Absergo employee and recruit them to their cause, using Arno’s memories to find the body of a sage, which may contain traces of First Civilization DNA.

Platform Played On: PC (Windows)

Rating: 3/5 stars

***Full review under the cut.***

I am evaluating this game based on four key aspects: story, characters, gameplay, and visuals. I will also be evaluating the Dead Kings DLC.

Content Warnings: violence, blood, body horror

Story: Assassin’s Creed Unity primarily follows Arno Dorian, an Assassin operating during the French Revolution in 18th century Paris. Following the death of his biological father, Arno is adopted by Templar Grand Master de Laserre, who keeps Arno in the dark about the Templar-Assassin conflict. Thirteen years later, de Laserre is murdered following Arno’s failure to deliver a message in time. Arno joins the Assassins to seek redemption and learns that de Laserre was trying to make peace between the Assassins and Templars, but many did not share his vision. Arno must therefore track down de Laserre’s murderer with the help of his Assassin mentor, Pierre, and Elise, de Laserre’s daughter with whom Arno is in love.

There were several elements to the main story I liked: the idea of star-crossed lovers dropped in the middle of a murder mystery during the French Revolution was intriguing, and I liked that the crux of the conflict was a reigniting of the centuries-old Assassin-Templar conflict. However, none of the “crumbs” of the mystery felt particularly engaging; Arno would track down figures which were introduced then eliminated, and even the bigger characters (Robespierre, Germain, etc) didn’t have enough charisma to carry the plot forward. Given the premise, I would have liked to see more emphasis placed on Arno’s emotional journey, since his guilt and romantic turmoil seemed to be more fruitful areas to explore than the larger mystery. I would have liked to see more flashbacks to his memories with his adopted father (like Edward’s flashbacks in Black Flag) to make the mystery feel more personal, and I would have also liked to see more tension between Arno’s Assassin loyalties and Elise’s Templar leanings. The closest we got, in my opinion, to some satisfying interiority were some ghostly figures whenever Arno visited Versailles (good, but infrequent) and a really nice trippy sequence when Arno first joins the Assassins.

I also think this plot felt different from the previous Assassin’s Creed games because there wasn’t a lot of focus on the First Civilization. Arno encounters a Sage - a figure we were introduced to in Black Flag - but there isn’t a lot of focus on First Civilization artifacts or power. It’s not an unwelcome change, but it was different.

The French Revolution was a wonderful choice for a historical backdrop, though I wish Ubisoft had done more (narratively) to make Arno feel entangled with the world. As the game stands, the French Revolution feels more like a set piece - the background is there, and Arno interacts with some historical figures, but the plot itself doesn’t necessarily need to be set during the French Revolution. I would have liked to see the setting be integrated into the main plot more, perhaps by having the Assassins and Templars be more involved with historical events.

The present-day plot which usually serves as the frame in Assassins Creed games is almost non-existent, which made it feel like a distraction rather than an integral part of the story. Most of the modern stuff was just voice-over, with an anonymous Assassin guiding the faceless and voiceless “Initiate” to comb through Arno’s memories in search of a Sage. Periodically, the voice would alert the Initiate that Abstergo was onto them, and the player would have to take Arno through a series of rifts which featured anachronistic obstacles. Personally, I found these parts more annoying than anything, and they didn’t really come together to form a plot of their own, like in previous installments.

The Dead Kings plot was pretty basic. Arno was tasked with finding a manuscript in exchange for passage out of the city. Along the way, he discovers that Napoleon Bonaparte’s subordinate is trying to find an artifact of the First Civilization, which is hidden in a temple under the church. There wasn’t a lot to set this plot apart - it did the job, and I enjoyed myself, but it wasn’t particularly memorable.

Overall, I think Unity’s plot is mainly hurt by its open world setting. The world is so expansive and full of stuff that it detracts from the main narrative; because players can pick up or put down the mystery of de Laserre’s death, it’s easy to forget about it, making it feel less consequential (or, at least, not very urgent).

Characters: Arno Dorian, the PC character, is a charming protagonist with a lot of likeable qualities. He isn’t really a fan of how the Parisian Assassins are more like a cult than a brotherhood, and he’s witty and sassy while also holding onto admirable ideals. I wish Ubisoft had given him a better plot, though I did like that they didn’t overwhelm him with grief and guilt to the point where he was broody. He mostly had a light outlook on life without downplaying the seriousness of the conflicts around him, which made him a fun character to control.

Elise, Arno’s love interest, had a lot of potential. She was independent and highly competent, and I liked that Ubisoft didn’t make her into someone in need of saving. I wish she and Arno got to work more together and that they had had more scenes where they talked about their pasts, but I guess that would have been too sappy for the target audience. Without spoiling anything, I do have mixed feelings about how her story ended. On the one hand, I think it demonstrated a real character flaw that Elise struggled with throughout the game (I like characters to have actual flaws); on the other hand, she didn’t deserve that.

Other characters were a mixed bag. Pierre, Arno’s mentor, was pretty gruff and grumpy, and I didn’t get the sense that the two were particularly close. I wish more was done to cultivate that relationship, especially given Pierre’s arc. Other Assassins were too uptight to be interesting, and the bad guys weren’t charismatic enough to be intriguing. I did like the Marquis de Sade, but that’s because he’s Extra in fun ways. Leon, a child thief in Dead Kings, was also fun, mainly because he played off Arno well.

Gameplay: Unity differs a bit from its predecessors. While the core doesn’t change - players still need to use a combination of stealth and combat to navigate an open world and achieve goals - Unity introduces skill trees and upgradable weapons/equipment. To improve Arno’s abilities, weapons, and gear, players must collect money, earn “Creed points” (awarded for doing impressive things like ledge assassinations or perfect parries), and gain “sync points” (awarded for completing missions). In addition to collecting money from chests, Arno can upgrade his base at the Cafe Theatre to gain a steady income, though there aren’t any widespread economic mechanics, such as the forts/strongholds in Assassin’s Creed 2 or Black Flag/Rogue.

Unity also infamously introduces “helix credits,” a type of currency that players can acquire by paying real, out-of-game money for. Helix credits unlock abilities and upgrades faster (or else just access exclusive content from the online store). I hate this concept just based on principle, so I spent a lot of time exploring the map and unlocking every chest until I built up enough money to purchase legendary equipment.

Weapons themselves were easy to pick up and use, with familiar things such as the hidden blade, one-handed swords, two-handed weapons, pistols, berserk darts, smoke bombs, poison gas bombs, and the like. New weapons included the phantom blade (a silent projectile), the guillotine gun (a gun/blade hybrid gained in Dead Kings), and the introduction of long-arms (such as halberds). I found most of these weapons easy to use, though I did have to get used to the fact that the hidden blade is not selectable as a primary weapon - Arno uses it automatically when doing a stealth kill, but draws his sword or other weapon whenever the player engages in combat.

In terms of movement and stealth, I liked that Arno’s animations were more inspired by real parkour, but I did find it harder to move precisely in this game for whatever reason. I often got stuck on a ledge or wasn’t able to change direction very fast, all of which caused me to fail missions or get killed fairly quickly. I also didn’t like that Ubisoft removed the ability to whistle and draw enemies to a hiding spot; while there were haystacks and structures to hide behind or in, enemies wouldn’t walk by them very often, making them difficult to use for ambushes or stealth kills.

Side quests/activities included a range of things, from “Paris Stories” (quirky missions where Arno had to go kill someone or steal something), to Murder Mysteries (in which Arno had to search for clues and arrest the correct culprit to achieve unique weapons and armor), to “Nostradamus Enigmas” (riddles which led to different landmarks and rewarded Arno with keys to the legendary armor beneath his base). I personally found these fun, even if a lot of them weren’t memorable. They did their job and provided some entertaining little narratives, so I can’t complain too much.

Unity also introduces a lot of coop multiplayer missions, which can be completed with other players or on your own. Players can form or join “social clubs,” which are mainly just teams of gamers, or search the internet and complete missions with strangers. While I liked that the coop missions were able to be completed alone (they were harder, but not impossible) and I was able to play some missions with a friend, I did not like that most of them required players to replay them 3 times in order to get all collectibles and rewards. For a completist, the coop missions will be repetitive, and at times frustrating if there’s a locked door you can’t access without upgrading your skills.

In terms of collectibles, Unity primarily has money chests, cockades (which unlock color schemes for Arno’s outfits), newspapers, artifacts, and nomad points (which can be used in the companion app). Other than the money, I didn’t find the collectibles very rewarding - I didn’t have the companion app, and I didn’t much care for new color schemes or armor/equipment.

Dead Kings introduces tricorns as collectibles while also inserting a few “Franciade Stories,” Murder Mysteries, and “Suger Enigmas,” all of which resemble their counterparts in the base game. The enigmas in Dead Kings were a bit harder than those in the base game because the answers weren’t necessarily in or around landmarks; players have to really pay attention to the map instead of relying on the database for historical clues. I also found it annoying that players could get accidentally stuck in Dead Kings; if you start the DLC unintentionally, you can’t return to the base game until after you complete the first mission. It really sucks if you’re underpowered or just want to experience the narratives in order.

Visuals: Unity is a visually stunning game, with a lot of beautifully-rendered environments, character designs, and the like. The streets of Paris feel like they are inundated with chaos, with crowds of shouting people moving past walls papered with posters and defaced by graffiti, while the interiors are detailed according to the social class of the inhabitants. Arno can wander into a poor person’s home, empty save for the basics, or a rich person’s, decorated with gold and elegant paneling. I very much enjoyed exploring the world and seeing landmarks such as Notre Dame overlooking a rich, vibrant world.

I also really liked Arno’s outfits, all of which captured an 18th century aesthetic. Arno can wear a number of coats, hoods, pants, belts, and bracers, all of which feature a blue, white, and red color scheme by default. I liked that the color scheme wasn’t based around white, as in previous games, as it made Arno feel more part of his world.

In terms of animation, Unity is really buggy, even years after release. Characters would float in the air or get stuck in odd places, but even so, I didn’t find it difficult to complete the game. I did really like that Arno’s combat animations were inspired by fencing, and his kills were fluid and elegant, almost like a dance.

Final Verdict: Although Assassin’s Creed Unity attempts to bring a new kind of gameplay to the franchise and includes some charming protagonists, the difficult controls, lack of engaging plot, and introduction of microtransactions make it merely an average installment in the series.

#video game review

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prettygraceful · 5 years

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ok, i’ve been telling my dad this for months and i thought i’d finally share here. here is my dream scenario for when shadowhunters comes back (since i still keep hope that it will). and by that i mean what should happen- within realistic parameters- that i think would bring the show more general positive reactions, a larger fanbase, and stable success to ensure many more wonderful seasons. so we pick up shortly after where the epilogue left off- with the mains divided into the new york group and the alicante group- and they stay split up. this allows for 2 “A” storylines to run concurrently to allow for a wider audience to stay invested and more character dynamics to be fully explored, instead of shoved into rushed, very limited screentime “B” and “C” storylines. i’m thinking similar to daenerys and jon snow (pre s7) in GOT, aka equally important main leads.

clary remains the hub of the NY squad, as she’s always been. she is the favored female of the fandom, and this still honors the spirit of the books. alec becomes the hub of the alicante squad. he is the favored male of the fandom (tv time’s recent poll had him at more votes than the next 2 guys combined. he had over 700,000 while jace and magnus only had over 300,000 apiece. clary was at over 200,000). ok, we’ve got the chosen by logic “hubs” so let’s talk the “spokes”.

NY squad includes jace, obviously, and simon, izzy, maia. but instead of sizzy or saia, they slowly develop into a polyamorous throuple. this accomplishes many things: 1st, the shippers could make peace. 2nd, maia would have a solid link to who’s always been the center of SH: the lightwoods family. and 3rd, it could trim the fat, so to speak. instead of having supporting character wlw (heline, ollie, sam- all stereotypically characterized tv wlw, who only ate up screentime that should’ve gone to the downworlder mains imo) the wlw rep could be izzy and maia- already fleshed out mains. after spending time together resulting in unlocking some feelings, they could all get together since they both still care for simon too. now they’d have to be bi/ pan obviously- so no lesbian rep- but as a lesbian myself, i’m averse to the idea that every show has to “check every box”. quality over quantity. a trio of only POC is original vs just another wlw pair with 1 white person. as long as it was written properly, it could avoid bi stereotypes.

now the NY squad has all the different dynamic options to explore that this fandom seems to love (clace, climon, clizzy, claia, sizzy, saia, jimon, and jaia. and the jace/ izzy dynamic can finally get it’s dues!) and with a 3 POC to 2 white ratio, it’s better diversity than when things always revolved around the squad of shadowhunters in s1 thru s3. meliorn can join the fun sometimes. clary gets her powers back, but hopefully without the “mary sue” aspect. when the solution for everything was often just being shown new runes and drawing them, where was the earned achievement? (versus like when valentine was defeated, she did that!) generally, self-made heroes- rather than “born special”- are more relatable and inspirational. like arya vs daenerys- who was born able to hatch dragons in fire. she achieved so much, but without the dragons- like clary’s angel powers- none of it would’ve been possible. then again, i know daenerys is very popular, so my preference in hero types obviously isn’t universal. so either way, i guess.

on to the alicante squad (my personal favs)! magnus and luke have obviously already joined alec here, and they’re rebuilding the shadowhunter homebase to be an accepting environment. there has to be an actual lengthy, difficult power struggle here- an extremely prejudiced regime like the clave wouldn’t just topple overnight. maryse is here too and should be bumped up to be a main. then it’d be 4 women to 5 men as our mains- much more balanced. then 1 or 2 new lady characters could be introduced. let’s get some new blood on the show! and to appropriately fit into the already existing dynamic here, it’d be best if they were 30+ in age. (and hopefully they cast taller ladies, cuz aside from the mother roles- jocelyn and maryse- all of them have been 5′2″ to 5′5″ and it’s time to mix it up). they can develop solid friendships with our squad. also the parabatri needs to finally get it’s dues, since we’ve been robbed long enough. ok, and so with 1 shadowhunter, 1 downworlder, 1 sh turned dw turned sh again, and 1 sh turned mundane, there’s a lot of different perspectives here. and the new ladies could have their own unique perspectives as well. so it’d be very interesting for there to be problems they all must solve, but they each have their own ideas on how to go about it. thru compromise at times- and deferring to the one who’s perspective lends a better insight other times- they’d have innovative solutions.

to address why mizzy instead of either with clary, why the new women would probably not be wlw, and why the “hubs” are both white- it’s cuz the point of this post is me throwing in my 2 cents on what changes could be made- in the hands of new showrunners and now that we’re free of the book material- but is still possible, realistic, and viable given the way the industry machine works, and the demographic of this fandom. i’d also like to note that i just really want raphael and catarina gone, since they refuse to let magnus interact with them! they each only had 4 eps with him, yet they’re his “family”? it became beyond absurd! raphael= none in s1. 1 in s3. catarina= none in s1/ s2. only 1 in 3b- 3x22 doesn’t count cuz they didn’t talk at all. and for those who’d balk at alec being separated from jace and izzy, i say- have you never met adult siblings? it’s healthy, normal, and encouraged in society, that when siblings grow up, they go their own separate ways and live independent lives. forge their own paths. it does not mean they love their siblings any less. i have a sister, i should know.

in conclusion, the 2 separate squads would have their own adventures in the first 8 episodes of each half season. i think most everyone agrees that politically driven themes- dealt with symbolically thru this fantasy world- would make for better story arcs rather than just good vs evil (val, jonathan, lilith) all the time (esp since SH doesn’t have the budget to make fantasy elements very exciting). since there is a nice ratio of shadowhunters and downworlders in each squad, the set up for these themes would already be in place. and then much like any show that has divided storylines, at some point you’ve got to bring them all together. this could happen in the 9th episode. a wedding or holiday celebration or whatever. they could all sit around a giant table and have a feast and this ep could just be warm and fuzzy. lightwood family time- including magnus/ jace’s long overdue friendship- and a chance for them all to reconnect, until the last scene of the ep when some big bad guy dramatic problem could arise. then the final ep of the half season could be them all working together (as a whole or separately in smaller groups) to defeat the big bad (save the budget and the big fantastical sets/ creatures for the finales). end on an exciting cliffhanger. ta da!

#shadowhuntersedit #tagged to reach a larger audience #plz no one start drama #just sharing my thoughts #if you like it let me know :)#if not... oh well #meta #like i said this isn't my absolute ideal scenario either #seeing as alec/ izzy is #my 2nd fav dynamic on SH after malec #but overall i feel this would be best #ok i've reread and edited this post #like a billion times for over a week now #i'm not even kidding #so time to just post it already #here we go...

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ruthiswriting · 7 years

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graduation

mp100 | serirei, AU, 2.8k

another drabble belonging to the series our endless numbered days, this one taking place about five years after the end of holding. wrote this a while ago, but held off on posting it. pre established relationship.

warnings: alcohol, mentioned major character death

Whenever Reigen drank, Serizawa resigned himself to getting him home.

It didn’t matter what he drank, how much he drank, or when he drank, but inevitably Serizawa would find himself supporting his weight as they walked the distance back to their apartment. Rather, as Serizawa walked— Reigen generally seemed to lose all capability to move his legs about in a reasonable manner. He simply would sling an arm around Serizawa’s shoulder and keep a running monologue in his ear. His warm breath, strong with the scent of shochu, would always tickle Serizawa’s ear.

Initially, Serizawa had found it charming. Now it was sort of exasperating.

But still charming.

And tonight, he couldn’t really bring himself to be annoyed with Reigen.

“Graduation,” Reigen said, shaping the word with exaggerated slowness. “Can you believe it, Katsu? Seems like yesterday Ritsu was just this moody middle schooler.” Serizawa attempted to straighten the suitjacket Reigen still kept on his shoulders, but then Reigen slumped into him. “Now he’s a moody high school graduate.”

Serizawa heard him chuckle against his chest, and then it turned into a hum. Reigen’s fingers danced lightly along Serizawa’s shirt, and Serizawa, underneath the embarrassing tingle in his stomach, realized they were blocking the door to the bar. He gripped Reigen’s upper arms and pulled him upright, and Reigen sagged comfortably in his grip. It made Serizawa think of one of those cats that went limp when you held it. He pulled him away from the door, tripping over the uneven steps and Reigen’s feet.

“Do you have everything?” Serizawa asked, patting Reigen’s jacket pockets. They were distressingly empty. Serizawa patted them more thoroughly, to no avail. “Did you grab your keys when we left this morning? Your wallet?”

He couldn’t quite make out the intricacies of Reigen’s expression— the streetlight above them shone on Serizawa’s head and cast a shadow over Reigen’s face, but he could see the suggestion of his face moving. Then Reigen settled a hand next to Serizawa’s neck, in a gesture that was probably supposed to be a pat but forgot along the way. “Relax,” he said. “I put ‘em in your pocket.”

Serizawa blinked. He checked his pockets. Both his wallet and keys and Reigen’s were there, forming a comfortable, equal weight on each side of his body. He turned his attention back to Reigen. “Why?”

Reigen slouched back a little further, and his teeth glinted in the sliver of light they caught. “Oops.”

Serizawa sighed and looped Reigen’s arm around his shoulder. “Okay, Taka. Time to go home now.”

“It’s too bad,” Reigen remarked as Serizawa began walking down the street, “Ritsu’s still not old enough to go have celebratory drinks with us. Maybe that’s bad mentorship on my part, hm. I think we got him covered, anyway.”

“You did,” Serizawa rebuffed easily. “I just wait for you to get drunk and then we go home.”

Reigen laughed, and the noise echoed down the street. “Well, I don’t keep you waiting long.”

“No,” Serizawa agreed, intentionally dropping his voice in hopes that Reigen would match. “You don’t.”

He pressed a light kiss against the side of Reigen’s forehead, where hair lay thick against his temple. In the dark walking home, everything felt like a secret. So did this silent declaration, especially when Reigen tilted conspiratorily towards him and his body caved into Serizawa. Every loud feeling settled right between the space where the crook of Reigen’s side didn’t quite fit into his. Serizawa felt himself smile as Reigen’s head leaned against his shoulder.

Reigen was quiet, which gave Serizawa the time he needed to find the street sign and figure out where they were. He squinted at the tall sign with white characters, barely illuminated in the dark. Just as he was piecing together the solution, Reigen slouched against him again. His voice was soft when he spoke. “He was moody, though. More n’ usual. Right? I’m not crazy?”

Serizawa hesitated. There was something dangerous in the way Reigen’s voice drifted up, hopeful and wistful all at once. “Not crazy,” he agreed, trying not to look at Reigen, “but you know him better than me. You’d be able to tell better.”

But Ritsu had been moody— distant in a concentrated way that Serizawa hadn’t seen for years. He’d smiled, and accepted their warm congratulations on his academic achievements, but it was with the same thin politeness that Ritsu regarded strangers with. Even when Ritsu’s mother hugged him, or his father rustled his hair in a practiced gesture, it was something he endured.

By the time that Serizawa had figured out that Ritsu built walls, Reigen had begun dismantling them. That meant that Serizawa didn’t know how to read what each guarded expression meant, in the same way that came so naturally to Reigen— but no, he’d worked for it. He’d worked hard to understand, to drag Ritsu up out of that mire along with himself. Serizawa wouldn’t discount that.

“Guess it doesn’t matter too much,” Reigen said distantly, drawing Serizawa out of his thoughts. “He won’t be needing me, now.”

A barely held together seam in Serizawa’s chest began to open up, revealing something cavernous below. “Taka,” he said, the word soft.

“It’s true,” Reigen said, and he went to wave a hand. It made a circuitous path through the air, then hung there. “I never expected any of you to hang around. You know? I mean, I wanted… Well, I guess everyone wants dumb, impossible things. Like hopin’ you’ll wake up tomorrow, and your bank account’ll be full, and your knees won’t ache because you’re gettin’ old, and you’ll have some incredible guy who lets you trip all over his feet all the way home…”

Reigen slipped on the pavement, and Serizawa grabbed him. He always grabbed too fast, too hard, and he feared constantly that his hands would squeeze, and then Reigen would break. But Reigen just flopped into his arms. “Well, that one came true,” he said.

“I’m not leaving,” Serizawa told him. “Ritsu’s not either. He won’t work at the office, but he still cares about you. We both do.”

“Mhm,” Reigen murmured in what Serizawa hoped was an agreement. The way it was shaped made him doubt that. Serizawa frowned and felt lines in his face deepen. He continued guiding Reigen down the street.

Eventually, Reigen yawned, then slipped into a sentence. “Well, I did what I could, Katsuya. Hope his parents can tell… Guess they’d know. Well, I think I know, I guess I can’t be certain. Kid’s like a puzzle box, sometimes…”

Serizawa pulled him to a stop next to the curb, bending his head around Reigen to look down the street, then at his face. “Know what? What about Ritsu?”

“He’s thinking about Mob,” Reigen said.

There wasn’t anything amiss on Reigen’s face, even in the sleepy way his lids settled on his eyes. Serizawa still felt his stomach drop out from under him. He stood still for a moment, unable to think of any way to proceed.

Shigeo had died five years and one and a half months ago. Keeping track of days had become a necessary compulsion for Serizawa, so the time measured out clearly in his head. He could probably count the days too, back to when he’d found out why the city had split open, then when he’d had to go to the funeral, and then a million small pointless things until now.

He pulled Reigen closer, arm wrapping tighter around his side as a poor shield. “Come on,” Serizawa said, softly. “Let’s go home.”

“He always… gets like that, around big milestones,” Reigen continued as Serizawa tried to get him walking again. “All moody and withdrawn. Think he feels guilty for growing up, when Mob can’t…” Reigen blew out air. “Dumb kid. Guess I can’t blame him, though.”

His mood didn’t falter, all the rest of the way home. He rambled, on in an endless train that Serizawa couldn’t quite focus on. Somewhere, his philosophizing about Ritsu turned to his philosophizing about Shigeo, and then into long, spooled out anecdotes. Serizawa had heard some of them before. Some of them he’d been there for. Reigen didn’t seem to remind recounting things both of them knew in authorial tones, tugging on Serizawa’s collar to get his attention when he grew too distracted for Reigen’s liking. There was something easy on Reigen’s face as he laughed. They sounded like stories about someone who’d just gone away for a while, and he’d be there at the office tomorrow. Maybe the feeling was created by the alcohol. Maybe he was too drunk to know what he was talking about at all. Serizawa ached.

He’d gone quiet when Serizawa drew them up the stairs to their apartment, and then to the door where he fumbled over the keys. Serizawa thought maybe he’d fallen asleep, finally, until Reigen nudged his shoulder with the top of his head. “Did I ever tell you,” he said, pressing one finger into Serizawa’s side, “how we met?”

Serizawa stiffened without meaning to. “You might have mentioned it, once,” he said finally. He knew the sketch of the story— some accidental meeting, and then Reigen had declared himself Shigeo’s mentor… There was some confused memory about it, tickling in the back of his head. But if he’d heard it, it would’ve been from before, and things from back then often felt out of focus.

“Well,” Reigen said, voice lifting in the beginning of a story, “It must’ve been about…” He tilted his head back, pretending to try to remember. “Ten or so years ago. God, Katsuya, when’d we get so old?”

The key in Serizawa’s hand clunked against the door, missing the doorknob once more. In a fit of frustration, Serizawa directed a burst of psychic energy at the door. It unlocked and swung open soundlessly, and Serizawa guided Reigen inside. He kicked the door shut behind him, and then they were in the dark. Serizawa slid his shoes off in the doorway and then, after a moment’s deliberation, swung Reigen up into his arms, tucking one comfortably under Reigen’s knees.

Reigen snorted against his shoulder, and Serizawa could imagine his bleary smile as he curled his fingers against the back of Serizawa’s neck. He wanted to kiss Reigen, suddenly, even through his exhaustion and exasperation and the aching pit of his stomach. Serizawa made it as far as pressing his forehead against Reigen’s before he couldn’t continue. He stayed there, listening to his breathing.

Reigen’s head tipped back, and Serizawa couldn’t follow the motion any further down. “He must’ve been about ten, I guess,” Reigen murmured, hand still playing against Serizawa’s neck. “He showed up at the office, back when it was just me, and he said he wanted help controlling his powers. Well, I was so sure it was some prank… Like I was important enough for anyone to go around playing tricks on me, hah. Imagine.”

Serizawa picked his way through their tiny apartment, past the kitchen that needed cleaning, through the living room with their half collapsed couch, and into their pitch dark bedroom. All the while, Reigen continued talking into his ear, low and confidential like someone might hear. “But I guess I felt bad for him, or something, or I couldn’t feel good about turning some kid out… So I gave him some hacked up advice, about how hard it was being a psychic but how it was still possible to be a good person. I don’t even remember what I said.”

He hesitated, here, long enough for Serizawa to doubt, and then launched forward again into the story. “Anyway, then I figured out he really did have powers, and I thought, hey, that’d be useful for the office, even if all really he can do is levitate cups. So I told him to come back, saying I’d help him control his powers, thinking I was smart enough to trick some kid into thinking I had powers. It’d be easy, right? People do it on tv all the time.”

Serizawa settled Reigen on the bed, then caught him before he could fall flat on his back. The words were pouring out of Reigen faster and faster as Serizawa peeled his coat off and began working his tie loose with careful fingers. “I spent years jumping through hoops, trying to impress him, convince him that I was really something. I was pulling my hair out over it, because what if he left? What the hell was I gonna do?” His arms spun briefly wide, hitting Serizawa in the side. “But, Katsu, do you know the best part?”

“No,” Serizawa said, dutifully. He settled Reigen back onto the bed, and it creaked underneath them as Serizawa bent over Reigen’s face. The dim light of the alarm clock was all Serizawa had to go on to see. He pillowed his elbow on a fold in the comforter, and then his chin on his hand. “What’s the best part?”

Reigen smiled. “He knew. The whole time, he knew, and the cheeky kid just let me run around in circles all day long. Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?”

The smile Serizawa made back felt weak and ill. Something was lodging into his heart, keeping it from functioning properly. He swept some of Reigen’s hair back to kiss his forehead. “Good night, Arataka.”

Reigen didn’t answer, and Serizawa sat up again. He lifted Reigen’s feet up from where they dangled and placed them on his knee, pulling the shoelaces loose. When Serizawa shoved Reigen’s shoes off his heel, a green light caught them in midair, and the shoes floated up. Serizawa sent them drifting through the bedroom door, back to the front door. Then, he slid his own jacket off, throwing it across the room at some place he’d trip over himself in the morning trying to find.

It was when Serizawa was pulling his own tie loose that Reigen said, “I really miss that kid. You know? I miss...”

Serizawa just sat there; feeling like a useless statue, a solid stone resting on the end of their bed. But then, Reigen made the smallest, ugliest, noise, and Serizawa turned, falling back next to him. There was something horrible working its way up Reigen’s throat, and Serizawa felt it when he dragged Reigen into his arms. He rubbed Reigen’s back in slow steady circles as a sob made Reigen’s whole body convulse. “It’s okay,” Serizawa whispered, hardly audible to himself under the noise of Reigen’s grief. “Taka, I know, I know…”

“I’m so selfish,” Reigen said, the words coming out as a wail. “I’m so fucking, sselfish, what do you think Ritsu’s feeling right now? God, five whole years of this and what have I done for him?”

“You’ve done a lot,” Serizawa said, raising his voice. “I swear, Taka, you have, you did so much for both of those kids, if you could see—”

Reigen shook his head, and he careened into Serizawa’s neck. His hands were clenching Serizawa’s shirt fabric, tighter and tighter. “I never even told him,” Reigen mumbled. “Mh- Mob. He knew, we both knew, but I was too much of a coward to say—” his voice hitched again. “And then today, I should’ve said something, to Ritsu, I could see, but I just let him walk away, I haven’t learned a thing… Katsuya…”

“He’s still here,” Serizawa whispered. “You haven’t failed, you can say something again, Ritsu’s still here, I’m still here, you’re still here…”

There was something unspoken in the ugly breath Reigen pulled through his body— a necessary absence in what Serizawa said, obvious in the tears slipping down Reigen’s face. Serizawa tried to pull him a little further up the bed so he could lay comfortably on the pillows instead of Serizawa’s chest, but instead Reigen pressed deeper against him. All Serizawa could do was wait until Reigen had given all he could, and his drunken sobs finally ended. Sobs settled out into ragged breaths, and Reigen was asleep.

Tears were still slipping down his face when Serizawa finally settled him into bed, pulling the comforter over him. He brushed a thumb under Reigen’s eye, then wiped the tears collected on the pillowcase by his head. Serizawa waited, as he listened to Reigen’s breathing, for the now cavernous ache in his chest to close so he could sleep. He watched the alarm clock slowly click through numbers in time to Reigen’s breaths.

Reigen’s hands slowly loosened their hold on Serizawa’s shirt, until they merely draped over the curve of his back. The congestion in his chest cleared with each slow breath. Serizawa smoothed a worried wrinkle out of his brow, and breathed in only to hear the congestion in his own throat. A few frustrated, angry tears slid down the bridge of Serizawa’s nose, and he buried his face in Reigen’s hair.

In the end, it wasn’t time slowly slipping by that dragged Serizawa into sleep. It was the sound of Reigen’s steady breathing that eased Serizawa into slumber, dark and dreamless as he wanted.

#reigen arataka #serizawa katsuya #serirei #mob psycho 100 #mp100 #our endless numbered days #graduation #alcohol /#major character death /#fanfiction

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ebenvt · 5 years

Text

Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to late 1800 when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.

The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.

The Danish Cooperatives and Saltpeter

Copenhagen, March 1891

My dear Minette,

It is Sunday afternoon. I slept most of the morning. I am excited and refreshed. I know you are here in spirit. Life has turned out much more insanely exciting than I could ever have hoped for. The entire thing is a grand adventure of discovery. I could never dream that trying to unlock the secrets of bacon would be as insanely exciting as it all turned out to be. Hopefully, you will receive the letter I wrote yesterday before you get this one. I will hold on to it and post it next Friday.

I have been wondering about meat curing for as long as I can remember. Even as a child I tried to imagine how people discovered that dry meat lasts longer. Initially, I believe that people ate meat raw or fermented. Animal carcasses that are left outside will start to ferment. Fermentation breaks the tough muscles down and the first priority of humans must have been to find ways to get tough game meat soft. Leaving the carcass then outside or in water to protect it from preditors would have been a natural way of softening the meat. Later, boiling the meat and roasting it over fire became other ways to soften meat or pulverizing it with a stick or a rock.

I imagine that as people soon discovered that dry meat lasts long and the wonderful benefits of salt. Food was initially only seen as something to consume in order to fuel our bodies. As humans developed, we started changing food into an art form. The king or leader and people with means could now demand the best meat. We learned that meat, like any other food, can be prepared in many different ways to improve the taste and food changed into art. These different techniques of “softening” meat were becoming art in themselves and Sharma, medicine men and women and housewives became the custodians of this new technology.

When we make bacon, we use a technique called curing. Cured meat is identified by three things. The salt and saltpeter change the colour of the meat. When an animal is killed, the meat blooms a beautiful red colour. If you do not rub it with saltpeter, it changes to a dull brown colour. If you, however, rub it with a mixture of salt and saltpeter, it changes the colour to a pinkish-reddish colour. Related to the science of making good bacon, colour is the first key.

The second thing that saltpeter does is to impart a unique cured flavour to the meat. The third characteristic of cured meat is taste. The last one is longevity. Cured meat lasts long outside a refrigerator and in Europe is the staple food in many countries as far as meat is concerned.

I know saltpeter is important because it imparts all three characteristics to bacon. Let me rather say it like this. Using Saltpeter is not the only guarantee for good bacon, but leaving it out of the salt-rub, you will never get the right colour, taste or longevity. You have the option of drying the meat without saltpeter in which case it will also last longer, but the meat will be dry and it will not have the characteristic taste of cured meat.

In South Africa, the old Dutch farmers fused their knowledge of drying meat in the chimnies in Holland and the North European practice of using vinegar in their hams with the indigenous practice of hanging meat out in the sun and wind to dry. I have found this to be an ancient practice among all the peoples of southern Africa that I met in my travels.

The Dutch farmers add coriander and black pepper with salt to the vinegar to create what they call biltong. The coriander and black pepper were initially added to mask any off-flavours in case the meat did not dry quick enough and some spoiling of meat has set in. This is a good example where drying works well to preserve meat with or without saltpeter. Saltpeter can only be left out of the recipe if vinegar is used and lots of salt.

I have always known that the secret of bacon is in saltpeter, but saltpeter is not everything that goes into the making of the best bacon on earth. So, my quest to understand bacon starts with saltpeter. What is it and why does it have the power to give longevity to meat, change the colour back to the colour of freshly slaughtered meat why does it give this unique taste? These are the questions I knew I had to answer first.

Besides understanding saltpeter, our goal in Cape Town is to set up a factory and not merely making bacon for home use. Scale changes everything. This is a lesson I learned from very early on. On my grandfathers’ farm, I have seen how easy it is to make the best bacon on earth if we make it for our family only. When my dad’s bacon became famous and Dawid de Villiers Graaff placed an order with us, we made five-time more we normally do. It was a disaster! Everything went wrong. We had more workers to help, but they were not trained. We could not keep the meat cool and in the end, we had to feed most of the meat to our dogs. Scale is difficult and the importance of the right structure of a bacon factory is something that we can not under-estimate. Right from the word go, I came face to face with lessons pertaining to structure and ingredients and the first ingredient to look at was saltpeter!

The Spirit of the Danes

The morning was crisp and interesting. Andreas’ dad is an impressive man. He is very intelligent with an amazing knowledge of many things. He gave me a lot of perspective on what Jeppe told me on Friday. For example, how did it come about that a man of Jeppes age was exposed to learning new butchering and curing techniques? Why was there in Denmark such a focus on continued education that people showed up for lessons by the Irish, in sufficient numbers to make a proper transfer of skills possible. How did the most current thing about the structure of a bacon plant fit so nicely into the Danish culture? How were the Danish people inspired to take up a new way of doing things?

It often takes a prophet to change long-held perceptions; a visionary to change entrenched positions! An inspirational man who draws his own strength from the Divine to lift peoples gaze from their own depressed positions and onto better things. To instill hope. These are however not all that is needed because these are often also the qualities of an imposter and someone who destroys. What is needed are all these qualities with a simple and effective plan to improve things. A person who can lead people to a better and more profitable future.

Andreas’ dad told me about just such a man. In many ways, he is the father of the agricultural miracle of Denmark. It may sound like a boring report on men and women who lived very long ago, but the truth is that it is an inspirational story about men and women with their backs against the wall. Who triumphed against the odds. The man at the center of the story is N. F. S. Grundtvig.

Denmark was an impoverished nation. They lost Schleswig-Holstein to Germany. The soil of their lands was depleted and yielding fewer crops with every harvest. In all of Europe, the Danish soil seemed to be the poorest. The conditions in 1864 were dire and farmers had little hope competing with Russia and America with their crops. They were not making money. Apart from little diversified agriculture, there was very little money in the country. Farmers identified dairy farming as a lucrative diversification of their economy, but they lacked the money to make their plans a reality. The depleted soil on the farms offered little collateral for lenders to advance money against.

I wish so much that I would get every South African to hear their message. We are a nation of faith and still, we complain as if we have no hope. What we need in South Africa is a prophet, a visionary and a very good plan! The plan will in all likelihood have to be built on very practical education! It is exactly for this reason that I am here! I need to be very clear on the plan! To my great amazement, the bedrock of the structure of the Danish bacon factory is in the first place not on the mechanics of doing it one way as opposed to another way. The basis of their entire system rests on an almost religious belief in the power of cooperation and education!

Grundtvig was a churchman who lived between 1783 and 1872 and was described by some as the Apostle to Denmark. He taught that Danish people must love their own country above all, more than any other real estate on earth. He believed that Danes must love God and trust each other; their own skill and ability to solve problems; that success will come through cooperation. The principal way to achieve this was through education and what he called the “cultivation of the people.” This was distilled through his concept of high school which is completely different from high school in the rest of the world.

N. F. S. Grundtvig’s high schools were initially attended by people from the age of 18 to 60 or even older and everyone in between. Every farmer’s adult son and daughter, every farmer himself or his wife, considered it a loss not to attend High School for at least one term. The poor and the rich paid the same small fees and lectures covered an array of interesting subjects. Religion and nationalism were part of the course, but it never dominated the other subjects. Men and women looked forward to high school in the same way as Americans looked forward to a trip to Europe. What he achieved is that even more than the information that was imparted, a general method of teamwork was created which would become the basis for cooperative farming and production. Later, men and women aged between 16 and 35 mostly attended these high schools. Young men attended in the winter and young ladies, in the summer. Experimental agricultural farms were set up around the schools. The teaching was not done from textbooks, but from practice.

Cooperation

His teachings against individualism slowly but surely sowed the seeds which germinated into mutual trust and a belief that by doing things together, more can be achieved. Directly as a result of this, in 1881/ 1882 the first cooperative dairy farm was established in Jutland. The Danes realised that to be successful, they must find ways for their fields to yield better crops and they must develop better ways to use their crops, once harvested. Better than selling it at depressed margins on the open market in competition with the Russians and the Americans would be to utilise it to produce commodities. On par with a relentless focus on scientific farming practices was unprecedented cooperation. The middle man had to eliminate. The farmer and the salesman joined forces and discovered that by cooperating they always had “something to go on,” a phrase which became an example of the new approach.

The cooperatives were set up where every member had equal rights. Each member of the dairy cooperative had one vote and his milk was collected every morning and the cooperative agents returned the skimmed milk. The cows, therefore, produced butter and feed for the pigs. Money is loaned from the bank. Each member made himself responsible for repaying the loan in accordance with the number of cows he had. Every seven days, the members received 25% of the value of the milk they delivered to the cooperative. Apart from selling the milk to the cooperative, the member was entitled to his shares of the profit on the sale of the produce. The cooperative kept 25% from which running expenses were paid and the loan was repaid.

There is another reason, Andreas’ dad tells me, why the Danish system works so well. Not only did they manage themselves, but they also elected farmers to positions of power in government. It was not only, like the Americans, for the people, by the people, but the Danes took it one step further. The need and most pressing priority was their agriculture and so the cooperatives elected representatives for the farmers, by the farmers to the government. These men and women abhor profiteering so that the priority is the benefit of the many. This hatred for large trusts and monopolies goes back to the old feudal system which was prevalent in Europe. Peasants did not own land, but in Denmark, this changed and the peasants were allowed to own their own farms. This gave them every stimulus and motivation to improve the small farms. It is said that 90% of all farmland in Denmark is owned by small scale farmers. The first revolution in Danish agriculture was ownership.

The new farm owners started protesting against rulership and land aristocracy. They sought more political power and proper representation. They worked out a constructive plan to break up the remaining large feudal farms and to distribute it among sons and daughters of the workers. Farm ownership, a systematic and thorough education system and the cooperative model for farming and production all work together. The one feeding the other and strengthening the overall agricultural experiment. In large part, the middle man was eliminated and the few matters run by the state are done for the benefit of the farmers and not for the government to make a profit. A good example is the railways. Still, the Danish farmer is not a socialist. They simply believe in cooperation who thinks in terms of self-help and are not reliant on the state for help.

As Andreas’ dad spoke, I again wished I could get him to South Africa to come and tell them how it was done in Denmark. I know that cooperation runs much deeper than simply pooling resources. The role of education and private ownership was the basis of the Danish miracle and I see no reason why the exact same model cant work in South Africa. The one reason I see is how deeply distrust runs between the different peoples who call South Africa their home.

Skimmed Milk to Pork to Bacon

In Denmark, it was probably the need to find a use for the skimmed milk that gave the farmers the idea of raising pigs in the same way that the need to feed cows indoor for nine months of the year forced them into intensive farming in fodder. Pig farming therefore directly grew out of dairy farming. It was going well with the establishment of cooperative pig farming and the live pigs were sold to Germany.

Before 1888, Danish farmers relied on selling all their live pigs in Germany. The Germans, in turn, produced the finest Hamburg bacon and Hams from it and it was mainly sold to England. A disaster struck the Danish pork industry when swine fever broke out in the country in the autumn of 1887. This halted all export of live pigs. Exports to Germany fell from 230 000 in 1886 to only 16 000 in 1888. One of the most insane industrial transformations followed. In a staggering display, the Danes identified the problem, worked out the solution and dedicated every available nation resource to solving it. The creation of large bacon curing cooperatives was born out of the need to switch from exporting live pigs to processed pork in the form of bacon and to sell it directly to the country where the Germans were selling the processed Danish pork namely England. The project was a stunning success. In 1887 the Danish bacon industry accounted for 230 000 live pigs and in 1895, converted from bacon production, 1 250 000 pigs.

After breeding and pig farming, the next step in great bacon production is slaughtering. On 14 July 1887, 500 farmers from the Horsens region created the first shared abattoir. On 22 December 1887, the first co-operative abattoir in the world, Horsens Andelssvineslagteri (Horsens’s Share Abattoir), received their first live pigs for slaughter. In 1887 and over the next few years eight such cooperative abattoirs were set up and there is still no end in sight where it will end. Each is in excellent running condition. As in the case with the dairy farmers, each member of the cooperative has only one vote. The profit of the middleman and the volumes exported for butter and bacon are determined by the cooperative. The market price is fixed in Copenhagen on a daily basis by an impartial committee.

Every farmer in Denmark or manager of a bacon curing plant cant be a scientific person, and yet, it is important that farmers and factory managers alike know something of the science underpinning their trade. It is here where the high school lessons play an important role because it provides a solid foundation and the government is doing the rest. They have a system of inspectors who look after farms and factories where they do the exact calculations, for example, to show how much butter must be produced from the milk of each cow. The reason for the inspections was that the Danish Government were required to guarantee the quality of the bacon and the butter it delivered to England, but it had the double benefit of on the one hand guarantees the quality and satisfy the English requirements and on the other hand, improved the quality by assisting the farmers and producers.

The logic of cooperation was extended into England, the largest market for Danish bacon. Some years ago the English bacon market was being serviced for the Danes by middlemen. The farmers organised a selling agency in England to represent them known as the Danish Bacon Company of London. The concept was applied to many areas of the Danish economy. Banking and buying in Denmark are likewise done cooperatively. Every village has a cooperative store.

The farmer in Denmark also uses the state in another interesting way. Commissions are sent abroad to study foreign methods. It was most probably on one of these trips that the Danes came across the striking workers in Ireland whom they brought back to Denmark to teach them mild curing. Mild curing technology that came from Ireland years earlier became the cornerstone of Danish bacon. It was this industrialised model that allowed the Danes to become the undisputed leaders in the world bacon trade. The Danes did exactly what we intend doing namely learning not only how the cooperative factory is set up, but also the inner workings of such a factory. They learned this from the Irish and I intend learning it from them! That will satisfy one of the cornerstone reasons why I am in Denmark.

Neat, Prepared, Ready

Many years ago, on one of my visits to Johannesburg, I met another chemicals traders with the name of Willie Oosthuizen. Willie told me that wherever I am in the world, before I leave home, every morning I must ask myself, “am I ready, prepared and neat? These are according to him, the three essentials without which nobody will be in a position to use opportunities that come our way every day.

Thinking about the Danish Bacon trade, I realise that the government ensured that when the right time came, the industry was ready, prepared and in a general position of neatness. It is a strange thing that as we walked through this small Danish town and I saw the small but neat Danish houses, that I could see this Danish approach to life in everything. I do not see class differences between people. I see people from all walks of life getting together in small coffee shops at the end of the day, celebrating life and sharing stories.

I can see how my quest to unravel good bacon curing is teaching me as much about life than it is teaching me about meat. Andreas told me something this afternoon before I retired to my room which is very curious. He told me that I am too quick to claim that this is the end of my quest. That simply knowing the steps of bacon curing without understanding it is not to know the steps at all. Brief exposure to the Danish attitude towards work and cooperation and the internal mechanics of a bacon curing operation is only the beginning of my education.

We were sitting in a small coffee shop one afternoon when Andreas and I were talking about all these matters. Nothing about the pork trade is easy! It is one of the most wonderfully complex trades on earth! He asked me how long I think I will have to stay before I know enough to set up our Woodys bacon plant in Cape Town. I knew enough by now not to simply venture a guess. “As long as it takes”, I said. He smiled. “There is so much to learn!” “Stay for at least a year!”. He then produced a pouch with salt in. He placed it in the middle of our table. I dipped a finger in the salt and tasted it. I recognised it as saltpeter. “This, he said, is the next subject. I discussed it with Jeppe and he agrees that after the structure of the factory, understanding Saltpeter is your next priority!”

That was where our business talk ended. The rest of the afternoon we talked about life. What it was like growing up in Cape Town and the many different cultures that co-exist in this great city. I shared many of my experiences with him from my transport business. I told him the story of Joshua Penny and how, after his ordeal on table Mountain, a Danish captain gave him a job on his ship sailing for Europe. I invited Andreas to visit us when we set the Cape Town factory up. The evening was pleasant and I became very fond of my Danish instructor. A great friendship was struck that would last the rest of my life.

Please give the kids all my love and to our dear parents. Please give them both my letters to read before you sent it on to Oscar, James, and Will. I will write Dawie Hyman, David de Villiers Graaff, and Uncle Jakobus separately.

I miss you dearly!

Eben

——————

Photos from Chris Speedy and my visit to Denmark in 2011 when Andreas Østergaard introduced us to the science of bacon production. Chris was a master, but as for me, I knew nothing! 🙂

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Bacon Curing, a Historical Review

Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan) 7 October 1906, p 60. From The Little Kingdom at the Mouth of the baltic Great Nations May Learn How to Build Up a Trade in Dairy and Meat Products.

Ellsworth County Leader (Elsworth, Kansas) 18 December 1919, p 2.

The Mother Brine

Tank Curing came from Ireland

The Yazoo Herald (Yazoo City, Mississippi), 7 November 1914, p 2, from the article, Agriculture in Denmark.

Chapter 08.02 – The Danish Cooperative and Saltpeter Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures.

#bacon and the art of living #Bacon History #bacon processing #best bacon on earth

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ges-sa · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://ges-sa.com/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-breakpoint-review/

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint Review

Imagine Jurassic Park but with drones. The island of Auroa, owned by Jace Skell (The owner of Skell Tech) is an island overrun by the arms and corruption of a corporate gone evil. The island was supposed to be a world of innovation and coined “World 2.0” by Jace Skell, this was not the case though. Skell Tech is a major tech weapon producer of the US Government and comes under major investigation and public eyes turn to them when they are thought to have their hands in some corruption and dealings. The Wolves, an ex-US military Spec-ops, take over the island and take hostage employees of Skell Tech. When the island goes offline, the CIA launch a Ghost Recon operation to find out exactly what is going on and take down the Wolves. A throwback to Wildlands sees Anthony “Tony” Perryman aka Nomad, come back into the light as the Military helicopters sent into Auroa are taken down by a mysterious projectile. And so it begins…

BEAUTIFULLY OVERBOARD

Breakpoint reminds me of those intellectuals that overexplain something and go into so much detail that everyone leaves saying “HUH”. The game brings a beautiful island into our views with different environments to concur as well as enemies, giving it that extra touch of change and difference from mission to mission. Here is the thing though, as much variant as there is; it is too much, sometimes taking you a good 10 minutes to reach your objective to actually start the mission. The problem does not lie with the travelling because they put fast travel to points on the map; the problem lies in the “too much of a good thing”. Personally, on open world games I like to roam and take full advantage of the game’s offering, however, I felt myself going mindlessly through missions just because I did not want to trek across the entire map just to go through an entire mission to find 1 blue print. The story became mechanical and I lost that entire “oh look a butterfly” side mission journey that makes playing the game worth the time.

WORTH THE TIME THOUGH?

When it came to the actual gameplay, I was extremely surprised at how much fun I had running through missions due to the playstyles of each mission. Playing at a higher difficulty turned up the importance of each encounter with the Wolves. Strategically planning an entry point and who to take down first, how to stay out of sight of automated turrets and watch-drones made for exciting time spent during the missions. The ease of the controls with the keyboard is something you don’t see very often on PC, easy to learn and quick to engage. The efforts put into the objectives made it an amazing experience, with the thinking factor of the game turned up to max I felt myself engrossed in missions.

SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

If you played Wildlands, you’ll know the general foundation of Breakpoint. In fairness, it’s a follow up title with links between the two. However, the same way wildlands felt and came across when it came out is the same way Breakpoint feels at this point. The title feels unfinished and not polished enough to call itself a AAA title. Wildlands did eventually see major updates some out that made it a lot smoother and more fun for the masses, which saw it draw a large fan base. The issue I faced with Breakpoint was the great number of issues I came across and the raw interactions I seemed to bump into. Visually I did not encounter many glitches or bugs but boy did I struggle with simple things like the camera getting stuck between taking cover or the character model clipped when I transition from cover to cover indoors. There was one point where I was laying on a rock to snipe into a camp and every time I went ADS the character model went full scorpion fit mode and start convulsing. A lot of these issues made me feel like the game was rushed and was not played through enough during the BETA phase. Perhaps the vast space and interactions makes it near impossible to get these kinds of things right and UBISOFT is relying on us to report back these issues, but then again I ask, why was the BETA not lengthened for this?

INTRIGUING AND PLANKED

In a world where Jon Bernthal is your antagonist, you would think “boring” would be the last thing someone says about this story. Well, you think right. The story is somewhat exciting and a little predictable on my end but that might be me. Learning your link to the now leader of the “bad guys” is an awesome experience in itself, but figuring out why and what is happening takes a backseat to this (Which I think was a smart move). Creating that personal character development and interaction creates a broken bind that is difficult to explain. The story is told well and characters are portrayed with great voice work and some awesome amazing writing. The main issue is the NOC side of the game; I felt like I was shooting walking scarecrows, mindless sacks of meat that were nothing but targets to slow down your mission. It was so bad at one point I restarted the game and turned up the difficulty to maximum so that I could get the best experience! Getting one shot by a screaming sack of meat was better than being stealthy just to shoot a mindless goof in the back of the head.

FUN WITH THE MASSES

The title seems thrive in the co-op function and cannot be stopped when you and your mates are sneaking around communicating your movements and actions in discord. The fun can be had with this, especially when you play like a spec ops team, making calls out and distracting the enemies together (like Wildlands before). Jumping into the PVP side of games usually comes to me quite naturally but I found myself not really worrying about that side of the game quite yet and only jumped in for a few rounds just to unlock my items and achievements from this. The PVP section is quite fast paced compared to the main game and the play styles needs to switch drastically if you’re a stealthier play like myself. I did have lots of fun but I would not say that this is even the 3rd or 4th strongest point about this game.

QUALITY TO COME

In all honesty, I believe in this game and the Ghost Recon titles has a whole, I trust in the developers and the studio to add more to this game like they did to Wildlands. With character customization and the level of skill tree progression, insane objective boards and crafting mechanics the game sure has potential to become one the other greatest objective based looter shooter out there in my opinion, if they devs choose to lead it that route. I say grab it if you’re a Recon fan, try it and if you don’t like it follow the patches until you see the changes you want because trust me they will come.

PRICE (ZAR)

AVAILABLE ON

RELEASE DATE

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R799 – R1069

PS4, XBOX, PC And Stadia (Soon)

05 October

Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft

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#AnvilNext #Breakpoint #PS4 #Tom Clancy #Ubisoft #Ubisoft Paris #Xbox One #Gaming #Reviews

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yogaadvise · 5 years

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Reflect to Connect: A Year-in-Review Practice to Count Your Blessings and Create New Goals

After the stress of the vacations, the New Year enters swiftly. Often, you're pumped with brand-new vitality as you have a fresh start before you. You start to hastily make your New Year's resolutions, which commonly look similar to those you have actually developed in years past. A few weeks later, your subsiding interest makes your list seem lesser, and also you're encountered, once more, with lots of insufficient goals.

By stopping briefly and mirroring on the past year, you can stay clear of making vacant objectives and, rather, create ones that are much more according to your character and also bridge your previous achievements. You could see beautiful points you had previously overlooked because you were so hectic chasing after the larger dream. You can additionally review points you didn't enjoy and also make a program adjustment towards a much more satisfying brand-new year.

While assessing the past year, avoid evaluating yourself on simply completing goals or not. Only looking toward your accomplishments can give you a slim vision of the progression of your life. End goals are not incorrect-- they can give you direction. However there are numerous other pieces of your life that can make a significant influence on that you are.

As you look to develop new goals for the coming year, assess the previous year with these 3 pointers in mind. They can aid you produce purposeful next actions to attaining what you want this next year.

Notice the Little Things

As you assess this previous year, pay interest to the little things that make your life what it is. As you go throughout your day, you could notice that you take several things for approved. You do not also reconsider your automatic cars and truck starter that permits you to get on your heated cars and truck. You're so utilized to Jenny having your triple-shot skinny mocha prepared at bench each morning that you don't reconsider it. Yet, these little points are blessings each day.

Think regarding the course you stroll or jog by your home. You might assume, "This is all the same old path, I require to locate a brand-new place to jog." Every time you probably notice something different-- the chalk drawings of neighborhood children, turtles or frogs standing in your means, or the pleased child in a stroller being pressed around by his grandmother.

Think back on your year as well as ask yourself, "What were the little things that made my day?" Perhaps it was the moment your work associate brought you lunch to your desk or the day your partner made the bed. Maybe it was your child tossing her arms around you and also informing you just how much she likes you throughout an unfortunate or stressed minute. Whatever the memories are, write them down and also treasure them.

Every day in your life is genuinely a gift. It has to do with unlocking those little presents throughout daily. Discover to accept the average, mundane minutes such as:

Commuting to work

Making the bed

Shopping for food

Tucking your kids into bed

The majority of life is made up of the mundane, yet it's so very easy to overlook those moments since you're as well focused on reaching the objective. Gain some perspective and relish in the ordinary.

Appreciate the Journey

It's usual to make fitness objectives like running a half-marathon. As you reflect on hitting that goal, recognize the lots of little actions it required to do well. Many individuals prepare two to three months for this type of race, and also some could also take eight to nine months to prepare. Each week is composed of little objectives. The race itself is always exciting and also stressful, however that's not the only component to celebrate.

Looking back on it, the minutes that made it terrific were the steps you took to get ready for it, like:

Putting post-it notes on your treadmill with your last running time

Making it to five miles the initial time

Hitting 10 miles

As you make brand-new goals, think of the actions you might take in order to arrive. Sometimes we desire everything to occur currently and also we miss the intriguing (as well as sometimes frustrating) steps such as making that trip to the house renovation shop or going to meetings with recruiters while going after a new job or occupation. And also yet, the important things that take place in those steps commonly make the most effective tales and also bring you one of the most delight as you share those tales with others.

When you miss out on the actions, you miss 80 percent of the joy. As you take inventory of the large moments in this past year, ask yourself, "What were the steps that got me below?" Possibly you stayed up examining all night for your college examination as well as were awake to see the daybreak. Perhaps you paid attention to the same song over as well as over again on a journey as well as now that track is a reminder of your destination and also the time spent with a loved one.

By appreciating the actions along the means, you take stress off of striking a big objective as well as realize that perhaps the pleasure remains in the journey.

Look for the Magic Moments

Take the moment to show on the magic minutes of 2016 with gratitude. You can start with the large milestones and also accomplished goals. Yet then try to look much deeper. What were those magic moments that composed your year? It can be something entirely non-tangible such as an area of individual growth. Perhaps you dealt with patience or rage and also tension administration. Probably you concentrated on a spiritual practice. A magic moment might be recovering a relationship or flexible a person from your past.

As you discover these magic minutes, create them down in a journal with the date they took place. Notice the timeline as well as any kind of pattern that might occur. These magic minutes probably really did not occur just by chance.

Where can you locate these magic minutes? They are anywhere. You can locate them while you're waiting in the checkout line at the food store. You can experience them on a cozy fall day as you crunch through the dropped leaves. Magic minutes make you feel alive.

Sit quietly as well as show on the following inquiries to understand how gorgeous your life has been and also what it can be in the upcoming year.

What was the craziest experience you had? That did you share it with?

What made your mouth decrease in awe and wonder?

What was your tiniest ritual that you loved?

Who made you smile the most?

What was a kind point a complete stranger provided for you?

What is an aggravating experience you had that is now an excellent memory?

When did you really feel closest to God or your Greater Power?

What made you leap for joy? (On the inside or actually?)

What was one of the most attractive point you saw?

What words made your heart melt?

Who gave you the best hug?

By putting in the time to review your previous year, you will be better able to make significant goals for the following. Remember, there is no right or incorrect way to produce your new goals. Be existing to who you are and what you require. Your psyche will certainly disclose how to ideal care for you this following year.

Discover exactly how to tune right into the knowledge of your body and identify when something is wrong-- prior to illness or disease strikes at our 4-day mind-body wellness workshop, Journey into Healing. Click here to learn more.

#healing #spiritual #yoga #yoga works

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pinkuboa · 7 years

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Adding a More Cohesive Storyline to Your Yume Nikki Fangame

Traditionally, Yume Nikki fangames are open world non-linear exploration fest with little to no dialogue, leaving a lot of things open to interpretation. However, that doesn’t mean the developer has to stick to it: there’s several ways to tell a more concrete story in your game, even without dialogue. This post will go over some techniques you can use to achieve a more solid story.

➤ Start the game with an introductory sequence. This gives the player more context to why the protagonist is exploring their dreams or jumping into different worlds or what have you. Answered Prayers and The Looking Glass pulled these off well. It doesn’t even have to be a long sequence either: .flow starts with Sabitsuki in a black room, with 5 seconds of the screen glitching out before static takes over and the game starts. A nice way to set the mood for the game.

➤ Use a growing nexus. When your player enters the nexus for the first time, have there only be a small number of doors they can access. Then, as they explore each world, they can find certain events or effects that unlock new doors in the nexus. This allows you a degree of linearity for your fangame without sacrificing too much of the open world feel. You can even put a few “wake up” events to the real world that move the real world pot forward (if there is a plot outside of the dream world).

➤ Add dialogue. There’s no rule that says you can’t use dialogue in your game. The Looking Glass & Witoru/Neta Dream worked in dialogue pretty well to their game, you can add it to yours too.

➤ Blocking off areas with puzzles only solvable by having the right effects. This is another way to add some linearity to your game without sacrificing the exploration. They could lead to optional events or important areas of the game, or could just open up new areas.

➤ Making effects mean something. You can have all the protagonist’s effects be something symbolic, something they do in real life, or something they just like. All of those add more character and more story to your game. Even cosmetic effects can do something. Say one of your effects is a clown nose. When the protagonist puts it on and honks their nose, nothing usually happens. When your protagonist has it on around a certain NPC and honks their nose, the NPC could laugh. Oreko & the helmet effect are a good example of this.

Effects can also fit a theme you have going on in the game. P.S. Rose has all of it’s effects related to flowers. Feel free to get creative.

➤ Having repeating themes, motifs, or events. Having eyes show up all over the place to represent insecurity and paranoia. Placing a certain type of flower symbolizing love appearing around a certain NPC that can be seen in a few different places in the game. An event or similar events happening over and over again can draw attention to whatever you’re trying to convey to the player.

For example, seeing some NPCs that usually have heads walk around without heads, then visiting another world full of dolls with one of them having it’s head chopped off, and the protagonist looking into the mirror and seeing their head chopped off as an event all seem like important foreshadowing or symbolic of something that happened in the protagonist life due to how much the idea of decapitation is repeated. It sends a message to the player without you having to outright say “yo, this is something important”. The example I gave is a unsubtle example of course, you don’t have to do something as obvious as that. :p

➤ Adding in various counters to your game. Basically, adding 1+ to a variable every time X happens, and subtracting -1 from the same variable every time Y happens, and having the number affect events in the game. These make up morality systems and friendship meters in other games. With these, you can give a sense of progression without losing the non-linearity of the genre since the player is making a number or two increase as they go along.

.flow uses these well: there’s a friendship counter with Oreko that goes up by one point every time you enter the nexus, by 5 points if you visit her or 10 points if you have the diving helmet on per dream session, and goes down by 10 points if you kill her. If you reach 30 points with Oreko, you end up unlocking a new nexus background, an event where Oreko is holding hands with young Sabitsuki in the industrial maze, and a transparent Oreko in the star world that gives you a new menu if you interact with her. Conversely, if you hit -30 she stops appearing all together in the dream world. .flow also has the rust counter which goes up every time you see a gorey event, and adds more blood to Sabitsuki’s keyboard when she wakes up. Both of these show things changing without Sabitsuki having to go in a straight line to activate these events.

➤ Add extra details. The small details that make everything that much nicer. Think of how Madotsuki wakes up with a crick in her neck once every so often. Or how when you de-equip the Witch Effect at the witch event Madotsuki falls out of her bed. Add small things like that. Maybe the main character de-equips the weapon effect and refuses to re-equip it when they’re around a certain npc. Maybe they do a funny little hop when they witness an event or meet an npc they like. Animations like that go a long way when you’re doing visual story telling.

➤ Planning your story before you start. Take some time. Write things down. Work out a timeline in the protagonist’s life beforehand if you’re exploring their subconscious. If they’re exploring another world that has had a long history, write a timeline for that. If they’re experiencing a plot as they go through their dreams or other worlds, write down what happens & map it out.

A good way to make sure your ending(s) doesn’t seem right the fuck out of nowhere is by planning the ending(s) first, and then working backwards. This way, you know where you’re going and you can get your game there with a clear goal in mind, putting in some nice foreshadowing and having a natural progression/build up of events leading up to it.

It’s harder to put a defined story into a Yume Nikki fangame, but that’s alright. Ambiguity and non-linearity is part of the genre’s charm. You can explore concepts and stories you wouldn’t be able to in a regular linear game. Go wild, dreamers.

#yume nikki fangame #yume nikki #pink talks #pink's guides #writing #ynfg devhelp #devhelp #dev help #horror #dream diary jam #ddj resources

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joereid · 8 years

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Top 10 Movies of 2016

I wrote about my favorites in movies and TV over at Decider last week, but here’s my straight-up Top 10 movies of the year. With apologies to movies I haven’t gotten to yet, most prominently Toni Erdmann, Fire at Sea, Aquarius, and The Love Witch. Also I ranked O.J.: Made in America as my #1 TV show of the year, so it felt redundant to put it here too. No judgments if you ranked it as a movie. Obviously.

Runners-Up: I thought this turned out to be a GREAT year for movies, best exemplified by the fact that I had a bitch of a time keeping these 15 movies out of my top 10:

#25 The Lobster (director: Yorgos Lanthimos) #24 The Witch (director: Robert Eggers) #23 Kubo and the Two Strings (director: Travis Knight) #22 Everybody Wants Some!! (director: Richard Linklater) #21 La La Land (director: Damien Chazelle) #20 Hunt for the Wilderpeople (director: Taika Waititi) #19 Love & Friendship (director: Whit Stillman) #18 Sing Street (director: John Carney) #17 Lion (director: Garth Davis) #16 Other People (director: Chris Kelly) #15 Fences (director: Denzel Washington) #14 Julieta (director: Pedro Almodovar) #13 Certain Women (director: Kelly Reichardt) #12 Cameraperson (director: Kirsten Johnson) #11 Mountains May Depart (director: Zhangke Jia)

My Top 10 Movies of 2016

10. Jackie (director: Pablo Larrain) It took me a while to get into the headspace of Jackie, and what a strange little animal it seemed then. Natalie Portman's accent seemed insane, the scenes felt overly gauzy and frustratingly vague, the score felt overworked. But the more time I spent with Jackie, the more intoxicated I was by whatever fog the movie exists in. Portman's performance clicked, the specificity of Larrain's focus felt more and more revolutionary, and the whole enterprise felt an exhilarating experiment on memory, idolatry, and the spaces at which our politics and our myth-making converge. 9. The Invitation (director: Karyn Kusama) I write a lot about movies on Netflix for my job, but by FAR my favorite discovery of the year was the meticulously built suspense of The Invitation. From the opening credits winding ominously through the Hollywood Hills to the slowly dawning terror of the final moments, I haven't felt this tense through the entire run of a horror movie since The Strangers. Featuring some great performances (in particular Tammy Blanchard, Logan Marshall Green, and John Carroll Lynch), and a premise that draws upon every time someone at a party told you they just started seeing a new yoga instructor.

8. Silence (director: Martin Scorsese) A nearly three-hour, racially dubious meditation on faith from a director who's provided me with more peer-pressure guilt trips from film critics than actual movies I've enjoyed over the last decade was not adding up to something I figured I'd enjoy. But Silence is more than just the best Scorsese movie since ... The Aviator? Goodfellas? It's a committed, rigorous, and deceptively complex story about faith and imperialism, anchored by an Andrew Garfield performance of such thoughtful vulnerability that it makes you incredibly grateful that Marty took a break from Leonardo DiCaprio. Also Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography is breathtaking.

7. Hail, Casear! (director: Joel and Ethan Coen) I like when the Coens are having fun. I know the knock on them is that they're supposed to be looking down their noses on their audience and having a laugh at their expense, but all I found in Hail Caesar! was an affection for people who dedicate their lives to something as silly and often contradictory as the movie business. Josh Brolin is probably doing better work than I give him credit for at the center, but I won't apologize for all of my attention going to Channing Tatum's dancing and Alden Ehrenreich's rope tricks.

6. Manchester by the Sea (director: Kenneth Lonergan) When the narrative about this one got boiled down to a) it's unspeakably sad, and b) it's white-male feeeeeelings pornography, I was confused. Well, maybe not confused; I know how Twitter works. More dismayed. To me, Manchester by the Sea is Kenneth Lonergan at his finest, and that means so much more than simple grief or patriarchy or for Pete's sake "Oscar bait." Lonergan infuses his movie with so much more humor, so much more complexity, so much more recognizable feeling than you're expecting by the description. The relationship between Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges's characters defies any kind of prescribed arc, instead presenting two characters who fit at impossibly odd angles.

5. Little Men (director: Ira Sachs) Ira Sachs has become so good at making movies about how the Big Things in life — love, family, fellowship, generosity, power, resentment — are inextricable from the small things. In the movies, we tend to gloss over things like rent or income or expense. Making it work is a matter of will or serendipity, usually both. In Little Men, Greg Kinnear and Paulina Garcia are good people whose resentments would usually be overcome in a movie by a grand act of love or charity or luck. Sachs knows better, but he also knows that the sum of life and the beauty of lives isn't about it all working out. And that's only the groundwork in this lovely movie featuring a central friendship of boys that is as beautiful, sweet, and gently painful as anything this year.

4. Moonlight (director: Barry Jenkins) Moonlight features such strong, simple storytelling, and that economy of language is all Barry Jenkins, and he deserves all the praise he's getting for it. But that's not the reason we're talking about this movie. There's something truly remarkable when strong filmmaking meets revelatory acting meets the kinds of stories and lives that we are STARVING for. There's sadness here, yes, and tragedy, but I can't help but feel an undercurrent of celebration just for the radical act of making poetry out of lives that are usually not even afforded prose.

3. 20th Century Women (director: Mike Mills) What a difference it makes listening to Annette Bening narrate about the universe and mortality versus listening to Ewan McGregor talk about same. I could never latch onto Beginners, despite the fact that its subject matter was targeted right in my general direction. But in his follow-up, Mike Mills had me cast under a spell from moment one. Bening is superb, playing a woman who's both incredibly wise and incredibly aware of how much she doesn't know. Any shot of her silently reacting to another character is to be treasured forever. And my darling Greta Gerwig does such wonderful, beautiful work as a scene partner here, taking her moments when they come but also as supportive an ensemble player as she's ever been. But it's those moments of narration, where the plot of the movie gives way to the longview, and we get to ponder a bit about the long arcs of time, and it was so beautiful, I nearly melted into my seat.

2. American Honey (director: Andrea Arnold) Andrea Arnold's great big American road trip is sprawling and sweet, dangerous and and desirous. It doesn't work for everyone, and I think I get that. But even if Arnold isn't seeing America through a photorealistic lens, the version of America she's showing us feels true in its emotions and textures and jealousies and desperations and explorations. Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, and Riley Keough are standouts in the cast, but the movie truly comes alive in the group scenes, where the energy of a whole generation explodes into something visceral and charged.

1. Arrival (director: Denis Villeneuve) I first saw Arrival at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and I was blown away by its emotion and intelligence in service of a sci-fi story that became a story about language and bridging unbridgeable gaps. I next saw Arrival a few days after the election, when the film's ideas about facing fearsome and unknown futures and seeing the end from the beginning were all the more moving. What's beautiful about Arrival — besides the photography and the music and Amy Adams — is how our only salvation grows out of achieving complete and total empathy and nothing less. Thats what unlocks everything. It's a beautiful message in a movie that might normally have merely been an exquisitely crafted, deeply emotional sci-fi tale. I didn't see anything else that year that blew me away so thoroughly.

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malwurt · 6 years

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Writer’s Block

Every author experiences it at one point or another. What writer’s block means is that you’re so critical of your own work that the analytical side of your brain blocks out all the ideas that your creative side comes up with, essentially shutting down the part of your brain needed to write. But how do you deal with a writer’s block, and, perhaps more importantly, how do you decrease its impact on your work?

The Process

First things first: writer’s block is a term to describe being unable to write when you would like to. However, with it is carried a connotation that you should write. After all, that is what makes an author, right?

It’s a common misconception that as long as you write, you can be an author. There are many ways to become an author, but the amount of time you spend writing will most likely never surpass a third of the time you spend on a finished product if you’re looking to be published. If you write for fun, this may be different, but if you care about the quality of your work, you write a draft, take hard criticism, rewrite, smooth over, lather, rinse, repeat.

The point is: the reason you’re having a writer’s block is that you’re being critical, which means you’re using the analytical part of your brain. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re not supposed to write all the time. Sometimes, you’re writing. Other times, you’re gathering inspiration. Then you research. When you’re not doing that, you might be editing. Or, in the end, you might just be gathering strength. Writing takes up an essential, but much smaller part of writing than many people think. And each part of the process is valuable. If you’re not developing your skill, perhaps you’re learning something about yourself and how you work as an author.

This is what I call the micro-process of writing, and understanding how you work best in each state of your micro-process is key to unlocking how to avoid writer’s block. If you can identify which state you’re in, you can figure out the way to best handle that part of your process.

In addition, you might want to consider the macro-process of writing. People who’ve been writing for years might need something different from people who’ve only just started out. Someone who usually writes short stories might have difficulty writing an entire novel. And finally, someone who’s used to minimalism might find emulating a flowery style a greater challenge than others. Comparing yourself to others can be a useful tool in understanding your own style, process, goals, and achievements, as long as you use it well.

Below will be a list of suggestions on how to deal with writer’s block.

Experiment: make writing into a game, challenge yourself, and play around with style.

Get feedback: different groups are good for different kinds of feedback.

Read: be inspired by your favourite authors or find new, surprising ones to change perspective.

Edit: if the analytical part of your brain is in charge, why not use it to your advantage?

Write: some people just power through, and others feel best when they’ve finished something, anything.

Relax: sometimes, all you need is (self) love.

Experiment

P R O S: getting a new perspective, having fun, blowing life back into your writing, developing skills.

C O N S: if your analytical brain won’t let up, this might just seem like another dead end and can end up as more pressure on you, cementing your writer’s block.

Experimentation can take many forms. You might have identified a section of your writing that you’d like to develop more, like dialogue, and go in search of writing tips in that area, trying it out. You might decide to try something completely new, like writing poetry instead of prose. Or you might find a community to share your work with.

Playfulness is the name of the game. A good way of experimenting is by doing small challenges. You can often find writing challenges on writers’ fora or simply by searching for them on Google. The clearer you are on what you need to experiment with, the easier it will be to find something that fits you. If you just want to have fun, I would suggest searching the fora on fanfiction.net. Some of them may be fandom-specific, but you can often find good challenge themes and apply them to your own work instead.

If it isn’t fun, though, this might not be what you need.

Get feedback

P R O S: get recognition, praise, or a second opinion on where you need to work/improve.

C O N S: if you ask for the wrong kind of feedback, be prepared to be disappointed.

Do you hate your own work? Talk to someone you have a feeling might feel differently and is able to point out why, like family and friends that you trust to be compassionate about it.

Do you feel like you’re not going anywhere with your writing? Update your social media or writing profiles with snippets or full works and promote it to the world. Having people follow you process will give you perspective and a reason to keep working.

Do you feel stuck and too close to your own work to identify what’s wrong? Ask someone with the skill and insight to point out to you what needs to be done and how to do it.

Like in all other areas of dealing with a writer’s block, though, make sure you know what you’re asking for and why. Identifying what you’d like feedback on and how will also help whoever you’re asking for help know what to focus on.

Read

P R O S: inspiration and motivation to improve. reading also helps you identify what you like about someone else’s writing, which will reflect back on your own style.

C O N S: comparing yourself to others can be disheartening, especially if you’re not comparing yourself to someone on the same terms.

Most authors enjoy reading and will most likely accredit their passion for writing to this hobby. However, there are different ways to read: you can read leisurely, enjoying a good book, comic etc. to the point where you disappear completely into the universe and characters, or you can read critically, identifying what the author does right and wrong and how you would do it differently.

The first kind can spark inspiration or motivation without warning, but if you’re waiting for inspiration to strike and magically solve your writer’s block, you leave yourself with very little agency. The second kind, however, will help you analyse what you personally believe makes a good story and use that to your advantage. If you’re already in a critical mood, after all, you might as well be critical about someone else’s work, right?

Be careful, however. It’s easy to slide from analysis to comparison, and comparing your writing to an already-published piece of work is rarely a good idea. Remember to be mindful of the work or person you’re comparing yourself to; just because you like something doesn’t mean it fits your style, and just because you’re the same age as the author you’re inspired by doesn’t mean you’ve had the same conditions. This is not an excuse to cut yourself slack if you’re just looking for a reason not to work on your writing, but if reading leaves you more exhausted than excited at the prospect of writing yourself, this is not the time to do it.

Edit

P R O S: cleaning up, strengthening the foundation for when you write on.

C O N S: bolstering the criticism of your own work, running down your motivation.

Editing, much like cleaning your room, house, or sink, can feel both exhausting and refreshing. Since you’re already in a critical mood, it’s a good idea to use your analytical energy on bettering your work. On the other hand, if your criticism is emotional rather than analytical, giving yourself more ammunition to shoot yourself down won’t be the best way to go about it. Instead, you could try to look at the previous possibilities to help feel better about your writing, like playing around and experimenting or asking good people to identify what they like about what you’re doing.

Write

P R O S: keeping yourself going, finishing something, not feeling like you’ve given up.

C O N S: might exhaust you further.

Some people just need to write, even when they hate what they’re writing. Others feel guilty when they’re not, which puts them in a further slump. And then there are those who, when they stop writing, just have a harder time getting back into it.

There are many reasons to keep writing when the going gets tough. Especially if you plan to get feedback. If you’re not able to write on your main project, try experimentation to blow some life back into writing. Or force yourself to shush the criticism that keeps your writer’s block alive.

Some people, however, might just feel exhausted if they force themselves to write, giving up quickly, hating everything they do, and further perpetuating the negative cycle of their writer’s block. If you’re one of those people, perhaps you need to take the last advice:

Relax

P R O S: everyone needs a break from time to time, balance, energy regeneration.

C O N S: instead of a few days or a week, stepping away might end up making it harder to come back.

You have to take care of yourself. Keep your posture straight. Look away from the screen. Get outside. Eat. Sleep. Many creatives know how difficult it can be not to be at the mercy of their inspiration; better strike while the iron is hot, after all. But a balanced process is not about exhausting yourself until you need a month to catch your break. If you want to go the distance, you have to refuel.

Relaxing is part of that. Especially as a writer, it can be difficult to let go of your work. Even when out with friends or family or just taking a walk, inspiration might push its way to the forefront of your mind at any odd time, but drawing your boundaries, both when you’re working and when you’re not is key to a healthy way of dealing with writer’s block, which might also appear because you’re stressed. Taking care of yourself is the best way to make sure you won’t be tackled by a writer’s block.

Just make sure you are also able to step back in after an appropriate amount of time, ready to roll up your sleeves.

Block and Load

There can be many different reasons why you’re not writing, but it’s almost always because you feel overwhelmed. You can feel emotionally overwhelmed or rationally overwhelmed, and identifying which it is will help you figure out what you need. Also remember that there can be several reasons.

Emotionally

1. You don’t feel good enough. Solution: be good to yourself, get praise.

2. You’re stressed. Solution: take a break, take smaller steps, remember your accomplishments.

Rationally

1. You’ve hit a snag in pacing, character, style etc. Solution: take time to practise, ask for feedback to identify your areas of improvement.

2. You’re in an analytical mood. Solution: write anyway, forget your critical voice, edit, analyse others’ writing.

3. You don’t feel like you’re developing your work or skills fast enough. Solution: keep writing, put your writing on display, set up a schedule to help you reach small goals every day.

Hopefully, this will help you. If I’ve missed anything or you have further questions, don’t hesitate to send me a message with feedback, and I will get to it as soon as I can.

#writer's block #writing #writers on tumblr #writersontumblr #writeblr #writing tips #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #writersblock

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watercat5-blog · 7 years

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Why Slay the Spire isn’t good

It's not often that a game manages to get over a 95% overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. Slay the Spire (StS) was able to do just that and in early access no less. With close to five thousand reviews and boasting a review score to match universally acclaimed games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, does Slay the Spire achieve the same degree of perfection? I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to say that StS isn't at that level and still has a long way to go. Despite that, many players are enjoying the game, and it even draws thousands of viewers on Twitch.

But popularity isn't a reliable indicator of quality, and this is certainly the case with StS. The game has many problems in its current incarnation, and several of these issues are simply impossible to solve with the games current design choices. I'll be giving a brief explanation of the game's mechanics in the next several paragraphs, but after that I will be discussing exactly why StS fails to offer an experience worthy of what its review scores might indicate.

What is Slay the Spire?

Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelite where you pick from a variety of procedurally generated paths to advance up the floors of the titular Spire. As you fight enemies, open treasure, and complete events, you gather cards, relics, gold, and potions to empower your character.

To begin, you select your character. Currently only two are available, but a third is on the way. The Ironclad and The Silent each have their own starting relic and deck. They also have a different set of cards that you can acquire throughout the game, leading to a distinct difference in playstyle between them. After character selection, you select a room to start in and begin your journey.

The types of rooms are very simple. There are ordinary fights, which will pit you against enemies in card-based combat. Should you prevail, you will get gold, the ability to add a card to your deck, and possibly a one use potion. When picking a card to add, you are given three choices, or there is the option to skip it entirely. I'll get more into the nuances of this later.

You can also fight elite enemies which give enhanced rewards and also a relic. Relics are potentially powerful items that give run-long boosts to your character. You can also find relics in chests which appear in the middle of each floor, occasionally in mystery rooms, and in the boss chest at the end of each floor. In shops, you can use your gold to buy cards, potions, relics, or remove a single card from your deck. Campfires litter the floor layout and provide much needed healing and an opportunity to upgrade cards. Lastly, there are mystery rooms which can give a large variety of events.

Combat will take up most of your time in Slay the Spire. By default, you get five cards and three energy per turn. Each card in your deck has an energy cost and an effect associated with it. Normally you discard your entire hand every turn, drawing a totally new set of cards on your next go around. Once you run out of cards in your draw pile, your discard pile is shuffled and placed back, cycling all your cards back in once more. Your goal is to damage, weaken, and eventually kill your opponents while simultaneously defending their attacks and debuffs they assault you with.

Essentially, that's all there is to know about the game. You advance room by room, gaining cards and other boons (or banes) that will affect your chances of victory. On death or victory, you gain progress to various card and relic unlocks.

What exactly is fun about this? From various reviews and other opinions, the deck-building seems to be the de facto point of interest. There are many synergies and combos to explore for each character, and the effects can be pretty spectacular. It is not that uncommon to create a deck that can play itself infinitely or to construct one that can destroy a boss with a single blow. Just looking at the game's cards can fill your head with ideas about different builds and strategies. However, the game is much more than just the cards, and these other mechanics and aspects tend to be the source of most of the game's frustration.

The Problem with Combat

Currently, the Spire is composed of three floors: each more deadly than the last. Unfortunately, the same can be said about how enjoyable each floor is. Simply put, the first floor is extremely boring unless you get a select few relics to make it interesting. You start the game with a deck of five strikes and five defends in addition to a couple special class cards. None of these do anything particularly unique besides doing damage, blocking, or applying some basic debuffs. You draw your beginning cards and have to think “what cards will be best against my enemies?” In standard TCG games like Magic or Hearthstone, oftentimes the solution to this question is not clear. You have to consider what cards you can draw, what cards your enemy has, what they might play in the future, and all manner of other considerations. In StS, this entire thought process is killed by its simple card design and the usage of intents.

Enemies in the Spire will have an icon above their head on your turn, signaling what they will do once their turn comes up. These icons are referred to as “intents” by the game, and the name is pretty appropriate. The intents go so far as to say exactly how much damage enemies intend to do. After a couple playthroughs of the game, even an average player will be able to tell exactly what action any enemy will perform on the next turn.

I'm sure many people if not all reading this have played Tic-tac-toe, but if you haven't, you might want to read about it before I continue. If I asked you to play Tic-tac-toe with me, would you? Even if you knew me quite well, you would likely only do it to humor me. Tic-tac-toe is simply not fun because it is just too simple. The optimal move is always obvious. In fact, it is so mind-numbingly simple that anybody who has any business playing StS can understand that Tic-tac-toe is also mind-numbingly boring. A sufficient level of complexity has to exist for a game to be fun, and in combat StS usually doesn't reach a high enough level to be fun.

In Slay the Spire, you will very frequently find that your turns play themselves just as obviously as Tic-Tac-Toe, and this is largely due to the intents the enemies will display. An enemy is attacking you for ten damage? Then you should play two blocks to block ten and then play an offensive card if you can. There are some scenarios where this is not the case. Your health is the ultimate resource in StS, so minimizing health loss is the measure of how well a fight went. Some enemies will buff themselves and grow stronger or make you weaker throughout the fight, meaning you may take more damage if you insist on always blocking the maximum amount. In these cases, taking a bit more damage up front to be more offensive is a wise choice, but this strategy is also fairly obvious. Once you have fought all the enemies, you will know the rate at which they get stronger and can plan accordingly. Even without the intents being shown, eventually the enemies' patterns will become ingrained in your mind, and then you will be able to predict their turns even further in advance.

Many roguelites suffer from a similar problem. The beginning is often too easy due to having simple enemies and not enough resources to perform difficult or interesting actions. StS takes this to a new level though as the enemies are so predictable, as is the way you interact with them. Playing cards is just not satisfying. The animations and sounds are basic, and there is no real skill involved in dragging a card over an enemy to attack them. The cards are straightforward, and so the game does an excellent job presenting information to the player. However, this makes the actual strategy of playing the cards trivial. Even well into the end game of StS, the act of playing a card is boring mechanically, visually, and audibly. Combine this with the mostly obvious turn orders, and you will quickly grow tired of combat.

I'm sure people will argue with me on this, so I will try to address some counter-arguments now. I don't think anyone can argue playing cards is mechanically difficult in a meaningful way. In terms of visual and audio effects, there is always a matter of taste involved. The animations and sounds are simple but done well. Obviously, Mega Crit Games can alter/add effects since the game is still in development, and they have. They just recently added a fast mode to speed up animations which makes slogging through the boring combat go significantly more quickly.

Many players will also probably disagree on what exactly constitutes an obvious turn. Even professional TCG players make mistakes in StS, but many of these errors are just from playing to quickly trying to rush through the game's combat. The main source of actual reasonable errors is from effects that draw cards. IF your hand does not have card draw, the hand will nearly always play itself optimally, and quite simply at that. Most cards will either do damage, buff yourself, debuff enemies, or block damage. Your health is very precious, so you always want to end a fight with the most health possible. You gain nothing from finishing the fight faster (the only exception being thieves which will flee with your money if you take too long). The only complexity in the decision of what you play is whether or not the enemies can outpace you. In an effort to not make this an hour long read, I will not spell out every possible way enemies can outpace you, but if you play the game or watch it, you will soon find out. The rate at which enemies surpass you is predictable due to their intents and patterns. IF you can draw cards, planning your turn becomes much harder, and this is the cause of essentially all complexity in combat. As I will explain later, drawing extra cards each turn is integral to making your deck grow in power, so almost every deck will have some form of card draw. Even drawing cards can be a very simple decision though. For example, you might have a hand full of blocking cards, but the enemies are not attacking. Therefore, you want to draw cards that have some other effects. With some decks, drawing is easy. You may constantly be digging for a specific powerful card that is the lynch-pin of your deck, thereby incentivizing always drawing if you can play this crucial card. Other decks might draw to try and fill their hand before playing a card that buffs their entire hand. A deck with draw is not necessarily a complicated deck.

Anybody with basic arithmetic knowledge will be able to play the majority of turns. I actually took a tally of several runs I played, and I found that usually at least half of my turns had a clear and optimal play. It's possible I make decks that are straightforward, so for those of you who own the game, feel free to track it yourself and see what results you get. You might get something different, but probably not by much.

The simplicity of the enemies as well as their predictability combine with the basic card functionality to create a very simple and unrewarding combat experience.

The Problem with Deck-Building

So, combat is fairly boring, but what about deck-building? In fact, the game's deck-building is its most lauded feature looking at the Steam reviews. With over a hundred relics and even more cards, Slay the Spire already has a large number of tools to change how you play each run. You will almost never end the game with the exact same set-up. Furthermore, each card is quite unique. Once you get an idea of what's available to you, a huge array of possibilities unfolds before you. It's unfortunate that the game does not allow you to explore these different paths reliably.

There are a decent number of ways to get relics and cards in Slay the Spire, but all of them are random. This makes it difficult to make a deck because getting certain cards or relics is not guaranteed. Even worse, you do not know when you will get them. Suppose I get a really interesting relic, but I get it on the final third floor. That means I have only one floor or less to make my deck work with it well. This is incredibly problematic because of a number of reasons, which I will discuss in the following paragraphs.

Firstly, you cannot know what cards you will get until you get them. When drafting decks in other card games, you will usually be able to select your entire deck at once. In StS, you draft the entire deck piece by piece. After each battle, you will get a choice of one card between three, and you can also buy cards at shops with gold obtained through combat and events. Already there is a problem. Because you do not know what cards you will get later, picking the wrong card early is a liability. Since your deck reshuffles when you run out of cards, any bad card will just be taking up space permanently, preventing you from drawing your good cards unless you can remove it. Removing cards is very costly. Some special events can remove cards, but mostly you are going to spend a lot of gold to remove cards at shops. There are only so many shops though, and constantly paying to remove cards prevents you from buying all sorts of other tools. You can get cards that will exhaust your bad ones, effectively removing them from the current combat. However, you still have to draw the bad cards once and have the necessary cards to remove them in the same hand. At worst, you may fill your deck with even more bad cards, and at best you still must waste part of a turn to exhaust them.

What this means is that the best early game strategy is to pick a couple generally good cards to add to your deck. In most scenarios, you will not know what your endgame strategy is going to be at the beginning, so you pick a few good cards to make your deck better. Why is this necessary? Because you need to fight elites. Fighting elite enemies gives you more gold, better cards, and relics. These fights are what will make your deck become truly strong, and there's no reason to be making a wimpy deck. Simply put, the best way to win is to fight as many elites as you can. With the basic deck, you will struggle against elites and take a lot of damage. Gaining health back is costly and usually requires resting in the early game. Avoiding rests means you can be more aggressive in fighting elites, or you can upgrade your cards at campfires instead. You need to add some cards to your deck to make it good enough to take on elites if you want to have a good deck (and why wouldn't you want a good deck?).

Now ideally, you fight some elites and maybe get a couple rare cards and some relics. With these you can start developing a strategy that will tailor your future card and relic choices, and you are off on a grand deck-building adventure. Of course, this is not always the case, and it usually isn't. Even though you fight elites, you are not guaranteed useful cards. Simply speaking, there are a lot of garbage cards or simply neutral cards that don't lend themselves to a particular strategy. Similarly, many of the relics are either very bad (Prayer Wheel) or don't offer anything specific to your deck (see the relics that just raise max hp). Worst of all, you remember those few cards you added to make your deck decent enough to fight elites in the early game? They probably don't all fit your strategy and now are just mediocre additions that overall will make your deck worse. Good luck removing those when you probably still have several strikes and defends that are even worse.

But inevitably, you will fight the first boss. Assuming you've picked up a couple decent cards and gotten some relics from elites, you should be able to win. This guarantees a rare card as well as a boss relic. Boss relics can be very powerful, giving you extra energy per turn or some other powerful ability. By this point, you probably have a feel for your deck and what you should get in the future. Immediately, several cards and relics come to mind, and you add them to your mental wish list.

The second and third floors are where the game gets an opportunity to be more than an arithmetic simulator. You now hopefully have a more well-defined play style that influences what cards and relics you are gunning for and how you play your hand. Enemies get tougher and have some more unique effects, so you will probably start to lose here on your first couple runs if you aren't used to building decks. Even still, the turns are usually straightforward. The enemies seem strange and difficult at first until you realize their attacks and mechanics. Then fighting them becomes the same as before: figuring out what their intents say they are going to do, and what your hand can do to get you out ahead. Most cards and relics still do simple things. The relic Vajra gives you one strength, and Storm of Steel discards your hand and replaces it with zero energy shivs to attack with. Yes, there are some truly strange relics that shift the value propositions significantly. Snecko Eye is one such relic that randomizes the energy cost of cards you draw. It makes high cost cards much more valuable and low cost cards worse. While this does turn the game on its head, you just need to adopt a slightly altered perspective to realize that it doesn't change much at all. You still want to achieve the same goals in combat. It's just the card values fluctuate proportionally to their energy cost, and you have to factor that in. In fact, Snecko Eye can make turns trivial when things are all either free or very expensive. The relics and cards you get do not really do anything different in the end. It's all just an arithmetic game to figure out how much damage you can do while minimizing health loss.

For example, let's look at some Ironclad cards. A basic Strike card does six damage to an enemy for one energy. Another common attack is Cleave, which does seven damage to all enemies for one energy. Obviously, Cleave is better against single targets and against multiple, unless there is some downside to hitting enemies (which there is sometimes, but again it is very obvious when this is). So in almost all scenarios, if you draw a Cleave and a Strike, you're going to be playing a Cleave. It all boils down to which number is bigger. Only drawing cards can disrupt this hierarchy as I've said before.

The real joy of playing the game on these later floors is finding those cards and relics that take your deck to the next level. If you are playing a poison deck, you may be looking for the rare card Corpse Explosion to deal some powerful area damage. If you are playing many attacks per turn, you could look for the relic Shuriken, which increases your strength when you play three attacks in a turn. So many cards and relics flit through your mind as you imagine what could be. It's unfortunate that you have little agency in actually fulfilling those fantasies.

The cards you want most are usually rare or at least uncommon. I frequently go five or more runs not seeing some cards. I unlocked the Entrench card several runs ago, and I didn't see it until just recently even though it's only an uncommon card. Relics are hard to come by as well. Often you can only buy one good relic per floor, and the rest are random drops from elites. I have only once found myself with every relic I really wanted, and that was due to extraordinary circumstances (I started with Black Star, fought two to three elites per floor, and also got the Shovel early, so I had almost every non-boss relic in the game). Even if you do get all the sweet cards and relics you could want, your deck will still probably never be the best it can be because you have a bunch of garbage cards from the early game clogging up your deck. Removing all of them is not possible unless you specifically get the relic Peace Pipe, which allows you to remove cards at campfires. But if you want to remove your cards at campfires, you have to probably skip other sweet stuff like elites or shops, making your deck worse than it could be anyway.

You will never be able to make a “perfect” deck because of this. The only possible exception to this are decks which combo infinitely, which is technically perfect in the sense that you will win on turn one taking no damage. However, these infinite decks are as boring as pressing left click a hundred times. Congratulations, you've managed to make the combat even more boring. Yes, it's fun to do once, but making these infinite combo decks that consist of a handful of cards is just not interesting to play.

I'm not going to go into great detail about every deck archetype you can make. What I will say, is that you will struggle to be able to make it as good as you want it to be. You will struggle to remove the weak cards from your deck, you will struggle to get the key cards you want, and you will struggle to get the relics that can elevate your deck to its highest potential.

Each time you play the game is like throwing a token into a slot machine. You gamble away an hour of your time to see if you can get something good, and your definition of good will change as you play. First you will be content with winning. Then, you need to win twice in a row. Eventually, you will look to do more than win and construct either extremely powerful decks or very specific strategies. Much like a slot machine though, you will find that you hit the jackpot very infrequently. Even if you do manage to reach those lofty goals, what do you do with your amazing deck? You just steamroll the game in a somehow more boring fashion, just with bigger numbers probably. Is it really worth spending hours of your time trying to get that jackpot of a deck just to coast through the end of the game and then have to start all over? The answer to this question will probably determine if you enjoy Slay the Spire for an extended period of time. Of course your definition of a jackpot deck matters too. Every deck is just more damage or defense in the end, and personally I've long grown tired of finding just more ways to do the same thing.

The Problem with Enemy Design

Now that all that is out of the way, we will revisit the enemies and why they are simply not fun. Beyond their simple, predictable selves, there are some enemies that create a whole new level of frustration. The reason for this is that decks in Slay the Spire possess two ways to gain power. You can increase the effectiveness of your cards via relics, upgrading, and card buffing, or you can simply find a way to play more cards. Usually most decks will employ both strategies at once, but one of them tends to be more dominant. I personally like to imagine a spectrum between the two extremes. Each deck you make lies somewhere on this spectrum, and based on where it lies, the late game enemies can wreck you in an extremely unenjoyable way.

What exactly is an enjoyable way to lose? The definition can vary greatly between different genres I think, but I know of one condition that must be met. The game should not force the player to lose. The main, unifying feature of games compared to other media is the player's capacity for interaction. A game that strips this capacity away ceases to become a game. Of course, if a player causes themselves to lose and then blames the game, then they are not exactly justified. But if a player truly makes the best decisions available to them, then there should be no reasonable way for them to lose. Obviously, many games use randomness, and there usually exists a chance to be completely screwed over by the RNG. However this chance should be small enough for it to be a one time occurrence.

There are several enemies in Slay the Spire that will punish you for picking certain strategies. These strategies are not bad by any means, but merely the act of picking them can doom your run. This is obviously not good. If a player can successfully execute a good and valid strategy, why should they be punished in such way? In many other games, similar situations exist where you will have trouble trying a specific strategy. However, the key mechanic in Slay the Spire is its cards, and this is also the source of a lot of inflexibility on how the player operates. In other games, maybe you are fighting an enemy that is strong against what you have been doing, but you can swap out a weapon or alter your playstyle to still come out on top. Honestly, most games simply don't create a situation where one strategy is completely invalid like the enemy I'm about to discuss. In StS, you cannot alter your strategy mid-fight. In fact, altering your strategy at all is very difficult once you get to the third floor. You've already committed to some particular deck, and if you want to retool it, you have to remove probably ten or so cards and try to get new ones to replace them. This is simply impossible to do. You cannot alter your strategy on the fly due to the inflexibility of the card system. In this case, punishing a player's strategy that by all other accounts works is not fun as the game is essentially saying, “You picked this deck, but our RNG says you must fight this guy and lose. Sorry about that.”

I will say first off, nearly every encounter favors buffing cards in favor of playing a lot of them. This is why the Ironclad is better than the Silent in terms of win consistency. The Ironclad can buff his strength to an extreme degree, thus making every attack incredible. In fact, strength buffing is by far the most consistent way to win. While this is a general rule, it is not always true. Several enemies are pains to fight including the aptly named Nemesis, but I do want to talk about one enemy in particular.

The Time Eater is by far the most terribly designed enemy in StS, but his existence is a symptom of an underlying problem that plagues the base design of the game. The Time Eater is a final boss that has one very annoying feature: after you play twelve cards, your turn is forcibly ended and the Time Eater gains strength. Note that the twelve cards do not have to be played in a single turn. If you play eleven cards one turn, then you can only play one the next turn. In a nutshell, the Time Eater destroys decks that play a lot of not powerful cards. Remember the spectrum I talked about? The Time Eater exists as a line on that spectrum, and once your deck goes past the line towards the “play many cards” strategy, you lose. He exists to unfairly destroy a subset of decks for no particularly good reason.

Why would the developers make such an enemy and not remove it? I'm not sure why they haven't honestly, but the Time Eater provides an important feature. Namely, he serves as a limiter that actually punishes strong decks more than weak ones. The Time Eater is not that strong by default. He only becomes strong when you play too many cards, and weak decks lack the mechanisms to play a large amount of cards. I had a run as the Silent where I took zero damage on the third floor. It was easily top ten in terms of strength that I have ever had, and it played probably fifteen or so cards per turn on average. I had no very strong buffs in my deck. It was just playing a lot of good basic cards and manipulating my energy amount and hand (for those wondering, I had ice cream and just an insane amount of energy creation as well as mummified hand). However, the Time Eater did manage to kill me. This was partially due to some unluckiness as I had some bad draws, but I had bad draws before as well and still took no damage. The issue is that I could not play my hand management cards because the Time Eater would end my turn before I could utilize what I drew. There was basically nothing I could have done. Fully half my deck did nothing other than draw cards or give me energy. If I didn't play those, I lose because I would be playing a non-buffed mediocre set of cards where half of them are dead draws. I had to race the Time Eater, and I just couldn't keep up.

The Time Eater, and other such annoying enemies, exist for the reason of trying to limit the power of certain decks, namely decks that play many cards. In most scenarios, the increase in power of the player will far outstrip the enemies if the player is competent. The developers could just increase the numerical values of enemies to make fights harder (which they try to do with the ill-conceived ascension mode), but this is a foolish way to increase difficulty. In my strongest Silent decks, I can accumulate over 50 block per turn quite easily. If the enemies were buffed to be able to even approach close to that, there would be a problem since one bad draw would get you killed. Also, the Ironclad has no way to consistently put up that much per turn, meaning he would become useless. Average decks or decks from unskilled players would be slaughtered since they wouldn't be strong enough. There wouldn't even be a chance to fight. There is a limit to how difficult enemies can be numerically. If this limit is exceeded, the game becomes singularly not fun in any way. Control is wrested from you as the the game says, “Sorry, your deck isn't good enough. Please try again.”

So, in a bizarre attempt to try and make the game artificially more difficult for stronger decks, the Time Eater is created. His mechanic is designed to punish specific strong decks more than weak ones. You could imagine a similar enemy whose purpose is to punish decks on the opposite side of the spectrum, those decks that play a few hugely buffed cards. Unsurprisingly, such an enemy does already exist although he is not as ridiculously heavy-handed as the Time Eater. The Awakened One is a boss that gets strength for every power you play. Powers are one of the key ways you buff your character mid-combat, and nearly any deck will have at least a few. I had one particularly strong deck where over half the cards were powers (another mummified hand run). This run was one of my first really strong runs, and I ended up dying to the Awakened One because I had to play powers to thin my deck at the very least. If I didn't play my powers, then over half my deck would be useless, unbuffed cards.

These two bosses serve as important examples. The player has access to so many cards and relics that they easily outstrip the game's current numerical scaling. A skilled player will nearly always be able to accomplish this should they choose to. The developers cannot simply raise the enemies' numerical values to make them stronger. There is a limit to how far they can go as I said before. Even if they approach this limit, the act of doing so would invalidate many deck types along the way. So, in an attempt to challenge players who have conquered their simple game, they have created enemies designed to limit strong decks without punishing lesser decks to the same degree. Why should this even be a thing? It shouldn't obviously. Imagine playing a First-Person Shooter and being told that because you are good at shooters, you get to do less damage. This concept is just unfun, plain and simple. But even this is a bad comparison. Shooters generally have mechanics that can still make the game fun, and skilled players will use them to overcome such a handicap. Slay the Spire is so simple in its gameplay that such a thing is not possible. There is no room to outmaneuver your opponent since they are mindless patterns that tell you their every move. Your deck is so simple that it limits you. The source of your strength can become your downfall all due to fighting a specifically designed enemy meant to counter your deck. Enemies like the Time Eater should simply be removed, but this won't solve the problem of the game not being sufficiently scalable. It's not fun to play against these limiter enemies like the Time Eater, but it's also not fun to just destroy basic enemies over and over. How can this be reconciled? Well, with the current state of mechanics it can't. The way the player interacts with the world is too easy and straightforward. If you want to hinder the player, the hindrance must be just as straightforward since it too must obey the game's rules. Increasing the enemies' numbers or giving them heavy-handed mechanics like the Time Eater does not make the game more difficult in a fun way.

Early Access

For the final section, I just want to talk a bit about early access. A lot of people cut games slack because they are in early access like Slay the Spire. Of course, this is deserved to some extent. For example, the developers at Mega Crit Games have been updating animations which helps make the game look a little nicer. However, there are some aspects that cannot be changed without great difficulty.

Some things can be changed easily like art, music, small enemy tweaks, UI improvements, and other great additions like the newly done “fast mode”. However, the key things that plague this game cannot be easily changed.

I've seen a lot of discussion about adding cards to the game. This is just a bad idea unless they are talking about adding a new character with their own set of cards. Adding cards to existing characters is bad, and the developers agree with this according to an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Already, you will have trouble finding certain cards. Even common cards will sometimes elude you. Adding more cards would further dilute the card pool and make it so much more difficult to make a coherent deck. Instead of increasing the number of viable strategies, it would actually narrow it since decks that require specific enabling cards would have a difficult time finding what they need.

Ah, but we could make finding the cards you want easier! This is a sentiment I've heard a lot as well, but it's no surprise that there is already a problem. If I could choose what cards I wanted, I'd win every time. The game's difficulty is not in how you play the combat because the combat is so trivial as I've said. The probability of you winning is directly related to the strength of your deck. Making picking cards easier means that deck strength would go up. Why is this an issue? As I've mentioned, there is no good way for the game to scale to match. Increasing the difficulty of enemies numerically is frustrating, and creating bosses like the Time Eater is unfair. How else can they try to challenge the player? Simply put, they cannot. Making cards or relics easier to find does not solve the problem here. If this idea of making drafting decks easier still appeals to you, I would suggest you might simply like constructing decks. If that's the case, there are plenty of card games that let you directly construct a deck however you want to without having to deal with the randomness and time investment of Slay the Spire.

The game needs something that the current design does not offer. There are a number of things that need to be revamped to make the game good, but honestly the idea of a card-based roguelite might just be bad. Some genres or ideas are just doomed from the start. I wouldn't go so far as to say the entire genre is just bad, but there are already a lot of issues. To start off with, the game needs to rework it's base mechanics. This attack and defend system is just too simple and is the root cause of many issues in my opinion. Cards are how the player interacts with the game the most. If the cards and how you play them are so trivial in scope, how can you stop this from trivializing the player's experience?

I could talk about Slay the Spire for hours as several people have had the misfortune to experience, but I will stop here and give a small recap. The base mechanics of the game are very simple, and while this does benefit the game in terms of its clarity of information, it makes combat trivial as well. The enemies follow predictable patterns that are even directly telegraphed to you, making combat even more trivial and boring. At this point, I don't even pay attention to combat on the first floor. Building decks can be interesting, but due to the random nature of getting cards and relics, certain deck types are frustrating to build. If you want to win, prepare to make the same decks over and over with slight variations. Even if you do develop a strange and novel deck, it will probably never reach its full potential. Frankly, novelty is all the deck-building has to offer after a certain point since playing the cards themselves is so boring. After all this, you still have to worry about the annoying enemies in the game designed to unfairly punish certain deck types.

All in all, Slay the Spire serves as a brief foray into the realm of roguelite card games that quickly loses its luster due to overly simple and frustrating design choices. The brief longevity of the game is due to the endless and ultimately futile pursuit to make interesting decks and find the perfect form of them. Even if such a deck did exist, it would be wholly unsatisfying to play. Unless the base systems of the game are revamped, Slay the Spire will not be a good game.

I am beginning to wonder if single-player roguelite card games even have a capacity to be good using just card mechanics, but that is a discussion for another time. To end this article, I would just like to comment that even though I think StS is a mediocre game at best (and there is evidence to support this opinion), that does not mean people can't enjoy it. I am speaking about the quality of the game, which is not a direct indicator of how much you might like it. If you enjoy the game, then by all means continue to enjoy it.

Thanks for reading,

Water Cat

P.S.

I have a strange inkling that some people reading this will think I am just some baddy who is upset that the game beat him. While I will not say I am the best, I do win quite frequently with about a 50% winrate. Furthermore, many of my losses are just me trying to make stupid decks and failing due to the game not giving me important enablers, or I sometimes just quit the runs mid-game because they are boring. I believe I was ranked 30th or so in the world for a while with a 10 win streak as the Ironclad before I lost by knowingly playing like an idiot with the new fast mode.

For those of you who incorrectly think my arguments depend on my skill playing the game, take solace in knowing that I am good, and you can stop worrying about it.

#video games #slay the spire #card game #review #critique #criticism

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gobuyappreviews-blog · 7 years

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theliteraturenerd · 7 years

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Getting Unstuck, Writers’ thoughts on writer’s block. Illustration by Caitlin Hazell, Article originally published on Rookie

Fran Lebowitz

(From an interview on Bullseye With Jesse Thorn)

I have only one fear in life, and that is of writing.

Up until the point that I got my first actual writing job, I loved to write. I wrote all the time when I was a kid, and when I was a teenager. But the second I got my first $10 writing assignment from a tiny, tiny newspaper, suddenly I hated to write. Part of it is that I just hate work. I am by nature a sloth—I am really lazy, and I really don’t like to work. I have never had any work that I’ve enjoyed.

I’ve spent most of my life reading, and I have probably never read without feeling guilty. I always feel that I’m supposed to be doing something else—and I always am supposed to be doing something else. When I was a kid, I was supposed to be doing homework; as an adult, I’m supposed to be writing. If I tell myself, “Fran, you have to write,” I will not do it. I am so resistant to authority that I am resistant to my own authority.

Writer’s block is painful. There are painful things in our lives that we don’t seem to be able to fix. Things that you know the origin of, you have a high chance of fixing. Obviously, if I knew exactly what this was, I would fix it. I do not know what it is, exactly. I have my theories, but I don’t really know. However, I do not believe that I will never write again. And since no one would ever accuse me of being a cockeyed optimist, probably I will.

Joss Whedon

I wasn’t sure how to start this, so I did anyway. I’ve faced plenty of writer’s block in my time, though maybe less than some. I’ll lay out whatever rules for dealing with it that come to me. I think I’ve already laid out the first.

Control your environment. No one comes or goes. You’re alone, with enough time not only to write but to fall into the place of writing, which can take a while. No internet, no phone. Play music. It can amp the mood and separate you from the people on the other side of the door. (I listen to movie scores when I write. Nothing with lyrics—too distracting. Modern movie scores are very drone-y, in a good way for writers. Just sustained emotion. Hans Zimmer, Rachel Portman, Carter Burwell, Mychael Danna…there’s tons.) Make sure your desk faces the right way. (I have to face the room, not the wall.) Not too much clutter…it all matters.

Start writing. You can overthink anything. You can wind yourself up into a frenzy of inertia by letting a blank page stay blank. Write something on it. (Don’t draw something on it. The moment I doodle on a page I know nothing else will ever go on it. The blank page is scary, but it’s also sacred. Don’t mar it.) Anything can be rewritten—except nothing.

Be specific. You want to write something. Why? What exactly are you going for? Whether you’re at the beginning or the middle or the last damn sentence of something, you need to know exactly what you’re after. Verisimilitude? Laughter? Pain? Something that rhymes with orange? Whatever it is, be very cold about being able to break it down, so even if you walk away, you walk away with a goal.

Stop writing. Know when to walk away, when you’re grinding gears. This is tricky, because it’s easy to get lazy, but sometimes straining for inspiration when it’s not there is just going to tire you out and make the next session equally unproductive. I believe that Stephen King once likened it to kissing a corpse. But then, he would. Walk away, relax, and best of all…

Watch something. Watch, read, listen—it fills the creative tanks, reminds us why we wanted to write in the first place, and often, it’ll unlock the thing that’s missing. That doesn’t mean you’ll see something and subconsciously steal from it (though it doesn’t 100% NOT mean that), it just taps into the creative place a blocked writer can’t access. Very often I’ll see a movie that’ll completely inform what I’m writing, which will bear no resemblance of any kind to that movie. I’ll just know how I want to feel when I’m writing it. (Episode 10 of season three of Buffy: totes indebted to The Last Temptation of Christ.)

Have a deadline. I would probably never get anything written if it weren’t shooting next week. I’m a terrible procrastinator, which means the adrenaline of last-minute panic is my friend. (It’s all that kept me afloat in school, I’m sad to say. My attention has a disorderly deficit. There was no acronym for that when I was little.) But you can create deadlines of your own. Friends are good for this. Make yourself mutually accountable—you have to deliver such-and-many words by this-or-then time, as do they. You might not always (or ever) hold to these, but they can help you remember that your writing may matter to someone besides yourself.

Have rewards. I’m talking about cookies. Actually, I’m finishing with cookies. What matters more? Earn them, then enjoy them.

Malcolm Gladwell

I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.

Susan Orlean

1. If you think you are suffering from writer’s block, stop writing immediately.

2. Walk away from your computer.

3. Remember this: writer’s block doesn’t exist. What does exist is a condition in which you don’t really know what you’re trying to say, and therefore are having trouble saying it.

4. Don’t try to think of what you’re trying to say—yet. Go do something other than writing or thinking, preferably something where you’ll sweat (running, weeding the garden, walking the dog) or be pleasantly distracted (cooking, going for a drive).

5. When you’re done with that diversion, start thinking about what you still need to learn before you know what you’re trying to say. Don’t start writing yet.

6. Usually this will require making some phone calls, or doing some research. DON’T START WRITING YET.

7. Once you’ve done that additional research and thinking, start composing in your head the idea that got you stuck.

8. Find someone whose opinion you trust. Explain to her what you are writing. Listen to yourself as you’re talking. You’ll be sorting out your thoughts as you’re talking.

9. NOW sit down and try writing that down. If you’re still stuck, maybe you still don’t know what you’re trying to say. Repeat steps 1 through 9. If necessary repeat again. And again.

10. Celebrate getting past a hard part of your writing!

Adrian Tomine

The worst case of writer’s block I’ve ever experienced struck when I was 14, before I’d actually written anything. I knew that I wanted to be a cartoonist more than anything, but thanks to a childhood spent reading superhero comics and science fiction novels, I’d gotten it in my head that you needed not only an idea, but also a plot and even an entire fictional “universe” before you even started, so instead of actually writing or drawing, I sat around wishing I was writing or drawing. And when I did eventually stumble upon what I thought was a suitable idea (e.g., Elric of Melniboné mixed with Neuromancer, only it’s set in an alternate, futuristic version of the 1950s, and all the characters are robots…or are they?), it was so ambitious and convoluted that I would get frustrated and give up before I had completed a single page.

Fortunately, I soon discovered comics by people like Chester Brown, Harvey Pekar, Julie Doucet, Seth, and Joe Matt—people who made comics about themselves, about everyday life. At first I was like, “You can’t just do a story about waking up and making a can of soup for breakfast!” But then I’d find myself thinking about that story for a long time after I’d read it, and going back to those comics and rereading them, trying to figure out what made them so compelling. I wasn’t smart enough to work up any big theories about the true nature of art or anything like that, but I did feel, admittedly arrogantly, that if they could do stories like that, so could I.

I felt like I’d been trapped behind a massive roadblock for years, and suddenly I was able to just hop right over it. I could write and draw about anything, even the most mundane occurrence in my generally mundane teenage life. The ideas had been there all along, I just didn’t realize that they counted.

Then, of course, I was faced with the realization that making comics was about so much more than just coming up with an idea or a story. Contrary to what I’d believed when I was sitting around endlessly brainstorming (“I’m an amazing cartoonist…all I need is an idea!”), I was terrible. It was obvious that I had a lot of practice and learning ahead of me. But I was actually, finally, writing and drawing; and I was surprised to discover that once I started making comics, those elusive ideas came to me with much greater ease than when I was sitting there staring at a blank sheet of paper. They weren’t high-concept blockbuster ideas, but they were stories I was eager to tell, and that’s a great feeling.

Julie Klausner

Writer’s block is hardly ever a symptom of having nothing to say. It’s usually just your dumb lizard brain beating yourself up because you’re afraid of (in this order, at least for me):

1. Discomfort/ boredom 2. Not knowing exactly what it is you want to say yet 3. Failure

If you can push through the squirminess and clock the hours at the computer like you’re doing brain cardio, puking out whatever it is you MIGHT want to say in a fixed period of time, you’ll be OK. Because once you get ANYTHING on the page, you’ll be able to return to it later and make it better. If you leave and you have nothing, you’re not being very nice to your present OR future self.

The good news is that, even if you’re judging yourself while you barf out that crappy rough draft, what you write is usually not as bad as you think it is! Just make sure you sit on it for a little bit of time before returning to it and editing the shit out of it. It’s always easier to shape something from something than to make something from nothing. So try as hard as you can to blurt something out, even for 10 minutes, and know that once you’re done, the hardest part is behind you.

Writer’s block isn’t magically ordained, or sent down as a decree from God or whatever. It’s not external—you’re the only one doing the blocking! So please try to be gentle to yourself. Being hard on yourself is the #1 cause of misery and wasted time and keeping yourself back. I’ve never heard of anybody who’s bullied themselves into being more prolific or successful.

Give yourself the gift of letting yourself put something down that isn’t perfect. You will return to it later and make it wonderful.

Vanessa Davis

The hardest thing for me has always been the beginning of a project—just getting started.

I went to painting school, and I learned all about how to stretch canvases in all of the olden-times ways, with hand-made stretchers and millions of layers of rabbit glue and sanding (so much sanding). All of this fussy craftsmanship shit. I’d think about painting, but the idea that everything had to be perfect and gorgeous and “right” had been drilled into my brain, and I wouldn’t even be able to start. Any ideas I’d have would immediately be second-guessed (by me) and would evaporate.

After college I decided to make comics, but at first I didn’t really know “how” to make comics. I’d never thought of myself as writer—I didn’t know how to structure a story. I didn’t know how to plan out my pages. I didn’t know how to draw my characters.

I thought back to a painting teacher I had when I was 16, who did one tiny painting a day, just as a way to always have something going. Like a diary. When our class visited his studio, he had thousands of paintings on his wall—the last five years of his life displayed all at once. It was so moving, so cool. I decided to do something in my sketchbook every day. I told myself I wouldn’t to show it to anyone. It could be big or small, a cop-out or an ambitious project.

There’s always something that happens in a day, something worth remembering or noticing. Putting those moments together started to form a story, without my even trying to write one. It was reassuring, but also humbling—it meant that I didn’t always have control over everything I made. And you don’t, either. Sometimes what makes something good is something you improvised, or something you weren’t even conscious you were doing, or something you thought was a bad idea. If you go into a project demanding perfection, you’ll never have a chance to be pleasantly surprised by those lucky “accidents.” But if you leave yourself room to figure things out as you go, you’ll not only have an easier time starting a book/poem/article/diary entry/whatever; you might also end up with a better end product.

I did eventually show people my sketchbook, and those sketches became my first graphic novel, Spaniel Rage. Since then, my process has changed—I found that I do like to do some pre-planning now. But when I just don’t know where to start, I stop and look around, and write and draw whatever I see around me, whatever I’m thinking about. It’s my start button. You can find yours, too.

(Also, I have put a waterproof notepad in my shower. All those good ideas you get in the bathroom go right down the drain if you don’t write them down!)

Jenny Zhang

I have been telling stories and making up nonsense words for as long as I can remember. But around the time I started high school, I started to realize that for me, writing wasn’t just a hobby. It was my freaking life. I knew I wanted to write and not just wanted to write but wanted other people to read what I wrote and not just wanted other people to read what I wrote but wanted other people to read what I wrote and like it and not just wanted other people to like my writing but wanted other people to read it and like it and be transformed by it.

Do you see how if you go down that path you will (a) seem full of yourself and (b) scare yourself into doing nothing by placing outrageous expectations on your writing? So let’s you and I take a step back, and try to remember a time when an afternoon of writing was something to look forward to, not something that caused us crippling anxiety and agony. Here are some tips to get you there:

The internet is not your friend. The internet wants you to do excessive online browsing. The internet wants you to scroll through Tumblr until your wrists hurt. The internet wants you to read other people’s writing. The internet wants you to have 30 tabs up at once that you can’t possibly close until you’ve read every single link from the Wikipedia page on zombies. You have to peel yourself away from the internet.

You could do what Miranda July does here, or you could download an app like Freedom or Self-Control, both of which block you from going online for whatever amount of time you specify. I personally prefer Self-Control, because even if you restart your computer, you still can’t get online as long as you are under the time limit you’ve set for yourself. Also, the app allows you a “whitelist”—a small number of websites, pre-ordained by you, that you can still access. I like to keep one tab open for Dictionary.com and one for Poetry.org, so I can look up words and poems as little breaks between writing bouts.

Give yourself small assignments and projects. I’m the first one to resist any kind of writing exercise because I’m all like, I am far too complex to submit to a lowly writing exercise. I will come up with my own inspiration, thank you very much. And then I go online shopping and spend three hours finding 45 items to add to my shopping cart until I have the equivalent of a down payment for a house in the ol’ cart. So, no, I am not too far advanced, and, yes, I do need a kick in the ass sometimes. So kick yourself. Tell yourself that whenever you get a paper receipt from a store, you will, by the end of the day, write a poem on the back of that receipt, or the first few sentences of a short story.

Take an old book that you don’t care about and a black Sharpie and make an erasure poem, which is where you delete entire chunks of text to create a new poem. It’s way more satisfying to do it to an actual, physical book, but if all of your books are precious, you can check out Wave Books’ online portal for creating erasure poems here.

Keep a notebook at your bedside, and every morning write down whatever you remember of your dreams the night before. If you don’t remember your dreams, make them up. Dream up your dreams.

Go to a café and eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. Write down what you hear, then go back over it and scramble it up, take stuff out, add what you want, and turn it into an absurdist play.

If the physical act of typing or using a pen on paper is somehow a block for you, get a recorder and record yourself telling a story. Transcribe it the next day.

Be curious about other people. You know who has a million and one stories to tell? Your parents. Your grandparents. Your weird uncle. Your weird aunt. These are people who have lived through a lot of shit, and what’s more, they know other people who have lived through a lot of shit. Yes, some of the stories are boring, and some are about how cute you were when you peed yourself at the movies, but there are also amazing, incredibly sad, and incredibly hilarious stories to be uncovered. Gabriel García Márquez’s inspiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude was just sitting around his kitchen table listening to the women in his family gossip. He turned that gossip into gold. You can too.

Read, like all the freaking time. I meet young writers all the time who don’t read, and I’m always like, “What are you doing? Stop writing so much! Read more!” Be a better reader before you start worrying about being a good writer. Reading George Saunders in college inspired me to write better short stories; reading Kafka and Babel and Gogol and Kharms inspired me to write with more imagination. Reading Chelsey Minnis in grad school got me writing poetry again. Ariana Reines’s first book, The Cow, encouraged me to keep writing poetry and eventually to emerge from my writing hole with my own book of poems. Read other writers. Develop your tastes as a reader and eventually, just as Ira Glass says in this video, your writing abilities will catch up to your high standards as a reader.

Dreaming counts! We’re all told that we’re supposed to be “productive.” There’s a glut of things to know about, memes to forward, hashtags to create, instagram photos to take, etc., etc., etc. There’s not a lot of time in our lives to dream. But being a writer is saying that you want to see beauty in places that other people often overlook. So give yourself a day or a week off, or even a few months off, to daydream. But don’t let your brain get comfortable. Make it spin. Give it time to gather strength from ideas.

A lot of writers swear by routine, but I swear by chaos. There’s enough fucking routine in my life. Every day I have to brush my teeth. Every day I have to smile at strangers. Every day I have to worry about money. Every day I want something I can’t have. Every day I find some way to go on! I know that writing every day for an hour would help me tremendously with writer’s block, but I also know that I need an element of wildness in my writing. I need to know that writing is something I do because it sets me free. It makes me feel golden with confidence. It gives me the gift of gab. I feel like a god. I feel like an entertainer. So write when you damn well please.

No one is going to die if you don’t write. The world will find a way to go on. But you might find your soul shrinking the longer you go without writing. The thing about writer’s block is that sometimes it’s real, and sometimes it’s just your brain taunting you: What if you’re not a good writer? What if once you put the words down on the page, it becomes evident that they are not so brilliant after all? And then there’s the fear that if you do write the most perfect story or poem in the whole world, will that mean you won’t ever have another good idea? What if you run out of ideas? Well, then you…

GO OUT AND LIVE YOUR LIFE, BECAUSE AS LONG AS YOU DO THAT YOU WILL NEVER RUN OUT THINGS TO SAY. The best way to avoid living your life, as a writer, is to spend your time worrying about writer’s block. So, live your life for a while. Your talent and your instincts as a storyteller won’t die, I promise. And then when you’re ready, hole the eff up, and write, write, write.

Etgar Keret

“Writer’s block” is a term invented by very spoiled and whiny writers to refer to periods in which they do not feel inspired. The assumption hidden behind this term is that creativity is an everlasting, full-powered fountain, so that if at any given moment we wish to write but nothing exceptional comes out at the other end of our keyboard or pen, there must be some malfunction obstructing the natural cycle of everlasting creativity.

I’d like to offer an alternative perspective. Creativity, very much like love, is a gift. And you don’t get to get gifts all the time. If you go on a date and you don’t like the guy or girl you are meeting, you are not experiencing “lover’s block”—you simply don’t love at that moment, and if you’re patient enough you’ll experience love in the future (probably in the place and the time you’d least expect it). If you don’t write well, keep writing bad stuff (don’t worry, bad writing is completely ecological—it doesn’t damage the ozone layer or give you cancer). If it gets too frustrating, stop doing it—move on to badminton, collect airplane models, or do all those other things that people who don’t write do. But mostly, wait patiently. (Patiently as opposed to impatiently, or angrily, or bitterly—because those kinds of waiting don’t breed future good writing. Patience does.)

Writing isn’t a habit. It’s a unique form of expression. And nobody owes you that special experience on a daily or a weekly basis. But if you make an effort, when it’s gone, to keep living your life and experiencing new things, it will eventually return. And when it does, enjoy it as much as you can, before it goes away again.

Ayelet Waldman

I had writer’s block today. Here’s what it looked like:

I woke up late and sluggish, a result of having spent last night watching a six-episode marathon of Say Yes to the Dress. Too logy to work, I lingered over my oatmeal and tea, reading the New York Times on my phone despite the fact that the actual paper paper was lying on the kitchen table, next to the sugar bowl. Convinced that I would never be able to focus on work without a dose of endorphins, I headed to the gym. An hour later, I was far too physically exhausted to even contemplate opening my computer, let alone work. Ever the taskmaster, I forced myself to it—and spent an hour pinning wool blankets and linen throw pillows to my Pinterest wall.

Then I was hungry. So I ate lunch. Afterwards, I considered what a challenge it is to concentrate on a full stomach, but I forced myself back to the computer. Isn’t it remarkable how an hour of web surfing passes in the blink of an eye? Before I knew it, it was time to pick up the kids.

Another day lost to the torment of writer’s block. Right?

No. Wrong. There is no such thing as writer’s block. There is only procrastination, and laziness. Had I just turned on Freedom and sat the hell down, I could have written at least 1,000 words today. They may not have been good words. In fact, they probably would have sucked. But that’s not the point. The point is not to produce lyrical perfection—that’s what rewriting is for. The point is to sit your ass in your chair and write, even if all you write is a paragraph about what a lazy cretin you are.

Writer’s block is a myth. Get to work.

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