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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Hi, I hope this isnt annoying to ask but w the old guard ive seen a lot of people mixing up catholic and christian when it comes to nicky. when by todays standards theyre not interchangeable as catholic is a specific strain of christianity. i was kinda under the impression the crusades were a purely catholic thing since the pope. is that right or were other christians involved??

Hmm. Just to be clear what you’re asking, are you wondering whether it’s a mistake to use “Catholic” and “Christian” interchangeably when talking about this time period or describing Nicky’s faith? And/or asking for a basic religious primer on medieval Europe and the crusades more generally?

First, it’s not a mistake to use “Catholic” and “Christian” as synonyms during the crusades, especially since a) Catholics are Christians, no matter what the militant Protestant reformers would like you to think, and b) until said Protestant reformation, they were the dominant and almost (but not quite) singular Christian denomination in Western Europe. Our source material for the period doesn’t describe the crusaders as “Catholics,” even if they were; they call them Christians or Franks. (Likewise, the word “Frank,” i.e. “French” was often used to describe Western European crusaders no matter which country they were from, since so many crusaders came from France and that was where the crusades were originally launched, at the council of Clermont in 1095.) To call them “Christians” points us to the fact that the crusades were viewed as a great pan-Christian enterprise, even if the reality was more complicated, and nobody would need to specify “Catholic,” because that was implicit.

In short, medieval Europe had two major strands of Christianity, which developed out of the centuries of arguments over heresy, the contents of the biblical canon, the nature and/or divinity of Christ, their relationship to Judaism, paganism, and other religions of late antiquity, and so forth. Eventually these two competing branches took on geographical, cultural, and linguistic associations: Western (Latin) Catholic Christianity, and Eastern (Greek) Orthodox Christianity. The Great Schism in 1054 split these two rites formally apart, though both of them had at least some thought that the internal divisions in Christianity should be healed and dialogue has continued intermittently even up to the present day (though they’re still not actually reconciled and this seems highly unlikely to ever happen.)

The head of Western Catholic Christianity was (and is) the Pope of Rome, and the head of Eastern Orthodox Christianity was (and is) the Patriarch of Constantinople. Both of these branches of Christianity were involved in launching the crusades. To make a long story short, the Byzantine (Greek) Emperor, Alexios Komnenos, appealed to the Catholic (Latin) pope, Urban II, for help in defending the rights of eastern Christians, territorial incursions against Greek possessions by the Muslims of the Holy Land and North Africa, and the city of Constantinople (and Jerusalem) itself. So although the actual French and Western European participants in the crusades were Catholic, they (originally, at least) joined up with the intention of helping out their Orthodox brethren in the East and “liberating” Jerusalem from the so-called tyranny of Islam. To this end, the accounts of the council of Clermont focused heavily on the brotherhood of western and eastern Christians and the alleged terrible treatment of these Christians by the ruling Islamic caliphate in Jerusalem. At that time, that was the Isma’ili Shia Muslim Fatimids (who had replaced the Sunni Muslim Abbasids in the early 10th century -- there are many names and many dynasties, but yes.)

However, despite this ecumenical start, relations between Western and Eastern Christians started to go bad very quickly over the course of the crusades, indeed within a few short years of Clermont. Alexios Komnenos wanted the crusade leaders to swear loyalty to him and pledge to return formerly Byzantine lands that might be recaptured from the Muslims, and the crusade leaders did not want to do this. There were deep cultural, linguistic, religious, social, and political differences between Greek and Latin Christians, even if they were both technically Christians, and these caused the obvious problems. The Greeks were obviously located in a different part of the world and had a different relationship with their Islamic neighbors (they fought them often, but also traded with them and established diplomatic ties) and this caused constant friction during the crusades, since the Westerners always suspected (not entirely wrongly) that the Greeks were secretly in league with the Turks. Albert of Aachen, writing his Historia Ierosolimitana in the early 12th century, referred to “wicked Christians, that is to say Greeks,” and our primary source for the Second Crusade (1145--49) is Odo of Deuil and his De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem (Journey of Louis VII to the East.) He spent the entire time grousing about “treacherous Greeks” and blaming them for the crusade’s struggles (though the Second Crusade pretty much sabotaged itself and didn’t need any outside force to blame for its failure). There was some truth to this accusation, since Byzantium was then engaged in a war against Sicily (Louis VII’s ally, though it had its own connections to Muslim culture and indeed had been Muslim before the Normans conquered it in 1061). The Greeks had thus been working with the Muslims to undercut the invasion of Western Europeans into this contested territory, and this was not forgotten or forgiven.

The best-known example of Western-Eastern relations during the crusades going catastrophically awry is in 1204, at the sack of Constantinople as the culmination of the Fourth Crusade. Basically: the crusaders were deeply in debt to the Venetians and had already attacked the Catholic city of Zara (Zadar in Croatia) in hopes of getting some money back, then got involved in the messy politics of the Byzantine succession, went to Constantinople, and eventually outright attacked it, sacked and destroyed the city, and raped and slaughtered its inhabitants. This obviously poisoned the well all but permanently between Latin and Greek Christians (frankly, in my opinion, it’s one of the worst tragedies of history) and Constantinople never regained its former wealth and pre-eminence. It declined until it was captured in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks and Sultan Mehmed II, and has been an Islamic city ever since. (It was renamed Istanbul in 1923, under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the “founding father” of modern Turkey.) Obviously, Latin and Greek Christianity still had to work with each other somehow, but the crusades were actually the single biggest factor in driving the two branches further apart, rather than reconciling them.

The words “catholic” and “orthodox” both have connotations of universality, overall correctness, and all-encompassing truth claims. Therefore, in some sense, to a Catholic Christian or an Orthodox Christian, defining themselves as such, with both words, is repetitious; they are Catholic/Orthodox and therefore the correct sort of Christian (even if their theological opponents would disagree). However, historians obviously do use that convention to distinguish them, since the identity is important, and makes a big difference as to what religious landscape an individual is living in. As for heresy, it was an equally complicated subject. Numerous “heretical” (i.e. not mainstream Catholic Christianity) Christian sects existed in Europe for this entire period, most notably the Cathars. (They got their own crusade launched against them, the Albigensian Crusade of 1209--29 in southern France.) The lines between heresy and orthodoxy (small-o orthodoxy meaning in this case, confusingly, Catholic Christianity) could often be blurred, and religious practices were syncretic and constantly influenced each other. A big problem in the Albigensian Crusade was identifying who the heretics actually were; they looked like their Catholic neighbors, they lived in community with them, their friends and family members were Cathar and Catholic alike, both rites were practiced, and plenty of towns were just fine with this hybrid arrangement. Hence it was not as simple as just pointing and going “get those guys,” and indeed, one of the leaders of the Albigensian Crusade, when asked by a knight how to tell them apart, advocated to just kill them all and God would know who the good Catholics were. Welp.

Northern and eastern Europe also remained pagan relatively late into the medieval era (into the 10th and 11th centuries) and the Northern and Baltic Crusades were launched with the aim of converting them to Catholic Christianity. (You will notice that the crusades have a complicated history as both a vehicle of religious warfare and as an attempted theater of conversion.) Heresy was a constant preoccupation of the Catholic popes, especially Innocent III (the progenitor of the Fourth, Albigensian, and Fifth Crusades). Especially in the thirteenth century, splinter religious groups and localized sects of “heresy” were popping up like crazy, and it was a constant point of contention as to how to deal with them, i.e. by force, persuasion, reconciliation, dialogue, etc. No, the medieval Catholic church was not the stereotyped instrument of fear, oppression, and tyranny, and could never enforce its views universally on all of western Europe. Church attendance on the parish level could be so low that in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, Innocent issued an order requiring Christians to take communion at least once a year. So yes. The standard was very far from “everyone believed Catholicism fervently at all times and if they didn’t, they were immediately punished/burned alive.” The idea of burning heretics at the stake wasn’t even introduced until the early fifteenth century, and even then, it required an often-months-long formal church trial and wasn’t just something that the local village priest could hand out on a whim.

There were also monastic orders, and these (at least in Western Europe) were therefore Catholic, but they had different ways of practicing it and what their orders emphasized. The most common order were Benedictines (founded in the 6th century by Saint Benedict), who adhered to the Rule of Saint Benedict, which is still the basis for the following monastic orders. There were also the Cluniacs (founded in 10th-century France at Cluny Abbey) and the Cistercians (founded as rivals to the Cluniacs at the end of the 11th century, also in France). In terms of the crusades, the Cistercians were by far the most involved with/zealously supportive of them (Bernard of Clairvaux was a Cistercian) and took part in directly financing, preaching, and launching the Second, Fourth, and Albigensian Crusades alike. The better-known monastic orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, weren’t founded until the thirteenth century, on the tail end of the crusades, and didn’t take much direct part in them. The Dominican inquisition, however, took over the business of dealing with the Cathars after the Albigensian Crusade petered out, and their concern was often with heresy thereafter.

Anyway. This has gotten long, as per usual. But I hope this gives you some introductory sense of the religious landscape of medieval Europe, the divisions within Christianity, and the fact that it’s entirely accurate to use “Catholic” and “Christian” interchangeably when discussing Nicky’s crusades-era faith and counterparts. The crusaders themselves did not specify themselves as being Catholic, and the crusades were (at least initially) viewed as a pan-Christian movement, even if eventually fatal tensions with Orthodox Christians left a permanent scar. The idea of identifying the precise denomination of Christianity is also another Protestant Reformation-era innovation, and wasn’t, at least in this case, necessary to do.

#history #medieval history #history of religion #long post #anonymous #ask

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panharmonium · 4 years

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Hey, do you ship merthur? I have conflicted feelings about it because Merlin does love Arthur but also their relationship is kinda shitty.

short answer: i do not

longer answer: i might not be the right person to ask about this, because i don’t really “ship” anything? it’s not how i engage with fandom. (disclaimer: this is not a value judgment of folks who do engage with fandom that way. just an explanation of how my own brain works.)

extra long answer: under the cut, because i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked me about merlin/arthur, and i might as well put my entire response in one place so that next time, i can just link to it.

questions like this are a little tough for me to answer, because i am completely uninterested in romance as a premise. if it’s not there, i don’t care. if it is there, i often wish it weren’t, because it’s almost never developed in a way that lives up to my standards. i don’t always mind if something contains romantic relationships (provided they’re written well), but i don’t want them to be the point of a story. i honestly cannot think of anything less interesting to me than a story that has as its main plotline “x character falls in love with y character.” for me, in my brain, it’s like, “okay...that’s it? do you have anything else to say?” there is literally nothing about that that i care about.

this can be a little difficult to navigate in fandom, because one of the oft-heard commendations of “fandom” is ‘gosh, fandom is so wonderful, we can watch the same two characters fall in love again and again and again in a million different scenarios!’ which is true, for the people who care about that sort of thing, but that’s not actually ‘fandom.’ that’s shipping. and there’s nothing wrong with shipping, but shipping and fandom are not the same thing, and they’ve become so conflated that it can be very difficult to engage in the latter without being absolutely swamped by the former.

many times, for me, fandom can feel synonymous with shipping. there was a post i reblogged recently whose tags described shipping as often feeling like a prerequisite to engaging with fandom, and that is often what it feels like to me, particularly in fandoms where one ship is so ubiquitous that any and all other material is utterly dwarfed by it in scale. (for me, my last two major fandoms have been merlin and teen wolf, so - i’m sure you see my dilemma, heh.)

all of that said, in terms of arthur and merlin specifically...

disclaimer: everything i say here is relevant to me only. these are my own feelings. i am making this post on my own blog, in my own space, in response to a question about my own thoughts. i do not want, expect, or need anyone else to share these thoughts. any commentary i make about fandom trends is not equivalent to condemnations of individual people’s opinions or shipping habits. i do not mind or take issue with folks who ship these two characters. i am glad you are having fun. please do not @ me about something you disagree with. i promise you it is not necessary.

okay. with that out of the way.

part of me is reluctant to expound further on this question, because my personal philosophy is that merlin and arthur as a ship have had more than enough time and space devoted to them in this fandom (way more than their share, frankly) and i generally prefer to focus on merlin and the other people in his life, as a deliberate counter to that. but, since you asked, and because i have been experiencing the “i’m tired of romance” bug more strongly lately, here is the long-form version.

the number one reason why i don’t ship arthur and merlin is what i already outlined above: i don’t really “ship” anything. i have never looked at two characters who were not already together/on an obvious potential path to being together and said “i want them to fall in love.” that has just never happened to me. (again - it’s not a BAD thing to have this happen, it’s just not something that’s ever happened to me. i can’t relate to the experience.)

therefore, when i do appreciate a romantic relationship, it’s pretty much always because canon has shown me something romantic (or clearly pre-romantic) that i find to be well-written and compelling. (it’s rare - as i outlined before, i would usually rather not deal with romance at all - but it happens.)

arthur and merlin, then, never had that effect on me, because arthur and merlin, as depicted in the canon, are not in love.

[to anybody reading this who just snatched up their keyboard and started furiously typing, i beg you - please go back and re-read my disclaimer.]

they’re not in love. the truth about these two is that if i had watched this show without having grown up in fandom as a culture (and without knowing exactly what kind of ships fandom immediately sees EVERYWHERE) the idea of anybody shipping these two together would never have even entered my mind.

(and like. because i DID grow up in fandom, and i DO know exactly what kind of ships fandom sees everywhere, i knew before i even started this show that arthur/merlin was going to be an inescapable thing. but that would not have been the case, if i had watched the series in a world where i didn’t know what fandom was.)

arthur and merlin, in canon, are not in love. the show never does anything to give me an inkling that either of them are harboring romantic feelings for each other. that is never what is happening onscreen. literally the last thing on merlin’s agenda is romantic attachment, ever, and arthur is never, ever shown to be in love with anyone who isn’t gwen. the show, onscreen, never tricks me, teases me, or leads me on. i was never under the impression that merlin and arthur were in love with each other, because they weren’t.

but that DOES NOT MEAN their relationship matters less. just because they aren’t IN love with each other doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and one of those things is not bigger or better or more powerful than the other.

i struggle a lot in fandom (all fandom, not just merlin) with the persistent idea that romantic attachment is the peak, the natural endpoint on a scale of “how deep is your love?” i am constantly running up against posts where the commonly accepted structure is to cite a moment of devotion or caring or some instance of basic connection between two characters, and then add a caption or tag saying ‘because they are JUST FRIENDS, right?’ or ‘^^totally platonic interaction between characters who are not at all in love, sure jan.’

and honestly? i hate that. that is one of my least favorite things about fandom. it makes me so tired.

i am completely disconnected from this idea that there are like...things you can do that are too caring to count as friendship. like - that there is too much devotion you can show, and if you go over the limit, then it’s laughable that you would do those things for “just” a friend. that’s so unpleasant to me.

(and i do think [when it comes to non-canon queer ships, anyway - straight ships unfortunately have no excuse, sorry y’all] that part of this probably has its roots in pushback at the tendency of people who try to “gal pal” actual queer ships (or literal real life relationships), so this, at least, is something i can understand. i’m queer myself; i get that. and that is why i will never like - attach myself to someone’s post and start complaining. people can vent however they want.)

it doesn’t change my own feelings, though. i hate seeing every meaningful friendship i’ve ever been invested in talked about like it’s just a romance in disguise.

other things: i am uninterested in romance as a motivator.

truly, from the bottom of my heart, i don’t care.

we are, at least in my corner of the world, oversaturated with romance, to the point where any piece of media that doesn’t include it in some fashion is shockingly bizarre. it is EVERYWHERE. it is in EVERYTHING. i cannot pick up a book without running into a romantic plotline. i cannot watch a movie or a tv show without being forced into multiple romances that i don’t care about. (rare exceptions apply, as always, but i’m speaking generally.)

this oversaturation, for me, means that romance as a storyline no longer holds any meaning for me. i see it EVERYWHERE. it is in literally EVERYTHING. making merlin into a “love story,” for me, makes the show so much less interesting, because there are billions of love stories out there. love stories are practically the only kind of story our media remembers how to tell! why would i take a story that is so unique in its exploration of deep friendship (that isn’t even quite friendship, because it’s not real, but merlin wants it to be real, but making it real would also destroy it) and loyalty (that isn’t necessarily deserved, but is still offered, but is damaging to the person offering it) and love (that exists in spite of arthur’s position as the oppressor, but still cannot erase merlin’s oppression, and is patently not a magical fix for the very real problems merlin is facing), and then want to water it down to “and then they fell in love”???

merlin bbc has so much to say about the transformative, redemptive power of love (not just romance), and the bonds we form with each other despite the fact that we don’t always deserve each other, and what we can do to make ourselves better, and how do we make amends for the ways in which we hurt the people we care about, and it is so complicated and there is so much beauty there and i adore it specifically because it is one of the rare pieces of media out there that doesn’t prop up romantic love as the most important and powerful force in the universe. romantic love is not what moves the story. merlin’s love for the people around him is based on compassion. it’s bigger than the familiar and overused ‘i am desperately in love with this one individual person and that’s what drives my actions,” which is a premise all of us know has been done to death. merlin’s love is not about romantic attachment. it’s a deep, abiding love for humanity. it’s based on hope, and faith, and the inherent belief that everybody matters, even in their worst moments.

condensing that kind of story into “and then they fell in love” erases its meaning for me. it makes it trite. uninteresting. i have seen “and then they fell in love” fully sixty thousand times. “and then they fell in love” has been done so often that it is utterly devoid of power for me. boring. i literally do not care.

other people might feel differently, and find a romantic love story compelling. i don’t.

i’m guessing the message that prompted this essay is asking me to evaluate how i feel about the “goodness” of the merlin/arthur ship, aka whether it’s worthwhile to ship it or not based on how healthy/unhealthy it is, which i definitely can’t answer, because i don’t think whether it’s “good” or not really matters. i am definitely too old to be riding the newer wave of, uh...idk, purity culture type stuff that is so oft-debated on here, lately.

but you’re absolutely right, anon - merlin and arthur’s relationship IS kinda shitty! it 100% is. it doesn’t mean you can’t ship them, though, if you want; otherwise i wouldn’t be invested in any aspect of their friendship, either.

the fact that merlin and arthur’s relationship is kinda shitty is an essential element of the show; it’s the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic problem merlin is trying to solve, and even with that being the case, we can see clearly that this also doesn’t preclude them from having real moments of connection and care and love. this is the contradiction i have to keep in mind whenever i engage with them in the friendship sense - merlin has been wronged by arthur in so many ways, and yet he still loves him and believes arthur can do better, and yet his dedication to arthur really does destroy his life piece by piece, and you really have to walk a line between those extremes and be thinking: in what ways was this a noble, honorable path for merlin to take and in what ways was this damaging, and was it all worth it in the end?

we probably wouldn’t still be watching this show if we didn’t ultimately think the answer to that last question was yes. but there are also equally valid ways in which the answer is, truthfully, no, and i think really the only important thing when dealing with merlin and arthur’s relationship (in whatever capacity you prefer) is to keep that dissonance in mind.

so, to more directly address your question, when it comes to my interaction with the source material, i don’t ship merlin and arthur romantically because i don’t see romance when they interact in canon, and i don’t think their relationship could be improved or made more interesting/more meaningful by adding extra-canonical romance into the mix. that’s really it.

but the other side of things is this: even if i were granted someone else’s ship-goggles to somehow see romance between these two (eg, once, in the distant past i read a harry potter fic that was so well-constructed it sold me on a relationship i didn’t [and still don’t] actually see in canon), i still wouldn’t choose to ship merlin and arthur, and it’s not because they’re a “bad” ship (no such thing, folks - tag your stuff and let people live their lives, thank you), it’s because this fandom has already been swallowed by them and i cannot bring myself to make that imbalance worse.

trying to be in the merlin fandom without shipping merlin and arthur is just...a little bit difficult sometimes. i think probably even people who do ship merlin/arthur are aware of that. sometimes it can feel like merlin/arthur is a given in this fandom, not one of many options - as if you’re not in the merlin fandom, but rather the merthur fandom, and you know you really, really do not belong there.

and it’s not even a canonical ship! it’s not even real. and yet if you like this show, and you want to engage in the fandom, your experience is, without exception, going to be chock full of merlin/arthur content by default.

essentially, my struggle with the merlin/arthur dynamic in fandom is two-fold:

1) the strikingly imbalanced content distribution

the merlin fandom, in terms of content distribution, is a pretty accurate mirror of merlin’s own existence, to be honest, in that pretty much every aspect of it is eventually taken over by arthur pendragon, and in that there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether or not that’s a good thing.

(spoiler alert: it’s not.)

even so, it is what it is, and as i said before, me commenting on fandom trends is not meant as a condemnation of individual preferences. people like what they like! that’s just how things are. shipping arthur and merlin isn’t a Bad thing to do, by any means, and the fact that so many people do is just, you know, bad luck for me, lol. but at the same time, the wildly unbalanced distribution of content does make it more difficult for folks who don’t ship merlin/arthur to engage in fandom with quite the same level of ease, and even though it’s nobody’s fault, it is still perfectly reasonable for people who don’t ship merlin/arthur to be frustrated about that.

fanfic is a pretty good case study for how this plays out. i saw a post a while back that was titled something like ‘merlin bbc gothic,’ and the first bullet point was “canon ships are rarepairs,” and HOO BOY, that is true. stats-wise, merlin/arthur makes up ⅔ of the merlin fic on AO3. ~25,000 fics. the next most popular tag after merlin/arthur is arthur/gwen, but arthur/gwen have ~2,900 fics in their tag. and when you remember to exclude any instance of merlin/arthur from the arthur/gwen tag, that number drops by another thousand, to ~1,940.

that’s buckwild. come on. merlin/arthur has twenty-three THOUSAND more fics than the next most popular (and CANONICAL, i might add) ship? and every other ship’s numbers are even lower than that?*

and if you don’t want to read shippy stuff in the first place, like me - the merlin “gen” tag has less than 8000 fics in it, by comparison, and then you STILL have to filter merlin/arthur out of the gen fics, leaving you with about 6300 - which number has to be filtered down further to remove OTHER ships that still make it past the gen filter.

in comparison to 25,000.

like. i’ve been in fandom long enough that i’m not surprised - mean, i came into merlin directly off a teen wolf phase, and boy, that’s a whole other bowl of noodles right there, with added squick factors that are irrelevant here - but i’m still just...man.

it still makes my head spin. and it is still frustrating, every time.

*(there is a lot more to be said about how gwen fits into all of this, and i know it has been discussed more thoroughly in other places, but yes, another reason i am leery of arthur/merlin as a thing is that i’m just...not super comfortable with what that implies for gwen and her position in the story. even if i personally am slightly more compelled by gwen/lancelot, technically - i still don’t quite feel comfortable taking gwen out of her canonical place. she belongs at the top. she deserves to be the love interest and she deserves to be the queen. and like - people can say that her relationship with arthur isn’t “developed” or “convincing” enough to warrant retaining in fic, and i get it, the show really did fail gwen in S5 - but i still don’t buy that argument. people literally INVENTED a romantic relationship for themselves and put 25,000 fics worth of effort into building it up; there is no reason why an “underdeveloped” canon romance couldn’t have gotten the same treatment. except, of course, for the fact that one [Black, female] character was being shoved aside to make way for yet another two white dudes.)

(and i’m not saying that everyone is doing this deliberately or maliciously. but we all know this is a cross-fandom trend. there is literally no reason for the gap in content to be THAT wide. a canon relationship with twenty-three thousand fewer fics than an invented ship? just...that is a stat that bears thinking about. it doesn’t mean that merlin/arthur is a “bad” ship, or that you can’t prefer lancelot/gwen, but it IS still important to recognize these patterns where they occur, across fandoms, and to really think about what they mean.)

2) the arthur-goggles

my second struggle with merlin/arthur in fandom is the ubiquitousness of the arthur-goggles, aka: the tendency in fandom, as in canon, to make everything in merlin’s life about arthur, and everything in the show about merthur.

this one specifically really gets to me. i am very committed to the idea that merlin is a complete individual, whether arthur is there or not. i write a LOT of meta about merlin being a whole person, specifically pushing back on the idea that merlin was “born” for arthur’s benefit - my motto is basically that “merlin’s life does not revolve around arthur pendragon,” and the way his life begins to revolve around arthur pendragon in later seasons is not in fact touching or romantic or beautiful; it’s a tragedy. merlin does not exist only in the context of his relationship with arthur; he possesses worth outside of his mission to save the prince of camelot, and he was already a complete person before he ever met the prince of camelot, and one of the many issues we have to think about when dealing with arthur and merlin in any capacity is how merlin is told from the get-go that he is supposed to devote his whole life to arthur, but arthur is never given any such reciprocal responsibility.

merlin and arthur’s relationship, just like the distribution of content in this fandom, is wildly imbalanced. merlin spends all of his spare time thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person. he is constantly working to keep arthur safe and happy. but arthur, at the end of a long day, doesn’t spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life. he just goes home and goes to bed. he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’ he is never told his life isn’t his own, that he is supposed to be one half of some two-sided coin. only merlin is told that his entire existence is earmarked for someone else, that his life’s purpose is to be someone else’s better half. only merlin is expected to devote his entire being to someone else’s betterment. only merlin is expected to say demeaning, self-abnegating things like “i was born to serve you.”

arthur, by contrast, is allowed to have a life of his own. he is allowed to exist on his own terms. he is never told that his worth is dependent on how well he can prop someone else up. and while fic might like to imagine merlin being the most important thing in arthur’s life, in canon that is just not the case.

merlin exists on his own merits, and the idea that he does everything he does just because “he’s in love with arthur” will never sit right with me, because it’s simply not true. merlin and arthur’s relationship is important to both of them, yes, and of course it is undergirded by deep love and care, but it is also way more complicated than that. merlin’s investment in arthur’s life - and his grief at arthur’s death - are NOT solely driven by his love for arthur as an individual; they are inextricably bound up with a sense of obligation and duty and self-worth and, eventually, failure, because he’s been told that protecting arthur is a) the only thing that matters about his own life and b) the only way to free his people and save an entire kingdom. and i think ignoring this very real complexity in favor of “merlin does what he does and feels what he feels because he’s in love with arthur” cheapens the depth of the story and flattens merlin’s character.

arthur-goggles automatically make everything about merlin/arthur, though. so the difficulty, for me, with merlin/arthur as a ship, is that it can be hard to make/find things about merlin that people don’t instantly, always try to link back to arthur in some way. merlin is not allowed to have things that are just his, and he can’t exist in a state where arthur doesn’t somehow factor in - no matter how unrelated to arthur something is, or how non-shippy it’s meant to be - there’s someone out there who’s going to loop it back to merthur in some way.

just like - scattered examples of things I’ve encountered:

all of merlin’s non-arthur love interests on AO3 having massive chunks of their ship tags actually being merthur fics, with the non-arthur ship serving solely as a stepping stone on the way to getting merlin and arthur together

readers, on fics that are specifically designated as focusing on merlin+someone else and in which arthur does not appear, leaving comments asking “so how long until arthur shows up,” “can’t wait to see arthur,” etc

meta about how ‘merlin’s time in camelot was actually really bad for him as a person’ being reblogged and modified by someone else with an addition like “but merlin doesn’t regret a second of it because he wouldn’t have known arthur if he were anywhere else,” and the OP having to reblog their own post and explain that this is literally the exact problem they were trying to critique

in fic, merlin’s friends being utilized only as vessels with whom he can have discussions about his developing relationship with arthur

etc etc

it’s not always huge egregious things, but wearing arthur-goggles means EVERYTHING comes back to merthur in some way, which for me is just...really insulting to other characters, and really limiting in terms of story analysis.

so, for example - this is a VERY specific example that few will relate to, because i am probably the only person on here who has ever tried to search the tag for merlin’s friend will from ealdor (a niche fave of mine) - but with him, especially, it is very hard to avoid bumping into a lot of people wearing arthur-goggles, because everybody seems to imagine him as merlin’s ex, who is only upset about what’s going on in 1.10 because he’s jealous about arthur appearing alongside merlin, never mind that will and merlin have known each other since birth and have a relationship that LITERALLY predates arthur by two decades.

so with him, as an example - the other day, i saw some post in the tag that was like “will gets teary when arthur makes his inspirational speech in ealdor because he finally understands what merlin sees in arthur and he can’t be mad anymore”

and that is just patently untrue. it is not even remotely close to a legitimate interpretation of what is happening in that scene. will hasn’t come around to arthur’s way of thinking yet; he literally still packs his things and leaves after this happens, and he is - i mean, first of all, he’s not crying, lol, and he stalks out of that scene weary, angry, and fed up, because he thinks the village is delusional and all of his neighbors are going to get killed in the morning. his arc - his dissatisfaction with what is going on, his anger at the ignorance arthur wields as a nobleman with all of that wealth and privilege, his resistance to the big “let’s fight kanen’s men with sticks” plan - that is about him and his history and who he is. it is not about an (imaginary) merlin/arthur love story.

but when the arthur-goggles are on, all roads lead to merthur. even when the other characters in question (*coughWILLIAMcough*) would be beyond mortified to have merthur, of all things, assigned as their motivation.

SO. now that i’ve gone over both the canon and fandom aspects of my reasoning, the succinct summary in response to your question is just that no, i don’t personally ship merlin/arthur. because:

a) i don’t see it b) the fandom is already trying to drown me with it and i choose to center other characters out of spite c) i just think merlin deserves better lol

however, as i said in my disclaimer - that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t ship and enjoy it! merlin/arthur is very much not my cup of tea, but that’s no reason why other folks can’t have fun with it. i think the best portrayals of it, probably, will be those that keep in mind exactly what you said - that merlin and arthur’s relationship is “kinda shitty” - but this is fandom, so if what folks really want to write is just lots of happy AU’s with no issues, then they should go for it! the point of fandom is to have fun connecting with people over a shared love of something, so i am happy to let others have fun doing their thing, and i will just be over here doing mine. 🙂

#thanks for the question!#hope this is helpful #fyi to everyone else; this is the most space i will EVER devote to this subject so #wave goodbye as it flies past!#XD #the once and future slowburn #meta #(sort of? fandom analysis? idk)

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doomonfilm · 4 years

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Ranking : Christopher Nolan (1970 - present)

From the moment he kicked the door down on the scene with the breathtaking Memento, the name Christopher Nolan has rung synonymous with high thinking, high level and high entertainment film. He always finds fresh and unique ways to tell stories, be it visually, narratively, or some combination of the two, and many of his conceptual deep dives have opened real conversations in regards to different aspects of space and time. For an artist, the impact the Christopher Nolan has had on the populous as a whole is impressive, which is why after recently seeing Tenet, I felt it necessary to take a look back at all of his films and determine where they stood in relation to one another (in my eyes).

11. Insomnia (2002) As stated with every instance of ranking the work of a director, there’s always one film that’s got to take the bottom of the list hit, and for Nolan, it was Insomnia. The film in itself is not a bad one, and it does offer some strong visuals in regards to the unrelenting amount of sunlight that one experiences in Alaska, but it does suffer not only from being a remake, but a remake that pales in comparison to the original. For my money’s worth, Nolan works best with original ideas, with one specific trilogy standing as an exception to that notion.

10. Memento (2000) While not his debut film, this was the film that put Nolan on the map. The story is unique and intriguing, and the manner in which it is told really makes it work, as a standard A to Z telling of the film would eliminate much of the dramatic tension felt. That being said, this film suffers from a similar fate to that of films like The Sixth Sense : it’s cool the first time you see it, it really wows you the second time you see it, and then further viewings find diminishing returns in regards to the experience of the “gimmick” (for lack of a better word). Definitely worth seeing if you’ve never seen it, or are looking for a gateway into the work of Nolan, but underwhelming when held up against his future work.

9. Batman Begins (2005) As previously stated, Nolan (in my opinion) works best as a writer/director of original ideas, so like many, I was slightly surprised when he was tapped to handle the Christian Bale edition of the Batman movie canon. There wasn’t so much doubt about his ability to pull things off visually, but with such a beloved franchise and character in his hands, there were thoughts about whether or not his style would translate in a way that an already dedicated fanbase would appreciate. Batman Begins was an effective table-setter for his Dark Knight trilogy, but due to the necessity of having to address an already familiar backstory, many of Nolan’s best ideas would have to wait until the sequel.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) This film found itself the unfortunate victim of an all too familiar national tragedy in the form of a mass shooting during an early screening, forever putting a sort of black cloud over the film as a result. That being said, the film was a stellar entry in the Dark Knight trilogy, anchored by an instantly iconic Tom Hardy performance. If this film was attributed to any other director, it would possibly stand as one of their top works, but Christopher Nolan is a man of such depth and style that The Dark Knight Rises merely stands as above average output from a creator who is pulling back a bit to fit the Hollywood ideal (or his version, anyway) of a comic book film.

7. Following (1998) Quite possibly the most personal of all Nolan films, which makes sense, considering it was his first. It was the buzz that this film generated during the 1997 festival season, along with an already completed script for Memento, that turned Nolan from an aspiring director to a household name. Following gives us a bit of insight into Nolan’s creative process, presenting us with a highly stylized version of an observational writer, forever receptive to the stimulus around him. The look of the film displays Nolan’s eye for location and cinematography, and the non-linear nature of the story served as a sneak preview to a format of storytelling he would soon master and manipulate beyond our ability to initially understand. Though a bit on the short side for a feature film, it is certainly a fun ride with much indication of where its creator was headed.

6. Interstellar (2014) Throughout the 2010s, it seemed that Nolan was hell-bent on warping our brains through the entertainment medium, and after the warning blast that Inception was, Interstellar served as a sort of thematic and spiritual double-tap for our psyche. Nolan took the basic structure for a story of familial, unconditional love and skewed it by thrusting our protagonist into the uncharted depths of space, skewing his perception of time so radically that the people he loved became old while he did not age, which in itself is enough of a heartbreaking concept to build a film off of. Add to this the fact that we are presented with (to the best of our knowledge, anyways) the most photo-realistic depictions of a Black Hole and a tesseract, and the end result is a powerful genre-blending journey that stands in rare company, with films like Tarkovsy’s Solaris and Kubrick’s 2001 : A Space Odyssey serving as the closest points of comparison.

5. Tenet (2020) When you have a track record like that of a Christopher Nolan, it is inevitable that people are waiting on your downfall, and with 2020 changing the way we take in films, many tried to seize this opportunity and label Tenet as this moment in time. To me, this is an absurd stance to take... not only is Tenet one of the most intriguing films I’ve seen in years, but its efficiency in storytelling trims away so much fat that we are left with archetypical characters with subtle amounts of depth shepherding us through a narrative line that folds in and overlaps on itself numerous times. With this premise set and our characters deeply devoted to their functionality (though not at the expense of performance), we are left with the spectacle of some amazing choreography and in-camera special effects work that makes you really and truly have to stop at times just so you can try and process what it is you are seeing. Hopefully, in repeat viewings, the “gimmick” won’t take precedence over the film itself, as I believe there is enough going on outside of the visual trickery to keep one interested time and again.

4. Dunkirk (2017) It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan has the talent to build vast, textured and deeply imaginative worlds with his films, but up until the point of Dunkirk, Nolan had not attempted a “period piece”. Luckily for us film lovers, Nolan decided to try his hand at that style in the form of a war movie, and the result was the extremely moving and powerful experience of Allied troops in World War II caught in a situation where death seemed inevitable. Despite the vastness of the beach and sea we are shown, the feeling of being trapped permeates through and through, and it is enhanced by stellar cinematography and practical effects. Even with a cast full of familiar names and faces, the experience of hopelessness created soon eliminates the familiarity that comes with star power, and we are left with nothing but our investment in the story.

3. The Dark Knight (2008) Simply put, The Dark Knight really has no business being as good as it is. You’d think that its placement between the two trilogy bookends would give it a transitional nature, potentially only existing to move the story forward to its conclusion. What we are given, however, is one of the most nuanced looks at heroes, villains, anti-heroes, and just how much those roles can alternate based on the perspective of those applying the title. For all of the horror that the Scarecrow character brought, or the pure intimidation of Bane, The Dark Knight gives us a complex agent of chaos in the form of Heath Ledger’s instantly iconic (and tragically final) performance as the Joker. All of the pacing issues that weigh down the other two films are completely absent in this middle offering, and the movie hangs around in your mind well after the final credits roll. To many viewers, this film set the artistic benchmark for what a so-called “comic-book” movie had the potential to be.

2. Inception (2010) For many, Inception marks the culminative peak of all that Christopher Nolan brings to the table as a director and storyteller. His ability to coherently weave together a narrative that deals with the perception of time as one goes deeper and deeper into the psyche is impressive in its own right, but the amount of breathtaking nuance, visual effects and mental gymnastics used to tell the story would bring a lesser director to their knees. If The Revenant and 2015 served as the culmination of Leonardo DiCaprio finally receiving much-deserved recognition as an actor via an Academy Award, then Inception feels like the starting point for that final leg of his journey. Everyone brought their A-game to this table on both sides of the camera, leaving us with a true visual and storytelling spectacle for the ages.

1. The Prestige (2006) Irony is a funny thing... I bring that up because Christopher Nolan has literally taken on (and, in some ways, conquered) space, time and perception in his films, all of which would be incredibly lofty concepts to illustrate and visualize, let alone make entertaining. With all of that in mind, it’s ironic that his best film would be one that does not rely on all of the aforementioned lofty aspects and visual tricks. The Prestige, at a base level, is a story about jealousy and how it can drive you mad, but it’s the way that this story is told that makes it possibly the best film in the Nolan canon. Christian Bale’s performance (or performances, at the risk of spoilers) is enough to put this film in a class of its own, but the balance that Hugh Jackman’s performance brings to the overall equation keeps you guessing on whom we are supposed to root for right up until the final frame. The triangle of love triangles in this film further serve to build up the eventual scale of damage that is presented when everything falls completely apart on both sides of the narrative coin. Most importantly, like any good magic trick, the film sets you up with expectations, only to wow you in the end. If you had to pick one Nolan film to watch, this would be the one that I recommend, hands down and without question.

Who knows where Christopher Nolan plans to take us next. I, for one, would not consider myself clued-in enough to hazard a guess on this, but I would almost certainly put money on the fact that wherever he chooses to take us, he will entertain us and amaze us, if not both at the same time, as he always does.

#ChiefDoomsday #DOOMonFILM #ChristopherNolan #Insomnia #Memento #BatmanBegins #TheDarkKnightRises #Following #Interstellar #Tenet #Dunkirk #TheDarkKnight #Inception #ThePrestige

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crimsonblazw · 4 years

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Zero-one is the perfect start to a new generation

artist credit:https://twitter.com/r5WitWG0y8Poz0K/status/1300385462972866560?s=20

Introduction

Kamen rider Zero-one concluded last week and I believe it to be a very strong first entry into the Reiwa era of Kamen rider. On the surface it's back to basics with a grasshopper themed main character and simple animal motifs for his forms and the other riders while the major motif of the season centers around Artificial intelligence and the concepts of free will,dreams,and empathy.

At first glance you'd have several preconceived notions about the series,but there is FAR more than meets the eye.

Story and themes

Structurally this season of KR is made up of bigger arcs (four in total) which break down into smaller two episode arcs that make up the week to week episodes which allowed the show to maximize the monster of the week formula while the main story progresses at it's own pace (the best way to do KR in my opinion), this pairs well with one of Zero-one's biggest strengths; world building.

Each two episode arc explores the humagears' place in society and they're overall relationship with humans leading to a diverse range of dynamics that get explored over the course of the show with very few stones left unturned.

In general the thesis of the show is built on the beliefs of the humagears' creator Hiden Korenosuke,that humagears will help humanity achieve the their dreams.

At first you can take this literally given humagears can be thought of as "tools" for day to day life when in reality they where meant to grow along with humans (in other words reach singularity) and use their own passions and dreams to elevate those of humans and vice versa,the significance being that humans by nature are empathetic and social beings who have only made it so far as a species due to our ability to care for one another, humagears are meant to help humanity achieve our full potential faster.

The challenges this idea faces is a society that not only wants humagears and humans alike to become nothing more than "beasts of burden" for the upper class but also it's mirror opposite;the potential malice and selfishness that ultimately destroys lives and dreams,all of this being synonymous with the classic fiction trope or A.I. and robots representing the inhumane treatment of the common person.

Characters

While the overall show and it's smaller stories make up the backbone of the show the main characters are the heart, having arcs that represent the exact message the themes of the show are trying to communicate.

Aruto Hiden/Zero-one- Our main character. He has the staple good heart of a main rider with a strong belief in the power of dreams.

His arc is flat in order to inspire the other characters around him and further their own growth while having his own convictions tested the challenges of the show. He's very endearing and seeing how he overcomes every obstacle (even when it's crushing him) is the mark of a good main rider.

Izu-Aruto's humagear partner. It's easy to dismiss Izu's growth but her change is present but subtle. She goes from following Korenosuke's initial directives to making her own decisions,she starts off confused by Aruto's jokes but begins repeating them,and she goes from being Aruto's secretary to being his family. The evolution of her and Aruto's relationship is heartwarming and gives them on the best male/female lead dynamic in the franchise.

Fuwa/Vulcan-He starts as a staunch humagear hating foil to Aruto and a rather typical secondary rider. But after discovering his entire mindset has been "crafted" by those who want to control him his arc blossoms into a great story of a man taking back control of his life and rejecting the false and toxic ideals forced on to him, resulting in arguably the best arc in the show.

Yua/Valkyrie- While her arc can be easy to miss she represents those who unintentionally surrender their personhood to those above them while believing they retain their independence. Despite some lacking screentime she does recognize her worth and atonomy and reclaims her life (not unlike her partner Fuwa) and I hope future female riders follow her example (but with more screentime).

Horobi and Jin- Our two initial villains and the heads of the humagear terrorist cell Metsubojinrai.net.

Horobi begins as a steadfast believer in his "master" the Ark and shares it's beliefs in the extermination of humanity, beliefs he tries to pass to his "son" Jin who has concerns about their violent and forceful methods before becoming indoctrinated.

As the show goes on Jin begins to develop his own beliefs separate from Horobi while Horobi begins to experience a crisis of faith. They're dynamic is unique in KR and their arc is a perfect representation of the kinds of toxic concepts that can be passed down from parent to child but with time can be unlearned.

Gai/Thouser- One of the two major villains in the show. In many ways he's a more serious version of Dan from Ex-aid, his main position in this story being a stand-in for the greedy ruling class who will destroy as many lives as they want so long as they get what they want.

He's genuinely impressive in terms of how well calculated his plan is and absolutely loathsome for the fact he essentially caused everything wrong in the series. His eventual "redemption" is VERY hard to swallow but for food or ill does fit with the shows themes of overcoming our worst aspects and also doesn't bend over backwards to make him sympathetic.

Naki/Raiden-the other two members of Metsubojinrai.net. Wish they had gotten more screentime, especially since Naki seemed like a character that would have been cool to see more of. I do like them still and think it's cool they got their own happy endings.

The final arc

This deserves it's own section. The final arc is one of the most bold and interesting final arcs in the franchise and in my opinion is the best one since Drive.

The asset that really makes this part of the show work is the "final boss" the Ark. Despite seeming like a generic "evil entity" final boss commonly seen in toku the Ark is a methodical and truly evil being.

The Ark represents the darkest parts of human existence, mainly that our compassion/love can be easily turned into malice when the hardships of the world take it's tole on us.

Going deeper the ark's "philosophy" can also be seen as a parallel to those who think humanity is better off destroyed because of humans alleged inherent cruelty,not realizing that not only are humans not inherently cruel but that mindset is at most a trauma based response to the hardships of the world or a hypocritical mindset that give those who think it a free pass to be malicious and hateful while thinking they're "enlightened" for recognizing the alleged folly of man.

The Ark utilizes these concepts in it's final plan when it manipulates Aruto and Horobi take each other to their lowest points by having them kill each other's most treasured person,the duel between the two fueling human/humagear tension to the point of war,and it did this all without being around for most of it.

Aruto is so besides himself with grief that he essentially abandons his dream,I think what stood out to me was Fuwa attempting to stop Aruto and pointing out that Aruto is where he used to be,full of rage and hatred that can only be overcome with someone else showing you genuine empathy, which is what Fuwa is attempting to give to Aruto as a parallel to when Aruto did it for him.

The final battle is not only between Horobi and Aruto but between Malice and empathy. And in the end the two breaking down and recognizing each other's pain with Aruto winning but sparing Horobi is the final "test" of what fully realized empathy is.

Outro

2020 has been rough. I think more than ever we see what's wrong with the world and what we need to do to fix it. Whether it was intentional or not Zero-one was the rider I think we needed right now.

In a society that doesn't value empathy ,unity,or dreams we have to elevate each other and hold on to our passions and dreams for the future.

Thanks for reading ! Please like and share ! And feel free to share your thoughts. Keep your eyes peeled for future posts! Best wishes friend

#kamen rider #zero one #toku #tokusatsu #hiden aruto #izu #fuwa isamu #yaiba yua #horobi #jin #gai amatsu #the ark #humagears #kamen rider vulcan #kamen rider valkyrie #metsubojinrai #review

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docfuture · 5 years

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Princess, part 1

[This story is a prequel, set several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16. There are a few minor changes in continuity from the serialized versions of Fall and Skybreaker's Call, for reasons explained here (spoilers if you haven't read Fall and Call.) Link to the latest chapter of The Maker’s Ark is here, and links to some of my other work are here. Planning to update this at least once a week until it's done--next update is set to be up by October 19th.]

When Flicker had formally started her career as a superhero, Doc Future had expressed reservations about her ability in two areas. Not her power, technique, knowledge, or motivation, but two mundane, almost trivial seeming skills. Flicker hadn't thought they would cause any major problems. They did. The skills were triage and pacing. What to prioritize when she couldn't get to everything, when to stop, and when not to even go on call for the day because she hadn't recovered enough yet. For someone who could respond to any emergency, anywhere in the world, they were essential. She'd eventually dealt with the triage issue by setting general priorities and letting Doc's Database handle the rest--because that let her concentrate on pacing. Which was still a problem. One that was manageable, but not always well managed. Because knowing that people somewhere were dying or getting hurt because she wasn't willing or able to push just a little further... bothered her. A lot. The problem wasn't a lack of time--she couldn't literally make time, but she could sure stretch it. She could think at up to a million times human subjective speed, and move even faster. But she eventually needed to slow down again to stay sane. So her bottlenecks were the things she couldn't speed through, like long-term memory organization and biological recovery. She still pushed--she was fast at them by human standards. By her own, she was glacially slow. And biological recovery--downtime while body and brain chemistry caught up with everything she'd done at speed--often felt like shirking responsibility, even when she desperately needed it. She'd finished her active patrol shift for the day after hitting her stop threshold. She'd saved lives. That helped a little. The estimated number of lives she saved had three digits. That helped a little, too. Neither of those helped as much as it hurt that the number was smaller than yesterday. But she'd learned; keep pushing too long and her judgement and health suffered. There were other things she needed to learn, too. Continuing her education was one of the few things that let her recover at human speed without feeling guilty, and she had access to Doc's Database, which was, among other things, the best reference library in the world. So Flicker had picked up a wide and detailed, if idiosyncratic, base of knowledge. Learning and recovery were what she was doing now. While on disaster watch, because her sense of duty wouldn't let her ignore the world's problems completely. That was an occupational hazard for superheroes. She was reading and tracing references on some subjects she found interesting, though not particularly pleasant. Which felt appropriate, because her new Database threshold algorithm wasn't very pleasant either. But it let her help with the worst events even when she was on the ragged edge of burnout. She needed the structure, otherwise she wouldn't reliably stop; it was too easy to keep going down the global incident priority list from the Database doing 'just one more thing'. There were always more things--her speed and the Database's realtime intel gathering and analysis meant she could intervene in a significant chunk of all accidents, fires, industrial mishaps, and assorted violence in the world. And wipe herself out in ten minutes. So limits were necessary. As was what she was learning. ***** Two days ago... "Doc, I need advice on my next research topic," said Flicker. "It's practical, not academic. And I got several Database warnings and an advisory about where I was going to start." Doc Future put down the scanner and pushed his goggles up on his forehead. They were in his lab. It was cluttered, as it usually was when he was working. They had their differences, but Doc always made time for her sudden interruptions, and his suggestions were often helpful. And he rarely tried to push any topic that wasn't vital. Flicker didn't know if that was what normal humans needed in a parent, but it was what she needed. "An advisory? What topic?" he asked. "Politics," said Flicker. "I've screwed up too much because I don't understand it, and I haven't learned better because I dislike it. But I need to." "Reasonable," said Doc. "The advisory was to talk to you if you had time. I did a Database search for a good book to start learning the foundations of applied political science from, and got a list of suggestions. And I did another search for useful guides for someone who has power but is still naive and doesn't want to get people killed out of ignorance. And I got another list." Flicker paused. "One book was on both lists. And the first warning was about the importance of context, proper translation, and annotations." "One moment," said Doc. Then, to the air: "Database, command, pizza and drinks, break room." "Acknowledged," came from the nearest lab speaker. "Um," said Flicker. "You don't need to drop everything--" "Priorities," said Doc. He shut down the scanner and a data recorder, then headed for the door. Flicker frowned. "How did you know I skipped lunch?" Doc smiled crookedly. "I didn't. But there will be enough for both of us."

"How is your pacing management going?" asked Doc, after his first slice of pizza. "It's okay when I spend at least some time working with Jetgirl or Journeyman. But she hit a long run of stuff I couldn't help with, then went on vacation, and Journeyman has been away dealing with that interdimensional magician thing again." Flicker looked away. "I had to do something about that fire in Lagos. There wasn't anyone else; Virago was in Sudan, the Saharan was in Mali, and the fire department was stuck in traffic. I trashed the building, but it all would have burned anyway, and I got the people out, so..." She stopped and took a breath before starting again. "Yeah. Pacing is still a problem. I set the off-duty interrupt thresholds even higher. I hate doing it, though. It feels like turning my back on the world--I get this angry helpless feeling. Like the last time I tried to study how politics works. But if I'm feeling that way anyway, I might as well deal with something important that I've been avoiding." "I've been known to do that," said Doc. "Jumping Spider calls it cage match coping. Not ideal, but..." "But we don't live in an ideal world," she finished. Doc's standard response to her unanswerable 'but why' questions when she was younger. "So, what's special about this book? Other than the fact that the author's name has become a synonym for scheming?" "Well," said Doc, "you were going to run into it eventually, because I encouraged you to consult historical sources if they're useful. The Prince is still germane in ways Newton's Principia is not, it's far shorter and more readable, and it was written colloquially, in the style of a guide. Machiavelli had personal, directly relevant experience--and a dark sense of humor. But it's been five hundred years. You do need that context. Also, later reactions to it by others, and their distortions of it, can be illuminating." "You seem to know a lot about it," said Flicker. "Yes." Doc waited for Flicker to finish a slice of pizza before continuing. "Given your current stressors, I'd like to test something, if you're up for it." "Possibly..." "You've mentioned occasionally your frustration with my reluctance to conduct further experiments involving your high speed mind." "Yeah. I get the dangerous part, but ignorance is dangerous, too." "There are always tradeoffs," said Doc. "So I'd like you to speed up, skim The Prince--skip the background and any translator editorializing for now--summarize your impressions, then slow back down and compare them with your normal speed reaction." "I won't retain much more than the summary unless I reread it at normal speed." "You were going to do that anyway. And it's short." "Okay." Flicker sped up, loaded the book into her visor, linked it to the virtual keyboard interface in the gloves of her costume, and started reading. "Yuck," she said after finishing and slowing down. "Gratuitous misogyny right near the end. That was obnoxious." "Yes. Welcome to a primary source from the Renaissance," said Doc. "Any reaction discrepancy?" "No, it was yuck at high speed, and still yuck when I slowed down. Initial impressions... The book reads like an overly wordy 'Dictatorship for Dummies'. I found it kind of uneven. The case studies of unpleasant stuff that worked, at least for a while, were interesting. Sounded like he was arguing against people who said it wouldn't. His advice about things you shouldn't do was a lot more convincing than most of his advice about what you should do instead--there were some pretty dubious generalizations. He seemed a lot better at specific topics where he had evidence--I liked that his advice about building fortresses was basically 'It depends'. Some of his generalizations were pretty good, though; sociological rules that seem obvious." "They weren't obvious when he wrote about them." "Ah. There was one part where I think he was trolling, but I don't know who." "What was that?" "Well, there was this long sentence with eleven conditionals over whether you should use this one guy as an example. Sounded like Machiavelli was trolling people who didn't like the guy." "He was known to troll. But I believe the passage in question was driving home the point that you should not ignore evidence, even if it was generated by someone you don't like. He was quite aware his views would annoy people. It's also worth noting that The Prince was a work in progress, and not published during his lifetime. It's not clear how close the versions we have are to what he intended to be final. He died rather suddenly." Doc took a sip of coffee and studied her. "How coordinated was your normal speed reaction with your high speed one?" "Pretty well. As much as with anything else. So... What does that tell you? What were you testing?" "Whether there were any warning signs of ethical inconsistency between the two parts of your mind. Reading The Prince for the first time was an opportunity to test for that." Flicker frowned. "But it's not about ethics, it's about how to succeed as an autocrat. It's notably ethics-free. I thought that was the point?" "Well, your consistency is a good sign." Doc paused, with the look he got when he was estimating how long a lecture she'd be willing to sit still for. "Go ahead," she said. "You think this is important, and I already expected it to be unpleasant. And we have food. I'm not going anywhere unless a crisis alarm hits." Doc snorted. "All right. Keep in mind that this is my summary, based on my own experience and judgement, and I'm leaving out a lot." "Granted. Go." "The Prince was written as a how-to book, and rather bluntly pointed out problems with trying to base political actions on any then-current dogma or ethical systems. That was implicitly a new ethical position, and very controversial. Before Machiavelli, there were two main families of ethics in Western philosophy--deontology and virtue ethics. After him, there were three, although there was quite a bit of thrashing around while various versions of the new one got elaborated and argued about. You didn't notice the ethics in The Prince because it's a consequentialist book, you were educated as a consequentialist, and you're more likely to spot things you disagree with when skimming." Flicker sighed. "I understand consequentialism, but those others only seem to get talked about in connection with philosophy or religion, and the signal to noise ratio of that stuff is so low." "That is a problem, yes," said Doc. "Wild oversimplification incoming. Something bad happens because someone screwed up. What's their excuse?" He waved a hand. "If they say 'I meant well', they're appealing to virtue ethics. If they say 'I followed the rules', that's deontology. And if they say 'My plan failed', that's consequentialism." "Ahh. Now that's useful. I wish... Hang on." She frowned again, then sped up to think and check some references in the Database. It was a long subjective time before she slowed down again. "I think I have an ethical problem. Several problems. I'm not sure if they're ethical, but they are problems. Is the Volunteer a deontologist?" "You could ask him." "Doc." "It's not a trivial question to answer. His views have evolved. He was raised as one, just like he was raised as a human. He does have certain fixed principles, but he considers taking consequences into account as a moral imperative." Doc smiled. "Complicates the categories a bit. And he doesn't expect people to try to emulate everything he does. If nothing else, because most people aren't bulletproof and can't fly." "Here's the problem," said Flicker. "I learned ethics from you, and you're a consequentialist. But I've been using him as a moral example. I assumed that was okay because you get along. Now, maybe not so much. Is it?" "I thought it was likely to require adjustments on your part as you grew up. I also thought you'd talk to one of us if it became a problem. You weren't particularly receptive to theoretical ethics discussion, so I focused on more immediate concerns. Like discouraging any tendencies you might have towards impulsive mass destruction." "Yeah." Flicker looked down. "Can deontology, like... sneak up on you? Can rules that you started using for practical reasons or because you thought they were good fallbacks start acquiring moral baggage without you realizing it?" "Oh yes. Happens all the time. Rules are easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to reinforce. And most people learn some form of rule-based morality as children, so it's familiar. That's one reason that the Volunteer is so careful about what he says. A lot of people look up to him, but others have been trying to twist the meaning of what he does to fit their own agenda since... Well, it started to get bad in the fifties, and has never really gotten better." "You didn't teach me that way. Your rules always came with explanations. Or even stories. And I could use the Database scenario analyzer to explore just why something would be bad." Doc nodded. "You were an extreme case. I didn't see any alternative to teaching you consequentialism as soon as we could reliably communicate, because of the amount of power you have. Database access and your ability to speed up to think helped make it more practical. And I think, based on your negative reaction to external rules without what you view as adequate justification, that somewhere in your missing memories prior to age nine, someone, or several someones, tried to impose a rule system on you." "Yeah..." Flicker watched the server bot refill her pop and add an ice cube as she thought. "But when I come up with the rule myself, like by watching the Volunteer, and it matches my consequence evaluation enough, I start just accepting it. And if it involves an emotional reaction when I'm at human speed, but consequences that are hard to evaluate fully without speeding up, it seems to sometimes pick up a moral value; I feel guilty if I try to ignore it. I think that's why the feeling that I'm not doing my duty if I don't help out somewhere every day, even if I'm wiped, is so hard to shake." "That's plausible. It may be a consequence of whatever mechanism synchronizes moral judgement between the two parts of your mind; that's why I wanted to check on it." Flicker looked back at him. "Is this book likely to make my problems worse?" "I don't think so." Doc scratched his chin. "But I do think your history and judgement synchronization are likely to be partly responsible for why you find reading about or discussing politics or ethics so unpleasant." "Great. I really wish I could talk to a human psychologist without putting a huge target on their back." "Unlikely after what happened during the Lost Years. And for any remotely safe intervention, they would need either training in a specialty that doesn't exist or years of experience with you." "I'd settle for a smart generalist with personal experience in human emulation. But that rules out most humans. And I can't do a real Database search for one because of the privacy restrictions." "The Database is frightening enough even with those restrictions. But..." Doc frowned and tapped at his handcomp. "There, I set up a Database thread to analyze what a minimally intrusive search for someone appropriate for you to talk to might look like. You'd need to think carefully about what you're looking for, and you wouldn't be able to access any of the raw data or decision process, even by override. It still might not be practical. You can discuss it with the Database integrity AI." "Okay. I'll talk to DASI about it." Doc strongly disapproved of anthropomorphization of the Database. But he was willing to let Flicker talk to DASI--the Database Algorithm Security and Integrity AI--for mental health reasons, so she was careful to maintain the distinction. Doc started on another slice of pizza, and Flicker leaned back in her chair. "In the meantime," she said, "I'll do a proper read of The Prince, and context on Machiavelli, and see if I can figure out why a consequentialist would write a handbook for autocrats." Another crooked smile from Doc. "He liked Florence a lot." ***** Now. Flicker had found the book and background material sometimes jarring and often depressing. But it wasn't boring, and a few bits were full of insight. Like: "...how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil." She did not understand how anyone could interpret that as 'The end justifies the means'. But a lot of people apparently had. Flicker saw it as making clear that neither the world, nor people, nor you, were perfect, and if you didn't pay attention to that you were going to get in trouble--but it didn't justify anything. You needed to get that somewhere else, if at all. She wondered if any of the superheroes who died during the Lost Years had thought that acknowledging imperfection was equivalent to abandoning their principles. �� She jumped back to a passage she'd read over and over. Superheroes weren't political leaders, but there was definitely something there. Still, it seemed a little... off. "Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with." Flicker wasn't sure about that. The Volunteer was loved a lot and feared a little. Virago and Nighthaunt were both feared a lot and loved a little. All were successful, in different ways. But safety didn't mean the same thing to her as it did to Machiavelli, and she wasn't sure how much that mattered. She was still thinking about that when a special alarm flashed. Flicker was off-duty, and still at Yellow endurance status--she hadn't fully recovered from her most recent shift. But she had a short list of personal priority interrupts for the Database. At the top was 'reckless speedster'. And a crisis analysis appeared on her visor, right after the alarm: Event: Shockwave generation. Building, infrastructure, and vehicle damage. Probable injuries, potentially life-threatening. Location: Rome, Italy. Tags: Severe, ongoing, casualties, assessment lag. Cause (extrapolated): 83%: Hermes. 14%: Unknown speedster. 3%: Other. Flicker was already in costume, and had sped up her mind. Now she sped up her body and virtual typed a response. Database, command, assign event cause neutralization to me. Alert Doc, Box crisis intake, local emergency response, Interpol. Start continuous updates by available channels, breadth over depth, cascading priority interrupts. Acknowledged. She sent further queries, ones that would take longer for the Database to answer, as she headed for the equipment bay. Duty called.

Next: Part 2

#FallofDocFuture #FallMisc

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lachryphage · 5 years

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Today was the longest day of the year. Many traditions celebrate the summer solstice, but as I've delved further into the personalization of my Craft and associated Meditations I've found none of those traditions particularly speak to me. So today I gave myself the simple task of considering what the Sun means to me, both in the physical and representationally.

I was raised with plenty of pagan influences. I have a spiritual background in celebrating the Sun, the light and life it brings. The synonymous nature of light and life and love. Basic biology teaches this as well, that all of the energy put into our network of life systems comes from the sun (ok, there's a few areas of chemosynthesis but that's besides the point). And even on the emotional level I cannot help but have a love affair with the sun, with its all encompassing warmth and the desert lands it rules.

Despite my adoration, the Sun has never wanted me. Nocturnal since birth, plagued with light-sensitive eyes, skin that burns, and an immune system hell-bent on battling the reactions the Sun causes in my skin... I can't even produce vitamin D from my exposures. I am at my core a creature of the night.

My line has always produced dark witches. Some would say we've been drawn too far from the light, and our nature has always been a secret in our community, a community that teaches the totality of light and life and love and truth. But it's in my blood to harbor darkness, and in my upbringing to allow myself to explore that without judgement and moralizations.

And so I find that no matter how much I struggle to conform, to adapt, no matter how much I have loved the Sun, it isn't for me. I need to stop trying to mold myself into something I'm not. No matter how much I struggle to conform, to adapt, no matter how much love I have given, I must accept that I can't live up to what others want from me, I can only be myself. It's a hard thing to do, to divorce myself from the drive to beg approval from authority figures, but in order to survive, I must.

Besides, the Sun is indifferent, it cannot see that it is burning me, I needn't feel guilty for turning away from it.

#it's past 4 am and idk if this is remotely coherent lol #i need a tag for this kinda stuff i don't want to put it in mainstream wi+chblr tags but i gotta keep my blog organized #long post #personal shit #craft and meditations #good enough for now #today's sound track is 'shutting out the sun' by lunatic soul #don't reblog please

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sarazanmai · 6 years

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Stuff I loved in 2018.

Its that time again. The end of a year and a look back on all the stuff I enjoyed. Honestly I almost wasn’t going to write this because I feel these posts are a lot of effort with very little reward, but there was a lot I experienced this year that I think was interesting and worth sharing. So let’s go.

Roger Ebert once said “artistry can redeem any subject matter”. While I’m not sure any subject matter can be salvaged through an artistic eye, it can certainly help. If someone approaches a certain material with a clear vision and purpose to what they do they can create something truly fascinating. The Monogatari series is a very strange one. Its told in a non chronological order, there’s characters who say they’re one thing and reveal themselves to be something else, there’s a lot of references to other anime, the visual style changes sometimes radically, its incredibly meta, some moments of fanservice have a deeper meaning to them while others not so much. Me personally I think the series goes through periods of being brilliant as well as periods where it just is not up to the same standard as before. That said I kind of like that, I like that you go through so many different moods and style shifts. Not everyone will like that, some will get frustrated with the weaker seasons, but for me I think it all comes together and really made for something I won’t forget. I watched the entire series within a week and then later in the year I rewatched it all barring “Koyomimonogatari” which is one of those weaker seasons in my opinion. Despite its bulk, despite its tendencies, the Monogatari series just kept me hooked.

There comes a time where we all must accept certain truths. One of them is a lot of you don’t really understand mecha. I still see all of these reviews and comments claiming that mecha before “Evangelion” were all just light fluffy Saturday morning cartoon fare with little substance. This could not be further from the truth. The Gundam franchise from the very beginning was serving what I am going to refer to as a human element. It was not this soulless creation who’s only goal was to sell model kits. Whether it was Amuro’s PTSD from piloting the Gundam or Kamille and his tragic romance with Four or Char’s true motives during the original series there was always more going on than just giant robots shooting things. This isn’t even taking into consideration other installments like “War in the Pocket” where its a story of war from the point of view of a child and soldier. I have not watched every Gundam anime, I am sure there are some that were just there to exist as another installment in the franchise and didn’t necessarily push the franchise or genre into new areas. But what I have seen in “Mobile Suit Gundam”, “Zeta Gundam” “War in the Pocket”, “Unicorn”, “Iron Blooded Orphans”, and even the polarizing “ZZ Gundam” which I admittedly dropped were all very interesting and very unique experiences. Tomino really hit on something when he created the series and now we’ve come so far that we have a franchise so massive and large it needs an entire wikipedia article devoted to its cultural impact.

Once again, mecha that came before “Evangelion” were still displaying that human element many critics are convinced wasn’t there. In “Macross” its very prominent to the point where it feels like a driving force to the entire show as well as its film “Do You Remember Love”. We spend as much time with the characters and their developing relationships as we do with the mecha battles. The emphasis on music and culture as something that can create a change in the world is one of the themes synonymous with the franchise. While there certainly were times in the show where it leaned a bit into a comical area, I didn’t mind this. It was a show aimed at a younger audience and was trying to communicate these themes on their level so at times things can be a bit silly, but I appreciate what is being said so much that it does not feel like an issue. The heart is still there, the human element is still there. And more complex and serious sub plots are there too. Regardless when it comes to the film “Do You Remember Love” and the OVA “Macross Plus” things were certainly approached with a more mature voice, bringing the franchise to new places. I watched this prior to any Gundam anime in an attempt to get a better feel for the mecha genre. I wanted to expand my tastes and I’m very happy I did because not only did I love this I also want to really explore the genre now more than ever.

With the release of “Lupin III Part 5″ this year I was really turned onto that franchise. I ended up getting this massive itch to explore it when that anime wrapped and while not everything I found was a masterpiece it was a worthwhile endeavor. There’s something to Lupin the character and the series at large that manages to be both fun while also evoking a sense of coolness in spite of his goofiness. It was interesting to go through the various TV series and the movies and some specials and get a sense for how its evolved through time. Rewatching “The Castle of Cagliostro” I really enjoyed it a lot and other installments like “The Fuma Conspiracy” and “The Hemingway Paper Mystery” were hugely entertaining. I really liked “Lupin III part 4″ and “The Woman Called Fujiko Mine” too and the original “Lupin III” anime. I can still hear that voice singing “Lupin...he’s a nice man...but he’s cool...”. And objectively speaking green jacket is best jacket. I feel like this is a series that has undergone so much evolution through the various people that came in to work on it that there’s bound to be something that appeals to somebody. You just have to find it.

I spent a lot of time ignoring “Gintama” and its a bit of a shame that I did because this is a really fun series. Despite how long it is I really didn’t feel like it took me a terribly long time to finish it. And even though its goal is more on the comedic side of things, the series surprised me with how strong of an emotional punch it can provide. The cast of characters is one of the most likeable and fun that I’ve seen in a while and the seiyuu cast was very impressive. Everyone plays their character well and I get the sense they really enjoy working on it. Akira Ishida in particular seemed to really get a kick out of playing someone as ridiculous as Katsura when so many of his other roles lean more serious. And of coarse everyone loves Tomokazu Sugita as Gin. His voice just feels so right for a character like this and it was great having him for something this big when in other anime I’ve seen him in he’s only around for so long. I’ve also got to give the series credit for its female characters. There’s a really sturdy amount and they’re all occupying their own place in this world with distinct identities. This is something that makes this world feel more alive and expansive. Kagura is a character I need to applaud for the fact that she wasn’t there for some sort of lolicon fanservice or to have a really awkward crush on Gin or Shinpachi. No she just cares about food and her dog. What a queen. Speaking of Shinpachi he was the MVP of this series, good boy. And there’s our Shinsengumi boys and of coarse Gin himself, so many great characters. I am sure a lot of people look at how much there is to “Gintama” and get nervous at the size of it, but there’s really no need to. When it clicks with you then there’s no putting it down.

“Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju” might be one of the greatest anime in recent years. It takes you through so many periods in this man’s life and the people around him and manages to hold you the entire way. Once again Akira Ishida is someone I need to give major credit to. He’s a very talented seiyuu and in this anime his performance was so impressive I was almost beside myself. Given the performance style the series is built around the cast all needed to be really great at reciting these stories and articulating them. And for the scenes where the characters are not on stage, when the interpersonal drama comes out, everything just hits in such a powerful way. I can’t remember how often I cried during this anime, but it never felt like I was being manipulated. It all felt as if it came through organically and easily. Even more subtle scenes like a character finding out he’s having a child hit on just the right emotions. If you are in the mood for a fantastic character driven drama this is absolutely one I’d recommend.

Speaking of character driven drama “Sangatsu no Lion” is another one to tune into. It initially presents itself as a very intense and dark story, but as the viewer stays involved you find that this is not about wallowing in self loathing but healing. The family that has taken this very troubled young man in and helped him navigate through his mental illness is so likeable and endearing. You find yourself wanting to see him get better and hope that these girls, as well as the other shogi players, find happiness for themselves too. Its not always simple though. There are ups and downs to the characters and their arcs, but it never feels bitter or angry. It feels like reality. Over the coarse of its two seasons it manages to do what so many other shows about a character with depression fail to do. It never feels exploitative or like it has no sense of how to handle such a topic nor does it feel hopeless. As difficult as things in Rei’s life can become you know deep down this isn’t the end of the line, things can get better. It also does a very good job at holding your attention whether you understand the intricacies of shogi or not. You’re told what feels like the essential basic rules to the game and you aren’t thrown into a state of culture shock if you’ve never looked into the game before. I feel like what we have here is a modern masterpiece and more people have been watching it and celebrating it as a great achievement and that makes me so happy.

“Galaxy Express 999″, pronounced “three nine” because why not, is quite the space opera. I watched every episode of the original TV series as well as the two films directed by Rintaro and while they have some flaws or areas that did not age well, they’ve remained famous for a reason. The TV series did a really great job at pulling at your emotions and showing you different worlds. Some felt similar to others, but then there’s so much creativity in other areas. The concept of a space train was inspired by the popular Japanese children’s book “Night on the Galactic Railroad”, which would receive its own anime adaptation, and what Leiji Matsumoto did with this inspiration ended up taking on an identity all its own. You really feel for this bond between Tetsuro and Maetel. You spend so much time wondering just who Maetel is and what her goal in all of this could be. She’s kept just vague enough where I feel we were told all that we needed to. Tetsuro is someone I’ve seen reviewers describe as a little frustrating due to his naivete, but he’s a child. It makes complete sense for him to place his trust in the wrong person or make a mistake like he does. Masako Nozawa, the future voice of Goku and all his male relatives barring Raditz, voiced Tetsuro and I think she really brought a strong likeability to the character. We feel for him and also have a lot of fun seeing him travel through space. Its hard to say what version is stronger, I’d argue the show but know its not easy to recommend something that hefty. Whether someone watches the films or the show or both I think they’re still getting something great out of it.

And they say you can’t sum up a show in one image. So “Madoka Magica” what are we to do about you? Its kind of hard to explain, but I rather purposefully chose not to watch it for this long. Mostly because I was tired of the hype and the fandom basically pulling an “Evangelion” and acting like no magical girl anime or manga prior to this served emotions. But its presence never really died, this anime is almost a decade old now and people still care. And while I don’t regret not tuning in while it was running, I am very happy to have experienced it on my own terms. It gave me one of my new favorite characters with Homura, its visually stunning and marvelously directed. the music is so enchanting, and the story really is good. I think the show from start to end was a great watch and really kept me going and the bittersweet nature of it did work for me. As far as the movies go I did watch “Rebellion” and while I think its good it does complicate what the message to the series is in my opinion. Either way its just the same as “End of Evangelion” where I don’t see it as canon. I think the big question a lot of people have is if this lives up to the hype and I’m not totally sure how to answer that, but it is an anime worth your time all the same.

This will be easy. I have a review already written out for “Slam Dunk” so if you want my more expanded thoughts there you go. This really is a fantastic anime.

Last year I watched the movie “A Silent Voice”, but failed to put it in my year end review out of pure laziness. I am not making that same mistake again. “In This Corner of the World” is a film I am very grateful to have seen. Its a very interesting take on a WWII story. Not that we haven’t had movies about the war from the perspective of a civilian before, but there is something to the way its approached through our protagonist that feels especially powerful. She experiences so much during those years and tries her best to keep living with keeping her family alive as her main motivation and eventually is met with tragedy. Its produced by a studio called Mappa who’ve gained a lot of attention for “Yuri on Ice” and this year’s “Banana Fish. I did not like those anime very much, but I really loved this film and have to applaud them for trying different types of stories. I hope the projects they have lined up for 2019 are as enjoyable as this. I’ve heard the director has an interest in releasing an extended cut and if that happens I’ll be very interesting in seeing what it offers.

Again I will not make the same mistake twice. “A Silent Voice” was directed by a woman named Naoko Yamada. She also directed “K-On” and “Tamako Market”, two series that made it on my post for last year. She has an incredible talent and in my opinion is the director in anime to watch. After the success of “A Silent Voice” a lot of people wanted to see where she would go and what she gave us is nothing short of amazing. “Liz and the Blue Bird” is a film more people need to pay attention to. Those who’ve seen it adore it, fans have given it very high scores and glowing reviews. But I think this movie needs even more attention beyond that because compared to movies like “Doukyuusei” this feels like it made a smaller splash in the community. Yamada’s approach to love and drama is so effective without being forceful, you really feel for these girls and the longing between them. Yamada is a director who cares deeply for respecting the emotions of her characters which is why she has successfully created so many famous emotional scenes without them feeling melodramatic or feeling staged. This is especially clear with this film where she manages to communicate everything we need to know, but in very few spoken words. And the animation as one expects from a Kyoani project is just lovely. It also manages to work very strongly with its blue toned color palette. So many people make these blue toned movies look dreary, but not here. Things still have a brightness to them and even a warmth. I feel very lucky I was able to see this movie this year when so many anime films take so long to be made available elsewhere. When it reaches the US on bluray I am definitely buying it.

When it comes to the seasonal TV anime for the year, this was my favorite.”Sora yori mo Tooi Basho“ or “A Place Further than the Universe” is a very interesting installment in the “cute girls do blank” genre of anime. Here its cute girls go to the arctic. It sounds like a weird premise to a show, but when you see it put into practice its impressive how much you feel invested in these girls and what they’re doing. Its directed by a woman named Atsuko Ishizuka who was once identified as one of the great talents at the famed studio Madhouse. I think, like Yamada, she manages to work within these character heavy stories while avoiding any unnecessary melodrama. A lesser director would have made some scenes so cheesy or so over the top sad and that can take you right out of the experience. At first I was unsure of how big of a hit this anime would be given how many huge shows came out this year, but its managed to top the bluray sales in Japan for quite a while now. I feel really happy it became such a success. People say the cute girl sub genre is played out and that if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, that is not true. Sometimes you need a talented director, an off the cuff premise, and you can get something fresh out of a genre that sometimes over saturates the market.

“Pop Team Epic” is an anime the like of which we’ve never seen before. And we will never get it again. A lot of people have said that in order to understand or get the jokes you have to know what it is they’re parodying and that really is not true. This isn’t referential humor like in “Gintama” where the impact of the joke relies on you knowing that material. If you don’t know "Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” you won’t get it when Gin references Joseph and Caesar’s training with Lisa Lisa. Here the approach to the comedy is so surreal that if you don’t know the reference it just registers as a bizarre thing they did. Sure I know they referenced things like “Hikaru no Go”, but someone who doesn’t would just think its “Pop Team Epic” being weird again. And if you do know what they’re referencing then you know the layers to the joke. The anime is also in a lot of ways very visually strong to the point of being almost avant-garde. It was expensive and time consuming to make even if people don’t realize it. All of these different animation styles, the mixed media approach to certain scenes. They even brought in Miyo Sato, the woman who does the paint on glass animation for “Mob Psycho 100″, to work on the show for a few segments. To a lot of people this show was a meme, but in a lot of ways I think it was doing more than that. We’re not going to get another season or anything out of it, but I’m happy something this strange was able to exist and grab hold of such a large scale audience.

I have an in depth analytical review out for "Berserk”, if you would like to read such a thing there it is. However it does contain spoilers. My unspoiled and condensed opinions are that its fantastic, with gorgeous art, well developed and amazing characters, and tons of soul. Its very intense and not exactly for everyone, but its definitely a masterpiece. Unfortunately it also has a very foul fandom which turned me off reading it for years. I genuinely expected my review to garner a lot of negative feedback given how this fandom is, to my surprise this never happened though. If you can remove the toxic fandom from the equation, which is surprisingly easy to do, then you’re golden. Also this is a romantic manga and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise because they’re cowards.

“Golden Kamuy” is fantastic as a manga. I watched the anime too, but I feel like that works best treated like a companion piece to the manga. I’ve best described the plot as “One Piece” meets “Silence of the Lambs”. This is also something that probably comes closest to evoking the same kind of strangeness that “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” has. The best way I can put it is that characters will say things that are weird, but nobody acts like they’re weird. There is also a lot of information fed to the reader about aspects of the Ainu culture and hunting and weaponry. At first it feels as if you’re being given a lot of information on topics that aren’t going to be important, but they end up having more significance than you realize. The same applies to the characters. I was surprised at how many characters I expected to be left behind were made relevant later on. And they’re memorable. Sugimoto, Asirpa, Shiraishi, Ogata, Tsurumi, Tanigaki, even that little girl Osoma was memorable. One thing the story really excels at is how you have a large amount of characters chasing the same prize, but with their own reasons. Nobody loses sight of their own motivation, some we still haven’t learned their true gain in all of this, and we see how this effects the flow of the plot. For such a large cast this would under a different writer feel very cluttered, but not here. And visually the manga looks amazing. Noda’s art is a little odd at first, but when you really look at it he’s got a lot of talent. Everyone looks distinct, the backgrounds look great, the animals look good (we’re not gonna discuss the anime’s CGI). If I had to recommend just one I’d say the manga as the anime does skip material, some due to networks being incapable of showing such things others honestly feel skipped because they wanted to streamline the plot at the expense of characterization and world building. I do still recommend taking in both as this sort of bundle deal though because the anime really is entertaining and has such a strong seiyuu cast it would be a shame to pass it by completely.

Takehiko Inoue is an absolute master at this stage in his career. In an interview with Akira Toriyama he was called someone with a real sense for manga and its amazing to see how he went from “Slam Dunk,” where he had not yet drawn a bare foot, to something like “Vagabond”. The art in this manga is deserving of all the praise it gets, its so detailed that it just leaves you stunned. The story also shows just how on point he is as a writer. I’m sure through the many movies and shows about Musashi Miyamoto a lot of Japanese audiences have a certain way they tend to view him and then here comes Inoue offering a different approach to the man. One where he is still working towards an enlightened state and trying to reign in an animalistic rage. Working in themes of being the strongest under the sun, what it means to live for the sword, how these choices effect the people left behind, its really fascinating stuff. There’s even an entire long stretch of chapters where we break away entirely from Musashi to focus on a young Kojiro and his adoptive father, its a very sudden break away yet it doesn’t feel random or jarring. I think because Inoue knows how to craft compelling characters so effortlessly it made that shift in focus work as well as it did. Its one of the most successful manga in terms of sales and with good reason, its a masterpiece. This is one of those manga that currently is on an indefinite hiatus and I can only hope Inoue is able to finish it. And if for whatever reason he can’t then at least we can say we got what we got.

Behold your new shonen king! Not Izuku, not Hinata. Open your arms for the next great shonen! “Dr. Stone” is a manga that at the moment doesn’t have the largest of audiences, but everyone I know who’s read it absolutely loves it. And with the anime being released next year I can only hope that will be the push that people need to experience it. The story is focused very heavily on innovation and discovery which feels so fresh compared to a lot of things Weekly Shonen Jump has been producing as of late. And the level to which things have been thought out really impresses me. In recent chapters it was revealed that in that period of time humanity was petrified the terrain has changed drastically and the maps from the past are now worthless. So that means finding a way to survey the land and get a better sense of the world. Its so exciting to read this sort of thing. And the characters are so fun. Senku is a very interesting character to place at the center of this story. He’s a genius and approaches things as logically as possible, sometimes he can be a jerk and self serving, but he’s always going to do what he can to further civilization because he just loves science that much. Chrome is a really funny character to bounce off of him. We recently were introduced to a new member of the cast that has great potential. I like Asagiri. Its written by the same mangaka behind “Eyeshield 21″ and while I have not read that I can say through this manga that he’s really got a great sense of story telling. I also really like Boichi’s art, he pulls out some hilarious extreme faces and also some really dynamic scenes. Next summer can’t come fast enough because I am so hyped and ready for this anime to start.

“Kimetsu no Yaiba” is another manga that will be getting an anime next year and I am extremely excited. If I had to compare it to anything I would honestly say its like if “Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood” and “Hunter x Hunter” got crossbred. Its mangaka Koyoharu Gotouge really feels very influenced by Yoshihiro Togashi in both her writing as well as some of her character designs. Togashi actually said this manga along with “Dr. Stone” is one of the ones in recent years to read which I’m sure made her thrilled to hear. I feel like this is something that does a lot of the things people generally want to see in anime and manga. You have a strong sibling dynamic at the center of the story (and it isn’t one of those relationships), there’s female characters that are involved with the action and its treated like a real fight, there’s themes of family that are always really endearing, aesthetically its very beautiful while still being able to pull off a more intense body horror style moment, fanservice aside from a couple moments is at a minimum, and it is also very funny. There’s a lot of personality to our main characters as well as the Pillars that we have gotten to know and it doesn’t feel crowded. She knows when to use a character and when to keep them out of a certain arc. She also has a lot of respect towards Nezuko who I feel another writer would have shoved aside in favor of her brother. But Nezuko is shown to still retain her autonomy in spite of her predicament, she fights and is sometimes vital to defeating a demon, and the more recent events in the story show a lot of potential for furthering her as a character. The anime is to be released for the spring and its made by Ufotable, based on the PV we have at the moment this show will definitely be gorgeous. I am very excited for what they’ve done with this material and I can only hope other people will be watching too because I do not want this to be a series people sleep on.

“Revolutionary Girl Utena” is a masterpiece. I have frankly a really complicated opinion of Kunihiko Ikuhara. A lot of people think he can do no wrong, I am not one of them. There’s things that happened with “Sailor Moon” that I know weren’t his fault, but there’s also things that happened during S where he had the most control over the project that still bother me. I can never know for sure if these were his ideas or things Toei forced onto him as he did leave the show because of a lack of freedom to do what he wanted, but that said when he really commits to a project he can produce something amazing. He has said many things over the years regarding Utena and a big takeaway from them is that he does not want to tell us what to feel, he wants us to decide for ourselves. I think what Utena fundamentally is about is deconstructing romantic tropes, analyzing chivalry, and the lies men tell women. The series gets more complex and symbolic as it progresses until we get to the movie “Adolescence of Utena” where its refusing to hold your hand any step of the way. Unlike with “End of Evangelion” or “Madoka Rebellion” the “Adolescence” movie is not an attempt at a different ending, but more of an alternative retelling of the story. Its a pure visual masterpiece and a movie that I honestly think deserves to be seen with or without the TV show. That said I would strongly recommend both of them as not only is it one of the greatest shojo ever, it is also Ikuhara at his finest. Moo.

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booksfornamjoon · 6 years

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화양연화TheNotes Analysis (Part II)

화양연화TheNotes Analysis (Part I): Jungkook, 22 May YEAR 22

*Keep in mind this text was originally written in Spanish, so forgive any mistakes, English is not my first language.

*This analysis is mainly philological and a personal opinion.

[Here you can read Part I].

First of all, we find ourselves before a first-person narrator: 'I thought my body was floating', which tells us about a past time of a traumatic memory. Following the theories of narratology, the narrator in the first person (called 'internal narrator' or 'homodiegetic narrator'), is a character within the story ('intradiegetic narrator'), therefore, he only has and provides information based on his own experience of events. However, we must bear in mind that this type of narrator is the one that most differs from the author (the author is not the same as the narrator): Jungkook is a character in the text, he must necessarily comply with all the rules of being a character, even when he is performing tasks of storyteller. I think that, as we will see in the analysis, this narrator-protagonist tells his own story, he is the main character and everything that happens we know through him, that's why there are questions and confusion. This narrator adopts a subjective point of view that makes him identify with the protagonist and prevents him from interpreting in an absolute and impartial way the thoughts and actions of the other characters in the narrative (as we will also see). In short, it is the type of narrator that is used in genres such as the diary or autobiography and, in this case, I think it also has influences from the stream of consciousness technique, that is, trying to reproduce the mechanisms of thought in the text (associations of ideas), trying to blur the textual construction (authors such as Proust, Virginia Woolf or Joyce are experts in this type of narration).

Let's go into the text:

I thought my body was floating, but it was on a solid floor.

From the first moment, reference is made to the denial of the basic senses. Let us return to the idea of the narrator-protagonist: for him to have knowledge of something, he necessarily has to experience it with his own senses, or that some other character tells him about it. He can tell his own thoughts and opinions, but not those of the other characters, unless he knows them for any reason. Therefore, since it can only be based on its senses and these are not working properly, the narrative creates an atmosphere of confusion (which is precisely the effect that it is intended to achieve). That is why he uses verbs like 'think' ('I thought'), which in a certain way do not denote certainty.

The narrator-protagonist believes that he is floating in the air, that is, his abilities (psychic and physical) are depleted. He's like in a dream. His mind thinks that his body is flying, 'but it was on a solid floor'. He is being deceived by his own situation. We can quickly think that Jungkook has suffered an accident and, convalescing, between life and death, he experiences these sensations.

I did not feel anything for a while.

This phrase further corroborates the idea of an accident. The pain suffered causes paralysis.

I just could not lift my eyelids because my whole body was so heavy. I could not even swallow or breathe.

His body does not belong to him, although he is able to organize his ideas. His mind does work, even if it's confused and lost.

I was losing my consciousness and my surroundings slowly blurred.

Here we have the key: Jungkook is losing consciousness, he's losing the connection with reality, with life.

Then, by surprise my body started shaking heavily from something. Unknowing of what caused it, I had pain and I was in thirst.

The wounds, the pain. He does not know what happened to him or how he got to that point (or does not remember, or does not want to tell), but he is in a situation of extreme danger. Notice how many times the body is named.

It seemed like the sand has blurred my sight but something appeared.

What most attracts my attention, apart from the fact that the narrator continues to use verbs of uncertainties ('It seemed like ...'), is that they use the word 'sand' to refer to his diminished ability to see. The sand is not an image that is normally used as a metaphor for blindness (as I pointed out in the first part), but I can not help but think that that word is there for something and that it has to do with some metaphors of 'LY: Her'. Namjoon, the one who normally composes the lyrics, seems to be employing assiduously the 'sand-water' opposition. All the words in a text are a conscious choice, up to the points and commas, and we can not overlook that detail. In addition, we are presented with the first object that breaks his loneliness ('but something appeared').

I thought it was a light but it was not. It was bright, big and faint. It is floated in the air without moving. Looking at it for a while, it gradually became a solid form. It was the moon.

There are many interesting aspects in this fragment. In the first place, we can be sure that it is night, or at least he's in a dark place. Second, this is the perfect explanation of how a metaphor is constructed.

Metaphor: Rhetorical figure by which a reality or concept is expressed through a different reality or concept with which the represented has a certain relationship of similarity.

The moon, whose identity is given to us at the end, is described by images that denote its qualities: 'light', 'it was bright, big and faint', 'it floated in the air without moving', 'solid form'. It goes from the plane of the abstract, of the imaginary, of the symbol..., to the plane of the real. Honestly, I consider it an excellent fragment. Precisely, Jungkook is carrying out the same process as any metaphor: he's moving from the plane of the abstract, of the imaginary, of the unconscious..., to the plane of the real, of the conscious.

If I use the word 'conscious' or 'unconscious', I must talk about Freud. I will try to summarize it since the theory of Freudian psychoanalysis is highly complex. Let's go in parts: 'conscious' is a term used by Sigmund Freud, as an adjective to qualify a psychic state, or as a noun, to indicate the location of certain processes constituting the functioning of the psychic apparatus. In this sense, the conscious, together with the preconscious and the unconscious, is one of the three instances of the first Freudian topic. The preconscious is, broadly speaking, those psychic processes, events, operations and contents that escape the present consciousness and that being essentially tied to the self, belong to its unconscious parts, without being properly part of the unconscious system. For Freud, the unconscious system is constituted largely (but not only) by repressed contents that have been prevented from accessing consciousness, precisely because of the mechanism of repression. In other words: the unconscious is a part of our cognitive system to which the conscience has no access (we do not perceive that it exists), but which is revealed in a series of formations such as dreams, lapses, jokes, games of words, failed actions and symptoms. The unconscious, according to Freud, has the peculiarity of being both internal to the subject (and to his consciousness) and external to all forms of domination by conscious thought. If these repressed elements (desires, phobias, impulses) manage to leave the unconscious (theoretically that was the role of psychoanalysis) and move on to the conscious, that is, if the symbolic passes to the real plane, then we are able to discover, among other things (I'm simplifying a lot), our internal drives, our true desires, our traumas. In short, the conscious designates the set of experiences from which the subject can give an account through an act of internal perception. In addition, for philosophy, consciousness is the human faculty to decide actions and take responsibility for the consequences according to the conception of good and evil. A conscious person, in this sense, is responsible, who does not act with negligence and who tries to minimize the negative consequences of their actions. If the albums of 'LY' (especially 'LY: Tear') are based on a process of self-knowledge, of the rupture of the individual for the construction of the 'self', it is not unreasonable that Jungkook is playing with the unconscious and the conscious, since, in a certain way, the Freudian theory pretended to facilitate to patients that cure of reality, that process of personal discovery.

On the other hand, the presence of the moon in literature, especially in poetry, is extremely extensive and repeated. Precisely, in Spanish poetry, the moon is a symbol of first order. Authors such as Federico García Lorca understand the moon in a contradictory way: sometimes it is a symbol of life and death, other times of fertility, but in general, he includes it as an antithesis of the life cycle. Miguel Hernández (who is also my favourite poet) uses the moon (as is common in poetry) as a symbol of perfection, since it is circular (perfect form par excellence), and its white colour becomes synonymous with purity.

The moon came to the forge with her skirt of white, fragrant flowers. The young boy watches her, watches. The boy is watching her.

In the electrified air the moon moves her arms and points out, lecherous and pure, her breasts of hard tin.

Flee, moon, moon, moon. If the gypsies were to come, they would make with your heart white necklaces and rings.

Young boy, leave me to dance. When they come, the gypsies will find you upon the anvil with closed eyes.

Flee, moon, moon, moon. Already I sit astride horses. Young boy, leave me, don’t step on my starched whiteness.

The horse rider approaches beating the drum of the plain. Within the forge the young man has closed eyes.

Through the olive grove they come, the gypsies – bronze and dreaming, heads lifted and eyes half closed.

Hark, hear the night bird – how it sings in the tree. Across the sky moves the moon, holding the young boy by the hand.

Within the forge the gypsies cry, are crying out. The air watches over her, watches. The air is watching over her.

(Romance of the moon, moon, moon, written by Federico García Lorca in 1928).

We change the paragraph and the text continues:

The world was turned upside down as if I had turned my head.

Many fans have already made reference to that in the video of 'DNA', V comes out in some scenes upside down, which could explain this strange symbol. At the edge of the unconscious, almost hallucinating, his world is upside down (in a way I can not help relating this to the video of 'Serendipity', where Jimin's world also trembles because of falling in love).

In that world, the moon was also hanging upside down.

As if he were floating, the moon is down and he is up looking at her. I love this poetic image.

I tried to cough to breathe but could not move. And then I got the chills. I was scared.

His senses remain numb, but look how the sentences get shorter, creating an atmosphere of suspense. Suddenly, realizing his helplessness, he is afraid.

I tried to talk but I could not speak.

He can not talk, can not see, can not hear or move. He is subject to something he does not know.

I did not close my eyes but suddenly everything became black.

Abruptly, the narrative takes another turn. Jungkook is fainting beyond repair. We are going to lose him, he will not be able to tell us anything else and suddenly the last sentence of the text appears:

I lost my conscious and someone said: Living can be more painful than dying. But do you want to live?

He loses consciousness (which is what the text was suggesting the whole time) and, outside the world of the living, of the tangible, of the 'real', someone appears. It is curious this figure that appears when he is on the verge of death. He can not tell us who he is, how he is physically..., he/she is categorized indefinitely, which gives the figure an aura of mystery and certain danger. This appearance addresses him with enigmatic words: Living can be more painful than dying. But do you want to live?

Is God? Is his consciousness? His unconscious?

Whatever it is, it is obvious that he/she's providing another opportunity to live, but first asks if JK wants that second chance. Do you want to live? Are you willing to pay the price of what it means to live? Do you value your life? Do you deserve to be reborn?

Living can be more painful than dying.

This phrase has a direct influence on one of the basic ideas of Christianity (at least in its origins): life as a valley or path of tears. The earth is a place of penance to reach heaven.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee, in whose heart are Thy ways, who passing through the Valley of Baca makes it a well; the rain also filleth the pools. They go from strength to strength; every one of them in Zion appeareth before God (Psalms 84: 5-7).

It also reminds me of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who only considered salvation through suffering.

Finally, inevitably, that 'someone', by how he/she appears on the scene and by the words he/she addresses, reminds me of Dante's Divine Comedy. Specifically, the encounter between Dante and Virgil at the beginning of the book (Inferno: Canto I). At that point in the storyline, Dante is lost, in the middle of an inhospitable beach (SAND!!!) that is as strange as terrifying. Afterwards, three wild beasts (symbolizing lust, pride and greed) prevent him from going (Does not this have anything to do with ‘Wings' album?!). When he can not advance anymore, he only has the path of the wild jungle, in where he has awakened without knowing how he got there (Similarities to JK's situation?). There, crying with fear, an unknown figure appears. It is Virgil, one of the most important Latin poets (and a role model for humanists like Dante Alighieri), who from that moment will become his guide through hell, the first stage of his purification process to reach his beloved, Beatrice. Dante, who personifies humanity, represents the temptation of sin, Beatrice, who personifies the Faith and will take Dante to each of the spheres of paradise, to the Empyrean, immobile space, where he will contemplate the mystical Rose formed by God and his chosen. And Virgilio, who symbolises reason.

It is because of me that he goes to the city of tears, it is because of me that he goes to the eternal pain and to the place where the condemned race suffers, I was created by the divine power, the supreme wisdom and the first love, and there was nothing that existed before me, abandon hope if you enter here (Inscription Dante reads in the door of Hell).

The Divine Comedy is a work written around 1321 and narrates the journey of Dante through hell and purgatory (with overcoming all tests) to reach paradise, where his beloved waits. Hell represents the human being in front of his sins and his dire consequences. Purgatory, the slow purification of their faults until liberation. Going down to the underworld to re-emerge, even if it leads to the resurrection from the dead, is the price for self-knowledge. We are, once again, facing a path of personal discovery that, although it involves pain, shapes the individual.

#365booksfornamjoon #화양연화TheNotes #방탄소년단 #bts theory #bts analysis #22 may year 22 #JK #LY #love yourself #love yourself tear #bts #fake love

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ewinglogan93 · 4 years

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How To Avoid A Bad Divorce Wondrous Tips

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Is It Possible To Save A Relationship After Cheating

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Save Marriage While Separated Synonyms

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#How To Avoid A Bad Divorce Wondrous Tips #How To Legally Stop A Divorce

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD: Ed’s Very Important Thoughts on Tarantino’s Ninth*

Where do I even begin with Tarantino’s latest?

Maybe with what you already know, that it’s the filmmaker’s ninth movie, and that it’s set in 1969 Hollywood centered around the events of the Manson murders of Sharon Tate and her houseguests one fateful night.. or does it?

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a ‘50s Western television star who has been relegated to guest villain in television’s second decade. He still has his trusty stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as a companion, as well as a driver, having been sidelined due to drunken driving. As 1969 Hollywood has become infiltrated by hippie culture and cute hippie chicks, both older men start seeing changes around them, including that Rick’s new neighbors are hot Hollywood couple Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).

Once Upon a Time… follows along three often disparate storylines, the main one following Rick trying to get his career back in order, Cliff and his encounters with the hippie counter culture and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, who really is just going about her everyday life.

DiCaprio does have some good scenes on the set of a TV Western pilot he’s filming in hopes of having a comeback, my favorite scenes being with a young 8-year-old actor* who threatens to steal her scenes with DiCaprio, just like Cliff’s dog Brandy (a male dog!) does the same in their scenes together. For the most part, DiCaprio seems to be having fun hamming it up in a less serious role, but I do not buy that it will get him another Oscar nomination. (*Her name is Julia Butters... REMEMBER that name!)

In some ways, Pitt’s Cliff Booth is the more interesting character and Tarantino’s film starts cooking with gas when Cliff pays a visit to the Spahn Movie Farm, where a group of young hippie girls (i.e. Manson’s clan) have taken up residence. This is actually where we see where Tarantino’s mastery of suspense flourishes – remember the pivotal scene in the Travolta/Thurman part of Pulp Fiction when he’s holding an adrenaline shot ready to plunge it into her heart? This is the point where you’re not sure what’s going to happen but it’s one of the film’s stronger scenes in terms of storytelling for what will occur later. Pitt’s role also solidifies the comparisons that have often been made between him and Robert Redford, because he maintains the same screen charisma in his mid-50s as he had when first starting out.

DiCaprio and Pitt do have some great scenes together solidifying the friendship between star and stunt man, while Margot Robbie is a ray of sunshine as Sharon Tate, a bubbly optimistic young woman who is embracing the hippie esthetic as she lives the high life in the Beverly Hills. I also loved Margaret Qualley as “Pussycat,” one of Manson’s cult who Cliff connects with – again, capturing the innocence of the hippie movement of the times, superimposed with the feeling of foreboding that would later become synonymous with the Manson clan.

Oddly, Damon Herriman’s Charles Manson only appears in one scene, one of Tarantino’s many seeming layers of red herrings, but that’s fairly typical of a movie where many characters only appear in one scene. Mike Moh as Bruce Lee, for example, has has a really good scene with Pitt, Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell, three of the many returning Tarantino collaborators. Some of these character you might wonder whether their scenes have any real importance or significance to the overall (and overly long!) movie. It’s nice seeing Damian Lewis portraying Steve McQueen, basically for one scene and then he’s gone with no further mention. (He seems to be there merely to comment on Sharon Tate’s choice of men.)

For a good hour or more, Once Upon a Time… doesn’t really feel like a Tarantino movie. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t feel as cinematic as his other work. In this case, he’s not making a genre movie, as much as he’s making a movie about the entertainment business and its effects on those who live in Hollywood. You’ll often wonder if Rick and Cliff are based on real people, maybe even some of the ones in Tarantino’s circles. But other than recreating movies and TV genres, most of it takes place in “the real world” at least up until a point. Fortunately, it does all come together as things go along, but it’s another case of a movie that could have easily been 20 to 30 minutes shorter.

Of course, Tarantino’s soundtrack programming continues to be on point, but that’s also part of what makes it feel different since he made his bones having movies scored by ‘70s soul music. For this one, he sticks to the ’60s with quite a bit of Paul Revere and the Raiders. There’s certainly a danger of Once Upon a Time… turning into full-on “nostalgia porn” – if you regularly read my “What to Watch This Weekend” column, you might even notice that all the ‘60s movies referenced have been programmed at Tarantino’s New Beverly repertory theaters in recent weeks. Either way, this is likely to be a soundtrack purchase just like “Pulp Fiction” and other Tarantino soundtracks.

It takes some time to get there, but when it comes down to it, Once Upon a Time… is a decent mid-range Tarantino film. We’ll have to see if it bears repeat viewings like some of his all-time classics, but any rewatching on my part will be more for Pitt and Robbie than DiCaprio.

Rating: 8/10

* Just in case you don’t get that reference…

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But I still like this one, too…

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#QuentinTarantino BradPitt LeonardoDicaprio MargotRobbie OnceUponATimeInHollywood Movie Review

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alex51324 · 7 years

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Comey Firing and Trump-Russia--an explainer

OK, my previous “explainer” on this topic was basically just keyboard smashing, but here’s the real one. I’m sure everyone has heard something about this story, but in this post, I will attempt to cover the basics of what happened, its historical context, and what it may mean for the future.

What happened:

Trump fired James Comey, the director of the FBI. Comey has been widely criticized by Democrats for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which also prompted concerns about his independence in investigating Trump-Russia. However, he is generally regarded as honest and capable, apart from this one glaring lapse, and people in a position to know how the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation reported no major red flags suggesting that he was shielding Trump or his associates.

Trump and his team initially claimed that they fired Comey due to his handling of the Clinton investigation. This was greeted by howls of laughter from liberal and moderate commentators. “Does he really expect anyone to believe that?” was the gist of the response.

It quickly emerged that the answer was “No,” as Trump proceeded to admit, on national television with reporter Lester Holt, “And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” (That is a real quote.) He also explained that he was not acting on the advice of Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his Deputy, Rod Rosenstein, even though the administration initially used statements from both men to justify the decision. He stated specifically that he had made this decision himself and was going to do it regardless of advice. Additionally, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated in the press briefing that they expected that the firing would bring the investigation to a rapid conclusion.

These statements by Trump were widely reported as being ridiculously self-incriminating--in essence, a deliberate, on-camera admission of obstruction of justice. (Link is to New Yorker magazine as just one example of such reporting, chosen because it’s a well-known mainstream source.) It is not clear why Trump would do this; the theory I find most compelling is that he felt that saying he acted upon advice from people who knew more and were not actively being investigated by Comey made him appear weak. Another possible factor is that Rod Rosenstein may have threatened to resign if Trump kept blaming him for this clusterfuck of a decision.

So why did he actually fire Comey? I mean, obviously, but why right now?

Theory one: Comey ramping up investigation

The most widely-reported and reliably-sourced reason is that Comey had asked the Justice Department (that is, Rod Rosenstein, since Sessions is recused from Trump-Russia) for more resources. The White House and the Justice Department deny this; however, the source says that Comey told lawmakers about this request, and lawmakers have confirmed that he did so. Those lawmakers are, unsurprisingly, Democrats, but Republicans who have defended Comey’s firing have not denied that he asked for more resources.

Theory two: Grand juries

Another major thing that happened around the same time as the Comey firing is that it was confirmed that a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia subpoena’d associates of Mike Flynn. (Flynn is the one who was National Security advisor for 20-odd days and who Sally Yates warned Trump about. That guy.) It had been rumored for some time that there was at least one, possibly several, grand juries empaneled on Trump-Russia, but these subpoenas made it possible to discuss them on rigorously-fact-checked mainstream media.

A bit of background on grand juries: The purpose of a grand jury is to investigate whether or not there sufficient evidence of a crime to bring charges. If the answer to that question is “Yes,” the defendant is said to have been indicted. While “indicted” is used colloquially as a synonym for nailing someone’s ass to the wall, a grand jury does not actually rule on guilt or innocence, only on the need for a further trial. An indictment, in the technical sense, means not “this person is guilty as fuck,” but “this person looks guilty as fuck.” Grand juries are usually used in cases that are large, complex, and potentially vulnerable to interference--public corruption and organized crime are the two commonly-cited examples. The equivalent for a more run-of-the-mill case is a pretrial hearing. As a result of these factors, grand juries operate in secrecy; usually, the first the public learns is when an indictment is handed down.

Therefore, while we now know that there is at least one grand jury looking at Mike Flynn, we do not know anything else about it. We don’t know if there is just the one, or if there are others. We don’t know if they’re looking just at Flynn, or at other Trump associates (or even Trump himself). We don’t know exactly what aspects of Flynn’s conduct they’re examining, or what potential crimes they may be interested in.

Now, with all that out of the way, there is a highly-speculative rumor going around that Trump ordered Comey to make those grand juries go away, and he was fired because he refused. The source there--the Palmer Report--is a guy who has reported a lot of rumors, and sources his articles almost exclusively from other people who report rumors. He’s been right a few times. (For instance, about the existence of the grand juries.) He’s also been wrong a bunch of times. (For instance, he’s said at least three different times that the first Trump-Russia arrests “could be coming next week.”) So, to be clear, this is a pretty active rumor--lots of the social-media rumor peddlers are saying it, including ones a bit more cautious than Palmer--but it’s still just a rumor.

However, we do know that there is that one grand jury, and that the Comey firing happened at the same time that the mainstream media started talking about it.

Theory three: The other subpoena

Another thing that happened this week is that Mike Flynn, himself, was subpoena’d by the Senate Intelligence Committee to produce documents relating to his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign and the transition. Flynn had refused to produce these documents after a formal (but non-mandatory) request, and this was known prior to the Comey firing. The subpoena was issued after the Comey firing, and the committee vote to issue it was unanimous. More on this below, under “So what happens now?”

Synthesis: the Upshot

So, taking these three reasons together, it’s reasonable to say that Trump-Russia was heating up. We cannot say which--if any--of these developments was decisive in Trump’s firing Comey. However, it is also safe to say that, if he had been the least bit concerned about the optics, this week was a particularly explosive time to make this move--there is no time Trump could have fired the person leading a major investigation into himself without looking suspicious, but almost any other time would have been better than this week. And that, more than anything, is what’s driving the speculation that someone was dangerously close to something.

Has anything like this ever happened before?

The short answer is, No. The long answer is, there are two possible historical parallels, neither of them exact.

One important detail to know here is that, after Watergate, a ten-year term for FBI directors was instituted. (Comey was about 3 years into that term.) This term was deliberately set up to span at least two presidential terms, in order to protect the independence of the FBI, in case a situation arose again where a sitting president needed to be investigated. So, you know, clearly it didn’t work, but this is a thing that government officials still reeling from Watergate thought nobody would be brazen enough to do. So that’s one data point.

The second data point is the only other time a President fired an FBI director. That President was Bill Clinton, and the FBI director was William Sessions (no relation). Clinton was, like Trump, a fairly new President--it was July of his first year. (The Whitewater investigation, incidentally, did not open until the next year.) The stated reasons for Sessions’s firing were tax evasion, refusal to cooperate with an investigation into his home mortgage, and using FBI funds for and resources for personal matters. These reasons were factually substantiated, unconnected to Clinton himself, and were not things that Clinton had previously applauded Sessions for doing. Both the previous and the current Attorneys General had raised concerns about Sessions’s conduct, and he was given an opportunity to quietly step down, which he chose not to do. Nevertheless, the move was regarded as somewhat controversial.

Finally, the other historical comparison to be made here is the Saturday Night Massacre, of Watergate fame. In October of 1973, Archibald Cox was the Special Prosecutor running the Watergate investigation. He subpoena’d President Nixon to produce tapes made in the Oval Office. (Nixon routinely taped his own conversations, even when they dealt with incriminating subjects.) Nixon refused to produce them, and ordered his Attorney General to fire Cox. (Nixon did not have the power to fire Cox himself.) The AG refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered his Deputy AG to fire Cox. That man also refused and resigned. (If you’re keeping a scorecard, those are the two jobs held by Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein today.) He then ordered the third-ranking official at the Department of Justice to resign, and that man followed orders. His name was Robert Bork, who was later nominated but not confirmed to the Supreme Court. (If you’re protesting anywhere in or around the Justice Department, you might want to consider a sign that just says “BORK.” I promise that Sessions and Rosenstein will understand that reference.)

So what happens now?

Nobody actually knows what’s going to happen next. There is a vast amount of tea-leaf-reading going on. Loads of lawmakers and other officials have made statements (or requests, or demands), and every political commentator in the media world is trying to read the tea leaves. Here are the big questions, and what I think are the major indicators.

Who is going to head up to FBI now?

Currently, the former Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe, is Acting Director. This occurs automatically when an FBI director leaves office. Trump gets to nominate the new director, who must be confirmed by the Senate. There’s a widely-reported list of four candidates being interviewed this weekend. Democrats, particularly in the Senate, are strategizing about how to handle this, since, obviously, it’s a problem that Trump will be picking the guy investigating him. One of the most-talked-about strategies is refusing to confirm a nominee for the position until a Special Prosecutor is appointed. It is not completely clear how the Democrats could do this, given that the Republicans will control the process, but options include either getting 2 Republican Senators to stand with them, or using arcane procedural rules to grind the process to a halt.

So--Special Prosecutor?

Note: The terms Special Prosecutor, Independent Commission, Independent Prosecutor, Special Counsel, and so forth, have different technical meanings, and the lawmakers and other officials discussed below are probably making very careful and deliberate choices about which option to call for. However, for our purposes, it’s sufficient to lump them together as “an investigator or investigative body Trump doesn’t get to pick and can’t fire.”

Calls for a Special Prosecutor, Independent Commission, or similar have been going on for some time now, but the Comey firing has added to the sense of urgency surrounding the matter. Up until now, Republican lawmakers and officials have been united in saying that one is not necessary, but now two Senate Republicans (Heller and McCain) have joined the call, as have at least three Republicans in the House. 20 State Attorneys General have also called for a special counsel. Democratic leaders have said that Rosenstein, the Deputy AG, should either appoint a special prosecutor or resign. Rosenstein, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Richard Burr (the Senate Intel chair) have all stated that they don’t see a need for one.

It is, frankly, anybody’s guess at this point whether this will be the thing that finally gets us a special prosecutor.

Senate Investigation--is shit getting real?

As noted above, after the Comey firing, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Mike Flynn’s documents. This is notable because Republicans on the committee have been slow to take any decisive action. An unnamed official stated that this move was meant to send a message to Trump that he is now on thin ice with his party. Some have even speculated that it actually means they are done covering for him.

The other big thing going on with the Senate is that the Intelligence Committee are now getting records from the Treasury Department’s money laundering unit about Trump’s financial ties to Russia. This request was made last month, prior to Comey’s firing, but the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that they are getting them, and they are red-hot.

We can say for certain that the Senate investigation has made some big steps this week. They made them after the Comey firing, not before, so it makes sense to interpret them as responses to (rather than causes of), Comey’s dismissal. However, anything anyone can say about why they did it or what it means is interpretation, not fact.

FBI Investigation: where does it go from here?

The other big question people are asking is whether Comey’s firing will hamstring the FBI’s investigation, by making FBI agents fear for their jobs, or strengthen their resolve to investigate Trump thoroughly. Acting Director McCabe, testifying before the Senate, contradicted Trump’s claim that Comey had lost the respect and confidence of FBI agents, stating that he “enjoys broad support” within the agency. McCabe’s willingness to publicly contradict Trump is viewed with optimism by many left-leaning commentators, as a sign that he can lead an independent investigation. We’ll have to wait to see how that turns out.

Finally, a new thread to the investigation

Finally, the firing of James Comey gives everyone involved a new thing to investigate, namely, whether the firing of James Comey was, in itself, an act of obstructing justice. Obstruction of justice was, of course, the charge laid in the first of four Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon.

And one more Watergate “rhyme”

Comey learned about his own firing when the news came up on a TV screen behind him as he was speaking to a group of FBI recruits. While that is a massive dick move, there’s no law against being a massive dick, so you may wonder why it matters. It matters because the GOP would really rather not be branded as a massive bag of dicks--they have no systematic objection to doing things that are massively dickish, such as taking away healthcare from 24 million people, but they want to be able to clutch their pearls and go “well I never” when anyone dares to point out that they if it walks like a massive dick, and quacks like a massive dick, it’s probably a massive dick.

The bit where history rhymes a lot is that on the “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon admitted to obstruction of justice, he also swore a lot. Like, a lot. Like, in comparison, the previous paragraph seems like something you could read to a Sunday school class. Many Republicans at the time felt that they just might have been able to get away with defending Nixon’s actual criminal behavior, if only he hadn’t been such a massive dick on the tape.

Times have changed--see, for instance, “pussy tape”--but it does seem plausible that the, again, massively dickish way that this firing was carried out could be the last straw for some in the GOP. And if it is, I’ll take it.

#trump #russia #comey #trump-russia #trump-comey #comey firing #explainers #long post #lots of swears #this is not normal #media analysis

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alldayjesusfan · 8 years

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Dream: Hanging out at the Mall

I woke up about 4:30am on Jan 11th and could only vaguely remember this dream. I didn't think I remembered it well enough to write it down and get anything out of it, so I started to fall asleep again. As soon as I fell asleep I immediately heard a knocking sound like someone knocking on a door, which woke me right back up. Wow, the Lord must really be trying to get my attention, I thought. So I tried my best to write down what I could remember from the dream.

Dream: My family and I were staying up late to hang out with friends at the mall (In the dream it was the Madison Square Mall). About 11:30pm I thought we needed to head home. I found my son Jesse and one in of his friends in the food court and convinced them it was time to be heading home. I couldn't find my wife but for some reason I knew that she was going to be riding home with other friends (I don't remember how I knew this). My son and I left and started driving home in the car (I don’t remember if his friend rode with us or not).

Although it was 11:30pm, once we started driving home it suddenly became fully daylight outside. I asked those in the car with me if they knew why it was daylight outside (Oh ya, my son’s friend was in the car), and I wondered if we had actually stayed out all night until 11:30am the next day.

Lord can you tell me the parts I can't remember?

You were at the mall with family and friends but you did not go in. You were outside sitting in the car. It was only when it was time to go home that you went in to look for your family.

Oh ya, that’s right. Thank you Lord, but what does that mean? I got no answer.

Key Action: Hanging at the mall and driving home.

Key Emotion: ???

Setting: My continuing dream life with God.

Word Meanings:

I know from a previous dream that the word “Mall” is not in the dream interpretation book, so I thought I should look up the definition of Mall in a dictionary.

Mall: A large building or series of connected buildings containing a variety of retail stores and typically also restaurants. Synonyms: shopping center, (shopping) plaza, shopping complex, strip mall, mini-mall, galleria, megamall, marketplace

So a mall is basically an indoor shopping center or marketplace. Ok, those words are in my dream dictionary.

Interpretation:

Ok, there’s way too much here. I think I’m out of my league with this one. Friends and family could mean fellow believers or literal friends and family. The Mall could be a church, the world, or even a work place. I really don’t know what all of this means. I’m lost on this one. Save me Jesus!

I got still and listened but heard nothing else from God about it. That’s strange, I thought, what happened Lord? I still heard nothing. I kept praying and listening for several minutes and did so several times. At one point it seemed like I could faintly hear someone speaking in my thoughts but I still couldn’t tell what they were saying.

Lord, I don’t know what happened. Why have you stopped speaking to me? Still hearing nothing, I went to lunch at Charlie’s Grill. Charlie is a good Christian man, by the way. As I was eating lunch, I was wondering about this and asked myself, “What’s different about this time? What am I doing differently?” Hmmm… Well, I haven’t fasted in about a week, I wonder if that could be it. Right about then, Charlie walks by me and says… “You know, I was just thinking about Jesus and how he fasted for 40 days…” Whoa!!! That sounds like confirmation to me!!!

Back when all of this started I had been partially fasting for several days. I then continued with partial fasting about 2 or 3 days every week. But for about the last 7 days I haven’t done any fasting, although I have been spending time praying every day.

So the next day I started doing partial fasting again, and guess what? As soon as I had time to ask God about this dream, I started hearing him talking to me again. Wow! I also know that he never really did stopped talking to me; it’s just that I couldn’t hear him well enough to tell what he was saying. So if you’re having trouble hearing from God, then a little fasting will work wonders!!! Yeah!!!

So here’s our conversation…

Lord, help me out with this dream. What does it mean that my family and I were staying up late to hang out with friends at the mall?

The mall/marketplace is the workplace. You are working a job but you would rather be in the ministry (in your car). Your friends and family are fellow believers who are also in the work place. You are hanging out as you are fellowshipping and sharing testimonies with each other.

Your son represents mature believers and your family is other like-minded believers. I Jesus, am the friend/friends that each of you is meeting with, even while at work.

Cool God, but what does it mean that we were meeting late, and also what about me wanting to head home at 11:30? (Suddenly, this thought pops into my head… “Late Night with David Letterman”), So I thought I should look up David… I also looked up 11 and 30. The definition for eleven did not seem to apply, but thirty is listed below.

Meeting at the late hour of 11 simply indicates that you are all dearly loved by me. You wanting to head home represents your desire for the things of heaven and for bringing heaven to the earth. You have begun moving in the Spirit into heavenly realities and you wanted to take your family (other believers) there with you. The number 30 confirms that this was done according to my timing.

Your son riding home with you represents other mature believers who are also sharing this ride in the Spirit into heavenly realities. You found them in the food court, which is a place of fellowship and communion with me.

(Food court was not listed in the book but restaurant was…)

Cool God, so why was it daylight outside so late at night?

The daylight is the light of my presence shining down on all of you as you are moving in the things of the Spirit and advancing toward heaven.

This is great Lord but it just doesn’t seem (to me) to be of such great importance that you would actually knock on my door to make sure that I would wake up and write it down…

Don’t forget that your wife didn’t ride home with you. She represents other believers who even though are like-minded, have decided that they don’t want to go on this heavenly ride with you.

Oh Lord, here we go again with sharing things that some people may not like to hear…

She will still be riding home with me but it will be later than I had planned for her, therefore her entering in to greater heavenly experiences will be delayed. Notice that you couldn’t find her. This was because she was not in the food court fellowshipping with me and the other believers. She missed her 11:30 appointment with me and therefore is missing the day of her visitation. There will be other appointed times of visitation for her but they will now be further delayed to a later time rather than the present time which I had intended for her, and if she continues to miss other appointments with me she will wind up in serious disappointment. Appointments with me are never a disappointment. Disappointments are nothing more than missed appointments with me. Each missed appointment will have a more serious consequence than the last. The difficulties that arise from these missed appointments are not from me, but from the enemy. For my times of visitation are designed to position you out of the enemy’s reach.

Oh wow… Help her Lord.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Missed Classic 85: Drive-In Adventure (1982)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sex sells. Whether you personally consume pornography or not, it is undeniable that whenever a new media technology came along, it quickly adapted for adult entertainment. Pornography influenced the rise of VHS in the 1970s, the early internet in the 1980s, and eventually the broadband push in the 2000s. Some of these claims are spurious, of course– do people really favor phones with larger screens now because of porn?– but it is undeniable that adult entertainment is a massive and often hidden economic lever that has shaped our technology landscape.

Adventure games were not immune to this pressure. In 1981, On-Line Systems (later known as Sierra On-Line) released Softporn Adventure; it supposedly sold so well that 25% of Apple II computers owned a legitimate copy, not even accounting for piracy. In 1986, Infocom released Leather Goddesses of Phobos, their final true hit. Even though it came out late in Infocom’s lifespan, it still became their 5th best selling game of all time. Both of these had remakes (Leisure Suit Larry, for one) and sequels. Larry sold 300,000 copies in its first year! There was a market for lewd (and more than lewd?) games.

And yet, none of those games could be called “pornographic”. At best, they contained sexy situations and innuendo. Graphical nudity, where present, was censored. In honor of making it to Leather Goddesses in my Infocom marathon, I am taking a detour back to the dawn of the genre to investigate the very first X-Rated work of interactive fiction, 1982’s Drive-In Adventure. It’s not a great game by any stretch, but at the time it must have seemed revolutionary. It also must have evinced a certain sense of nostalgia for those that played it; it warranted, by my count, no less than three ports or updates in the years that followed. In the interests of our readers (and Google search ranking), I will keep this review as close to PG-13 as possible. I’ll talk about the naughty bits, but forgive me if I must be a bit circumspect.

“Le Coucher de la Mariée” (1896) was the first adult film.

Let’s start with the basics: Drive-In was written by Douglas C. Rogers and distributed by Program Dynamics for the Commodore 64. As far as I have been able to determine, this is Rogers’s first and only adventure game, although he remained close to the genre for many years. The game credits name a distributor, but I have been unable to confirm that it was sold commercially. My guess is that the game primarily made its rounds through the early Commodore 64 BBS scene, no doubt helped thanks to its unusual subject matter. Even so, it includes this note at startup:

THIS ADVENTURE DEALS WITH SEX AND OTHER ADULT THEMES. IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED, DO NOT PROCEED! RETURN THIS COPY TO THE STORE WHERE YOU PURCHASED IT FOR A COMPLETE REFUND! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Following his work on this game, Rogers remained active in the interactive fiction community for many years. Through the 80s, he ran “Adventureland BBS” (also known as “Mister Rogers Neighborhood BBS”), one of the largest repositories of interactive fiction at the time. He operated it until approximately 1994. In 1990, he released “Adventure Author”, a front-end to simplify the process of creating Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) games. Although he helped others to write and distribute adventures, Rogers does not appear to have written any further works that survive to the present. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to reach Rogers in time for this review. I have a million questions about how this game came to be, what choices he made when designing it, and how it was distributed. I’d also love to learn more about his work to improve AGT authoring and what games, if any, took advantage of his toolkit.

Before I begin, I discovered one more interesting coincidence: After Rogers closed his BBS, Bob Newell (who we introduced last week as the author of Pesach Adventure) launched the “GobblerNet Adventure Games BBS” as an unofficial successor. It was strange to see Newell’s name pop up again so soon, but I love that for their very different games and approaches, a common thread connects these two promoters and lovers of interactive fiction.

Are you ready for some smut? It’s time to play the game.

Is watching the movie an option?

Journey to the Snack Bar

Well, here it is! The big evening! Your buddy Arnie set you up with this little number named Andrea, and here you are! What do you know? She LOOKS OK, at least! After that last blind date of Arnie’s, his LIFE depended on that. Thing is, he didn’t tell you a damn thing about her. What she likes and doesn’t like, how far she goes and how fast… all the important stuff you need to know. With this background, your DRIVE-IN ADVENTURE is about to begin. As with all adventures, you direct the computer with VERB-NOUN two-word English sentences. Your sensual computer will be your eyes and ears and hands and… well… you’ll find out.

The game opens and we find ourselves sitting in a car next to our blind date, Andrea. We immediately discover that we cannot even hold hands with our date because the “noise from the movie” is too distracting. If you are not familiar, drive-ins worked by parking your car facing the screen in a large open space. Next to each car would be a pole with a portable speaker. You bring that speaker into your car to listen to the film in beautiful monaural glory. Even in its opening moments, we already hit the first parser problem: how the heck are we supposed to turn off the speaker? We cannot drop it, move it, or turn it off. You can beat your head against this all you like, but the answer turns out to be “loudspeaker off”. Moments after being told that you have to enter commands in “verb noun” format, we have to break the rule to continue. This won’t be the only case like this! Not only will we have similar constructions (“radio on” will be needed in just a moment), but we have weird commands like “put arm” if we want to snuggle up. The author clearly knew how a good parser should work but chose to make one of the first commands of the game nearly impossible to guess.

Beyond cosying up to our date, we cannot do anything more at this stage except hold hands. If you ask for “help” (one of the nice features of the game!), you are told that refreshments are in order. It’s time to take a trip to the snackbar!

Let’s all go to the lobby… er… snack bar.

Leaving the car is easy and we find ourselves in a sea of parked vehicles. Unfortunately, the unfairness of the parser gives way to the unfairness of the adventure itself. We can explore, but going more than a room or two results in the message “You are lost!” and we have to restart the game. The game practically taunts us to explore: there are different cars in different spaces, debris such as a broken speaker, and even a (ewww) used condom. An explorable children’s playground is to the north, with swings, a slide, and a see-saw. You can even climb up the slide! Despite having a few things to see, all of these rooms and objects will turn out to be red herrings so I’ll just skip them.

Beyond the playground is the snackbar and bathrooms. Even getting inside is an exercise in parser frustration. It might seem that since you got there from the south, you’d just go north again to enter. Nope! You have to type “go snackbar” then “go counter” to walk up to the salesperson. The menu is surprisingly inexpensive (popcorn for $0.50!) and we can easily buy whatever we want then return to the car. As a good adventurer should, I check out the bathroom. (That is also an exercise in frustration: a sign shows the men’s room to the west but we can only get in by typing “go mens”.) Once there, we discover a machine selling “Super-Chiefs” for $0.50 for a package of two. Of course, we have no change. The puzzle is that we need to order something at the snackbar to break our single $1 bill so that we can use the rest to buy… something. No explanation is given for what a “Super-Chief” is, and the game’s parser pours salt in the wound. Even if we guess (correctly) that it is selling condoms, the game only recognizes the word “rubber”. There is no hint anywhere that “rubber” is the correct synonym for condom; the game doesn’t even recognize “super-chief” as a synonym! There is a small final trick in that everything we buy in the snackbar is bought in pairs, one for us and one for our date. We must factor that in and not buy anything over $0.25 or else we run out of cash. I grab colas for Andrea and use the change to purchase condoms. Time to head back to the car!

Lucy in the sky with Super-Chiefs.

Heavy Petting

Returning to the car, we arrive at the heavy petting portion of the game and there’s no more adventuring to be done. From here, we have to slowly seduce our date. We can start with “hold hands” and “kiss neck” and usually we have to do the same command over and over again until the message repeats. That lets you know that she’s happy with what you have been doing and you can escalate. Here is an example exchange from early in the session:

> kiss neck The perfume is sweet…maybe jasmine. > kiss neck Nice curve right THERE, where the ear and the neck meet.. > kiss neck OK > kiss neck OK

You get the idea. Honestly, there’s a lot of trial and error since we don’t know what’s possible. I was stuck for a while because we reached a point where the only thing to do is blow into her ear. (And she responds by blowing back into yours…) Without a help system or consulting the source, I’m not sure I would ever think to try that. Kids in the 80s sure did strange things…

In all honesty, that is just one of many examples where the text seems “off”. Unless I miss my mark, Rogers was in his mid-30s when he wrote this game, but some of the sexual descriptions seem immature:

> kiss lips WOW! Her tongue just flicked yours!

While I can think of many ways to describe the amazing feeling of making out with a woman in the backseat of a car (an activity that I’ve partook in once or twice), “flicking” is not a term I would use.

After making out, the game tells us that it is too cramped in the front seat for further activities. Getting into the backseat is easy enough (“go backseat”), but getting Andrea to join you requires the inscrutable command “call andrea”. Once there, we can get her shirt off and do some biting and sucking until she gets bored. Where would you go after that? I’ll give you one hint: she likes to have her tummy rubbed. Yes, we move from heavy petting to actual petting. After that, the hints state that you should move to her legs and I’m sure you can see how the progression of clothing removal and fondling continues from here.

The climax of the game, if I can abuse that word, is similarly inscrutable. You reach a point where you can have sex with her (using the command “f*ck p*ssy”), and while she likes it, the game does not end. To reach the ending, we have to type “f*ck andrea” which somehow– and I have no idea how– is a different action than “f*ck p*ssy”. Hopefully by now we also remembered to have safe sex; if we did, the game ends and we get a “Congratulations!” message. If not, we lose because she gets pregnant. Since I had spotted the condom at the beginning of the game, I was well prepared. I won!

Time played: 2 hr 15 min

Once is enough, thanks.

This is a strange game. Just from a pornographic side, it’s tremendously vanilla. The parser doesn’t recognize the word “ass”, there is no girl-on-boy oral, and none of the sexual descriptions are very descriptive. Basic aspects of female arousal are either never described or feel off in some way. Prior to researching the game, I was sure that I would discover that the text was translated from another language. How else could you explain the strange word choices (“flicking”) and the bizarre differences between the two uses of the word “fuck”. Alternatively, I expected to find that the game had been written by a 13-year old who knew all about sex from reading stolen Playboys and Piers Anthony novels. I try to never be rude when I review these games; their creators put a lot of their blood, sweat, and tears into making something for us to enjoy. This game is no different, but I would be remiss if I didn’t try to explain how the text came up short.

Despite my own reservations, the game was well-liked enough that it was ported or remade several times:

In 1987, someone adapted the original Commodore BASIC version of the game to QuickBasic and compiled it for DOS. This version keeps the original copyright date and is listed as a 1982 game on the sites that include it, but the QuickBasic v2 library it was compiled against didn’t exist before 1985 and the timestamps on the file place it in 1987. There are a handful of textual differences between this edition and the Commodore one that I played, but it is unclear when those differences were introduced.

In 1988, Alan Pilon posted the game to QuickBasic v4 and released it as Passion Pit. Despite saying that it is “so totally different … that I have absolutely no qualms about representing this program as mine”, much of the text appears to be the same with added colors, a rotating name for the female companion, and other details. Pilon released the game through Western Reserve Automation, Inc. a company that he incorporated in 1986.

In 1990, “Stark” ported the game to the Adventure Game Toolkit as Crusin. I have been unable to get this version of the software to run. Reviews state that he removed the adventure portions outside of the car in favor of a more streamlined experience, but I do not know that from personal experience.

I first played this game through the DOS version, before realizing that the Commodore 64 edition was the original. That version includes one further change which I found unconscionable and which initially made me decide not to review the game: the ending is much more explicitly “date rape” with Andrea saying “No” and you continue anyway. I could say a lot about this– about how American culture through the 80s made light of date rape through movies like Sixteen Candles, or even objectified it as “manly” thanks to James Bond and similar films. It is also true that many pornographic games fall prey to this trope as well, from Larry Laffer’s use of the “Spanish Fly” in the first Leisure Suit Larry (1987) game to the mind-control antics in Voyeur (1992). That is a much larger discussion, but suffice it to say that I was not comfortable playing a game where the solution to the final puzzle of the game is rape.

Shakespeare could not have put it better: “No more yankie my wankie. The Donger need food!”

Final Rating

Let’s get to the final score. I have a feeling this will not score high…

Puzzles and Solvability – There is an adventure game puzzle or two with the snack bar and the condom dispenser, plus many red herrings scattered around the drive-in lot and adjacent playground. Unfortunately, “seduction” consists of typing the same things over and over again until the message changes. I have to give credit for the novel help system, but hinting what body part to touch next could have been better integrated into the text of the game itself. My score: 1.

Interface and Inventory – I have never played a game that seemed to hate its player so much. Moments after being told to only use verb-noun commands, the game forces you to do something else. Movement is inconsistent. Everything is so much harder than it needs to be and I still have no idea what the difference is between the two “f*cking” commands. I suspect that this game was remade so many times in part because someone saw the promise in the premise, but was frustrated by the engine wrapped around it. My score: 0.

Story and Setting – There is a setting and a nugget of a story, although the game punishes you for trying to explore thanks to the “You are lost!” failure messages. The story is unfortunately as deep as a mud puddle and there isn’t a ton to say about it. My score: 1.

Sound and Graphics – No sound or graphics. My score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere – I feel dirty playing this game, so I guess the environment is good in that respect. The drive-in theater has a sense of gloomy seediness with broken speakers, discarded condoms, and similar, although the overall presentation is sparse. We just see “red” or “blue” cars, for example, but no beaten up Ford Focuses. There’s not really enough detail to help you really feel the location. My score: 1.

Dialog and Acting – For a sex game, the text is mostly unsexy and the dialog is sparse. You never learn a single thing about your date, or even have her say one word to you that isn’t gasping thanks to your touch or pushing you away because you haven’t turned her on enough yet. My score: 1.

Let’s add that up: (1+0+1+0+1+1)/.6 = 7 points! I think I’ve said quite enough rude words for one evening so we’ll leave that score stand.

Drive-In Adventure wins the prize for being the lowest-rated game on the site, a record that has stood since Trickster’s days. Fans of Psycho can finally breathe easy that a worse game has been found! In all seriousness however, it is not unexpected that a 1982 game written in Commodore BASIC would struggle with an interface, overly sparse text, and a limited depiction of a NPC. These were very early days for our industry. You may be shocked to learn that this whole game fits into 400 lines of BASIC code, although those are very dense multi-statement lines that are quite challenging to read and parse through manually.

I especially don’t want to sell Douglas Rogers short for what he created here. My frustrations aside, he was the first person (that we know of) to cross that barrier from erotic to lewd. He saw the limits that had been set by Softporn the year before and set out to cross them. The fact that his work was ported at least twice to newer systems shows that it resonated with his audience, and I have no doubt that those later implementers looked at this game with a sense of rose-tinted nostalgia. We also cannot sell short Rogers’s other contributions to our industry, including distributing titles on his BBS and his AGT front-end. Writing smut just wasn’t his calling and I hope that he looks back on this game with a sense of bemused embarrassment, but nothing more negative than that.

Up next for me will probably be a bonus Leather Goddesses review. I had intended this as a placeholder post for the LGoP playthrough since TBD already played and rated the game, but we decided that a one-off post won’t hurt. Until then, stay safe and stay healthy.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-85-drive-in-adventure-1982/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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darcyfarber · 6 years

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4 Free Traffic Channels To Grow Your Online Exposure!

There is absolutely no way you can succeed online without targeted traffic. And the big pain has been how to drive traffic that converts without spending money.

We have different traffic channels to trigger an avalanche of readers to our online store or website. While this isn’t something that can be achieved with the click of the mouse, following the channels with patience and consistency will allow you gradually build sustainable sources of targeted readers.

Let’s examine these traffic channels and how you can capitalize on them for your business growth:

1. Search Engine Traffic

Without any iota of doubt, Search Engines are a major part of the Internet world. They drive a huge part of Internet movement through keywords.

Keywords are the basis of Search engines from the point of view of the searcher. But from the perspective of content marketers, it’s completely changing to semantics.

What I mean is that searchers on Google (for instance) will actually key in a short or long tail keyword in the search box. But Google doesn’t just match these keywords against content. What it tries to do is figure out which content has a fair understanding of the keyword intent.

There are two main branches of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you must focus on to see results:

a) Technical SEO: This includes your web server configuration and optimization, mobile friendliness of your site theme, images and other aspects that have to do with your site load speed

b) Content SEO: This is further split into two

On Page SEO

Off Page SEO

Let me say something more about these two:

– On Page Search Engine Optimization

In today’s semantic web, the new keyword is topic. That sounds weird but I think marketers should cease optimizing for keyword and rather try to cover topics in details.

I’m of the opinion that most of the LSI SEO tools in the market today should be overhauled. I recently was trying out LSIGraph and I think something should be done about this:

These are simply keyword variations not semantics. Semantic SEO (which is what On Page SEO is all about) is about topical relevant world not seed keyword synonyms . I have this post on Semantic SEO on my blog. You may want to read for a bit more on this.

– Off Page Search Engine Optimization

Off Page SEO is principally about backlinks and mentions. But you really have to be warned.

Tell between building links and earning learns. To earn links, you have to create and publish link-worthy content and wait for free inbound links from your community. Your readers find your article and deliberately link to it without you doing anything.

But if you have to build links, you’ll have to get your fingers wet on outreach marketing. Here are some common link building activities:

Guest posting on relevant blogs by yourself.

Hiring SEO experts, Link building agencies or Guest Posting Services.

Blog commenting on relevant blogs.

Buying of links from micro job boards like Fiverr (Serious Warning though)

Etc.

But I’m not fan of buying links from random link sellers. First, Google frowns at this as it’s considered manipulating search results.

Be weary when it comes to working with guest posting firms. I have written this post about guest posting services to study out more.

I worked more closely with Sunil Gupta, one of my good friends who runs the Trafficora guest posting service and came to understand that one has just got to be very careful. Some of these link building services out there may end up completely damaging your SEO marketing campaigns.

2. Email List Traffic

If you are online and not building an email list for your business, you are hurting your business growth. Your list is an asset. It’s the only source of traffic whose terms fully dwell in your pocket. You decide when and what to send to your list.

Each time I mail my subscribers, there is always a huge leap in clicks on my blog. Everyone else that builds and maintains an active list similarly has a success story.

There are three simple steps to building an email list for your online business:

Choose a cost-effective and reliable email marketing platform.

Get a free gift to entice your readers to signup to your list.

Place the list building elements on your website (Sidebar forms, Content Upgrades, Pop ups, Light boxes, Pop Unders, etc)

Recommended Read: 12 Action Steps To Build A Profitable Email List From Scratch

3. Social Media Traffic

Social media today has moved considerably from social to business. And if you are not involving social media marketing in your strategies, you really are getting it wrong.

Of course it’s absolutely free to use these platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. However, for purposes of ease, you may want to spend on services that will get more traffic for you.

We are not talking about these paid services though. Let’s maintain the talk within the free sphere. What you must do is to have an active presence on any of these platforms. You may not be active on all the platforms. Chose one or two and be the king.

Depending on your business type, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc have different approaches. While Pinterest is specifically designed for traffic, others have more emphasis laid on social.

Creating content and spamming social media won’t just help. Successful social media marketers are folks who engage and help others with exposure.

As you share your content, share others’ as well. Engage with them and build solid relationships. Many people will share your content simply because they recognize your brand. They may not have the time to read through. But they know that this coming from you must be worth sharing.

That’s why branding is a strong content marketing factor that must be heavily invested in.

4. Referral Traffic

This is traffic sent to your site by clicks on links on other sites. If you click here ( for instance) to my blog, I’m going to have a referral traffic from nopassiveincome.com.

Getting your website mentioned on other sites for referral traffic is tough. But there are different content marketing practices that can make this easier:

Guest posting (like what I’m doing here)

Commenting on other sites

Posting on Content Curation platforms – Medium, Zest, Scoop.it, etc

Forum signatures and active participation

Etc

Now, these are things you can do yourself for more referral traffic and it’s just the basics of Content outreach.

If you build healthy relationships with bloggers and publish link-worthy content, you are going to get those links from your content consumers. Of course that will add up to your referral link.

Wrapping Up

You may want to go on and identify many different traffic channels, but most evidently, these are near fetched. Start building up strategies for them and watch as your results grow.

Let me know what you think as you share your thoughts in the comment box.

4 Free Traffic Channels To Grow Your Online Exposure! published first on https://mysingaporepools.weebly.com/

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