#to better understand the components of each dr cast

[thegrunkiest]

Not gonna lie, returning to Skyrim over the past few days has reminded me of just how much I hope TES VI does factions like they did in Oblivion.

!Some critical ranting of Skyrim/positive rambling of Oblivion ahead!

I’m saying this after I started trying to immerse myself in the College of Winterhold, at last, after installing some good magic mods. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t really care less about this Eye of Magnus or why the Psijic Order wants to talk with me specifically. I couldn’t care about stopping Ancano I can hardly remember what even happens in the questline aside from go into ruin, find orb, go into basement, talk to an aura, go to a ruin, beat up a skeleton dragon and something after that.

This is the same issue I’ve personally had with the Companions, and to a lesser extent, the Thieves Guild. I legit only remember the Companions as “the guild that gives you lycanthropy”. Thieves Guild is a little better, as I do distinctly remember a few of the characters and their quests could get quite creative. I never felt particularly invested however.

So why exactly do I (and possibly some of you) think Skyrim’s factions don’t work, and that they should look back on Oblivion when creating questlines for the next games? For me personally, it boils down to two components: the state of affairs, and sense of progression.

Sense of Progression

I’ll start with the simplest one first. Let’s use the College as an example again, comparing it to the Mage’s Guild of Oblivion. What do you do to gain entry to the College? Cast the requested novice/apprentice level spell (or alternatively, shout if you’re a Dragonborn or just schmooze if you, for some reason, already have 100 in speech). In Oblivion? You have to gain a recommendation from each of the individual chapters by completing a quest unique to each quild hall, which involve a little more work than simply casting a spell.

Alright, alright, so what do we do once we’re in? At the College, we engage in a little lesson with our many (see: three) fellow students. Cool (it’s also our only magic lesson from what I recall - great education system!). Then we’re immediately thrust into the questline, with no real or necessary deviations from the main subject regarding the Eye of Magnus. Then guess what - you’ve become Arch Mage!... wait what? I thought I just joined not too long ago?...

I find it hard to feel good about gaining the leadership role, despite me having just stopped a potentially devastating crisis to earn it, because I never felt more than a junior beforehand. This is how Oblivion does it right with its ranking system in my opinion. While I admit I might have chosen a bad example to draw from, as the Mage’s Guild quests also heavily concerns the main threat in at least some way, but what personally makes it more immersive for me is the fact you’re promoted whilst you’re playing - even to the point you’re being passed onto a different superior for more daring assignments! This is where the little things really count.

Then there’s the Thieves Guild. Unless there’s some backstory I’m glancing over, I don’t see why the Thieves Guild of Skyrim couldn’t have shared the same ranking system as the Oblivion branch, if no one else. In Oblivion, you can only initiate the quests after you’ve passed a certain threshold of fencing stolen goods, something that encourages you to actually be a thief to progress as a thief. I’m not just going from Pickpocket to Gray Fox, as I feel I am from an initiate to Nightingale/Guildmaster in Skyrim; you have various titles you earn in between.

If I had to summarize the point I’m trying to make - I’ll use Oblivion’s Dark Brotherhood. Arguably one of the most popular questlines in TES. Now, could you imagine an Oblivion Dark Brotherhood without Whodunit?, The Assassinated Man, Permanent Retirement, etc. - just axe those unrelated quests in favor of focusing on rooting out the Traitor. No promotions, just primarily finding ways to stop a person who, probably, has killed assassins much more seasoned than you! A deadly threat! Why? Because you’re you! And you obviously deserve to become the Listener after being a Murderer the whole questline.

Which leads me into my next point....

State of Affairs

Skyrim’s questlines seem to have a fixation on factions that are destitute and/or are on the brink of extinction. Business is dry with the Thieves Guild; in the Dark Brotherhood, all but the Falkreath sanctuary is destroyed and the Old Ways are abandoned; the Companions are struggling with the lycanthropy that plagues its strongest members; the College of Winterhold have little reputation in quite an anti-magic province; hell, even the Blades, who were previously slaughtered and run into hiding. The Dawnguard factions I feel are an exception (a reason I like that DLC so much), as the Dawnguard can excuse its low wealth and reputation with the fact that it was just reformed, and the Volkihar Clan have, for all I know, have just been... existing, in the shadows.

Admittedly, Oblivion also has a bit of a running theme among its faction - stable and well-organized factions plagued by a specific threat. The Blades have their Oblivion Crisis, the DB with their traitor ordeal, the Mage’s Guild with the necromancers/Mannimarco, the Fighter’s Guild with the Blackwood Company, Court of Madness with Jyggalag.

The reason why I prefer Oblivion’s guilds over Skyrim, I suppose, is related to my personal problem of power fantasy. Skyrim is a big old power fantasy. You’re the Dragonborn, the chosen one, the Hero of prophecy. So obviously you need to be the savior of each guild, right? You have to be the one the Night Mother deems Listener; the one the Psijics talk to; the one Nocturnal makes a Nightingale.

One might say it’s more realistic that way though, as it adds to Skyrim’s aesthetic of a darker, more unstable time with the Civil War and return of dragons. That’s a fair point. But did 90% of the guilds have to be restricted to poor little groups? Surely the Companions could’ve had other bases in some of the cities somehow, or the Thieves Guild have another hideout in, say Solitude?

You could argue you’re also chosen in Oblivion, sure. But while Uriel saw you in his dreams, you’re place as HoK wasn’t in part due to a superpower, either. I felt I was closing the Oblivion gates because my characters were who they were. You aren’t the only one who can enter Oblivion gates, but you were determined and skilled enough to make it through to the end. While in the factions, you were, for the most part, a newbie working through the ranks until eventually, you’re trusted to confront the threat. In Skyrim it feels less like organizations, and more like ragtag groups that were waiting for you to come in and fix them.

Coupled with the sense progression, this makes experiencing Oblivion’s factions much more organic and satisfying - in my opinion. That’s what’s most important. I’m not ragging on anyone who likes Skyrim’s factions, and I still love Skyrim despite my endless complaints. I understand I may have missed a few points (like the Civil War and Arena), and the ones I made could be disputed.

TL;DR: Skyrim’s fondness for power fantasy and the lack of ranks makes its faction questlines less immersive and more forced, whereas in Oblivion climbing ranks as a sort-of average joe feels organic and more rewarding. This is just my opinion. I don’t hate Skyrim. You’re free to agree or disagree and add to the discussion.

[baconpal]

talkin bout fuckig manga

hey it’s me, haven’t had internet for over a week and i’ve been sick and uni and blah blah blah time for a rant about manga

this time its about  "Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru", tl;dr, good manga read it idk

lots of bullshit below the cut

Before anything I say gets too confusing or I go off on an insane tangent, just know my recommendation is that you read "Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru". It's not very easy to find online since it has an official English release (which my recommendation extends far enough to suggest I might pick up in the future, just to have it, but I am very stingy), but there's an alright torrent of all the volumes on your local anime torrenting website, and is at the very least worth the trouble of reading as such. There is also an anime that gets better as it goes, but the manga is my primary recommendation. Beyond this point I'm not gonna give much regard to what I write, so get ready for anything, read the manga and see if you agree with me, or don't and see if I care:

BOUT THE ANIME: The SoreMachi anime is one of those rare comedy anime you find where the animation and overall production is just really extra the entire time. Hopefully you know what I mean because I won't really be able to explain it any other way, it's simply one of those shows where the jokes are decent and it's a fun time for the most part. Unfortunately, the anime makes a couple of critical missteps that kept me from getting far into it when I first tried watching it about a year ago, and in retrospect seem even less reasonable.

Starting with the good, as an adaptation it does a good job with most chapters it covers, it properly sources where each chapter comes from incase you intend to read the manga and skip around to catch up, and the anime adapts some sections to have additional jokes that fit very naturally in to the story. It also covers up some of those problems only manga can have like having a concert segment without any actual music involved, until they invent mp3-paper it's just something we'll have to live with. Translation work was pretty good (I watched the [WhyNot] release for those who care), which is extra important for something as difficult to translate as jokes from another language. The set of episodes they chose to end on was very good, and was expanded to be a lot more impactful in the anime. If it wasn't for the last episode being as strong as it was I may have given up on finding the manga when I saw it wasn't super easy to read online.

As for what the anime fails in, some episodes feature some really blatant over-acting that doesn't really help make characters believable, and there's this obnoxious gag that continues the whole where through where most scenes have a few seconds long line from what is essentially a forced mascot character, which usually mean nothing and only serve to harm the pacing of many episodes (there isn't even any sort of equivalent bit in the manga so I really don't know why they did it, most of the anime original jokes are pretty good so I just really don't get it). The biggest issue the anime faces is that the source material is about 140 chapters, while the anime is only able to cover 24 chapters. This comes with a LOT of problems, the first being what I'd call the "required reading". SoreMachi is not a 1-note simple comedy where you can skip to any chapter and be completely okay; There are many small but meaningful subplots lying beneath, and characters have a fair bit of development throughout. What this means for the anime is that the first 3-4 episodes are just the first few chapters of the manga, which are a bit rough and not as good as the majority of the work, which is true of a lot of comics (god fuck I promise there will be more than a first chapter of my comic I promise it'll get better fuck). In terms of the anime by itself, I'd say episode 1 is decent, 2 is middling, and by 3/4 their still taking a while to introduce members of the cast, and I didn't immediately want to finish it. I put the show down for a long time until my internet started dying and I wanted to watch something fun. Slapping it back on at episode 5 I immediately had a great time and watched the rest of the show pretty soon after. While I understand the reasoning behind doing this, the anime does not pay off this structure, as beyond the first few episodes, the chapters start being presented out of release order and out of chronological order, kind of destroying any consistent throughline. This decision in and of itself isn't the worst, since the comic isn't always chronological, and the volume ordering is a bit different from the release ordering, but the inconsistency makes the first few episodes feel lessened without reason. The other large failure that comes with only animating about 1/7th of the entire work is that many themes and concepts that are core to the manga are not represented in the anime well at all. One of the biggest is the rare but unnerving supernatural chapters, of which only one is animated, and not a particularly good one. In order to talk about these themes I'll have to transition into talking about the manga itself, since they aren't part of the anime.

DA MANGA: So one last recommendation that you read the manga, the whole damn thing. Cus we're gettin into themes and character moments that take a long time to pay off, and obviously is all part of my interpretations, so if that stuff means anything to you don't let me ruin it for ya.

The title of the manga is, in essence, the entire manga's "punchline" in that every chapter could meaningfully end with simply the text "And yet the town still turns..." (My translation of the title, fuck "And yet, the town revolves" or "But the town moves"); by this I mean most chapters end in an anti-climax where a mystery is left unsolved, or a mystery is solved and undercut by the realization that life simply keeps on going without much change. This is used to essentially force your eyes open to all possibilities when reading, as the main character spends her time acting like a detective, and these mysteries end up as either misunderstandings, secrets, riddles, and sometimes something out of the ordinary happens that makes you unable to pin anything down firmly. Similarly, these endings aren't always read-and-forget scenarios. Several chapters come back in the form of a continued joke, a continued mystery, or contribute to some greater purpose later. Readers are properly rewarded for keeping everything they can in mind, while also tormenting such people with loose ends.

I enjoy Hotori as a protagonist due to her character being defined not in flaws and strengths, but in mindedness. Hotori seems like a simple "haha she's dumb" character to start, but consistently throughout she proves that her strengths are in memory, observation, and deduction, while lacking in some more common sense and abilities. Her brain works in strange ways that some people may or may not understand, such as her need to think through even the most trivial fictional scenarios, which I relate to deeply.

The art and paneling throughout are wonderful. Ishiguro Masakazu is one of those artists who draws very simple characters, but knows how to use details and depth to breath so much life into the artwork. He also clearly uses the occasional supernatural happenings as an excuse to draw what he loved, as all sorts of artistic depictions of the supernatural come out that simply look satisfying. These parts obviously meant a lot to him since he's been working on a primarily mystery-action manga that has a lot more of that stuff in it. (Also, as hindsight is 20/20, if you've read any of his new work you'll notice that the main character of it is eerily similar to a character who shows up very late in SoreMachi that the author obviously fell in love with, cus she just keeps coming back and even ends up with a really unsettling end to her character arc despite only being introduced as a component in a harmless mystery. Feel free to call me out for the same shit 30 years from now when I'll probably do the same shit)

I'd like to get into some of the major themes of this work, as a lot of them hit very close to my mind (which I guess is true of any theme you recognize for yourself, you wouldn't really "get it" if it didn't mean something to you...).

The simplest theme, again, comes from the title. The main character, Hotori, expresses a desire that the town she lives in continues going on, unchanged forever. This is obviously a fear of change, which ya know, same, but also an exploration of what it means to fear change. Hotori actively tries to keep businesses from closing down, keep friends from leaving, and keep relationships from changing, while simultaneously making all sorts of new relationships and solving mysteries. Hotori even comes to realize that simply learning the truth about something changes the world through your own perspective, and that such changes can't be undone. In spite of this, Hotori mostly gets her wish, any time she fears that a large change will impact the town, its resolved about the same as any other issue. Whether its a message that even time can't keep you from your loved ones and that change isn't worth fearing, or a concession that large changes to the setting would be a bad idea in terms of humor, I can't really decide. This theme reaches it's conclusion in what is one in a series of "ending" kinda chapters at the end of the series. Hotori is faced with a supernatural ethical situation, save her town from destruction at the cost of her existence, or live through the disaster, knowing her town and the people in it will forever be changed. While the actual result is that nobody disappears and nothing is lost, and the event may have simply been a strange dream, Hotori confidently decides that sparing the people in her town from a life altering event is worth giving up her memories with them. A kind of bold spit-in-the-face to the idea that change is okay, where we find that Hotori didn't fear change for herself, but rather for the people around her.

There's another major idea in this manga, which takes a very long time to pay off, and completes its arc at the very very very actual end of the series, the idea of "leading someone to be something". A character that rides that line between main and side character, Shizuka, is a writer of detective novels, who feels the best person to judge her works would be a version of herself without the bias of being the author. She tries to achieve this by leading Hotori to be interested in detective works (including her own) and generally be just like her, starting from a young age. The end result is a young girl dead set on being a detective herself (or at least another novelist), while Shizuka keeps her identity as an author secret. She then uses Hotori as a scapegoat for herself, attempting to see how she would solve various mysteries and use that as inspiration, and this is depicted as though Shizuka were some sort of villain, which she may feel like she is. The end result of it all, though, is that Hotori was likely already a detective-minded person, and that even if Shizuka pushed her down that path, it was Hotori's decision to continue down it, and the very end of the manga is a scene revealing that Hotori figured out Shizuka's secret at some point, and even still respected Shizuka and aspired to reach her, and the two accept each other for who they are. I enjoy this ending a lot, since as an artist I've worried that some of my love or aspirations for and from other artists came with an ulterior motive of wanting a better community for art to exist in, but people are people and will make their own decisions, and some day everyone may be able to become equals in a truly meaningful sense, where everyone is inspired by and guiding each other together.

So that probably didn't mean shit to nobody and I didn't even really talk about anything in the comic like most of the main characters or any of the shit goin on but ya know fuck you go read it, and thanks for reading this.

[deaddominionsofdolor]

Lecture 2

We’re back with the next IC lecture in the series! This time our GMPCs cover the basic powers that Sin-Eaters have. We’ll put it below the cut!

Hisaya: Alright. Well. Damien, explain.

Damien: What, again? Jeez. Okay, so...I guess let’s start with the, uh, somewhat obvious. You can’t die now, so….congrats!

Keiichi: Don’t get tooooo excited though, you can still get hurt. I mean, getting stabbed won’t be fun, you can bleed and all that, but if you bleed out, you just come back after a while.

Ori: But it is not very pleasant, I do not recommend dying... Oh. Dying again, sorry. But you can undergo a lot more than it seems. Limbs being ripped off, being peppered with bullet fire until your body is a bloody pulp, gaping holes in your abdominal-

Hisoka: We get the point. Aaaanyways, the plasm running through you makes up for a lot. You’re resistant to disease, for one. You can bring back missing body parts or patch up wounds that would kill anyone not-a-Bound before you know it.

Damien: You can run out of it though and then you’re just back to being...well, sort of human, not really since you’re still attached to your Geist, so be careful.

Keiichi: Soo-o. It doesn’t really replenish itself naturally since you aren’t a ghost, but there’s a few ways to do it. One, find something cast off into the Underworld and drain away its Plasm. It’ll disappear, but you’ll be full up.

Hisoka: Two, there’s a sort of, “break in case of emergency” thing. You know that when you die, there’s a sort of barrier you cross, an opening of the doors of death. Fancy way of sayin' that you’re assigned a key based on your very own manner of kicking the bucket.

Ori: Be more dignified!

Hisoka: How you croaked, your mode of transportation to Whitey Bulger’s Final Airbn-

Ori: What they’re trying to say is that you’re all granted powers- and we’ll get to that, abilities that take on the tinge of the Key. And unlocking the key, tapping into that energy, can also restore Plasm. This comes with a caveat! You’ll take on the Doom associated with it.

Damien: Ever seen the movie Final Destination? It’s like that. Basically, if we consider the Key as being what binds you to death, using it makes Death realize you’re supposed to be dead so it tries to kill you again. Not that it’ll work, but that doesn’t make it fun, you know.

Hisaya: And it’s always appropriate for that element. You died in a fire, you get hyperthermia for no reason. You got stabbed to death, and the next time violence can break out, it will. And so on. Point is, it’s not a literal, physical Key. The Underworld operates by Laws, just like the real one. And what goes up will come down.

Keiichi: Anyway! That stuff is all great, but you can use  ghost powers too. Don’t worry about the how, you just know-- or maybe your Geist does. Or both of you! The details aren’t important, it’s like an instinct thing.

Damien: It’s...y’know, most of it is typical horror movie ghost stuff? Turning intangible, poltergeist-ing things…

Hisoka: Ya get cool abilities, to cut it short. Just think of what ghosts can do in urban legends and you’ve got it. Even the name for ‘em’s kinda cliche. Haunts, exactly what it implies.

Keiichi: Orrrrrr that’s what we’ve been calling them at least. Heh. I think it’s a cool name.

Hisaya: That’s only most of it, though. Or what your Geist gives you. But being connected to death gives you other powers.

Damien: Right! The Old Laws. Well, we can kind of manipulate them. Or...at least something like them. It’s the same principle, you’re messing around with the metaphysics of death and drawing power from a...something else. It’s pretty interesting, because the powers they give imply that a lot of religious and ritual practice might have actually been able to accomplish some small-level miracles depending on who did it…

Hisaya: Miracle’s a strong word. Don’t get too excited.

Damien: It’s close enough. Banishing supernatural affliction, cursing people, summoning food a ghost can eat, things like that. We’ve all been able to pick up a thing or two that we can teach you, but there’s a catch.

Hisoka: Once you’re with your Krewe? You’re basically able to master a set of practices, but you’re kinda limited to those. It’s kinda like… fuck, Ori, explain. You’re the one into this metaphysical bullshit. Just keep it short.

Ori: Well, if you’re giving me the opportunity, thank you! So... Think of how we explained the Old Laws, where they are like laws of gravity. These rituals are similar. There are forces you are able to tap into when your own goals resonate with them, which means that our personal philosophies cause us to have affinities for specific rites.

Damien: Symbolism is important when it comes to the Underworld in general. So like, say you want to banish a curse. Well, crows are considered tricksters, they’re ill omens, they’re often considered witch familiars or magical in some way...so, you can take a feather, invoke a trickster story, and the crow-- uh, not a literal one, I guess the metaphysical power of the crow, steals the magic and puts it in the feather.

Hisaya: Yeah, look, I’ll be honest. I don’t get it, but we found some books in the library before it got raided that had instructions on this stuff. And it works. Somehow.

Ori: Well, if you’d ever need suggestions or assistance with symbolic elements, I would be glad to help! ...Any one of us, really, I suppose, but I do enjoy researching these sorts of things. But there is another caveat. The physical materials remain, but they lose their metaphysical resonance. Think of a battery losing all of its charge. The figurative crow has flown away and needs some new story to catch their interest. You cannot simply re-use the same components and do the ceremony again an unlimited amount of times. The materials used are consumable, and can be quite hard to come by.

Keiichi: Yeah, we have to go and scavenge for them on the Rivers, since stuff washes up there from the surface world. Which gets complicated, and that’s kind of why we haven’t had a chance to do this very often...buuuut with you guys this should be a lot easier!

Damien: So, back to that symbolism thing...it does matter what your intentions and philosophy are when it comes to doing these things, and that...should...theoretically, at least, bind us together and let us actually do this stuff. Working alone is a lot harder. So, let’s talk a little bit about ourselves, yeah?

Hisaya: Right. Well, your idea. You go first.

Damien: ...Fine. So, haven’t you ever wondered what was lost to death? Scientific advancements cut short by someone dying before their time, philosophy and religion lost because the person who spoke it was born in the wrong time and killed for it...that’s what we’re trying to recover. Think of how much further we could’ve advanced as a species if death weren’t an obstacle to discovery. There’s truth out there that’s been lost and we have the power to find it again. I’m not letting that power go to waste.

Hisaya: ...I don’t really have a fancy speech or whatever prepared. I just started out wanting to understand what the hell is going on with this place. The way I see it, the Underworld is as much a natural part of the world as...trees or the air or any other ecosystem. What is will always be. You can’t change it. It’s like trying to fight the desert or the mountains. We can’t make it go away so we have to figure out how to work within it. I’m still trying to figure out where to even start, so, I guess research is the first step if anyone wants to help or something.

Keiichi: Alright, well, my turn! In my line of work you kind of find out people don’t really care about the victims in these sorts of situations. Most people on the periphery of true crime remember the names of the killers but nobody they killed. It’s easy to talk about dealing out justice and revenge or changing the world-- uh, no offense to everyone-- but it’s hard to get down and do the dirty work of dealing with actual people one-on-one. Ghosts lead pretty miserable lives and we should do what we can to make it better until we can help them pass on again.

Hisoka: Hmph. Being afraid of death is a part of human nature, but why? Is it innately taboo? Painful? Hard to consider? Whatever it is, talkin’ about death is easy to avoid and all until you have to face it yourself head-on. It’s that kinda thinking, that it’s all pretty or poetic or something you’ll never face until you’re old, that keeps people from realizing it’s just another part of the cycle of life. And then, after you die? You have to contend with your new existence. Wouldn’t preparing others for that eventuality make more sense?

Ori: Ah… I suppose I’m last? And mm, no offense taken! Anyways... Death is a topic that’s hard to fathom for so many. When it is focused on, it is fraught with sensationalism and people prettying up the fact that it was a human being who died, not a statistical figure or memory, nor a euphemism. Lives are often cut short due to unjust or unsavoury circumstances, while others are content to stand by and do nothing if it means keeping the status quo. Some people are of the opinion it is better that skeletons are kept in the closet, but that is an insult to the victims. Coming to the Underworld is difficult enough as it is, and an existence as a former shadow of yourself who can only relive the motions of the injustices committed upon you in life is unfathomably painful. Countless wrongs go unanswered every day, brutal systems crush others underfoot, and it may feel easier to remain complacent and bury your head in the sand. But we cannot be complacent. Someone has to step in to ensure that the perpetrators of wrongs must answer for and learn from what they’ve done. Above all, justice for the victims remains our priority, not violence or vengeance.

Damien: Well, I guess we found out that letting us talk about philosophy is a bad idea because the tape’s almost--

[END OF RECORDING]

TL;DR

Motley Krewe

Each Krewe represents a philosophical outlook on the best way to help the dead rather than helping oneself move on.

Furies help the undead to take vengeance on those who wronged them and help settle scores through typically aggressive means.

Mourners bring back the knowledge and works of the undead to the living, so in the future no-one will have unfinished business.

Necropolitans try to create a comfortable existence for the undead to keep them from falling to the predatory structures of the Underworld.

Pilgrims explore the Underworld and try to help everyone to accept sometimes harsh realities of the worlds around them, letting go of what can’t be controlled or changed.

Undertakers seek to change the nature of perceptions of death to create a more peaceful passage from life to death. Most believe that removing the trauma from death will create a more peaceful Underworld.

Pomp and Ceremony

Ceremonies are ritualized practices that tap into the Old Laws of the Underworld to bestow minor benefits on the practitioners. Each Krewe specializes in different Ceremonies. Because they take time, effort, and concentration, it’s best to do them in a safe location like Dolor.

Haunt-ing Presences

Haunts are the innate powers granted by the synthesis of life and death only Sin-Eaters have. Sin-Eaters and Geists have an instinctive understanding of how to use them. They are divided up into general categories, with each giving a different type of problem. They can be used very quickly. Use your Haunts to solve problems on the go!

[lostsummerdayz]

Sonic The Hedgehog Movie Review

“Blue Blur or Blue Devil, this speedy flick is very ‘Omoshiroi~!’ indeed!”

By Nay Holland

The Sonic The Hedgehog movie had quite the hype and history leading up to its eventual release. It was around this time last year that the general audience saw first hand what Sonic would look like on the big screen. Needless to say, they were not happy with the design choice. Several months later, a new design for Sonic was revealed to greater approval. The slated November 2019 release was pushed back to a February 2020 release due to the resulting backlash.

Sonic’s design was just the cherry on top for most skeptics at the time. Fans of the classic Sonic animated series will remember Jaleel White as the iconic voice for Sonic. Many of said fans wanted him to reprise his role for the feature film. Ultimately, that role fell on Ben Schwartz of Parks & Recreation fame.

Throughout the trailers, the absence of many other iconic characters from the universe wasn’t ignored. Many had thought that Jim Carrey’s role of Eggman Dr. Robotnik would be the only bright spot in this film of uncertainty. The reputation of video game movie adaptations in the past also preceded any major hope savvy fans would have as well.

However, with the release of Detective Pikachu, I had newfound hope for Sonic The Hedgehog. Detective Pikachu was a movie with an original yet at-times nonsensical plot fueled by star power. Ryan Renolds played the titular character as well as one would expect, though the supporting cast were passable.

Still, compared to the terrible era of horrific fighting video games to movie adaptations earlier on in the decade, Detective Pikachu was a breath of fresh air. It was a fun movie littered with references that fans of Pokemon will catch, yet it was never over-reliant on them. The movie was able to provide its own form of momentum from start to finish. It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done.

It may seem like I was giving a mini overview on Detective Pikachu, but the same thoughts can be applied to Sonic The Hedgehog as well. It was a fun movie with an original, yet highly nonsensical, plot. I’ll excuse the plot on the grounds that it’s Sonic The Hedgehog. Sonic was never quite known for intricate stories.

I am aware that this game exists, but, this is the exception rather than the rule.

Look who developed the game guys. C’mon.

Whoever was in charge of the script could have watched the entire first season of Sonic X for all I know and based some of their ideas for the film.

My point is, while there is a reason for Sonic to arrive on Planet Earth via his backstory, it’s not the main attraction of the film. The fuel that powers this movie are two dynamics.

The first is the dynamic between Sonic and Tom, the human protagonist of the movie. Remember when I joked about inspiration from Sonic X? The punchline punches itself.

Okay I know I’m not being fair in comparing a kid to a grown police officer but it’s the same energy!

Oh, right. The human sidekick is a police officer from a small town in Montana. Wanna know the name of the town?

Green Hills, Montana! Get it! Green Hill? The introductory zone that will never

Ever

Ever

EVER

Go away in some way shape or form?

I’m not gonna lie I looked it up just to see if such a place exists in Montana. I was sad to discover that was false. Bummer.

Sonic and Tom share most of their screen time together and you have some classic tropes. The “we’re a family!” trope, the “trying to understand someone different than you” trope, and the classic “ROAD TRIP!” trope.

The cliches aren’t bad however. They only seemed to enhance the dynamic that these two characters have with each other. Sonic is filled to the brim and armed to the teeth with pop culture references for centuries. Any reference you can think of is there. 

Several speed puns involving his collection of Flash comics including the movie, Speed, itself? Check. References to The Fast and The Furious? Also check. References to modern gaming such as live streaming and...a certain dance that is honestly dated at this point? Checkmark.

Sonic’s personality is unique to this movie yet key components remain. He’s still very much so impulsive, adventurous, and bold as his other counterparts. One thing I feel the movie does right is his development. He doesn’t know the power of his own strength or his own powers. Sometimes he overestimates his abilities, which leads to trouble for both Sonic and Tom. Other times, he feels out of place and yearning for family. By the end of the movie, however, there are enough seeds planted to promote further growth in the inevitable sequel.

The human protagonist, Tom, was surprisingly as interesting. We’re introduced to his character as a wise-cracking police officer who would fit the role of a cocky protagonist in any other movie. At times he tries to play the straight man to Sonic’s antics, but after a certain part in the movie, he’s not that far from Sonic in terms of impulsiveness.

Marsden, who plays the role of Tom, is no slouch either as he delivers his one-liners, matching the same energy as Sonic. Most importantly, he is able to stand on firm ground with Jim Carrey’s Robotnik. I honestly loved seeing them both on the screen as they tried to show who was the bigger smartass.

Ah! Jim Carrey! The main reason why everyone’s interests were piqued to high levels. This leads into the second dynamic. The man with the master plan! He is the Eggman Doctor.

In trailers and in promotional images, Carrey never looked better. In this movie, it is my honor to say that Carrey looked in rare form. The quirky and zany antics of Dr. Robotnik portrayed by Carrey felt nostalgic, harking back to the days of Liar Liar and The Mask. The hair-triggering jerk reactions, the body language, and the endless amount of quips made Carrey a perfect role for the Egghead. I could literally fill this review with all of his one-liners and dialogue. That’s how subtle yet powerful they were.

Remember when I said that the plot was a tad bit diluted? I’d say that Robotnik’s introduction is where the movie begins to take flight and he’s introduced fairly early. If you look at the movie as an hour and some change of Tom and Jerry style antics, with Robotnik and Sonic respectively, then you’ll get the most mileage out of the film.

Finally I’d like to mention the miscellaneous. The attention to detail to Sonic’s design is amazing, from his fur to his beat-up footwear. The method in which he received his iconic kicks was also adorable.

The special effects were also spot-on. There are two moments in the movie where Sonic is using his speed to get himself out of a disadvantageous situation. In both of these scenes, the rate of speed is exaggerated by a still frame of his surroundings. 

For those familiar with “bullet-time” and “slo mo” effects in video games, these are how the scene plays out. Seeing Sonic manipulate the environment around him only for time to regulate into “normal time” was one of the better touches of the movie from a design standpoint. I honestly wished there were more scenes like that in the movie. 

As mentioned earlier with “Green Hills,” there are several in-universe references as well. I won’t mention them all, but my favorite had to have been the “Hill Top Road” street sign.

This obviously refers to Hill Top Zone from Sonic 2.

There are also references to his moves, from the iconic spin dash, to other niche ones such as his wall kick.

For a ninety-minute movie, Sonic The Hedgehog cuts to the chase, pun intended, with no filler. Post opening credits, every scene in the movie had a purpose for progression. Nothing ever seems to overstay its welcome. 

For a film geared towards the younger audience, it’s enough to keep their attention span with enough content to keep the fans of Sonic in their seats. For the parents of said younger audience, the appearance of Jim Carey in rare form is a treat in itself to see. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is far from the dumpster fire that everyone feared it would be. It is, however, more than good enough to check it out. 

Sonic the Hedgehog is now showing in theaters. This Valentine’s Day weekend, take your Amy Rose out on a movie date and enjoy a fun movie after dinner!

And park your butts in your seats after the credits for a surprise! Don’t leave the theater!

[hecallsmehischild]

Grieving the Good

Beyond Boundaries by Dr. John Townsend claims there are six components for grieving a lost relationship. Most of the steps are already inherent to how I deal with pain, and I recognized each as I went through them. One, however, took me off guard. It makes sense, but it hadn’t been said to me before.

3. Name what you valued.

When you value someone, you affirm that he or she is important to you. When the connection is over, there are certain aspects of the person and the relationship that you miss the most. There are the values you have to grieve. {List of examples follows}

Sometimes, the value you need to grieve is connected to specific memories as well. It could be a trip you took or a private joke you shared. It might be a time of deep intimacy in which you were very close. Perhaps it was good times with the family.

Why is it important to name the specific things you valued? Because you must say good-bye to the entire person, not simply the negative parts of the person. You cannot walk away from the things you disliked, which may be the things that ended the relationship, without also saying goodbye to the things you loved as well. A half grief is never a healing grief.

It has been seven months since I ended a ten year friendship. Things have been better. I feel more healing every week that goes by. However, I am still stuck some days. I still cycle fruitlessly through each thing that hurt me. In my head, I argue and shout and scream until I’m acknowledged. I deliver biting, sarcastic lines designed to cut. I make it so that this time, I’m not the one in a thousand pieces on the floor.

I can’t seem to move on from this simmering anger on the back burner. I want it to protect me, but I know that’s not what it will do. It will turn into bitterness and a permanent wall that will hinder me from connecting to new people in my life. I also know, though, that if I try to suppress or ignore it, it will come back to bite me in other nasty ways down the line. So I continue to try and find ways of legitimately dealing with it, torn between letting it run its course and trying to find ways to let go.

I have grieved the negative parts and events for months, now, though I have not publicly disclosed all the specific events that led to this dissolution. It is time to grieve the good. I will grieve the good without asking which parts were lies and which were truths, because I’ve already asked myself that untold times and there is no answer to be had. At the time, it was all true, and I will grieve that.

My friend,

You are one of the two people that I know who writes at what I call a college-Lit-class-level. It’s a very specific compliment that carries a great deal of my awe. I know many truly wonderful writers who floor me every time I read their work. But I do believe your work, if published, could be taught in college classes. Not everyone would get it. You probably will not have a broad readership. It took me years of reading your writing to start to understand what you were getting at. It’s a small niche, but people who understand what you’re saying, well. Their conscience will be smitten. Your wordplay and sensory overload descriptions are brilliant. I will miss getting to read your work in advance and offering what I could to the editing process. I will miss cheering every time you got accepted for publication. I will miss collecting any printed piece you got published and begging for your autograph. I grieve that I will never hold your published novel and say, “See? I knew you could do it.” I still know you can.

We made two books together. Did you know how fun that was? Yes, there was some pain in the process, but we made two children’s books. You crafted two lovely stories. You weighed in on design ideas and I illustrated them. I am much more comfortable with my tablet and Art Rage after 9 and 6 months spent on the respective books. I have some concept of character design, simply by doing it over and over. This isn’t something I ever sought to pursue myself, but I learned a little of it through trial and error and repetition. Perhaps you will take the stories and have someone else illustrate them for publication. That is okay. I have my copies. They are the only two I can’t part with, even now. I will miss creating children’s books with you, friend. I grieve the ones we will never make. I grieve these ones will never be seen, but for the few copies that exist among friends and ourselves.

I miss sharing music with you, trying to find songs you would enjoy and occasionally finding for you one you’d searched for without success. I will never hear many of the songs you would have sent me, a lifetime of accumulated musical taste we could have traded.

I miss your passionate conversation about topics that interested you. You were never annoying, in spite of your concerns about being so. I could have listened to talk about your passions for hours. I miss how, when we got together, we could (and did) literally talk for hours, as if jamming together all the time we hadn’t spent together. I miss our long-distance communication. The wall-o-text emails. The few months we did Marco Polo, when we thought it would revolutionize our communication to be able to pick up on tone and facial expression. I miss getting to show you the cool little mundane things about my day. I grieve the loss of our communication.

You and I shared our deep sorrows and victories. We shared vulnerability and acceptance. We both mourned friendships that didn’t last or people who used us and wondered why people were so quick to cast loyal friends aside. I thought I could talk to you about anything and everything that hurt. I kept that belief very shielded from the things I knew I absolutely could not bring to you. Fortified heavily with denial was the belief that you were a safe person, and during the time I believed it, it was a good thing for me. I grieve the loss of that. I grieve the loss of trusting that you were really going to tell me the truth once you confessed to your lies, and that there were and would be no more lies between us.

I saw a great beauty in you, and I wanted so desperately to see that beauty bloom and grow, and to have been a small part of that because I felt you were so much wiser, smarter, more talented than me. I grieve that I will never see what becomes of you in this life up close. I hope, desperately, that you do heal and grow.

Once, when I really needed it, you stood up for me. Though details have come into question, now, in that moment I fully believed I needed it, and you were there for me. In the very early years of our friendship, you provided a friendly and safe-feeling place to talk with you. We talked about anything and everything. I grieve that.

I grieve the gifts I could not keep, chosen with care for every birthday and every Christmas. I grieve the joy I took in picking out gifts for you as well.

You loaned me your knowledge. Knowledge about health and food, theology and psychology. Book recommendations that were dead on what I needed to know and what my brain was able to process correctly. Articles you sent that made you think of me. You have had your head more in the real world than I ever cared to, and when I was stymied about how to even research, you shared your store of collected knowledge with me.

You had such insight. I felt that you “saw” me, and you phrased what you saw in me all so beautifully. I thought I was so fortunate to be friends with someone like you, who would point out my strengths in such a healing way. Do you even comprehend what a balm your words can be, when you want?

I remember playing the What-Does-M-See game. Because you said you could see the spiritual realm. Now I don’t know what to believe, but at the time, I was always in awe when you saw or described something. Especially if it was about me, and especially if it was accurate to something in my life.

I miss praying with you in the early days, when we first got to be prayer partners in the huge house.

I’d never had a delicious vegan meal before. You astounded me by cooking incredible savory 100% vegan dishes. And I got to cook one dish for you that you fell in love with. And even when we lived apart, it was fun to cook with you over Skype, creating the same dish across several states’ distance.

I’d only recently begun reading aloud books for you. Books I thought spoke to your situation, or books that I hoped held some answers for you. I grieve that I will not be able to share with you like you shared with me.

Slumbertale was a short story born out of our friendship. I wanted to sustain you from week to week. Give you something to look forward to. I miss coming up with a new few paragraphs of the story each week and waiting for your reaction to the next twist in the tale. I miss picking out a weekly treat to mail you. I miss making gestures of Philia (deep friendship)--nearly Storge (familial)--love and having them received. I grieve the loss of the times I was able to shine a little light into the darkness for you.

You actually got me to like parenthesis. With a super creative poem. How even? I was so anti-parenthesis in fiction and storytelling, but you did the thing. I liked it so much I had to literally paint the poem.

Some of my most beautiful artwork and poetry were inspired by something you said or wrote, or a part of who you were. You influenced my poetry style. You twined into my craft sphere. We even started a mini-partnership about my trees, remember? I wanted to start writing micro-fiction, but was having a hard time titling the trees. Your titles were spot on and creative and always inspired a fabulous story. I offered $2 per title if the tree sold because I wanted to. Now I title them myself, and have only just returned to the micro-fiction, because the grief was so sharp.

I believed you were someone worth flying out for on as short notice as I could afford during the absolute worst times. I did this three times. I grieve being able to hold the belief that you deserved this, and much more, from me. I grieve the image of you that I had and refused to release for so long.

I grieve good times in Seattle, the city I never want to visit again because the painful associations now outweigh the good associations. You were the last remaining reason I ever wanted to return there.

I remember one time, during a visit to you, I spiked myself into a panic attack. I had ordered a mocha from one of Seattle’s hipster one-off coffee shops. I could tell from the first sip that the balance skewed way more toward coffee than chocolate, and that it might be too strong for me, but I drank it anyway. And shortly after, my heart was hammering and my breathing was shallow and every dread in my heart came screaming up to the surface of my skin. And I asked you for a hug, and in the middle of the coffee shop, with no embarrassment, you held me. Spoke gently into my ear. Helped me regulate my breathing. Helped me back down to a tolerable level of anxiety (it would be a few hours before the caffeine totally left my system).

You wrote me a journal in response to the one I wrote to you. Then you spent months helping me decode your handwriting so I understood all of what you had to say.

You wrote the single piece of derivative fiction (or fan fiction) that exists for my still unfinished novel. You accompanied it with components of a visual piece of art for me to assemble, one that directly related to the story you’d written, in spite of you “not being a visual person.” It had so much meaning to me.

You gave me a deeply meaningful nickname, and called me that almost to the exclusion of my name.

I miss your laughter. I miss your sense of humor. I miss your warmth.

I grieve the good in you, and I grieve the good I received from you. I grieve the good we made together, and the good we shared with each other. As hurt and furious as I am, I still miss you. But I will not return this time. I cannot express to you how much I hope you heal, truly heal, and learn to relate to people. I wish you well. I wish you healing. I wish you true joy. I wish you a life where you do not have to leave claw-marks behind.

Goodbye.

[sandgame]

Some NPC thoughts

Part of the magic of Uru was being able to actually talk to the characters in the game (if you were lucky enough to be around at the right time, of course). Unfortunately, using that as the primary mechanism of keeping players involved in the story just can’t scale to the size of a player base that would also make the game financially viable. That said, it’s a key component that made Uru very different and very special, and I want to find ways of keeping it around, while also recognizing its limitations.

Additionally, I want to give players more of a relationship with the various characters in the game, so that they have a better understanding of them and their roles in the cavern. Because the DRC and company were only ever “live” NPCs, the only way to get to know them at all was by being lucky enough to meet them in person. Otherwise, you were relying on word of mouth (or worse) to even know who they were. I know having deeply personal relationships with them is unrealistic and impractical, but there should at least be guaranteed opportunities for every player to meet them all and interact on some level.

To that end, the various main characters in the game (the DRC, Watson, etc.) should be able to exist as both traditional NPCs and Uru’s “live” NPCs – Actor-Controlled Characters, or ACCs, if you will. As ACCs, they would operate much the same way they did in Uru, occasionally wandering through various areas of the game, conversing with bystanders, and carrying out day-to-day business (the “palace intrigue”, if you will) with other ACCs to nudge along the finer points of the game’s current narrative. (As a side note, there will need to be some way to cover and report on this stuff in game for those who are interested but can’t be online 24/7.)

As ordinary NPCs, these characters would also exist to give and/or receive quests – for lack of a better word. Players may be tasked with bringing Kodama equipment to help shore up a chamber in the Aquarium, for instance, or be dispatched by Dr. Watson to talk with another NPC “explorer” who has information about the bahro. These tasks may be assigned directly by other NPCs, or come in the form of a KI message. Some quests may even only be possible if the player has a certain reputation with the character(s) in question. Anger Kodama, for instance, and you won’t get asked to help him anymore (or maybe you’ll get asked to help him by somebody who also dislikes Kodama and wants to annoy him). Or, if you blow off too many of Watson’s messages asking you to help vet information, he stops asking. Be diligent in completing marker mission tasks, however, and Laxman may take a shine to you and recruit you for more regular Lattice maintenance operations.

The challenge to this approach is marrying the ACC and the NPC so that they feel like a cohesive experience. First, ACCs should have access to the underlying metrics about their relationship with each person they interact with. This helps inform their tone and attitude. Players who have angered a character should expect to have their questions ignored at town halls, for instance. Similarly, ACCs should be able to feed the outcomes of live interactions back into the NPC’s metrics, so that if they substantially alter their standing as the result of an in-person interaction, the computer-driven NPC can take that into account going forward.

Second, characters should only ever exist in one location in the game at any given time. An ACC should never appear in Negilahn at the same time as their NPC counterpart is waiting patiently for you to arrive at a drop-off point in the City. When an actor logs on to control a character, the NPC counterparts should always link away (unless that would cause them to link out while actively speaking with a player, in which case we can let the mask slip a little, so to speak).

On a related note, as NPCs the main characters should generally not be visible in-game unless they are part of a player’s quest. In that case, they will be visible only to that player (and anyone else in their party currently engaged in the quest). Lesser characters that will not have an ACC counterpart can generally exist within the game 24/7, it will simply be the responsibility of the story department to know which characters are currently engaged in an activity so that they’re not used in another one somewhere else at the same time. Generally, NPCs that get used as elements in a personal quest shouldn’t also be used for ambient narrative to avoid conflicts. In the event that a special live event is in progress (like Wheely’s rescue), it should be possible to completely suspend the assignment of new quests relating to the NPCs involved, and active quests should also be suspended for the duration of the event, in order to prevent potentially incongruous interactions (we don’t want Laxman to be giddy with excitement over a new KI function while the cavern is in mourning, for instance).

To help keep players from getting frustrated or confused by receiving instructions to meet an NPC somewhere, only for them to be missing because their ACC is yucking it up in a pub downtown, players should be given temporary insight into a character’s location via the KI when they need to interact with them, along with receiving a ping when the ACC logs out (causing the NPC can return to their post) so that they know the character is available to speak with in the appropriate context. ACCs should stagger their availability so that players are not consistently locked out of progressing a quest because they can only play when the character is in ACC mode (having ACCs operate on 30-hour D’ni days would help with this). Additionally, players should only be able to receive a single assignment to locate a particular character, to prevent them from running into the same person in multiple places. If a quest line would conflict with this, an alternate branch should exist that puts the player off until they finish whatever quest currently has the NPC active. Then, after a delay, another quest can re-activate the NPC in another location.

Lastly, to prevent ACCs from getting flash-mobbed every time they show up, they should be available very regularly (taking into account the aforementioned staggered presence). Ideally every main cast member would appear in the game at least once a week, if not more so. It should also not be possible to add them as buddies, so that players can’t monitor their online status unless they’re actively involved in a quest. Calendars should be produced for the live events department that lay out each character’s availability, and assignments should be made in advance for when ACCs will log in, for how long, and who will be playing them during a given session.

[itsshortfurball20]

Percy Jackson, The Avenger

Summary: Percy has an encounter with Nick Fury. A year later, he’s being called on to help protect the world… again. He’s not alone in this Avengers Initiative. A genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist; a super soldier; a green scientist; a Norse god; and two secret agents. What could go wrong?

1 2 3 4 

This chapter has 2,640 words

5 – The Continuum of Villains in Glass Prisons

It took them an hour to get back to the Helicarrier. An hour of Percy nervously glancing up at the ceiling. An hour of violently gripping the nearest surface every time they hit turbulence. An hour of wondering whether Zeus would strike the plane down.

Steve had sat by Percy and tried to make small talk. Percy gave short, quick answers, not in the mood to chit-chat. Steve left after a while, giving Percy some space. When the plane landed, Percy was the first one off. Being on the Helicarrier wasn’t the same as the ground, but Percy could feel the ocean below them, giving him a much-needed boost.

The others followed after Percy. Several agents had been waiting for their arrival, taking Loki and escorting him to presumably his cell. Percy watched him go, the unsettling feeling from his stomach still not gone.

Everyone made their way inside. They ended back up in the main area, where Dr. Banner was waiting, pacing back and forth. As soon as the group entered, Banner stopped his pacing. They all took places around the table. Romanoff managed to pull up a security feed of the holding cell that Loki was in for them to watch.

Percy found himself staring at Loki through a glass prison cell. The guards had taken off the cuffs, letting him wander around the small cell freely. Percy stared at the god, trying to figure out what his ulterior motive for coming here was. No man—or god, for that matter—would let themselves be captured without a plan of sorts.

Director Fury walked on screen, just as intimidating as he had been when Percy first met him. He didn’t spare Loki a glance until he was standing next to the control panel of the cell. “In case it's unclear,” his voice boomed. “You try to escape, you so much as scratch that glass—” Fury pressed one of the buttons on the panel. Percy figured that the button must have opened a hatch under the cage as the sound of gushing wind became almost deafening. Loki tried his best to peer down the glass without pressing himself to the window. “—Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?”

Fury pressed the button again, and the hatch closed. With a pointed gesture at Loki, he said “Ant,” before gesturing to the panel. “Boot.”

Loki smirked. “It’s an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me.”

“Built for something a lot stronger than you.”

“Oh, I’ve heard.” Loki turned to look into the camera. Around the table, the others took subtle glances at Banner, who was watching Loki intently, trying to ignore the others. “The mindless beast makes play he's still a man. How desperate are you that you call upon such lost creatures to defend you?

“How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace and you kill cause it's fun. You have made me very desperate.” Fury was walking closer and closer to Loki’s cage, illustrating each point with another step. “You might not be glad that you did.”

“Ooh. It burns you to come so close.” Loki nearly laughed. “To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share, and then to be reminded what real power is.”

Fury stared at Loki, not backing down from the god. After a beat, he turned away, hiding a small smile. “Well, you let me know if ‘Real Power’ wants a magazine or something.”

The director left, leaving Loki by himself. With a smirk, Loki cast the camera another glance, before the monitor went dark. Everyone around the table was silent. Percy sat there, mulling over Loki’s words. The speech didn’t sound like what someone who had been captured would sound like. Loki sounded relaxed, confident. Even though he was the one in the cage, Loki sounded like the one with the upper hand.

Across from Percy, Steve sat in silence. Just to his left, Thor stood, looking torn. Percy remembered that Thor and Loki were brothers. Until this moment, the son of Poseidon realized that the Greek gods might not be the only immortal dysfunctional family out there.

Dr. Banner broke the silence first. “He really grows on you, doesn't he?”

“Loki's gonna drag this out,” Steve noted. The super soldier lifted his eyes to the blond god. “So, Thor, what's his play?”

“He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard or any world known.” Thor uncrossed his arms and wandered closer to the table. “He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract.”

“An army? From outer space?” Steve repeated, tone sort of disbelieving.

Percy swiveled his chair towards the Captain. “Trust me on this, Cap. Space armies? Not the weirdest thing.”

“So he's building another portal.” Banner pieced together, ignoring Percy and Cap’s small conversation. “That's what he needs Erik Selvig for.”

Thor frowned. “Selvig?”

“He's an astrophysicist.” Banner explained to the god.

“He's a friend.”

“Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours,” Natasha spoke up for the first time. Percy gave a small jump, having forgotten that she was in the room with them. The demigod assumed that was just part of her nature from being a spy—don’t be noticed, blend into the background.

A troubling thought that had plagued Percy earlier popped back into his head. “Something’s up with Loki. Did anyone else notice how he actually sat and watched us like we something on Prime TV before letting us take him? Loki’s planning something.”

”I don't think we should be focusing on Loki.” Banner waved Percy’s concern off. “That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him.”

Thor turned on Banner. “Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he's my brother.”

“He killed eighty people in two days,” Natasha informed him.

“He's adopted.”

Percy chuckled. Dysfunctional family all right. He stood up from his chair, walking closer to Thor. “Hey man, I get it. My cousin once told me families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy.” Percy shrugged his shoulders. “The best thing to do is just remind yourselves that you’re related, for better or worse.” Thor’s shoulders slumped as Percy’s words moved over him. “He also said to try and keep the killing to a low, but…”

“Thank you, Perseus,” Thor told him. “I’m not sure things with Loki will go over smoothly, but I will keep your words in mind.”

Percy gave him a nod. Some of the uneasy air that had been between them seemed to melt away.

Banner looked deep in thought. “I think it’s about the mechanics.” He spoke up.  “Iridium. What do they need the iridium for?”

“It’s a stabilizing agent.”

Stark and Coulson walked into the room. Tony had answered Banner’s question before turning back to Coulson and finishing whatever conversation they had been having before walking into the room. When he finished, he turned back to them. “Means the portal won’t collapse on itself like it did at SHIELD” Tony walked by Thor and gave him a pat on the back. “No hard feelings, Point Break. You’ve got a mean swing.

“Also,” he switched back to Banner’s question. “it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants.”

“Like to bring in a giant army from space,” Percy realized. He turned to Stark before he realized that the man had turned his attention to the agents that were milling around. Percy wondered if the man had ADHD. Stark reminded Percy of some of the kids at Camp Half-Blood, jumping from one conversation topic to the next without any logical solution behind it.

“Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the top sails.” He commanded. “That man is playing GALAGA. Thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.” Tony then proceeded to cover one of his eyes and look at the large monitors. “How does Fury even see these?”

“He turns.” Agent Hill answered.

“Sounds exhausting.” Tony turned back to Banner, but not before subtly placing something on the back of the monitor. Percy furrowed his brow as Stark continued talking. “The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get on his hands pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density, something to kick start the cube.”

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?”

“Last night. The packet, Selvig’s notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”

“Pretty sure you’re the only one who got that,” Percy spoke up. “Unless I missed that in my skim through.”

Steve pipped up with a question. “Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?”

“He’s got to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier.”

“The what now?” Percy asked, confused by what had just come out of the Doctor’s mouth. Only Tony seemed to understand his words because the two quickly launched into a conversation that Percy had trouble following.

“Finally, someone who speaks English,” Tony said.

Steve frowned. “Is that what just happened?”

“I don’t know, Cap.” Percy shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t sound like it.”

Tony and Bruce shook hands. Percy could see what looked like mutual respect for each other as they introduced themselves to one another. “It’s good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled.” Tony paused for a second. “And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into a huge green rage monster.”

Banner looked away. “Thanks,” he muttered.

“Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube,” Fury announced to Stark. “I was hoping you might join him.”

“Let’s start with that stick of his,” Steve suggested. “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a HYDRA weapon.”

Percy frowned. “Hydras don’t need weapons.”

Everyone around the table seemed to look over at Percy. The son of Poseidon noticed the shocked and questioning looks from mainly everyone except from Agent Hill and Director Fury, the latter of who looked over at Percy. “Not Hydra as in the monster. HYDRA as in the secret organization that existed during World War Two. I’m not sure this is like them, but it is powered by the cube. And I’d like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”

“Monkeys?” Thor asked. “I do not understand.”

“I do! I understood that reference.” Percy stifled a laugh at the proud looking Captain who finally wasn’t the clueless one on a pop culture reference.

Tony looked to Banner, ignoring Steve. “Shall we play, doctor?”

“Let’s play some.”

Tony and Bruce walked out, heading towards the lab. Percy headed off to his room, ready to make a call to Annabeth.

He made sure to close the door behind him before heading into his small bathroom. Percy stared at the shower, trying to figure out how to turn it on. Instead of a knob, there was a couple of buttons and a pad. Percy started pushing the buttons. It took him a couple tries before he got the water going. Taking the water, he bent it to the bathroom lights just right to get a small rainbow.

Percy tossed a drachma into the rainbow-colored water. “O Fleecy, do me a solid. Show me Annabeth Chase, Upper East Side, Manhattan.”

The rainbow started to shimmer, and the familiar sight of Percy’s living room came into focus. He saw Annabeth curled up on the couch, fast asleep. There was a stack of papers on the coffee table in front of her. Next to the stack of papers was a cup of coffee, half empty.

Percy paused. The last time that Annabeth had drunk coffee was when they were studying for their college finals. Prior to contrary belief, coffee actually made them better focused rather than bouncing off the walls. So when Annabeth was studying hard for something, she always had a little bit of coffee to help keep her on track. He tried to peer closer at the stack of papers. The IM, while great for getting general pictures across, was not good enough to help Percy see the words on the paper, that were just a small blur.

On the couch, Annabeth stirred. One of her eyes blinked open lazily. “Percy?” She asked, running her eyes as she sat up.

Percy smiled. “Hey, Wise girl.”

“Percy,” she sat up fully. “It’s like midnight.”

Percy glanced over at the clock that hung on the wall. “It’s two over here. Sorry that I woke you, I just wanted to check in on you.”

“I’m fine. I was just working on something.” She waved her hands dismissably towards the coffee table. “How are things going? Saved the world yet?”

Percy chuckled. “I’m not sure if getting by podex handed to me by a god with a heavy hammer counts.”

“Which god?” Annabeth asked.

“Thor,” Percy told her. “His brother Loki is the one we were going after. He’s in his cell right now while Stark and Banner are tracking down the cube that he stole from SHIELD so he could invade Earth with an army from outer space.” The son of Poseidon paused, replaying his last sentence and realizing how confusing that probably was.

Annabeth seemed to agree, if her furrowed brows were anything to go by. Percy was about to explain more when she asked a question that he didn’t expect.

“Did you say Thor and Loki?”

Percy froze. “Uh, yeah. Why? Do the names mean anything to you?”

Annabeth was visibly more awake than she had been moments before, leaning forward towards Percy. “Thor and Loki are famous Norse gods. If I remember correctly, Thor was the god of thunder while Loki was the god of mischief. I think stories also said that Loki killed an unkillable guy and his punishment was to have snake poison drip on him.”

“How does one kill an unkillable person?”

“Percy—”

“That’s not logical Annabeth.” Percy pointed out. “If the guy’s unkillable, then how can someone kill them?”

“I think the guy was meant to be unkillable. I’m not up to speed on my Norse mythology. I may be smart, but I can’t remember something I read once in a book when I was six.” Annabeth took a deep breath. “Okay, I need you to tell me. Does Loki have any scarring on his face? Any marks whatsoever?”

Percy shook his head. “No. That guy could be a model if he, you know, wasn’t a murderer. But he can do illusions.” Percy added after a second. “Maybe he’s hiding something.” He shrugged. “Not all stories are true though, remember?”

“Yeah.” Annabeth agreed. “I know, just making sure.” She glanced at the clock behind her. “Listen, Percy, I got to get to bed, and so do you. You never know when you’ll get to sleep next.”

Percy didn’t want to go, it felt like they had just started talking, but Percy couldn’t deny his heavy eyelids or calling bed in the next room. “Okay,” he said simply. “I’ll IM you with another update soon. I love you, wise girl.”

“Love you too, seaweed brain.”

He swiped through the Iris-message and shut off the shower. Percy stared at the place Annabeth’s beautiful face had only just been before trudging back into his bedroom and falling into his small bed. Within minutes, he was fast asleep.

6

[tarysande]

So, I'm re-reading A Handful of Dust (it's f***ing amazing you are spoiling us) and I was wondering, with such a large cast, how do you maintain each characters' voice? Like, it's a LARGE cast, and I LOVE SO MANY Mass Effect characters, and your ability to capture each personality and voice so accurately astounds me! Like, how? How do you do that? How do you keep those voices from bleeding into each other? How do you keep their perspectives unique?

THIS IS THE BEST ALMOST-VALENTINE’S-DAY LOVE NOTE EVER.

The other day, as I was stoking the AHOD fire (takes time to get an engine that big running again but it’s starting to rumble), I made a list of ALL THE CHARACTERS. The major ones, the minor ones, the ones I know play a significant role going forward, the ones I don’t want to forget about.

And afterward, I looked upon all I had wrought, and I said, “TARA. WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!”

But what I was thinking was this: God, I love Mass Effect. The series gave us so many wonderful characters with so many wonderful personalities and voices and stories. When I first sat down to start AHOD, lo these many years ago, I wanted it to tie up a lot of loose ends, yes, but I also wanted it to be my love letter to the series. Mass Effect has given me a lot, over the years. I’ve talked about it before, but it came into my life when I really needed it, and it’s been a companion through a whole rollercoaster of ups and downs and ups and downs. That said, even though Shepard and Garrus are my OTP to end all OTPs, my love of the series was never just about them. Even when my internal camera is following them through a scene or a story or a POV, there are always other people in the shot, and that’s because BioWare gave us so much to choose from. 

I’m not sure how valuable it is for other people, but a lot of how I focus on character and voice comes from my background in theatre. I did an acting degree at university, and even though I don’t use it to act (right now), I rely on it constantly when I’m writing. The entire first year of my program, we broke people apart into their component parts and then put them back together again to make new people or variations of people that didn’t exist before. How a character walks, talks, stands; how they move, their expressions, the way their voice changes depending on their emotions; the clothes they wear, the unconscious gestures they have, the gestures they use very consciously, even the individual words they use (and don’t use!)… all of this stuff is just a part of the unique blend of ingredients that make you, you and me, me and Shepard or Garrus or Jack or Mordin or Legion or Samara them. Throw in a lifelong love of psychology, a fascination with how people tick, and characters that make me want to know them better, and I suppose that’s part of why I’m so passionate about getting things right. Or at least recognizable.

The thing is, I love Mass Effect (and its characters) so much that I want to do them proud. I want to honor them because I love them as they are, with all their tics and flaws and foibles and strengths. Honestly, I can probably count on one hand the number of characters I’m meh about. Given how many characters there are? That’s amazing.

As to how I keep it all straight? Man. I reread every chapter a lot before I publish it. I read every chapter out loud at least once. If I can’t hear the dialogue in the character’s voice, I tinker with it until I can. If I still feel like I’m not quite getting it, I’ll go back and watch YouTube videos or play scenes until I feel like I understand the character (and their composite components) again. Until, basically, I can hear their voice in my head again.

I make lists of how many !@@#%ing people are in the !@!#!%ing medbay ;P But seriously, in some of those extremely large-cast scenes (WHY TARA), I try to make sure that every character is there for a reason, and that they serve some purpose (and aren’t just unnecessary extras). When people speak, either for one line or ten or fifty, I try to make it count.

The tl;dr of all that, I suppose, is that I’m a perfectionist who thinks about this stuff WAY TOO MUCH and really really really loves Mass Effect ;D

[shoury01]

BARRIERS TO TEAM OPERATIONS: BEHAVIOURS ASSOCIATED

The collaborative nature of teams means they are subject to pitfalls that individuals working alone do not face. Team members may not always work well together and focusing the efforts of individuals on shared goals presents challenges to completing tasks as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Three Barriers to Building a Team

A)     Flimsy Leadership

Everything flows from leadership. And when there is a problem in the team, usually, it’s the leader’s fault. The wise king Solomon said, without a vision, the people perish. There could be several reasons that a team is not working, and most often, it starts with the leader.

        i.            Is there no vision for the team?

       ii.            No one in the team knows where they are heading?

     iii.            Is there favoritism being practiced by the leader?

     iv.            Is the leader too critical of new ideas or suggestions?

       v.            Is the leader’s style too imposing on everyone?

It could be various reasons, but usually the problem has its roots with the leader. 

B)     Fragile Communication

Communication is key to the proper functioning of a team. And poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, resentment, offences within a team. Sometimes it’s because one person’s frankness or direct approach offences another person; and another responds in hurt. While conflict is normal in teams, without resolving them, this poor communication can lead to destructive conflict and cause a team to break down.

C)      Vulnerable Team Dynamics

Teams can fail because some people just cannot work with others. For example, if we have two extremely opinionated team members, we will be seeing conflict all day in the team. Also, if we have team members that are ‘yes’ men; we won’t see a lot of participation and open discussion in the team. The thing is that, we must find the right mix of individuals to make a team; not just in terms of personalities, but also in terms of skills and abilities.

While these right individuals may have disagreements in approach and perspective, but that’s the idea behind a team, different individuals bringing different points of view so that synergy within the team can be achieved.

The Secrets of Great Teamwork

Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They are far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration.

The basics of team effectiveness were identified by J. Richard Hackman, a pioneer in the field of organizational behavior. He uncovered a ground-breaking insight: What matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members. Instead, what teams need to thrive are certain “enabling conditions.” These conditions—a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context—continue to be particularly critical to team success. Modern teams are also vulnerable to two corrosive problems— “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information. Overcoming those pitfalls requires a fourth critical condition: a shared mindset.

The Enabling Conditions

A)                 Compelling direction: . . . . . . . . . The foundation of every great team is a direction that energizes, orients, and engages its members. Teams cannot be inspired if they do not know what they are working toward and don’t have explicit goals. Those goals should be challenging (modest ones do not motivate) but not so difficult that the team becomes dispirited. They also must be consequential: People have to care about achieving a goal, whether because they stand to gain extrinsic rewards, like recognition, pay, and promotions; or intrinsic rewards, such as satisfaction and a sense of meaning. In remote teams, direction is especially crucial because it’s easy for far-flung members from dissimilar backgrounds to hold different views of the group’s purpose.

B)                 Strong structure: . . . . . . . . .Teams also need the right mix and number of members, optimally designed tasks and processes, and norms that discourage destructive behavior and promote positive dynamics. High-performing teams include members with a balance of skills. Diversity in knowledge, views, and perspectives and demographics can help teams be more creative and avoid groupthink.

Team members from diverse backgrounds often interpret a group’s goals differently. This is one area where remote teams often have an advantage. Cosmopolitan members bring technical knowledge and skills and expertise that apply in many situations, while locals bring country knowledge and insight into an area’s politics, culture, and tastes. Larger teams are more vulnerable to poor communication, fragmentation, and free riding (due to a lack of accountability). With remote teams, people in different locations often handle different components of a task, which raises challenges. Repartitioning the work to give them ownership increases motivation and engagement and improves the quality, quantity, and efficiency of work.

Destructive dynamics can also undermine collaborative efforts. We’ve all seen team members withhold information, pressure people to conform, avoid responsibility, cast blame, and so on. Teams can reduce the potential for dysfunction by establishing clear norms—rules that spell out a small number of things members must always do (such as arrive at meetings on time and give everyone a turn to speak) and a small number they must never do (such as interrupt).

C)                  Supportive context: . . . . . . . . . . . This includes maintaining a reward system that reinforces good performance, an information system that provides access to the data needed for the work, and an educational system that offers training, and last—but not least—securing the material resources required to do the job, such as funding and technological assistance. Ensuring a supportive context is often difficult for teams that are geographically distributed and digitally dependent, because the resources available to members may vary a lot.

D)                 Shared mindset:. . . . . . . . . . . Distance and diversity, as well as digital communication and changing membership, make teams especially prone to the problems of “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information. The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team members—something team leaders can do by fostering a common identity and common understanding. Teams now often perceive themselves not as one cohesive group but as several smaller subgroups. This is a natural human response: Our brains use cognitive shortcuts to make sense of our increasingly complicated world, and one way to deal with the complexity of a remote team is to lump people into categories. But we also are inclined to view our own subgroup—whether it’s our function, our unit, our region, or our culture—more positively than others, and that habit often creates tension and hinders collaboration.

Incomplete information is likewise more prevalent in remote teams. Shared knowledge is the cornerstone of effective collaboration; it gives a group a frame of reference, allows the group to interpret situations and decisions correctly, helps people understand one another better, and greatly increases efficiency. There are many ways team leaders can actively foster a shared identity and shared understanding and break down the barriers to cooperation and information exchange. One powerful approach is to ensure that each subgroup feels valued for its contributions toward the team’s overall goals.

**Sources: The works of J. Richard Hackman

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.

[aion-rsa]

Toronto International Film Festival 2020 Movie Round-Up

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It really is a festival like no other. That’s something critics and journalists probably write every year about the Toronto International Film Festival. After all, TIFF (along with Venice) is considered the kickoff of awards season. Studios and independent distributors alike bringing their biggest hopes and brightest dreams to Canada, where a positive reception can make or break early Oscar buzz. However, in the case of TIFF 2020, there really has not been a film festival like this.

In the wake of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the entire press component, including our attendance to the festival, was virtual; the red carpet was permanently rolled up; and even the stars and filmmakers stayed away, giving rare publicity one press conference on zoom at a time.

In this environment, and with studios keeping their traditional highly marketed end of year wares in indefinite stasis, some worried that the show couldn’t go on. But as glimpsed in our notes on the handful of movies we screened during this year’s festivities, there remained as great a range as ever of cinematic stories and triumphant debuts. Some of these projects shined, and others revealed illuminating facets of talent we only thought we knew. Despite so much other anxiety in the world, Toronto’s show did, in fact, go on. Here’s why we can be glad it did.

Another Round

In the abstract, most people are smart enough to know they shouldn’t stare at the carnage left by a wreck. It’s unseemly and never leaves you feeling good about yourself. But that sensation of indulging what you should know better about permeates director Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, both for audiences and its protagonists. As Vinterberg and star Mads Mikkelsen’s reunion after the masterful The Hunt, their follow-up once again documents the fragility and unspoken lunacies of upper middle class life.

Take Mikkelsen’s Martin in Another Round. As a history teacher, he should know better than to think alcohol can fill the void of years of encroaching ennui. But when his old school buddies and fellow teachers buy into pseudo-science that claims keeping a buzz up at 0.09 BAC will wake you out of the doldrums, it’s drinks in the morning and evening. Martin leans on historic figures like Churchill and Grant to excuse his mistakes, but we all know where this is going. Vinterberg’s intelligence is that he gets there in an immersive and morally ambiguous, if not outright indifferent manner. The excellent ensemble cast, and Mikkelsen’s slick jazz ballet dance moves (really), also make this stiff drink go down all the smoother.

Concrete Cowboy

As the other artful indie that relies on real people from a real subculture to give its film texture (see Nomadland below), Ricky Staub’s Concrete Cowboy is fascinating whenever it’s about the actual culture of Fletcher Street Stables. A last holdout for a Black population of horsemen and women in north Philly, these stables are where honest to God urban cowboys still ride. And they pass like ghosts in a city that left their community behind nearly a century ago��and is now coming for the last few blocks.

That is the documentarian aspect of Concrete Cowboy that is, at times, engrossing. Unfortunately, it suffers from being background to a rather generic and aloof coming-of-age story that is the film’s center. Both Idris Elba, as the laconic father who hasn’t seen his son in years, and Caleb McLaughlin, as the wayward lad who’s been unexpectedly dropped on his doorstep, do fine work. McLaughin is especially good in a part which is outside Stranger Things’ nostalgic suburbia. But every narrative beat in his and Elba’s relationship arrives minutes or hours after you’ve guessed the whole familiar yarn. And it makes you wish the film belonged more to the horses and their real riders.

Get the Hell Out

In this day and age, it’s easy to feel like politicians have turned us all into monsters. People who once went about their day helping their neighbor are now ready to attack them over a bumper sticker, and cheer on the verbal theatrics in legislatures in seemingly every seat of government in the world. Wouldn’t it just be better if these pols had it out already? They finally do with maximum amounts of bloodlust in I-Fan Wang’s Get the Hell Out, a bizzaro horror comedy where the Taiwanese Parliament is infected with a zombie virus.

It’s an amusing premise that could make for terrific sketch comedy or a YouTube video, which is about how long Get the Hell Out works. Opening with a bugnut montage of MPs ripping at each other’s throats and spilling blood on the floor, the movie promises midnight madness, but you may be asleep much earlier with the often cliché-riddled script. The film attempts to make up for its narrative thinness by using stylish graphic introductions for characters, and freeze frames that wouldn’t be out of place in anime or video games, but all the hyper-kinetic energy here ends up being hyperbolic.

Good Joe Bell

If you lived only in social media threads where like-minded people discuss the need for inclusivity, you might convince yourself the world really has changed. But take a few steps outside of that safe space, and reality will inevitably rear its messier, and often tragic, head. And it’s a messy reality, indeed, that Jadin Bell (Reid Miller) and his father Joe (Mark Wahlberg) are forced to confront in Good Joe Bell.

A well-intentioned drama about a traditional American father in the Oregon heartland trying to understand and then honor his gay son, the movie casts Wahlberg in perhaps his quietest and most circumspect performance to date. But that is of course Joe’s parat of the tragedy: He mistakes silent resignation to his son coming out of the closet as loving support; and then after his son’s suicide following years of bullying, Joe attempts to make sense of his child’s life and death by again stepping out, now by walking from Oregon to New York in his son’s memory. It’s a noble gesture, as is the film, even as they both leave you wanting.

Written by Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana (Brokeback Mountain) and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men), Good Joe Bell is a sweet but emotionally distancing experience. Told in a nonlinear fashion in which vignettes of Joe and Jadin’s relationship are interspersed with Joe walking in his son’s name, the mounting awareness by Joe in the present, or despair of Jadin in the past, is consistently fractured and strangely muted. There are moments of grace, especially when the very strong Miller as a distraught youth can (or can’t) connect with his father. But as even Joe admits late in the picture, “I just made this all about Joe Bell.” That’s a problem when the movie’s stronger with his son.

I Am Greta

“I shouldn’t be here.” It’s a refrain teenager Greta Thunberg repeats time and again, whether she’s speaking before the UK House of Commons or the General Assembly at the United Nations. And yet, here she is: one of the most effective advocates for addressing the climate change crisis in the last 30 years. It’s a painful paradox that the all-too-young public figure struggles with in I Am Greta. She’s aware that nothing changes year after year, applauded speech after applauded speech.

The power of Nathan Grossman’s new documentary is not that it only chronicles Greta’s high points of speaking truth to power (though it does), but it also undercuts some of the nastiest criticisms lobbied at her by certain world leaders and their supporters. By following Thunberg’s journey from speaking with random disinterested Swedish adults on the side of a Stockholm street to standing before the world, we see how her message has remained as laser-focused as her love for her family, their dogs, and being a kid surrounded by stuffed animals and often sudden bursts of hyper energy.

She really shouldn’t have to be in these places and focused so severely with having the weight of the world on her shoulders. Really. As the film documents the growing stress this child is under while crossing the Atlantic in a boat that’s little better than a skiff, one is forced to question the healthiness of such pressure. But her ability to actually grab attention is as evident as the endless loop of world leaders, legislators, and one bodybuilder turned Governor of California line-up to extol their admiration… and then change nothing. That’s the real honest takeaway, though the doc errs on a cheery message in the last few minutes about how children will save us all. I suspect the real Greta might have her own doubts about those attempts at uplift.

I Care a Lot

Not since Gone Girl has Rosamund Pike been so perilously irresistible. All toothy grins and smiling eyes, Pike’s Marla Grayson enters every room in I Care a Lot as a ball of sunshine. But also like the sun, if you get too close to this woman, she’ll burn you alive—all while dipping into your savings account and selling the family home. That’s literally her job as a legal guardian: She takes care of people the state deems incapable of caring for themselves… and she’s made a hell of a mint doing it.

Read the full review here.

MLK/FBI

The FBI spied on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a simple fact, but the uncomfortable implications of the federal government attempting to undermine and eventually intimidate a Civil Rights leader are unpacked in full, disquieting detail via this Sam Pollard documentary. In this way, it’s a sobering record of the salacious details about King’s private life that the feds unearthed and a chance to remember perceptions of King during his lifetime.

As the film strikingly reminds viewers, during a public dispute between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Nobel Prize winning King, polls showed 50 percent of Americans believed Hoover when he called King “the most notorious liar in the country.” Only 15 percent of Americans believed King’s protestations. It’s a glimpse into how a figure now considered saintly in U.S. history could be smeared as a radical in his time when juxtaposed with the self-anointed gatekeeper of American values. It also helps understand why Hoover thought he had the right to anonymously tell King he should kill himself.

This sordid shadow conflict between one of the most influential leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and the feds is examined with the precision of an anthropologist’s chisel. But what’s most surprising about MLK/FBI is what it doesn’t show. Until the end of the film, the sources and interview subjects remain unseen and uncredited, while only the most sordid words from the FBI’s declassified documents tease the extent of King’s apparently numerous infidelities. Yet the film doesn’t ask to judge King so much as consider a broader portrait, bigger than the tabloid muck the FBI peddled, but maybe more complex and dimensional than what our marble statues also suggest. It makes him loom larger.

Nomadland

Frances McDormand’s Fern is a gateway into a 21st century heartache, representing thousands of similar stories of Americans who’ve turned to a nomadic lifestyle of transient existence and seasonal gigs. One of the most fantastic actors of her generation, McDormand is searing as the hardscrabble heroine, yet she is matched by a troupe of real-life nomads whom Chloé Zhao has populated her film with. Images of these displaced Americans persevering in the margins where they’d been pushed can at times make Nomadland feel like a modern day Grapes of Wrath, save McDormand’s version of Ma Joad travels only with her ghosts. And yet, the beauty of the movie comes from her visible enjoyment of that specific kind of company.

Read the full review here.

One Night in Miami

These are the benefits that come from Regina King and Kemp Powers—the latter drawing from his stage play of the same name—using extreme artistic license to put Ali (El Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and football star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) alone together for most of One Night in Miami’s running time. But while the situation may be fictional, the textures and paradoxes it reveals among these four real-life friends is luminously authentic. It’s also a feat more lasting than traditional biopics, which posit themselves as allegedly true accounts of a person’s entire life. Instead One Night in Miami prefers examining the legion of pressures facing Black artists and leaders who hold the double-edged sword of America’s undivided attention.

Read the full review here.

Pieces of a Woman

If movies could win awards for their first 30 minutes, Pieces of a Woman would be a shoo-in. With a single tracking shot that details the anxiety, terror, and (brief) joy of giving birth over nearly half an hour, the movie begins with a stunning piece of emotional whiplash and theatrical bonafides from its leads, particularly Vanessa Kirby as the expecting mother. But as her home birth goes awry, and the worst fear of every parent comes true, all the vital oxygen escapes Pieces of a Woman’s balloon, never to return save for a brief, devastating monologue.

Directed by Kornél Mundruczó, working from a screenplay by Kata Wéber, the movie remains watchable due to the strength of its ensemble performances. As the anchor, Kirby is sure to be a frontrunner in the Oscar race, while Shia LaBeouf does fine supporting work as her partner Sean. My personal favorite performance, however, belongs to Ellen Burstyn, who’s late in the picture speech is the single other time the movie sizzles—even if it’s out of absolute fear of this wrathful, denied grandmother-to-be.

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Yet performances alone cannot carry a movie, and beyond that early opening salvo, Pieces of a Woman is a movie left adrift, unsure of where to go, or how to keep the viewer engaged with getting there. It wants to be a chilly intellectual melodrama in the vein of latter day Ingmar Bergman. Instead it’s just chilly.

Shadow in the Cloud

Yes, there is a gremlin in Shadow in the Cloud, and like the claustrophobic verticality of the movie’s setting, its presence is always felt like a breath on the back of the neck during a stormy flight. Granted this makes for a more effective first act than second (there is no third). Yet when the film turns into an all-out creature feature with more pulp than an orange grove, there’s still enjoyment to be found for horror fans who always wanted to know what would happen in one of these old school gremlin stories if the monster got through the glass.

Read the full review here.

The Water Man

David Oyelowo is another actor who tried his hand at directing this year via The Water Man. Decidedly family friendly in his first behind-the-camera effort, Oyelowo offers a sweet and gentle children’s adventure story that will land right in the sweet spot for distributor Disney’s target audience. It’s a ghost story for all ages, and like the best spectral yarns from your youth, it is about setting the imagination free to look beyond its backyard.

Oyelowo has a supporting part in the film as a second-guessing father, but The Water Man belongs to the impressive Lonnie Chavis as Gunner, his sensitive son. Gunner is a kid more inclined to sketch his graphic novel than engage with his father, but after realizing his mother (Rosario Dawson) is ill, Gunner and cool girl next door, Jo (Amiah Miller), set off into the woods to find a local legend: to find the Water Man, who’s discovered a way to cheat death. More classical Walt Disney than modern day Guillermo del Toro, there’s still just enough shadow in Oyelowo’s direction to give The Water Man shading. And in those dark pools, young ones can carry much out after the closing credits.

The Way I See It

So much of our collective memory of the men who’ve occupied the Oval Office in the last 50 years is shaped by the invisible hand (and eye) of the Chief Official White House Photographer. Most Americans don’t know the job title, but ever since the Kennedy administration, we’ve known the work. Lyndon Johnson standing next to Jackie Kennedy while being sworn in on Air Force One; Richard Nixon shaking hands with a spaced out Elvis Presley; Bill Clinton blowing hot air into the saxophone in front of Boris Yeltsin; and everything from Barack Obama playing Spider-Man with a young boy to being wound tighter than piano wire while watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

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More than any other president, Obama’s tenure was defined by a cornucopia of history-making photographs taken by one man: Pete Souza. An old school photojournalist who’d been freelancing around D.C. for decades, Souza made his bones as a White House shutter fly during the much more private second term of Ronald Reagan. But even in his younger days, Souza dreamed of one day getting to go on the full ride of a presidency as its visual historian… little could he suspect he’d do that with the first Black President of the United States.

The Way I See It showcases some of Souza’s most famous images and unpacks the stories behind them, just as Souza unpacks his own life story and career. Directed by Dawn Porter, this documentary offers an astonishing bit of whiplash by transporting us to the Obama Years—an era which feels like four years and a lifetime ago. Warmly nostalgic, the movie ultimately acts like a wonderful exhibition for Souza’s artwork while rarely diving deeper than museum placards with bite-sized information and background. Thus the film is mostly a chance for Obama lovers to get wistful, and for Souza to hone his own political attack ad against Donald Trump by reminding us how much better the world used to be. Which… fair.

The post Toronto International Film Festival 2020 Movie Round-Up appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[gavinhalm]

Strange Times: Mario Falsetto’s Conception of Temporality in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”

In Mario Falsetto's book, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, the author makes the case that Kubrick established a "direct correspondence between fictional and real time" (37) through a reading that utilizes an “empirical”, proto-Cultural Analytics approach à la Lev Manovich, measuring such things as the histograms of Average Shot Length (ASL) per scene. Along with other, quasi-scientific occlusions into the filmic space, he interestingly and mysteriously states that filmic techniques such as long shots of three or more minutes "(add) to the sense of temporal compression" in Kubrick’s oeuvre (35). It’s not entirely clear how such a conclusion could be inferred from the work of any filmmaker. †

Also, like a weirdly farcical Kubrickian creation, Falsetto perceives in the director’s techniques a temporal/spatial equivocality between the real and filmed worlds (36-7). In contrast, even through the most superficial viewing of this film, one cannot help but believe that the various approaches utilized by Kubrick, such as long shots of “tense” scenes filled with absurd dialogue, do the exact opposite.

Indeed, the need for urgency that is expected in some of Kubrick’s scenes are cunningly undermined by the very length of time taken in each of them with their rambling and silly dialogue, along with the intentional and ironic veracity of taking shooting cues from documentary film. 

Also, it is this writer's feeling that, through such techniques as the attention paid to exacting decor in the film’s art direction, along with the high level of overall "realism" (37), all such means are put to extremely ironic use by Kubrick in rendering the decisive moment of crisis whereby panic, sense of agency, and quick delivery of (rational) dialogue should instead be immediately given, but are not.

--

The scenes involving General Ripper, and his British subordinate, Mandrake, are one of the primary sites of ironic/farcical display within the film. That is to say, the rambling, insane, cowboy talk of the General, shot in long takes, seemingly creates tension within the plot, but is instead subverted by Mandrake's very existence. This is no more apparent than in the very name given to the General's Executive Officer. 

Through a cursory look at definitions found in a few common dictionaries, a mandrake is descriptive of three primary items that are of interest to us here:

1) It was the NATO code-designation for a Stalin-era interceptor used in the north and eastern outlays to protect the former USSR. 

2) The word is derived from the name of a 16th century demon of Spanish origin that was conceived for the purpose of consultation by occult sorcerers in a time of need and is immune to fire. 

3) The mandrake was a symbol for birth in William Blake's early graphical/poetic work, "The Gates of Paradise: For Children".

In relation to these definitions, Mandrake, the character, becomes a multi-pronged foil to Ripper's lunatic excess (and the very idea of "realistic" tension existing within the plot). A polysemic character, Mandrake is, as the paranoid Ripper at one point imagines, a potential Ruskie; a "demon" of sorts that Ripper has "created" and locked inside his room to help him continue casting his paranoid spell upon the world (though Mandrake does exactly the opposite). And also an ironic symbol of birth in a situation that promises to promote nothing more than total, nuclear megadeath.

Thus, such a Bakhtinian, "dialogical" reading deconstructs the very notion that Ripper and Mandrake are renderings of anything sufficiently "realistic". Instead, they are, in the hands of Kubrick, farcical characters that both prolong the narrative through wild dialogue referencing American cowboy culture and comedic British silliness, when it should instead be racing forward towards some sort of rational outcome. Not least when Mandrake tries to extract the mission stop-code from Ripper (44)--In an inverse "consultation", the demon now tries to get help from the sorcerer!

--

The other major scenes produce much of the same kind of black-comedy goofball "Slaughter!” to a theory that wishes to show Kubrick directly correlating fictional time with real time, or some scene being perceived as more "realistic" because of its realistic set design.

The pilot and crew's demeanor in the B-52, while certainly presented with more editorial speed and within tighter spatial quarters than the other scenes (37), also displays a languid, happy-go-lucky approach to dialogue which should not be happening in a nuclear war. 

From the pilot Kong’s (Slim Pickens) goofy cowboy hat and darkly slap-stick ride upon the tip of a bomb, to the inordinate amount of time-consuming preparations for launching the weaponry and finding the target, all of these sub-scenes ironically contradict any sense of "real" time. Likewise, the War Room scenes with their hilarious time-sucking dialogue, cavernous space, and cocktail hour amenities (such as the delicious spread of catered food), do the opposite from what one would expect in a time of crisis.

--

Though Falsetto rightfully understands that Kubrick utilizes temporal/editorial techniques and space to create narrative momentum, the director’s entire point seems to rocket right over Falsetto’s head, with his thesis applied to Dr. Strangelove coming across as strangely humorous as the lines spoken by any of the film’s bizarre characters. As it stands, Falsetto’s general thesis is a fair warning siren for all who wish to force reductionistic, quasi-empirical interpretive methodologies upon artistic objects.

Notes:

† As an example, Elephant, by Alan Clarke (1989), especially because the film contains a lot of action in its long takes and acts as a foil to the argument one might expect in defense of Falsetto’s claim: that long shots with a lot of action compress time.

In particular, Elephant utilizes long takes fused to tracking shots in order to build up tension towards the individual murders at the end of each scene; it is the extreme production and presentation of space that takes over our perception in order to define the urban geography of Northern Ireland and its Troubles as an entirely violent place (space), and that its violent history (time) ultimately no longer has any meaning or use beyond the fog of hatred as distant psychodramatic impetus.

Bibliography:

Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Praeger Publishers, 1994.

[briangroth27]

Logan Review

The first X-men film is one of the few movies I’ve seen in theaters more than once and the first time would've been unforgettable even if the movie hadn’t blown my 14-year old mind: a fight between two adults broke out during the movie and one guy got flipped over the other’s head! A little old lady usher came down the aisle armed with a flashlight, whisper-shouting “There are kids in here!” and kicked them out. The movie itself was—and is—awesome, bringing characters I’d loved since the early 90s animated series to life while taking place squarely in our (slightly heightened) world. Even without nostalgia, X-men is still one of my favorite superhero movies and kicked off my favorite comic book film franchise (even if it also counts my least favorite superhero film, X-men The Last Stand, among its ranks). Among its other achievements, X-men included the perfectly-cast Patrick Stewart as Professor X and unlikely newcomer Hugh Jackman (who didn’t have the role until Dougray Scott got injured on Mission: Impossible 2, delaying filming and necessitating his replacement), who became the iconic Wolverine for me while maintaining the things that made the comic character—one of my favorite X-men—great (even when scripts like X-men Origins failed to live up to both Logan and Jackman’s potential). Seventeen years later, Logan has been announced as Jackman and Stewart’s final turn in these roles, and both of them made the most out of their final X-cursion into this world. Unfortunately, I think the film as a whole boasts strong performances but could’ve gone deeper into areas it only touches on. Jackman, Stewart, and newcomer Dafnee Keen are all outstanding! Stewart playing a broken Xavier was hard to see, but he was brilliantly layered and vulnerable. Keen has a very bright future ahead of her: she doesn't speak at all for the first half of the movie and her expressiveness is amazing; she might have been my favorite part. Jackman is great and gives it his all, but my problem is that we've seen nearly all his plot points before. Logan dealt with massive loss in both his previous solo movies and The Wolverine left him learning to hope for all the promise and good his immortality could bring to the world rather than feeling cursed for outliving his loved ones (such an original take on immortality that I’m annoyed it wasn’t followed up on). In Days of Future Past, he seemed at peace with himself, even in the midst of the apocalypse. But Logan opens with everything horrible once more and makes him learn to form new connections all over again. The new factor—Logan as a father—wasn't explored as much as I hoped it would be. It's there enough for me to be invested and emotionally affected, but I wanted more of Logan and Laura interacting and learning about each other (and Logan teaching her to fight the animal inside as he had years earlier would’ve been a fine arc). Still, I liked the levity that was in the script and the family bonds between Logan, Xavier, and Laura that are there worked well.

The villains were pretty thin, though Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) had charisma and presence; ultimately they served their purpose and I didn’t feel like I needed any more from them. The evil plan that was killing mutants off and controlling evolution was fine as a background element and didn't need to be more than it was. Caliban’s (Stephen Merchant) inclusion as a helper to Logan and Xavier felt random (though there are plot reasons for his powers later), and I didn’t feel a connection to him; I preferred the much more memorable and distinctive way the character was portrayed in X-men Apocalypse. Logan’s action is brutal and intense, but I didn't need to see this level of violence; the fights in The Wolverine were enough to show his fury. That's not a knock against the film, just me saying I wasn't ever begging to see more beheadings. It's what would really happen with mutants whose primary weapons are claws, so I get it and wasn’t grossed out by it. The touches of a sci-fi future worked well and felt like organic components of the world. The directing is on point, moving the pacing along at a good clip. The plot points are repetitive, but the writing is good on the whole. Logan has heart and hope, so it never felt overly depressing, except the mostly unspoken backstory and one scene with very unlucky bystanders. I was worried when several reviews called out how somber this was that it would be dark for no reason but the belief that grimness is somehow inherently better than light, and I didn’t come away thinking that was the case. I liked the callbacks to previous films (noting that despite Days of Future Past, at least the first two X-films and The Wolverine still happened in some form), but I really hope this is relegated to its own universe as the franchise continues. (Light spoilers for the rest of this paragraph) The world is in shambles just 3-6 years after DOFP’s happy ending? What purpose does that serve? What purpose did the X-Men serve? I liked the in-world comics, but the team should have accomplished more than just inspiring fiction (particularly given their being a metaphor for minorities—what kind of message is it that none of their heroes can save the day?). Speaking of the comics, I wish Logan took the time to deal with Logan and the team’s apparent fame—only two characters recognize him as famous and he never comments on being famous (or more specifically on being a mutant in the spotlight), except to say life wasn’t like the comics. Even Laura, an X-fan, doesn’t seem to take his comic book portrayal into account at all when dealing with him. It seems like a big missed opportunity to explore a new facet to his existence, and perhaps a more meta take on Jackman’s time in the role. Ultimately I enjoyed this and was very satisfied with the performances, but felt the material the actors were working with could’ve been more original. Had this been the first solo adventure for Logan, it would’ve been fantastic…but after seven movies where he was a major focus, I wish Jackman's last adventure could've had him in a totally different place emotionally. Still, just because it’s not exactly the movie I wanted to see doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie by any means. Logan's a well-crafted film with great performances from its three leads and definitely worth seeing!

4/5

I'm going to miss Jackman and his Wolverine a lot, even if he did overshadow other favorite characters of mine from time to time. He always felt like he truly loved the character and gave 150% to each film. I've been a fan since the first X-film and can't imagine anyone else in the role…I just hope they leave Logan out of future films and not recast, exploring the other X-men instead and not lessening the impact of Jackman and Stewart’s exits. We already have James McAvoy doing a great version of young Xavier, but Stewart will be missed all the same. His Xavier (along with his Captain Picard) are iconic bits of my youth that can’t be replicated or replaced. As much as I think Logan’s swan song could've been improved in some ways script-wise, Jackman and Stewart’s excellent performances definitely made an impact on me, as they have for almost two decades now.

So, thank you to both Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart for bringing these iconic characters to life for 17 years. I’ll miss you in this franchise, but I can’t wait to see what you do next!

Major Spoilers... -X-23 not being a clone was a change I totally understand for the purposes of the film and it didn’t bother me.

-I'm glad Dr. Rice (Richard E. Grant) wasn't Mr. Sinister (like Apocalypse’s post-credit scene seemed to indicate), so they can use him in X-men 7 instead; he’d have been wasted here. Hey, maybe a way to bring Laura into the “present” of the X-films would be to say that Logan isn’t the first time they’ve tried to make her.

-Was Xavier’s first psychic seizure, wherein he killed seven people—presumably the X-men at the mansion at the time—the film’s version of Onslaught?

-Xavier's death was so heartbreakingly tragic! I’m sorry to see him go, but what a finale for Stewart! He was the perfect Xavier.

-The biggest disappointment for me (after Logan’s repetitive arc) was that we didn’t get closure and/or reappearances by Wolverine-centric characters like Mariko, Yukio, and Sabretooth (and even Anna Paquin’s Rogue, though she was in the comic book). Creed at least could've swapped in for Caliban and accomplished the tracking he did; it would’ve been interesting to see Jackman and Liev Schreiber continue to develop the Logan/Creed relationship (by far the best part of Origins), adding to the film’s examination of families.

-I'm not sure how I feel about X-24 (who looked freakishly like Liev Schreiber at times!), but he was effective as a brawler. I guess I was expecting the Reavers to be more effective with their enhancements. I like the idea of Logan fighting the animal inside himself, but I feel like that was a fight for a movie or two ago (when Sabretooth would've filled that role). 

-Even if the backstory was needlessly nihilistic (not only Logan but Xavier too is fated to destroy everything he’s built? Really?), I'm glad there was a happy ending of sorts…at least a sense that not all hope is lost.

-I feel like they could've done more with Logan's death...this made perfect sense, but it also felt like par for the course for where his life was (and had always been). He never really grew out of his life being constant pain, loss, and fighting; never improved his prospects, or even his outlook (in fact it only got worse up until the end) for very long. I don't feel like he grew very much at all over these movies, since the time between this and previous films worked to erase the family he'd forged with the X-men in 1-DOFP and the peace he'd found in The Wolverine. I suppose this is paralleled with the Shane quotes about man not changing, but I wasn't fully satisfied with what this film did to his journey over the franchise. I’m much more emotionally affected by his and Xavier’s deaths than by the events that led to them. Of all the X-men, Logan has the most potential to change for the better (given he has arguably the darkest backstory), and that was squandered by making him go over the same lessons again…how many times can you break him down and watch him build himself up again?

-I teared up when Laura called Logan "daddy." That was heartbreaking.

-I knew they were going to make the cross an X and loved that they did.

-I would definitely be down for continuing the Wolverine series with Laura as the all-new lead!

[mcgrannkileigh1996]

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[theresawelchy]

Optimizing walking routes to keep you in the sun or shade

Keith Ma was an Insight Fellow in Summer 2018. He is currently a data engineer at Tellus labs where he works on understanding and modeling the global crop supply. Keith is excited by the intersection of geospatial data and machine learning and the challenges unique to that area. Prior to Insight, he completed his Ph.D. in geology and geophysics at Yale.

Sun and shade have a strong impact on how many of us pick a route to the places we want to go. For me personally, direct sun is the devil himself. The point of Parasol is to leverage knowledge of the environment to help people make these decisions. This is analogous to how we use popular navigation apps like Google Maps or Waze to navigate around traffic: we want to avoid congested routes and the apps use extra information about current conditions to help us do so. The Parasol navigation app knows more about where it is sunny and shady than you do, and can help you stick to whichever is your favorite.

I built Parasol over four weeks as an independent project with Insight Data Science. I cannot recommend this fellowship highly enough. If you are a PhD considering a career in data science, apply to Insight. If you are a company looking for newly minted data scientists, become a partner.

For the interested, all of the code for this project is posted on Github at: github.com/keithfma/parasol.

TL;DR

Parasol uses high-resolution elevation data to simulate sunshine and constructs routes that keep users in the sun or shade, whichever they prefer. You can try out the app at parasol.allnans.com. Easier still, check out the demo video below:

The demo starts by finding the shortest-distance path between the Esplanade and South Station in Boston. Next, I turn on the sun/shade layer, with light colors indicating sun and dark colors indicating shade. Then, I use the sun/shade preference slider to update the route to prefer shade, and show that the resulting route is 19% longer than the shortest path and has 13% less sun. Shifting the slider to prefer sun yields a different route that is 5% longer than the shortest path with 18% more sun. Finally, I change the time-of-day and show a new best-sunny-route that is 2% longer and has 25% more sun.

The approach behind Parasol is surprisingly straightforward. First, I built a high-resolution elevation model. Next, I simulated sun/shade using the position of the sun for a given date and time to illuminate the elevation grid. Then, I computed a cost function that incorporates sun/shade as well as distance for each segment of the transportation network. Finally, I applied Dijkstra’s algorithm to compute the shortest path given this custom cost. All of this is wrapped up into a friendly web application.

To make this a little easier to follow, the figure below shows a high-level schematic of the inputs and outputs of the system. Later sections provide some insight into how I designed and implemented each part of the system.

Parasol system overview, showing the input data used to build minimum cost routes that incorporate distance and user sun/shade preference.

The input data I used:

NOAA LiDAR elevation

OpenStreetMap via Overpass API

User-supplied route endpoints and sun/shade preference

The main tools I used:

Python with all the usual data science packages

Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL)

PostgreSQL with PostGIS, pgpointcloud, and pgRouting extentions

GRASS GIS (r.sun for solar simulation)

Flask, Leaflet, Geoserver, Apache (for the web app)

Gridded Elevation from LiDAR

To run a decent shade model, I needed a decent elevation model. My goal was to build two elevation grids: one for the “upper surface” including buildings, trees, etc., and one for a “lower surface” that excludes these things. For my purposes, the sun shines on the upper surface, and the people walk on the lower.

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scan data is a near perfect data source for my application. The raw data consists of a “point cloud”, meaning a long list of (x, y, z, …) points, with a <1 meter spacing. Even better, each laser shot can have multiple returns, so that it is possible to resolve both tree top canopy and bare ground elevation.

The first challenge was separating the point cloud into upper and lower subsets (i.e., tree-tops and bare ground). There are a few well-established methods for doing so, but it turns out the LiDAR data I used were pre-classified by NOAA. As these classifications were quite good, I just used them straight out of the box.

Now I had two point clouds, but still no grids. LiDAR data are not on a nice regular grid, but rather scattered about with irregular spacing. Because there is some noise in the measured elevation, I needed to smooth (not interpolate) the raw data and then resample on a regular grid. This is trickier than one might expect, especially because features with sharp edges (e.g. buildings) are important to the sun/shade simulation. I used a nearest-neighbor median filter, which returns the median value of the k-nearest neighbors for each point on the output grid. This has the nice effect of both smoothing the noise in the data and preserving sharp edges. Median filters are common for image de-noising, but I had to implement my own to work with scattered input data. If interested, you can find the code for my nearest-neighbor median filter here — it is quite simple!

Example of the input LiDAR point cloud, and the computed upper and lower surface grids (1 meter resolution).

Simulating Sunshine

To simulate sun and shade, I use the GRASS GIS module r.sun to compute insolation on the upper surface grid for a given date and time. This simulation includes ray casting for direct sun, as well as diffuse illumination from scattered light. It is not fast, nor is it easy to use, but it gets the job done.

Simulated insolation near the Prudential Center, Boston for each hour from 5 AM — 7 PM on July 20th, 2018. Light colors indicate higher insolation. Pretty, no?

I also did a quick qualitative validation in which I compared simulated shadows to the observed shadows in high-resolution aerial photography (from the NAIP program).

Comparison of observed shadows in NAIP aerial imagery and simulated shadows created by Parasol. Comparisons like this served as a qualitative “smell test” to make sure the solar simulation worked acceptably well.

To account for shade cast by trees, I set the insolation at all pixels where the upper surface is higher than the lower surface (i.e., where the user will be walking below some object) and set it to the minimum observed insolation in the scene. A more sophisticated approach might account for sunlight angling in under the trees, or for the changing leaf cover in each season, but these features were sadly out of scope for this project.

Sun and Shade Cost

Dijkstra’s algorithm (which I used) finds minimum cost routes between nodes on a weighted graph. The weights are essentially a cost incurred for traversing between two nodes. An obvious choice for the cost in a navigation application is the distance between the nodes. For Parasol, I needed a new cost function that included sun/shade exposure in addition to distance. The key requirements for the cost function were:

Incorporate both insolation and distance

Allow for routes that prefer sun and well as routes that prefer shade

Have a minimal number of free parameters (ideally one) so that it is easy for users to indicate their preference

Be non-negative

It turns out I was able to write the cost as a simple weighted average of a “sun cost” and a “shade cost”:

cost = β⋅sun_cost + (1−β)⋅shade_cost

The weighting parameter (β) reflects a user’s preference for sun or shade. It ranges from 0 (total preference for shade) to 1 (total preference for sun).

The “sun cost” term is the path integral of the insolation along each segment of the OpenStreetMaps transportation network. This is related to the amount of sun you would absorb by walking a given segment. The beautiful thing about integrating over the length of each segment is that the cost implicitly includes the length of the segment — it is the average insolation times the segment length.

It turns out there is a problem with this super simple approach: insolation is on the order of 1000 W/m², whereas route lengths are on the order of 10 m, which means sun is much more important than distance in the total cost. From experience, I can say that this leads to some very crazy routes. To fix this problem, I rescaled the insolation to the range 0 to 1 prior to computing the cost. This amounts to giving distance and insolation equal weights in the cost function. In practice, this generates sane routes so I stopped here, but it would be very interesting to explore what scaling would lead to an “optimal” cost function. Letting I be the normalized insolation, the sun cost is:

sun_cost = ∫ₛ I ds

Moving on, the “shade cost” term is a bit weirder than the “sun cost”. It is the path integral of the reduction in insolation due to shade along each segment in the transportation network. This is related to the amount of sun avoided by the shade cast on each segment. I computed the shade cost as the difference between the maximum insolation and the observed insolation. Since the insolation is normalized (has a maximum value of 1), this amounts to:

shade_cost = ∫ₛ 1 − I ds

Example of the sun and shade cost components for the route shown in the demo video above (i.e., from the Boston Esplanade to South Station).

Here is the fun part: if the user sets β=0.5, then we recover the shortest-length path! Working this through shows that the cost in this case is just the path integral of a constant, which is proportional to the length.

cost = 0.5 ∫ₛ I ds + 0.5∫s 1 − I ds

cost = 0.5 ∫ₛ I + (1 − I) ds

cost = ∫ₛ 0.5 ds

Voila! A single-parameter cost function that allows users to choose sunny or shady routes and still cares about distance.

Routing with a Sun/Shade Cost

The heavy lifting for computing the route is handled by the wonderful PostgreSQL extension, pgRouting. This extension computes least-cost routes using a variety of algorithms (I used Dijkstra) and allows the user to specify the cost as a function of the columns in an OpenStreetMap database. All I had to do was to store the computed sun and shade cost for each segment of the transport network in my database, choose the right column to use based on the time of day, and apply my simple cost equation.

Web App

I won’t go into the details, but I set up the web app using Python and Flask to host an API with endpoints for generating routes, etc., used Leaflet with a few wonderful extensions to build an interactive map, and hosted the sun/shade simulation images using Geoserver.

Next Steps

My biggest hope for Parasol is that the idea catches some traction and gets picked up and integrated into one (or more!) of the many wonderful navigation apps out there in the wild. A few things I had hoped to tackle but ran out of time for are:

Use sidewalks rather than roads for routing. While OpenStreetMaps includes special tags for sidewalks, coverage is woefully incomplete. This is problematic because Parasol is not able to advise users to take advantage of streets where one sidewalk is shady. A few ways to go about this might be to (1) try to synthesize a sidewalk graph, or (2) adjust the sun and shade costs to follow the best side of each street.

Adjust shade to account for seasonal tree cover. It is definitely possible to identify trees from the LiDAR data, and the shade cast by these trees could be adjusted based on the season. Even better, it is probably possible to use satellite imagery to drive the timing of the change.

Better ray casting! I used GRASS GIS, which worked fine, but it would likely be better to take advantage of the wonderful machinery that drives modern computer graphics instead. An additional benefit would be that the LiDAR could be converted to a proper 3D model, rather than an elevation grid, and the ray casting could handle the edges of obstructing objects better.

Interested in transitioning to a career in data science? Find out more about the Insight Data Science Fellows Program in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Toronto. Apply today, or sign up for program updates.

Originally published at http://www.allnans.com/jekyll/update/2018/08/07/introducing-parasol.html on August 7, 2018.

[xavierdominico-blog]

My review of League of Legends

We initially reviewed League of Legends at 2009, when it initially introduced. It's changed significantly since that time, so much that we chose to review it .

What can it be?

She understands I am there. She just can not see me entering the shrubbery too --nullifying her array edge and letting me shut in with my Aquaman-esque trident. So rather, the Caitlyn participant requires a potshot to the field having a skill that hurts in a direct line; no targeting demanded.

It is sufficient to kill my diminished winner Fizz in 1 hit. Additionally, it is exactly what I have been awaiting. Fizz can pogo jump on his trident, which makes him immune to these led attacks, and jump forward in a destructive slam. I utilize the momentum to dodge Caitlyn's burst and shut the space she wished to keep. One lunging strike afterwards, the contested is dead in the dirt, and a soul of gold and experience points just prepares me farther for another battle.

Such tense one-on-one, do-or-die struggles happen in each League of Legends game, however the adrenaline in these minutes makes them memorable. League is a lens which amplifies every emotion about the spectrum.

Every game is like a whole multiplayer action-RPG condensed into 20-to-50 moments. Each player begins with only control of one unit and one particular ability. They are divided into two teams of five and let loose from each other within a top battlefield. Smiting enemy components in real time makes experience and gold, which grant access to stronger abilities and a selection of better equipment. The group that wins is the group that best leverages its components' specific strengths.

Your final aim is to destroy the opposing group's headquarters. The combating largely occurs across three streets leading to every"Nexus." Each path is safeguarded by AI sentinels and individual players distressed to warrant their own use of free time.

I really don't blame them. In addition, I need my in-game announcer to yell"success" and warrant the strain and valuable life span I invested demolishing virtual warriors and towers. I would like to feel like becoming flanked and murdered five occasions in the first half hour has been worthwhile to get your own last-minute push into enemy land that cinches the triumph --because I had the foresight to decide on a late-game winner made to return from behind. The psychological investment in these strategic gambles is increased by the period of the games, raising the high of success, while creating every minimal texture that much lesser . It is a recipe for both friends and perfect strangers to flip their frustration on every other, including a private layer to each perplexing loss.

League of Legends' pay-per-character business version pushes against mastering the sport and knowing how its winners play.

Every game you re-dedicate to playing an important role on a staff, such as support or tank, attempting to accrue experience, cash and rewarding player kills quicker than another group. Nevertheless, the actual investment in League of Legends goes far beyond this. You can find 140 playable characters and climbing. That is not even such as passives from mix-and-match runes, or charms which may be outfitted in front of a game begins.Between the absolute scale of factors at play, and League's well-documented toxicity (even the match's own programmers are not resistant to it), it is among the most daunting matches ever.

League does little to alleviate any of the strain. Allowing countless gamers to become civil is a demanding, probably Sisyphean endeavor, but easing players to League's sophistication needs to be more viable eight years following launch. This is the way you pick a winner. This is the way you buy them a wonderful pair of sneakers. This type of thing. Where it's flounders, or barely even attempts to help in any way, is in describing when and why you need to apply those principles to some given situation.

League of Legends' pay-per-character business version pushes contrary to mastering the sport and knowing how its winners play. It is going to take you a few decades of grinding, the greater part of a million bucks, or a mixture of both to unlock the entire roster indefinitely. There is a weekly rotation of free personalities, also, but not one of those choices compare to on-the-job instruction. When I get crushed by Ryze, for example, I could spit over his kit beyond the match, but nothing is a true stand-in for understanding the way he manages under my index finger.

This free-to-play version remains a significant impediment into LoL's availability --and of course its'innocence' as an esports occurrence --and a few strange UI options do not help, either. You can not analyze a winner's skills from the select display, as an example. Likewise, you can not peruse an opposing player's abilities mid-match.

But if you work beyond the competitive team conversation and devote an whole lobe of your mind to memorizing movement rate and cooldown timers, League's high highs return quite lots of lost ground. I have developed the patience to just start Brand's fiery, bouncing death-ball if it is certain to ricochet off each enemy winner.

At its finest, League of Legends is aggressive, high-energy mathematics. Maintaining your attack damage take, the staff tasked with pumping out constant damage in large staff struggles, in one of 3 lanes to soak up gold and experience points may only provide you the increased amount. Then again, possibly moving them about to land the profitable killing blow squishy, defenseless affirms is your thing to do.

At its finest, League of Legends is aggressive, high-energy mathematics.

Success is not only a prefabricated strategy coming together. The understanding that reside human beings are supporting the track, inventing their own approaches to prevent me, means that I have well and truly outplayed individuals of apparently similar ability.

And thanks to League's relatively speedy action--only marginally twitchier than Dota two's yawning chess games and a hair more than Heroes of the Storm's blatantly accessible skirmishes--there is an awareness of physical domination, also. Among the most powerful jelqing in Dota, as an instance, continues for a maximum of five minutes. A very similar ability at League of Legends shirts out at roughly two-thirds of this. When I am overly fussy to step from the manner of Ashe's knockout strike in League (each time), I am back to ditching magic missiles that far quicker. If I reside.

As games advancement, things purchased with hard-won gold create player-versus-player struggles more prevalent and ferocious. The Dark Cleaver, a key in-game thing for Illaoi, among my favourite winners, supplies a wonderful cushion of wellness and a few attack power. Maybe more incredibly, the chopper also slows down its wielder's skills significantly quicker. So do a number of different products.

The consequent shorter period between spell casting raises the speed of struggle without taking away the attention from specified character abilities. I understand Illaoi summons ghostly tentacles together with her passive capability. Things like the Dark Cleaver simply call the tendrils to my help faster, and allow Illaoi reach harder in between. They seldom ask me to recall over her fundamental spells.

So while getting into League takes a lot of memorization, mastering it's much more about finesse. Every player begins every game with limited tools. The wiggle room for outdoing competitions is largely found in response time and accuracy. Or you may be playing just and your competitors, but losing anyhow.

The solution is that it does not. It is simply not necessarily the same clique of favorite children month .

That altering assortment of S-tier selections, bans, and personality builds is known as the meta, and I have always known League's to become only slightly narrow. When a specified strategy functions, it has a tendency to work really well, and the top echelons of aggressive play cling to it for dear life.

In 2017, it had been the insufferable tank . Immortal abominations such as Dr. Mundo and Maokai spent this age whomping each other with the seriousness of a Nerf war whilst dragging out every game to double its normal span.

Twice monthly spots make small but significant changes to the mathematics behind the mayhem. Each such alteration nudges optimal champion options in 1 direction or another, but there is essentially never a totally level playing field.

There is always a possibility the numbers will tell you to decide on a specific tank or support which simply does not strike your fancy. That is a simple fact of life in almost any aggressive game. However, League's often slender circle of top-tier winners restricts those choices even further. And because you do not have access to each given champ in any particular time, you might be stuck using the lemons of this meta until grinding enough humorous cash to rejoin the contest.

That should not matter much in casual sport buffoonery. Teamwork and ability are the higher factors . There is an all-random winners manner for people who would rather have silly fun with charm slinging. But if I am currently dedicating myself into League's learning curve, then I need the guaranteed payoff of a correctly tactical brawl. Along with also the'principles' of this meta that begin at professional drama finally trickle down to my degree. It is absolute candy for each armchair analyst seeking to blame for their loss on anybody but themselves.

I have been advised to not play my favourite wizards for this very reason. I have been told my triumph did not count since I was being"cheap" I have seen new players leave games since a noxious teammate always blamed their inexperience to get a ruined turret. Nevermind that everyone started someplace. As frequently, it is another crack for this notorious rust to float in.

A certain type of variety Luckily, League of Legends includes a great range of fantastical weirdos to select from. Illaoi is my existing go-to: a brawny, squid-worshipping priestess that siphons enemy spirits with a large, iron skull.

Not all the character style is that trendy.

There is nothing inherently wrong with hot personalities, but League's devotion to girls with a slender and busty body kind feels on par with these pop-up advertisements for sexy Clash of all Clans clones. It is a disappointing position quo for winners that typically play with in interesting ways. The musically inclined Sona, for example, sports a superbly challenging mixture of service abilities that vary based on the sequence she uses .

Every smart shortcut involving lanes, or tap of the key that a nanosecond quicker than your competitor feels like a triumph.

It is that variety of drama which produces LoL so intriguing. Sure, maybe not every winner or spell functions in addition to others on paper. But there is a seemingly endless flow of these to attempt . Say Fizz had neglected me contrary to Caitlyn. Maybe I could teleport from the way as Ezreal, or halt the attack from happening by magnificent Caitlyn with New (Correction: a previous version of the review misstated among Jinx's skills ). League's strong roster is among the greatest strategic toyboxes readily available now. Odds are you will never cease being amazed by the amazing ways that your human foes utilize them to slide past and creep upon you. You will surprise yourself, also.

Maybe League of Legends is becoming only a little complacent in the decades since it established. The sexed-up costumes and obstacles to entry feel as the goods of a rather major game which has not had to increase its viewers in some moment. But breaking beyond those issues finally rewards new gamers with grand, amazing complexity. Every smart shortcut involving lanes, or tap of the key that a nanosecond quicker than your competitor feels like a triumph. League makes these minutes downright ordinary, but barely less special for this. And its always changing roster means there is another suggestion simply waiting to slip up your sleeve.

[3ezentrum3-blog]

Chronotherapy Helps Lung Cancer Patient on the Road to Recovery

Margaret Olszowka was determined to have lung disease on New Year's Eve, 2002. The guess was exceptionally dismal: her sickness had progressed to Stage 4 and was inoperable. Specialists at an exceptionally understood college healing facility advised her there was nothing they could improve the situation her. They didn't offer chemotherapy as an alternative; she was advised she had a very long time to live. Nonetheless, rather than surrendering, she chose she would battle the ailment, and at last discovered her approach to growth expert, Keith Block, MD, where she got chronotherapy as a feature of her treatment design. Today, she is doing and making the most of her two kids and six grandkids. She needs the world to think about the part chronotherapy played in her survival with expectations of helping other tumor patients.

What is chronotherapy?

Chronotherapy considers how our body's characteristic rhythms' effect our capacity to process drugs. Examples like resting, menstrual cycles, even our physical reaction to the evolving seasons, are distinctive for everybody. In the days of yore we called these biorhythms. Today, specialists are finding that understanding a patient's biorhythms, and organizing the planning of their restorative medications to these biorhythms, can significantly influence the result of their medicines. This is designated "chronotherapy."

"Each medication has an ideal time when it is slightest lethal and best." says Keith Block, MD, editorial manager in-head of the companion checked on diary Integrative Cancer Therapies, and Clinical Professor, Department of Medical Education, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago (UIC), and at the Department of Pharmacology. For malignancy treatment, this is controlled by a few components, including the organic uniqueness of the specific medication being given, the time when the particular kind of disease cells isolate the most, when the typical sound cells of the patient for the most part partition the minimum, the patient's circadian clock and individual rest-movement cycles, and even the time zone the individual lives in."

As per Dr. Michael Smolensky, co-writer of the book The Body Clock Guide to Better Health, "When growth solutions are given in a chronobiological way, patients might have the capacity to endure higher, more powerful measurements than would be conceivable something else."

"This technique for regulating chemotherapy is progressive and has shown in substantial randomized preliminaries its capability to enhance survival," states Dr. Square. "We have discovered that regularly patients accepting chronotherapy diminish what might have been repeating symptoms of queasiness, retching, looseness of the bowels, and exhaustion. This is vital in light of the fact that the weakening caused by chemo can make patients lessen or even stop medicines that could some way or another assistance them win their fight with disease."

Chronotherapy is in effect generally looked into around the globe:

There are more than 62,000 references in PubMed (the National Institute of Health's document of biomedical and life sciences diary articles) about chronobiology (how science is influenced by timing) and more than 500 logical articles particularly about chronotherapy. The National Cancer Institute's Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM) gave a whole web cast for specialists on chronotherapy.

So for what reason isn't chronotherapy utilized all the more broadly?

One of the principle issues has been coordinations - making sense of how to convey chemotherapy in precisely planned measurements. "Versatile implantation pumps may hold the appropriate response," clarifies Gerald Sokol, MD, an oncologist with the division of oncology in FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Dr. Square has conveyed innovation to the U.S. that manages chemotherapy by means of a draw intended to exactly time up to four channels of implantation at the same time to the individual needs of a patient. Profoundly compact and sufficiently little to fit in a fanny pack, patients can keep up full versatility, play sports, and appreciate an entire night's rest - while getting their particularly planned tumor treatment.

Leni Kass has been composing and altering articles for different media outlets for as far back as 8 years. She is prime supporter and CEO of Hey U.G.L.Y., Inc. NFP, a 501c3 philanthropic association that engages youngsters with confidence building instruments, to enable them to counter difficulties, for example, dietary problems, tormenting, brutality, substance manhandle and suicide. U.G.L.Y. is an acronym that stands for Unique Gifted Lovable You. Site: http://www.heyugly.org

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