#would chuck norris even exist in their world?

[mvltifxndomchaos]

George: What is the best number? By the way, there's only one correct answer. Kipps: 5,318,008? George: Wrong. The best number is 73. [short silence] You're probably wondering why. Lucy & Lockwood: No, no, we're good. George: 73 is the 21st prime number, its mirror 37 is the 12th and its mirror 21 is the product of multiplying, hang on to your hats, 7 and 3. Did I lie? Lockwood: We get it. 73 is the Chuck Norris of numbers. George: Chuck Norris wishes. In binary, 73 is a palindrome, 1001001, which backwards is 1001001, exactly the same. All Chuck Norris gets you backwards is Sirron Kcuhc. Kipps: Just for the record, when you enter 5,318,008 in a calculator, upside down it spells boobies.

[laurasauras]

rose lalonde. that's it, that's the question.

isn't it just! god i love rose.

it's that she's one of those girls who pretends she has it all together, who thinks she's worth more because she is witty and can come up with brilliant burns exactly on cue, but she's also the girl who pretended her cat could talk to her and who would pretend to have a magnetic W as a mustache and is 13 and was probably making potions in the mud with a stick last week.

she's as cool and calm as a forest pond, and you know there are depths there but you assume those depths are things like "can commune with gods (really)" and "maybe she's telling the truth when she says she's read proust". and then you're 14 and so is she and you're finding out that the depths are "she learned how to cope with being bored and isolated and doomed from a mother she maybe shouldn't have forgiven".

and oh, i have all the pity in the world for momlonde. how awful to be put on this planet to raise a child who will end the world before creating a new one? how could you make friends under those circumstances, knowing they would all die because of what the universe has planned for your little girl? how could you sleep at night knowing that at the very least she'll be traumatised, but it's much more likely that she'll just be dead.

but rose didn't know any of that.

rose just knew that her mother wasn't around, not even to make sure she had the capacity to feed herself, let alone making sure that she was.

she knew that if she screamed that she wanted to kill herself or jammed needles in a (dead) powerpoint, her mother wouldn't talk to her, but she might be given a pony or something.

she knew that the only time her mother was around was when she was drunk, and when she was drunk she would be able to tell rose that she loved her and that she was perfect, and maybe she was merry or maybe she was crying but whatever it was, it was fucking hard to trust. because being sober next to a drunk person's sincerity is unbearable. you know that if they weren't drunk they wouldn't be crying or saying all of that, so it doesn't fucking count. and if you were so perfect and loved, then why would she even need to drink. you're 10 years old and you're supposed to be the centre of your mother's whole life, but you're not and you never have been. you're just the inconvenient kid she remembers when her breath stinks and she can't pronounce your name anymore.

and when you're 14 and she's dead and you're staring at the code you found while trying to make apple juice for someone who is your family (but you can't express your love for him), you remember being 4 and standing in her high heels, your ankles barely poking out of the toe of the shoe. and now they fit pretty damn well.

you're on a journey you can't speed up, knowing that at the end of all this bullshit that doesn't matter the people closest to you might be hurt, might be dead, and the air smells just a little bit doomed ... and in that golden window after two drinks but before five, your mom was charming and funny and beautiful, and she could actually say what she felt. if you're going on your first date with a woman who might make the meaningless tedium worth it, maybe you could use a little of that.

BUT ROSE ISN'T JUST HER TRAUMA!

Rose Is The Flame I Am Drawn To. She Makes Me Feel More Alive Just By Glancing At Me. I Am Bewitched By Her Intelligence And Electrified By Her Humour And Devoted To Her, Just Her, Everything That She Is

rose acts like shes a princess and like the rest of us should feel grateful that she even notices we exist but when you get down to it no one carries a bit like her. she matches me every goddamn step no matter what and she gets what its like to care without making some kind of deal about it

rose is just kind of a dork. it's funny how everyone thinks she's scary. okay, so in a battle between chuck norris and rose lalonde, chuck is going home crying about his kicked nuts and his mommy issues, but just because rose is badass doesn't mean she isn't also the kind of girl who snorts milk through her nose laughing at me pretending to be a walrus with breadsticks. last week. we are 40.

(dear god i'm sorry about the inaccuracy of those text colours, it hurts me too)

so yeah. rose lalonde. that's it, that's the answer.

[divine-motion]

i’m having more of my tmnt au/2012 rewrite-ish thing so i’m gonna post this doodle of Karai and Leonardo bc it also summarizes one problem i have with 2012 and then the rest of my thoughts will be under keep reading

if you can’t read my handwriting/the quality of the phone picture is too bad: Karai: You ever think about how we’re in this mess just because our dads were fighting over a girl? Leonardo: ...... Y. Yeah. All the time.

yeah so obviously i don’t really like the reason for The central conflict of the series and shredder’s motivation to begin with, especially when they put in a much better reason in his backstory but still focused on “gorl didn’t like me back :(”

like really this guy devotes his life to revenge, kidnaps his niece, tries to murder several children, allies himself with colonizing aliens, and literally dooms the earth to destruction all because... he’s an incel. like i do like how crazy devoted he is to his revenge bc i love that stuff but with this it’s just kind of funny when it’s not supposed to be. so! i would change his motivation to what it should have been and is actually in the show, namely: the whole thing about the Hamato Clan taking him in as a baby after they launched a devastating assault on a Foot Clan village, where they found him.

they do add in a little bit of it but. it should’ve been his main motivation, not just an extra thing! it could’ve even made him something of a sympathetic villain! like how i would’ve done it, he finds out about his origins as being part of the Foot Clan and the fate of his home village, and is enraged that he’s been lied to his whole life. he questions the honor of the Hamato Clan since they clearly attacked civilians - this was a village, and there were clearly kids there, he wonders if he really was the only child there and how many were not given the same mercy he did - and his family were apparently killed in the attack. so he confronts his brother yoshi about it (not sure if i’d have yoshi know about it or not but his reaction remains the same). saki expresses his desire to have revenge, tear the Hamato Clan down since he doesn’t believe that it deserves to continue to exist, but that doesn’t mean yoshi has to die too, and asks yoshi to join him. of course, since saki wants to kill yoshi’s dad as revenge, yoshi refuses, the two fight, tang shen jumps between, house burns down, big ol’ domino brick effect.

i think he still has feelings for tang shen and while he’s jealous he leaves it be and remains best friends with tang shen, and her death at his hand drives him further off the edge. he takes in miwa/karai partially as a way to make it up to tang shen, though he knows it’s not enough. oh and also as a dramatic irony/more revenge against the Hamato Clan since that’s exactly what they did to him.

while he is entirely dedicated to eradicating the Hamato Clan he gets more and more obsessed with revenge as the story goes on. like i’m thinking of having leo and karai suggest a truce between the Foot and the turtles with the Kraang threat afoot and shredder actually ends up accepting bc he agrees they can’t let the Kraang win. maybe more bc he genuinely cares abt karai in his own way and wants there to be a world for her to grow up in (even though at this point she’s been trained as an assassin for her entire childhood but. well. he’s still a villain yanno. “this is how my adoptive parents treated me when i was growing up, i don’t see what the problem is.” “your parents who you hate?” “yeah. what of it.”). but then, later on, he would become entirely obsessed with revenge and not care about anything else that happens, probably after killing splinter and finding it brought him no peace or satisfaction

seriously what’s up with 2012 allying with the Kraang. how do you see that working out for you sir. sure he was expecting a betrayal but. still.

of course he takes opportunity of the truce to steal mutagen and Kraang tech while they can and makes sure to make use of the fact that the turtles can’t interfere in his business to make more weapon deals and gain more territory.

... hmm... i could... have tang shen live... potentially surviving the wound... and she and yoshi both believe that miwa perished in the fire, and they either get divorced or they both move to usa together and then yoshi gets mutated and tang shen is left alone, not knowing that her husband turned into a giant rat... i mean that’s just a potential thing. it sounds a little bit melodramatic and contrived but i think tang shen should get to survive sometimes and making splinter Epic Divorce Man would be funny. i dunno just a thought!

while we’re on the topic of Foot Clan stuff i might as well talk a little about other Foot Clan goons

bebop and rocksteady join way earlier. i care them ok. not sure if they’d still be anton zeck and steranko... idw and bay movies are peak bopsteady ok, and i like them being friends from the start! also for design changes i just don’t agree with bebop being skinny. he’s fat :)

Xever doesn’t get mutated, i like his human design more and there are, what, three major black characters in 2012 and they’re all villains and all get mutated? let xever be human!! he’d also be a bit more of a major and respected villain, a very Neutral Evil type, and makes a point to show he’s out for himself and for his own survival. if possible he’ll try to talk his way out of situations when he can and speaks in support of the truce i mentioned earlier because he’d prefer it if the earth was still inhabitable. karai proclaims that he is her favorite among her dad’s cringe henchmen but the only thing they bond over is their mutual disdain of bradford. he just thinks karai is kind of a brat, if a very skilled and dangerous brat.

while bradford/rahzar is a fairly formidable threat, there would be more emphasis on how pathetic he is. he’s chuck norris so he deserves it. also he’s like a 50 year old guy who acts so entirely devoted to shredder who’s. what. 39 years old? 40? he deserves to be dragged more

i’m thinking mr baxter stockman wouldn’t be mutated either, i like his human design a lot too. he would also be much less of a loser in this rewrite since bradford would take that role. instead, he’s just... an absurdly normal genius scientist/engineering guy who happens to be part of a really evil crime organization full of evil ninjas. he’s polite and eccentric, happy to have someone who finally funds his many inventions and experiments, even if that someone happens to be someone literally called The Shredder. however, while he is a nice man, he is rather impatient when people rush him with inventions. whenever shredder tries his usual “if you fail there will be consequences” it just doesn’t work bc baxter points out that failure is part of the process and that shredder absolutely needs him to make the inventions shredder wants.

karai is weirded out by baxter the most bc he just seems so normal

later on when karai goes double-agent to try and take the Foot Clan down from the inside: i trust baxter the least leo: it’s the sweater isn’t it karai: it’s just so pink, i can’t stop looking at it whenever we’re having an Evil Ninja Crime Organization meeting! do you know the tonal dissonance of seeing him next to The Shredder? and listening to shredder speak in grunts and growls while baxter just keeps a chipper tone?? i don’t think i’ve ever used the word chipper to describe someone before but with him, it’s the only word i can think of!!! leo: he is disarmingly pleasant. karai: right!!! he looks more like someone’s wacky dad!! the other day he literally told me a dad joke. i felt like i was light-headed

i don’t think i’d change tiger claw very much, if at all. maybe make him a little less invincible at times, and a little more regretful of the outcome with alopex.

i have more thoughts but this is. already several walls of text so i’ll end this nonsense post here

[starlight-ascension]

10 Years Later

The year is 2025. Haruka has just returned from a night dancing with Minami, still singing and twirling in her ball gown. 

Of course, they do it once every summer, and sometimes during holidays. Dress up in ball gowns and tiaras in the evening, drive to Minami’s mansion in a car decorated to look like a white horse, and enter the celebration room which is decorated to resemble a fairytale ballroom, complete with cutouts of princes and princesses. The two pretend to be princesses of neighbouring kingdoms at the royal ball, and they dance the night away, singing romantic duets, sneaking out to the gardens, discussing kingdom affairs in a way that actually has a coherent plot line, and talking for hours. 

The two are planning for the proposal to involve this princess roleplay. 

Minami’s butler just goes along with it. It is entertaining to be dragged into being a side character in your mistress and her girlfriend’s fairy tale LARPing. Unknown to anyone, he’s imagined in some really epic stuff with his own character, who was directly involved in numerous things in the plotline and has a pretty crazy life outside of being a servant to the princess of the seaside kingdom. 

Kirara did attend one of these two-person parties before, and she too wore an elaborate ballgown and tiara and pretended to be a princess. But she’s got a lot to do, and can’t often visit the girls outside of their nightly video chat. After all, Kirara is one of the most famous supermodels in the world. She was on the cover of the spring 2025 issue of the world’s biggest fashion magazine, and she’s appeared in the most famous fashion shows and events and the hardest ones to get into, several times. She’s also been on several of those TV shows that bring in celebrities. She’s one of the celebrities who’s loved by the internet for her chaotic energy, with Tumblr posts about how “i can see Kirara doing literally anything” “what do you mean you DREAMED that, this is exactly something Kirara would say/do” “today on Kirara Retweeted (insert meme or shitpost)” “God should fear Kirara” etc. 

Minami has achieved her dream, much to the excitement of her teammates. But we knew that from the timeskip in episode 50. 

Meanwhile in Hope Kingdom, Queen Towa is assisting in research on how to make the bridge between worlds reappear. She never forgot her team, and for a while hoped that Kirara hasn’t forgotten her or found another girl. Then she learned Kirara hasn’t. The two daydream of seeing each other once more, after what they both believed was hopeless became within grasp when they shared a dream which then showed the bridge beginning to reappear for a moment. So far, they’ve made only small amounts of progress, but it’s progress- and the team might manage to reunite once more if it works. Kanata is almost as enthusiastic as Towa over this, and he helps her with everything.  Of course, Towa does still text her team, but their group chat is no substitute for doing things together. And they might be able to hang out together again soon. 

Yui’s book was a best-selling hit. Yui is now on a tour, answering fan questions and signing books. Every now and then, she responds to questions with something cryptic, and subtly implies that the fiction isn’t just fiction. Every now and then, her friends send her memes about her badassery, lifted wholesale from ancient Chuck Norris memes they dug up from long-running websites. She just laughs at the memes. It’s now an inside joke with the 5 of them to take Chuck Norris memes and edit them to be about Yui. The exception here being Kirara, who’s like “guys... Shaggy memes exist, are easier to find, and don’t use outdated formats.” She’s eternally puzzled as to why the others never think of editing Shaggy memes. She does it anyways, even if they don’t. 

Miss Siamour is as awesome and fabulous as ever. #queen

(you know what, let’s just say that fairies live longer than the animals they’re based off of. Coppe is still alive after fighting alongside Kaoruko when she was 17, there’s proof that precure fairies live longer than normal pets. No fairy-killing here.) Anyways, Puff is nearly an adult now.  

Life is awesome. 

[recentanimenews]

IN-DEPTH: How The God of High School Revealed the True, Weird History of Taekwondo

  If, like me, you found yourself yearning for some physical activity and breaks from the tedium of schoolwork as a kid, you might have found yourself wanting to learn some martial arts. Watching action stars like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, as well as anime, playing fighting games and more, left me with an interest in learning a martial art myself. I found myself at the door of a local Taekwondo school and was instantly hooked. Sadly, like many things, time and obligations got in the way and I had to give up my pursuit of martial arts, but I always found the subject interesting. When I started reading The God of High School, I was instantly hooked by the idea that Jin Mori used Taekwondo, but suddenly, I found myself questioning things: What did they mean, that there were multiple types of Taekwondo? Wasn’t all Taekwondo the same? What was “Renewal Taekwondo” and was it a real thing? The answer to that question is... sort of. Also: There are some light spoilers here! Be warned!

    In The God of High School, the revelation that Jin practices “Renewal Taekwondo” serves as a shock to the cast, particularly the Judges and Park Mujin, as it reveals the fact that Jin’s grandfather, Jin Taejin, was not only still alive, but that he had passed on the incredibly powerful skills of Renewal Taekwondo to someone else. At this point in the anime, the reveal has played out far differently, although there’s no telling whether this might change as the anime progresses. We do know that Jin uses Renewal Taekwondo, but we don’t get the same backstory and discussion revolving around Jin’s grandfather, and the past regarding Taekwondo itself. In the WEBTOON series, Park Mujin reveals that “Renewal Taekwondo” was created by South Korean leaders following a defeat at the hands of North Korean “ITF” Taekwondo. And, suddenly, my childhood came back to me: I had learned “WT” Taekwondo, so what was “ITF?” Was it just something the web comic made up, like “Renewal Taekwondo?” As it turns out, this particular rabbit hole went a whole lot deeper, and weirder, than I ever imagined. 

    Perhaps the first, and most shocking, fact regarding Taekwondo is that it is less than 100 years old. Many historians agree there is some fluidity to a solid date, but as 4th Dan David Lo notes, Taekwondo likely began formally in 1955, when General Choi Hong-Hi named it after developing the first basic forms of the martial art. While many other popular martial arts, such as Karate, Tai Chi, or Kung-Fu often discuss their proud, long lineages, Taekwondo is often mistakenly assumed to be ancient; in fact, it is only perhaps somewhat related to Taekkyeon, which was nearly wiped out during Japanese occupation. After World War II, the Japanese occupation of Korea came to an end. During the occupation, Japan was particularly cruel to Koreans, suppressing their language, culture, and identity — extending this treatment to martial arts practitioners were forced to quit or go into hiding while Japanese Karate was taught instead. Taekwondo would come from the confluence of various martial arts, having more in common with Karate, mostly due to the violent banning of Korean culture. 

  Combining their knowledge with new techniques in Shotokan karate, Kung-Fu, and others, would begin to create schools, or “Kwans,” which would give rise to what we today recognize as Taekwondo. Scott Shaw, one of the eminent English authors and students of Taekwondo, explains the genealogy of the first 5, and subsequent 4, Kwans; these Kwans were fairly diverse, with nine divergent approaches and teachers developing their own takes on martial arts. In many cases, historians consider Song Moo Kwan the Kwan most responsible for eventual Taekwondo, with Byung Jik Ro called by some as the “father” of “modern” Taekwondo (more on that later) the original five Kwans — Song Moo Kwan, Chung Do Kwan, Moo Duk Kwan, Ji Do Kwan, and Chang Moo Kwan — were the birthplace of Taekwondo, but it would take another war, and social and cultural upheaval for Taekwondo to really emerge.

    Song Moo Kwan and Chung Do Kwan were founded in 1944, with the other 5 founding Kwans appearing in the following 2 years. If we start Taekwondo’s timeline there, that means Taekwondo is only 76 years old (meaning there’s a good chance your grandparents might actually be older than Taekwondo!), but the “real” birth of Taekwondo would come a fair bit after these Kwans were founded. For that to happen, Korea would be forced into another protracted battle that would decide the course of its modern fate, and the dispersal of Taekwondo to the rest of the world: The Korean War. 

  Separating the country along the 38th parallel into what are today known as North Korea and South Korea, this civil war shaped Korea’s modern history in cataclysmic ways, separating family members, friends, and cultural identity. Like many aspects of Korean life, Taekwondo found itself straddling an uncomfortable and unclear line: The original Kwans were spread out across the Korean peninsula, with Song Moo Kwan being in what would now be North Korea. Following the Korean war, this would lead perhaps the most controversial figure in Taekwondo history to emerge: General Choi Hong Hi, the true “father” of Taekwondo.

    Alex Gillis' A Killing Art reveals the life, warts and all, of General Choi. Born in 1918 in Hwa Dae (located in now North Korea), General Choi Hong Hi was sent to Japan by his father to study, ending up in the tutelage of Han Il Dong, a master of Taekkyeon, one of Korea’s oldest martial arts. Forced into military service by the Japanese, Choi would eventually find himself continuing to serve in the Korean military following the end of World War II and Japanese occupation, earning the title of major general in 1954 (and thus earning him both his title and nickname, “The general”). 

  Choi’s mastery of Taekkyeon and Shotokan karate led him to develop what he titled “Taekwon-Do,” or “foot, fist, art.” Choi is, as far as historians can tell, the first person to use the word “Taekwondo,” and rightfully seems to deserve the title. The controversy, however, comes from the disagreements between Choi (who, some authors note, was somewhat disagreeable and even deceptive) and other Kwan leaders and Taekwondo practitioners. This would lead to the eventual creation, and split, of Taekwondo into ITF and WT schools, among many other offshoots.

    Whether Choi was or wasn’t a deceptive and deceitful person seems to be based on who you ask, and the most common perception of him was that he was complicated (as are we all). What authors and historians such as Lo, Gillis, Shaw, and others agree on is that without General Choi, there would be no Taekwondo, and the subsequent power struggle nearly destroyed, as Lo calls it, the “family” of Taekwondo. While it is perhaps more palatable to consider martial arts as monastic and scholarly, the reality is that they are practiced, created, and influenced by people, and Taekwondo’s somewhat ugly and public schism is a great reminder of this. Choi originally founded the ITF, or International Taekwon-Do Federation, in 1966; however, Choi’s attempts to control all aspects of Taekwon-Do, and the South Korean government’s insistence on “owning” Taekwondo, would create the split that saw Choi flee from Korea to Canada and South Korea creating the KTA (Korean Taekwondo Association), which would eventually give way to the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF, now known as WT), under the governing body of the Kukkiwon. 

  In the ITF version of this story, Choi simply decided to go “on tour” in 1959, before eventually creating the ITF in 1966. The WT version of the story is just as revisionist, claiming that Taekwondo has roots that supposedly go back 2000 years and that the WT was created in 1973 as the first governing body of Taekwondo. No mention of Choi or the ITF exists in the WT version of Taekwondo. Udo Moening, author of numerous papers about Taekwondo’s cultural and social significance, helps explain the disparity between these two stories by noting that Taekwondo is as much an object of political importance to the identity of Korea as it is a form of martial skill and discipline. Simply put, Moening argues, Taekwondo became a piece of the struggle for identity between South Korea and North Korea, and the eventual race to Olympic recognition would become a major victory in this battle for the WT and South Korea. 

    The schism in Taekwondo (or Taekwon-Do, in ITF’s usage) is perhaps even more interesting in the sense that one did not immediately replace the other; instead of the WT supplanting the ITF, the two schools of Taekwondo went about their own paths. Yet, Kukkiwon managed to obtain a significant victory over Choi and ITF Taekwondo: inclusion in the Olympics. In 1982, Kukkiwon was able to arrange a demonstration of Taekwondo for the IOC in 1988 and became an official event during the Asian Games in 1986. In 1994, Kukkiwon “won” the competition for Taekwondo legitimacy by being selected by the IOC as an official sport of the Olympics, joining Judo as the only other Asian martial art in the Olympic games, and debuting in the 2000 games in Australia. 

  Choi, however, had won in another way: his ITF Taekwondo spread across the world, and his somewhat ingenious method of sending Taekwondo “acolytes” to various places to form their own schools helped make Taekwondo popular and profitable. There are other forms of Taekwondo out there, including ATA (American Taekwondo Association), Jhoon Rhee Style, and the GTF (Global Taekwondo Federation), a split from ITF. Chuck Norris, during the height of his popularity in the '90s, even formed his own school that blended Tang Soo Do and Taekwondo called Chun Kuk Do!

    While Choi was successful in spreading Taekwondo around the globe, and South Korea was able to claim “ownership” of the sport through political engineering and historical revision, Taekwondo in the United States would owe much of its growth and popularity to a different individual: Jhoon Rhee. Rhee, learning Taekwondo at the Chung Do Kwan in his childhood, came to America in the '60s to study engineering. Needing some extra money, Rhee began teaching Taekwondo, and through luck and hard work, launched the popularity of the martial art in the United States via television and Hollywood. Like all good and weird success stories, Rhee gained fame from his “viral” '70s commercial jingle, written by Nils Lofgren, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band! 

  Rhee’s unconventional approach to success worked, taking his Taekwondo to both of America’s hearts: Hollywood and Washington DC. Rhee would go on to teach and demonstrate Taekwondo to various celebrities including Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee — even writing a book, Bruce Lee and I, in 2011. He also met with President Reagan and famously demonstrated Taekwondo to the United States Congress in 1965. There was even a sparring match between Republicans and Democrats! 

    But what do all of these different types of Taekwondo actually mean? When I was practicing, did I learn “the wrong” type? Well, the answer is… no! The major difference in schools seems to come down to forms, ranks, and some other small administrative differences — such as who can spar, and why, or what types of focus there is in learning Taekwondo in general. Perhaps due to the odd nature of Taekwondo’s spread outside of Korea, the sport is also highly “commercial;” the ATA and Jhoon Rhee schools, for example, were founded on the idea of both teaching the sport and also establishing chain schools that would funnel profits back to the original founders, essentially creating a business instead of the somewhat monastic idea of a martial art like the Kung-Fu or Karate that appear in movies and media. 

  As noted by Doug Cook, the forms, of Poomsae, are constantly changing, due in part to the various types and hybrids of Taekwondo, but also due to the somewhat infant nature of the sport compared to other forms. It would be hard, as many authors point out, to find a “true” strain of Taekwondo these days. Instead, the various approaches, forms, and inherent teachings all help create different, unique ideas of the original created by Choi in the '50s — itself a hybrid of various types of martial arts.

    It's fairly common in martial arts stories to hear epic tales of the history and longevity of a martial art, but Taekwondo provides us with the unique and interesting experience of seeing that historical mythology evolve in real time. From the controversial Choi to the roots of the Korean search for identity following Japanese occupation and later civil war, Taekwondo serves as a mirror for Korea’s own evolution. While Taekwondo may not be an “ancient” form of martial arts, it is a uniquely Korean one, and one that has a complex history and personality, and thanks to The God of High School, I found myself falling into the rabbit hole of its story. “Reclamation” Taekwondo may not actually exist, but in many ways, Taekwondo was a form of reclamation for Korea: an attempt to create something new and unique in the face of years of brutal occupational rule and civil strife. 

Did you know about the history of Taekwondo? What's your favorite style to practice? Let us know, and while you're at it, tell us your current fave WEBTOON series in the comments!  

➡️ Watch The God of High School today! ⬅️  

    Nicole is a frequent wordsmith for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries. Here's that serotonin you ordered.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[quirkwizard]

What do you think happened to the entertainment industry in MHA? Since Quirks made the impossible possible, I can imagine that most movies, plays, and TV shows involve heroes. This could probably only extend to documentaries or licensed media about their lives, though. Can you imagine an All Might Animated Series?

I swore I talked about this before, but I can always say more.

I really doubt that the industry would change that much. Even if you want to say that people can’t just make a world where certain aspects of our world don’t exist, say they wanted to make a piece of media about spies in world without Quirks, there is still a large period in history where they didn’t have Quirks. They could simply set shows around that time instead having it be in their modern day. And you can still add fantastical elements to this setting, like time travel, aliens, or magic. If anything, superhero movies my not do as well because they are public figures and people have gotten used to them. Unless it was a really popular hero or, like you said, a documentary.

If anything, I believe that Quirks would expand how things are done in certain mediums. You could save money on special effects by getting a person with a certain Quirk or you can get someone with an illusion Quirk to enhance your play. you  That’s not even mentioning the kinds of possibilities that could come from TV shows where Quirks may be involved. I’ve seen how crazy and out there mystery shows could get, could you imagine if they added superpowers to the mix? If you think a Quirk would easily deal with the situation? Just don’t include it in your story. Though I will say type casting would probably be a big issue, more so then it already is.

However, I do question having his own animated show for kids. While it’s easily something I could see happen in the series, I would also question the ethics of that. Because unlike Chuck Norris and Mr. T, other public figures that had their own cartoons, those were real people in real danger, so making an animated show about that seems a little jarring to say the least. So I’d imagine a lot of the events in the show would need to be made up for the show, with some elements taken from real life. Though I do think that All Might would have a TV show, I’m not sure if as many people would have their own show, mostly because they aren’t as popular.

[mst3kproject]

602: Invasion USA

 This is not the 1985 movie with Chuck Norris.  I suppose I should watch that one someday as an Episode that Never Was, but for now we have this.  Its basic purpose is the same as that of Rocket Attack USA, to scare the audience into patriotic loyalty, and it shockingly manages to be even worse at it.

A bunch of people are sitting around in a bar talking about the universal draft when an unnamed country suddenly declares war on the United States, and… well, that’s it, really.  Stock footage of anti-aircraft guns fires on stock footage of planes. Stock footage of atom bombs is dropped on stock footage of cities.  Stock footage of warships crosses stock footage of oceans.  All while the so-called characters watch it happening on television and remark on how they can’t believe this is real… no wonder, since none of it is happening in the same dimension they’re in.

I refuse to call Invasion USA a movie.  It doesn’t qualify.  It’s more like four newsreels in a trench coat and a fake beard, trying to pretend they’re a narrative.  Take, for example, the part where Boulder Dam is destroyed.  We see stock footage of the planes.  We see stock footage of the dam.  We see stock footage of a mushroom cloud.  And then stock footage of a flood.  The closest this comes to interacting with the characters fleeing from it is that we see the flood footage back-projected behind their car, and then the camera rolls over and we cut to some of their possessions which have been tossed into a river.  It’s all so obviously a juxtaposition rather than a series of events.  You can’t help but roll your eyes.

The nearest this comes to being interesting or exciting is some of the stuff we see in the military stock footage.  The audience doesn’t exactly feel involved in this – it’s just film of random Things Happening so it doesn’t tell a story, except in retrospect when the TV news anchor tells us what’s supposed to be going on, but there are some spectacular plane crashes and so forth.  Of course, then you remember that none of this is special effects.  You’re watching real human beings die gruesome deaths.  That sucks the fun out of it pretty fast.

It’s not until the last twelve minutes that we get anything that might be called a special effect.  The bad guys nuke New York, and while what we see looks nothing like the aftermath of an atomic bombing, there is an actual miniature building that falls apart, dumping Styrofoam boulders on our heroes.  This is followed by a mediocre matte paining, but one that still does the job its meant to do.  It’s actually kind of a shock, since up until now the war has seemed to go on all around this room but never to enter it.

That’s one halfway-effective moment out of an entire seventy-three minutes of film, however, and the rest is all garbage. Not only is there the endless stock footage, there’s also the bad guys.  They’re never identified as Soviets, though they speak with Russian accents, because the film-makers didn’t want Invasion USA to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (thus making them more sensible than the people who made The Interview).  Much is made of the fact that they’re wearing American uniforms, but the one time they try to make a plot point out of it, a guard sees through the ruse immediately. The real reason is once again to avoid mentioning a country, and so they can use the stock footage of American soldiers to represent both sides.

The baddies espouse ideals of equality, freedom, and peace, but the only ones we actually meet are a couple of bullying, alcoholic rapists. This serves its purpose but the writers apparently see no contradiction between portraying ‘bad’ characters as drunks and having the ‘good’ characters sitting around drinking for half the run time.  I guess whether alcohol is good or bad depends on how nicely you’re dressed and what shape of glass you’re drinking it from. Not to mention that the psychic who can be seen as a bully and a rapist based on what he does to the other characters’ minds, but I’ll get back to that.

How long the whole war takes to happen I have no idea.  A few days must have passed, since a guy drives from San Francisco to somewhere in Arizona, and somebody makes a reference to ‘months’, but the way we keep cutting back to the same people in the same bar gives the impression that the invasion of America happens in about twenty minutes.  Maybe this is intentional, since the story, of course, ends with the revelation that it was alllll a dreeeeeeam.  Or maybe everybody was just too incompetent to show us time passing.

The ending attempts to work on multiple levels and is shit on all of them.  First, there’s the ending to the narrative we’ve been watching.  This isn’t really a story, since there’s no plot as such, merely things happening that the characters cannot possibly do anything about. They’re powerless in the face of these overwhelming events, and once the factory owner is shot after refusing to build tanks for the invaders, it doesn’t take the audience long to realize that this fate will be pretty universal.  Sure enough! The rancher is drowned when the flood from the broken dam sweeps him away, along with his wife and kids to make it extra-tragic.  The politician is killed in the attack on Washington.  The reporter is shot for picking a fight with a bad guy, and his girlfriend leaps out the window to her death.

Then of course they wake up back in the bar, and learn that it was all a dream, or rather a vision, instilled in their minds by a psychic who hypnotized them with swirling whiskey!  I’m inclined to be slightly more forgiving of this than I normally would be, since it was sort of set up and at this point there’s really nowhere else to go.  It’s still an obnoxious way to end a story and there’s a reason your high school English teacher told you not to do it.  Some dialogue establishes they all had the same vision, and then the psychic informs them that this is what the future will be if they don’t take steps to avoid it.

Uh, excuse me, what?  Nothing we’ve just seen suggests that any of these five people were in a particular position to save the world.  They can do small things – the woman goes to get a job at the blood bank, the factory owner decides to make tank parts instead of tractors, and so on (are tractors not important?  Call me a commie but I’d rather my tax money be spent on feeding people than on blowing them up).  But none of this will prevent the invasion we saw and could only make the slightest of differences in its outcome.  Are the five of them somehow crucial in a way the narrative didn’t bother to make clear?

Of course, that’s not actually the point here.  The real moral of the story is that we all need to do what we can to grease the wheels of the war machine, or we’re gonna end up calling each other Comrade.  So… what was the psychic’s goal, here?  Did he just decide to scare the pants off these people because he was annoyed by their opinions about the draft?  Or is he going from bar to bar, instilling this vision of the future in every person he meets one at a time?  And of course we have only his word for it that it is the future. The bartender does call him a con man, and for all we know he made the whole thing up.

What about the woman and the reporter, who saw themselves falling in love and then being tragically separated?  They didn’t consent to that.  The illusion of the relationship, with all its emotional, psychological, and sexual consequences, was forced upon them by an outside influence.  They decide to use this second chance to pursue it in a situation where it might not end in tragedy, but who’s to say it’ll work without that background?  They would have every right to object to this violation of their minds… as would the others, who saw their families die and their homes destroyed.

The final shot gives us a quote from George Washington: to prepare for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.  I don’t know if Washington ever said that but if he did he stole it.  Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin adage, first attested in Vegetius, although versions also appear in Plato and Sima Qian.  It’s as old as humanity, and attributing it to Washington is just one more attempt to tug on the patriotic heartstrings.  Of course, if you consider the Romans, the Athenians, and the ancient Chinese… yep, this is something said by empire builders.

You know what movies like this have taught me?  That propaganda film-making is really hard.  If you want to deliver a message without annoying the audience then it has to emerge naturally from the story being told, rather than being imposed upon it like, say, the save-the-oceans message in Gamera vs Zigra. Then the story also has to make sense outside of that message, it has to feel like it would be worth telling even if the moral weren’t attached – Pacific Rim has a moral about working together, but it’s also just enjoyable to watch.  Invasion USA is not like that.  It exists only to shove its message down our throats and it isn’t even any good at it.  Fuck this stock footage montage pretending to be a movie.

[purplesurveys]

775

Do you always carry breath mints? No, I don’t find it essential considering I only get (or got, by now) a certain allowance per week and my budget is usually just right to fit in food, gas, other necessities, and maybe one or two nights of eating out. JM always brought a pack of those every day though and if I felt like I needed one, it was easy to ask him for one. On a side note, it’s so weird having to type these out in the past tense now that that part of my life is virtually over... What is the point of scented pens/pencils/erasers? I don’t think they have one. They’re just fun to have around if they’re new to you and you have a bit of extra money to buy them. Do you buy/wear band-aids with cartoon characters on them? No but we do have packs that come in different colors, which is entertaining enough for me. Are you amused by celebrity fashion flubs? Egh, not as much these days but it’ll sometimes be fun to look at what people are wearing at major events like the Oscars and Met Gala to see who hit the mark and who didn’t. What do you think your reaction would be upon entering the White House? Political feelings aside, I think I’d be as excited going there as I would be going to other tourist destinations. Bonus points if they’ve got a museum inside.

Do you buy and wear crazy looking socks? I wouldn’t call them crazy-looking, but I do like socks with wackier designs like if they’re sushi-themed or burger-themed haha. Would you run down the street wearing a tutu, fishnets, & flippers? That literally just sounds like a task that other college orgs make their applicants do as part of their application process. I’d do it if it was a dare or if something’s in it for me, but I wouldn’t on my own. Have you ever grown your own sea monkeys or dinosaurs? I don’t know what you mean. Would you want to travel into deep space? You kidding? I’ve wanted to go to space since I first read about people going to the Moon. I’d for sure do it if it was offered to me. Have you ever thrown a game controller (or the game) and broke it? Nah but pretty similar; I’ve often smacked my laptops when something goes wrong, like if the internet isn’t fast enough or if it hangs.

Did you ever own an Etch-a-Sketch? No. I think my mom did though. Do/did you ever have glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling? Nope, but my dad’s family in Tondo had these, in my cousins’ room. When we went over to visit we’d typically spend the night, so every time it was lights out the stars were my favorite thing to see cause they felt pretty magical to me. Does your house have an attic that had stuff in it when you moved in? No. We don’t have an attic but our third floor is our rooftop. What movie were you really worked up for that ended up disappointing you? Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. And this is gonna get so much flak, but The Shawshank Redemption. Does/did your school have special dress-up days? No for both schools I’ve been in. I do appreciate the fact that my current school has no dress code though. What cartoons did you watch when you were little? A lot, since kids are supposed to watch cartoons anyway lol. My favorite ones were Spongebob, Fairly OddParents, Mr. Bean, The Wild Thornberrys, Jimmy Neutron, House of Mouse, and The Emperor’s New School. Do you eat peanut shells along with the peanuts? I don’t. Have you ever gone white-water rafting? Nope. What part of a paper is hardest for you to write? Introduction. It sets the tone for your entire paper so if it isn’t good or appealing enough, it’s hard to follow through and come up with an excellent piece overall. Does your grandma wear an apron when she cooks? I never saw her wearing one, no. This is your chance to get it out! Place random rant here: Get me the fuck out of this house. How often do you need "me" time? These days I’ve had so much of it I wouldn’t even want it anymore for a while after this lol. Normally though, it’s important for me to have this at the end of the day. I’m always with a bunch of people and friends everyday in school and recharging by being alone is vital to me. Does it bother you that almost everything is done on computers now? Sometimes it can feel impersonal, like if you get invited to a debut or wedding through Facebook. But most of the time I find it convenient because everything is instant now. Have you ever gotten stuck in a revolving door? I don’t think so. There was a time I had fun going around a revolving door at the City of Dreams entrance for a few turns because I hadn’t seen one in a while hahahaha but I didn’t get stuck. Who is your favorite superhero? Not big on that whole genre. I guess I like Wonder Woman. KFC Chicken: original or extra crispy? Original please. What class in school do/did you secretly love? Idk, if I like a class I’d be vocal about it lol. What animal do you most resemble while eating? A human? Pop-Tarts vs. Toaster Strudels. Discuss: I’ve never had the second one and I really like Pop-Tarts, so the verdict here is prrrrretty obvious. Do you believe there are subliminal messages in songs? Like...Illuminati-wise? Lmao not at all, but people sure were busy trying to prove this about Beyonce and Lady Gaga back in 2009. I do think other intentional forms of subliminal messages exist, like how Hayley was actually singing the word ‘mercy’ when she sang the chorus to Simmer. Think about your first kiss. Did you have any idea what you were doing? No, she had to teach me how to move my lips and to not be scared and just go with the dance, because I was very nervous. Would you play Jumanji, if given the chance? I’ve never seen the movie, both original and remake.

Name a song lyric you heard wrong the first time and what it really said: I can’t recall an instance at the moment. Do you text/call while going to the bathroom? (Go multitasking!) I’ll bring my phone so I can scroll through Reddit or play games. Do you always make sure your cell phone is charged before going somewhere? Most of the time. I’ll still forget sometimes, though. Did you get Happy Meals just for the toys as a kid? No. They weren’t my kind of toys so I didn’t really ask my parents for Happy Meals. I asked for other toys I knew I’d have more use out of instead.   Have you ever seen your parents cry? If so, how did it make you feel? My mom. She was crying because my sister did a very kiddie mistake, and I was mostly indifferent because at that point our relationship was severed, and also why the fuck would you cry over a little booboo your 8 year old daughter did? She was being dramatic that day and I had no fucking time nor pity for it. What are your thoughts on Chuck Norris? I mostly know him as a 9GAG meme but other than that I know nothing of him. Did you answer that last question with a random Chuck Norris fact? No.

What is the most annoying sound in the world? Boomers complaining and getting their uninformed opinion out in the open. Do you honestly care about calories and fat content? No. How do you feel about animal testing? Fuck outta here. Do you often shift blame towards others? No. This is what my mom did and continues to do, and like I’ve said before I’ve made it my life’s mission to not do the things she did. Do you ever feel like you're smarter than your boss? I don’t have a boss. But I definitely didn’t doubt my internship boss, she was obviously very wise and had gone through a lot to get to where she is today. Your very first best friend: Is he/she STILL your best friend? No. Do you add condiments to your ice cream, or just eat it plain? Nah dude what the hell? Have you ever witnessed a crime? I saw a car very nearly run over a group of pedestrians walking on the pedestrian lane, but the driver was able to hit the brakes before they hit them hard. What's the coolest personalized license plate you've ever seen? Not a lot of cool plates here considering we’re only allowed a maximum of three letters and three numbers. If a plate is personalized it’s usually the driver’s initials and birthday, and that is hardly interesting lol. Did you ever have a piggybank that literally ate your money? No.

[dukeofriven]

From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic.  Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

[betterthedevilyouknowuk]

“Michelle Remembers”: The story of the literary hoax that started a tragic moral panic

Written by Sean Munger 

If you were a child in America in the 80s, especially the early 80s, you probably remember Satanic Ritual Abuse. This was a fear, especially prevalent among white middle-class suburbanites, that groups of Satanic cultists were going around kidnapping children for the purpose of abusing them in the course of bizarre and evil rituals. It sounds incredibly far-fetched–and it is–but millions of otherwise rational parents were terrified that their kids might be targeted by pedophilic Satan worshipers who supposedly had some kind of organized network in North America.

SRA fears were so prevalent that they were the subject of various mainstream media reports on shows like 20/20 and Oprah Winfrey. There are few starker examples of a “moral panic” in modern history.

The entire SRA scare can be traced to a single source: a book called Michelle Remembers, written by Lawrence Pazder and published in November 1980, billed as a true story. In the book, Pazder, a psychiatrist from Victoria, BC, Canada, documented his therapy with an adult patient named Michelle Smith, who while under his care recovered repressed memories of horrifying sexual abuse in her childhood in Victoria in the 1950s. Under hypnosis Michelle recalled strange rituals, many occurring in a basement room and in a cemetery, involving knives, masochism, rape and murder. At one point Michelle said she was bundled into a car with the corpse of a dead victim of the Satanists, and the car was purposely crashed. She also claimed she endured 81 straight days of abuse in a marathon mega-ritual in which the cultists summoned Satan himself. Michelle fingered her mother as one of the instigators of this abuse. The mother, Victoria Proby, died in 1964.

Michelle Remembers made a huge splash when it appeared on the literary scene in 1980. By now Pazder was married to Michelle Smith, and the husband-and-wife team went on a publicity tour to promote the book which was very successful, garnering articles in mass media publications like the National Enquirer. The allegations of an organized network of Satanists throughout North America, who abducted kids and did these horrible things to them, were too explosive to tamp down. Pazder began consulting on other cases where people came forward and claimed to remember sex abuse from their childhoods. Suddenly it seemed there was a wealth of corroborating evidence to prove that indeed organized rings of Satanists had been running around the U.S. and Canada for decades and committing horrible acts with children.

Ross Bay Cemetery, in Victoria, BC, was identified in Michelle Remembers as one of the places where the abuse took place. However, the descriptions of what happened there make no sense in light of the real place, which is shown here on Google Earth.

At the same time, however, a second story was developing. Even before the book came out an investigative reporter in Canada went to Victoria to interview Michelle’s surviving family and friends and investigate the now 25-year-old allegations. Michelle’s father, who was still alive, refuted every allegation made against his late wife. Curiously the book contained no reference to Michelle’s siblings; why weren’t they also targets of the cult? There was very little corroborating evidence for the abuse and no witnesses directly supported her story. Some news outfits were squeamish at reporting the Michelle Remembers claims as truth.

Many, however, did–and with tragic consequences. By 1983 the country was awash in SRA allegations. The most awful of them came from a preschool in southern California, the family-run McMartin Preschool. One woman claimed, upon pretty flimsy evidence, that her young son was abused by the woman’s ex-husband, a teacher at McMartin. The woman was later found to have been insane at the time she made the allegation. Authorities investigated and called in social workers to interview the school’s students. Ultimately 360 of them claimed they had been abused. However, the investigators’ methods were quite sketchy; the claims seem to have been coaxed out of very young children through extremely leading questions and spurious interpretations of sometimes incoherent testimony. One child identified a photograph of actor Chuck Norris as one of his abusers; Norris never had any conceivable connection with the case. Other children talked about underground tunnels under the school and watching the teachers fly around the room–obviously impossible. Clearly something was wrong, but the prosecution forged ahead anyway.

Seven people associated with McMartin Preschool were charged with child abuse. An excruciatingly long investigation period led up to the trial; during this period one district attorney called the state’s case “incredibly weak” and dropped charges against five of the seven defendants. The case against the remaining two went ahead. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith were consultants to the accusing children’s parents. By the time the incredibly long and expensive trial ended in 1990 the number of victims whose claims were asserted had dwindled to only 48. The jury acquitted one of the defendants, Peggy McMartin Buckey, and was unable to reach a verdict regarding the other, Ray Buckey; eleven of thirteen jurors voted to acquit him but two were intransigent. The media focused on these two jurors. Eventually the state gave up trying to convict Buckey who had already spent five years in prison despite not being convicted of anything. The trial cost $15 million–still the most expensive state criminal trial ever–and ruined countless lives. In the years after the trial, the children accusers grew up and many stated plainly that their testimony had been coerced, that they knew it was wrong at the time but wanted to please their parents and the investigators.

Shockingly, even as the trial was nearing its end, the news media was still treating Michelle Remembers as fact. Oprah Winfrey had Pazder and Smith on her show in 1989 and repeated the allegations uncritically. (Oprah would later get burned by another fake memoir, James Frey’s infamous A Million Little Pieces). In 1990, as the McMartin disaster was ending, another round of press investigations probed into the book, demolishing its claims. The car crash Michelle claimed to have been involved in was never recorded by the papers or the police of Victoria. Furthermore, someone pulled Michelle’s school records from 1955 and found she was attending school during the period of the alleged 81-day ritual marathon. No evidence has ever come to light suggesting the existence of a vast Satanic conspiracy to abuse children. Lawrence Pazder responded to these revelations by saying that whatever really happened was less important than what Michelle Smith believedhappened–not a very ringing defense of what was supposed to be a memoir. He died in 2004.

Some incidents of mass hysteria, such as the great windshield-pitting epidemic of Seattle in 1954, are relatively harmless, even amusing. Satanic Ritual Abuse, by contrast, is an episode of mass hysteria that was horribly damaging. A few people out there still believe in SRA, though their numbers are small; most of the world recognizes it as having been discredited long ago. But the whole sad saga of Michelle Remembers demonstrates the old adage that a lie can circle the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.

[mahvaladara]

Shah talks Psi - The beneficial effects of giving your kid nightmares

You know how people say children shouldn’t see certain shows because it’ll give them nightmares?

I only partially agree and disagree of this statement.

As a therapist I stand my ground that children SHOULD be allowed to have nightmares. 

NIGHTMARES. Not night terrors, there’s a difference. A nightmare is a concrete dream the person remembers and can be discussed and deconstructed with the child. A night terror is a constant, insidious and persistent nightmare that the child may or may not remember, though most often the latter and therefore can not be broken down.

What do I mean with deconstruct a nightmare? Read on.

As a child, I loved movies. I grew up with Stallone, Van Dame, Seagal, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, Schwarzenegger and so on. I also grew up with the old school gory horror movies.

Three shows that I love but gave me nightmares as a child are, without a doubt, Robocop, Alien the 8th Passenger and yes, Jurassic Park. Now I am not saying you should let your child watch those movies. Robocop, especially the acid scene, is not a movie a kid should watch. HOWEVER, neither of those movies are that bad...

Most of today’s horrors movies aren’t that bad. I mean, you shouldn’t let your kid watch the Saw franchise, what form of sick fuck are you? But Anabelle? Pffft. Ouija (if anything maybe the kid grows to avoid those toys, like... for fuck sake mate!)? Sure. Aliens? Yup. Predator? That’s more of an action flick. Let’s see... 

The Conjuring scares me, and it will scare you kid shitless. It will give them nightmares for weeks. They are going to start locking their bloody closets at night XD. The Bye Bye Man, the Others, Us. Get out. 

Troll: But that’s going to give my kid nightmares!

Yes. And thank god it does. It means your kid’s brain is working correctly.

When it’s night terrors and constant everyday nightmares, then it is bad, something is failing. Either you have not broken down the “nightmare” correctly or something else entirely is scaring your kid. 

My mother used to think my night terrors were caused by movies before she found out I was actually terrified of school because of my teacher’s physical abuse towards me. She removed the movies from my life, but the night terrors persisted all the way until I left that school (hope that teacher burns in hell).

A child having a nightmare every now and then it’s actually beneficial for them.

Nightmares have a very important role in emotional organization, emotional management and brain development. Nightmares are basically dreams, but dreams that are organizing negative concepts. Dreams that are organizing the concept of ghosts, death, blood, the concept of fear, anger. But also, and this is important, the concept of fiction, of security and above all, DISBELIEF. 

It is okay for a child to EVERY NOW AND THEN watch a horror movie. A horror movie with a plot and preferably a good ending. A good resolution to the horror movie, like they kill or destroy the demon, is very important. Why? Closure. It tells the child, this terrifying thing existed in fiction and could be defeated. 

But, the child must not watch the movie alone. It is important the parent is with the child, it can be at night, but the parent must be with the child. Because what’s going to happen is that that kid is going to ask questions, questions the parent must answer, question the parent must deconstruct. And at night, that kid is going to wake up crying that there’s the Conjuring Witch inside their closet. 

What must the parent do at this point?

Deconstruct.

Basically the parent must break down the child’s fear, explain the notion of fiction, look for the child’s fear, show it is not real, or offer a solution. Lock the closet door, turn on the nightlight, offer to sleep with them. These are ways to break the fear, and offer security. 

Troll: But isn’t it best to avoid this?

No. It isn’t. Because a child who does not have nightmares has a much worse skill at managing negative emotions. And a child who does not have nightmares, has night terrors. Because, as the brain is being literally prevented from organizing these negative emotions, it goes a-wire and doesn’t know what the fuck it is supposed to do.

Children who don’t have nightmares, are more prone to night terror, to emotional management dificulties, to outbursts and tantrums.

Nightmares helps them organize in a safe environment negative emotions, such as fear, anger and frustration. And it is very important a child know how to act with fearful things. 

I advise you watch Black Mirror episode “Arkangel”, I think it shows perfectly the effects of painting the world pink for children and not allowing them to experience and organize their bad dreams, their bad emotions.

So. What should you do?

There’s a horror movie on TV or Netflix. Google the plot. Watch the movie on your own, and then make your own judgement if it’s really that bad.

Would I let my kid watch Alien, the 8th Passenger? I’d let them watch the entire franchise actually. Would I let them watch Saw? Nope. The Conjuring? The Walking Dead? Evil Dead? Yes. Sinister? Drag me to Hell? Nope.

Depends on your own suspension of disbelief. How real is this fear? And above all, does it have a good ending? 

Horror movies with good endings? A-okay.

Gorefests, “bedisturbed” movies, and bad endings. Nope.

Basically use your common sense. You’re not about to watch the Human Centepide with your mother. But an X-Files marathon is awesome.

Last, but not least. It is important that, while the kid is watching and even if he has nightmares you explain to a child the notion of Fiction.

Children don’t have the capability of looking at a movie and seeing that as fiction, to them, those movies are real. All shows are real, when I was five I thought Lara Croft was a real woman. After I realized what was shown in games wasn’t real, I thought she was inspired on a real person, and eventually I was taught the notion of fictional characters.

Now, children cannot look at a movie and flat out realize nothing of that is real. The adult must explain that the Alien in the movies is a guy in a suit that happens to have very elongated arms. 

Basically.

Nightmares are necessary evils for our emotional development.

And use your common sense.

Someone once told me: 

“Raise your child the best you can, for regardless of what you do, you’ll be doing it wrong.”

So, my advice is do the best you can and don’t be so worried of shielding your child from all the dangers of Media. Children are not idiots, and if you sit down with your child and explain to them what they just watched or are about to, they themselves, will eventually form their own opinions and decisions about what they want to watch or not. 

So, rest assured that your kid accidentally watching Vin Diesal fly over a truck in a car, or Steven Seagal breaking a guy’s arm, or Sam and Dean being ragdolled by a demon, is not going to “traumatize” them. It might give them nightmares, but they will, most likely, be fine.

Fiction is different from reality and that is something important for them to understand.

This was Shah. I am done here.

[anhed-nia]

PROFONDO ROSSO/THE APPLE

For some disgusting reason that may never be explained, I recently watched THE APPLE back to back with DEEP RED, and the experience produced a powerful moral outrage that I didn’t even know I had in me. Readers may be aware of the latter-day cult classic THE APPLE, a US-West German nightmare vision from 1980 that was exhumed in recent years by masochistic thrill-seekers and subsequently elevated to appropriate infamy. In fact, nonsensically, THE APPLE may have enjoyed wider visibility in our time than PROFONDO ROSSO, a virtuoso directorial effort from giallo master Dario Argento arriving the year before the more popular SUSPIRIA (not a giallo, by the way). PROFONDO ROSSO was exported under the ironic american title DEEP RED: THE HATCHET MURDERS--ironic because the film was hacked nearly to death, with the fatal amputation of more than twenty minutes of character development, leaving behind a movie that was too confusing and too revolting for foreign audiences then unfamiliar with the italian thriller genre. Happily, the film has enjoyed loving restoration and increased circulation since its 1975 debut, giving one a feeling of justice served. It is hard to feel that same sort of cultural pride in the endurance of THE APPLE, which is similarly impossible to look away from, though for quite opposite reasons.

So the thing is, Dario Argento is an artist who, in spite of his notable misanthropy, has given something to the world. He works in what I would call the most complex artistic medium in human history, and for more than a decade, he consistently lives up to its many intricate challenges. Here you have a guy who wakes up one day and says, "You know, I have something to say. I see the world in a certain way, and I need to tell everyone about it. I'm going to shoot a movie that's really going to make people feel something." And he does. He makes PROFONDO ROSSO, a perfect film. He really cares about it. Every single thing is just so. He takes these absurd miniature tableaus, and photographs them in a way that transforms them into another universe. He makes you feel like you're seeing the color red for the first time. He positions flashy modernity against grave antiquity, and seductive trash against high art, creating juxtapositions that communicate vividly about the dazzling contradictions in the very soul of Rome. This dichotomy is mirrored in his main character, a nervy but vulnerable pianist who has to hide his full artistic sophistication, lest he lose his job playing in seedy dives. This being a giallo, he witnesses a mysterious murder, the key to which is buried in his own memories--he himself becomes the only substantial evidence of the crime, and he is forced to live out his life in an escalating nightmare until he gathers enough context to make meaning out of what he knows. PROFONDO ROSSO is indeed profound and savage, offering reflexive commentary on its own existence as a primal and salacious piece of entertainment that is executed with almost impossible elegance and wisdom. Dario Argento is an artist who recognized the full multifaceted power of cinema, and then with great deliberation, fashioned this gift to the world.

Meanwhile, this same world also contains a guy like Menahem Golan. Golan may be forgivable as the crass commercialist behind the Cannon Group, who shat out a number of dusty-looking vehicles for goons like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. However, nothing forgives THE APPLE. Nothing even explains it. It appears to be marketed to no one at all, being that no human being who has ever walked the earth could derive pleasure from it. While it may be hard to imagine possessing Argento's talent, it's easy to imagine him contemplating the vast potential of cinema, identifying its prismatic means of expression, and approaching it with both the humility and the courage to make of it something flawless. He does due diligence. He is responsible. He may injure his audience with his brutality, but he’ll never hurt their eyes. It is in no way so easy to even begin to estimate what Menahem Golan was thinking when he dreamed up this grueling fundamentalist christian sci-fi fantasy in which a pair of dopey Adam and Eve-like folk singers tries to save the distant future of 1994 from a literal disco inferno. This dystopian fable, apparently shot in the mass transit hubs of West Berlin, describes a world that has been taken over by a tyrannical music production company-cum-government, Boogalow International Music. The defining characteristic of its rule is enforced disco dancing. The viewer will never find out what is gained by all this disco dancing, or what else this company/government does; there is almost no apparent violence, physical or institutional, and there seem to be no consequences for the disco-averse other than that they are occasionally fined for failing to wear their "BIM marks" (a sort of "mark of the beast" that's obviously just a dead stock skate sticker). BIM's worst crime is trying to turn cherubic hippie chick Bibi into a disco diva, while keeping her apart from her beloved folksy musical partner Alphie. The action culminates with the lovebirds running away to live with a bunch of dirty hippies who leave unattended fires burning all over the public park where they live, and who are presently rescued by a godlike intergalactic being (or just god, but he flies around in outer space, I have no fucking idea) in a white tuxedo, who ferries them all off to another planet in his flying Rolls Royce.

That is how THE APPLE resolves itself. It's almost a feat in and of itself that, in spite of being based so transparently on the story of the Garden of Eden and certain parts of the Book of Revelations, THE APPLE manages to have no clear message whatsoever. There's a tenuous thing about how it's good for people to love each other, but it's impossible to imagine what BIM's point is, why they care whether or not people love each other, why they oppress people, how they oppress people, and what happens if you defy them, other than that you get a ticket and someone chases you out of the civic space that you're vandalizing. Besides that, the movie is simply bad in every single way. The music is the worst you'll ever hear, vacillating between being purely idiotic, and being militantly offensive, as in the case of a reggae number comparing the rule of BIM to the American slavery period. The costumes are beyond ugly, leaving every single character looking like they've been scribbled on and thrown in the garbage by an angry child. At a certain point, THE APPLE seems to be meticulously checking off a list of things that no person would ever wish to see in a movie, from filthy gangs of sack-clad children shrilly repeating nonsense lines, to warty old jewish stereotypes being sexually molested while they spoon-feed unctuous folk singers a greasy-looking stew

The film is so hideous in every dimension that you wouldn't even take a picture of it if it were happening in front of you. It's bad enough that the people who collaborated on this movie actually did any of what you see on the screen even one single time, without someone actually deciding to record the whole thing and distribute it to the world at large. What I'm essentially trying to say is, on the same planet in the same timeline, you can somehow have a person like Dario Argento, considerately and patiently crafting an incomparable work of art that speaks to the artist's economic and historical context--and you can also have someone like Menahem Golan, who can't even figure out how to make meaning out of the fucking Bible, who has the fucking nerve to shoehorn a bunch of degenerates into grimy leotards and make them twirl batons in a world covered in shitty stickers, and he calls that a fucking movie. He charges money for people to see it. It is literally maddening to even try to imagine what would motivate all this wasted motion, the product of which is so aesthetically and emotionally destructive that it is actually evil. It can be evil, to make a bad movie. This is the one and only lesson of THE APPLE.

PS I've seen THE APPLE like a hundred times so I guess I actually love it in some perverted way, I mean I'm not above it. Just, something had to be said.

[zydrateacademy]

Roleplaying 101

Over the years I’ve spread this post around. Takes about 10-11 forum posts to get it all down and it’ll be one of the few posts I give a “Read more” break on. It has gotten a bit taxing to transfer it between communities, so I’m going to bring it here at long last to give a proper, singular link for people who wish to learn.

Currently, this post is in the form of Conan Exiles. I usually give my own little edits and “notes” depending on the game of the community I’m posting it in. So if you see this floating around, it won’t be in the same form most of the time.

Now, let’s get to it. (Very, very long post)

I will give credit where this is due; All this information has been borrowed from my old RP server on World of Warcraft. Most of it will be copy/pasted... However I may give a few edits to try and make it the most relevant to this particular game. If you find any references to WoW (Or even SWG, where I had posted this before), I apologize. Still, when it comes to MMO/RP terms, many of them can be interchangeable.

RP 101: Welcome to a RolePlay

Is it "role players" or "roleplayers?"

This is a question I've thrown in myself (IE: Not from the original source).

The answer is; Both! I can't debate on which one is more grammatically correct (That's for people smarter than I) but I can tell you that in our community, referring to "role play" or "roleplay" is acceptable.

“WTF is up with the (( )) ?”

Bracketing is a form of indicating one is speaking out of character. It can look many ways. Double parentheses (( )), singles ( ), brackets [ ] or any number of other bracketing form. The most common is the double parentheses.

By indicating that one is speaking out of character, they are saying “You are speaking to the player right now, not the character.” It’s good to know the difference (in case the character is particularly abrasive).

Sometimes a group will indicate that Group chat is automatically OOC while /say is automatically IC. In such a case, when speaking in group, (( )) is not necessary. There is no standard as to what channels are IC and which are OOC. It is entirely subjective depending on who you’re with…. With one exception.

"/say Chuck Norris ROXXORS!"

…. Please don’t. When you consciously engage in RP, normal local chat should be assumed to be IC. If you speak OOC in Local, please bracket. No, not everyone does it. No, not everyone is going to be bothered by it if you talk about Chuck Norris, your latest Facebook picture or how much cheese it takes to make a really good Welsh rarebit… but why start off in bad habits? If you want to play on a role play server then start off in a good way and keep good habits all the way through.

"Dude! Why are you wearing that armor?!"

Some MMO's have a cosmetic function, though that's not applicable here. However here at Exiles, you might find that some people wear some of the barest of clothing. What this is called is an "RP outfit", something we wear that makes a bit more sense in the context of our interactions.

Thankfully in Exiles, you can wear a variety of things while still being able to contribute in RP-PvE.

"How do I find the role players?"

This is always the toughest part. It’s easier if you know someone on the server and they can drag you around and introduce you or show you where the events are. Otherwise you have to rely on your own detective ability.

Step one: Read the forum of the realm you have chosen (though hopefully you read them before you joined). Before you jump on there going “HEY! WHERE’S THE RP??” make sure they are not a hive of scum and villainy. Be sure they aren’t a putrid den of RP hatin’.

Step two: Talk to other people. Whether you meet them in a group, on the street, see them fishing in blue overalls, talk to them. Ask questions. Make it a point to reach out to others. Let them know you are new to the server and trying to make contact.

Summary

Being a roleplayer can be a fun and rewarding experience. You can meet some incredibly imaginative, creative, and fun players. There also tends to be a higher maturity ratio among role players. The most important thing to keep in mind though is you are coming to us. Don’t come to us with a LAWLRPSUX attitude because you are a guest. The rules of the house were set long before you came along. If you respect those that choose RP because they are roleplayers, you will have a much more pleasant experience. If you give it a chance, it is very likely you will find that RP brings an extra element of "adventure" to your game. One much more unpredictable and fun than anything that could be programmed in.

RP 101: Role Play Etiquette Is there such a thing as Role Play Etiquette? Certainly there is! It may not be so obviously called that but you can usually tell when someone is breaking it. How can you tell? By listening carefully to what others say. I’m going to try touching on the subject of RP Etiquette. Mind you there are hundreds and hundreds of RP pet peeves that individual RPers might have that I certainly can’t cover, but I will try to cover some of the most common ones. I will also discuss how to know if you’re breaking RP etiquette and possible alternatives or solutions to such behavior. Making role play fun for everyone is the goal. So let’s work towards that goal together. Interrupting Active RP Like in any real-life conversation, it is considered rude to interrupt a RP conversation that is going on. Though often role players are more open to others joining in, it is usually wise to try to determine if others are welcome before jumping in. The simplest and usually fastest way to do this is to send an OOC whisper. Something along the lines of “(( I see you are engaged in role play conversation. Is this a private conversation or may others join in? ))” Quite often you’ll find that role players are seeking others to join them. But be prepared for the times when it is a private conversation not open to others. There is also the technique of simply listening in to see what is going on with the conversation. Don’t worry! Mom won’t scold you for eavesdropping this time. In life, you can catch a few lines of conversation quickly and determine if it is something you can join or if it is a private matter you should step away from. Snowplowing This is the term I use though others probably have different ones that mean the same thing. Snowplowing is stepping into someone’s active RP conversation and overwhelming it with YOUR rp. You plow right through with what YOU want to talk about without regard to what is already going on. Not good. Everyone gets their time in the spotlight. It does not have to be your time every time. If there is already an active conversation going on or someone’s RP plot, don’t snowplow through it with your own plot. A good example. We were all at RP night in Stormwind one evening enjoying some casual conversation, doing a bit of fishing, a bit of drinking, and sharing some bawdy jokes. Up walks Darkandspooky (I’ve changed his name to protect the guilty). Immediately he begins spamming us with his description (in the form of bad emotes) and starts in with bizarre behaviors that are meant to reinforce the fact that he is “dark and spooky” (which I will discuss in a later article). Now the characters already present either continued with their conversation as if he hadn’t interrupted, or reacted in the way people who had imbibed large amounts of alcohol would. He seemed terribly upset that the other characters didn’t appropriately react to his all-powerful “dark and spooky”, but that was because he was trying to snowplow his way into the existing RP. It simply didn’t fit and forcing it wasn’t going to make it fit. There are much more subtle ways to introduce your RP thoughts, ideas, plots or conversations. RP conversation, like real life conversation, flows and convolutes and changes. It may start out as a conversation about the fish in the canals and end up discussing whizzing off the docks in Westfall. You never truly know where it is going to end up or what roads it is going to take in between. So if you’ve got something you would like to bring into the conversation, listen to it. Follow the flow. Bring it in carefully where it fits rather than trying to force it on others. Trying to force it where it doesn’t fit has a tendency to go over like a turd in a punch bowl. Sometimes conversations don’t go down the paths that would best fit what you want to talk about. Sorry sweets, but that happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean you are a bad role player. It doesn’t mean the others are trying to be rude to you. It simply means that the conversation flowed just like in real life. It is unpredictable. That is what makes it fun! Hovering Now there are two different forms of hovering. One is rude and one is not. Telling the difference is subtle so pay attention. The first form of hovering, the not-rude one, is the person sitting to the side just listening to the conversation. Maybe casually emoting something once in a while. The shy character that just wants to be near people but really doesn’t want to interact. Sometimes the hovering character has a player that is being pulled away from the keyboard frequently so lets the character sit quietly as the conversation scrolls across the screen and catches up on what is going on when they return to the keyboard. I’ve done this a number of times. This form of hovering is okay and is also a great way to learn things. By keeping the ears open and the mouth shut. The hovering that is irritating and rude is of a completely different variety. The character that walks back and forth past the conversation participants over and over and over and over again…. but never says anything. The character that sits right at the edge of the conversation (usually with their back to the others) clearing their throat, emoting other trivial things such as spilling a mug or tying their shoe or picking at the lacings on their trews…. but never says anything. They make it clear they want to rp too but are not doing anything to reach out the hand to play. As a matter of fact, their behaviors generally are not something others would comment on. If I see someone picking at their fly I’m not going to call attention to it. The latter form of hovering is a behavior that is guilty of waiting for contact. I discussed the difference between looking for contact and waiting for contact in a previous article. Inclusion isn’t a one-way street. In order for others to include you in conversation, you have to do something that they can react to. Simply wandering back and forth isn’t sufficient. I’ve seen characters just wander back and forth for twenty minutes not saying or doing anything but then getting upset because they weren’t included in the conversation. Role players are not mind readers. In order to be part of the conversation they have to be given something that they can comment on or notice. Don’t be shy. Try speaking out. It can be something simple like asking for directions or commenting on the weather. Be creative. God-moding This is by far the singlemost irritating rp behavior out there. God-moding is when you do something that affects another character without giving them leave to decide their own actions or opinions. An extreme form of god-moding would be emoting that you stab the other character, killing them instantly. It can take other, more subtle, forms though. If you emote something along the lines of another person’s character noticing that your character has eyes red from crying, that is god-moding. A better choice would be to emote that your character rubs at eyes red from crying and leave it up to the other player as to whether they notice it or not. Sometimes characters have reasons for not noticing things. Many role players won’t come flat out and tell someone they are god-moding. That is, perhaps, a fault many share. Generally they will ignore the god-moded behavior and continue on with whatever they were doing or simply ignore the character guilty of it. If you find yourself being ignored or legitimately snubbed and you truly do want to improve, don’t get angry, ask the person about it in whispers. Usually others are quite open to helping eager role players improve their rp skill. Manners, Manners, Manners! In general, role play behavior should mirror real life behavior. The same rules of manners still apply. Take time to think in these terms and you will find smooth role play laid out in front of you. Inclusion in role play also takes effort on both parts. Don’t just wander around doing nothing and get upset when you’re not included. You have to try too. Remember, everyone gets their time in the spotlight. It may not be your time at just that moment but it will be eventually. Patience is the key. And as with all things involved in role play, be creative! Even if your attempt to reach out and be involved is awkward, it gives a place to start.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author. She does not claim they are the only way to RP. Hopefully someone will find some merit in the article but as with all RP, it comes down to personal preference.

Character Building Part 1 - Introduction & Personality So you want to create a role play character. You want this character to be interesting, be attractive, be loved by those around, have others to interact with regularly, etc. How do you go about it? As a writer and role player for 20+ years, I’ve learned a few things along the way about character building. I’ve made many of the mistakes that afflict new writers and role players and have seen firsthand the results. It is my hope that some of what I have learned the hard way can make character building less painful for venturing into the role play realm. Because building a good character is such a far reaching topic, I will break it down into a series of articles to make for easier reading. Fun Everyone wants their character to be fun to play. If the character isn’t fun then what is the point in logging in and slogging through the levels? I’m sure we’ve all created a number of alts then abandoned them for various reasons simply because they were not fun. First thing you need to look at is what do you find fun? Do you like being by yourself or being in large groups? Do you like one on one interaction? Do you like funny, light-hearted RP or do you like more serious and dramatic? All of these must be considered when building a character. Interest Everyone wants to have an interesting character. After all, if the character isn’t interesting then what is the point in having him or her around? There are several factors that play into whether a character is interesting or not; Personality, Appearance, Believability, Weaknesses, and Background. These are just boiled down because sometimes factors overlap but this is a good starting point. Let’s Talk About Personality Try to create a personality that not only you can enjoy playing but one that others enjoy interacting with. That is if you want interaction with others. If the character bites, insults, or otherwise abuses others about them for no apparent reason and with great frequency, you’ll soon find yourself without anyone to interact with. This goes for drama llamas too. (See definition below). Now I’m not saying every character has to be Polly Pureheart, but they should have enough redeeming qualities that there is something to bring others back to play. First generalization you need to consider is do you want to play a good guy or a bad guy? This may seem like a silly thing to consider, but it is the beginning point of your personality. Don’t worry, there are bad guy characters that are cool beyond belief and others certainly do want to interact with them. Good Guys: First off, not all good guys are of the Polly Pureheart variety. By being a “good” guy, that could be as simple as someone who works hard, helps others, brings food to their sick aunt Patty. Then there are the extreme good guys. If you’re going to play a good guy, you need to think about the level of the character’s goodness. Now, as with many things, there are areas of gray. Not everything is black and white. Perhaps the character is mostly good in that they do not try to actively harm innocents. They try to be good but sometimes what may seem good to them, is not so good to others. During the course of play, these types of situations will also help shape the character. Bad Guys: Not all bad guys have to be of the kitten-eating demon variety. Someone who is greedy or a bit of a megalomaniac can be considered a bad guy. Perhaps it is someone who feels they have no choice in what they do. It doesn’t mean they are not a fun character just because they are a bad guy. Some bad guys are obviously bad, but they are so cool and suave about it we continue to be drawn to them. I use Dr. Doom from Marvel Comics as an example of a cool bad guy. He’s bad, he’s a megalomaniac, and he wants to kill the Fantastic Four… a lot. But he’s cool. If you can create a bad guy with the element that leaves others saying “Wow. That character is bad… but cool!” you’ve created a good bad guy. Common Personality Traps: When creating your character, there are a few common personality traps that you should try to avoid, otherwise you may have others rolling their eyes at your character or just avoiding it all together. Mr./Ms. Perfect: The character that is so pure, so heroic, so sweet, so loving and so GORGEOUS that everyone should lust after them and want to be their friend/lover/pet/champion. Nobody is that perfect. Others like to interact with characters they can in some way identify with. Why do they roll their eyes at Mr. Perfect? Because he is not believable. Disbelief cannot be suspended with this type of character because they do not exist in life. (Zydrate's Note: In RP communities, this is generally referred to as a "Mary Sue") Superbad: Superbad is a character so evil they eat kittens on their Cheerios, happily slaughter their way through Stormwind on a daily basis and steal Ol’ Emma’s water bucket just for laughs. In general, they treat everyone around them like crap. And they are sooooo bad nobody in the universe could ever hope to quell them! This one should be self-explanatory. Who wants to interact with someone that treats everyone around them so badly? Where’s the fun in that? If people enjoyed being treated like crap they’d go back to High School! Even bad guys need some redeeming qualities. Drama Llama: “Oh my life is so tragic! It is more tragic than yours could ever be! There is nothing that could ever be done to make my life less tragic! And nobody else cares!” /eyeroll Yep. Nobody else cares. You know why? Because the drama llama seeks only for everyone else to fawn over her while she whines and wallows in misery. How is that fun for anyone but the llama? Others expending their energy trying to make someone feel better or help them out and that person continues to wallow. Eventually people run out of energy to expend and go off to do something fun. The one factor these types have in common is extremes. Anything taken to extremes gets real old, real fast. A good character has a balanced personality. A good character is not only fun for the player, but fun for those around as well. Zydrate’s Note: A lot of this section had to be omitted because it had an emphasis on World of Warcraft Lore. Sorry about that. Character Building Part 2 - Background Every character has a history of some sort buried away somewhere. This history filled with experiences shape the character’s personality, reactions, quirks, hobbies, style – everything about them. Sometimes finding that background is the most difficult task in character creation. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Often times you have to play the character before you can fully flesh out the background. Many role players and writers refer to this as “giving the character time to tell you about it” or waiting for the character to start “talking”. No, they aren’t suffering from delusions or multiple personality disorder. This is simply giving their subconcious imagination time to brew up what it needs to fit the character and manifesting it in a way that is easier to translate into written or role played form. Taking time with the character, seeing how a few things play out, is usually the best way to build a background. If you have it all written out before you ever set foot in the world with the character, can sometimes be very limiting. The last thing you want to do is restrict yourself and the character you play beyond your ability to have fun with them. That being said, you should have a general idea about where they come from before you let them speak. Here are a few tips to help you get started. Know The Lore You don’t have to be an absolute fiend about knowing the lore of the game to create a feasible background, however you should have a general idea of the history of the race you’re going to play and some idea of timeline. Avoid The Eyeroll There are some common backgrounds that I see from many new role players that leave me rolling my eyes. I’ve heard the same comment from other long time role players as well. While this is RP and you are more than welcome to play what you like, if you want to interact with others and avoid the eyeroll response, try to avoid some of these common background traps. The Vampire While you may think its cool and spooky to play a vampire, when you announce to other players that you’re a vampire, you leave many of them rolling their eyes and putting your character name on a mental – if not actual – ignore list. If you want to play a vampire, check out Vampire: The Masquerade and its subsequent additions. It’s a very good table top game for vampires. The Daughter/Son of (Insert Major Lore Character Here) It's generally considered bad form to make your character be related to a known NPC. It simply feels like you're trying too hard to seem "special" or "distinguished". There are MANY other ways to go about this, make sure not to fall into this trap. The Catgirl Whether it is born to a druid in cat form or the product of a mating between a druid in cat form and a wild tiger, it’s overdone, and simply put – ridiculous. You may think you’re being so creative with your cat-tail hanging down and your furry ears and you’re pointed teeth peeking out of your mouth, but if you go around claiming you’re a catgirl (or boy) don’t be surprised if you’re not taken seriously. The Trauma Llama Everything bad that could ever happen to a character has all happened to this character at least twice. Now while bad things are a part of everyone’s history, nobody enjoys a trauma llama that wallows in it, spouts it to every person they meet on the street, and tries to one-up everyone else’s traumatic events. If the trauma of the character’s life is the be-all, end-all of their background you’re going to have a difficult time getting anyone to take an interest. This is a game meant for fun. Trauma can, and does, help shape a character, but it shouldn’t be the sole focus of their life and history. Where is the fun in that? Think Creative Without Being Outrageous It is possible to create a wonderful, interesting, and colorful background for your character without being a victim of the eyeroll. Your character doesn’t have to be the leader's illegitimate half-demon catgirl in disguise to be interesting or fun to interact with. Don’t try to force importance, validity, or take any aspect of the background to extremes. A good background is like a good personality; well-balanced and feasible. Do not underestimate the power of the ordinary. The Background of your character does not have to be grand or outrageous or even noteworthy. It is merely a tool to help shape the personality of the character, to help guide their actions and reactions when you play them. It’s there to give you something to talk about on occasion. What’s wrong with being a mere notekeeper? A mere Soldier or Apprentice? It isn’t the background that makes the character, it is how you play the character that makes them. It is how that character acts and reacts with others. It is their views, their loves, their dislikes, their mannerisms. Let the character make the character. If you’re creative and confident enough to do that, you’ll do just fine.

Character Building Part 3 - Appearance Tips For Writing A Good Description When writing a description for your character, remember that there are five senses; Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch and Smell. Now it is unlikely you’ll write what your character tastes like. I know I don’t usually walk up to someone I’ve just met and lick them. Touch might be a bit awkward, but there are some situations where this sense should not be written off entirely. Your most commonly used sense in descriptions is going to be sight, however sound and smell have their own validity. Sound This could cover the sound of their voice, the rattle of their armor, the beads on their shirt. There are many things that could be incorporated into the sound of a character. Remember to listen to your character’s appearance when writing about it. Smell The sense of smell is one of the most powerful we have. It can draw us to someone or repel us. There are many things that could stimulate our sense of smell. Does the character wear any scented oils? Are they consistently sweaty? Do they smell of grass? Herbs? Close your eyes a moment when writing about the character and think about how they would smell. If something stands out, then put it in the description. Sight This is going to be the sense most characters will touch first. What they see will be a key indicator in other’s first impression. Some of the basic descriptors are hair length, color (if it is different than the avatar), build, height, and weight. Some of the more detailed descriptors are eye shape, color, face shape, jewelry worn, or condition of clothing (neat, ragged, dirty, etc). Then there are outstanding features. Outstanding features can cover a number of things; missing limbs, eye patches, limps, anything of that sort. Large ornamentation, visible body paint, oddly colored stripes in the hair. Something that would stand out. These outstanding features should most definitely be included in the description. Be creative on these. Don’t go for easy. Take some time and think about the character and what, if anything, might stand out. And be sure to include at least something on how they dress. Loose fitting, ragged, neat, armored? Think about that as well. And while I realize this is, indeed, a fantasy game, understand before you write “this person wears armor, even while sleeping”, that you understand (from a person that has worn plate armor for several hours on end on numerous occasions) that armor is uncomfortable. It is bulky, difficult to move in, noisy, stiff, and pinches in places that a body was never meant to be pinched! Mannerisms should be considered when writing a description as well. Does this person flinch when new people approach? Do they have a notebook they carry with them at all times? Is their hand constantly on their weapon? Do they have a teddy bear tucked under their arm? These sorts of observations in the description give a bit of insight into the character’s personality. Something that can be seen to support their actions and reactions when we encounter them in actual contact. Keep It Simple Now that I have told you all the wonderful things you should think about when describing your character, I’m going to confuse you by telling you to keep it short and simple. I can hear your cries of “Foul!” from all over, but honestly, especially when it comes to an in-game addon description, few people will read one that is overly long and complicated. We don’t really need great details about how many buttons are on the character's shirt or which direction he laces his boots. Give us the most obvious in the most succinct manner possible. Having a novel for a description will actually hinder people reading it. Avoid God-Moding When writing a description, god-moding involves describing a trait and how the reader feels about that trait. Avoid writing things such as “Your jaw drops when you see her enormous bosom.” Honestly I couldn’t care less about her bosom. I’m not in the habit of looking at them. I have one of my very own that I have to look at every day. That is an extreme example but they are out there. However there are others that are more subtle, but just as incorrect. For example if you were to write “He is the most handsome man you have ever seen.” How do you know? Whether a person is handsome or not is a matter of opinion. You should never try to force an opinion on someone else. Let them judge whether they find that character handsome or not. Instead of telling us he’s handsome, tell us about the traits that YOU think makes him handsome. Describe the dark skin, black hair, golden eyes – whatever! But don’t tell us we think he’s handsome. Description Only Please When writing a description, especially for in-game addons, do not include information such as the background of the character or what kind of personality traits they have. We can’t see that, hear it, smell it, the first time we encounter that person. A description is just that; a description. Do not include information that is not apparent to the senses of other players. By putting in that information you’re expanding the length of the description unnecessarily and making it less likely anyone will read it. If they want to know that, they’ll find out when talking to the character! Avoid The /eyeroll Now I’m not going to try to tell you what your character should look like; only you can decide that. What I am going to offer are some tips on what will elicit the /yawn or /eyeroll response. Many role players when first starting out want a character that is particularly handsome or beautiful. There are probably a number of psychological reasons behind this and I won’t attempt to delve into them, however I can point out a few of the most common appearance traps. The Scar This is a harsh world our characters live in. Some scarring might to happen. If that is the focus of your character’s description, then it is not a very interesting character. Where extreme scarring is rare IRL and shocking when you see it, it is so common in role play descriptions that it seldom elicits more than /yawn. If your character has scars and there is a reason for them, by all means, write about them, but don’t just use them to make the character “cool”. Chicks don’t dig scars. There are literally hundreds of ridiculous description traps that I could write about here, but that would make this article far too long. I’ll try to summarize and make this all fit together in a final bit of advice. • Keep it simple • Think with your senses • Avoid description opinions • If it sounds even slightly ridiculous to you, it probably is. Zydrate’s Note: I've omitted a couple others that were noted on the source, such as "The Buxom" and "The Cyber-Bait". Players here (Conan Exiles) would probably be less concerned considering half the point of this custom server is to ERP. Still, I'd recommend being a bit classy with it. Build a character for world interaction, and sexual encounters will come regardless. Sexuality is just a mere footnote to a character's complexity. Don't drown others in it, but there's no need to shy away from it either. And one final bit of advice, especially if you are new to role play; if you have a friend who also role plays, get them to read your description and give an honest evaluation. Tell them they MUST be honest. Having others read it and tell you what works and what doesn’t work is a great way to learn.

Character Building Part 4 - Weaknesses Throughout these articles I have discussed the need for balance. One of the features that make a character well balanced is weaknesses. Their weaknesses will contribute to their personality, behaviors, responses to others and different situations. Weaknesses are woven deeply into everything about the character and provide a more well-rounded personality. After all, nobody is perfect. Weaknesses contribute greatly to who a character – or person – is. Well-crafted weaknesses are just as important and interesting as any other element of your character. It would be impossible to determine a character’s strengths without weaknesses to offset them. Weaknesses can also provide something to work towards. If, for example, the character is scared of dogs, that provides a goal to work toward; overcoming that fear of dogs. Types of Weaknesses There are certainly many types of weaknesses, but they can be most easily broken down into two; Psychological and Physical. Psychological weaknesses are those that spring from the character’s own mind. Whether it is a fear of heights or narcississtic tendencies, they are self-defeating weaknesses. Psychological weaknesses are, in essence, controlled by the character’s own mind, which makes them especially difficult to overcome. They may have been created by some severe trauma in the character’s past or perhaps some other event that brought it on. However it came to be, it is part of the character and may or may not be something that can be overcome. Physical weaknesses are of the sort that affect the character’s physical appearance or abilities. Physical weaknesses can also cause psychological ones that are closely intertwined. A physical weakness might include a missing limb, sensory loss (blindness, deafness), vertigo, or some sort of disease or condition such as allergies. Physical weaknesses can be caused by injury, disease, birth defect or any number of other factors that can affect physical appearance or ability. Severity Not all weaknesses are of the debilitating variety. Some are small, just little quirks of a sort. Some are humorous, some are sad, some are so outrageous we find ourselves trying to fix the person we encounter with it simply to have it gone. Sometimes we give our characters weaknesses without even realizing we’ve done so. Is your character bigoted toward another race? Do they drink to excess? Are they lazy, dishonest, scared of the dark? Do they have a teddy bear that must be with them at all times? Are they promiscuous? These are all weaknesses that help to round out the character. When deciding the severity of your weaknesses, however, be sure that you don’t write yourself into a role play corner and leave yourself with a character that is unplayable. I have a friend that wrote a character that has issues with his foot. Severe enough to keep him from adventuring. He recently realized that this made it very difficult to get anything done with the character and is working on a role play reason to make the character viable again. My friend is an excellent and creative RPer so I have faith he will have no problem coming up with a creative and believable way to make this happen, but it helps to illustrate the point here. All things in moderation. Don’t defeat yourself and your character before you’ve even started playing it. Reasoning If you are going to build a weakness into your character, be sure there is a believable reason behind it. Do they dislike the Strangers because one of them stole his prized shield? Are they repulsed by the smell of the clockworks? Did they lose their left pinky toe in the fight with Vanaduke? Be creative but be believable. The weaknesses must fit the persona, not just be tacked on because you think they are “cool”. In-Play Happenings Sometimes weaknesses can come from happenings in current RP. These can either be temporary or permanent, depending on the situation. Whatever the case, again, make sure they are believable. When coming up with other happenings that influence your character, make sure it is not something you’ve already done to death. If your character is possessed by demons every Tuesday, others are not likely to give the reaction you’re looking for. They are more likely to roll their eyes and relegate you to a forgotten corner of obscurity. Avoid The Most Common Trap The single most common weakness trap is “Sir Buford is afraid of failure.” Now, if played properly, this can be a valid weakness, however quite often it is seen as a cop-out for someone trying to run Mr. Perfect who never has failures, and has no weakness. Remember, weaknesses can be fun! They don’t have to be huge and traumatic. Be creative and go with what fits the character. 

Character Building Part 5 - Believability & Summary Over the course of these articles I’ve tried to give some basic tips on creating a believable character. Most role players want a character that is fun to play and fun for others to interact with. After all, if we don’t have others to interact with then we have no true role play. It is like writing a story with nobody to read it. Vastly unfulfilling. One thing holds true for all creative endeavors; if your audience, or in this case those you interact with, do not enjoy your story/character, they will find someone else to play with. You will find your sandbox sadly empty. Believability is an important factor for any character you create and hope to play. If other players do not find the character believable, then this dampens their enjoyment and they will gravitate elsewhere. What makes a character believable? Many things actually, but most importantly are the traits that we can identify with. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing an undead mage, bi-pedal cow, or cloven-hoofed warrior of the Light. If your character has traits we can identify with, and if they are presented in a reasonable and logical way, the character can be believable… and likeable. Watch out for extremes. If our character is always emo, flogging themselves about how horrid they are, that gets old real fast. If the character is perfection itself, can do no harm or wrong, that also gets old real fast. You don’t have to push the character over the edge to be interesting. I can’t say it enough; Do Not Underestimate The Power Of The Ordinary. So many people out there are trying to build RP heroes and gods and whathaveyous. Trying to capture fame by forcing “importance” on their character. Trying to steal respect without earning it. In all things; looks, personality, background; the ordinary can be the most fascinating and extraordinary thing to others. What you may see as ordinary, may be the most incredibly fascinating trait to the next person you interact with. Give it a try. 

Role Play 101: Romance in RP- The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Now before you start to point and snicker, muttering about “cyborz”, notice the title is ROMANCE, not ERP. We get plenty of that too but there's plenty of reason to be mature about it all. Romance and sex are friendly concepts in many settings, this server more than some. Romance can cover a wide range of emotional depth from the friends that exchange flowers on occasion to full fledged lovers or marrieds. Role playing romance DOES NOT mean cyber just like reading a book that has romantic elements does not mean reading porn. The Good If you choose to involve your character in romantic relationships it can bring in another level of role play that is interesting and a good development tool for the character. It can also bring pleasant interaction and memories for both the character and the player to counteract the war-stricken and depressing world they live in. It’s a way to see that even in such terrible times, life does go on. There is hope and there are things to take joy in. Emotional beings need that. If a mind is constantly bombarded with the awful with no respite, eventually it will break down. The Bad Sometimes RP romance can be taken too far; too seriously. Always always always remember IT IS RP. IT IS NOT REAL. I have seen people who’s characters are involved in romantic RP begin to believe that it is an actual relationship and when one of those involved plays another character or spends time with other friends, the other gets jealous or angry. These are pixilated images inside a box of computer parts. They are not real flesh, bone or emotion. They are story characters that we play with and read about but do not really exist. Do not fall into the trap of thinking they do. The Ugly I have seen RP romances turn sour and because one party or both have taken it too seriously, when the RP romance fails, it destroys the friendship between the players. I have also seen it go so far as to fracture guilds. Bands of friends choosing sides because one or two people pushed it too far. Truly a sad affair and one that should NEVER be allowed to happen in RP. Rules For Romance In RP While this list may not be all inclusive, I will try to provide at least a beginner’s guide for those looking to involve their character in RP romance. Much of this may seem like common sense but perhaps, for some, reading it will drive it home and give pause before the ugly rears its head. 1 – The most important! If you forget everything else, do not forget this! – RP Romance is not real. It is an interactive story development. Nothing more. 2 – The character your character is involved with has a player behind it too. This player usually has other obligations such as real life, other friends, guild members, other characters that they want to play as well. Don’t try to monopolize their time. 3 – Don’t let your time be monopolized either. If you have other things you wish to do, be sure the other player understands this as well. 4 – “Intimate” role play should be decided on in advance by both parties. Set your boundaries and stick to them, or be respectful of the other person’s boundaries as well. 5 – Make sure all boundaries and limitations are clear and understood. Do you only have time once a week to dedicate to RP? Do you have another character that you want to spend time on as well? Do you want to be able to spend time leveling as well as role playing? Make sure it is all clear. 6 – If something comes up that is going to keep you away from contact for a while, let the other person know. Heck, let all your friends that you play with know! They’re your friends. If you just disappear without a word they worry about you. 7 – The other player likely has other characters that they want to play too. These other characters may become, or already be involved, romantically with characters that are not yours. This is acceptable. Do not get jealous or snippy because the player wants to spend time with other friends too. This comes back to both #1 and #2. Making It Work Now there are many factors that play into whether romance can be feasible. First off, it is not likely the characters are going to be able to spend as much actual time together as a couple might in real life and trying to do that will cause issues of its own. However there are still ways to have the characters “be together” in down times that will fit with the RP and won’t leave anyone feeling pressured. Zydrate’s Note: There was a whole section about fading to black and "It can be assumed..." but this is (Conan Exiles). Most romance and sex is actively roleplayed. It might be assumed that characters spent the night in bed together and when you log off, the other has gone on a hunt. Many ways to play it. Combining Objectives Are you questing in similar areas? Level ranges? Have the same instances you need to hit? So make them into a RP session. Grab a group of like-minded individuals for that instance and RP as you go. Run around the countryside with your RP muffin and complete quests while engaging in conversation and the occasional stolen kiss. Be creative. RP doesn’t always have to be just sitting in a bar in Stormwind. You can RP and accomplish other tasks as well. Schedule It Set up a time or day that you and your RP partner are scheduled to hang out together in game. That way neither of you gets lost in the shuffle. Maybe every Wednesday you meet for RP dinner at the Blue Recluse. Perhaps Friday is the night that you both have set aside to kill monsters. Be creative and keep it interesting. Maybe all you want to do is sit in a chair and talk all night. That’s good too. By scheduling a day/time to do it then you avoid the hit or miss of scheduling differences. Write It A great deal of story can be created and told through written RP. Most guilds associated with RP have a place for storytelling. By creating a written story coinciding with the in-game RP, there is a great deal more information and development of character that can be accomplished. So you’re not the greatest writer in the world. How will you get better if you don’t practice? Use your spellchecker and your grammar checker and then learn as you go. Share the story as it grows and give it the details that we cannot see or experience in game. It’s a great way to tie everything together when actual play time is limited. As with anything, communication and respect are very important when involving your character in RP Romance. Have fun with it. Be creative. But always remember, it is just RP. 

Role Play 101: Drama In RP: How Much is Too Much? Every story must have some conflict or drama to be interesting. When it involves RP, how much is too much? Every player has their own tolerance threshold for character drama. Some are going to have a fairly high tolerance, some are going to have a fairly low one, and some it will depend on what they have recently been involved in, how believable the drama is, and how original it is. Personally, I only rarely create major dramatic threads for my characters. Why? Because they get real old, real fast. I rarely get involved in other people’s major plot lines. Why? Same reason. Part of the problem with major RP threads is the time commitment. Most major drama threads require a commitment of time either in game or in written RP that many folks have trouble making. This is a busy world, things happen and the larger the storyline, the more people involved, the greater the chance that someone will have trouble meeting the time obligations due to real life. There is also the interest factor. I can attest to the fact that after waiting for days on end for the next person to do their part, interest wans. You want to move on, do other things, spend your time on something that is moving rather than wasting it waiting. RP Is For Fun The one point I cannot stress enough is that RP is for fun. It is not supposed to feel like work. It is not supposed to create stress. It should leave all participants with the feeling that they enjoyed themselves. It should not leave anyone feeling bruised, angry, or in any other way stressed out. I realize that many people find the long, drawn out, dramatic role plays fun but I ask you, for how long? For whom? Please stay tuned as I explain. At one point in the rp community on my (old) server there was a chick, we’ll call her Chiclet to protect her identity, that wasn’t content unless she was surrounded by huge dramatic rp. If there wasn’t huge drama going on that she could somehow switch the spotlight to her, she would create it. She became a bit of a joke among role players with her “weekly demon possession” and people quickly learned to avoid her. Now there are many reasons why Chiclet became a joke. First off there was the overuse of old plots. She had been possessed by demons no less than four times that I am aware of. One possession well played (which I have never seen done) can be an interesting plot. More than that and people yawn and walk away. It’s too much! It is not believable and if it was poorly done the first time, the second and third won’t be any better. Chiclet never allowed for down time either. It would be wave upon wave of huge dramatic RP. She was possessed, she was dying, she was pregnant, she was pregnant with a dying possessed catgirl… You get the idea. After a while, others get tired of expending their time and energy. Finding The Line There is a definite line in dramatic RP and some people are very good at not crossing it. Others, not so good. The difficult part is finding that line in the first place. RP is meant to mirror reality in many ways. Even though we're in a fantasy setting, the aspects of life, of believability are what draw people back. They want a glimpse of people, situations, places, creatures they will otherwise never see. They want a story to entertain them for a few hours here and there. They want to interact with that story and influence it and have it affect their characters in return. Because this is a fantasy setting, we’re pushing the line of believability every day. However, you can push the setting believability line a lot further than you can push the character believability line. Characters should mirror life much closer than any other aspect of your story. Their life path and how they deal with it are the elements that will draw others back or repel them. Life is full of ups and downs. I know for a fact that there are times when it feels like it is nothing but downs, but truly there are ups too. When looking at a character as portrayed in RP there are a few things to consider when planning their plot. First off, if you only give the character down moments, never any up moments, you’re going to turn others off really fast. The character that is the perpetual downer that ONLY has bad things happen, has them happen three times a day, and is so traumatized by every single one of them that they can never be happy is not very interesting. People reading, or participating in, a story like for things to get better. Like for the character to have ups as well as downs. After all, if nothing ever gets better, what is the point in trying? People don’t like to have hope killed. Hope keeps us, as human beings, plugging along through our lives even when things are bad. If the characters in our entertainment have no hope, it creates a sense of fear that we have none either. How the character deals with it is another point that can draw people in or repel them. Time to talk honestly here. Overall, tragedy makes people uncomfortable. We feel helpless in our lack of ability to fix it. Sometimes we can do something to help ease it, but overall, we’re not truly comfortable again until it is gone. If we can watch that character actually work towards improving their situation, we can follow the story with pleasure because it builds up that sense of hope. The “mud puddle” character is not going to accomplish that. What is the “mud puddle” character you ask? That is the character that falls into the mud puddle and instead of trying to climb out, just sits there, splashing around in the dirty water, saying, “Oh no! Oh no! I’ve fallen into a mud puddle!” Because we only see the characters for such a small amount of time, every moment that we do see them that is influenced by the downs is going to be magnified. Because we don’t see the flashes through the day of them just staring at the sun daydreaming, or sleeping peacefully at night. What we do see is intensified by the short amount of time that we see it. Some drama is great for a story. But give your “readers” breathing space or you may find yourself RPing alone. Now if you are sitting there insisting that your character is defined only by tragedy, then I have nothing further to say to you. You’re stuck in the mud puddle, you don’t want to get out, and nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise. However if you’re the one reading this that wants there to be more to your character that a string of cheap misery tricks, read on! No Firm Numbers Nobody can give you firm numbers on how long you should wait between dramatic events. RP, like life, should be fluid. It should not be forced. Let it flow and take it’s own path. If it feels too soon for something else to happen, likely it is WAY too soon. The owner of the character is always the last one to recognize this. While many role players will say their character “talks” to them, we all do have some control over the path they take. And you should exert that control on occasion to make sure the character is not only fun to play but fun to interact with. Role playing alone isn’t nearly so much fun! If you’ve played out a major dramatic storyline, give your character some time off. Let them run around doing mundane things for a while. Take them fishing, to an evening out in a pub, for an afternoon walk in the park with their pet worg. Let them live a normal life for a while. If your character has a tendency towards depression, give them a few moments of “uptime” here and there. Let them enjoy themselves while questing with others or find something they do enjoy for a while. If it is something they’ve done alone, let them talk to others about it. Eeyore is cute, but after a while his bummer attitude gets a little old. Be Creative As with anything involved in rp, be creative. Down time doesn’t have to mean dull time. With a bit of creativity you could even make sitting on a curb eating cheese interesting. Be imaginative! Is there something simple that you don’t often play out with your character? Well, try it! Something totally off the wall that they’ve never done? Do it! The really fun part is the “why” behind it. Give it a shot! Try walking through a city, but don’t just walk! Interact! Set up a macro that has the character nod at those they pass or bump into them or something else. Nothing is going to be perfect every time. Nothing is going to be audience captivating every time. But if you keep trying, keep testing new things, keep the audience entertained without forcing depression down their throats, you’ll have more fun than you could imagine. Gloom, despair and agony are not the only path to interesting role play. I have said it before in other articles; Never underestimate the power of the ordinary. Make it a challenge for yourself to take something ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary. So you’re standing at the mailbox reading a letter. What can you do to make it fun? Interesting? To draw others in? Giggle at the letter? Start talking back to it as if the author could hear you? If walking through town, what can you make happen by tripping over that warpstalker’s tail? Make it a challenge to yourself. Take an ordinary situation and challenge yourself to make it something else. If you like, come back here and tell me about it. I would love to hear your story and I’m sure others would too!

  RP 101: The Difference Between "Looking for Contact" and "Waiting for Contact" The single most common complaint I hear from role players is either “nobody RPs anymore!” or “I can’t find anyone to RP with!” My first instinct is to ask, “Does that include you?” You see, there are lots of profile's running around out there that say “In Character, Looking For Contact” but are you *looking* for contact, or *waiting* for contact. There is a distinct difference. Looking for contact is the act of putting out effort to find, create, or otherwise engage others in RP. Waiting for contact is sitting on a bridge, saying nothing, waiting for others to engage you. Do you see the difference here? In a perfect world, we would all have RP dropped into our lap whenever we wanted. This is far from a perfect world, however, and in order to find RP, you also have to be willing to put out some effort. If everyone just sits around waiting for RP, when is it ever going to happen? Someone has to take the initiative. How can you tell if you are looking or waiting? Through a simple analysis of your own in-game behaviors. Do you approach others with their looking for contact tag up? If someone you don’t know comes up while you are engaged in conversation do you try to include them? Do you walk while in town instead of run? Do you put on RP clothes? If you answered no to these questions, you are waiting. Looking for contact does involve some effort but is not as difficult or scary as you might believe. I’ll try to provide some tips and hints to set you on the right path to finding the RP you crave. Clues To Finding The Role Players Now just a name is not always enough to pick out who role plays and who does not. Watch behaviors too. Walking in town is always a good indicator. Wearing “street clothes” rather than armor is one too. Are they a member of a well known RP guild? If you see them talk in /say, is it IC? There are lots of subtle indicators, and some not-so-subtle, that can lead you closer to someone who would be more receptive to role play. Making IC Contact Lots of people have difficulty making first contact IC. Called “first contact fear”, hopefully I will be able to provide some tips here that will help others to overcome this. Don’t worry! You are not alone. Everyone has felt that first contact anxiety at some point. It can be overcome. The most common question is “Why would my character talk to that person?” Why indeed? This is where you have to be creative! It doesn’t have to be something profound. Find an excuse. If you wanted to strike up a conversation with someone in real life, what would you do? It could be as simple as complimenting their clothing or if they have a pet, comment on that. Comment on the weather or ask for directions. Use your imagination. All it has to be is something to get the conversation started. Making OOC Contact When you simply cannot come up with an idea to start a conversation IC, resort to OOC. Send the person a whisper OOC. Something along the lines of /tell Person (( Hey! I notice you have you're speaking IC. Would you like to RP? )) Don’t let fear keep you from at least trying. Most people are either going to be receptive or tell you if they are about to log or leave to go to a raid or whatever. Sometimes you may not get a response at all. Don’t assume this is a snub. The person may be on a stealth afk. Or they may be wrapped up in drama over other channels. Or they may simply miss it in the spam. Because this is a typed medium, be sure you give plenty of time to respond before you move on. But don’t let one failed attempt keep you from trying again. It is only through trying that we ever succeed. Events Another way to find RP is to attend events. Small weekly gatherings or larger events thrown open to the public are a great way to make contact with others. Yes, this may mean giving up an evening of Vanaduke runs, but if you want to find RP, you have to make the effort. Check your forum for events. Also check any guild forums you frequent or other forums tied to your interests. Ask around among people who are well known on the server. Likely they will know of any upcoming events or where to find information on them. When you attend events, be sure you don’t just sit on the side and wait for others to talk to you. RP is a two-way street. It takes effort from both sides to make it happen. If you attend a ball, mingle! Talk with others, compliment their clothes, comment on something you hear in passing. Once again, be creative. You are looking, not waiting, remember? If there are no events coming up, consider organizing one. That isn’t as complicated as it may seem either. See my previous article on Hosting A Role Play Event for ideas and information on this fun and rewarding process. Don’t Be A Wallflower Apathy kills RP. I cannot say that enough. If we all sit around and wait for RP to happen then who is going to initiate it? We must all put forth effort to make it happen and keep it alive. Don’t expect others to bring RP to you. Step out of the safety of silence and look for it. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out every time. That’s normal! The more you try, the more success you will have! If you sit around like the wallflower at the prom, don’t be upset if nobody asks you to dance. The next time you find yourself complaining about there not being any role play, ask yourself what are you doing to get some going. With a little bit of effort, we can make more RP happen for everyone! 

Zydrate's Note: The first part of this next article was personalized for the actual writer of all this, but it all leads up a very specific point so I'll simply replace her bio with, well, mine.

Role Play 101: The Other Side of the Pixels I’m going to touch on a subject that all players, not just role-players, should keep in mind. It may seem like it has nothing to do with RP and therefore has no place in this series of articles, but I assure you it does. It has a very firm place in all interactions we have online and I hope people will read it and take it to heart. Who Am I? Who Are You? Hi. I'm Zydrate. I like to write stories and play video games. My home life is not terribly impressive; I'm 29 and I work as a bagger in a grocery store. I enjoy the job but it does not pay well, and thus puts a strain on my home life. I live with my brother, mother who in turn also lives with her mother. My brother has mental issues which prevent him from getting a job as well. My entire family has various forms of depression of varying severity. I have dreams and daydreams, I think every day about what I'm going to do the next. I have wishes and goals and theories. In other words, I am a human being on the other side of that computer; a real person with real feelings that can be damaged by carelessness. Just as I am sure you are too. It’s a tragedy that so often that fact is forgotten or blatantly disregarded in a world that conducts so much of its business, communication and social interaction online. We may be utilizing a heartless machine to communicate, but the being doing the communication is still human and should be treated as such. Sometimes it’s far too easy to forget that person on the other side. Many times it is incredibly easy to misinterpret something that was typed or to type something that seems fine at the moment but might act like a fiery brand on the temper of the person on the other side. Other times it is far too easy to hide behind the Great Wall of Internet Anonymity and be an ass. Verbal vs. Electronic While a study in human nature determining what the exact percentage of our communication is nonverbal is nigh impossible, fair estimates put it firmly somewhere between 85-95% with 93% being the most common approximation. So that means that approximately 93% of the meaning of our message is conveyed through nonverbal cues; tone, volume, inflection of voice, facial expression, body language and eye contact. Literally hundreds of messages can be conveyed through half a dozen spoken words by the nonverbal signals we send. Our world is moving deeper and deeper into the digital age. The average person conducts somewhere between 40-60% of their daily communication electronically, either by email, text, chat programs, social networking sites, etc. Each year that amount increases as electronic communication becomes faster, cheaper, easier. Our youth grow up in a world where instant, anonymous communication is the norm. Yet none of those forms allow for nonverbal cues. Now considering the message conveyed in the two previous paragraphs, is it any wonder that it is so easy for drama, cruelty, depression, anger and frustration to explode so fast and so painfully over the internet? The Great Wall of Internet Anonymity It really is easy to hide behind internet anonymity. That dark little voice in the back of your head that reminds you that person doesn’t know you. You don’t know them. You don’t have to look them in the eye, you don’t have to acknowledge their feelings, you don’t have to witness the pain you cause. We are empowered by being anonymous. This freedom from having to acknowledge others as sentient beings with viable feelings and emotions that should be respected leads to hordes of people across the cyberverse that display little or no regard for others. They don’t know that elf/troll/dwarf/noob/pug personally so they feel no responsibility to treat them with common courtesy. I’m sure there are a number of people that have stopped reading by now or will stop shortly but think really hard. Examine your behaviors and really look at them. Consider them from the other side of the computer. “Noob.” “WTF! Idiot!” “You suck!” “OMG you can’t heal/tank/dps!” It’s so easy to type. It is so easy to picture the fingers typing the message. But when the same messages are directed back, they don’t feel very good, do they? You feel angry, hurt, confused. It’s even easier to lash back because we feel justified in our anger. “They started it! I’m going to finish it!” syndrome. Sometimes the messages are more subtle. How we type a phrase always has the chance of being misinterpreted. Wording is a very tricky matter if you don’t pay attention. Study the three following sentences and see if you can pick out which one is the best and why the others might cause problems even though they all say the same thing. #1 - “If you don’t pick up your dps you’re going to get kicked out.” #2 - “You even going to try getting your dps up, noob?” #3 - “Your dps seems a little low. Do you need some help figuring out why?” #1 – The other person has just been threatened. It might have been meant as a warning or advisement, but the more common interpretation is going to be seeing it as a threat. Being threatened causes a person to become defensive; feeling the need to defend/protect themself. The most common reaction is going to be to strike back. #2 – The other person has just been insulted. When typed it might have been meant in a joking way however there are no nonverbal cues to communicate that so the more common interpretation is going to be as a deliberate and cruel insult. Once again, the person has been put on the defensive. Most common response is likely to be the same as the threat. #3 – It should be obvious that number 3 is a more correct path to prevent hurt feelings and explosive drama. I hope to many it is, but it’s also easy to forget. In number three it has been communicated that there may be a perception that something is wrong and there is an offer to figure out why this is so. There is no accusation, no insult, no threats. Nobody responds well to threats, insults, accusations in any form. Always think about what you are going to type before you hit that enter key, sending it into someone’s face. One should never feel justified in cruelty. You may be stuck in that group of idiot puggers. Sure, someone may be acting like an ass. Does imitating that behavior make us so much better? In-Character Is Not an Excuse What does any of this have to do with Role Play? It has quite a bit actually. You see I can’t tell you the number of times I have witnessed someone using role play as another wall to be cruel. One more excuse to hide behind. Not only are you anonymous behind a computer, you have yet a second face to use as a shield. One that is imaginary. I have seen “characters” mob another one with hate filled comments carrying on for days to the point where the receiving player is so hurt and upset they lash out, hide, quit or engage in defensive behavior. Then the phrase “Oh it was IC hate” is flippantly tossed out as if that makes it all better. I, myself, have been the target of in-game hate mail thinly disguised as role-play from not only an anonymous player but character as well. Insults bordering on OOC or some of them blatantly OOC meant precisely to be cruel and cause damage. Hidden behind an excuse of “but it’s in character”. IC anger/hate/maliciousness/cruelty should be understood and explained before ever beginning. If it happens spontaneously out of the blue, communicate with the other person and make sure it’s okay. Discuss it and maybe come up with a fun plot, rather than one person feeling abused. If IC hate/anger/drama starts to hurt the player, they need to speak up reasonably about it and the other party needs to be willing to drop it and move on to something else. Period. (Zydrate’s Note: I actually like to chime in after a heated IC argument. I like whispering the person with something along the lines of "That was fun! " to make sure that the other player knows that there is no ill will. This usually opens up a bridge, "Oh, okay. They're civil, I can arrange something with them at a later time". Because there is part of our brains that if there's absolutely no OOC contact, we will attribute the character with the player. It's wrong, but it's a natural occurrence.) The moment a player expresses that a role play behavior directed at them is bothering them out of character, the other person needs to stop and the players need to consult. Maybe a compromise can be found, maybe the characters just need to not be in the same stories or they need to pretend the other doesn’t exist. Either way, it cannot be allowed to continue. The player’s needs always outweigh the role-play. Don’t think that someone is being too sensitive because one character abusing their character bothers them. Our characters are extensions of some part of ourselves. Whether the character is the law abiding paladin, the pocket-picking rogue, the puppy-sacrificing cultist, they are the creations of the player. They are that player’s work. When creating a character for role play or writing we always put a bit of our heart, our soul into that character. Without it we could not make that character seem real. However even that tiny little piece of ourselves that we build into each character can cause pain and we need to be aware of that. Courtesy is not so difficult. If you want to interact with someone’s character, especially in a negative way, it is basic courtesy to communicate with them. Especially if it seems feelings might be getting hurt in the interaction. Whether in role play, in groups, on the forums or in chat, it is important to break down that wall. Don’t use the Great Wall of Anonymity as an excuse to be an ass. Courtesy is not so difficult. Kindness goes a very very long way. One tiny bit of kindness could improve a person’s day one hundred fold, prevent weeks of drama, and does it really cost so much to spare? It doesn’t take very long to examine what you type before you do so. Let’s put faces back on the person we communicate with. Hi. I’m Zydrate. It’s a pleasure to meet you and I hope we can be friends. I will be kind to you even if I feel you are not kind to me because I know on the other side of that screen, we are not so different.

How to Have Living, Breathing Emotions Now this is a section that I thought up entirely on my own. You may even notice it has a different writing style, as I'm told I have a "conversational" tone, informed by my several years of blogging experience. So this piece will be entirely original. This has been bouncing around in my head for some time, and is something I've struggled with when I interact in WoW-RP. This new guide is just as much for me as it is for all of you. Employ the Senses Earlier in this guide, we read about using three of the five senses when it comes to character creation and description. This continues to apply in every day custom emotes. When approaching an unfamiliar face, you need to give them a sense of who your character is. Tell them what they might see. Is their armor clean? Are they wounded? What quality of weapons might they be carrying? Do they look out of breath? In WoW, there are complete AddOns that help mitigate some of this but in Conan Exiles, we must lay a little bit of groundwork for our interactions. Throughout conversations, try to pepper in mannerisms. In real life, none of us are stone cold when having conversations. We move our hands, we look around the room, we continue about our business shuffling papers or making sure we're productive while speaking to co-workers. Starting an RP post with a custom emote rather than dialog is the best way to go about this. For example, Livia will tend to clasp her hands when something excited her. Other ways to do this is to show that your character is "shaking with excitement" which illicit a visual of something practically bouncing on their toes about a fun prospect. That's just one idea of many, and will go a long way in helping your character feel more alive in any given interaction. Your character is a person. Act like it! Avoid the Two-Line Curse Understandably in dialog-heavy situations, you want to quickly react to what your partner is saying, especially on heavier topics. That's a fair assessment but it's still not an accurate way to look at it. Tying into the point above, your character should often be emoting properly about anything that is said. A widened eye to signal surprise, that kind of thing. I might be repeating myself here but too often I see emotes out in the world such as; Livia turns the corner and sits upon the stool, thinking and taking a swig of her glass. What does that accomplish? What can other characters do with that information? Who cares? The dreaded one or two liner especially in a fully written custom emote (as opposed to pure dialog) gives nothing for the other characters to work with. Typically, we're also not mind readers. Do not pad your custom emotes with idle thoughts, unless you accompany it with physical tics and cues that may give us a hint to what they may be thinking. Better still, just write those tics and keep the thoughts for yourself, and give the partners their own mini-game to try and suss out what your character is thinking about the situation. Balancing Size and Time Don't get me wrong. Seeing paragraph-full posts are often times a joy, and have been the primary source of thinking of this post because I want to employ their mastery and help others along. There is however, a double sided issue. On one hand, there's a lot to reply to. Notably, if they have multiple dialog that can branch into multiple reactions and replies. On the other, the effort the player puts in their posts can easily sap time. Taking several minutes to type of fifteen lines kills a lot of time, and we all have places to be eventually. Some need their sleep, some need to get to work, or sometimes there's several people involved in the interaction and the conversation has the chance to completely derail if someone has to reply to something said several posts and minutes ago by a character that apparently went into a small coma for the time it took for them to type it all out. See what I mean? Again, it is always a mixed blessing. Sometimes great posts like these make people feel inadequate as a writer and roleplayer. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, use this information. Borrow their style. Pick it apart, figure out what makes it so great, and eventually employ it into your own writing. I've met several great writers that have pushed me to be a better custom-emoter. Whether I have or not, time will tell. Hopefully, I just want to help pass it along and help everyone emote better. In a way, we're all actors here. We take on a role and we write it out. I just hope this tidbit helps.

[bibhabmishra]

Ghostbusters

I’ve read a lot of film books and they’ve taught me a few things about how film books should be written if they are to be taken seriously, and these are lessons that I feel are as useful in life:  1. Drop in random French phrases wherever possible so it looks like you’re quoting from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, because even if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, nobody will be able to tell; 2. When in doubt, start waffling on about Godard; 3. Never describe a film as your “favorite film.” This looks unprofessional and childish. Instead, claim—in ringing tones comme les écrivains de Cahiers du Cinéma—that it is the Greatest Film.  Zut alors! Malheureusement, not all the French in the world could convince any- one that I am more interested in Godard than The Goonies, so that’s a non- starter. But I shall make use of one of these handy life lessons and state that the best, most brilliant, most extraordinary, the most deftly created piece of au- teur film work of all time is Ghostbusters. For pretty much most of my life, I’d assumed that this was a fact accepted by everybody: Ghostbusters is the greatest movie ever made. Sure, people tend to say random words like “Citizen Kane!” and “Vertigo!” when asked by Cahiers du Cinéma for their favorite film.

But I thought they did this just as, when asked who they’d like to have at their dream dinner party, they say, “Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela!” as opposed to who everybody would actually like, which is, obviously, Madonna and Bill Murray. Now, one could take my massive assumption that my tastes reflect those of everyone else on the planet two ways:  1. I have an ego the size of Asia coupled with a narcissist’s complex and incipient sociopathic tendencies; 2. Ghostbusters is so good that even if it’s not everyone’s FAVORITE movie, it is probably in their top ten and so whenever I mention my love of Ghostbusters people say, “Oh yeah, everyone loves Ghostbusters.”  For the purposes of this chapter, we will go with option 2. I never thought of my Ghostbusters obsession—and it is, I fully admit, an obsession—as remarkable. If anything, I saw it as a perfectly natural response to a great work of art. Devoting an entire shelf to books and articles by or about the people involved, however tangentially, in the making of this movie? Com- mendable intellectual curiosity. Spending two hundred dollars on a book about Ghostbusters that came out the year the film was released, just because it finally explains why the character of Winston is squeezed out of the movie? Hey, that’s an investment piece! Refusing to go on a second date with someone be- cause they failed to recognize a completely random (and not, to be honest, wildly relevant) Ghostbusters quote over dinner?I Well, why waste time with losers? It wasn’t until I found myself awake at 2 a.m. at the age of thirty-three on a Tuesday scrolling through eBay in search of a rumored copy of Bill Mur- ray’s original Ghostbusters script, which obviously was not going to be on eBay, that I felt it might be time to look at what, precisely, was going on here and why, after all this time, Ghostbusters still feels so special, maybe even more spe- cial, to me. There is sentimentality, for sure, not exactly for my childhood but for the city of my childhood. Ghostbusters is as much a love letter to New York as any- thing by Woody Allen, and a less self-conscious one at that, showing New Yorkers reacting with relative normality to an invasion of the undead.II Many of the jokes in Ghostbusters stem from the idea that, ghosts aside, Manhattan it- self is an out-of-control Wild West place, a Gotham city where a man could collapse against the windows of the Tavern on the Green, the ritzy restaurant that used to be in Central Park, and the diners would simply ignore him. Trash is piled on the sidewalks and Checker cabs whizz around corners: this re- creation of New York, 1984—the New York of my childhood—is still how I think of the city, even though it has, for better or worse, changed a lot since then. Even the hilarious anachronisms give me a sentimental frisson: Louis being mocked for his love of vitamins and mineral water; Ray and Peter snarfing down cigarettes while toting nuclear reactors on their backs; Larry King in a cloud of cigarette smoke while chatting drily on the radio; the bad guy being the man from the Environmental Protection Agency. These all look particularly out of date in the Manhattan of today, and I can’t help but feel the city is a little poorer for it. But my absolute favorite New Yorky moment in the film is at the end, when a doorman brings Ecto1 round after the Ghostbusters have saved the world—or at least Central Park West—from destruction. Despite having battled a giant marshmallow man, Dan Aykroyd still has a couple of dollar bills in the pocket of his ghost uniform with which to tip the doorman. You cannot get more New York than that. But there is something else in Ghostbusters that makes me sentimental, something else that I love in it that doesn’t exist anymore. That is, its depiction of how a man should be.  •  •  •  Just in terms of sheer variety, one could do a lot worse than turn to eighties movies for lessons in how to be a man. When most people think of mas- culinity in eighties movies, they probably think of that strange genre that sprouted and bulged up in that decade like Popeye’s biceps after eating spinach, consisting of men who look like condoms stuffed with walnutsIII speaking their lines in confused accents and emphasizing random syllables, strongly suggesting they’d learned the words phonetically: Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Stallone,IV and, toward the end of the decade, Van Damme. Chuck Norris, too, can be included here, despite his lack of walnutness, but he earns membership in this group with his similar lack of obvious acting talent and strong fondness for right-wing messages in his films.V But there is more to eighties men than that. For a start, there are the men who raise babies and children (Mr. Mom, Three Men and a Baby, Uncle Buck), which some feminist critics argued at the time was a backlash against femi- nism because the films seemed to mock the idea of feminized men. In fact, in retrospect, these films look more like movies awkwardly coming to grips with feminism (Tootsie, too, can be included here, with a man pre- tending to be a woman, and occasionally looking after a child, and becoming a better person for it). Mr. Mom (1983), in which Michael Keaton loses his job and looks after the kids while his wife works, is clearly none too sure what to make of this “feminist” thing: the movie’s message is that the swapping of traditional gender roles will probably destroy the marriage and almost certainly the house (somewhat dismayingly, the film was written by John Hughes). But by 1987, Three Men and a Baby was getting much more of a handle on things. The men (Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson) are unex- pectedly lumbered with a baby girl and, by the end of the film, very much want her to stay with them in their bachelor shag pad, even after the baby’s dippy English (foreigners—tchuh!) mother turns back up. It turns out that, unlike Mr. Mom, they are capable of looking after a baby without causing havoc to domestic appliances (men—amirite??). The men in Three Men and a Baby are

notably much less obnoxious than les mecs in the original French version, Trois Hommes et un Couffin, who have a pact never to let a woman stay more than one night in their flat and have a tendency to call the baby “a swine” when it has an accident on the sofa. Ahh, les Français—ils sont tres masculins, ooh la la!VI Which is not to say that the American version is without its anxieties. Three Men and a Baby goes to such lengths in order to reassure audiences of the übermasculinity of the three guys, despite their TERRIFYINGLY FEMINIZED baby-raising skills, that they become hilariously camp. Peak camp is reached, for me, when Selleck goes out jogging wearing little more than a tiny pair of shorts and an enormous mustache, and he picks up a sports magazine full of photos of muscled-up half-naked men. Now, if that isn’t the definition of throbbing heterosexual masculinity, I don’t know what is. Yes, the eighties were a different time and American movies in that era seemed to think that homosexual was merely Latin for “psycho killer or flouncy interior decorator.” But nonetheless, whenever I watch this movie (which is more often than I’m going to commit to print) I think it’s a shame the director (who was the late Leonard Nimoy, very pleasingly) didn’t just go with the obvi- ous option here and make the guys gay, living in a happy yuppie ménage à trois. After all, this would explain why three apparently very solvent guys in high- flying careersVII in their thirties would choose to share an apartment in mid- town Manhattan as opposed to getting their own American Psycho–style bach- elor pads. And for heaven’s sake, have you looked at that Broadway-themed mural Steve Guttenberg paints of the three of them in the atrium of their apart- ment? No amount of references from Selleck to his love of sport can obscure the fact he and his two friends are living in the campiest New York apartment north of Fourteenth Street. These guys—the actor! the architect! the car- toonist!—are basically the eighties yuppie version of the Village People. And let’s talk about that homoeroticism! Accidental homoeroticism is yet another one of the great joys of eighties movies, and it was the last decade that would be blessed with the pleasure because from the nineties onward, gay cul- ture and references would be too mainstream and recognizable to slip past studios unnoticed. The plethora of eighties buddy movies easily and frequently tip into acci- dental homoeroticism, with the female characters being explicitly excluded from pretty much the whole film and all sorts of intense emotion between the two male leads. Lethal Weapon is one example and an even more obvious one is Stakeout, in which Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss spend an entire movie living together in faux domesticity and, in the case of Estevez, voyeuris- tically spying on his male partner’s sexual encounters. The Lost Boys is the most blatantly homoerotic mainstream movie ever made for teenage boys. In this film, young Michael (charisma vortex Jason Patric) is initiated into the manly life of a new town by going into a cave with Kiefer Sutherland and his male buddies (none of whom seems the least bit interested in the fact that a half-naked Jami Gertz is wandering around drunk- enly in front of them) and drinking their body fluids. Sure, why not, right? Vam- pires are inherently homoerotic and the director Joel Schumacher (who later homoeroticized Batman—not difficult, admittedly—by sticking nipples on the batsuit) revels in the connection in this movie in a way Twilight later deter- minedly, somewhat dismayingly avoids. Michael does at some point have what looks like deeply unsatisfying sex with Jami Gertz, but the person he gazes at with the most intensity is young Jack Bauer. And I haven’t even mentioned that Michael’s little brother Sam (Corey Haim), who dresses like he’s trying out for Wham!, has a poster on the door of his closet of Rob Lowe lifting up his shirt. Because sure, why not, right?

[toukaisbetterthanyou]

I come again bearing a long review to spam your blog because I don't know how to add the read more cutoff line

I wish I could add gifs to this, sadly you’ll have to deal with the wall of text and mountain of salt because I just got off a 36 hour shift from hell. I did sneak a peek at the Ayahina fluff so I am saving that for after I finish this because I have a feeling- based on last week’s ending- that this chapter will royally piss me off- in a good way.

I am also going to play a little game with this chapter based on this because I just recently read this book on recognizing emotionally abusive relationships so I am going to check anything that fits Touken in this AU.

/I am sorry in advance for any poor comprehension this reaction will show. 36 hours with only 30 minutes of sleep in them./

– and even ignores the phone calls that she received on her cell phone. After the first day at his flat, she turns it off entirely. He can’t hold back a smile from seeing her do that.

And here we go. Touka, baby girl, y u do dis? Those are your family and friends. I realize they have been less than understanding about the whole situation but you’re ghosting them for the goth fuckboy?!

He would miss her once he was gone.

/EXPLODING IN RAGE/ YOU LITTLE BITCH! IF YOU HAD A DECENT BONE IN THAT RIPPED BODY OF YOURS YOU WOULD LET THE POOR WOMAN GO! Not that I am absolving Touka of the blame here, she is willingly going along with this but he is seriously pissing me off. I realize his love is supposed to be selfish but imho, that line proves there isn’t much love to begin with because he hasn’t yet considered changing his plans for Touka and/or the baby.

Sex had always helped her forget her problems. When Ken is inside of her, she doesn’t have to worry about the growing child inside of her, or Nishiki and Yomo-san, or her own anxiety about whether this child was even viable.

The trouble always came after.

You feel bad about yourself when you are around him. [✔]

You only feel good about yourself when you are with him. [✔]

This isn’t love.

She just wants it to be. Badly.

At least we can rejoice in knowing she is self-aware.

She could fool herself into believing that it would last. That he was doing this out of love and not some misplaced selfishness in finally having something to call his own.

She was hurting too, and in a moment of resigned irony, accepted it.

She would play the fool and take what she was given.

You find yourself accepting him “for now,” even though you have plenty of red flags that would help you terminate the relationship if you paid attention to them. [✔]

How funny that Kaneki of all people was taking her out on a date? After everything they had gone through, it was laughable that the prospect of a date was what really tripped her up.

Babe, it’s part of the “not giving any fucks” attitude a lot of people with concrete suicidal ideation have. It should trip you up!

or she’d go to the chateau, and later, his flat.

I thought she avoided the chateau because of the murder babies in it? I am interested in knowing more details about this, would any of the Qs know about her? Would this affect the story?I want Saiko!

Even back then – long ago, there hadn’t been a label placed on what they did. She had viewed it as stress relief, and who better to sleep with then the sweet boy that he had been? She had realized too late what he had meant to her, and by that point he had become an entirely different person.

I was under the impression they had a one night stand before the raid but this paragraph is making me imagine they had a thing going for longer than that which would be really interesting to contrast with their current relationship.

Still, nothing had changed. He was still a dove. He was still choosing to kill ghouls.

She tries not to think about it.

Your value system and his are very different, and it is problematic. [✔]

I have been thinking about this since last chapter tbh. I come from a minority that has suffered genocide in its history and I kept wondering if I would ever actually date someone who was an accomplice to the murder of my people and the mere thought of that made me feel disgusted with myself.

I know Touka is self-loathing and does not value her ghoul nature but even so, being with someone who works and profits from killing her species (or race?) would just add to the slew of issues she has going. Especially when you consider she started re to be a haven for ghouls the way Anteiku was and now she was sleeping with the enemy, the internal conflict must be out of this world and no result of it would be positive.

What are you trying to do right now? The question is lodged in her throat, like lead. Did he really want them to be together? Did he truly want a family with her? Or was this some sort of elaborate scheme to cage her even further?

…

She’s the oddest mix of ecstatic and devastated. Her hands tremble around the bunny. It was an adorable little thing – so cute. This was nice of him to do, wasn’t it? Ken was always doing nice things like this for her. Things that made her fall for him a little more each time. She’s almost hysterical.

You feel uncomfortable about something he has said or done, and the feeling remains. [✔]

You think he’s too charming or a little “too good to be true.“ [✔]

But I have to admit that the bunny date idea is quite adorable. I wonder if those actually exist? I don’t want to Google and be disappointed. I do find it tragic that this is something Touka would enjoy but she is so melancholy right now that she can’t ease up and forget about everything for 30 minutes to pet a bunny.

 “Do you want to buy it?” Ken asks, watching her as she sets it back into the pen.

Sure, dick, bring in another life to abandon later. The more the merrier. Why not adopt a couple of impoverished children while you’re at it? 

“Why not?” Ken asks, “You’ll be living with me now. There’s no reason for you to work, so you’ll have plenty of time.”

I’m sorry? Who the fuck do you think you are? Did you accidentally get into Marty McFly’s car and transported yourself back to the 1950s?

“Yes,” he responds, still smiling that cheerful smile of his. The dimple on the side of his cheek seems to be taunting her.

SOCK HIM AGAIN TOUKA! SOCK THE BASTARD RIGHT IN THAT FUCKING DIMPLE OF HIS!

“You’ll need help with the baby,” he says, in a very matter of fact kind of way. “I don’t want you to be alone in case there are any complications.”

Oh, good to know you are considering complications but before you imprison her in some flat with a disgruntled reception office employee, have you considered getting her a doctor? Prenatal vitamins at least? Moving away from the CCG who want her dead? A college fund for the kid? Finding a place to live? I doubt the CCG will just ignore your apartment after you go rogue on them and you want her to be there when it happens? May as well put a bulls eye billboard on top of your apartment building.

And who is going to help with the baby? Will your ghost ass drop by from the afterlife to change a couple of diapers? Maybe rock the baby to sleep? What a shit excuse.

“I won’t let that happen,” he says stubbornly.

Unless he is planning a Samson style suicide attack on the CCG, I have no idea how he could possibly do that from beyond the Cochlea compactor.

“Where are we?” She wanted to go home. This entire day had been tiring and her mood only continued to worsen.

You are emotionally tired from him; you feel he “sucks the life out of you." [✔]

He answers, getting out of his side to open the passenger door to help her out.

At least he’s being a gentleman?

“We need to start shopping for them, or else we won’t have enough time after they get here.”

We? We? We?!!! What we is he fucking talking about?! That’s it, this proves he believes in reincarnation or something. Either that or he’s taking Touka and the kid with him when goes to get his ass kicked by his dad. 

I don’t think I can explain how much his attitude is pissing me off!

No, she couldn’t do this. But his grip on her arm was firm and he looks at her with a pensive stare, almost like he was trying to make amends.

Touka, babe, embrace your inner Chuck Norris and roundhouse kick him in the face!

Once we get home, those words make her feel good, pathetically enough.Stupid , one word from him was enough to make that pathetic, longing part of swell with misplaced hope

/ugly crying/ mods, y u do dis?

He holds up a little jacket, too small to belong to a child. It was pink and soft looking, the insides lined with fleece.

There were bunny ears attached to the hood.

He gives her a wry smile.

“What do you think?”

Dirty move, Ken. Dirty fucking move. I am 19 weeks pregnant now and I crack at the sight of any baby items, using bunny ears to break down her defenses is such a dirty move.

On a side note, the image of the goth reaper in a sea of pastels and waddling pregnant women is making me laugh so hard. That image is not enough for me to forgive you for this chapter though.

What would they act like? How would she – be with them? She’s always liked kids, but to be a parent? She wonders how her mother had done it?. How had she brought in two children into their world, even knowing that it wasn’t a safe place for them? How did her father support her knowing that any moment, one of them could be snatched away?

/ugly wailing/ 

This makes her blink. Too late? Too late for what? “What do you mean?” He doesn’t answer her, and instead lifts her dress up over her hips, and palms her over her panties. Then, he’s hastily removing his gloves and sliding his hand underneath the elastic band to touch her directly. She loses track of what she had been attempting to say.

Using sex to ignore present problems, kinda like how you got into your current predicament. Nothing new to see here.

Maybe this could work. 

Don’t be stupid.

Maybe he was changing. Things could be different now

Don’t delude yourself.

This honestly breaks my heart. I am alternating between NO and YES so fast that my head is getting whiplash.

Then, she asks again.

“What do you mean by too late?”

…

“Answer my question,” she says, this time taking only the head into her mouth and hollowing her cheeks as she sucks

Aha, the deepthroat interrogation technique. Classic. Can’t say I haven’t used it myself. I am sure the CCG would get a lot further with their investigations if they used it in Cochlea.

“T-There’s never enough time,” he says weakly. “With you. Being with you. Like this,” is the only sentence that he has the presence of mind to string together. She has a feeling that’s not all there was to it, but she’s satisfied with his answer for now.

That is such a half assed  answer and Touka, dear, I don’t know how you could possibly be satisfied with it. You have his cock in your mouth, that means you have the upper hand, play it!

not ripping them to shreds because she would be upset.

So you didn’t mind her getting upset before? What a piece of shit.

She can’t respond when he begins to suck her pert nipples into peaks, kneading the swollen breasts and making her quake from the sensitivity she felt.

When my fiance did that, he ended up with tinnitus from how loud I screamed so lucky you Kaneki, lucky you.

“You’re mine,” He whispers, with an excited smile, “All mine,” And then, “It’s just going to be us.”

Now read that with the soundtrack to any thriller film and tell me it doesn’t fit perfectly.

He’s never been like this during sex. So attentive. Well, he was always attentive – like giving her pleasure was more of an impulse, something that he needed, rather than something that he actually did for her benefit. It had gotten him off to make her come, to make her delirious from her pleasure. This feels – different now, though.

/screams into the night/ I didn’t think it was possible for me to like this dick any less but here I am, somehow sinking lower into the abyss. I thought you did rough sex before because you both liked it? But now he stopped for the baby or because he may have feelings for her? So you are really embracing your fuckboy status?

Her earlier worry about his behavior was becoming less and less of a concern. Maybe it was idiotic of her to trust him – to blindly have faith in him this way, but maybe he was right.

Maybe they could finally be a family.

You make excuses for why you are dating him. [✔]

You make excuses for his character and minimize his behavior. [✔]

“Why do you need to go back to Re?” Ken asks, watching as she places her phone and the keys that he had given her into her purse. “I told you that you didn’t need to work.”

…

“What if they tell you not to come back?”

You feel isolated from other relationships with friends and family. [✔]

While he is not actually isolating her, he wants it and is manipulating her- consciously or subconsciously- by showing vulnerability to fall for it. What are you so worried about, jerk? That her family may actually talk some sense into her? You want her hanging on your rope till you off yourself then fuck her and her kid?

Something about that fills her with excitement. He needed her. He needed her.

NOOOOOOOOO! BAD BUNNY! BAD BAD BUNNY! THIS SHOULD NOT FILL YOU WITH EXCITEMENT!

Ken’s gloved hand curls around one of her hands.

Why the fuck is he wearing gloves indoors? Was he roleplaying Kureo Mado? Is that the sort of kinky fuckery they are into now?

This might be a cage – but if it was like this,  then it might not be so bad.

/facepalm/

It had been a good week since she had left.

I had to read this a couple of times because I thought it was from Yomo and Nishiki’s point of view and was about to add them to the fuckboy list.

But in the end, it’s not a lecture as much as it is a hug from Yomo and a playful slap on the arm from Nishiki.

I am glad they went his route and didn’t give her hell for what happened. It is important for her to know she has a supportive place to go home to.

I’ll be there in half an hour, we can go to the place with the cakes that you like.

Bitch, she is traumatized by throwing up and you want to take her out in public to do an activity that will make her nauseous? WTF?!

Yoriko better be in that bakery.

Touka is deliriously happy.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Neither of them notice a pair of watching eyes from outside of the bakery. A man woman in a black trenchcoat  an apron smiles, and then laughs.

…

Somewhere, Kosaka Yoriko is laughing.

Here, fixed that last paragraph for you.

Well, putting aside the emotional trauma this chapter put me through, this was a really well written chapter. I can’t remember the last time I felt so frustrated by a character in a fanfic or so invested in the story in general. I am angry with you in the best way possible because I don’t know if I can wait till next week for a new chapter, the clowns getting involved should make things fun not.

Looking forward to the next chapter but for now, I will just go get depressed about the pathetic state Touka is in.

[junker-town]

Sports movies that would be more fun to emulate in real life than ‘Field of Dreams’

Photo by Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post via Getty Images

MLB wants to emulate ‘Field of Dreams’ next season, and that’s fine. But if we’re being honest, big league adaptations of these movies would be even cooler.

I’ve never seen Field of Dreams. It’s probably fine? From what I gather it’s sickly sweet with a lot of I Love You Dad-type stuff engineered to exploit our too-human hearts.

The effect is apparently pretty strong, because Field of Dreams is still revered 30 year after it was released. So much so that Major League Baseball will try to bring the movie to life by making the Yankees and White Sox play in an Iowa cornfield next season.

If you build it …@Yankees. @whitesox. THE Field of Dreams. August 13, 2020. pic.twitter.com/RuBpS04BgG

— Cut4 (@Cut4) August 8, 2019

Ignoring the fact MLB’s promotional image implies Aaron Judge, Gleyber Torres, Tim Anderson, and Yoan Moncada are ghosts walking out of the cornfield, and therefore will have shuffled off this mortal coil by the time the game is played, this could be fun! Baseball is a goofy sport that is enhanced when played in goofy places. Why not!

But it does get us thinking: What famous sports movies would be even more fun to replicate for a one-off event? Here are some of our ideas. Go ahead and tell us yours via your nearest comment section and/or Twitter account. Being realistic awards you no bonus points.

Eddie (1996)

Pretty sure everyone reading this has had this fantasy. Take a vocal fan out of the stands, let them coach the Knicks, and if they win the fan gets to keep the job until the Knicks lose again. There’s no risk to a cratering team. In fact, the changeup might help break the loop of hope and letdown (and hope and letdown) that the Knicks have been stuck in for 20 years. — Louis Bien

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)

I want this. I want this, like, yesterday. How have we gone 15 years without someone trying to take the world of professional dodgeball by storm with professional wrestling-esque characters, overwhelming production values and all the pageantry it entails?

The best part is that since this is a one-off event we can totally get Jason Bateman to do commentary and stick Chuck Norris courtside. I’m almost upset I’m sharing this information here, because I know some wealthy industrialist is going to steal this idea. — James Dator

Nacho Libre (2006)

First off, yes, wrestling is a real sport. The action might be slightly scripted but the moves are real. Imagine a random cook in a monastery becoming a luchador. It’s an underdog story for the ages. He even fights for a great cause: so the orphans in the church can eat better quality foods. It’s a heartwarming story filled with adventure and danger, mostly from the fear of having their bones broken from getting power-bombed. Picking a random person and making them a part-time luchador is an event worth watching. Especially if one of their first matches is an eight-person battle royale. Sign me up for the chaos. - Vijay Vemu

Teen Wolf (1985)

I just want to see people get eaten. — Christian D’Andrea

Air Bud (1997) or Treasure Buddies (2012)

The Air Bud archives, including its spinoff series Air Buddies and Santa Paws, is more voluminous than the Police Academy and Mission Impossible franchises put together. And you really couldn’t go wrong picking ANY of its 14 installments. SO MANY GOOD DOGS.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll narrow it down to two: OG basketball-playing Air Bud, which still holds up 22 years later, and which seems like the most logical choice if we’re talking about replicating it in real life. (Here’s one suggestion for the starring role.)

The other is Treasure Buddies, which I have never seen and technically isn’t a sports movie but gets the nod based on a Wikipedia description that belongs in a museum:

The Buddies find themselves on an Indiana Jones style adventure.

Yes, please. — Sarah Hardy

Over the Top (1987)

Don’t you want to win an arm wrestling championship? — Russ Oates

The Sandlot (1993)

The Sandlot — or more specifically Sandlot 2 (2005), where girls exist and play sports — is truly the only answer here. Since about age 7, all I wanted to experience was playing baseball at the sandlot, and that hasn’t changed as I’ve gotten older. Just make sure James Earl Jones is present. — Kennedi Landry

Brink! (1998)

Brink! is a Disney Channel original movie about extreme in-line skating and how capitalism exerts its influence on our passions. But the X-Games already exists, so we don’t need to bring skating to life, we just need ... more milkshakes to the face.

Pup ‘N Suds forever. — Michael Katz

Like Mike (2002)

I need to see a 4’ tall child dunking on NBA Players. — Tyson Whiting

Ed (1996)

In this film, Matt LeBlanc (who is basically channeling Joey, because what else is he going to do, he is Matt LeBlanc) winds up as an errand boy for a professional minor league baseball team. One of his errands has him cross paths with the titular Ed, a chimpanzee who, it turns out, is really, really good at playing baseball for unsaid reasons. Hijinks ensue. This film has everything — a fart-off, some light animal torture, a magical coin (?), and yes, a meta Friends reference — all of it terrible. In fact, we called it the worst sports movie ever made.

But am I going to sit here and pretend it wouldn’t be awesome to play minor league ball with a farting monkey? No, reader. I am not.

— Ryan Simmons

Slap Shot (1977)

Nobody wears a helmet. Fighting, while not exactly legal, is certainly encouraged. As is putting on the foil. Winning captain has to strip down to his jock strap. Don Cherry would spontaneously combust, leaving a technicolor apparition muttering about “Old Time Hockey” for all eternity. — Paul Flannery

White Men Can’t Jump (1992)

Blacktop basketball, Jeopardy!, and undefeated Wesley Snipes drip. This movie has everything anyone could ever want in a movie, and also two-on-two basketball should be an Olympic sport. — Michael Pina

Brewster’s Millions (1985)

Quasi-sports movie with Richard Pryor portraying a pitcher for the Hackensack Bulls and John Candy serving as his catcher. I’d happily work to spend $30 million in 30 days and have no assets to show for it to inherit $300 million. — David Fucillo

Space Jam (1996)

There is no better time to do this than the present. With talks of wanting to raid Area 51 and kick it with aliens, we can surely assemble a group of five extraterrestrials, have them take the talents of guys like Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, or other NBA stars, and do a live-action remake of the original Space Jam. Only difference is that LeBron James replaces Michael Jordan. — Harry Lyles Jr.

Luck of the Irish (2001)

This Disney Channel classic has a description as follows: “A teenager (Ryan Merriman) must battle for a gold charm to keep his family from being controlled by an evil leprechaun.”

Do I need to explain anything else? — Whitney Medworth

Blades of Glory (2007)

It’s really hard for me to comprehend why we haven’t seen an all-male figure skating pair since this movie came out more than 10 years ago, but hey, I’m not in the movie business. Not only was this a highly underrated Will Ferrell film in my humble opinion, the sports world deserves to see two men complete the Iron Lotus (successfully, I feel like I need to add) on live television, dammit.

— Morgan Moriarty