#yeah reading 2011 gives you context for some stuff later on in 2016 but

[house-on-sand]

im reading rhato 2011 (kind of) only because my brain is an on fire garbage can and says I Need To bc i read rhato 2016 and like im so hyperfixated on fuckng jason todd it's stupid but i didn't realise that when people said rhato 2011 was bad they meant it was bad bad. like that's why i read 2016 first bc i had heard it was bad but i figured i should read 2011 in case like. more stuff would make sense but. its Meh. and maybe im just judging it by the first couple issues but its enough to turn me off of it. like im probably gonna drop it for awhile and power thru at a later date maybe.

[leam1983]

Quarantine Musings

I’ve been playing Doom Eternal and watching those with higher neurokinetics than me slay stuff on Ultra Nightmare, and I came to the realization that Doom 2016 marked a kind of zeitgeist shift for id Software. 

Prior to remaking Doom, id was mostly a tech-focused house under John Carmack’s leadership. It still is to a degree, with the latest Tech engine showing solid improvements, but it feels like even in trying to embrace the silliness of Doom, Hugo Martin and his team created a solid diegesis - an interestingly layered collection of tales and legends that goes from the originals’ lack of narrative involvement to meaningful and expertly-delivered chunks of scenery-chewing.

If you read Masters of Doom, all of this comes into focus: you’ve got a company funded  by a wünderkind Gen Xer with grandiose dreams of fast cars, busty babes and billion-dollar game franchises as far back as the era of garage-sale publishers (John Romero), along with a laser-focused kid who probably would’ve been diagnosed as a light case of Asperger’s, decades later, who thought nothing of the idea of committing theft if that meant he’d get to clack away on an Apple II’s keyboard before his own finances would permit it. id started as a tech-focused joint, with the storyline only existing as a bare-bones framing device. After all, Carmack once said that stories in a video games are comparable to the plot of a Skinemax special. Nobody gives a damn about ‘em.

Unsurprisingly, then, you’ve got a company that would spend decades trying to position itself in a manner similar to, say, Crytek. Doom the first in name set a technological and thematic benchmark, but those that followed only iterated on the technological aspect of things. Doom, Doom II, its expansions, Final Doom and its expansions, Quake One through to Arena and Team Arena - they’re all precursors to Yahtzee Croshaw’s “Spunkgargleweewee” genre, they’re all bang-bang-shooty types and they only care about storytelling in that they deliver a starting point and an endpoint. In-between, all you’ve got is the result of a level designer looking at a prototype and thinking “Yeah, that looks cool! Pack it in!”

Before Doom 2016, there came the much-maligned showing of a hypothetical Doom 4 that  went for every single element in the Call of Duty catalog. Unsurprisingly, the fans hated it. It was a technical tour de force, but it wasn’t Doom. Then came RAGE, the last project John Carmack helmed at id. Again, a chunk of hardware-related brilliance in and of itself, but an otherwise eminently forgettable shooter. Back when id made the QuakeCon rounds for RAGE, the one and only selling point Carmack had on offer was the game’s use of megatextures.

Does that relate to the gameplay? Not at all. Are megatextures diegetic? Not in the slightest. Do they excuse the Bethesda-demanded hiring of big-name voice actors? Nope. If anyone remembers id Tech 4 for anything, nowadays, it’s for delivering us That One Game What Got John Goodman in It. 

Games don’t matter to John Carmack, at least not in and of themselves. They’re a neat way to package tech, like an expensively-produced megamillion Demoscene intro. They also didn’t really matter to Romero, who saw them and still sees them as a form of adolescent posturing.

Then, you’ve got Hugo Martin. He and the design team at id realized the Doom franchise was and is inherently bonkers, and that expectations had evolved. Telling gamers to shut up and check out a README file wouldn’t cut it anymore - a structuring plot was needed.

So what do you do, in the face of an adolescent hyper-violent murder fantasy that cribs from anything between Pantera, Slayer and Sepultura, James Cameron flicks and H.R. Giger’s works? You Bioshock Infinite the fuck out of that insanity. You lovingly plaster it around context, pick out the bits of sense amidst the madness and structure your lore from there. It seems easy now, but keep in mind that id circa 2011 would never have done that.

I repeat, dixit Carmack - plot is for porn. In his mind, all games need is a good set of mechanics and a killer engine, designed specifically to keep that GPU manufacturer sponsorship money rolling in. It’s really no surprise, then, that he packed his bags and turned CTO for Oculus, seeing as he’s now free to focus on technology. He cut out the neediness inherent to game design and finally managed to do what he’d been hoping to do since Doom’s days: to work as the Architect, as opposed to the Designer.

Honestly, I see that as the best thing that could’ve possibly happened to id. They’re no longer stuck with the need to chase some hypothetical technological Rainbow Road: they can put together something that works, and then use that to craft an experience that’s mature enough to be self-deprecating while retaining all of its adolescent thrills.

But seriously, go watch DraQ’s five-hour Ultra Nightmare run. I’ve only scratched the surface at about twenty minutes in, but this is someone who very clearly gets Doom Eternal.

[larriefails]

First off, I’m not a rad nor a larrie, I’m a louie who hates both. I was just commenting on that because I’ve been in the fandom since 2013 and the de facto leader comment not only came from the boys but also during a billboard interview. In the billboard interview, they highlighted how Louis was the one taking the business calls and talking to their team about certain things. Also it’s not completely impossible to believe that once the 1d train ran out the big producers/names didn’t care to +

Work with him, because he was no “harry styles” liam is the same he even said that Simon didn’t want him on his label as a solo artist despite him having a great rapport with him. But there were other times louis’ business contacts were brought to light such as when he went to the Brits in 2016 and a reporter commented on how he was constantly on his feet to greet big name record executives and businessmen. He has the connects in the business that’s all I was trying to state.

Look, 99% of the time when I reply to an anon “you sound like a conspiracy theorist” it’s not because I think they believe in Larrie or because they’re rads, it’s because they fucking reason like conspiracy theorists

And your reasoning here is just… conspiracy theory mess. I don’t care which parts of it you believe or not, I don’t care what your personal feelings on these specific sets of conspiracy theories are. It doesn’t matter, the point is that you’re reasoning like a conspiracy theorist

I was gonna put this in a separate post, but I think it fits here very well (I might still make a separate post about it who knows)

A few days ago, I saw this video on twitter of a woman talking about her own death like it was nothing in a very matter of factly way, wearing a wig and using a very funny tone. Someone in the replies linked to her IG page so I went to look at it, and when I saw comments telling her “thank you for accepting my follow request” I realized she was usually on private and I’d just been very lucky to find her profile to be open, so I followed her just in case with the intention of watching her funny videos later

Since she was a new follow she continuously appeared on my recent IG feed and I soon realized how relevant what she was saying was to my interests

This is the woman

One day she posted this, and my alarms went off

Let me clarify that I don’t care if she’s a professor or a therapist or not, I followed her because I thought she was funny and that she’d go on private soon, this was all a complete surprise to me. The DM rang close to home to me, seeing as I’ve read Larries for a while now, it was all too familiar, her reply was too

Then she posted this

Once again, I said it before and you can read it here X it doesn’t matter if she’s a professor or not, if their suspicions are real or not, if she’s lying or not, because going through UCLA’s professor roll call is a step too far, and confronting her about it, even more so. And the way she presents it.. she’s right. She just linked the website, she never claimed to work there. If you go to her page, she’s very careful with the information she provides, so the people that want to prove she’s lying have very limited resources. They go with the preconception that she’s lying so they try to find ways to prove their preconception

You have the preconception that Louis was the de facto leader of 1D, so you’re working your way backwards to prove it. You’re looking at bits and pieces of interviews that will prove your theory right, but that’s just not what reality is

“The de facto leader comment not only came from the boys” .. no it didn’t, though? They didn’t say this. Do you know where the “the boys say Louis is the leader” comments come from? Stuff like this

Context for that interview? The Hot Desk, August 2011 X

One Direction had exactly ZERO songs out, this interview was recorded before they even released WMYB. All 5 of them had written on 3 songs of their first album that would come out in November. Savan Kotecha was still running the show. Louis was still 19 and he hadn’t been in show business for a year. How much of a leader that conducted business meetings do you think he was? I’m not gonna watch the entire interview to see the context, but this is not Zayn saying Louis was the de facto leader, this is Zayn kidding

What to even say about this, which is from the video diaries in X Factor?

Or this?

What? No, no they’re not, like, they’re just not, they’re standing in a circle and looking forward

This is just ridiculous

Does the person that created this gif set not realize that this is the performance where Louis doesn’t sing at all? It’s Torn at judges’ houses. It’s infamous for the fact that only Liam Harry and Zayn sang. This is all for dramatic effect because X Factor was a reality show

Louis liking motivation chants means he’s the leader? That he goes to business meetings? I’m so confused

That’s not because “he’s the leader” that’s because he’s the class clown

If accepting an award means he’s the leader then I guess this meme fits 1D very well

They all accepted awards, Christ

Anyway….

And that’s an entire gif set that was solely engineered to show that Louis was the leader and that “the boys said so”…. but they actually didn’t? The only two times it comes up they answer jokingly and it’s before Louis could do anything remotely leader like. But that gif set is so popular, created by a Larrie but that spilled out to the general fandom enough that I saw it on my dash reblogged by non CT blogs X

And it created this notion among some people, especially those who have Louis as their fave, that the other members of 1D had in fact said that Louis was the de facto leader, when they didn’t. It’s conspiracy talk, scouring through hundreds of MILLIONS of milliseconds of footage to pick 9 of them and put them in a gif set to prove a point they’d already decided on

There are also three news articles linked (copying and pasting directly from the source, sorry for the weird formatting idk how to take it off)

1: That’s the number of hotel rooms in Mexico City used for dance rehearsals. The guys locked down a room for three hours. Louis took control of the rehearsals and even helped conceptualize some of the routine.

That’sabout 1D learning the choreography for Best Song Ever

How exactly does it prove that Louis is the de facto leader for him to take over 1 dance rehearsal when everyone in 1D had confessed they couldn’t dance a million times at that point? Louis had some musical theater experience, so that’s that..

Harry: Louis is still loud and mischievous - he likes to test the boundaries. He’s quite outspoken. You need someone like that, because he’s great at standing up for us as a band.

That’s perhaps the most “leader like” comment any of them have ever made about Louis, and it’s not really about him being a leader once you put it by itself instead of surrounding it by “look at all the times they said he was the leader,” right? It’s just more of a testament about the fact that Louis was louder than the rest, which we already knew. If someone had asked me six months into my journey in the fandom who I thought was the loudest in band meetings I would’ve said Louis. That doesn’t mean he’s the leader. A leader has SO many more characteristics than being loud and outspoken. In fact, a lot of leaders aren’t loud or outspoken at all

The last link they put is once again, what How I Met Your Mother explained as the cheerleader effect X which taken away from the time period sounds quite misogynistic but let’s not dwell on that. Basically, it’s when a group of women appear hot when they’re all together but not individually. When you have the gif set all together, it looks like “wow, these are hot arguments as to why EVERYONE thought Louis was the leader,” but look at them individually, see their context and they’re not as hot now, are they? Especially when you realize, once again, that these are very very small morsels of time taken from very very large portions. That’s how Larries operate

Several people in your management and inner circle have described you to me as the unofficial businessman or leader of the group. Is that a fair assessment? I’ve sometimes felt like that, but to be honest most of the time I’m the immature one who needs to be told to get focused. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I have to be kind of be on board with every minor detail and [I’m] quite opinionated.

And that last link is also the Billboard interview you mention in your ask. Do you know when it’s from? December 2012. One Direction had just released Take Me Home, their second album, which according to the interview that Larries love the most to base their sabotage conspiracies, didn’t very much involve 1D’s input at all

Savan Kotecha: I think by album 3 (Midnight Memories), yeah, not all of them, there was definitely one or two-one especially-that was like, kind of bitter about the fact, that, you know

Ross Golan: They were a boyband?

Savan Kotcha: And he was not the talented one. He wasn’t the singer, and he wasn’t the star. And you know which one I’m talking about…

Ross Golan: Of course.

Savan Kotecha: And he then started having something against me and against that process, I think. And, you know, maybe we could have been more inviting in the creative process during album 2 (Take Me Home) and not been so…authoritative.

At that point, Louis STILL wasn’t in a position where he could really be the leader. None of them were because the creative process wasn’t inviting still. It wouldn’t be until the third album

The conclusion here isn’t that Louis isn’t outspoken, or that he didn’t care about business or that he didn’t defend the band, or that he didn’t want to write more, or that he didn’t want to make connections. No one here is arguing that he didn’t care at all or not giving him credit for anything. The point I‘ve been making for days now and that people don’t seem to get (one way or another, because I’ve gotten very unpleasant messages about how he’s not equipped to be a businessman and shit like that that I’ve just decided not to publish at all), is that things don’t have to be black and white

I don’t think ANYONE was the leader of 1D. I think that Louis’ personality made him stand out more in certain aspects (such as meetings with their team), and because people need to label everything all the time, instead of describing it as it was, it took the position of “de facto leader”

The problem here isn’t even that people believe he’s the de facto leader, that wouldn’t concern me at all in and of itself because who cares? It’s not hurting anyone… The problem is that it puts an excessive amount of weight on Louis’ shoulders, I also explained this. It’s this dichotomy of a person who basically carried the whole band during its five years but that also is completely defenseless and at the mercy of binding contracts to even choose the socks he wears

These sort of preconceptions aren’t harmful by themselves, they wouldn’t be harmful in a normal band. I wouldn’t have a problem with this preconception if Louis was Calum Hood and this was 5SOS, my problem is that this is One Direction and preconceptions and conspiracies have tormented these guys for YEARS. No conspiracy and no preconception is innocent, they all have to be dismantled, we have to examine EVERYTHING that leads to absolutes if we want a chance at healing the fandom, and I don’t mean the 1D fandom because that’s gone now, it’s never gonna heal, I mean Louis’ specifically

If we want a chance at him being left alone from Larries these things have to go. Stop seeing him as this commodity that you can just paint over and start seeing him as a person, not a caricature

That interview also doesn’t say anything about him taking any calls business or otherwise. I don’t think anyone has ever said it and I have no idea where it came from because I’ve found zero sources. The interview doesn’t mention him “talking about certain things“ either, it’s just what I pasted here. That’s all of it. Everything else comes from years and years of stretching this one question out of this one interview done when Louis was still 20 and 1D had less than 2 years in the music industry. It’s no exactly the smoking gun y’all think it is, guys. Same with the Savan Kotecha podcast

Then the rest of what you say is just noise, man. IDK what to tell you. It’s just noise. If Louis had ran the show BTS for five years, then he’d have access to the best producers and writers on speed dial, why would he not being Harry Styles hinder how he’s perceived by the people that work backstage? They’d recognize the person that was “the backbone of 1D” for who he is because those things spread in the business. If LOUIS said that wasn’t happening, then it’s because your preconception was wrong and you took a bunch of things out of context to create a “narrative” that simply wasn’t real. Louis was dedicated to the band and wanted to write for it and involve himself in the creative side and he GENUINELY WAS IMPORTANT for the band, but he wasn’t its backbone or its de facto leader

Simon didn’t wantt Liam on his label probably because he couldn’t afford him, btw. He decided to stick with Louis because they’ve been thick as thieves since 2014 and those contracts cost money and Syco is a very small label with very limited resources, so they couldn’t offer anything to more than one member. I’m  aware that I’m making assumptions here, but they very much align with reality, especially now that Syco lost so many other acts and now that Fifth Harmony disbanded and Syco landed only Lauren (Camila being like Zayn) and having to leave Ally, Dinah, and Normani go to other labels. That doesn’t mean they saw no value in them (in fact, I think Lauren is the one faring the worst), it’s just that they can only afford so much

And how much can you grin on one report written by the HUFFINGTON POST in 2016?X I’m talking about the “Louis hugged industry people that one time” comment you made. Once again, I’m not saying he doesn’t know anyone. I’m saying I BELIEVE WHAT HE SAYS. If he says he can’t easily get the producers and writers he wants, then I’m going to believe him. And that one report doesn’t really change anything for me. It’s, once again, very conspiracy theorist behavior to put more weight on an isolated report from an untrustworthy source three years ago than on Louis’ own words. If he really had enough reach to be friendly with everyone in the industry, then he’d be able to get any producer he wants

You can’t have this dichotomy that you present in this very ask of “they’re not picking up the phone because he’s Harry Styles” but he was the de facto leader of the biggest band on the planet for five years and everyone in the music industry knows him. It just doesn’t mesh together. You’re placing him in the same impossible position Larries are placing him and that’s harmful. He needs fans that see him as a person and you, I’m sorry to tell you, do not. You see him as a caricaturesque figure that can both be incredibly important and incredibly subjugated

“He has the connects in the business is all I was trying o state” 1. no that’s not all you were trying to state. 2. According to himself, he doesn’t have all the connects. He’s clearly close enough to be friendly with Rob Stringer, but that doesn’t mean that Rob Stringer will lift a finger for him and according to Louis, he’s not.. But that doesn’t mean that Louis can’t get ANYONE or that he’s being sabotaged. As always, truth lies somewhere in the middle. The only reason it’s harder to spot in this case is that people stretch it on every possible side so much

I know this is long as fuck and I probably lost any person that was willing to read my drivel in the first place, but I just really think it’s important that you start taking what LOUIS SAYS ABOUT LOUIS as fact, instead of twisting it around to present alternative facts that would present a reality that will please you more. It starts at “Louis was the de facto leader” and it ends as “he’s been faking fatherhood for three years and lied about his mother’s last few days” Sick..