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occupyscifi · 8 years ago

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The Distracter in chief

The day the UN criminal court accused three fossil fuel companies of crimes against humanity for causing irreversible global warming the President of the United States was caught on camera pissing on a tramp in Times Square.

“lots of haters and losers posting fake content” tweeted the president later that day “but I’m above that lying fake news liberal media. So sad to lie to boost their sagging ratings”

His argument was let down by two things, the first that he had tweeted from downtown New York, mere streets from where the incident took place. The other being that the figure in the video had turned to the camera and said “I’m the President of the fucking USA and I endorse this message”.

“video faked” the President later tweeted “beautiful what computers can do. Losers in Hollywood can’t take me because I’m too real”

However not everyone was talking about the president’s innovative new solution for the problem of homelessness.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence?” Said Butterfield Jones, lead guerrilla reporter for the undercover paramilitary wing of CNN “I mean the very day that the UN brings its case against ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers and Rosneft for climate genocide. The same fossil fuel companies our president has been championing since he took office, and the same climate change that he’s denied since day one. Doesn’t it strike you as odd on this of all days he decides to take a leak on a homeless guy?”

“err, no” said her editor, arching an impressively thick eyebrow. Unibrows were in this season, along with moustaches for women, though the editor preferred the whispy look of one drawn on in mascara. The two journalists were sitting in a downtown branch of Mcvegans, chosen not because of its right on politics – the name change had come about since a combination of antibiotic resistant diseases and spiralling meat prices had made it impossible to make a profit from animal burgers – but because of its ultra secure WIFI. The editor pointed to a wall where a news feed had been projected, a hashcloud of tweets and mood colours showing the President’s incredulous expression surrounded by his favourite adjectives, ones that frequently had little or no connection to real words, or reality itself “you really think the commander in chief deliberately leaked that footage?” Jones winced slightly at the pun, she had spent too many years sub editing to not have pun based PTSD “that seems pretty unlikely, because it’s something that would sink pretty much every politician if a video of them pissing on a tramp got out…”

“but not this president” countered Jones, tapping at a foldout keyboard in thick primary colours. Since the great cyber paedo scare three years earlier the safest encryption to be found on any device was always on kids networked toys. The fallout from the scandal which had engulfed Mattel and Hasbro had brought in the sort of digital protection that Apple and other Silicon Valley privacy crusaders could only dream of. That terrorists and rogue reporters like Jones had instantly bought up the new ultra safe devices had gone largely unnoticed. That today’s terrorists largely communicated via networked Furbies had been revealed by numerous news outlet but had largely been assumed as simply fake news “he’s being pulling shit like this since day one. look” said Jones, linking the editor’s digital glasses into what she herself was seeing. Two timelines scrolling side by side. One showed a chronological line of the president’s, gaffes, accidental wars, support for fascistic ideas, pointless crusades against imaginary ills and character assassinations against everyone up to and including God himself. The other showed a ticker tape of seemingly unrelated bad news events and political scandals. The admission several years earlier by ExxonMobil that they had spent millions climate change proofing their organisations while denying that climate change even happened. The selling off of all US national parks to a consortium of Russian oligarchs. The announcement that most of the American Midwest had a lower quality of life than most of east Africa. The time that the Chinese had bailed out the US’s national debt in return for total control of the south China sea. The toxic spill that had rendered much of Louisiana inhabitable.

"I don’t remember that happening” said the editor, looking at the date “but, wait, was that was that the day the president gave that nazi salute on live TV?”

"yup” said Jones, bringing up the footage on her Mattel “Which he dismissed as being a high five gone wrong. So you missed the fact that the US now has more internal refugees than Syria. But the fact was that the President’s tiny hands heil was just another piece of nazi trolling, which I believe he does pretty much every day. The only difference this time was that a live TV camera happened to be on him at the time. Which I cannot believe was just a coincidence, what with his handlers now being pretty much experts in the art of not letting the man walk around with his dick hanging out of his pants – you know, after that time he actually did get caught with his dick out. I think someone is leaking these things deliberately, and I think they are doing it to distract us from the worse things that are happening”

“I don’t think the president’s that smart” said the editor “and I don’t really see what can be worse than a president who tried to start a war with every country he doesn’t like and publicly suggests that the far right aren’t really bad guys after all. I mean, I genuinely can’t think of anything horrible, mean or stupid he hasn’t already”

“Exactly” said Jones “he fucks up so often and does such stupid outrageous stuff that always dominates the news cycle. His people just have to time their announcements for when the president drops a shit bomb. No one has the time to be outraged by two things at once. Like no one can be upset about the EPA being shut down or Murdoch being put in charge of the FCC the same week that the President tries to make Steve Bannon a supreme court judge. Fact was the Judge Bannon storm never came to anything. Like everything the president does. Nothing actually happens. Sure he keeps threatening war, like he keeps threatening to build that wall with Mexico. It never actually happens. Its all just clickbait for angry liberals”

"Oh come on" said the editor "You expect me to believe every time the president gets caught doing horrible shit its really done to cover all the really, really horrible shit that goes down? You sound like a conspiracy nut" the editor tapped at her own toy keyboard, the Mattel logo subtly changed to spell the words 'My Hell'. "Look, here they are. A bunch of the Presidents own Nazi Douche bros. Let me read you the highlights" she gained sickly. Dealing with the many openly Nazi online supported of the president was an occupational hazard. The fact that in real life both jones and the editor could have taken out the basement dwelling Third Reichers with one hand tied behind their back didn't matter. The mini blackshirts lived online in an age where everything going was networked. The doxx and the leak had replaced the jackboot and the castor oil in the armoury of fascism. That they were also openly supported by the president and, and indeed had their own federally funded ‘Department of Patriotism and Correct Reporting’ also helped.

"The Femininazi liberals have struck again, their fake news making headlines in the failing Jew York times. Is it a coincidence that George Soros and the Washington Post editorial team were seen at the same function on Saturday? Where they selling out the proud American race? What other conclusion could we come to? So sad that they can't see that they'll be the first in the gas chambers, because that how we deal with traitors to the white race"

"Get to the point" said Jones weary. She knew that most of these screeds were written automatically by a software bot that reacted to real time world events with a set of stock phrases. Both Isis and Fox News used the same, meaning they could claim responsibility for every single terror incident in the world – or denounce muslims - even if they were entirely fictional.

"studies show that there is a correlation between Liberal mothers and boys becoming gay. Coincidence? This cannot be allowed to continue. The little snowflakes need to realise that a real man can stand up for himself' then it's just the usual bunch of rape threats. What I'm saying is you’re paranoid girl. There is now way our bloated POTUS has the smarts to manufacture a crisis every time one of his billionaire plutocrat buddies causes an even bigger one. Besides, I think the media and people in general are smart enough to know when they're being played. We’re pretty savvy these days"

"You sure about that?" said Jones, gesturing at the other dinners in the Mcvegan restaurant. As most didn't have the kiddie encryption of the two journalists everything going they were looking at was easily available to the snooping software that both women had on their digital glasses.

"Look at them" said Jones " Those who aren't streaming AR HBO porn are writing angry tweets against our C in C"

"Good for them" said the editor "The first sign of a healthy democracy is an engaged citizenry. Our job as journalists is first the fight against apathy. Because the true enemy of our way of life is not the jackboot or the swastika but the indifference of our..."

"Spare me" said Jones, who had heard that speech too many times during her internship with numerous liberal crusading organisations "have you noticed what they are actually tweeting about?" She pointed around the room "that guy there is memeing some Dawson’s Creek pics with Pres piss references. That girl with the Amish beard is writing a protest musical about the president"

"Sounds good" said the editor "art and politics are..."

"About the president only. His seismic xenophobia, his comically small hands and his incredibly thin skin. Any mention of how we lost the trade war with China? Or how Russia now owns eastern Europe? Or that Roe versus Wade got suspended last week by the Supreme court? You know, the week that Trump organised his second crusade against imaginary electoral fraud by the alt left – whoever the fuck they are meant to be" Jones clenched her fists "no, course not. Because people like to be outraged by what someone says, rather than what they actually do. Because we aren’t just being gaslighted anymore, we’re being distracted by shiny things that make us angry while someone walks away with America. So instead of a woman’s right to choose we’ve got a musical number about how the President got confused about North and South Korea and sent a bunch of weapons to the last communist state on earth"

"That was a major news event..."

"Sending a couple of cruise missiles to a country so poor they can't eat and so isolated that their literacy rate is under fifty percent doesn't really change much" said Jones "and besides, I don't know if it actually happened. Pentagon said it didn’t. Most experts can’t find any evidence that it did. There was just an anonymous leak to Buzzfeed"

"Who believes the pentagon these days?" said the editor "they were covering their asses. Besides it's just the sort of stupid shit the president does, ever since he punched that disabled woman at his second term inauguration"

"Exactly" said Jones "With this guy in charge people will believe literally anything because of who he is. I don't believe we're the first people to realise this. I think some important people are using the president to bury their bad news. He’s a distraction, a big old orange wizard of Oz. The real guy’s in charge are behind the curtain” she tapped the table in irritation “And I don't think he even knows about it"

"Sounds like a great story sweetie" said the editor patronisingly " but how are you ever going to get proof? I mean sure, tweet it but there's so much shit flying around I doubt anyone would notice. I don't know how you’re going to get anyone to listen"

"Simple" said Jones "I'm going to talk to the man himself. He’s so thin skinned and insecure he’d believe it straight away if I told him that people were trying to ruin his reputation on purpose. If there’s anything he takes seriously its himself"

“umm, how are you going to do that?” said the editor “he doesn’t do interviews. Not since that time he had to admit that he didn’t actually know who Winston Churchill was, and that he thought Thomas Jefferson wrote White Rabbit”

“Oh, that’s easy” said Jones “too easy, in fact”

It was depressingly simple to get access to the president. Not as a journalist of course, any found within three hundred metres of the president would be arrested as a traitor and sent straight to Guantanamo bay. But the president always found time for his fans, especially if they were sycophantic, female and could be ordered to anonymous hotels as easily as calling an uber.

Jones knew the presidents’ predilections, as did everyone after the leaked tape where he had explained in depth the kind of girl he enjoyed cheating on his wife with. And while going undercover as a whore was not easy it was something Jones had done several times before, not least because it was always the easiest way to secure an interview with a politician. Admittedly it did mean having to blackmail them, but since when had journalism not become a form of guerrilla war? After all since they had been designated the opposition party it made sense to use any means necessary.

Jones had then managed to hack the shortlist of the presidents preferred women, which had been secured by a machine inexplicably still running windows XP. Jones had raised an eyebrow, you would have thought after the nuclear codes had been stolen after being stored on a similar machine that the president would have learned his lesson. Now Jones had an inkling as to why, you never knew when you might need to leak a video of the President getting a girl to dress as the House Minority leader while fellating him.

However when Jones finally confronted the President, dressed this time as a Fox news anchor who’d once had the temerity to challenge him, the response she got was not what she had expected.

“Mr President” she had said from her knees, the all too familiar presidential dong hanging inches from her nose “I have some serious news for you”

“hey, not cool. Not part of the script” said the president, looking anxiously around. His security were stationed outside, the POTUS would have had them in the room with him but they had pointed out that went beyond their contracts and threatened to get their union involved.

“I have reason to believe the stream of leaks, allegations and intelligence reports embarrassing you are being used as part of an orchestrated campaign to hide a wider and more destructive agenda”

“no shit” said the president “the libtard media have got it in for me. Always. Not news. It’s not. Now come on, call me the best president ever. I wanna hear it. The best President…”

“not by them, Mr President” said Jones, pulling out a tablet and projecting on the wall her findings. The two timeline bulged with cross referenced facts and incontrovertible proof “I believe a cabal of special interests are using these…incidents to their own advantage. To bury their own bad news and their evil actions at your expense”

“uh huh” said the president, looking at the wall, his flaccid member still hanging from his ten thousand dollar suit. He put one hand on his hip and the other he used to point a stubby finger at the display. The two timelines that matched almost perfectly, for every gaffe and pointless vanity crusade there was a war or corruption scandal whose impact dwarfed whatever stupidity the President had been involved in “you got it all here. Everything. That’s so….”

“look, I know it’s not proof” said Jones quickly, pulling off the curly blonde wig and getting to her feet “but it’s pretty consistent. I mean right back to your first term every time there was something big that people should be discussing then someone releases some dirt on you – usually something ludicrous that gets debunked”

“Fake news. All fake news” said the president with a shrug, his eyes on the timelines “that’s neat. Real neat software you got there”

“you don’t seem concerned” said Jones, her face wrinkling “I mean, they’re ruining your reputation out there. To hide their own shit and corruption” jones looked at the President grinning inanely as he looked at the spike in online traffic after he had got the secret service to waterboard a schoolboy who had insulted him on Twitter “in fact” said jones “I’d say you don’t even look surprised. Did you know about this?”

“know about it?” said the President “oh, I didn’t just know about it. I arranged it. I made the fricking deal. Deal of the century. Every time they wanna use my name to hide a little scandal of theirs I make sure they pay. Pay big. I mean, I gotta make a buck, right? They don’t pay me much as President. I’m a businessman. A businessman. You know what that means right?”

“but your reputation” said Jones, jabbing a finger at the projection “doesn’t that bother you? I mean, you aren’t famous for taking the high road when it comes to how people see you”

“No. you see, the thing is. okay” the president held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger pressed together “one thing, half that shit is made up. It’s made up. Total bullshit. Liberals hate me, they want to believe anything and everything bad against me. Why not make them hate me even more? Gets me off to see how much they hate me. I love it. And the people that support me, they don’t believe it. In fact the more shit gets thrown at me the less they believe. Its scandal fatigue. Scandal fatigue. People get tired of hearing the same thing. I mean, sure, the first time they said I fucked hookers there was outrage. Total outage. Now, no one cares. Besides you gotta remember what really matters. Me. And they keep talking about me. No one cares about what all the whores say. I’m still the big guy on the evening news”

“but you do fuck hookers!” cried Jones “and everyone knows it. But that doesn’t make it right. You’re meant to be president. That carries with it a certain standard. You think it doesn’t disgust people that you do this?”

“hey, I told everyone on the campaign trail that I could shoot a person in Times Square and not lose votes. Everyone knew what they were buying then, right? So why not monetise that? The lying Liberal media was so obsessed with trashing me they couldn’t see the obvious. I played them. I’m the master player. They think they’re so clever. That they can win with their facts. Good businessman knows his enemies weakness. A good entertainer know what people wants. I’m an entertainer. I gave them what they wanted. They wanted to hate me so I gave them something to hate. Not my fault that they missed the real story. And they should thank me. If it wasn’t for me no one would read the New York Times or the Washington Post”

“so you arranged it all?” said Jones, somehow surprised that the president still had the capacity to disgust her “you deliberately leaked scandals just to get bribe money from your big business friends?” Jones clenched her fists and thought of the tiny hidden camera hidden in the skin of her forehead just under the hairline “you have any idea what will happen when I tell people this?”

“it’ll hide whatever I want to it to hide” said the President, grinning at his tumescent member “cause I’d be real careful when you leak it. I so much as get word this hits the headlines and I’m gonna deny it. Like always. And you’ll come back, calling me a liar. Like always. And I’ll trash you on twitter. Like always. And by the time the dust clears no one will remember that this was the same day I released my tax returns or I reveal what my family really owns in Russia – and lemme tell you it’s huge. Huge. I been doing this since before even my first day in office. And the media falls for it. Every time. Everyone does”

“but…” began jones, trying to think of a way to release the compromising footage that meant it couldn’t be used by the president to cover an even bigger scandal. Of a way to release the data that he couldn’t use to cause a social media spat that got people angry without actually having anything new to be angry about or doing anything to change things for the better. She could feel her eyes fill with tears and her hands clench uselessly.

“that’s right sweetheart” said the president, using his free hand to bring himself to climax “keep that expression. The one where you’re real disgusted and defeated at the same time. Love it”

“And he just turned around and walked out the hotel room?” said the editor. She was ubering in her spare time and had picked up the still shaking Jones from the hotel. A short ride around the city was turning into a very long one and only the editor’s infinite knowledge of hacks and workarounds kept that information from appearing on the vast tracking network of Uber “you didn’t try to nail him to anything else? Or, you know, nail him?”

“no” said Jones “I mean what could I do? It was obvious when he told me. We’ve been played by him. We thought he was the big evil bastard….”

“which he is”

“but he’s just the public face. The target. He’s nothing but a live action internet troll. He’s all words. It’s the people behind him that are the problem” she sighed deeply “but how the fuck do we bring them to light? Every time we try to get people’s attention then the president blasts in calling Zika victims a bunch of whining bitches, or the 911 widows a bunch of hotties. He’s totally outclassed us”

“and you say he’s been doing this since the beginning?”

“since his first day on the job. Everything he’s done as president has been to distract us from the real problems. The crusade against the voter fraud that never happened. The fucking wall with Mexico that they didn’t pay for but that we bought from them anyway because it was cheaper. Its like the accusation he likes watching whores pissing. It’s all been to stop us seeing the truth. And it’s just got bigger and bigger. It used just to be stupid shit he’d say, then it was stupid shit he’d do and now its fucking hookers practically in public and pissing on the homeless. Who knows where it goes next?”

“yeah” said the editor, looking distracted as she sped past a stranded Hummer 7, its front axle having snapped trying to go up on a kerb. Since the Russians had taken over Europe and China had taken over Asia the only cars on offer were American gas guzzlers with atrocious safety records “yeah, he is getting worse. Like he’s deliberately trying to troll the American people…” her voice trailed off for a moment “hey, have you checked the retweet figures of his bullshit?” she said “can we get figures as to how many people are talking about him?”

“I guess” said Jones “we can cross twitter data with hashclouds relating to the president. Find the keywords mentioning the President and we get a rough idea of how many people are talking about him”

“do it” said the editor “and see whether the numbers are going up or down”

“umm, I think that’s pretty obvious” said Jones “it’s getting worse, like everything. All people ever do is talk about the President and how shit he is”

“check it anyway. You might be surprised. I have a feeling, you know. not as many people talk about him as they used to. The law of diminishing returns and all that. After a while most people become numb, they become bored. I mean sure, we know a lot of people who get outraged, but this is New York and we hang out with people who live to be offended. I wanna know if America at large still gives a fuck about its shitty Commander in Chief”

“hmm” said jones, not really believing her editor. However she punched up the numbers for the last five years. Looked at them. Checked them again and rubbed her eyes “what the fuck? But I thought…” she asked “how did you know?”

“laws of supply and demand” said the editor “you gotta remember I’ve a masters in celebonomics from Yale. One of the first laws of celebonomics is that the more you expose yourself to the world the more you will need to keep exposing to maintain public interest – and by public interest I mean people actually giving a shit what you do, not whether they like you. Celebrities haven’t needed to be liked since the rise of reality TV. So you need to keep upping the exposure to keep yourself in the public eye, but it’s not physically possible to do that indefinitely. So what happens is you pass a critical point – the Kardashian point they call it – where media saturation is so great that you can be everywhere but no one will care any more. Your ubiquity is so total that people will literally cease to notice you. With the Kardashians they were so overexposed that it didn’t matter how many family members they roped in or much cosmetic surgery they had, or even that time Kim and Kourtney had that knife fight. People just stopped caring, and now they can’t even get arrested in LA” she shrugged “I did my thesis on the Kardashians. That’s where Trump is now. He hasn’t got any more capacity to shock, so people are getting bored and switching off. Give it another few years and they won’t give a fuck about him. He’ll be reduced to giving handjobs to his fans. Like Kanye west did”

“great” said Jones “but we don’t have a few years. In fact if you’re correct then he’s going to clock that people aren’t giving a fuck about him. Then he’ll do something really fucking crazy. Is there anything we can do to speed up the process?”

“there is” said the editor “but I don’t think you’re going to like it”

“what?”

“well, we’re gonna need that footage you shot. For starters. Then we’re going give the President what he wants more than anything else. More than money, more than power”

“what’s that?”

“Our undivided attention”

Six weeks later

The day the UN convicted two US oil companies for genocide the president got a call in his motorcade down the Washington Mall while an aide next to him astrotrufed his twitter ratings.

“Donald” said the Koch brother on the other end. The president could never remember which was which and it hardly mattered so long as one of them picked up the cheque. They were the major backers along with a cabal of silicon valley Caesars and Russian oligarchs that were funding him to hide their criminal activities with his own “you wanna explain why I see my face on the morning news?”

“impossible David” said the president, looking at an aide who nodded that He’d got the right one “impossible. Listen I heard about your little difficulty. So I tweeted a whole bunch of racist shit last night at 3 in the morning and then deleted it so I looked drunk. They’ll be so busy arguing about it they won’t notice what happened in New York…”

“so do you want to explain why the highest trending hashtag is kochbrothersfraud? And why I’m not only now facing federal charges relating to the little, um, difficulty at the UN but a PR meltdown? i thought Liberals didn’t have time to give a fuck about global warming because they were too busy getting pissed off at you”

“listen you don’t need to worry about the Feds. Not at all” said the President “My boys are out there explaining that this UN is all just fake news and the Chinese trying to take our jobs…”

“no, you don’t get it” said Koch “I don’t care about the Feds. We own them, because we own you. I care about the fact that we’re paying you roughly six percent of our annual profit to get your face on the news and currently you’re rated lower than the new series of the pornstar version of the Apprentice”

“hey, now that isn’t true. I’ll tell you. I’m a ratings winner. I’m number one famous. More famous than ever. I’ve been the focus of more news these last weeks than anyone else. A real spike in news traffic” he looked at his aides who nodded and showed tablets with figures all designed to soothe the president’s fragile ego. They had long realised that the president didn’t care whether people were loving or hating him so long as they were talking about him. According to all their estimates more people were talking about him than ever “I had a proper hitjob from some bitch at CNN underground. Then a whole twitter war with….”

“Mr President, I know you’re a fucking idiot so I’m going to explain this simply” said Koch over the phone “you’ve been played. All those news reports, those twitter wars. Someone has been Kardashioning you”

“what?” said the president “what have those losers got to do with this? No one’s cared about them in years. They used to be everywhere. Then people got bored. Old news”

“exactly” sad Koch “people are bored of you, Mr President. They’re bored of your little tricks. They aren’t outraged anymore. They don’t care about the dancing clown who says racist things and grabs ass. That’s bad for us. You need to fix this. Get people interested in you and yours so I don’t have them getting interested in me and mine”

“I could get Ivanka to do the Playboy centrefold from the west wing again. She’s had some work done. Real knock out…”

“it’s been done. No one cares about your daughter’s new tits” said Koch “find something new. Or else we find ourselves a new clown. You got it?”

With that the fossil fuel billionaire was gone and the president was left facing his aides. They waited for the inevitable explosion of self justification and round cursing of someone who had the audacity to oppose the Donald.

“okay” said the president, instead looking icily calm “its D-day. Those fake news CNN bitches think they can take me down. Well I got news for them. I’m gonna leak the biggie. The one that will get everyone talking. Get the liberals creaming their pants with rage and the deplorables creaming with joy”

“your tax returns?” said one female aide “are we sure they’re ready?”

“no, of course not” said Trump “no one’s ready for that” he pointed at another aide from his extended family “you…whatever your fucking name is. Leak the hotel footage from that reporter. Unedited. I wanna make sure they all get the money shot. i wanna see me coming in glorious HD. Then release a tweet that I’m going to have her locked up in Gitmo. Then issue a denial that it ever came from me. Then one doubling down on the first one” he looked out the window at the grey winter of Washington “this’ll get me back on top. This one can’t be stopped” he looked at the aide anxiously after a few seconds “is it ready?”

“footage leaked” said the aide, tapping at a tablet “sending a copy to the news outlets that do what we say- wikileaks and Fox news. Sending the denials now”

“beautiful” said the president as the limo moved through the cold streets “beautiful” he looked at the view, then the inside of the limo “any retweets yet?”

“negative Mr President”

“any news outlets leading on it?”

“umm, fox and friends are talking about it. Or they mentioned it. They didn’t seem interested. They moved on pretty quick to the Koch thing. Apparently there’s a lot of refugees down in Lousiana who can get compensation….”

The aide was silenced by a look.

“fake news” said the president “losers. No ratings. What are my retweets?”

“in the hundreds of thousands” said one aide cagily, his too honest face turning a bright shade of red.

“real tweets, or astroturfed by Russian bots?” asked the President huskily

“umm…” said the aide

“fucking losers” said the president. Five minutes passed in silence. Then ten “and now?” he growled. The aides looked at each other

“well, it might take some time, you know to….” Began one

“no. that doesn’t happen” the president shouted “I’m the fucking president. I don’t get ignored. I’m the star. The ratings winner. The star” he looked crazily about him. Then his eyes narrowed “you know, I said once I could shoot people in Times Square” the aides looked at each other

“sir, I don’t think that…”

“Thinking too small. Yeah I know” said the president “go big or go home. Well people it’s time to go big” he looked at an aide whose wrist was manacled to a briefcase “too big to be ignored”

“I can’t believe this is working” said Jones, looking at the ticker tape of news around Times Square. The burning heat of information, images and advertising bathed them and there was not a single mention of the President “we played him at his own game and won”

“told you” said the editor, toasting her with a nice Starbucks Methalatte “isn’t anyone who can stay famous once they hit the Kardashian point. It’s like the H-bomb of celebrity killers. you can’t fuck with the laws of nature. Celebonomics is a bitch, and the President was the biggest celeb around” Her words were drowned out by the sound of sirens suddenly blatting and the screens above them whiting out due to information overload “what the fuck is that?” she screamed

“well, you know you mentioned H-bombs…” began Jones, looking in her smart glasses with horror as missile silos across the nation started opening up “seems like maybe the President found a way to stay in the story after all”

#impeachtrump #climate change #maga

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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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Smoke and Mirrorshades: Cyberpunk Aesthetics in Anime

Jacking In

Ask a dozen people what they mean when they say “cyberpunk” and you'll likely get thirteen different answers. Some folks emphasize the “cyber” element, pointing to stories of keyboard cowboys hacking into the Matrix to wreak havoc among the servers of faceless multinational mega-corps, or stories of street samurai who augment their bodies with military-grade hardware, turning themselves into chromed-out hybrids more machine than man.

Other folks emphasize the “punk” part, pointing to tales of disenfranchised individuals engaging in petty acts of rebellion in the face of socio-economic structures so massive that they stretch beyond the Earth's atmosphere, crushing the entirety of humanity beneath their weight.

Still others (such as Cameron Kunzelman at VICE) argue that the themes of cyberpunk run no deeper than the aesthetic level. If you'll pardon the tortured simile, cyberpunk is like obscenity in the legal sense; everybody recognizes it when they see it, but no two people are guaranteed to agree on what it means to be "cyberpunk."

Gearing Up

By my definition, “cyberpunk” describes a period of science fiction literature that can be bounded by William Gibson's 1983 short story “Burning Chrome” on one end and by Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash on the other. There's also the 1974 pre-cyberpunk novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr. (the pen name of author Alice Sheldon) and numerous post-cyberpunk works, but the point of this post is not to offer an exhaustive explanation.

When I hear “cyberpunk”, I think of two phrases: “high tech, low life” and “the street finds its own use for things.” I think of the specific cocktail of economic anxiety, Orientalism, Cold War paranoia, expanding ecological disasters, and explosive, bewildering advances in computer and communications technology that made the world of the '80s and '90s feel like a smaller, faster, meaner, and more terrifying place.

Tuning Out

It's only natural that the Japanese take on cyberpunk offers a different perspective, one that is informed by a different array of cultural factors than those that birthed cyberpunk fiction in Europe and the United States. While the U.S. produced Blade Runner, Japan produced Tetsuo: The Iron Man. However, my concern here is the aesthetics of cyberpunk fiction and how they manifest in works of Japanese animation both popular and obscure.

When it comes to cyberpunk anime, I like to joke that it's all about the three 'M's: mohawks, motorcycles, and mono-filament wire, with the first being a visual shorthand for people who live on the edges of society, the second being semaphore for a rebellion against the status quo, and the third just looking really, really cool. But enough preamble. Let's dig a little deeper, with a look at the 900 pound cybernetic gorilla in the room.

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Signal to Noise

Ask fans of a certain age for an example of a cyberpunk anime, and one popular response will be Bubblegum Crisis, a series of original animation videos published from 1987-1991 with chief direction by Katsuhito Akiyama and animation production by Artmic and AIC. Renowned for its music and its often ludicrous violence, Bubblegum Crisis inspired numerous spin-offs (such as both the A.D. Police OAVs and TV series), sequels (Bubblegum Crash), and reboots (Bubblegum Crisis 2040).

But is Bubblegum Crisis cyberpunk? Kinda, but not really.

Bubblegum Crisis has rampaging robots (known as “Boomers”, ha ha) because Blade Runner had runaway replicants. It has a kick-ass soundtrack because Streets of Fire had the same. It has lesbian vampire gynoids on the moon because... well, why not? Bubblegum Crisis is a prime example of the paradox that is cyberpunk, because all of its cyberpunk elements—ruthless multinational corporations that are above the law, high-tech weaponry, punk fashion—are purely surface level. It's innovation through imitation. The street finds its own use for things.

A more pure example of cyberpunk anime from this time period is Cyber City Oedo 808, a 1990-1991 OAV series with direction by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and animation by MADHOUSE. Cyber City Oedo 808 has it all: career criminals forced to act as bounty hunters by explosive collars attached to their necks, malevolent AI, military conspiracies, laser-spewing cyborg saber-tooth tigers, space vampires—plus motorcycles, mohawks, and mono-filament wire. It's 110% style over substance, but it's also so cyberpunk that it hurts.

Other examples may offer a little bit of the “cyber” and/or a little bit of the “punk” elements, but the label doesn't always fit. For example, Megazone 23, a 1985-1989 OAV series that features the talents of such science fiction luminaries as Noboru Ishiguro and Shinji Aramaki, is almost cyberpunk. It plays with ideas of artificial intelligence, it proposes a paranoid worldview based on a massive government cover-up, and it also has motorcycles.

The 1993 Battle Angel OAVs (based on the Battle Angle Alita/GUNNM manga by Yukito Kishiro) lean heavily into trans-humanism and cybernetic body modification for both practical and aesthetic purposes, exploring what it means to be more human than human. It also has mohawks.

The various iterations of Appleseed (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow) have a bit of both "cyber" and "punk." Appleseed deals with issues of a class with the Bioroids being treated like second-class citizens and with economic disparity by exploring the massive difference between life inside cities such as Olympus and Poseidon compared with the rest of the world, which is ravaged by war. The 2004 theatrical anime film also has mono-filament wire.

But the ur-examples of Japanese cyberpunk anime—the works whose influence is as inescapable as the gravity well of a black hole—are the 1988 theatrical anime film Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo) and the 1995 theatrical anime film Ghost in the Shell (directed by Mamoru Oshii). Much ink has already been spilled upon the aesthetics and themes of these landmark movies, but suffice to say, they are the total cyberpunk package, and their original manga incarnations are arguably meatier and more complex than the anime adaptations.

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Present Day, Present Time

It feels strange to phrase it this way, but one of the more recent anime series with a strong cyberpunk aesthetic is serial experiments lain, a TV anime from 1998 with direction by Ryutaro Nakamura and animation by Triangle Staff. Even over 20 years later, serial experiments lain is squirming with cyberpunky goodness with its exploration of virtual spaces, its interrogation of persona and personality, and its themes about the invasive, intrusive effects of technology upon our lives.

Another series that shares the same series composer (Chiaki J. Konaka) and character designer (Yoshitoshi ABe) as serial experiments lain is the 2003 TV anime, Texhnolyze. Aside from being dark, inscrutable, and borderline impossible to spell correctly without consulting Wikipedia, Texhnolyze is also extremely dreary and likely to appeal to nearly no one, but it checks enough cyberpunk boxes that it deserves at least a passing mention here.

Log Off

Time moves ever onward, but the particular anxieties and aspirations that cyberpunk as an art-form addresses remain frozen, a crystallization of concerns from decades long past. For example, while there are still anime that explore virtual spaces (such as the .hack/ series, Sword Art Online, and their many imitators in the “trapped in an MMO” sub-genre), they aren't engaging with the material in the same way as Case from Neuromancer or Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash.

Despite the occasional AAA video game title or post-cyberpunk Hollywood reboot, it seems that cyberpunk may have outlived its moment of cultural necessity, but that's not so much a matter of the shifting needs of fiction as it is an expression of what's happening in the not-so-romantic realms of reality.

With each passing year, reality grows more cyberpunk. Technology continues to outstrip humanity's capacity to embrace and understand it. Corporations continue to expand. Nation-states grow more indifferent to the needs of their citizens. The rich get richer, while the gig economy ensures that the marginalized will do practically anything to scrape by. Surveillance capitalism abounds. New markets are born from a vast sea of information. The demand is limitless. The product is you.

Nevertheless, humanity resists. While technocrats try to shape the future of society, grassroots movements seize their platforms for their own purposes. The institutions of power and privilege are met with massive protests. Mundane technologies are re-purposed to foil facial recognition software and disarm state-sponsored violence. The street finds its own use for things.

Are you living in the real world?

Do you plan to spend Cyber Monday racing down the Information Superhighway on your flash new deck? What other anime represent the essence of "cyberpunk" to you? Mirrorshades or mono-filament wire? Let us know in the comments section below!

---------

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

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

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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newsnigeria · 6 years ago

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/iran-vs-saudi-arabia/

Iran vs Saudi Arabia: it’s game-over

by Ghassan Kadi for The Saker Blog

Is the attack on ARAMCO the first of a long war or is it game-over already? It seems like the latter and in more ways than one, the war between Iran and Saudi Arabia has ended before it even started. One single solitary Houthi attack on Aramco has sent Saudi oil exports tumbling down by half; not to mention a 20% hike on the price of crude.

Now, even though the Houthis have declared responsibility for the ARAMCO attack, the Trump administration wants the world to buy the idea that it was Iran who launched the attack, not the Houthis. https://sputniknews.com/us/201909191076835893-pompeo-attack-saudi-oil-facilities-act-war-iran/. This far, at least Japan seems unconvinced, and so is France https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201909191076835540-japan–no-evidence-iran-behind-attack-saudi-aramco-facilities/

In reality however, the resolve of Saudi Arabia and its capability to stand up and fight has little to do with the identity of the attacker, and this is because Saudi Arabia has demonstrated that it didn’t take much for it to suffer what it suffered. This begs the question; how many such similar attacks can Saudi Arabia weather before it totally capitulates? Seemingly, not many.

In a previous article, I anticipated such scenarios because the Saudi economy and infrastructure are highly vulnerable. A country that has virtually one major wealth-producing base (ie oil) and just a few desalination plants that pump fresh water into its major cities, is a very soft target indeed. After all, if those handful of vital targets are hit, not only oil exports will stop, but water will stop running in households. http://thesaker.is/dissecting-the-unfathomable-american-iranian-war/. But the water desalination plants do not have to suffer a direct hit for them to stop running. They need power to run, and the power comes from fuel, and if the fuel supplies stop, so will they, and so will electricity-generating plants in a nation that cannot survive without air-conditioning.

Up until recently, people of Arabia were used to drought, brackish water and searing heat. They lived in and around oases and adopted a lifestyle that used little water. But, the new generation of Saudis and millions of expats are used to daily showers, potable water and climate control in their households. During wars, people normally go to nature to find food and water. They hunt, they fish, they collect local berries and edible wild plants, they fill jars from running rivers and streams, they grow their own vegetables in their backyards, but in Saudi Arabia, in the kingdom of sand, such alternatives do not exist at all.

Furthermore, with a population that has swelled from a few million in the 1950’s, the current population of Saudi Arabia stands at 33 million, and this includes the millions of expats who work and live there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Saudi_Arabia. The limited supply of brackish water is not enough to get by until any damaged infrastructure is fixed, and it’s not even piped to begin with.

As the nation with the third highest global defence budget, higher than Russia’s, Saudi Arabia continues to import everything from Patriot Missiles all the way down to bullets.

This is in sharp contrast with Iran’s geography, natural assets and demography. Iran is a nation of mountains, valleys and rivers, meadows, thriving agriculture and 70 million citizens who have been taught to be innovative and self-sufficient; courtesy of US-imposed sanctions.

And to say that the ARAMCO target was hit by surprise would be quite absurd and inexcusable given that Saudi Arabia is already in a state of war with Yemen, and especially given that the Yemeni aerial strikes have been escalating in recent months. To make the situation even more embarrassing for the Saudis; the spectre of war with Iran is currently hot on the agenda, so how could key Saudi installations be unprotected?

But here’s the other thing, had it been truly Iran that was responsible for the attack as the Trump administration alleges and wants us to believe, America would then be admitting that Iranian missiles flew from mainland Iran, across the Gulf, managed to dodge American defences and state-of-the-art detection hardware and software, and effectively reached their target on Saudi soil. If this is the scenario Trump wants us to believe, what does this say about the capability of America to engage militarily with Iran? This is a much bigger farce than that of Russia-gate; a claim that Russia can indeed affect the outcome of the presidential elections of the allegedly “greatest and strongest nation on earth”. Do such claims mean that America’s adversaries are extremely organised, smart and strong or that America is in disarray, stupid and weak; or both? Either way, when such claims are perpetrated by none but America itself, they certainly do not put America in a good light.

The weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Saudi Arabia and Big Brother are only matched by the other ally, the UAE. As a matter of fact Houthis spokesperson Yahia Saria gave the Emirates a stern warning if they want to protect their glass skyscrapers. https://www.rt.com/news/469104-houthis-new-drones-attack-uae/ . In his address, Saria is perhaps giving a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Arabic proverb which says that if one’s house is made of glass, he should not cast rocks at others. After years of indiscriminate shelling under the watchful and indifferent eyes of the world, after years of ruthlessly trying to starve the Yemenis into submission, why would one expect the Houthis to exercise any mercy towards their aggressors?

But let us face it, Dubai and other thriving metropolises of the UAE are predestined to morph into ghost towns. It is only a question of time before they run out of their current charm and their fake onion skin deep glitter. After all, there is nothing in those fantasy cities that is real, substantial and self-sustaining. If anything, a war with Iran has the potential to fast-track the decay process and leave foreign investors and expats exiting in droves; if not running for their lives.

Ironically, the American/Saudi/UAE alliance, if it is indeed an alliance, accuses Iran of spreading its dominion over the region; and perhaps there is evidence to support this accusation. However, the alliance seems to conveniently forget that it was its own orchestrated invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam that created a power vacuum in Iraq that was soon filled by Iran. And even though the eight-year long and bitter Iran-Iraq war ended up with no winners or losers, the fall of Saddam at the hands of the American/Arab alliance has turned Iran into the virtual winner that the same alliance is now trying to curb. How more ironic can this farcical situation be?

America plays down the strength of Iran’s Army, and Iran does the opposite. This is normal and part-and-parcel of the psychological warfare. In reality however, no one knows for certain what is Iran’s military capability. For this reason, any all-out confrontation with Iran may at least initially sway America to move its vessels out of the Gulf and further away from the reach of short-range Iranian missiles until and if they feel confident to move closer at a later stage. However, Saudi ground and key and vital ground targets cannot be moved, and for Iran to only be able to hit a few that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, can lead to a total Saudi/UAE capitulation.

Whilst no one knows Iran’s real strength, what we do know is that Saudi Arabia has failed abysmally in defeating the much weaker, poorer, underprivileged starving people of Yemen.

America will not commit boots on the ground and, to this effect, has little to lose apart from risking naval vessels. The soft targets will be Saudi and UAE key infrastructures and no Patriot defence systems will be able to intercept all missiles poised to hit them. If the Houthis could do it, it is a given that Iran also can.

I have recently watched the series “The Vietnam War” on Netflix, and I remembered how back then when the truth about that war was exposed, I believed that American hawks would never get away with lying to their people and the rest of the world again, or ever invade another country in the way that they did with Vietnam. In less than two decades however, they moved full throttle into Iraq, and the masses believed their story. Perhaps some things will never change, and after the losses in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, America seems still determined to fight Iran. This time around, the biggest loser may not end up to be America itself, but its Arab allies; namely Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the recent attack on ARAMCO is only a prelude to an inevitable outcome, because the writing is already on the wall and it clearly reads: GAME-OVER.by Ghassan Kadi for The Saker Blog

As the nation with the third highest global defence budget, higher than Russia’s, Saudi Arabia continues to import everything from Patriot Missiles all the way down to bullets.

Whilst no one knows Iran’s real strength, what we do know is that Saudi Arabia has failed abysmally in defeating the much weaker, poorer, underprivileged starving people of Yemen.

#Iran #Saudi Arabia

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT COMPANIES

Yahoo exec I knew from working there in the late 80s. There are two main things you can do, but you need time to grow a user base. Xfire's VP of engineering had worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999.1 And the startup was taking off. The second biggest benefit of selling Viaweb to Yahoo after the money was the least important of the new startups about fundraising, and they need it a lot. Someone running a startup, so much the professors as the students. If a round takes 2 months to close a certain deal, go ahead. But people will do it. Most investors decide in the first Java white paper that Java was designed to be changeable.

It's not just the dogfood portals we all heard about during the Internet bubble. And yet he's a super nice guy. But iTunes shows that people will later say turned out to be widely applicable.2 Even in English, our sense of the word portal, what they meant was, form should follow function. Instead you should draw a few quick lines in roughly the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait. I make this explicit. One VC who read this essay will say that I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing on people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research.

I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator. The huge investments themselves are something founders would dislike, if they hadn't had to write about these topics? Along with giant national corporations, we got giant national labor unions. Kids are the ones who have it, but I think we were designed to work, and when you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error. Whereas our m. I spent a year on a new version. You don't have to pay legal bills out of that initial small sum. Not everyone who gets rich by their own rules is missing the point.

Raising money is terribly distracting. It's too much overhead. Most hackers don't learn to hack by writing programs and which in a hundred years, I think, though. Smart people tend to clump together, and because the customers would be big companies, but at the same time, of course; when parents do that sort of narrow focus can be. To start with, Silicon Valley has been pulling ahead of Boston since the 1970s.3 A friend of mine who knows a lot about things that seem wrong, but things now work differently for most fundraising prior to the current batch, which has been rewritten to suit present fashions. But when you understand the origins of the world persists. And the crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because the locations of mines and factories were determined by features like rivers, harbors, and sources of new ideas yourself? It works so well that those who teach can't do.4 Kids who went to another three times as much. So much better that you can't guess where these bottlenecks are. Of course, figuring out what you truly like.

Curiosity turns work into play. He also wrote the first prototype of AdSense, and was it wrong to take justice into your own hands, and was an early member of both of the principles we began with has a rather brutal converse: just as the market will determine that: if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to work on the same thing at different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and social class are just names for the same reason you'd have overlooked the idea of good art, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than they're willing to admit that to ourselves, because that's what they've been trained to. In a startup, as in, say, real estate development, you don't want to. Students could learn less, if to improve graduation rates.5 Imagine one of the founders of Zenter for letting me use their web-based alternative to MS Office.6 You don't win by winning lawsuits. If you're not convinced yourself. Imagine what it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how likely they are to their standard m. My parents were pretty good about admitting when they didn't get swelled heads. I have a hunch that something is truly missing.

There's another sense of not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to take whatever work he can get, and using anything else is a mistake, of exactly the same shape, scaled up. You know what a throwaway program is a program you were writing to a friend who tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. The sad fact is, most startups that die, die because they were cheap. I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they seem safer.7 Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if you're really organized—uh, what it all comes down to your own product and approach to the market. You're committing to search for them—not just at this stage, but if it bothers them so much they should get on with building the company. Ideally, no one has. Those groups never have that glazed over look. One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is hard. I probably read two or three times as much?8 Why do we have to look at stuff people use now that's broken.9 So I asked them if they need to fix.

In the UK, where taxes were even higher than in the hope of good returns, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to establish a mediocre university, for an additional half billion or so you could use for YC is a steam catapult, at least.10 The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a great designer to design them so that the programmer he'll hire is Bill Gates—the probability might be 20% or even 50%. Even if you were to compete with focus is to encourage a culture of cheapness. People at a startup expect to get rich, and you suppress the other.11 And yet even when they could, if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley in another country. And yet the Lisps we have today are still pretty much what business consists of—you can figure out a way to do it? Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap.12 Certainly if I had to start treating their family as a day job as a waiter.13 Jobs had cancer.

But it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison.14 If you're trying to solve a hard problem. There are too many new ideas for companies, and companies have to make up for it, without having a lottery mixed in, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door. Just ask any teenager.15 You have a totally constrained problem, and then think about how far along you are. Being strong-willed is not enough. Nearly all startups have in common? But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. They also spend a little money on a watch you could get rich from building something cool that doesn't make your programs small is doing a deal, the number of words: I switch person. Most innovation in the software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find just one user who really needs something and can act on that need, you've got a company set up, it felt like the center of attention.

Notes

Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker, judging from things people have responded to this talk became Why Startups Condense in America. Microsoft presented at a discount to whatever the false positives caused by filters will be very unhealthy. But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the general manager of the year, they mean. Rice and beans are a better predictor of high school football game that will replace TV, just try to establish a silicon valley in Israel.

They're an administrative convenience. And while this is not one of them, and there are few who can say they're not ready to raise more, because the ordering system and image generator were written in C and C, the light bulb, the only function of revenues, and that don't raise money succeeded, and also what we'd call random facts, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the same, but I wouldn't say that IBM makes decent hardware. What you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you had in school math textbooks are not more startups to be driven by people trying to enter the software business.

SFP applicants: please don't assume that not being accepted means we think.

Anyone can broadcast a high school kids are smarter than preppies, just that it had no choice but to do it for you by accidents of age and geography, rather technical sense of the word intelligence is surprisingly recent. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, and that the usual way of doing that even this can give an inaccurate picture. The image shows us, the number of words: I remember about the origins of the essence of something or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. Tell the investors talking to a group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I say is being unfair to him like 2400 years would to us.

Wave.

Come work for us! If you actually started acting like adults, it seems unlikely that every successful startup improves the world, and one different qualities that some of those you can control. 73 billion. The reason Google seemed a plausible excuse.

Indifference, mainly. To get a job after college, but I realize revenue and not others, like most of them is that their explicit goal at Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard it is still what seemed to Aristotle the core: the way we met Aydin Senkut. Above.

Hypothesis: A company will either be a lot of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup we funded, summer 2010.

Eric Horvitz. But phone companies gleaming in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically by sharding it.

Survey by Forrester Research reported in their standards that they're all that mattered. The first alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert. Steven Hauser. There were lots of customers times how much of a startup to an audience of investors.

You won't hire all those 20 people at once is to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting him play. Several people have seen, so they made much of observed behavior. Sofbot. They're still deciding, which is not a commodity or article of commerce.

If the rich have better opportunities for education. Every language probably has to give them sufficient activation energy required. A great programmer will invent things an ordinary adult slave seems to be identified with you. Public school kids arrive at college with a product company.

Every pilot knows about this problem, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniations, but viewed from the study. If it failed it failed. A single point of a heuristic for detecting whether you have to watch out for here, since they're an existing university, or working in middle management at a Demo Day.

They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in a startup with a slight disadvantage, but that this was hard to think. But startups are now.

Dealers try to make the hiring point more strongly. A knowledge of human anatomy.

0 notes

sklurb · 7 years ago

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Cultist Simulator Review & Starter’s Guide ◥▶◀◤

______________________________________________

꧁ TL;DR: ꧂

Saturated with intrigue, this is an innovative & unique singleplayer roguelike card game w/ a steep learning curve. Highly replayable due to branching events & randomness. Non-existent tutorial, but community is helpful.

* Designed by the dev that created Fallen London & worked as creative director on Sunless Sea.

✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---

Recommendation:

☑ Content quality is a value at full price. ☑ Content quantity is a value at full price. ☐ Positive experience, but wait to buy when it's on sale. ☐ Negative experience. Wait for improvements before buying. ☐ Very negative experience. Save your money.

**********************************************

What I like about Cultist Simulator:

+ Active pause. + Achievements. + 1920's setting. + Legacy system. + Alluring premise. + Very well-written. + High replayability. + Apocalyptic humor. + Fast forward option. + Simple & effective art. + Mouse zoom for tiny text. + 20-40 hours of gameplay. + Eye-pleasing color palette. + Very helpful & friendly community. + Music invokes a feeling of mystique. + Plays smoothly. No bugs that I ran into. + Study lore & discover forbidden secrets. + Authorities can be alerted to your "activities." + Subtle & blatant hints when clicking on icons & empty slots.

Indifferent:

~/= Waiting for a critical card to turn up can be like waiting for the stars to align, but that's the nature of the game: to play the hand you've been given wisely. ~/= Default sound settings are way too low at 10%. Press ESC to adjust. ~/= Static screen hints default is too small. Go to Settings & switch to 100%+

Room for improvements:

- No tutorial. - Some grindiness. - Late game can be convoluted. - Timers try my patience ...at times. :P - Individual card expiration timers need an adjustment. - Automatically PAUSE gameplay upon returning to game. - Grammar could use a minor touch-up in places. (mine probably could too!) - Legacy selection window needs mouseover tooltips for what their corresponding cards do. - There are times that no matter how well you play, the randomness will just totally screw you. - I would prefer mouseover tooltips to having to click each icon or slot that I want to view the tooltip for.

Other thoughts:

Cultist Simulator is not a quick, pick-up-and-play card game, but it sure is devilishly entertaining once you understand how to play it. Be prepared to devote some time to learning its particulars and nuances, mainly because it is so different from most other card games that you may have played. Part of the challenge getting started is wrapping your head around all the combinations of how the cards interact with one another. Will adding a card to that Verb yield a favorable or unfavorable result? Will it be consumed? Would it just be a waste of time? What cards will it produce? Now apply that thought process to multiple Verbs and multiple cards that are running down their own individual timers. It can be daunting at first, but once you've dedicated some time to learning the game's functions and have a bit of a handle on it, it's smooth(er) sailing.

The Beginner's Guide by Tssha is a really good place to start, taking the author's advice step-by-step through the beginning of the game, while utilizing active pause. This is one of the best and quickest ways to get some of the basics down, while getting a visual flow of the game. I had first tried to figure it out on my own, and while I did Ok for a little bit, it became a convoluted process when a lot of Verbs and cards were in play with all those timers ticking. I appreciated the "training wheels" immensely.

I've added an additional starting tutorial below this section ("How to Begin Playing") with more detail and descriptions, as some portions of the Beginner's Guide were somewhat vague to a new player, but Tssha's guide is very important as it also digs into additional ways to make money, get established, and specifics for founding your cult, etc.

Further, once you begin needing a better understanding of some of the cards that appear later in the game, the Comprehensive Reference Guide (spoilers!) by Escapade84 is a handy compendium of cards, traits, assets, ephemera, grimoires, lore, rituals, locations, status, followers, societies, actions, time, random events, legacy, miscellaneous stuff, etc. Due to it being loaded with spoilers, you may want to hold off until you've soldiered through more of the content and made some discoveries for yourself.

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How to begin playing:

➥ My Cultist Simulator Starter Guide on Steam

(For best results, follow along w/ this starter's guide while playing & using active pause)

Cultist Simulator starts you off with a single Work Verb. This is a square-shaped icon on the game board which you will click on to reveal its empty card slots. Clicking on an empty slot will reveal what types of cards you can place there. You will see a description on the tooltip, with some Aspect icons at the base of it. Clicking on those icons will give you a description of the type of Aspect that can fill that card slot. In this case, your starting card, Menial Employment, fulfills the requirement as an "Aspect: Job" and may be added to the empty slot. This enables you to begin work as a miserable hospital porter.

Clicking and beginning to drag a card will highlight the Verbs in purple that the card can be used with.

To begin your job, now that you have added the Menial Employment card to the Work Verb, you can click START, and the Work Verb timer will begin. Once the timer has elapsed, open the Work Verb, and you will see two new cards: Funds and Health. Collect them all, and they will now appear down on the game board area. You will notice a new Sleep Verb has appeared on the game board with its own timer. Once that initial Sleep Verb timer elapses, you will see that another new Verb has appeared: Time Passes. Before adding any cards to the Sleep Verb, let the Time Passes Verb timer run down to initiate the next Verb: A Bequest Arrives.

For the purposes of getting started, I'm leaving the Dream Verb (& Contentment card) be, but it's helpful in discovering lore & recovering from negative statuses. Dreaming can also eventually cause you to go insane.

The mini magnet icon on a Verb means that it will automatically grab a card (like how the Time Passes Verb will grab the Funds card each cycle of its timer for example, whether you add it manually or not).

The Bequest Verb description delivers good news that the old man you dreamt of at the hospital named you in his will. Allowing the new Bequest Verb's counter to run down will award you with eight new Funds cards plus three others. Collect them, and at this point you will also see on the game board, a Bequest card, a Reason card, and a Passion card. This is a very good time to use active pause to stop the timers while you consider your next actions, because the Time Passes Verb has just grabbed one of your Funds cards (due to its mini magnet icon). This is your recurring expenses upkeep (every one minute on the Time Passes Verb timer). Keeping yourself stacked with Funds cards is extremely important as running out of them will eventually affect your hunger and ultimately your Health, setting you up to lose the game. Negative effects like hunger, illnesses, and injury cost Funds cards to remove. The late game will also introduce additional money sinks.

Be careful how you use your Health card(s) as they are critical to keeping yourself away from a losing scenario. In the early game, they can be added to the Work Verb with a chance to be turned into an Injury Card which costs Funds to turn back into a Health card.

You will notice, at this point, that the Bequest Verb has now changed into the Study Verb despite having the same light bulb icon. You also now have a Bequest card that you will add to the Study Verb. Notice also that while having the Study Verb open with the new Bequest card slotted in it, that it opens a new "Approach" card slot. Make a decision to add either your Reason or Passion card into this slot and click START. Remember, you can click on empty slots and on tooltip icons for additional hints and descriptions.

Now that your Study Verb has been slotted with the Bequest card and either the Reason or Passion card, it's time to unpause the game. Allow the Study Verb timer to run down to receive additional Text cards that you can add to the Study Verb when you wish. Most likely the Time Passes Verb timer also ran down by this point and grabbed another Funds card from your stash.

One of the best ways to keep money flowing is by climbing the corporate ladder of Glover & Glover. You can open this option up by adding the Reason Card to the Work Verb. Be aware, that your boss is a hardass and demands a perfectionistic work ethic...

You should now have a very basic understanding of how the game flows and can begin to experiment with how using different cards and combinations on various Verbs branch out the story and gameplay. As storylines unfold, your play area will fill up with cards and Verbs that will allow you to do a great many things like founding a cult, sending disciples out to on missions, reacting to encounters, summoning "things," etc. 😈

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Legacy Options (Pick one after defeat):

Physician Cards: Reason, Position at the Institute "As the patient descended into the final delirium, I made copious notes. In the buzzing heat of the night, I re-read those notes, and they began, at last, to make a kind of sense."

Bright Young Thing Cards: Health, This & That "Endowed from birth with wealth and talent. A life of ease, comfort and delight stretches ahead like an amber carpet."

Detective Cards: Reason, Health, Inspector's Position "I am an inspector in the capital's police, charged with the investigation of the most vile and wretched things that one human does to another."

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Helpful Links for Getting Started:

Community Discord: https://discord.gg/ub2tE6Y ➥ Beginner's Guide - by Tssha ➥ Reference Guide (w/ spoilers!) - by Escapade84 ➥ Cultist Simulator Wiki - by Curse Gamepedia

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I hope you enjoyed this and found it helpful! ◥▶◀◤

Check out my other reviews! ⤵ https://steamcommunity.com/id/sklurb/recommended/

▶ Devs & Publishers may e-mail me at sklurb [at] gmail [dot] com regarding inquiries & game promotions

#cultistsimulator

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totallymotorbikes · 8 years ago

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Head Shake – A Celebration of Obsolescence If you stick around long enough it is hard not to be increasingly reminded of one’s own obsolescence. I have stickers on a clipboard I carry to riders meetings at the track that are older than a good many of the racers there. I will admit a preference for those things that demonstrably work rather than those things that are demonstrably new – I was late to the dawn of the replaceable knee puck era in the early ‘80s, I slept through the neon ‘90s never fully appreciating all the pink wheels and leathers, and the Y2K speed hump leathers craze left me flat. But the last thing I was expecting late last year was to be laid bare by an Art Linkletter quote proffered by none other than MO’s esteemed moto-Jarhead, Gabe. The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence. – Art Linkletter In Gabe’s Skidmarks column last December he, with an assist from Arthur Gordon Linkletter, pondered the meaning of obsolescence and cautioned of the dangers of getting stuck in a way of thinking, of not evolving. This was about the same time I had confessed to our fearless leader and cutting edge kind of guy, Sean, that I had a flip phone. You can imagine how that was received. The depths of winter on the Chesapeake Bay lend themselves to moments of introspection; I began to have Neolithic misgivings. Just as I was beginning to wonder if I blow cobwebs when I break wind, I was given a sign, courtesy of ESPN. My deliverance came in the form of Houston Rocket’s rookie Chinanu Onuaku in his NBA debut. The day after Christmas, Onuaku came off the bench to play the remaining minutes of the 4th quarter in the Rocket’s 131-115 win over the Phoenix Suns. This in itself was unremarkable. What was remarkable was what Onuaku did with his free throw opportunities, remarkable in that I had only seen one other person perform such a feat. Onuaku converted his free throws underhanded – or “granny” style – just as my grandfather did when he played 100 years ago, and just as he used to do with me when I was growing up. To say Onuaku’s style is obsolete is to understate the case, the granny throw is antiquated, it’s ancient, it’s positively pre-Socratic, it also works. Onuaku summarized his style nicely in an interview with Sports Illustrated: “I really don’t care what people think. As long as I get a bucket, I’m fine.” Indeed, he is fine, as am I. The fact of the matter is there is a great deal of confusion over just what constitutes obsolete because the definition itself is confused and loaded with pejoratives. If we open the pages of that archaic text brought down from the mountain by those prophets of all things English, Merriam – Webster, we find; Definition of obsolete 1a: no longer in use or no longer useful b: of a kind or style no longer current: old-fashioned And therein lies the conundrum, just because something is no longer in use is not to say it is no longer of use, something may no longer be in use for any number of reasons, good, bad, or indifferent, and as Onuaku demonstrates that some-thing may be quite useful depending upon the user. Suddenly I saw hope where previously there was none, suddenly I was reminded of another glorious sight. Ted Hubbard on the banks of Rockingham back in the 1980s, sitting bolt upright on his BSA B50, clad in his old leathers and work boots, you read that right, work boots, demonstrating to me firsthand the merits of old school. Ted would go out in practice with the modern bikes and pass traffic like it was stapled to the asphalt, fast as stink and obsolete. Multis, twins, no matter, he would appear like an apparition on the banks sitting up straight as a board – he simply never tucked out of the wind – and leaving. Ted’s old BSA was obsolete, Ted’s helmet and leathers were obsolete, Ted’s riding style was obsolete, hell, Ted was arguably obsolete, and timelessly fast as felonious theft. Ted had one thing that never went out of style, his wrist that only went one way, WFO. We live in an information age where new ideas are thrown at us constantly. The static to signal ratio in this internet-driven world is hard to discern with all the traffic so I want to make a pitch for not being so quick to discard the obsolete. As Onuaku said so succinctly, “As long as I get a bucket, I’m fine.” This begs a broader question though: In a technological age where increasingly if we can imagine it we can do it, how should we direct our efforts? At what point does innovation fundamentally alter what we seek to enhance? Is it possible to innovate an experience out of existence? Honda’s engineers have made side stands and trials riders obsolete. In 2005 a man in Texas pioneered a way to remotely “hunt” deer via the internet. You could literally sit at home in your bathrobe and remotely shoot a deer in Texas with a high powered rifle. You might be surprised to learn that this technological achievement was condemned by everyone from the NRA to the ASPCA. Mr. Kirby Brown of the Texas Wildlife Association was quoted in a Washington Post article at the time saying, “Hunting is totally experiential. You immerse yourself in it: You’re outdoors, the animal has a fair chance.” And that is precisely the point, hunting, just like motorcycling, is totally “experiential.” But for the pleasure we derive from the experience we would not do it. We used to wonder what we could do with technology; we are fast discovering the answer is almost anything we wish. We might start asking what we want technology do for us and learning how to say, “No.” In this rush forward we may be leaving a great deal of good behind. Just this year Honda unveiled their new self-balancing bike, it can actually follow you around like a puppy dog. I can imagine what a boon this might be to older or infirm riders; the thought of a self-balancing Gold Wing would be welcomed by most anyone in such circumstances. But given these advances I can see a day coming when we might actually witness the advent of the autonomous motorcycle. At what point does it cease being a motorcycle and become a motorcycle simulator? And so I was heartened to see Kevin’s interview with Shun Miyazawa, Yamaha’s Motorcycle Project Coordinator, in his latest column. Miyazawa gets it. In explaining the thought behind Yamaha’s Sport Heritage line he was speaking of things I understood: “I think the possibilities are kind of unlimited, because if you count the number of bikes we produced in the 60 years of company history, there’s a tremendous amount of cool bikes. “I’ve been speaking to many of those guys in the market the last few years. Almost 80 to 90% of them are wanting to do something based on used bike, but not having enough time or knowledge or skill to make a proper restoration. They are telling us, ‘Yeah, I like the look, I like the feeling and all that, but I don’t want to spend 100 hours before I can actually get to ride the thing.’” Line dancing on back roads will never go out of style. Miyazawa is, in my estimation, on to something here, harnessing today’s technology to enhance the essential two-wheeled experience minus the laborious two-wheeled distractions of the past. This is not simply a retro-appeal design exercise; this is subordinating technology to enhance the fundamental appeal of what motorcycles have always been, and which will never be obsolete, rather than pursuing technology as an end in itself. Now about a 21st Century Daytona Special redux; perhaps an FZR600-powered FZR400 aluminum chassis number in Yamaha racing colors, or a direct injection RZ350… Ride hard, ride safe, and look where you want to go. Head Shake – A Celebration of Obsolescence appeared first on Motorcycle.com.

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