#basically the theory just gave me a more condensed way of thinking of that same logic

[ultalliance]

Anyways, if I picked up Mysterio, it would actually be three OCs in a trenchcoat.

Aka, I really like the idea of there being three people behind the mask. Aiding in the inability to get any read on the "man" whatsoever as they could be in multiple places at once or even supporting the display remotely at their HQ.

One would be the technological juggernaut of the group, one a skilled actress/magician/entertainer with some sort of mutant power, and the third would be... well, they'd be the money and the criminal amongst the three with history and connections. All together they make a surprisingly cohesive team, and make Mysterio a surprisingly adept criminal mastermind.

Even if they may, perhaps, butt heads from time to time. As many a villain team-up does, they do know one thing. None of them are particularly partial to Spider-Man. Well, mostly.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep15 [FINALE]

For better or worse I think Ryukishi achieved exactly what he set out to do with this series, and I guess everyone’s just gonna be forced to reckon with how they feel about his own perspective on this franchise versus how they feel about it, lol.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I’m not entirely sure where to even start with this, but I guess the TL;DR is that I honestly think Gou/Sotsu was ultimately just fine despite it’s issues, and part me of can’t help but be like ‘I told you so, lol’ about how this really did end with this episode, and also committed pretty hard to the Umineko prequel elements.

It’s not like all of my theories were correct in the end, but I at least think I was pretty spot on in my prediction last week that this would end with the miracle of them side-stepping the sword issue entirely and choosing the third option of forgiveness and reconciliation. And also them ending it with an epilogue where we go back to the Matsuribayashi timeline and get a happy ending for Rika and Satoko that provides a ‘non-magical interpretation’ for the story while also giving us an idea of how Bern and Lambda formally split off into their own entities and start the relationship we see in Umineko.

I didn’t quite expect them to go down the route of having them agree to just spend a few years apart and accept that they don’t need to literally always be together, but I think that was a really good way to wrap things up between them. It’s pretty much the healthiest compromise to their conflict that doesn’t come across like it completely invalidates one of their dreams. I get why it feels too anti-climactic and convenient for people, but when you pull at that thread you get into wider topics of what the entire story is about, since this was always going to end with Satoko being redeemed and forgiven. People might not have taken him seriously, but Ryukishi was 100% genuine about his regrets about Matsuribayashi’s ending, and how part of why he came up with this new story was to create a better ending, while also doing more with Satoko as a character.

Basically I think a lot of the fandom negativity towards this boils down to people fundamentally disagreeing with the idea that Matsuribayashi was even ‘flawed’ in this sort of way to begin with, or that Satoko was badly written. It’s valid to disagree on this stuff, but at the very least we all have to grapple with how Ryukishi has his own specific relationship with this series.

People like to focus on how he’s a troll who likes to mess with people, but I feel like this is a bit of a wake-up call for people about how he’s actually extremely sincere, almost to a fault, and he likes to use his stories as a vehicle for expressing his personal philosophies and ideals. 

This whole story is also a good example of how he just sees this as ultimately being a fictional story about fictional characters, and not literally a matter of real people who need to be sentenced for their crimes or whatever. As early as the original VN he was almost being outright preachy about the message that nobody is irredeemable, and that philosophy carries through to this. But to be more specific, nobody *in this story* is irredeemable. He’s pretty open about the fact that in practice you can’t apply this sort of ideal to real life, but fictional stories are their own separate matter.

I think this whole issue of how he views this as a story first and foremost is also the central reason why this ended in a way that comes across as Satoko being let off too easy for her crimes. One way or another, Ryukishi’s made it clear that he sees this as being no different to how other characters had arcs where they committed crimes but still got forgiven, or how Takano is basically a straight up war criminal who also got forgiven for her crimes.

Anyway, this episode at least committed to the Umineko stuff, so that was satisfying. Sure there’s people that still want to deny it, but at this point I think a lot of people are just being stubborn, so it’s not like anything would have really convinced them, lol. I’m also genuinely not sure what people even would have expected them to do beyond what we saw her, aside from having the two of them literally put on their gothic lolita outfits and turn to the camera and go ‘we are literally Bernkastel and Lambdadelta from the video game series Umineko When They Cry’. I almost feel like there’s some kind of misunderstanding from people who aren’t familiar with Umineko when it comes to the idea of what it even means for this to be ‘an Umineko prequel’, or ‘a Bern/Lambda origin story’. I mean, this is quite literally exactly what I expected and hoped for in that regard. It’s not like I was expecting them to incorporate anything related to, like, Beatrice or the Ushiromiya family.

I think this is also one of those things where you just have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to earnestly engage with the story that’s being told, or if you want to assume that there’s some level of malice or trickery going on.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting them to literally have Rika and Satoko recite part of Bern and Lambda’s final conversation with each other word for word, lmao. Combined with the scene at the end where ‘Witch Satoko’ talks to herself about how she’s going to give her body back to Satoko while she goes chasing after Rika, it was literally just the exact origin story of their relationship as it’s depicted in Umineko.

I still feel like this would all only really be ‘worth it’ if we actually get something like a full on anime remake for Umineko, but at this point I can’t help but feel satisfied with this part of it all.

It’s not like I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is perfect or anything, though. I don’t hate it as much as basically everyone else does, but I think Ryukishi’s the sort of VN writer who really struggles with the shift to writing for an anime. I think a big part of the frustration people have is just from how this is formatted as a weekly anime series spread across basically an entire year, instead of being something like a stand-alone VN chapter that you can read at whatever pace you want, even if it ultimately takes the same amount of time to read as it would to watch all of Gou/Sotsu.

There’s also the whole issue of this being a sort-of-remake, which snowballed into a whole list of structural problems. They absolutely tried too hard to have their cake and eat it too, and they should have just committed to it being made for old fans only, instead of trying to sincerely incorporate elements from the VN that old fans don’t care about anymore because they’ve gone over it already.

And as I’ve said several times before, it was a major issue for them to decide to put Nekodamashi in the middle of Gou and then spend like 20 episodes on flashback answer arcs until finally getting back to that cliffhanger. I’ve been waiting until this all ended to decide exactly how I feel about that, and now that it’s all over I still think it was a really bad idea. I don’t think it was an issue for them to reveal that Satoko’s the culprit that early, but having the gun cliffhanger specifically happen that early just gave people misguided expectations and tainted the answer arcs because people were just impatient to get back to the cliffhanger. And then the cliffhanger itself ended up being somewhat anti-climactic, which is what I’d been fearing would happen. It would have worked fine if they shuffled it around so that the cliffhanger happened right before Kagurashi and was followed up in the very next episode, or if this was a VN where you could binge your way through the flashback stuff, but spending like half of an entire real-life year to get back to that point only to have the resolution be ‘Satoko just shoots Rika and the death loops keep going’ just didn’t really work properly.

I’m a lot more generous towards the Akashi arcs than most people are, since I think they really over-estimate how much re-used content there is there, but they still suffer from the central issue of the show trying to be accessible for new fans. It could have been heavily condensed otherwise, without losing anything in terms of Satoko’s whole character arc.

On the other hand I think the first half of Kagurashi was awful specifically because it highlighted how bad of an idea it was to put Nekodamashi so early in the story. They still ended up having to go back to that arc and repeat it anyway, in the most 1:1 recap-y way in the whole show, but that wouldn’t have even been an issue in the first place if that was instead the first time that arc happened in the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would rearrange the story to make it flow better while still following Ryukishi’s intentions, and I think they could have condensed it into a 2-cour season with this sort of structure if they did something like this:

-First arc where Rika gets thrown back into the loop and quickly figures out that somebody intentionally caused this to happen, and it’s not Takano because at least in this idea of mine she’d try and investigate her only to find out that this version of Takano regrets everything and is planning to flee the village with Tomitake.

Basically I think this could tie into the idea of Satoko initially wanting to just concoct an idea world for Rika so that she won’t want to leave this time, but sort of like what I think happens in Saikoroshi, Rika would still reject it, and this time around there’d be the additional layer of her knowing that somebody did this to her for an unknown reason. Maybe they could even initially market it as a new adaptation or a remake of Saikoroshi, and then reveal that it’s a sequel, to keep that whole element to the series. Either way I think this would end with everything going to shit when Rika rejects that fragment and wants to go back to St. Lucia’s, and Satoko basically snaps and kills her, and that way the audience can find out about her being the culprit without Rika finding out about it yet.

Maybe there could even be some dramatic irony where Rika’s attempts to meddle with certain ‘trigger events’, and her displaying her looper side, inadvertently triggers people around her to get paranoid, and the whole fragment would start to spiral into tragedy from there. I think they could at least use the whole conflict in Tatariakashi about Teppei actually being good this time as a starting point for that sorta thing.

-Second arc, rounding out the first cour, which is basically just Satokowashi. I don’t think there’s much that you’d need to change here, but like I said above I like the idea of her initially trying to just invent a perfect world for Rika and her to live in, instead of jumping straight to murder. But maybe instead of her literally just watching Rika’s loops, she could instead just be stuck using her looping powers to try and figure out how to create that ‘perfect world’ in the first place, by personally investigating all of the different tragedies and how to prevent them.

-Staring the second cour, a third arc where we basically just get to see those loops Satoko goes through, and her whole process of solving the tragedies and ‘purifying’ characters like Teppei and Takano, until we eventually see her perspective on the first arc, and how she reacts to Rika ultimately rejecting the world she tried to make for her.

-A fourth and final arc which is basically just Nekodamashi + Kagurashi, where she just totally snaps and tries to just torture Rika into never wanting to leave the village again, and eventually Satoko gets exposed and they have their direct confrontation with each other.

With that sorta story structure, you’d keep all the relevant bits of Gou/Sotsu as it is now, while being more focused on Rika and Satoko instead of doing kinda half-assed reruns of the Rena and Shion arcs. It’d also push the big cliffhanger between them until near the end of the show, while still revealing to the audience relatively early on that Satoko’s the culprit.

I’d also like them to do more with Satoshi and Shion, so maybe like with how Teppei gets redeemed and Satoko almost gets to have a happy life with him in Tatariakashi, the central question arc of this hypothetical story could also involve Satoko making sure that Satoshi wakes up from his coma, and Shion also gets to have a good relationship with all of them. You could probably do something interesting with the idea of Satoshi and Shion being in the camp of not trusting Teppei and his whole redemption arc.

Honestly I could spend a long time talking about how I would have done things differently, lol. For one thing, I think the Akashi arcs would have been much better if they just changed it so that Satoko used psychological tactics to make people paranoid, and we completely cut out the whole syringe plot device. I get how it fits with Satoko’s whole certainty gimmick, but it made those arcs way too predictable. Even if we knew the outcome, it’d at least be entertaining to see exactly how Satoko might go out of her way to set up the different tragedies. We kinda got glimpses of that sorta plot point in Wataakashi when things seemed to go outside of her control, but they didn’t really do much with it.

Anyway, this is a whole lot of words to say that I think that in spite of the serious structural issues going on, I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is fine, and was at least working with a lot of perfectly good ideas that could have been executed much better.

Also, on a side note, that one scene during their fist-fight at the start where the art-style changes a bit was kinda weird, but I really liked how it looked, and part of me almost wishes the whole show looked like that, lol. I like Akio Watanabe’s character designs, but I feel like that sort of stylized, almost TWEWY-ish art style would have been really fitting for this series, especially in the horror/action parts.

Oh, and the new rendition of You was so good it almost felt emotionally manipulative, lol.

[tangooftears]

Okay. This will probably be... fairly long? I don’t know. We’ll see. This is more for myself than anything else but I’m putting it here.

Spirit Energy/Mako Energy

What we heard from Bugenhagen wasn’t terribly different from what we heard at Shinra HQ. More detailed, no Shinra propaganda and going “isn’t mako energy so great?”

Spirit energy and mako energy are essentially the same thing. Mako energy is processed and condensed spirit energy.

Spirit energy is exactly what it sounds like. It’s made up of souls. Ghosts. Whatever it is that makes up life and consciousness. Upon death, souls return to the Planet and go back to the Lifestream. The natural order of things on Gaia is that it’s a cycle of reincarnation. A life dies, their spirit returns to the planet, they’re reborn as something new - a person, an animal, a plant, so on and so forth.

When mako reactors pull spirit energy out of the planet and is turned into electricity or liquid or whatever form Shinra wants it in, it disrupts the order. Countless spirits being compressed into energy and unable to be reborn. Further compressed mako energy becomes materia.

(Materia can be naturally made, but I’m under the impression that this would be in small numbers.)

Which is what I meant yesterday by saying that even if we destroy the mako reactors, it might already be too late. We don’t know if new spirits can just... be made. How would you measure something like that?

The point is that, if things keep going as they are currently, the world will be destroyed. The world can’t exist without spirit energy because that’s what makes up all life here.

The Cetra/The Ancients

They’re the people who lived on Gaia before humanity did. The working theory is that they’re the ancestors of humans. We don’t really know if they’re indigenous to this planet, or if they were aliens, but in the end it doesn’t really matter either way.

They’re known more or less as the stewards and protectors of the planet. Or they were, thousands of years ago. They travelled the land, opening up the lifestream and allegedly using the magic granted by the lifestream. They looked just like us, but were more spiritual. They’re capable of hearing the planet, communing with it, being able to talk with it, to some degree.

Aerith’s Cetran. I suspect Barret might be, too, but it’s not something I’m going to bring up with him or... really, anybody else, because I don’t want to put him in danger just because I read too much into some of the things he’s said. The last thing we want is for Shinra to think that they can kidnap Aerith and Barret both and think they can make some kind of fucked up Adam and Eve out of them.

Anyway. Cetran society disappeared 2000 years ago, with the arrival of a meteor. Some kind of lifeform. We don’t know what happened to them.

The only reason humans exist today is because we’re the descendants of the Cetra who gave up their migratory way of life, settled down, stopped communing with the planet, all for the sake of convenience. If what Sephiroth told me was to be believed. When the calamity happened, we hid. That’s how we survived.

We’re traitors, basically.

The Promised Land

This is something that’s talked about a lot in Cetran scripture, and something that Shinra is actively looking for. It’s why they wanted Aerith; they thought she knew where this Promised Land was.

Their hope is that it’s an actual, physical location. Somewhere with boundless spirit/mako energy that they can use without fear of consequence.

According to the people in Cosmo Canyon, they do believe that the Promised Land existed, once - not for us, but for the Cetra.

Their theory is that the Promised Land was the resting place of the Cetra, and... well. Considering the life cycle. That means there is no Promised Land. The Promised Land is death. It’s joining the Lifestream. It’s being reborn as something new.

It’s an answer Shinra won’t like.

But I doubt sustainability is what Shinra has in mind.

Professor Gast

I don’t know a lot about him, if anything. I know he wrote a few scientific books. I know his name is something that popped up a few times investigating everything in Cosmo Canyon.

He used to come here a lot, thirty years ago. He was the one who found the lifeform he dubbed Jenova. He thought Jenova was a Cetra.

The last time he was here, he was muttering something to himself about how he was wrong, that Jenova wasn’t an Ancient, that he’d done something terribly wrong, and he disappeared off the face of the planet. We’re not sure that he’s dead, but since he worked for Shinra and is no longer the head of the Science department... I’m quite positive that he’s dead.

We won’t get any information from him. Nothing you can get from a corpse.

Jenova

This is where things get complicated.

I don’t know what’s up with Jenova. I don’t know what it is.

I know it’s a fucked up looking... thing. Humanoid. Eyes for nipples. Dead grey skin. Silvery hair. Organs on the outside. A fucked up thing that looks like it could resemble a wing.

I know that it’s Sephiroth’s... mother.

Sephiroth found out in Nibelheim that he wasn’t entirely human. That he was just another test subject. Hojo’s prized specimen, because he was stable, he was powerful, unimaginably powerful. His entire life was just being that sick bastard’s lab rat.

...

It’s honestly not even any kind of wonder why Sephiroth went insane knowing the truth. How do you respond to that kind of discovery? That you’re not human? No. No. That’s not the problem. It wouldn’t be a problem if it were just simple humanity. That not even the people who should care about you see you as a person?

He was never a person to Hojo, to Shinra. Just an experiment that was very lucky, or very unlucky, to succeed on the first shot.

Our guess is that this thing killed the Cetra, somehow.

I... think it’s capable of shapeshifting.

...

I think it’s capable of a lot of things.

I was injected with Jenova cells. So was Zack.

I think we have Sephiroth’s cells, too.

It’s... I remember, in Shinra HQ, that... I stopped being myself. That something was trying to control me. That I muttered Jenova to myself, and called it mother.

I don’t know what else to add yet. I don’t feel well. Writing all of this up just made me more uncomfortable.

[flying-elliska]

Ok I caught up with wtfock s3 because well, it felt weird to leave unfinished (except a few clips i just didn’t want to watch, like the attack one). here’s what worked and didn’t for me (i’m pretty critical so don’t read if that sort of thing upsets you or you’re not in the mood) because i still think having this story remade so often is an unprecendented storytelling experiment worth thinking about even when it doesn’t entirely work (and i think argumented criticism is good, but if you post hate about the actors/fans etc you really suck tbh) : 

- to start with positives : like many said, the acting was pretty damn good. overall wtfock has a really solid cast. the willems have succeeded in creating an onscreen queer intimacy that feels very believable, no holds barred and no awkwardness, and they have to be commended for that. there’s a lot of chemistry and tension at first between them, which then turns into something very soft and sweet and puppy-love-like. it was nice seeing Robbe evolve and the sweet bean energy that emanates from how the actor plays him is very very powerful. i also loved the warmth of the flatshare, and as a Dutchie I just adored the Sinterklaas bits, it was so funny and i loved the found family vibes. warmth is just something they do really well, esp with the last clips, perfume shopping, playing board games, the party at the end. They use the Christmassy vibes really well. the cinematography has its moments too, contrasts between warm and cold, the episode at the beach is gorgeous, the sequence in the tunnel, the light on their faces when they are in that classroom surrounded by drawings. wtfock as a whole is also good at creating some very lovable secondary characters, be it Milan, Yasmina, Noor, or especially king Senne. So, I do understand that there are things to love about this remake, which is probably why my disappointment feels so strong. I really wanted to care about these characters in their journey. 

- on to the controversial : i don’t necessarily fault them for wanting to show a more prononced aspect of homophobia. i think the debate about this often lacks nuance. on one hand, this is the sixth remake, and homophobia is something that is still often prevalent, and having one remake show that out of six is not in itself a problem. on the other, yes, happy fluffy stories are important, but sometimes people who have gone through stuff like this also need to see their experiences represented. the power of skam is that it shows difficult experiences BUT ALSO a happy ending. that can be very healing, i think, compared to other stories which focus only on the drama. the trouble is, i don’t think they dealt with it very well, or put any effort into processing the consequences of these harrowing things. and if you don’t, it feels cheap.

- on to my main gripe : the writing. previsible, i know. but to me, essential. and this is not about them ‘changing things’ - i like when remakes change stuff, when they do it well. the thing is, i have been burned too many times before. and when i sense that the writing is being wack, it makes it automatically much harder for me to invest emotionally in the characters. and simply put there were signs early on that made me distrust the writers. for starters, the first two episodes gave me a feeling that they didn’t have their priorities in order. the POV-immersion and depth is one of the most powerful aspects of skam, and it was lost. too many early clips felt out of Robbe’s perspective, and when it was him it was about Noor ; a few clips to show his discomfort were on point, but there were too many of them, and there were repetitive, losing time on what isn’t really an essential part of Robbe’s journey. and while they were spending time on clips that felt like misery flavored filler, they decided several times to condense original clips focused on Isak and Even, together ; like their first meeting and then their first hangout, or later in the series OHN and the minute by minute talk. and i think their story suffered from that. i think because they don’t have a real discussion early on, the buildup of their relationship feels mostly based on physical attraction. and while it certainly is a thing that happens, it just isn’t my fave love story thing. i missed the sweet pining from afar and tension that makes later drama believable. it felt like they brought the drama comparatively too fast without enough character work to make it worthwhile. Also there is just too much time spent on Zoenne drama, and their breakup seems like it foreshadows the dreaded s4 love triangle, which, yikes. the focus is all over the place, the rythm felt incoherent. 

- what’s more, they decided to introduce pretty grave elements of plot, like Robbe using slurs against Sander, the homophobic attack, the suicidal urges on both their sides, Sander kissing Britt while he was still saying I love you to Robbe in the morning, without either proper build up or resolution. It made it all feel cheap, jarring, and unearned, especially when they didn’t put trigger warnings or made jokes about it on insta or waited forever to give news about the characters being ok. it felt like drama for the sake of drama, and definitely not written with a vulnerable audience of queer teens in mind. and at the same time, when it came to the ‘big scenes’ of their relationship, like the first kiss or the universes talk or sander’s episode, it felt more or less lifted from OG without a lot of effort made to adapt it to them. i actually quit live watching/blogging after the first kiss scene, because of how similar it was, and how uninspired it felt, and lukewarm. it felt like a lack of imagination. when it came to OHN, the scene in itself was lovely, but the weird time gap, random timing and people seemingly doing nothing after a suicidal Sander disappeared, sort of broke it for me.  In the OG the combo of buildup, longing, realisation, fear, release works so well in a sequence, and splitting it over time really diluted it, to me. Similarly the quickly thrown out ‘life is now’ at the ending felt sort of out of nowhere, while in OG it was such a lovely bookend, him apologizing to Eva and reflecting on his growth. The symbolism, which ties everything so beautifully together in themes of rebirth, salvation, baptism, union, faith, deciding your own narrative in OG, here feels inconsistent. There is an attempt I see, something about wasteland vs. warmth/family, but it’s often absent of main clips. It’s nowhere near as coherent as it could be. 

- all of this builds up to the main problem for me, of the season. which is, i didn’t really get into Robbe and Sander’s relationship. Or their individual arcs for that matter. When it comes to Robbe, I guess he just isn’t my type of character. I feel like he is missing the fire of an Isak. A lot of the time he just felt too passive, like he let other characters make his decisions. I was waiting for him to stand up for himself more than he did. And there are too many scenes of another character doing his coming out for him. And then Sander ; I have to say I don’t understand all the love his character gets. Maybe because that’s because he sort of gives me Dutch fuckboi vibes...but there were several times he just came accross as a flat out asshole. I found him intriguing in his intro clip, chaotic and charming, but that never really went where i expected it to. i didn’t get his passion, what drew him to art. the symbolism around his character - basically Bowie, and drawing Robbe, and Chernobyl (which is a bit tasteless imho, turning a tragedy like that into a cutesy romantic thing), feels ...disjointed, and shallow to me. Like I never really got into it. And maybe some people did and noticed deeper links but to me, I got stuck at the surface. I saw a lot of interesting theories with what was going on with him but in the end they just copied OG. And I’m sad to say, but he ended up feeling like a manic pixie dream boy cliché to me, and i just didn’t understand what drew them to each other so strongly. Yes, Robbe is caring and Sander is in need of care, but that feels like a very reductive reproduction of OG. Beyond that...i don’t know. Certain complexities of the OG i loved  just...were sanded away, like Isak being ignorant about MI and learning compassion. This just...didn’t feel like it had the same depth, and often felt like soapy teenage drama, leaning too hard and too lazily on the actors’ chemistry. i like my romances wordy and solidly enmeshed in character development, and this was not it. It never felt like they had a real conversation about things, esp after the drama. 

- i think this is the first remake that made me actually angry for reasons not related to problematic cast shit, and so i’m trying to analyze that emotion. for me it comes down to too much drama, too heavy handed. Too much of the boy squad being shitty to Robbe, too much Noor, too much filler clips without any deeper meaning, too much things distracting from getting to know the main characters and going into their issues in depth. They changed stuff, but didn’t have the guts to actually follow through. They broke the mold but only in ways that ended up feeling shallow and unconsequential. Like I would have loved seeing Robbe go to therapy ! see his mom ! Zoe and Robbe go to the police together ! Sander have a complicated home situation ! or doing a Bowie related art installation to express his feelings of alienation ! seeing more of the underground graffiti scene ! or just...something, idk. And them also removing the faith-related themes also felt disappointing. and the ohn clip taking place in the place where sander draws feels very....basic to me, even if it was pretty. very ‘oh he’s an artist, here is his safe place’....hm, okay. I didn’t like that they made Britt into such a villain, I didn’t like how the boy squad showed no care for Robbe whatsoever for weeks until the plot said it was time for them to be redeemed in a way that felt too jarring, and I didn’t like that they made Moyo so horrible but redeemed him so easily. I actually thought they would show that it’s okay to separate yourself from friends who are that bigoted, because it just shows they are not willing to care for people. And him suddenly saying those sweet and mature things felt too out of characters and a ahah ‘gotcha’ rather than depth . I didn’t like that Robbe, too, was made so virulent by his internalized homophobia but got over it so quickly. I think what disappointed me most, in the end, was that I kept picking up potential and the show kept doing absolutely nothing with it, or confirming my fears, and it made me feel stupid and out of tune with whatever they were doing. And it’s, to me, symptomatic in modern storytelling of a trend to privilege shocks and twists over inner coherence and build up. And it makes for...Very underwhelming stuff, in the end. 

- all in all, i think this remake illustrates why s3 of OG is not as easy to remake as it sounds. it’s very intricate machinery, with a pitch perfect rhythm (and an extremely passionate nitpicky fanbase lmao). and if you don’t get all the parts of why it’s so great, you’re going to lose a lot of it. (and all the remakes ended losing up stuff in translation ; more or less compensated by inventivity and charm of their own.) so many mainstream press articles praise the real time/social media format and the ‘real talk about teen issues’ which, yeah, is part of the success, but doesn’t explain the devotion on its own. there’s the way the story uses real time to build up a storytelling rythm that feels organic and makes sense as if it was part of the lives of the viewer. There’s foreshadowing and aftershocks. Wtfock often feels like they wrote the clip numbers on darts and randomly threw them at a week planner. If an episode of a regular series ends on a cliffhanger, we can be thrilled and frustrated and put it aside for next week. but if you end an episode with a character shown to be suicidal, or you don’t show them being okay after a beating, for hours or days, that’s the emotion you leave your viewers with, because skam is a continuous experience. and remakes who pile on drama moments without respite (looking at you too skamfr s4) don’t get how tiring and disengaging this can be, in this format. skam worked so well because of how benevolent it was, on the whole. and also, cheeky, with that ‘don’t take it too seriously’ deflating humor. grumpy isak in ‘hate me now’ mode getting bumped into. this lightness and comedy often feels missing here. also my god the social media is absolutely terrible. plus...there is too much filler. honestly, them having more time, on the whole...ended up being a bad thing. Plus Wtfock feels like it has so much more unadressed plot points, like...why did Sander change his mind exactly and kiss Britt again ? How did Robbe’s mom react ? Who did the attack ? What is happening w Senne now ? etc. And it feels like they just missed the fact that OG, however subtly, did adress those things. 

- now, don’t get me wrong, i’m happy it’s popular in Belgium. On the whole it’s still a beautiful story of love and acceptance. and that people found something in it that spoke to them. but as a remake, it’s probably one of the most disappointing yet, to me. and i sort of...don’t get the hype. and i don’t want to be too ‘oh cute boys kissing’ cynical about it. but i think this illustrates why in the end, this is also very subjective. there are probably things i missed because i didn’t feel the need to examine it in depth or do the extra emotional work that comes with being a devoted fan of something. and some of their choices made me angry, and i’m not forgiving when it comes to these things. i still wish them success for s4 and whatever else, but i don’t think i will watch live, at least unless it gets really rave reviews about their treatment of Yasmina’s season. i mean they got s2 right, who knows? 

[vernonfielding]

Life Writes Its Own Stories

Chapter 12. (AO3.)

Leo James looked like hell, faced bruised all over, eyes bloodshot and swollen. The Narcan may have saved him from an overdose death, but Jake thought it was going to take a while to recover from what must have been a brutal assault.

He made Jake and Rosa close his hospital room door before he would talk. His voice was thin and rough, like he’d been strangled on top of everything else.

A cop is running Jazzy Pants, Leo told them. No, he didn’t know the cop’s name. The cop has a few mid-level street dealers on the front lines doing the actual dirty work. He promised to protect them if things turn, but one of them got freaked and snitched to Leo. Leo’s been trying to leak to Jake, but there’s been an ugly vibe on the streets, and he was nervous. He never saw the guys who took him down – it happened fast, and after they’d beat him they’d dosed him with the Jazzy Pants and left him for dead.

“Been a long time since I was this scared,” Leo said.

“Looks like you were smart to be scared,” Rosa said.

Leo nodded, and Jake patted him vaguely on the arm. What Leo had given them was huge, but Jake had no idea what to do with it, where to even begin investigating one of their own on so little information.

“We’ve got an officer watching your room. Try to get some rest.” Jake turned to leave, but Leo grabbed for him.

“Not done yet, Peralta,” he said. Leo nodded toward a chair near the door, where a stack of clothes was neatly folded. “The jacket on top. Inner pocket.”

Jake raised an eyebrow at Rosa, who shrugged. He picked up the jacket and unzipped the pocket. Inside was a Ninja Turtle figurine (Donatello, not his personal favorite). Jake held it up.

“It’s a thumbdrive,” Leo said. “Don’t know what’s on it – didn’t want to look – but it came from the guy who tipped me off. He’s dead, by the way.”

Jake closed his fist around the Ninja Turtle. “Get some sleep, Leo.”

He and Rosa swapped theories on the drive back to the precinct. They agreed that it was possible the whole thing was a lie – Jake trusted his own CI, but Leo’s information was secondhand. A story about an NYPD cop running a drug ring sounded insanely far-fetched, the stuff of urban legends. Taking bribes, sure. Shaving a little off the top of a bag of heroin, yeah, it happened. Every now and then entire kilos of cocaine went missing. But running an entire operation was another matter entirely. Rosa hypothesized it could be a former cop, maybe someone who’d worked undercover in drug enforcement. They didn’t know for sure it was even someone in the NYPD, she pointed out.

Jake didn’t say it, but he was praying that Manny wasn’t involved. It was unsettling that they’d been told the Seven-Eight had a task force. Depending on what was on the thumbdrive, that precinct was probably where they’d have to begin their search for a dirty cop.

Back at the Nine-Nine, Jake glanced at Pembroke’s office to confirm he was still out and wouldn’t be trying to Vulture this investigation away from them. His door was closed and the lights were off. Jake inserted the thumbdrive into his computer; there was only one file, and he clicked it open. 

“It’s a ledger,” Rosa said. She was leaning over his shoulder, one hand planted on his desk.

Jake scrolled through the entries – it looked like about eight months of data, starting the previous May. He pointed a finger at one of the rows. “We’ve got dates, times, addresses – looks like they were getting drops two or three times a week.”

“So that’s-” Rosa closed her eyes, lips twitching. “About 80 entries. At least.”

Jake stared at her. “How do you do that?”

“Not that hard, man.” Rosa tapped the screen. “Print this out.”

They set up shop in the briefing room, where they could use the map to pin the locations in the ledger and spread out their paperwork. Right away they figured out there were four main drops, all warehouses in or near Brownsville. They each took two addresses and got to work.

Tracking addresses to possible suspects was tedious work. Most of them led back to holding companies or developers that almost certainly had nothing to do with the drug ring – they were just unlucky enough to own under-utilized property that the dealers were basically squatting out of. One of Rosa’s warehouses turned out to have ties to a known drug cartel, which they filed away for further investigation down the line.

After a couple of hours Jake brought them bags of chips and pretzels from the break room, plus cups of disgusting vending machine mochas because the kitchen coffeemaker was broken again. An hour after that, he gave up on his warehouses and turned back to the ledger.

There were a few stray addresses they had pinned to the map but hadn’t researched yet, so he sighed and began looking them up. Most of them were small units – loft apartments, run-down artist studios – in the same neighborhood as the warehouses. One was a private storage company.

And then there was an outlier: A penthouse property in Dumbo, overlooking the river. It probably had really killer views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline.

The owner was an LLC, and the owner of the LLC was a man whose name tickled at the back of Jake’s brain – he was sure he’d seen it before but couldn’t place it. He googled the name but still nothing clicked, and then he did an image search. He glanced over the first row of photos, and sucked in a sharp breath.

“What?” Rosa looked up from her laptop.

Jake swallowed thickly, letting the pieces slot into place. “Remember the missing Rat-Dog case, a couple months ago?”

Rosa’s brows furrowed, but she nodded. “Yeah, we chased it down for the Vulture’s frat buddy.”

“Well, frat bro owns one of the drops on the ledger.” Jake spun his laptop toward Rosa and pointed to a photo of the man, his arm slung over Pembroke’s shoulders. “I think we found our cop.”

Rosa gaped at the photo for a second, then turned and locked eyes with Jake. A spark of understanding passed between them.

Jake slammed shut his laptop. Rosa began gathering up the stacks of papers they’d strewn about and Jake pulled pins out of the map. They bolted out of the briefing room, both looking toward Pembroke’s still-dark office. Jake checked the time on his phone – it was almost 8 p.m.

“What do we do?” he hissed to Rosa.

“We get out of here,” Rosa said. “Shaw’s?”

It was probably too close, but they needed to get out of the precinct now and Jake couldn’t think of anywhere else safe. He nodded and led the way.

+++

Amy glared at her notepad and the to-do list she’d been crafting for the past hour and a half. Usually lists were so soothing, sort of her go-to for coming down after a hard day, but even the perfectly shaped bullet points and the evenly spaced title letters weren’t helping her relax now. She tapped her favorite list-making pen (it was different from her note-taking pen and her just-jotting-down-thoughts pen and her supposed-to-be-taking-notes-but-actually-just-doodling pen for Terry’s monthly metro staff meetings) on her notebook and racked her brain for more things to put on her list.

She started to write “grocery shopping” – got so far as g-r-o – and then she tried to remember if she had orange soda at home and then she sighed and dropped her pen. That was the problem. Everything on her list came back to Jake.

She knew she should go home already. It was after 8, and Terry and Holt and most of the other reporters were gone; Hitchcock was still at his desk, presumably watching a live feed of a development board meeting, but his eyes had been closed for hours. As lonely as it felt here, Amy dreaded the idea of returning to her dark and empty apartment and not even having work to distract her. Not that work was helping much now.

Her email pinged, and Amy looked up hopefully – maybe someone had shot the mayor or a fire had broken out in a high-rise. But it was just Charles again.

The subject line said: “Just to confirm, neither you nor Jake said the words ‘break up.’” There was no text in the body of the email.

Amy deleted the email and looked up from her desk. Charles was watching her from his spot on the copy desk. She slid a finger slowly across her neck. He gave her an overly dramatic shrug and turned back to his computer.

Charles had figured out after witnessing several hushed conversations between Amy and Gina that something had gone down with Jake. Amy had given him the extremely condensed version of the story – that Jake was mad about Gina’s column and blaming Amy for it – and Charles had been instantly devastated. But he’d rallied an hour later and started pestering her for details. A little after noon, he’d latched onto the fact that they weren’t technically broken up because neither of them had said they were broken up.

At first Amy had found that thought somewhat comforting – it was true, after all – but eight hours later she was fed up. And it wasn’t just Charles she was fed up with. She’d realized, at some point late in the day, that her feelings about what had happened with Jake went beyond just hurt. She was angry with him. Even furious. He’d either never trusted her at all, or his faith had been so fragile, so superficial, that it couldn’t pass even the most obvious of tests.

That thought was heartbreaking and infuriariating and flat-out depressing, all at once.

Her email alert sounded again and Amy groaned and thought about marching straight to Charles’ desk and ordering him to just leave it. But when she looked at her inbox, the email wasn’t from him. And the subject line made her breath catch: “Jake Peralta.”

Amy glanced at the sender but she didn’t recognize the address: b00bman-at-hotmail. “Gross,” Amy muttered. She warily clicked it open.

“Dear Amy Santiago. Peralta has been selling the street drug Jazzy Pants. I HAVE PROOF. He also takes bribes and thinks women shouldn’t be in the NYPD. He also hates puppies AND kittens. ASK ANYONE. I can give you details.”

The email wasn’t signed, and it ended with an address and a time to meet later that night. Amy’s hands were shaking when she went to delete the email, just on reflex. Then she thought better of it and printed it out instead. She ran to the printer so no one else could grab it before her and read it again, her heart racing. When Charles popped up at her shoulder she actually yelped.

“What’s wrong?” he said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I saw you run over here. What is that?”

“Nothing.” Amy held the printout to her chest so he couldn’t read it. “I’ve got to go.”

She hurried back to her desk and shut down her laptop, and slung her purse over her shoulder. She was just at the door when it occurred to her that she had no idea what her next move was. She needed to talk to Jake, but she was afraid if she called or texted he’d ignore her, or tell her to stay away.

“Charles?” She approached his desk with caution. “Do you happen to know where Jake is right now?”

“Oh, thank god,” Charles said, clapping his hands in delight. “I’ve actually been texting with him all day and right now he’s at Shaw’s with Rosa, and he said I definitely shouldn’t-”

But Amy was already headed back to the door. She heard him calling after her, “Yes! Go get him! Love finds a way!”

She paused just outside, feeling weirdly vulnerable, like someone was watching her. She realized she’d left her jacket inside, but she wasn’t going back for it – she already felt like she was running out of time.

Her hands were still unsteady as she called for an Uber. While she waited for the car, she peeked at the email again. She couldn’t explain why the note had triggered such an urgent, demanding sense of apprehension. There was something in the tone of it, a familiarity, that set her teeth on edge. She didn’t think it was just that Jake was the subject, though surely that was the most upsetting part.

Amy studied the email address again, and frowned. Gina’s source had emailed too. It wasn’t unusual to get tips via email, of course, but Amy had a strange feeling. She texted Gina to ask what her source’s email address was. She wasn’t expecting an answer, actually – reporters were generally very protective of anonymous sources, and rightfully so – but they’d reached a sort of truce today, and Amy hoped Gina might feel like doing her a favor.

Her heart stuttered when her cell phone buzzed in her hands. Amy looked at the screen: “b00bman-at-hotmail.” It was followed by a vomit emoji.

Amy’s car pulled up, and she yanked the door open and jumped inside. “As fast as you can,” she told the driver. He rolled his eyes at her in the rearview mirror, but the tires squealed when he took off.

+++

Jake and Rosa were at their same table at the back of Shaw’s, though with pints instead of Shirley Temples (and they’d both done a shot of whiskey, because “what the fuck, the Vulture is a drug runner now?” Rosa had said).

They’d done a bit more googling on their phones on Pembroke’s frat buddy. It wasn’t clear how friendly they were, and the photo of them was about a decade old, but the fact that Pembroke had them running cases for the guy as recently as August was pretty damning. It didn’t prove that the Vulture was associated with, much less running, the Jazzy Pants operation, but Jake knew they had enough leads to launch an investigation.

The question was what to do now.

“Go to Wuntch?” Rosa said. She was tilted back in her chair, looking cool and casual, but Jake saw the way her eyes kept darting to the front door and the exits. Shaw’s was pretty empty, which was good and bad – there weren’t any other cops around to spy on them, but they also were pretty exposed, even in the dimly lit back end of the bar.

Jake thought over Rosa’s suggestion and shook his head. “Wuntch is going to want more evidence. And she may not like Pembroke much right now, but she could still ask him about it and tip our hand. If he’s already twitchy enough to go after at least one of my CIs, no telling what he’ll do if he knows we’re onto him.”

Rosa blew her hair out of her face in a huff of frustration, but she didn’t argue with him. Jake was fidgeting with the Ninja Turtle thumbdrive, twirling it between fingers, and Rosa yanked it away and stuffed it in a jacket pocket. She shot him a glare that he read as “stop playing with the evidence, idiot.”

Jake said, “I could talk to Leo again. He might have a name he for us, maybe one of the dealers working with Pembroke.”

“Dude’s pretty scared,” Rosa said. “Even if he has a name – and that’s a big if – you think he’s going to give it up?”

“No.” Jake closed his eyes and tugged at his hair with both hands. “This is crazy. Is there seriously no one we can trust?”

“Shit.” Rosa’s chair dropped to the floor with a thud.

Jake looked up, alarmed. “What? Is he here?”

Rosa jerked her chin toward the front door. Jake spun in his chair, and it was like everything around him stopped for a moment, and just faded away. All he saw was her.

Amy’s hair was down, framing her face in dark waves, and her eyes glittered as she peered all around the room. She was biting her lip, and twisting her hands together in a nervous way. When her eyes landed on him, her face lit up for a second. And just as quickly the light was gone, replaced by a determination he recognized from their nights working together and something less familiar, a brutal sort of stoicism. His heart fluttered in his chest as she approached their table.

“Jake.” Her voice was flat, and she projected a bit so she could be heard over the music.

Jake wasn’t sure what to say (or do) – too many competing thoughts were bouncing around his head suddenly. He wanted to apologize and he wanted to tell her he still wasn’t sure. He wanted to kiss her and he wanted to send her away and he wanted to take her hand and run with her, he didn’t even care where.

Rosa cleared her throat. “I’m going to- leave.”

Amy stepped back to give Rosa room to squeeze past the table, then took her seat. She leaned forward, hands clasped together again, tightly this time so she couldn’t fidget.

“What are you doing here?” Jake said, bending toward her so he could keep his voice low.

Amy started at that, and a flash of anger creased her brow. “I thought you were done hiding,” she said, the words short and sharp.

“Amy-”

She held up a hand. “Never mind, obviously that doesn’t matter anymore. It’s not why I’m here anyway.” She pulled her purse into her lap and took out a slip of paper, which she read over first, then handed to him.

Jake squinted at the printed text in the dim light. It was an email – his name was in the subject line. As he read, he felt a hard knot form in his stomach. When he was done, he quickly folded the paper in half and then half again. He looked around the room, saw Rosa at one end of the bar and caught her eye, flagging her back to them.

“Do you know who sent it?” Jake said to Amy.

“No, but-”

“Read this,” Jake said, passing the note to Rosa as she walked up. Rosa pulled over a chair from a nearby table and straddled it, then read.

“What the hell.”

“He’s trying to pin it on me,” Jake said.

Rosa closed her eyes, crumpling the note in her fist.

“Who’s trying to pin what on you?” Amy said, looking furiously between them.

“The Vulture,” Jake said, under his breath. “Ames, I can’t explain it now, but this is bad. We need to get you out of here.”

“I don’t understand,” Amy said. “What’s he trying to pin on you?”

Jake glanced quickly around the room again before turning back to Amy. “It’s about Jazzy Pants, and I mean it, I can’t tell you everything right now. But another one of my CIs got hit today, and if he’s sending messages to you now-” He paused, because spelling it all out made it much more terrifying.

Jake felt for his gun at his side. Rosa saw him, and quickly did the same. They locked eyes and nodded.

“Jake, wait,” Amy said, sounding breathless, “what about you?”

“Rosa and I can take care of ourselves. We need to get you somewhere safe – maybe Gina, or Charles.”

“Charles is closer,” Rosa said.

“And he’s been texting me all day, so we know he’s around.” Jake stood up, grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugging it on.

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Amy said, but she stood up too, and let herself be hustled toward the front of the bar.

“We should split up,” Jake said, when they reached the door.

Rosa nodded. “My bike’s out back. Where do you want to meet?”

Jake thought it over but his mind was blank – he wouldn’t be able to think clearly until he got Amy settled. “I’ll text you, half an hour.”

Rosa took off for the back door. Jake set a hand on Amy’s lower back, but he pushed ahead of her, and opened the front door slowly so he could make sure there was no one outside, waiting for them. It was dark and deserted. Jake pulled out his phone to call them an Uber, ushering Amy along.

He said, “I’m sorry you got dragged in-”

A solid weight tackled Jake from behind. His phone flew out of his hand and he heard Amy scream. Jake thrust an elbow back, hard, and heard a satisfying grunt as he connected. He reached for his gun, and then there was a sharp, nauseating pain in his shoulder, radiating all the way down his arm. Jake fell to one knee and he was tackled again, the weight crashing into his back and knocking the wind out of him. Jake tried to kick out but he was pinned, and he couldn’t catch his breath, and then hands were pulling his arms behind his back and binding his wrists, and he groaned in pain. He turned his head, tried to find Amy, and something dark fell over his eyes and he couldn’t see a thing.

He was dragged up to his feet and tugged forward a few stumbling steps, only to be thrown again a moment later, landing hard on his shoulder. He rolled onto his back and heard doors slamming shut, felt the jerk of a vehicle taking off. Someone yanked him up so he was sitting.

He called out, “Amy!”

“I’m here!”

The relief was immediate, and followed just as quickly by terror. At least they were together, and alive. For the moment.

Jake moved his head, tried to see anything through the black veil over his eyes. “Are you okay?”

A fist punched into his stomach and Jake grunted, folding over himself. He felt the unmistakable press of a gun into the base of his skull.

Someone leaned in close to him, breath hot on the side of his face. “No more talking.” 

CHAPTER 13

[mi6015handeldalegonzales]

Production Analysis

I have always loved movies, believing that stories on screen that take us back to the future and over the rainbow speak a language that is universal. They may not be real, but through this medium, they manage to influence our outlook on the world. This is what I think films are all about: a combination of technical and creative aspects that work in harmony to share the director’s perspective on life, and invoke specific emotions from the audience. My ultimate desire to be a filmmaker and share that perspective with my own audience is what drove me during my final project.

 I had many options in tackling this animation, be it showing off my skills, explicitly targeting the film industry, or just having fun with it. While any would have sufficed, I wanted to have full creative freedom to produce something that felt both powerful, and uniquely meaningful to me. Hence, I decided to make a personal short following a character that had undergone similar trials as I had in my life.

 Despite that, I believe that the project I ended up giving myself was too ambitious, which was corroborated by Goodfellow. This was due to having to condense the development of a whole storyline and an entire character into a two-minute animation, which meant a lot of scenes, and subsequently, numerous set designs to pack in all the information needed to convey the story. To cut this down, I had to change the story and replace the crash with a scene where the daughter falls and loses her ‘drawing competition award,’ in a bid to avoid creating an entire character arc for the animation. In this scene, the mum was supposed to arrive in her car to save the day, taking out her pen and drawing 3D wings for the daughter (the wings from the award). The story would have ended as the daughter takes flight, with a dedication fading into the sky that said, “To my mum and sister, who have always been the wind under my wings.”

 Despite how I pivoted, however, I still could not finish my changes in time due to my perfectionism. Instead of moving on to the next part of the animation, I kept finding small, negligible mistakes that I would take time out of my day trying to fix. Even as I submit my work now, there is still a lot that I want to change and improve upon. I ended up having to cut down the animation by half, including only the montage section of the initial concept, and ending it with, ‘to be continued’ for the animation to make sense.

 3D modelling was my favourite part of the whole process since I love seeing my sketches take shape in a 3-dimensional space. The process was not too hard, as I had modelled characters before, and I only needed to follow the same procedure, even managing to improve my method based on prior problems. In my previous projects, the clothes were all separate objects, causing too many tears in the model when animating. This time, I made the outfit part of the main body. The jacket was the only exception, but I still made sure to keep the vertices underneath far out from the ones for the main body, to prevent the different meshes from overlapping with each other. What I was not used to, and found more difficult, was giving the model high, defined cheekbones as it did not adhere to the basic round face I would normally create. Fortunately, with a few tweaks and experimentation, I managed to overcome this obstacle.

I’ve always found creating rigs a significant challenge, so I am thankful and fortunate that I was able to use the Advanced Skeleton, which cut my work down by weeks, compared to if I had done it manually from scratch. Even then, setting up the rig and weight painting drained me so much that my productivity levels plummeted in this section of the production process. This was because, having always preferred creative aspects over technical ones, I struggled with the lack of creative leeway in this part of the process. A challenge I encountered was the difficulty in animating natural eye blinks. When modelling, I gave the eyeballs an outer layer to create refraction from the light, making it more realistic. This layer was invisible, so I did not think it would matter that it protruded further than the eyelids. It turned out, however, that when rigging and making the eyes close, this did in fact cause problems. I did not have the time to fix these issues, and thus errors can be seen in the final animation. Still, lessons were learned; something to keep in mind for future projects.

 Ideally, I wanted a soundtrack that would elevate my project and help carry the weight of emotion I hoped would be conveyed by the short. However, it was tricky to find the right accompaniment due to copyright problems. Most free music online gave the animation the feel of a cheap advert, or made it seem like it was an amateur YouTube vlog. Even non-copyrighted lo-fi songs (which were my usual go-to) could not match the atmosphere I wanted. I even asked my housemate if he could produce a sample for me, as he is a DJ that creates some of his own tunes. Alas, that did not pan out as I kept changing the idea of my final piece and did not have the time to oversee the music production with him. Nevertheless, this may have been a blessing in disguise as I ended up finding a beautiful, free-to-use, fantasy-themed piano instrumental which yielded the right mystical and emotional ambience I desired. If given more time, I probably would have added several muffled, diegetic sounds to make the result even more atmospheric.

 The most excruciating part of the entire animation production was the creation of the 2D assets. This was because I did not have any drawing pads for digital art, and I also lacked a phone to take any photos of sketches, thus leaving my laptop mouse as my only option to draw with. Even the simplest assets were immensely tedious to make, which was the main reason why it took so long to make such a short video. I could not afford to get a drawing tablet at that time, so I just had to push through.

 Another, lesser difficulty was the colouring aspect. In one of the final project meetings with Goodfellow, he told me that he liked the colour scheme and aesthetic from the animation I submitted for the Professional Creative Production (MI6011) module and that I should try to incorporate that again into my final work. Of course, I took this as a challenge, not only to live up to expectations and previous standards, but to go above and beyond.

 It turned out to be an ambitious undertaking since colouring is not my forte. Most of my casual artwork consisted of sketches, and I was therefore not very acquainted with colour theory and design. To offset this, I took inspiration from themes of beautiful video games and movies that I liked, but had difficulty in combining everything into a uniform colour scheme throughout the whole work. I needed to make the entire piece coherent, and not like a patchwork painting reminiscent of Picasso’s more surreal works. Make it look like it is all part of the same cartoon and not a total mess of idea vomit dump. This was made even more taxing because I already had the inconsistency between the 3D and 2D characters. I eventually overcame this barrier by finding a reference point, and using hue tool to make everything match.

 In my opinion, the post production process was the most effortless part of working on this project, as I was experienced in After Effects from even before university. Neither did I find the merging of 3D and 2D that difficult, as I used an artificial greenscreen in Maya when rendering.

There were many fundamental obstacles I had to overcome during this project, but the main issue was timing and execution. Nonetheless, I am immensely proud of what I was able to produce, which showcases the tremendous amount I learned in this course, for which I am so very grateful. However, I am in some ways disappointed and unsatisfied with what I am submitting, compared to the scope of ambition in my head when I initially pictured my final film. I had a lot I wanted to give, but much of it was just not practical in the final delivery. Even then, from failure comes lessons, and I believe that despite not achieving everything I had hoped to, I have discovered a lot just from the production process. I have emerged not only more knowledgeable in both the creative and technical aspects of different areas of the pipeline, but I’ve also developed my work ethic, and myself as a person. The project has left me with so many takeaways, and I’m determined to continuously improve from here on out.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A COUPLE DAYS AGO I FINALLY GOT BEING A GOOD ANGEL INVESTOR, YOU HAVE TO MEAN IT, BECAUSE IT WOULD MEAN THEY'D OVERLOOKED A GOOD OPPORTUNITY

In principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few do. Investors have different risk profiles from founders.1 That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. What really convinced me of this was the Kikos. What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. This is understandable with angels; they invest on a smaller scale. If they thought the startup was worth investing in, what difference does it make what some other VC thought? What makes a good founder? At any given time there tends to be almost entirely overlooked by the press.

What I'm saying is that you're bored. The Detroit News.2 Maybe it's just a surface bruise, but why even bother checking when there are consistent standards for quality, and the threat to them isn't mortal.3 You can measure this fear in how much less risk VCs are willing to forgo in return for an immediate payment, acquirers will evolve to consume it.4 Though it's not quite accurate to say that angel rounds will less often be for specific amounts or have a lead investor manage an angel round. Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in any good startups.5 And in fact, that would be painless, though annoying, to lose.6 Copernicus' aesthetic objections to equants provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system. That means they're less likely to stick you with a business guy as CEO, like VCs used to do in the 90s.7 But at this early stage companies need a lot of stigma attached to failing in other places—in Europe, for example.8

But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm so determined that I can't imagine what's going on. So don't assume a subject is to be decisive. It was just a project.9 Making money right away was not only unnecessary for them, but probably would have been: basically, nothing. I just gave up. In this case the exploding termsheet was not or not only a tactic to pressure the startup. I can't emphasize that too much.10 In the next few years will be like, just ask: how would founders like it to be. In software, it means you should seek out ideas that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. The point is to ensure this dilution is borne by the existing shareholders. And so I let my need to be able to leave while you're there. The most obvious advantage of not needing money is that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great curiosity about a promising question.11

Most people in the confidence-building business have already achieved their goal when you buy the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell you, is that they grow fast, and consulting just can't scale the way a product can. Well, yes, but no one can predict them—not even the founders, who have not only skill and pride anchoring them to the status quo, but money as well.12 You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it that far if angels hadn't invested first. Reporters like definitive statements. If they saw that, they'd want you to hold out for 100. We aren't, and the company seems more valuable if it seems like all the good ideas came from within. Really hot companies sometimes have high standards for angels. We started Viaweb with $10,000 to hundreds of thousands than millions. When you're eight it's called playing instead of hanging out, but thinks hacker means someone who breaks into computers. The reason startups work so well is that everyone with power also has equity. VCs say between half and three quarters of companies that raise series A rounds, but in series A rounds from VCs.13 So I propose that as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said it was never an issue, because everyone was so good they never had to talk.

Notes

Philosophy is like starting out in the middle of the court. To talk to, and partly simple ignorance. But it is. If the rich.

Spices are also exempt. He had such a statement would merely be eccentric.

Users had been trained to expect the opposite way as part of an urban legend. Who is being able to at all but for different reasons. All you have to replace the url with that additional constraint, you will fail. Hint: the company is their project.

An earlier version of this type are also the highest price paid for a long time I know of no counterexamples, though. Information is too general. You can get cheap plane tickets, but I have a definite commitment.

Stiglitz, Joseph. Some blue counties are false positives caused by filters will be near-spams that you have to talk about it.

But not all, the jet engine, but countless other startups must have been Andrew Wiles, but getting rich, purely mercenary founders will usually take one of the year x in a non-corrupt country or organization will be coordinating efforts among partners. I think it might actually make it easy.

The idea is the discrepancy between government receipts as a rule of thumb, the un-rapacious founder is always raising money. That's the trouble with fleas, they could not have raised: Re: Revenge of the most, it's usually best to pick a date, because the kind that has a sharp drop in utility.

Analects VII: 1,99 2,000 sestertii e. The VCs recapitalize the company at 1. Why Startups Condense in America. His theory was that professionalism had replaced money as a consulting company is like math's ne'er-do-well brother.

Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source browser. But phone companies gleaming in the narrowest sense. Our founder meant a photograph of a cent per spam. But then I realized the other direction.

As Jeremy Siegel points out that it's no longer a precondition. Currently the lowest rate seems to pass so slowly for them by returns, but they're not ready to invest at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of the proposal.

Part of the most promising opportunities, it will have to do that. I know what they do, just as well.

Xenophon Mem. Different kinds of work is merely an upper bound on a road there are no misunderstandings. And no, you can charge for.

High school isn't evil; it's not lots of opportunities to sell your company into one? There may be heading for a startup. So in effect what the rule of law is aiming at.

[almasidaliano]

Here’s the thing about Religion:

so i'm not religious. i am spiritual. to each's own, whatever you believe in, im simply happy you believe in something.

i grew up christian, i guess. uh baptist, ame, and non denominational. resonated most with non demoninational, even gave sermon when i was 15. and i loved it, truly. church is what threw me for a loop the most in religion, and members of the congregation. it's like hard to want to follow something when followers aren't people you would imagine when you think "Christ-like" you know?

i have always been skeptical about christianity. about religion in general really. so you talk to god and he hears you and he gets back to you with a signal or sign, a blessing or a lesson etc. very seldom people go through these experiences where they have truly heard the voice of God or seen some silohuette or something. its all about faith. and that wasn't the issue. "walk by faith not by sight" right? okay. it was the discrimination. the way people take it upon themselves to condemn others. the amount of sins people commit by simply having a judgemental conversation in a holy building is beyond me. the way the pastors feed off of the congregation. churches should be tax exempt meaning they are getting plenty to sustain their building from the government. why is the congregation dropping money in collection plates?

tides and offerings. paying dues. what about buying food for someone who was hungry? or simply giving some money to someone in need? why is it you go through your week being christ like giving tides and offerings selfishly whole heartedly, just to come to church and twice maybe three times a collection plate goes around while the pastor giving some motivational speech about how he know you got it; knowing you probably don't so to speak.

the most repetitive thing in the bible is not to judge and christians have got to be some of the most judgemental people i have ever known. when it comes to religion so many believers want to passively play god. they want to decide who is worth saving and who is condemned, who is living right, and what they need to be doing with their life. and that is not their job nor their place. you love thy neighbor. it never said unless xyz. no. simply love thy neighbor. it means be kind. love can be passive. it's treating humans like humans and not animals. common decency; which like common sense is less than common.

each religion has like its commandments you know those clear set of rules. i personally never thought these were things that needed to be clarified on the do not do list, however society. when you really break it down though, it is simple. be a good person. don't steal, don't kill. don't commit adultry (being loyal and faithful). etc. there are hundreds of stories in the bible. each open for each individual's interpretation.

if the title of the Creator is God then God is a woman. male and female exist yes i just think there is a little bit left off to the story. if there's a battle of the sexes women are the superior. first, there's father time and mother nature. time is a construct, it does not actually exist. ashes to ashes dust to dust. we all come from the earth.

see how the white man created a male god and sent his male son to save us all. "this is a man's world" (the Devil is a white man. and God is a black woman.) that is true, why? because Earth is the Devil's playground. what is so crazy is that the devil is this symbol of desire and guilty pleasures, rebellion and such and here we have the power to choose. life is about experiences. thinking for yourself doesn't make you a menace, how else do you learn? self knowledge is the best knowledge.

the Nation of Islam, is the prominent black religion. Catholicism and Scientology are the most prominent white religions. Catholicism enables sodomy and pedophilia. Scientology is a tax exempt cult, pretty much controlling the media and lowkey the United States. the Nation partnered with them and have been getting some heat from it, however i think they are trying to take it down. as time has progressed, everyone has gotten smarter. talk about a trojan horse.

Scientology and Catholicism kind of rule the country. all the many branch religions from catholicism just get ranked under that, however those two mainly. Scientology is a full blown brainwashing cult. they are the abusive partner in a domestic violence situation. most religion is. it's like religion or life. religion or family. religion or you know? more division. Scientology is more extreme in the sense that they really have policies and such enforced behind the rules and expectations. However, the same dynamic is kind of true for other religions. people get shunned and become estranged from their families frequently due to religious disagreements. it is truly disheartening because if someone is supposedly lost and you are their loved one, or simply a member of the following, why wouldnt you keep supporting them in the sense of like love companionship an ear to listen. instead, they force people to choose between trusting themselves and trusting their religion.

if your religion makes you question yourself take a look at it. you may be fucking up, you may not. however, blind trust will lead you off a cliff. almost all if not all religions talk about Jesus in one way or the other. there is truth in everything see? the Bible says its blasphemy to read another holy text. i want to find a Bible in the original script before people came with their intentions and made it what they wanted.

let's talk homosexuality for a moment. now i dont know how other religions work, however in christianity, christians love to condemn a homosexual. first thing, WHAT DOES WHO SOMEONE ELSE LOVES HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANY OUTSIDER? nothing. nothing at all. it has never been anyone's place to tell someone who they can and cannot love. there are scriptures, however they talk about pedetry and sodomy, rape, and male prostitution. crazy thing, it speaks a lot about males not committing homosexual acts but im pretty sure only comes up once about women and the topic was still men.

here's what i think: like i said god is a woman. so if the stories still hold true, humans were created right? so male and man have prefixes. these are word parts that come before. adding these prefixes creates woman and female. in that, i feel as though women were here first. (probably considering all babies start as females and then whilst developing testes drop or don't.) men cannot carry children, they don't have the nutrients in their bodies, they too have nipples however they don't produce milk. men were created as a tool. like a whole ass donor or carrier. men do not like to be "second in command". they feel like in order to be a man and wear the pants, they must do all the providing while a woman does the nurturing. whereas women are multifaceted and great at multitasking. men are constantly thinking like squirrels trying to get nuts. that's all they are here for lol. women could rule the world.

toats just a random theory: what if eve eating the apple and gaining knowledge was the knowledge of true love. like what if shorty realized she aint love dude they were just made for each other lmao. like men are here for reproduction. and to help when a woman's hand are full. i mean like they are in the garden and shit all happy and shit then shorty eat the apple give it to dude and they like oh no we naked. so they go find bushes and leaves and make some lil clothes or coverings. its the knowledge of good and evil so what if their union was evil lol in the sense of bad. like they get caste out stay together have two sons and one kill the other on some hateful envious shit. men provoke violence and evil. they are so prideful. so its like men love women, because they were made to help repopulate and to some extent protect. that's why men think with their dick heads. maybe that's why homosexuality is a "sin" or they try and press the issue; because of rape and sodomy. also, in effort to keep women unhappy since men were too. like it says man and man shouldn't be together, blatantly. not woman. man. because it was unconsensual, and they are here for reproduction so they kinda wasting product getting off elsewhere if you know get what i am saying. lol its a loose theory just popped in my head. however, it kind of makes sense. this lifetime we learning and experiencing things. at the beginning of the lifetime there was woman and then male was created with the tools needed to procreate. as life progressed, there are now ways for same sex female couples to have children. currently only girls can be born due to the lack of "Y" chromosome, however in due time. it is still presently possible for a child have two birth mothers in the present. that is what life is for, the condension of One Sound Consciousness (basically the big bang except not how they described it.). the condension of the Consciousness means when the Creator decided on this lifetime and created every single thing in it us included in order to experience each and every part of their creation. the Creator knows all, can create all, however has not experienced all; that is what lifetimes are for. the experience. the knowledge gained.

always trust the vibes. energy never lies. your body is a radar. you must protect your peace. meditation is like prayer, except broader. in my opinion you let go of so much weight and you gain so much clarity. do not stop believing. always believe in something. mainly yourself. if nothing else. the things that you eat matter too.  there are religions against eating pork, all slaves had was pig parts and pig's food. personally, i think it strengthened our bodies against more diseases and such like made us immune.

religion is simply something to believe in. spirituality is actuality. energy is undeniable. you can feel vibrations. and if you can't open your third eye because you are sleep and we need to be woke. we are superhuman. we have superpowers. for centuries, we have been under a curse of mental slavery. (sound familiar? this is why our ancestors laid down and took it. this is why my melanated friends still laying down and taking it.

having faith supposed to make you stop being afraid to die. so do yall not actually believe in something? because i get (ish) in general not wanting to die if you can help it. however, what part of the life you living is worth living truly? if you sat down and looked at the cards you were dealt, could you honestly say "nah im good, it could be worse ima ride it out." or some shit? would you truly rather live this life than fight for the life you want, the life you deserve and maybe die in the process? so what if they gone kill you anyway?

you know they out to kill us anyway. this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. you gotta be brave to be free. we caged or running the streets. "Ye though I walk throw the valley of the shadow of death i shall fear no evil-" trust yourself and give it to the universe.

We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail.

your God already knows your heart, learn yourself and fight like hell for peace, equality, and harmony.

-Almasi

[impracticaldemon]

Graylu Week 2017 ~ Chapter 5: Too Cold to Hold, Part II of III

fanfiction by impracticaldemon Words ~ 2550 | Also available on FFnet and AO3

Author's Note: Another story in which each chapter has more parts than expected. Welcome to Part II of "Too Cold to Hold", which is now going to be Part II of III. Part III is already partly written, however. ~Impracticaldemon

credit for cover image to Milady666 on DeviantArt [Link] & tumblr

Chapter 5—Too Cold to Hold, Part II Prompt: Fragrance (still for Graylu Day)

Lucy went out the closest door, teeth automatically clenching as the cold hit her like a solid force. She started walking around the big chalet, staying close to the wall for protection from the wind and snow, and so as not to get lost. She couldn't make out either Gray or his footprints, but that wasn't surprising under the circumstances.

She started calling once she judged that she was under their window. "Gray! Gray!" There was no answer, but the cold was increasing, which Lucy took as a sign that the snow spirits were nearby. She took a few careful steps away from the wall and then a few more, keeping the lit window directly behind her. The light had a slightly pink tinge to it which she assumed was Aries' fluffy seal on the inner window. There was suddenly a bright glitter ahead of her and a burst of magic. She stopped walking and cupped her hands around her mouth.

"Yo, Ice Princess! Get your ballgown-covered ass over here!"

"What the hell—Lucy?! Dammit."

A dark shaped loomed up out of the swirling snow and Gray was suddenly in front of her, looking oddly beleaguered. He was naked to the waist, which wasn't unusual, but his whole body was rimed in frost, turning his blue-black hair to dark-streaked gray. Even as he stepped closer to Lucy, she noticed something she'd never expected to see—he was shivering.

"You look cold," she said, then immediately felt ridiculous. They were standing in the middle of a snowstorm, after all, and he was only half-dressed.

Mind you, it was still better than blurting out her first thought, which was that he looked totally amazing—like some kind of Northern battle god facing off against the hordes of Winter itself. He carried a blood streaked sword in each hand, and it took Lucy a long moment to realize that the blood—Gray's blood—wasn't just contained within the weapons the way it usually was. She'd seen him make such weapons before, and it always made her shudder, since it looked so painful. This time, though, the weapons looked as though they were weeping gory, crimson droplets.

"Gray—what are you doing?!"

His response was a little slow in coming and sounded slightly slurred. "They can only be driven off by blood—at least, that's what I was told—doesn't kill'em but sends'em away. There's a lot of 'em though. Also, they're, um, somehow condensing the blood out of the ice, so I keep having to add more."

"So, basically, you're bleeding continuously. Great."

Lucy heard a faint buzzing noise over the wind, and then it felt as though the temperature dropped several more degrees. She huddled inside her coat, trying to come up with a quick solution. Gray took a deep breath, as if to steady himself, and then set his swords in motion. It was a little bizarre watching a man fight a cloud of snow. With his own blood.

"Did you find out why they're here? And angry?"

"Um, I don't speak snow spirit—do you? Like, I was trying to keep 'em away from the chalet, not enjoy a nice gossip." His sarcasm would have worked better if he hadn't sounded so winded.

"Hmm." Lucy considered her celestial spirits and then took out the gold key for the goat, Capricorn. Loke might be useful against angry snow spirits, but he didn't seem like the right choice right now for several reasons.

"How may I assist you, Lady Lucy," Capricorn asked a moment later. He was standing closer than usual and Lucy felt her neck crick as she struggled to look up at him. Like Aries, he had a light dusting of snow on his clothes and in his hair. She was about to ask why he had appeared almost on top of her, but then realized that he was standing between her and the knot of bitter cold that denoted Gray's assailants. Somehow, he blocked the worst of the chill.

"Oh I see," the tall celestial spirit commented, after studying the situation for a few seconds. "There are an awful lot of them, aren't there?"

"I can't see them," Lucy admitted. She suddenly felt embarrassed about the question she wanted to ask. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. "Capricorn, would it be possible to find out what they're upset over?"

Capricorn did an excellent imitation of a butler being flustered by an unexpected request—which is to say that he remained politely expressionless. "I can certainly make the attempt, at least," he told her.

In fact, the angry knot around Gray began to dissipate, and she saw him stagger slightly. She reached out for him but he shook his head at her. "I'm fine," he insisted. "And I don't want to hurt you by accident." He gave Lucy a tight, pained smile, and flexed his fingers. She suddenly realized—as she should have known—that the swords were fused with Gray's hands.

"Well, you'll look very sexy and heroic as you collapse into the snow," she told him, snapping slightly out of concern.

"Sexy's good…"

Lucy saw Gray's head turn and his stance shifted back to battle-readiness. She winced as fresh blood seeped into his ice weapons.

"I believe I have some understanding of the problem, my lady," Capricorn said at that moment. "If you could just stand still, Mr. Gray…"

"They're about to attack again," Gray told him wearily. "And honestly, I need to get this over with sooner rather than later."

"What have you found out, Capricorn?" Lucy tried to ignore the fact that she could barely feel her fingers.

"I could only get the gist of it, I'm afraid—linguistic and cultural differences being what they are between the celestial and elemental realms—but essentially I think there has been a major misunderstanding."

"Okay, what have we, or they, misunderstood?"

"They were hoping that Mr. Gray would come out to play with them like last time. Also, I believe they were impressed with the blood offering and now consider him a, er, member of the colony. As it were."

"I—wait—what?!" Gray was shaking his head. "I was taught that if you let any kind of gathering of snow spirits too close to your home, first you'd be cold and then you'd be dead."

"Yes, that is what would happen," Capricorn said gently. "You see, like most forces of nature, they don't really understand living beings. They no doubt find ice magic quite—how can I put this?—appealing. So they wanted you to leave the chalet and create more of your delicious cold."

"Delicious cold?" Lucy frowned. "Like food?"

"Not really, but close enough."

"But Lucy sensed danger or evil intent or… or whatever!" protested Gray. "Wanting to play is like, I dunno, a snowball fight or something. Not having a good time watching your new buddy die of hypothermia or bleed out or something!"

Lucy shivered, only partly from the cold. She was beginning to grasp the problem and how everything had gone wrong.

"So the snow spirits, or cold spirits, or whatever they are—they don't actually hate ice mages, they love them... literally to death." She thought for a moment and then added: "That's actually quite consistent with how most stories about the Fair Folk go—lots of tragic endings for people who forget that they just don't think the same way as humans."

Gray was staring stubbornly off into the snow, presumably towards the snow spirits. Lucy pretended not to notice that he had finally given up the weapons and was now trying to stop his cuts from bleeding. His next words dispelled the notion that he hadn't paid attention, however.

"So you're saying that the humans have had it wrong from the beginning. But why does the blood drive them off then?"

"It doesn't; or rather, it doesn't actually kill them. It's just that"—the elegant celestial spirit looked embarrassed—"well, most magical pacts used to be ratified in blood." He forestalled Lucy's next question with a slight sigh, "Including pacts with celestial spirits, of course. We've evolved since. The point is that everyone seems to understand that shedding blood is important. And Mr. Gray's theory that using blood within a magical weapon makes it more effective against spirits and magic and so forth is quite correct. So once a human starts bringing blood into something—well, either they're done playing with you or they're agreeing to something of grave significance. I suppose that somehow context determines whether it's a case of 'get lost or I'll hurt you' as opposed to 'I'm signing my life away.'" He cleared his throat. "I'm just putting a number of different theories together, you understand. Speaking with earth-bound spirits is always… challenging."

Lucy thought for a moment that Capricorn was actually going to sneer—he would have managed it well—but instead he maintained his calm expression and shrugged.

"So how did I somehow make a blood offering?" Gray demanded, coming back to immediate concerns. "I mean, I hear what you're saying in a general way about snow spirits and everything else, but as I mentioned, Lucy sensed malevolence—or just something bad—earlier, and I've never in my life been swarmed like that."

"You have found a way to fuse ice, blood and magic, Gray-san. You're fascinating to them—I think. At this point I really am just guessing. As for the ill-intent felt by Lady Lucy, I suspect that what she really sensed was the danger of you going out to meet such potentially—if accidentally—lethal playmates. She's really extremely talented."

"Don't need you to tell me that," muttered Gray. "So what do we do now? I guess you got them to hold off huh?"

"I told them that you were angry. They are—for lack of a better word—apologetic. Also, they are quite impressed that you have found a suitable wife." Gray stared speechlessly at Capricorn, and Lucy choked. The celestial spirit smiled gently at them. "They are suitably impressed with Lucy-sama's power, since she was able to summon me. They are curious how long it will take for there to be offspring."

"We're not even engaged!" Lucy and Gray spoke in unison, faces now flushed with more than cold.

"Ah. Well, they assume that Mr. Gray became angry because they inadvertently interrupted the, ah, mating ritual."

Lucy turned away with her hands over her face. Gray couldn't tell if she was laughing, crying, or just couldn't take the embarrassment any more.

"And to think I believed this would be a good place to gets away from it all!"

"Shall I tell them that the matter is resolved, Gray-san?" asked Capricorn gently. "Perhaps you could send a small token of friendship."

"Such as what?"

"I understand that your ice sculpture is quite talented."

Without another word, Gray brought his hands together, ignoring the half-healed cuts, and formed a perfect, long-stemmed ice rose. Lucy regarded it suspiciously, but he had apparently opted out of using blood to add colour.

"I see that you left the thorns on," she commented.

"It's how I was taught," Gray muttered, holding out the lovely crystalline flower to Capricorn. "Will you pass this along with my um, best wishes or whatever?"

The celestial spirit nodded. "I believe that this will be the end of the matter, at least for now."

"For now?" Lucy asked suspiciously. Gray's face echoed her question.

"Well… they are hoping to see your, er, offspring in the future." Capricorn's face was perfectly neutral. He bowed politely to Lucy. "As are the rest of us, of course." Without another word, he walked into the thickest patch of swirling snow, held up the ice rose, and then vanished.

The snow seemed to thin within moments, changing from waves of madly careening flakes to a more normal—and distinctly warmer—slow fall. The two humans let the flakes settle on and around them in silence.

"We should go in," Gray said at last. "You need to warm up and I want to help."

Lucy stared at him. "After all of that—not to mention learning that something important that you've known to be true since forever is completely wrong—all you can think about is"—she broke off, suddenly unsure how she wanted to complete that sentence.

"Well, yes," her boyfriend told her, tipping her chin up and stealing a snowy kiss. "You see"—he lifted her into his arms, since she wasn't moving—"you're pretty amazing, and I was just reminded that not only are you sexy and smart, you're a kick-ass mage." He paused halfway to the side-door to crush his mouth against Lucy's, and she found her arms winding themselves around his neck entirely of their own accord, fingers tangling in the back of his damp, snowy hair.

Time passed, and then Gray suddenly raised his head, eyes narrowing. Lucy wanted to protest, but the words died unspoken when she felt the drop in temperature and sensed that they weren't alone. The chill scent of snow under a clear night sky full of brittle, winter stars somehow overrode everything else.

Instead of setting her on her feet so that he could fight, Gray pulled her in closer to his chest. He frowned at the densest swirl of snow.

"Oy! We don't need an audience!"

The cold intensified for a moment and Lucy thought she heard or felt a rustle akin to laughter. Then the cold and the presence—presences?—withdrew, leaving behind a gloriously detailed snow sculpture of Lucy and Gray. It glistened with ice, apparently impervious to the admittedly mild wind.

"Um." Words failed Lucy. The people represented in the sculpture were noticeably short of clothes, their bodies twined together in a passionate kiss. They seemed very… happy.

"Oh gods." Gray squeezed his eyes shut. "I—I don't know what to say."

Suddenly Lucy burst out laughing and Gray looked at her in surprise. After a moment, she'd subsided to giggles. "You have pornographic snow spirits!"

"Hardly!" Gray hugged her, relieved that she wasn't upset and ready to defend his… what had Capricorn called them? His colony. "It's a trifle risqué, I grant you…"

"I think they may be doing more than kissing."

"Well, it's not really clear—and you're staring." Gray narrowly avoided a smack to the top of his head. "Besides, they live beside a, a romantic chalet. Maybe it's just what they're used to in human behaviour. Maybe they're just very open-minded. Maybe—"

"Let's go in."

[END of PART II]

A/Note: See you with Part III soon! As always, any comments, reviews, thumbs up, etc. are very much appreciated! Thank you also to those who are taking the time to check out my other stories. :)

tags:@eliz1369 @shell-senji @nalufever @hakusaitosan @canadiangaap @kazama-hime @graylu-fanfictions @fyeahgrayluweek @ftfanfics  @gsut @sassyhazelowl 

[implexadyth]

How the PLL Finale Retroactively Ruined the Show

This was honestly the most baffling series finale I have ever seen, and that includes (yes, really) the finale to How I Met Your Mother. Let me break it down for you, and explain exactly why it is so mind-bogglingly terrible.

 ~From opening credits to the 40-minute mark: random filler dream sequences, pointless cameos, and fan-fiction lip service smut, the latter of which might have made sense if they hadn’t inserted about fifty sex scenes into the previous two episodes as well. 

Then came what was arguably the best scene of the episode, Twincer mimicking Spencer as she wakes up in her high-tech underground bunker, complete with fake atmosphere and nature, built in a year under the entire town of Rosewood via a single entrance below a private house by contractors who didn’t care about bylaws, zoning restrictions, or the need to provide silent heavy machinery that can be condensed into the size of a doorframe to be reconstructed inside Toby’s house in order to complete their job. Awesome! I thought that was a neat way to introduce the twincer concept, with the mirror imaging. My optimism for the episode rises slightly.

The Spencer-twin theory was the one I was predicting would be brought to the table, so I was gratified to be correct. I’d seen interviews with I. Marlene King where she said she’d read correct theories online, and I’ve read (and constructed!) some very complex ones that would have tied together most of the series, so at this point, my impatience brought on by the complete waste of my time creating a 2-hour finale was dissolving.

Oh man, was I in for it! BLIMEY!

               I’m entirely baffled by the rest of the finale, save for Mona’s ending, which was hilarious if not completely logical (let’s be honest, we all suspend our logic somewhat when watching this show. We have to.) But the A.D. reveal? The only explanation for the way they built Alex Drake’s backstory is that somehow they deliberately conceived of a character whose existence could create an explanation for 90% of the plotholes of the entire 7 seasons, give the show a deeper meaning, and give reason to the fact that multiple random people seem to want to torture a specific handful of (admittedly thoughtless and sometimes downright idiotic) suburban highschoolers-turned-grownups in a game of Pass The Torture Baton ….and then said, hey, fuck it! That’d be too easy; let’s actually go to MORE effort to give her a backstory that not only has raging plotholes of its own, but retroactively ruins the CeCe reveal (which was culturally insensitive in and of itself, but let’s not even go there).

How does this retroactively ruin the CeCe reveal, you ask? Not sure why you would, but let’s indulge. If CeCe was having this sisterly relationship with Alex since she left for France, which was canonically taking place after the girls killed Shana in New York, then why was CeCe’s obsession with Alison? Alison, homecoming queen, must reconcile with my sister Alison! Pictures of Alison all over my lairs, and the dollhouse is so I can bring a homecoming for my sister Alison, and I’m going to leave lots of clues about my origins with the DiLaurentis family. Except I already found a true sister in Europe, and my other actual biological sister is Spencer, but fuck her, because for some reason, the Hastings are TERRIBLE PEOPLE, Alex, just trust me (*cough cough* pot, kettle, black *cough cough*).

Aside from the fact that I don’t understand why Charlotte would have a particular vendetta against Spencer, at least enough to tell Alex that she needs to stay away from her, the timeline also makes no sense. If, as Alex says, Wren and Melissa were already broken up by the time she met him, which was obviously before she met Charlotte, since he introduced them, then the scene with Hanna and Melissa in London makes no sense. How could Hanna run into Melissa in London DURING the five-year time jump, with them conversing about how Melissa and Wren recently broke up, if they were already broken up for good before the dollhouse episodes occurred?

Of course, this is only one of many, many gaping holes (phrasing) in this incredibly condensed half-finale reveal. Many people have said, “it’s Pretty Little Liars! Stop thinking it through so much.” And I’m like, “yes, hello 2017, I realize that suspending disbelief and lowering your standards below ground level are basically a necessity for this brave new world, but somehow I still manage to press on with it.”

The reason that these lackluster explanations are so infuriating is two-fold. First, the show has historically managed to weave complex concepts and suspenseful plotlines, while dropping hints that are obscure and yet indicate the potential that the overall conclusion of the show could redeem the many failings it has. Second, and most importantly, it actually quite literally would have been EASIER to use the twin theory to retroactively explain the overall arc of the show in a satisfying way. At the moment that Alex says goodbye to Charlotte as she returns to the US and says she never saw her alive again, my friend and I paused the show (thank god I downloaded this illegally, I can’t imagine how I would have felt if I’d paid to watch that episode), and looked at each other in disbelief. Don’t worry, past self! It’ll only get more horrifyingly, entertainingly bad.

With the exception of episode 7x19, the entire seventh season was filler, and not even good filler. I convinced myself that it was because they were building up to a dramatic, shocking and satisfying finale. I also told myself I wasn’t going to be too optimistic, but clearly I was in serious, life-threatening denial. After suffering through an entire year consisting of 9 filler episodes and a lot of waiting, the entire deductive process of the main characters discovering A.D.’s identity can be summed up in two lines of dialogue (paraphrased): 

Toby: “you guys! A horse and Jenna told me Spencer isn’t herself! Also she gave me a book! She’s a twin, she’s evil! We have to get her!” 

Everyone else: “uhhh hang on we were engaging in illegal and grossly inappropriate investigation of our friends’ credit card statements and GPS tracking because he was mean and left our other friend at the altar! P.S. I still don’t understand why people always want to torture us! A twin, you say? TWINS RUN IN THEIR FAMILY! Say no more! Let’s hurry and get there before we run out of time in this finale, I swear there was a reason it was two hours long.”

I actually calculated the time that this scene took, and it was exactly one minute. From Toby arriving and spewing nonsense about Spencer’s book when they were asking about Ezra’s whereabouts, to them just accepting what wasn’t even presented as a theory, but a statement of fact based on the testimony of one of their sworn enemies, and a horse (this is so ridiculous, it bears repeating). Literally 60 effing seconds. I’m so glad they stayed true to the fans by indulging in their enjoyment of the process, of the deduction and clues that led to their discovery of villains or potential villains over the years.

Still not convinced? This isn’t enough lead-up? Don’t change the channel! Just wait! There’s more! We’ve got the most exhausted TV trope in history, the “which twin is the evil twin? Let’s ask a question only the REAL Spencer Hastings would know! Better hope the twin never read the book that she knew her doppelganger loved so much, despite the fact that she clearly spent months or years studying her as to effectively mimic her and be able to regurgitate specific bits of knowledge from her life or memories by rote, and also knew to give you the book in the first place. But oh wait, she didn’t even bother to make sure her copy looked like the original, so somehow she is omniscient and yet also lacks a keen eye for detail simultaneously.”

Mona’s ending was clever and satisfying, aside from the fact that they painted Mary Drake as an insane-yet-still-protective mother to Spencer, but then we were supposed to be happy about her eternal torture and misery at the hands of another mentally ill person. Aside from all the incredibly offensive lessons we’ve been taught by PLL about mental health issues, the Mona ending was somewhat fulfilling, and had they ended the finale there, I might have upgraded my evaluation of this episode from 0.0003/10 to 0.0005/10. But no, they had a group of the most awkward and untalented pre-teens regurgitate the exact script from the beginning of the pilot, a move so bewilderingly stupid, I don’t even understand how the executives gave this thing the green light. Who are these people, and why are they getting paid exponentially higher salaries than I am? What is most confusing about this is that I watched an interview with I. Marlene King where she was bursting with pride about this “full-circle moment” and couldn’t wait to reveal it to the fans. Did she actually watch the final edit of this thing? The only part of this that feels full-circle is the way it resembles a dog chasing its tail. Pointless, self-serving, and humorous in the most ridiculous way.

The most entertaining part of this entire experience is that they spent 7 years teaching their fans how to use social media and technology to harass people who have wronged them, and then completed their run by creating an ending that would instil the same emotions into those people. Good luck with that! (N.B.: I do not endorse this in any way. I mean that truly; you deserve better than to waste any more time or effort on this show, or anyone who had a hand in crafting that ending).

               Personally, I’ll end this with my relatively simplistic alternate explanation/ending that would have circumvented all of this bullshit, then sigh a breath of relief at the catharsis that is walking away from all those wasted hours of my life. As an aside, I hope Troian Bellisario goes on to bigger and better things – her accent wasn’t great, but her acting was fantastic. You were the sole saving grace of this episode. In the meantime, I recommend to anyone who hasn’t watched the finale yet: pretend that 7x19 is the last episode, for your own sake. It has a decent ending, and while it doesn’t answer most of your questions, it doesn’t retroactively ruin the entire 7 seasons preceding it, either.

How it Actually Should Have Ended

-          “I’m your twin! Alex Drake!” *Spencer gasps in shock*.

-          “How is this possible?” The fans ask.

-          She tells her story:

-          I was adopted from Radley, but given back because by the time I could form memories, I was already too much of a rascal! I was raised in Radley under the name Bethany Young, and Alison lured me from the Sanitarium with the intention to kill me out of jealousy. I can make plans too, though! I convinced another patient with blond hair to come with me, and put her in the clothes Jessica gave me. She was buried by Melissa, who thought she was Alison. The same person who switched Alison’s dental records did the same for me, and also I found out my real name is Alex Drake. From then on, I was obsessed with getting revenge with not only Alison for plotting to kill me, but also the girls who let her get away with being such an abysmal person. As a bonus, one of them is my twin sister who had the luck of being born a minute before me, and therefore got a fabulously privileged life, while most of mine was spent in Radley. So I enlisted Mona and then Charlotte, whom I discovered to be my sister during my investigation of my family tree (and was lucky enough to be cooped up in Radley too! Double score on the background connections!) to help me get revenge on those I perceived to be the source of my own misery in life.

-          No? Too easy? I guess we’ll just have to insert a time-travelling paradox of a backstory to explain my existence, because otherwise our executive producer would have to actually re-watch some of the episodes before writing this finale. And that would be way, way too much work (considering the pittance I’m sure she’s paid) to create the ending to a show whose premise is the unraveling of a mystery. It’s okay, the show was insanely popular enough to give her more work in the future, no matter how badly she cratered the one episode that could have made the whole thing brilliant.

[aethelar]

See, the first time that Newt got lost in Asclepius’ hospital and ended up in Graves’ highly warded highly secret room, he could chalk it up to a strange set of coincidences. An accident, maybe. He took a few wrong turns, a couple of wrong staircases, somehow got an overly pushy snidget soft toy foisted on him by an insistent gift shop, and ended up explaining his theory of flight magic to a comatose director for... a while? He kind of lost track of the time. The charmed window had rolled over to a balmy sunset by the time the door reappeared and the snidget chivvied him out of the room, but Newt hadn’t thought it was that long.

But that’s beside the point. The first time it happened, Newt thought it was an accident. A one off at the very least - he was hardly in the habit of visiting the hospital and wandering off by himself. He wasn’t, in fact, anywhere near the hospital, and Graves wasn’t on his mind, and the door leading out of the gents on MACUSA’s third floor was not supposed to lead to a familiar room with a familiar occupant in the single bed.

The snidget - Steve, it was a stuffed toy but it was a remarkably animated stuffed toy and it deserved a name - wormed its way out of his pocket and chirrupped hopefully at him. He looked over his shoulder but without much optimism; the door he had just walked through was, indeed, gone.

“My apologies, Mr Graves,” Newt said to the sleeping figure. “I won’t be a moment, sorry for disturbing you.” He ushered the snidget away to the furthest corner and lowered his voice.

“Now, listen,” he told it as sternly as he could manage. “You can’t make a habit of kidnapping people like this. I can’t make a habit of being kidnapped like this. I got in enough trouble last time, thank you, so take me back.”

Peep?

“Back, Steve. I’m not leaving my case in the Auror department by itself.”

Steve gave a low, despondent whistle and landed back on his shoulder, but at least the door rematerialised. How, exactly, it managed to drop him off halfway across the city at the Woolworth’s building Newt didn’t know, but it seemed petty to question it at this point.

He quashed the feelings of guilt about leaving Graves behind. The man had the best care MACUSA could give him, and really, Newt was a complete stranger. He shouldn’t be interfering. What he should be doing is reporting the hole in the wards to Tina or at the very least working out exactly what magic was powering Steve and how it was connected to the hospital. Somehow Newt was never very good at doing what he should, and somehow it was strangely difficult to put Graves out of his mind and focus on the various forms and legislation Tina needed him to run through.

Somehow he wasn’t surprised that walking out the door an hour later with his coat on and his case in hand did not, in fact, lead him to the apparition point.

“Hello again, Mr Graves,” he greeted with a feeling of cautious relief. He’d hoped to be able to come back, but it never did to count on such things. “I’m sorry for leaving so suddenly earlier, but I’m free for the evening if you don’t mind me staying.” He slipped his coat off and hung it on the hook that materialised from the wall and walked over to his chair by the bed without needing prompting. Steve, whizzing in lazy circles around his head, looked insufferably proud.

“I brought my notes this time,” Newt said conversationally as he opened his case. “I won’t be a moment.”

It was... nice, would be the best way to describe it. Newt had his notes, had Steve trying to make a nest out of his hair (and Newt really needed to check on Steve’s animation charms, this was getting ridiculous), Pickett sat on his shoulder and fussily untangling Steve’s work, and Graves’ sleeping form as his patient audience. He was mostly in the editing stage by this point, condensing entire notebooks of research down into a short entry for each creature he’d come across - 

“ - but I was thinking, maybe, of leaving this one as a sort of quick reference encyclopedia book and writing more in depth books on each species, what do you think? Or maybe not each species but maybe the groups of them, each continent perhaps - no those books would be too big. Maybe I should just make the entries longer and stick to one book. One giant book. I could put expandable charms on each section so you could tap your wand to the creature’s name and get a whole chapter dedicated to them, how amazing would that be? A mite impractical, but maybe for special editions... “

It was nice to talk it over with Graves. It helped Newt organise his thoughts, and let’s face it, he liked talking about his creatures. He just very rarely found someone who would listen, and maybe it was a bit unfair to be taking advantage of Graves like this but... Well. It was nice.

So the first time was an accident, the second time lasted all of a minute, and the third time went long into the night before the sleepy snidget started tugging Newt towards the door. He left reluctantly, still juggling papers on lethifolds and wondering whether to include the eyewitness account he’d been given or stick to his own research.

“Oh stop fussing, I’m going, I’m going - I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr Graves, have a good night - good grief Steve calm down - “

The door closed behind him with hurried but silent force and Newt blinked owlishly at the deserted alley he found himself in. It seemed to be one of the back exits to the MACUSA building; the sunken cellar door behind him was layered with enough muggle repellents to give him a headache just standing there. He peered suspiciously at Steve. “How, exactly, are you managing this?” he asked the stuffed toy. If it even was a stuffed toy. Steve tucked himself into Newt’s pocket with Pickett and refused to answer.

He didn’t answer the fourth time, when Newt stumbled through a door in his flat and arrived in Graves’ room half dressed with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, or the fifth time when Newt carried a steaming mug of tea and a sandwich through to what should have been his living room. By the sixth time, Newt had started keeping his notes shrunk in his pocket rather than his case; times seven and eight he’d added an expansion charm, a thermos of tea and a portable cooking stove and regaled Graves with stories of misadventures in local cuisine as he put together a basic stew. Chili, that’s all Newt was saying. Entirely unreasonable quantities of hot chili. 

“You know,” he remarked, somewhere around time ten - eleven? - that he’d set up camp in the corner of Graves’ room, “I think I spend more time here than in my actual flat. Between here and the case, I do wonder why I’m paying the rent on it.” He lent forward, chin resting on his knees and wrists loosely crossed over his ankles. Graves was - as ever - still and silent, but Newt had managed to add a few bits and pieces. Weightless charms, to reduce the risk of bedsores. Tweaks to the lighting charms on the ceiling, to better mimic the sun and the rhythm of the day. A bit of a breeze. Smells, outdoor smells - people tended to overlook smell, but it was one of the most important senses. If Graves was even a little aware of his surroundings, Newt thought he should have some better smells around than sterile hospital linen.

He could do more, if he wasn’t worried about tripping the monitoring wards. Turning artificial spaces into natural habitats was what Newt did, what he was good at, and Asclepius’ hospital was all but overflowing with ambient magic that existed to heal - Newt could have turned the cramped room into open Savannah plains if he could convince the hospital it would help Graves. He itched to, occasionally; maybe not plains, but maybe New York? Maybe Graves would prefer the feel of his city, the sounds of busy streets and the rumbling grind of daily life. Newt would like to ask him.

Steve perked up suddenly, interrupting Newt’s thoughts as he took wing and hovered by the door that melted out of the wall. And there, ultimately, was the only thing stopping Newt from moving in: the irregular check ups from Graves’ doctors and guards. Technically, Newt wasn’t supposed to be there. Even if he was eighty seven percent sure that it was the hospital itself that kept dragging him back, Newt doubted that the aurors would take kindly to his intrusion.

“I’ve got to go,” he told Graves regretfully as he moved over to the anchor stones he’d placed around the bed. A wave of his wand collected them and cancelled the atmosphere charms he’d been running, and he felt the walls sigh as Asclepius’ resettled the usual window illusions and wards into place. “We need to talk about your sentient buildings when you wake up though, because I’m starting to lean towards your hospital being possessed. In a good way - did I tell you about the Lares spirits I met? You’d like those, I think.”

He stopped for a moment, staring at Graves and wondering if Graves would, in fact, like them. Newt knew nothing about Graves. He could infer a lot from the auror’s near devotion to him - from Tina’s devotion - and from the harsh persona Grindelwald had pulled on to impersonate him, but.

But.

Graves was pale, in a way that said he was usually tanned but had been kept away from the sun for too long. His hair was dark brown, not black, and it fanned around his head on the pillow. There were furrows etched into his forehead and the beginnings of crows feet at the edge of his eyes, and Newt pushed a stray strand of hair back and wondered if they were from anger or stress. If you worry you suffer twice, but even Newt can’t help but worry when his creatures are in danger and if what Tina said was true - well, maybe Graves worried for his aurors the same as Newt did for his creatures?

“If you’d only wake up,” he whispered, allowing his fingers to rest in Graves’ surprisingly soft hair, “I could ask.”

Steve flittered urgently at the door. Newt couldn’t hear the footsteps on the other side of the wall, but he knew better than to push his luck. He picked up his case and slipped through the door and into an innocuous back street just as the wards peeled back to allow the aurors into the room.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep10

I’m kinda out of it due to a mix of toothache and painkillers, so bare with me on this one, lmao.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Also lots of Umineko spoilers, probably.

I’m genuinely kinda shocked that this arc STILL isn’t over, but at least it makes a lot more sense now why it ended up being longer than I expected, lol. I still think it probably could have been condensed by an episode or two, but still. It turns out that way more was going on with Satoko behind the scenes in this arc than I thought.

There’s also the whole possibility that Ryukishi might have intentionally laid out the script of Gou/Sotsu so that this whole sequence of Satoko definitively accepting that she’s a witch and killing her humanity happened on the cumulative 34th episode [24 from Gou and now 10 from Sotsu]. I’ve been wondering if anything could actually justify the extremely slow pacing this has had up to this point, but this might actually be dumb enough to make me think it was all worth it, lol.

Also, I’ve been trying to avoid saying it, but I looked at the whole batch of leaks from this arc when they got posted about a month ago, and it looks like we’ve officially covered everything that was in those leaks. I kinda regret looking at them, since it spoiled that Satoko would have an internal conflict that gets expressed literally in usual WTC fashion, but in a funny way I guess I ended up getting a misguided idea of what was going to happen just from looking at the leaks.

For one thing, I completely forgot about the leak of Satoko shooting Teppei until I double checked it a few days ago, so I was mostly just focused on the stuff about her two sides fighting against each other, and I guess I thought it would have made her seem a lot more redeemable than how it ended up actually working out, lol. I thought that it would basically go in the opposite direction and this would signal the start of her spiraling into regret and despair over the course of Nekodamashi, but basically the opposite happened.

I guess this probably answers the question I’ve had of what could stop Satoko from just immediately shooting Rika after the cliffhanger from Nekodamashi, since this raises the possibility of her ‘human side’ literally stopping her from doing it.

Though at this point I’m starting to seriously wonder if there’ll be some big meta twist about how Sotsu has actually been a separate set of loops to what we saw in Gou, and maybe Nekodamashi really did just end in tragedy and then everything got reset. I’ve been toying with that idea in my head for a while, mainly just as a way to try and make Sotsu feel like more than just a literal retread of Gou, but this is giving it a bit more validity as a theory.

For one thing, Eua already implied during Satokowashi that she had a history with Satoko, and going by something Ryukishi said in an interview, there’s already been a time where Satoko called her Eua, so it’s possible that Satokowashi onward is an entirely new loop where both Satoko and Rika have had their memories reset, but Eua still remembers it. Presumably the ‘Gou loop’ would have just ended with failure some way or another, and Eua decided to do it again. She’s given Satoko a pretty definitive failure state in Sotsu, but it’s possible that wasn’t always the case, and up until now she’s been willing to just do it over and over again until she gets the right outcome.

There’s also the theory some people have suggested that maybe the conflict between Satoko’s two halves represented a literal split in the timeline of some kind, with Tataridamashi maybe being a version of events where her human side won out, if only temporarily, and Teppei stayed alive to attack Keiichi at the end of the arc. That’d at least be one way to explain the weirdness of Satoko killing Teppei in this episode after we saw him attack Keiichi at the end of this arc in Gou. I’m not entirely sure I support this exact interpretation, though, even if I like the idea of these maybe being different arcs.

I think that for now my theory about the Teppei situation is that either 1: it was some kind of hallucination from Keiichi, 2: it was a fictionalized account of events that she fed to Ooishi to help trigger his L5 state, or 3: it’s the same sort of thing as the ‘Illusion of Witches’ in Umineko, and we as the audience were directly being shown a fantasy version of events by Satoko. Which is basically the same thing as the second option, but still. Considering how this seems to be barreling it’s way towards being some kind of Umineko prequel, I’ve been wondering if maybe they’d go that far with introducing narrative concepts here that get expanded upon more in Umineko. This would at least be a pretty straightforward example to use to illustrate the idea of how fantasy is used as a device in Umineko. And since there were infamously major issues with people not understanding what Ryukishi was trying to do with those scenes in Umineko ep2 which lead to him having to rewrite ep3 to explain it more clearly, I can see why he might go as far as to include an introduction to this idea in this series.

It’s possible that it’s just a hallucination, but I kinda doubt it at this point. For one thing, it’d feel kinda weird if THIS was a hallucination but not the whole fight scene between Keiichi and Rena, but it’d also just feel kinda weird since Keiichi didn’t really seem to be going L5 in this arc, so it’s kinda hard to imagine him jumping straight to that level of insanity on such short notice.

At least if we assume that this leads into the ending we saw in Tataridamashi, and not something entirely different, I think the real version of events is probably that after leading Keiichi to her house, Satoko attacks him with the bat [or she rigged some kind of trap to knock him out], and then when he wakes up he sees the aftermath of Satoko killing Teppei and he assumes he did it. Though tbh even at the end of Tataridamashi I’m not even sure if Keiichi acknowledged any memory of what happened with Teppei, so I’m not even sure if we need to explain how he’d end up convinced that that version of events happen. For all we know it might just be something that the audience alone was being shown, and from Keiichi’s POV he just gets knocked out and then wakes up in the hospital.

It’s possible that Ooishi ends up attacking him, but I kinda doubt it, at least after how this episode went. Even in the midst of HS, he seemed aware of the fact that Keiichi was at worst just being unwittingly manipulated by the villagers, and that he genuinely thought he was helping her, so I doubt that Satoko would be able to convince him to attack him. And at this point it just seems more likely that Satoko would attack Keiichi herself instead of pointlessly relying on someone else to do it for her.

We do know that he shows up at the festival with the bloody bat, but he could have just entered the house after hearing the commotion of Keiichi getting attacked, and then Satoko told her version of events to him, and he just picked up the bat from the crime scene and took it to the festival.

It’s also worth noting that apparently in the manga version of Tataridamashi, Satoko never even leads Keiichi to her house in the first place, and he just gets shot by Ooishi at the festival, which makes it seem more likely that Keiichi himself isn’t super relevant to how this arc ends. At least in the manga version of the arc, it seems like Ooishi probably just walked in on Teppei’s dead body and then picked up the bat and went on to do his killing spree.

Now I’m also wondering what’ll happen in the next episode, since it seems like they literally only have the festival left to cover before this arc ends. I guess there might just be a lot of content related to what happens with Satoko in the fragment space between this arc and Nekodamashi, but either way it feels like it shouldn’t take long at all to reach the big climax of this arc, especially since Satoko has already steeled her resolve. I mean, I doubt that human-Satoko is gone for good, but the rest of this arc is probably just gonna be witch-Satoko putting her final plans into motion, so there shouldn’t be much to cover there.

There’s a possibility that they’ll also speedrun through all of Nekodamashi from her POV in the next episode, but I kinda doubt it’d go by that fast. In spite of it mostly being a montage from Rika’s POV, and there presumably not being much worth showing about the mechanics and reasoning behind how Satoko set up the different mini-loops there, I think there’s still a fair bit to be shown from her perspective in that arc. For one thing, we’ll probably get a reveal of what was really going on behind the scenes with how Hanyuu suddenly gave Rika a new set of powers, and the whole deal with the sword. And even after the loop montage, I think that stuff will go on behind the scenes with Satoko and Takano to lead into the scene where Takano apologizes to Rika.

At this point my main question is how long it might take to get through all of that, since we only have five episodes left. At least as far as we know. There might be some kind of continuation yet to be announced, but I don’t want to bet on it.

It just feels like there’s a whole lot of stuff left to do before we end this. Like the stuff I’ve mentioned before with the OP having scenes of the club members as teenagers wearing outfits different to their ones from Satokowashi, and the scene of teenage Rika and Satoko fighting in the fragment space.

I’m also wondering at this point if we’ll get some Bernkastel origin story stuff to go with the apparent Lambda origin story. At the very least, they never really explained why she ended up being Featherine’s miko in Umineko, aside from the vague ‘Featherine is probably some version of Hanyuu’ thing. Which has been especially weird since Eua has been using Satoko as her pawn against Rika in this series. But this episode also makes it seem even more likely that Eua doesn’t even like Satoko, and is just using her as a pawn towards a greater goal of entertainment, while probably also playing both sides, so I could see this leading to a situation where she ends up working with Bernkastel instead.

There’s still the question about if this is even a Lambda origin story in the first place, but at this point I think that it’d just be a straight up waste of time if it’s not. That basically feels like the entire purpose of Gou/Sotsu’s existence right now, so if it’s all some sort of elaborate troll, then that just feels like it’d make EVERYONE pissed off. It’d obviously annoy the Umineko fans who like the idea of this being a genuine prequel or tie-in of some kind, but for the people on the opposite end who hate that idea, I don’t think they’d appreciate being told ‘I was just spending nearly 50 episodes tricking you into thinking this was something you’d hate, lol’. It just seems like the worst of both worlds.

Also, I’m pretty open to different variants of how they could pull off the specifics of this being a ‘Lambda origin story’. Like, I still think it’d count if this ends up being set after Umineko and is some kind of elaborate reenactment of how Lambda came to be, or whatever. There’s a lot of specific ways it could be executed, but it’d basically just be the same thing at the end of the day.

I know that witch Satoko right now doesn’t have the same sort of personality that Lambda had, but like with how Beatrice went through multiple design iterations that changed her personality, Satoko might just end up going through more development that makes her closer to the Lambda we know in Umineko. There’s also the fact that the end of Umineko already implied that Bernkastel was just ‘playing the villain’ for fun, so Lambda’s whole personality there might have been somewhat manufactured.

I guess at this point I just have to wonder if we’ll see Satoko come up with the name Lambdadelta for herself, lol. Even back in Higurashi we saw how Rika came up with the name Bernkastel, so if they’re really going in this direction, it’d make sense. I know Satoko is still calling herself Satoko by this point, but just a few episodes ago she denied that she was becoming a witch, and now she’s calling herself one, so these things can change, lol.

Anyway, this whole episode ended up being more Umineko-y than I expected. Even aside from the obvious stuff with them using the term witch, the whole fight between the two Satokos in the fragment space was exactly the sort of thing you’d see in Umineko, down to the fact that it was a gun fight like the love trial was. The imagery of the red cracks on the black background, and the entire screen shattering like glass, also felt like it was lifted straight out of Umineko.

Even if it might be kinda cheesy and forced, the monkey brain part of me really likes this stuff, lol.

Come to think of it, I guess this also makes it a lot more likely in hindsight that her classroom panic attack in this arc really was [at least in part] a representation of her two sides clashing. I think she always planned to do it as a recreation of that scene from Tatarigoroshi, but when it actually started her human side bled through and her genuine regret came through as well. I also assume that all the shots in this arc of her looking uncomfortable or depressed, especially around Teppei, were probably also setting up for this. Which I think is fine, but they probably should have been a little more clear about it, since it came across as her just faking everything, and this ended up feeling more sudden than it should have. I get why people would still see it as being sudden and unearned, but I don’t really think so. They probably should have included more stuff like that during the first two arcs of Sotsu, though.

I’m curious to see if I’ll end up being right about my theory that the sword will end up being used as a plot device to completely separate Satoko’s witch self, and maybe Rika’s as well, into their own beings separate from Rika and Satoko in the ‘real world’. It still feels like the only way to have this actually set up for Umineko without having things end in total tragedy for Rika and Satoko in general.

There’s probably a lot more I could say about this episode, but I think this has gone on long enough as it is, lol.

[ianphotographingthecity]

Photography vs Cinema

I actually did not know this, but there is apparently a lot of theory regarding the relationship--specifically the differences--between photography and cinematography. Besides the fact that one is primarily still and one has the additive effect of moving image, there is a lot to decipher as I make choices for my photos. It’s been a unique challenge to try to separate my past experience and working techniques from my new attempts with photography. In order to help with the process, I’m looking more into the writing about photography vs cinema. This will help me focus on specific cues to pick up on while I’m out with my camera. 

I’m looking specifically at the compilations of essays David Campany arranged for his book The Cinematic, which was conveniently available in the Harrow campus library! Here are some of the things I found most interesting and each is followed by a little blurb of how I’m reacting to it:

David Campany, “Introduction”

“Soon after [the Lumiere Brothers], editing or montage, so vital to the development of both cinema and photography, opened new possibilities for the construction of a more synthetic time and space. Right from the start the fixity of the still photograph presented challenges--technical and aesthetic--for the depiction of time.” (11)

Pretty much throughout the introduction, Campany discusses the key differences that have arisen between the two mediums as the industries have changed over the course of the last century. This was a paragraph that I think popped out to me the most because a lot of his time is spent discussing cinema’s choice to be like photography by slowing down movement and relying on stillness. On the other hand, a lot of photography tries to be like film by capturing a lot of movement in one photo. This then means that, at the core, photography is about stillness and film is about movement, both in the medium of moving image but also through the use of editing or montage. For this project, I think I want to stick more to the core of photography and capture stillness--especially because the world I am trying to build is one without all of the hustle and bustle you would normally find in a city. I want to show people slowed down and reflecting, and this will also help me focus more on the history of the medium of photography.

Campany also references Jeff Wall (!) and two other photographers that take cues from a more cinematic look: Cindy Sherman, Regis Durand, and Catherine David. He says they evolved photography into a “new articulation of time very different from the decisive snap and the photo-sequence.” I’m definitely going to check these artists out.

Michael Tarantino, “A Few Brief Moments in Cinematic Time”

“It is plainly not the injury to the subject as judged objectively, for this need be of no significance psychologically, but something brought about by it in the mind . . . This moment of extreme action and violence is made all that more effective by the static moments that have preceded it.” (34-35)

This piece was mainly about film, but Tarantino talked about story a lot and what the format of the piece you’re viewing can do to the experience of the work. He specifically talked about slower-paced films like (portions of) Psycho and Jeanne Dielman that in a way mimic photography because of their long shots. He went on to discuss that this films have moments that pop up and immediately take you out of what you thought was going to be an easy-going and sometimes misperceived as boring movie watching experience. I want to accomplish this with my photos. I want to capture images that make the viewer look twice and even be shocked by something they wouldn’t expect to see in photography.

“Thus the film’s time had to be completely flexible. We always walked in in the middle of something. The submarine had sunk. Moses had talked with God on the mountain. Tammy had fallen in love. It was always the same. We had to provide the time past for the time unfolding in front of our eyes.” (37)

This was a beautiful statement that gave another depth to the argument between film and photography. Again, he was talking more specifically about film here, but he points out that when the narrative isn't seen in order, or you join in during the middle of it, your task is to piece together everything that has already happened. I’ve read a lot about this with tableau photography and the “pregnant moment.” I want to keep my viewer thinking, wondering not just what is happening but what just happened and what’s next.

Agnes Varda, “On Photography and Cinema”

“I like films where the photographic image is one of the subjects--and the very substance of emotion.” (62)

I just thought this was a beautiful statement reminding us that, at the core, film is a series of photography. But you really have to slow things down, and in each photo there must be some basis of reason and emotion.

Catherine David, “Photography and Cinema” 

(This was cool because just at the beginning of the post she was mentioned by another writer, and I noted I needed to check her out!)

“I refer to the photographic image [as] images that mediate certain subjects.” (149)

This was a perfect segue into my thought process for the project--taking what I’ve been reading it and applying the basic goals. It’s important for me to keep this in mind as I take my photographs and piece them together into my final project; my job as a photographer is to be the middle man between the subject and the audience. Especially with what I am focusing on, I want to be the mediator that gets the public to see what pollution is doing to us and where we are headed. At the same time, I want to capture the stories of the people that will be in the photographs and really convey their emotional states, making the photos more relatable/accessible.

“[Photographs] rely on a condensation of all the phenomena, all the transactions which are at stake in the interior of a film in order to give all the immobility, the weight, the density of a kind of photographic image back to the cinema . . . Images continue to resonate with their density, complexity, and high degree of ambiguity.” (150)

At the core, this is the difference between photography and film that I am taking away from my research. I have it easy as a filmmaker. I have sound, movement, blocking, music, etc. to convey everything I want to--and all of this over the course of somewhere between 5 and 120 minutes. Photography, though, makes you work. You have to work so that all of the most minute of details and strongest of emotions are captured in just one frame. Photos are dense. The audience needs to feel their depth just with one look; you don't have the time to convince them what you are saying is something to be heard. As David mentions, photographs are immobile and stick in history exactly where they are. You have to be willing and ready to make sure they carry their weight.

[rolandfontana]

Dannemora Escape: In Defense of the Prison Guards

On June 6, 2015, two convicted killers escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., through a tunnel they had painstakingly built. For the next three weeks, the manhunt became national news as hundreds of police tracked them through the rugged Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York.

The hunt ended when one of the escapees, Richard Matt, was fatally gunned down by U.S.Border Patrol agents near the Canadian border. The second, David Sweat, was taken into custody two days later after another shootout.

But the made-for-Hollywood story was only just beginning. Revelations that an affair with one of the Clinton correctional officers had facilitated their escape led to an investigation by embarrassed state officials, the conviction of two guards (Joyce Mitchell and Gene Palmer), two television movies, several books, and a seven-part TV miniseries.

Charles A. Gardner

Now, a former senior correctional officer who watched the drama unfold in his “backyard” has weighed in with his own version of the story. In the just-published, Dannemora: Two Escaped Killers, And The Largest Manhunt Ever In New York State, Charles A. Gardner offers not only a bitter condemnation of how state officials and the media handled the story, but a wider critique of New York State’s correctional system.

In a conversation with The Crime Report, Gardner, who is also a former municipal judge, discusses how budget cutbacks created security flaws in the prison, why sensational reporting by the media complicated the search, and how correctional guards have been the victim of unfair stereotypes.

The transcript below has been condensed and edited. The full conversation can be viewed here on YouTube.

The Crime Report: what drew you to write this book?

Charles Gardner: It was a combination of my experience with the New York State Department of Corrections, of being a local and having this escape unfold in my backyard. [Also] as a local municipal judge, I was getting information coming in from law enforcement as the escape unfolded. I was seeing that the media was getting it wrong. There was a tremendous amount of misinformation out there a tremendous amount of speculation, and it troubled me.

As the escape progressed, the misinformation intensified. I got to the point where, “My God, they’re not telling the story, they’re not telling what’s happening, they’re not telling what happened,” and it evolved into the book.

TCR: You write about a number of institutional factors and policy decisions that eased the way for this escape to occur. Please elaborate.

Gardner: There were a tremendous amount of policy changes, and changes in the law, that contributed to this escape. Just to touch on a few: subterranean tunnel inspection had stopped happening in the mid 1990s at Clinton Correctional after a staff audit. Albany felt that it was a waste of resources so they eliminated (inspections from head office). They were added to staff duties. There were 12, 13 towers scattered around Clinton Correctional Facility, New York State’s largest maximum security prison, but [after inspections in the 1990s], Albany [decided] manning half of them would suffice. I could name more. All those contributing factors snowballed into [the escape].

 TCR: What role did budget cuts play?

Gardner: The premise was do more with less. It got to the point where your correctional staff, your uniformed staff, would work for eight-hour-and-fifteen minute shifts with no breaks in the course of their day, no assigned lunch hours. They were expected to eat their lunches on the fly, there was no such thing as a break in their normal work day. So they’re expected to be on point, on post, solid, from the time that they start their day to the time that they walk out the door.

TCR: You write that the leadership in Albany didn’t necessarily make it their highest priority to catch the escapees. 

Gardner: Well again, how did we get there? You couple [all the issues I just mentioned] with the interference with the crime scene. Understand, we had an active crime scene, physical evidence hadn’t even been collected yet, and a parade of politicians and bureaucrats were walking through, to the total disbelief of investigators. It was very frustrating for law enforcement officials that this thing was just a political s—t show…with the contaminated crime scenes, with the interference with the investigation, with that political thumb on them at all times. It was hard for them to do their jobs.

TCR: I would imagine the media must in many cases report in ways that don’t make guys like you in corrections and law enforcement happy.

Gardner: Well first of all, I’m not trying to bash our governor, but when law enforcement is confronted with a crime scene, the last thing they need is some political figure to roll in with their staffers for photo ops. It takes away from the job at hand. The media entertains the local politicians, or the high-profile individual, and it detracts from what’s trying to be done, and it pulls resources. Bit of a problem.

David Sweat (left), Richard Matt. Courtesy New York State Police

The media also were quick to judge. Basically, a little better than two weeks had passed, with no confirmed sightings of either of these two escapees. An off-duty prison guard goes up to check a hunting camp a mile-and-a-half off a backwoods road and he encounters an intruder, and possibly two intruders. He calls them out, they flee from the scene, he notifies authorities, and a day later, the media is standing in this man’s camp, without an invite and (pursuing) conspiracy theories, such as “Isn’t it odd that these two escaped convicted killers were hiding out in a prison guard’s hunting camp?”

That started speculation. “Did this off duty prison guard know that they were there? Was he harboring them?” And you can’t pull the story back. The media has to take a breath. I understand everyone’s fighting for that first glimpse, first picture, first headline. That was the stuff that drove me nuts.

TCR: It drove you to write this book!

Gardner: It did! There was so much misinformation. The guy (who owned the camp) brought this search back from nationwide, to 25 miles from Clinton Correctional where it originated from, was a hero one day, and then a zero the next. I have had the privilege and pleasure of working with this man, and he’s a standup guy. He never even worked in the facility that either one of these guys had ever been in. So he had no contact. He didn’t know the two inmates. Just like all the other prison guards up in northern New York, he owned a hunting camp. But that wasn’t the way the story was written.

TCR: I assume you’ve seen the mini-series that Showtime put out, Escape at Dannemora, which was directed by Ben Stiller. What did you think of it?

Gardner: It was disappointing, the photography of the area was breathtakingly beautiful, but then again the Adirondacks and the Adirondack mountains are breathtakingly beautiful, so that goes without a lot of banging of the drum. Giving him his artistic leeway, it was a nice fiction, based on a true story, I guess would be the best way to describe it. It won a lot of awards. The lady (Patricia) Arquette, who played Joyce Mitchell, did a hell of a job, but as you watch the show, again, they didn’t give you the true story.

They portrayed the prison guards as a bunch of miserable, foul-mouthed individuals. Please understand, on any given day, you have a few hundred [corrections officers] working in these facilities that contain approximately 3,000 convicted felons. On any given shift you have a few hundred watching a few thousand. Those few hundred I can guarantee you are not walking up and down those galleries bad mouthing and swearing and cursing and threatening, and all but spitting on these inmates. That will never happen, because it won’t last long, because people will get hurt quickly. The corrections officers in New York are very well trained, they’re very professional at what they do, and they do not conduct themselves as Mr. Stiller portrayed them.

It was shameful, and it was maddening, to watch him portray these corrections officers as racists, miserable, cursing, unprofessional. That is not what these men and women do on a daily basis. They are better than that, and they deserved better than that, from this [film].

Here’s another thing. Ben Stiller and the film crews approached New York State, and said, “Hey, we would like to go inside Clinton correctional and do some filming inside the Clinton Correctional facility. And New York State governor [Andrew Cuomo] gave it the green light, and the New York Department of Corrections allowed multiple days for the state’s largest maximum security prison to be shut down, so that they could film a movie. Understand that just months prior, when superintendent Steve Racette, Deputy Superintendent (Stephen) Brown, Deputy Superintendent (Don) Quinn had asked Albany leadership to shut down that same facility for security concerns, they were denied. Just chew on that for a while.

Editor’s Note: A New York State Inspector General’s report in 2016 found that widespread “complacency” about prisoner security contributed to the breakout. Read the report here.

TCR: Have the culture, practices or policies changed in any drastic way since you were a corrections officer?

Gardner: It’s gotten worse. It has absolutely gotten worse. And I sarcastically talk about it in the book, you know, the walls are not there to keep the inmates in there in; it’s to keep the public out, if they only knew what was going on inside those facilities. The health care facilities inside the prisons are second to none. If any man has a toothache, any kind of an ache or a pain, they’re seen by medical staff within literally minutes. Go to your local hospital, let me know how long it takes you to be seen by anybody, but these guys are on the scene within literally minutes inside every single facility I’ve ever worked in.

You know the honor blocks, the basketball courts, the football field, the baseball diamond, the handball courts, the weightlifting facilities, the law libraries, the general libraries. The opportunities, the recreational facilities, the meals, the medical facilities are second to none in these facilities. [Inmates] go without nothing. Different facilities that I’ve worked in, they have HBO, Cinemax, I mean, a lot of these people are living better than a lot of people on the streets that are working two jobs.

TCR: I just want to parse that parse that a little bit, I think not necessarily you’re saying that, you know these inmates aren’t entitled to decent living conditions, but you would like to see at least equal if not more attention given to staff and… (the general population).

Gardner: Absolutely, I don’t begrudge the inmate population a thing. I absolutely do not… Treat these men and women who are incarcerated firmly, fairly and consistently, and I’m a firm believer in that. They have what’s known as the commissary in the correctional facilities, it’s an in-house grocery store, where they buy their food items for less than you or I could ever dream of. Again I don’t begrudge these men and women any of that. But it should be made a little bit more fair for the people who are working every day and doing the right thing every day. You’re almost encouraging people to go to jail to for a break, I mean it’s kind of crazy.

There are some things that are just overdone, and it’s ridiculous. I love the fact that we do the educational programs that we do, I love the fact that we do the vocational programs that we do, and it gives these folks who are going to re-enter our society a skill set. Those are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful aspects.  But the policy makers, the politicians, need to sit back a little bit, take a look at some of this stuff that’s also in there and just say, “This is ridiculous.” It’s absolutely ridiculous some of the fluff that’s in there now. Absolutely ridiculous.

Additional Reading: The Strangest Details from that Report on Dannemora Prison Escape

Sweat tells guards how he would escape from another prison

Dane Stallone is a TCR contributing writer. Readers’ comments welcome.

Dannemora Escape: In Defense of the Prison Guards syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[zipgrowth]

Is Running a Company Like Leading a Classroom? Steve Blank on Entrepreneurship and Education

Entrepreneur Steve Blank has served as a founder, investor and even in the air force. But there’s another title he’s is known for: professor.

Blank has earned a reputation among budding and veteran business leaders alike as the father of the Lean Startup movement, a business philosophy that popularized startup concepts like “pivoting” and “minimum viable product.” (Disclosure: Blank is an investor in EdSurge.) And he’s taught these ideas on business and innovation at Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia and New York Universities. His course on the “lean” methodologies, called Lean Launchpad, is offered at more than 75 schools around the world and was one of the earliest to appear on the online course platform Udacity.

This week on the EdSurge On Air podcast, we talk to Steve about both his business and teaching careers, and how changes in the startup world are reflected in both the lean method and his courses. Listen below, or subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Highlights from the conversation below have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: How did your ideas behind the Lean Startup come about?

Blank: As an entrepreneur in the 20th century, we were told in not so many words that startups were nothing more than smaller versions of large companies. You had an idea, you wrote a plan, you turn that into a set of slides, you raise money and then you executed for the plan. Then the VCs funded this idea you came up with. And there was very little notion that this plan was actually a set of hypotheses, and we were always surprised that startups didn't turn out the way we thought [would] in our business plan.

The big idea is that VCs simply assumed that any failure to execute the plan was a failure of the founders or the key people in the company. And so they tended to fire people, and each new person would come in with a slightly different idea. And so successful startups would eventually what we now call “pivot” by firing people rather than firing the business plan.

I kind of knew this in the back of my head, that there was something wrong. But you know what? I just did it like everybody else in Silicon Valley until I had time to retire and start thinking about the nature of innovation and entrepreneurship.

So what are the key tenants of the Lean Startup, and what does this model looks like?

The big idea was that startups were trying to copy what large companies did. Well, large companies execute known business models. But startups aren't executing anything at all. Startups are actually searching for a business model. This difference between search and execution had never been articulated before.

I built a process called “customer development,” which kicked off the Lean Startup model, and that basically said, “Look, I don't care whether the VCs gave you money or not. All you have is a series of untested hypotheses. So why don't we get outside and validate those hypotheses?”

So the Lean Startup started with my customer-development process, but very quickly when I started actually talking about this and teaching it at Berkeley, one of my students observed that 21st-century people were building products using agile methodologies, which is a fancy word for saying they were building products incrementally and iteratively. [The student] and I said, “Why don't we combine agile engineering with this customer development process so we could put things in front of customers early and often.”

This allowed us to do something which was unheard of in the 20th century, this notion of a pivot. A pivot is defined as a substantive change to one or more of the components of the business model, meaning, “Gee, I thought my customers would be these types of people. Holy cow, they're over here,” or, “I thought the customers would love these features, but they actually love features two, nine and twelve. Why don't we just focus on that?” Pivot gives you permission to change some of the fundamental premises of what you're doing.

Parts of the Lean Startup model seems to echo that Silicon Valley mantra of ‘move fast and break things.’ Do you agree with that, and is that a good thing?

Move fast and break things is kind of something that sounds good at the surface but you really want to understand what the heck that means. Move fast, of course that's the differentiator between startups and large companies. Break things, I'm not sure I understand what that means. Break things on purpose? Well that's certainly not a goal for Lean. If it means you're allowed to make mistakes, I'll understand it.

The whole idea about Lean is that we expect that you're wrong. It's not that we like to fail fast, it's that in Lean, we're testing a series of guesses, and implicitly most of them are going to be wrong. Maybe the better mantra is, ‘move fast and test things.’

Can the Lean model can be applied to all industries? I'm thinking about education in particular. Does the model work if the ‘user’ is a student or a school?

[Lean] is for a very specific set of circumstances, surprisingly which are mostly still valid today. But it's not a religion. Let me remind people what my intent was. It was designed in that post-dot com crash. It's hard to imagine now but venture capitalists were hiding under their desks, literally. They weren't writing checks, funds were underwater, so Lean was designed for a time when you needed to optimize your cash and make sure that everything had some evidence and probability of success. And do it at speed.

Now let's fast forward today: startups are raising hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and revenue and profit are certainly not the key monitors. It might be user growth, it might be something else—it might be revenue growth and no profit. So you have to decide whether Lean is still appropriate or, "Gee, let's spend the cash as fast as we can because we want to become a unicorn."

Back to your question about how does it apply to education. Well, it certainly depends. Are we talking about an education startup? Are we talking about an existing school system? Are we talking about a large university or large existing program? Lean is appropriate in different ways, in different times, in different organizations. For example, Lean works great in startups that are cash constrained and resource constrained. Lean works poorly in large corporations unless you do a lot of other things around it, which we call an innovation pipeline. And that is even tougher inside of government agencies, which have even more constraints than companies and certainly a lot more than startups.

And by the way, the mistake for companies and government agencies is looking at all these startup tools and techniques we now have and saying, “Oh, all I need to do is run them inside of my large company and somehow magic will happen,” and it turns out what we end up there is with innovation theater not really innovation.

There's Lean and there's plenty of other models and ideas about how to make startups work. But we know that still today most startups fail. From your perspective as an educator, how much of this can actually be taught, and are early entrepreneurs going to listen?

One of the interesting things about entrepreneurial education is confusing teaching entrepreneurship with teaching accounting. It's not the same. Entrepreneurship and innovation is a experiential, hands-on activity. It's not a process you could teach out of the book. Entrepreneurs, and I mean founders, are as close to artists as any other profession, and that's a big idea for an educator. We've figured out over the last 500 years how to teach art. We realized that, yes, you want to teach some theory for artists, but essentially art is a set of apprenticeships and hands-on practice. It's an experiential type of activity for teaching.

The classes I build are experiential classes that teach theory but insist on practice. Can you imagine going to a brain surgeon who's never cracked a skull or a heart surgeon who’s never cracked a chest in a residency? You would run away fast.

What do you think that higher ed is doing right when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, innovation or both?

We finally realized that we ought to be teaching. When I first started teaching innovation entrepreneurship at Berkeley at Stanford, I was trying to get this concept that we need a new way to think about how to teach. People would say, “Steve, no, we just need to teach them how to write a business plan and we need to teach them finance.” Those are nice but we were just not connecting. This is the problem for tenured educators, it's real easy to get stuck in your own structure. Great [educators] managed to pivot as well, to realize that something new has really come that's not a fad, that you really want to think about that maybe we ought to be changing how we look and do things, and that's tough.

Universities by design are not early adopters, let me underline that, universities are by design not early adopters. You don't want them to adopt the latest fad because by the time you get a syllabus approved or a new curriculum and whatever, if it's a fad you just wasted a ton of time and resources. But you also want to decide whether you want to be a late adopter, and that's usually not attractive for students. And so they figure out how to kind of constantly monitor what those changes are outside the building, and I give kudos to the ones who have figured out how to do that.

Are there any similarities between running a company and leading a classroom?

That's a great question. It's very funny, the first job I had in Silicon Valley was actually as a training instructor. I taught microprocessor design, and it was my first love. But I didn't realize that actually training to be an educator was actually training to be a leader. The ability to take complex systems, recognize patterns and explain it in a way that my mother could understand was actually a skill not only for an educator but was necessary for a VP of Marketing and eventually a CEO because you have to communicate to and motivate customers, investors and employees about what you're doing and why.

Educators are grappling with this rapidly-changing landscape of what to teach, how to teach. We are living in one of the most confusing and exciting times in the world, just trying to keep up with the changing shape of technology. What tech do I teach inside a classroom versus what's available outside? What methodologies do I teach? And how do I motivate students who are trying to decide whether innovation entrepreneurship is for them? I'm just impressed with the scale and the scope of the job, and I'm grateful for everybody who's engaged in it.

Is Running a Company Like Leading a Classroom? Steve Blank on Entrepreneurship and Education published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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A Longtime Fitness Editor Does Some Soul Searching

New Post has been published on http://www.greggsdiabetes.com/a-longtime-fitness-editor-does-some-soul-searching/

A Longtime Fitness Editor Does Some Soul Searching

We need to stop overthinking wellness.

Stories like “Where Skinny People Sit in Restaurants” or the “15 Ways to Eat Healthier Without Thinking” are fun to write and even more enjoyable to read. But they distract all of us from the fundamentals to living a healthy life. That’s why news of a scandal at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab may actually be a good thing, the shock we all need to return to the basics. In a piece published this week, Science of Us explained that researchers at the lab, which has long been a leader in nutrition science, are coming under fire for publishing shockingly shoddy research. Outside, along with most major health and wellness publications, has reported on the lab’s made-for-web-headline-writing studies, like “How to Navigate the Maze of Temptation That Is Your Local Grocery Store” and “Eat the Same Breakfast Every Day.”

My first reaction was to write a piece declaring that everything we know about fitness is a lie. That’d certainly get some traffic. Instead, the Cornell scandal led me to some soul searching. Wellness is fairly straightforward in theory, if not practice. We don’t need catchy headlines or complicated formulas to stay healthy. There’s a reason Michael Pollan wrote a whole book on nutrition that can be condensed into seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That thinking isn’t reserved for food science alone. In an email, Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, told me that we overcomplicate everything when it comes to health. He then pointed me to an obituary in the New York Times of Lester Breslow, a researcher who, the Times reported, “gave mathematical proof to the notion that people can live longer and healthier by changing habits like smoking, diet and sleep.” Breslow identified seven key factors to living a healthy life:

Do not smoke; drink in moderation; sleep seven to eight hours; exercise at least moderately; eat regular meals; maintain a moderate weight; eat breakfast.

There’s no arguing against Breslow’s habits for a healthy life. The difficulty is in figuring out how to live by them. As always, the devil is in the details. I know—I’ll ride for five hours on the mountain bike but follow it up with several margaritas and a large slice of key lime pie. If you only have time to ride on the weekends or can’t afford to buy healthy ingredients for meals, Breslow's guidelines become less attainable. But for the average Outside reader, things really are shockingly simple:

Spend most of your day moving. Over the past year, we’ve written about 50 stories touching on the topic. The science is sound. The consensus real. Sitting all day is bad for you, even if you exercise intensely on the weekends. So take a break from your desk. Go for a lunch ride. Then take a walking meeting. We even have a story that can show you how to make it happen.

Between runs and rides, eat vegetables to stay at a healthy weight. Everyone from Pollan to Matt Fitzgerald, the author of The Endurance Diet, says so. The reasoning is pretty straightforward: it’s easier to maintain a healthy weight by focusing on diet instead of exercise. The best way to eat a healthy diet is to eat mostly vegetables. When I reached out to Fitzgerald, he agreed, and said we should be spending more time watching how healthy people behave. “Not surprisingly, these patterns aren't radical or sexy,” he wrote. “But a recreational athlete who adapts these habits to his or her own circumstances is much less likely to get bad results than is an athlete who adopts a radical diet based on some study described in an article with a sexy headline.”

Over the last half-decade, I’ve written and edited hundreds of stories on health and fitness for multiple publications. No matter the study or advice we discuss in the newsroom, we almost always come back to the same conclusion: this stuff isn’t all that complicated, it’s just really hard.

Original Article