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stoicanalyst · 4 years ago

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The Darkest Philosopher in History - Arthur Schopenhauer

Being one of the first philosophers to ever

really question the value of existence,

to systematically combine eastern

and western modes of thinking,

and to introduce the arts as a serious

philosophical focus, Arthur Schopenhauer

is perhaps one of the darkest and most

comprehensive philosophers in western history.

Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in what is

now Gdansk, Poland, but spent the majority

of his childhood in Hamburg, Germany after

his family moved there when he was five.

He was born to a wealthy family, his father

being a highly successful international merchant.

As a result of this, young Schopenhauer would

be expected to follow in his father’s footsteps.

However, from an early age, he had no interest

in business, and instead, found himself compelled

towards academics. And after going on a trip

around Europe with his parents to prepare him

for his merchant career, the greater exposure

he would receive to the pervasive suffering

and poverty of the world would cause him to

become all the more interested in pursuing

the path of scholarship and intellectually

examining, down to its very core, how the

world worked and why—or perhaps more accurately,

how and why it appeared to work so negatively.

After eventually going against his family’s

readymade path of international business,

Schopenhauer would attend the University of

Göttingen in 1809, where, in his third semester,

he would become more introduced and

focused on philosophy. The following year,

he would transfer to the University of Berlin

to study under a better philosophy program led

by distinguished philosophy lecturers of the

time.

However, Schopenhauer would soon find

academic philosophy to be unnecessarily obscure,

detached from real concerns of life, and often

tethered to theological agendas; all of which,

he despised. Eventually, he left the academic,

intellectual circuit, and spent the following

decade philosophizing and writing on his own.

By age thirty, Schopenhauer had published

the two works that would go on to define

his entire career, contain his complete,

unified philosophical system from which

he would never deviate, and eventually influence

the entire course of western thinking with.

The first groundwork of his philosophy

was established in his dissertation,

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle

of Sufficient Reason, published in 1813,

and his entire unified philosophical system,

including his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,

aesthetics, value judgments, and so forth,

was laid out in his subsequent masterwork,

The World as Will and Representation, published

in 1819. Despite these impressive works going on

to hold major stake in western philosophy,

influencing some of the greatest thinkers

and schools of thought thereafter, during

this time, they would go mostly unnoticed.

Over the decades following his early

work, throughout his thirties and forties,

Schopenhauer would spend his time working to be a

lecturer at university, as well as a translator of

French to English prose, while continuing to write

on-and-off along the side. He found very little

success in all of it. His lectures were unpopular,

his translations received very little interest,

and his philosophical work remained mostly

overlooked. Only by around his fifties,

did Schopenhauer finally start to receive

any notable recognition, at all.

And only

after publishing a book of essays and aphorisms

in 1851, would he achieve the status of fame,

which he would remain in for the rest of his life

until he died in 1860 at the age of seventy-two.

In terms of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system

established within his work, it is relevant to

note that it leaned heavily on the work of his

predecessor, Immanuel Kant. In Schopenhauer’s

mind, he was completing Kant’s system of

transcendental idealism. Building off his

interpretation of Kant, Schopenhauer essentially

suggested that the world as we know and experience

it, is exclusively a representation created by our

mind through our senses and forms of cognition.

Consequently, we cannot access the true

nature of external objects outside our mental,

phenomenological experience of them. Deviating

from Kant, however, Schopenhauer would go onto to

argue that not only can we not know nor access the

varying objects of the world as they really are

outside of our conscious experience, but

there is, in fact, no plurality of objects

beyond our experience, at all. Rather, beyond

our experience is, according to Schopenhauer,

a singular, unified oneness of reality—a sort

of essence or force that drives existence

that is beyond time, beyond space, and beyond all

objectivation. Schopenhauer would go on to explore

and define this force by referencing and probing

into the experience of living within the body,

suggesting that this is the only thing

in the world that we have access to

that is not solely a mental representation of

an object but is also a firsthand, subjective

experience from within it. From here, Schopenhauer

would suggest that what is found from within,

at the core of our being, is an unconscious,

restless, striving force towards survival,

nourishment, and reproduction. He would term this

force the Will to live.

Essentially, this would

lead him to the conclusion that reality is made

up of two sides; one side being the plurality

of things as they are represented to a conscious

apparatus, and the other side being the singular,

unified force of the Will—hence the name of his

master work, The World as Will and Representation.

It is worth noting that the term Will can

perhaps be misleading in that it might seem

to imply an intention or human-like conscious

motivation, but the Will, for Schopenhauer,

is a blind, unconscious striving with no goal

or purpose other than to keep itself going

for the sake of keeping itself going. All of the

material world operates by and through this Will,

moving, striving, consuming, and violently

expressing itself in order to sustain itself.

Schopenhauer’s work was largely a response to

Kant and the western philosophical tradition,

but his work also contains distinct notes of

Hinduism and Buddhism. His conclusion of the

nature of reality is strikingly similar to that of

both. And his qualitative assessment of reality’s

negative relationship with the conscious self

mirrors ideas central to Buddhism. This made

Schopenhauer one of the first philosophers to

ever really combine eastern and western thinking

in such a systematically comprehensive way.

Especially similar to Buddhism, Schopenhauer

would top off his philosophical medley with a

layer of dark, unwavering pessimism. “Unless

suffering is the direct and immediate object of

life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.

It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount

of pain that abounds everywhere in the world,

and originates in needs and necessities

inseparable from life itself, as serving no

purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each

separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt,

to be something exceptional; but misfortune in

general is the rule.” Schopenhauer wrote. As a

qualitative assessment of the nature of reality,

he would describe the Will to live as a sort of

malevolent force that we, as individual selves,

become victims of in its process of continuation,

deceived by our own mind and body to go against

our fundamental interests and yearnings in order

to carry it out. Since the Will has no aim or

purpose other than its perpetual continuation,

then the will can never be satisfied. And

since we are expressions of it, neither can we.

Thus, we are driven to consume beings, things,

ideas, goals, circumstances, and all the rest,

constantly hoping we will feel a satisfaction or

happiness as result, while constantly being left

in the wake of each achievement unsatisfied.

"Human life must be some kind of mistake.

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if

we only remember that man is a compound of needs

and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even

when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state

of painlessness, where nothing remains to him

but abandonment to boredom.” Schopenhauer wrote.

As the best possible ways of sort

of escaping and dealing with this,

Schopenhauer would put forth two primary methods:

one, engaging in arts and philosophy, and two, the

practicing of asceticism, traditionally being the

deprivation of nearly all desire, self-indulgence,

and everything past the bare minimum. In this

later method, Schopenhauer felt that by denying

the Will from being fed, so-to-speak, one would

turn the Will against itself and overcome it.

However, he also recognized the sheer

difficulty of this for the majority of people

and suggested the average person should

simply make their best efforts towards

letting go of ideals of happiness and pleasure,

and rather, focus on the minimization of pain.

Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not

a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather,

the reduction and freedom from pain

as much as possible. “The safest way

of not being very miserable is not to

expect to be very happy.” he wrote.

Alternatively, engaging in arts and philosophy,

in Schopenhauer’s mind, served as another, more

accessible method. He felt that good art could

provide a source of clarity into the nature and

problems of being, without any of the illusion or

drapery. And while engaging in this sort of art,

one would have a transcendent-like experience

that provides a relief and comfort from existence.

As a result of this concept,

Schopenhauer would end up being one

of first thinkers to ever really introduce

philosophical significance to the arts,

and would eventually become known by

many as the ‘artist’s philosopher.’

Of course, throughout his work in general,

Schopenhauer makes large, often unprovable,

and unknowable claims about the nature of reality

and the value of existing within it. Some of which

is validly constructed and worth considering,

but some of which is likely not. Ultimately,

any attempt to define and assess the side of

reality beyond logic and reason through systematic

logic and reason is perhaps paradoxical in way

that is beyond repair. What precisely is the Will,

where does it come from, where does it

end, and how can we know or prove it?

And in terms of Schopenhauer’s suggestion

that one should turn against the Will

through an ascetic process of self-denial,

if all of life operates through the Will,

to turn against it, would seem to merely be the

Will turning against the Will for reasons that

favor it. And there can be no turning against

the Will if the Will is doing the turning.

Alternatively, considering the view of Friedrich

Nietzsche, a philosopher who notably followed in

Schopenhauer’s footsteps, the endless cycle of

desire and dissatisfaction caused by the Will

is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel

towards the process of self-overcoming and growth,

which we can then obtain life’s meaning

from. Of course, this is the more pleasant

of the two interpretations, but it isn’t clear

which is more apt and/or accurate, if either.

Ultimately, Schopenhauer is another surprising,

yet seemingly common story where a highly

important thinker, artist, or writer, barely

caught any recognition in their life, if at all,

only to die and end up with their name in

nearly every history book on the subject.

One trait these stories do all

seem to have in common, though,

is a refusal to stop, a refusal to budge from

pursuing and defending the world as one sees it.

Schopenhauer never deviated from the

philosophical system he created in his twenties

and never stopped confidently working to build

upon it and reinforce it throughout his life,

despite the world seeming to suggest to

him he should do otherwise. And yet, now,

it is hugely significant to the world that he did

exactly what he did. For some, his work might be

bleak and disconcerting, but for others, his work,

like all great works of dark, melancholic honesty,

is comforting, relieving, and legitimizing. It

reminds us that are not crazy, and our sadness

and suffering are not unfounded, even when they

may feel like it. We are merely put in a crazy,

sad, violent reality with a mind and body

that are often all in conspiracy against us.

Because of this and many other reasons

unmentioned, his work would go on to

influence artists like Richard Wagner and Gustav

Mahler; writers like Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy,

and Samuel Beckett; and thinkers like Friedrich

Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,

as well as many others, ultimately influencing

the course of modern thinking, forever.

Having been one of the first to properly

and philosophically bring the value of life

and the possibility of meaning into question,

Schopenhauer helped locate the early budding

problem of the growing agnostic world

that philosophy would need to address.

With humanity seemingly suspending

further out into a void of meaning,

his unyielding and fearless confrontation with

the nature of existence, including all its

horrors and miseries, revealed an opening of new

possibilities towards finding answers from within.

#philosophy #arthur schopenhauer #SoundCloud

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weaselandfriends · 6 years ago

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Systems vs. Individuals in Dark Magical Girl Stories

Who is the primary antagonist of Puella Magi Madoka Magica? The obvious answer is Kyubey, who deceives the protagonists into signing the Faustian contract. Homura's goal is to stop Madoka from becoming a magical girl, which sometimes causes her to fight Kyubey both directly and indirectly. Yet choosing Kyubey as the answer relies on two flawed assumptions:

1. Homura is primarily struggling against Kyubey.

2. Homura is the protagonist of Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

The first assumption is incorrect because, while Homura does on occasion oppose Kyubey, she is far more concerned with removing situations that would prompt Madoka to sign the contract. As such, her conflicts with Mami, Sayaka, and Walpurgisnacht equal or even take precedence over her conflict with Kyubey. Kyubey is impossible to defeat, something Homura recognizes. When she kills one of Kyubey's innumerable bodies, she does so solely to delay.

In the back half of PMMM, Homura enlists Kyoko to help her fight Walpurgisnacht. She stockpiles military-grade weapons and sets traps. She prepares a detailed plan of attack that is almost ridiculous in its specificity. All for the purpose of defeating Walpurgisnacht.

Despite her best schemes, Homura never even gets close to defeating Walpurgisnacht on her own. By the end of Episode 11, after Homura has unleashed enough weaponry to arm a small African nation, Walpurgisnacht laughs it off like Homura hasn't even scratched her. Before Madoka steps in and makes her wish, Homura begins to recognize that defeating Walpurgisnacht is an impossibility.

Why does Homura put this much effort into trying to defeat Walpurgisnacht and not Kyubey?

On the surface, Kyubey is seemingly unkillable. If one body is destroyed, another takes its place. Yet the fact that Kyubey grouses about the destruction of a body being "wasteful" implies he has a finite amount of them. Being charitable to Homura, we can assume that in one or several of her previous timelines she attempted to destroy every Kyubey body and failed. But in all of her previous timelines she has attempted to destroy Walpurgisnacht and failed, so why has she given up on Kyubey but not Walpurgisnacht?

This line of questioning possibly comes across as a plot hole nitpick, the kind common among YouTube video essayists. But my goal isn't to say that the story is stupid for having Homura fight Walpurgisnacht instead of Kyubey. Instead, I want to think about Homura's psychology, and about the differences between bad systems and bad individuals.

Homura's mindset is fixated totally on the individual. In particular, the individual Madoka Kaname. Her goal is, explicitly, unambiguously, to "save Madoka Kaname." The magical girl system disinterests her beyond its corrupting influence on Madoka. Homura never seems to regret becoming a magical girl herself. Even at the end of the story, when she is about to succumb to despair, she does not regret becoming a magical girl, only that she could not save Madoka. Madoka makes a miraculous wish that improves the magical girl system for everyone and Homura is upset because it means Madoka ceases to exist.

Homura cannot operate on the level of the system. It is simply not her concern. As such, she prioritizes the immediate, corporeal threat of Walpurgisnacht over the abstract, systemic threat of Kyubey. Walpurgisnacht is a "thing" that can be fought and, assumedly, killed. Kyubey appears to be a "thing," but is actually an extension of the magical girl system itself and cannot be killed, at least not with a gun.

The problem is that Homura does not realize that Walpurgisnacht is, like Kyubey, also a non-individual. The name "Walpurgisnacht" refers to a gathering of witches and demons. In Goethe's Faust, a story to which PMMM makes frequent explicit reference, Walpurgisnacht features as a Pandaemonium of sorts where innumerable ghoulish figures interact with the protagonist. Writer Gen Urobuchi, in a 2011 interview, described Walpurgisnacht as such:

It has the destructive power to bring about natural disasters powerful enough to blow away an entire town, but originally it was a single witch. It's a witch that has grown from the combination of countless other witches. Walpurgisnacht combines with other witches in the same way two powerful tornadoes are able to combine and become larger. It's essentially a "conglomeration"-type witch. Because it's so powerful, it rarely shows itself.

Much as Kyubey is an amalgam of bodies possessing a singular purpose, Walpurgisnacht is comprised of an amalgam of witches inflicting a singular destruction upon the world. Like Kyubey, the individuality is an illusion, and as such, the individual-focused Homura cannot defeat it by herself, not in any timeline.

That doesn't mean Walpurgisnacht is undefeatable. Indeed, Walpurgisnacht is shown defeated in a previous timeline; but defeated by Madoka and Homura working together, not by Homura alone. Even though at this point in the story Homura is a significantly weaker combatant, and even though Madoka is not shown to be anything more than an average magical girl herself, they somehow accomplished what a Homura possessed of perfect foresight, immaculately armed, and in peak physical condition could not. If read literally, it must be concluded that Madoka is capable of accomplishing something that Homura cannot, regardless of Homura's physical prowess and perfect (time travel-aided) intelligence.

What does Madoka possess that Homura does not?

Why is Madoka the protagonist of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and not Homura?

The second question may at first seem strange. After all, Madoka serves as the primary point of view character for most of the show, while Homura comes off as aloof and even antagonistic until near the end. Over time, however, it becomes clear that Homura is the one driving the action of the story, while Madoka, although central to Homura's motivations, is often a useless tagalong. Simply being the point of view character doesn't immediately make one the protagonist, as Nick Carraway and Dr. Watson can attest. Madoka's role for most of the story is closer to the damsel in distress than the hero.

And yet, while Homura drives the action and fights Walpurgisnacht and has the goal most central to PMMM's storyline, she is utterly incapable of achieving her goal. She doesn't simply fail, she fails over and over and over again until the prospect of success begins to appear to her as an impossibility and she teeters on the precipice of despair. She fails despite being stronger and faster and more knowledgeable than previous incarnations of her that succeeded with Madoka's help.

Madoka steps into the final episode after an entire story of uselessness, does one thing, and fixes everything.

The reason is because Madoka correctly identifies the true antagonist of PMMM. Not Kyubey, not Walpurgisnacht. Not an individual, not a monster to fight, not something that can be shot and killed. The magical girl system itself. Her ability to identify this antagonist is what sets her apart from Homura. If Homura is individual-minded, Madoka is universal-minded. She abhors the suffering of all magical girls. She is kind and compassionate to everyone. This difference is what prompts Homura's one-sided obsession with Madoka to begin with. Homura interpreted Madoka's universal kindness toward everyone as an individual kindness toward Homura in particular. It's this difference that sets the stage for the events that transpire in Rebellion.

(It's important not to conflate this distinction between individual and universal with the distinction between selfish and selfless. Of the characters in PMMM, only Mami makes a truly selfish wish. Sayaka, Kyoko, and Homura make wishes that directly help someone other than themselves. Well, sort of—Homura doesn't wish for Madoka's safety, she wishes specifically for "the power to save Madoka," which indicates a kind of selfish hero complex. Likewise, it's implied that despite the ostensible selfishness of Sayaka and Kyoko's wishes, they made them for selfish reasons, so perhaps the statement is indeed that a selflessness focused on the individual is actually disguised selfishness.)

So, how do you fight a system? As Madoka states explicitly at the beginning of Episode 12, she would not have been able to make her wish if not for Homura's constant struggling. This statement is supported by the literal explanation Kyubey provides for Madoka's immense power, that being that Homura's innumerable repetitions of the timeline have maximized Madoka's "karmic potential." The show's literal answer is obviously fantastical. But the metaphorical implication seems to be that the suffering of individuals, once it reaches a certain magnitude, is capable of prompting universal change. This statement is not particularly controversial if looked at in a historical context; almost every improvement humankind has achieved, political or technological, occurred after humans suffered a long time without it. PMMM ends with a statement of hope: Keep hoping, and eventually your suffering will come to an end. You yourself may be powerless to change the world, but that doesn't make your misery meaningless.

Regardless of its truth, it's a platitudinous statement, akin to "Never give up!" I don't think it's valuable to take that final statement of hope as PMMM's ultimate theme or moral, despite its placement Aesop-like at the show's conclusion. It's a theme one might find in any more traditional magical girl show or even any children's show in general, and it's divorced from the show's many emotional and narrative complexities. What is more valuable is how the show arrives at that conclusion. After all, as I've heard detractors state, Madoka could have technically resolved the entire story as early as Episode 2 by making the same wish as she eventually did. Something, not external but internal, prevents Madoka from doing that until the end of the story.

If Madoka is taken as the protagonist of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, despite role for most of it as a passive, helpless observer, then it's imperative to view the story not as a traditional struggle against a "thing" that can be destroyed (the way Homura views it) but as a struggle for understanding. Madoka requires a certain amount of knowledge, lacking at the show's onset, in order to make the wish she always could have made, the wish she failed to make in countless failed timelines. That knowledge is the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this essay: Who is the antagonist? Who must be defeated?

The answer, broadly, is not an individual, but the system.

I could go more into why she specifically targets the part of the system (the concept of witches) that she does, or why she doesn't eliminate the system entirely. But for now, I want to expand this discussion to another dark magical girl story, Magical Girl Raising Project.

Magical Girl Raising Project is a series of light novels, the first of which was published in 2012, one year after PMMM was released. As of the time of writing, the series has seven distinct arcs, with each arc being a mostly self-contained story (although some characters and plot elements appear in multiple arcs). The first arc was adapted into an anime in 2016. It follows sixteen people who, after a popular mobile game turns them into magical girls, are forced to fight to the death by the game's twisted administrators.

Many dark magical girl shows that came out in the wake of PMMM have been derided as imitators, but while it's possible that these shows would not have been greenlit if not for PMMM's success, narratively most of these shows are quite different outside of superficial similarities. MGRP, for instance, is much closer to Battle Royale or Hunger Games in plot progression than it is to PMMM. However, one way in which MGRP is similar to PMMM, beyond simply featuring magical girls in an unexpectedly violent situation, is the thematic emphasis on systemic change versus defeating bad individuals.

At the beginning of MGRP's first arc, the game's administrators, represented by the mascot character Fav, present themselves as legitimate officials of the "Magical Kingdom" where all magical power originates. The battle royale is justified to its participants as a natural and necessary component of the magical system—the specific excuse being that having too many magical girls drains too much mana, so the number of magical girls must be cut to save energy. Like PMMM, the cruelties that the characters experience are excused as necessary for the benefit of the system. As such, while many of the battle royale's participants are displeased by the situation, few attempt to fight against the system itself and most focus on the immediate threat of their fellow participants.

Where MGRP diverges from PMMM is that this system is eventually revealed as a lie. Fav and his partner Cranberry are indeed representatives of the Magical Kingdom, but the mana problem is a complete fabrication and magical girls can be turned back into normal humans without killing them. In truth, the system is entirely benign, with its only stated goal being to create magical girls who can help humans, and there are no actual systemic drawbacks to being a magical girl. Fav and Cranberry have manufactured the battle royale for their own sociopathic purposes, and the Magical Kingdom is ignorant of their actions. In short, they're outlaws. Once they are both killed by the end of the first arc, the battle royale ends and the survivors live on.

Like PMMM, the initial difficulty the characters have in answering the question "who is the antagonist" prolongs a story that could have ended very early into a bloodbath. Had the battle royale participants known that their true enemies were Fav and Cranberry, they might have worked together to defeat them with relatively little issue. It is the seemingly hopeless systemic explanation for their woes that causes most of them to shut up and do what is expected of them.

Even though the situations are reversed, with a systemic threat concealed by individual threats in PMMM and an individual threat concealed by a systemic threat in MGRP, the psychology of the characters remains consistent between both works. If that was where MGRP ended, then on the whole it would be a fun play on post-PMMM audience expectations without betraying many of the fundamental concepts that underlie PMMM. But MGRP continues, and in its continuations develops a much larger amount of complexity and nuance (not necessarily to be confused with "quality") over this basic dichotomy of antagonistic individuals and antagonistic systems. As I mentioned previously, PMMM's ultimate moral is somewhat platitudinous: Never give up! Homura's individual-minded approach to problem-solving is depicted as fundamentally ineffectual, and her constant failures are only valuable insofar as they inspire Madoka to action. The narrative's focus is on the discovery of the true antagonist, and the actual resolution to the conflict is immediate and abrupt, nearly to deus ex machina levels.

This simplistic resolution is possibly a byproduct of several restraints that, in most other cases, allow for PMMM's phenomenal technical quality. By that I mean, PMMM is a highly simplified story. It has a limited cast of characters, a limited runtime, and a limited narrative arc that strips out almost anything unnecessary in favor of presenting a singular storyline. Its characters are stark, almost archetypal, with few character traits that do not directly feed into their role in the story. It lacks filler and its pacing is extremely even, with a significant plot development occurring every two to three episodes. From a technical standpoint, these are all massive advantages in telling a cohesive, well-designed story, and the popular reaction to PMMM has been overwhelmingly positive despite its niche subject matter and blunt brutality. Indeed, when most people compare PMMM to other dark magical girl stories, the thesis often boils down to "Here is why PMMM is good and this story, with fundamentally similar subject matter, is bad."

But while the limited narrative elements allow for consistent technical excellence, they also limit the narrative's ability to tackle complex subject matter, such as the reformation of necessary but cruel systems for the betterment of all individuals. How do you fight a system? PMMM doesn't have narrative space to delve into that question the way it can its fundamental question of "How do you recognize the true antagonist?" Homura suffers, Madoka learns from her suffering, and then Madoka makes a wish and everything gets better. Never give up! That isn't to denigrate PMMM, which I consider to be the best anime that I've seen. It's simply recognizing that PMMM does not and cannot do everything. Its resolution isn't even bad, per se; on the contrary, it is incredibly cathartic and satisfying. What is important about Madoka's wish is that she recognizes what must be done, not the way that she achieves it. That is why I describe PMMM as a story about Madoka gaining knowledge, not a story about Homura fighting to save Madoka.

MGRP, by contrast, is not a masterpiece on a technical level. Over seven arcs it accumulates a cast of over one hundred named characters, many of whom are completely pointless and die without purpose. Its storylines promulgate and do not always add to the overarching whole. It can lurch between a breakneck pace and long periods where little happens. But this technical sloppiness allows for a much broader, more complex storyline, and through this complexity MGRP is able to accomplish things that PMMM cannot.

As MGRP continues past its initial, death-game-style arcs, it develops into an overarching narrative about an ineffectual, bureaucratic government and various attempts to improve it. The Magical Kingdom, while benign in its stated goals, is nonetheless painted as incompetent at best and corrupted by petty infighting at worst, which allows bad individuals such as Fav and Cranberry to take advantage of it and get away with various misdeeds. The question of "who is the antagonist?" or "what should we be fighting?" becomes again muddied. Should the emphasis be on defeating all the bad individuals, or should it be on reforming the ineffectual system to remove the influence those individuals have? MGRP refrains from answering this question definitively one way or another, a restraint aided by its lack of a single central protagonist. While there are prominent characters who recur from arc to arc, none is present in every arc, and even in arcs where they do appear they are not always in a central role. As such, no one character's goals are aligned with the goals of the story itself.

The most obvious answer of the question "who is the protagonist of MGRP?" would be Snow White, one of the survivors of the first arc who also has the highest number of appearances of any character across the series. The notion of Snow White as protagonist is aided by her moral purity; her goal is consistently to help people and defeat villains, and although she is technically a vigilante insomuch as she operates outside the Magical Kingdom's official law enforcement system, she never wavers in her fundamental moral values when achieving her goals. Regardless of whether she is the protagonist, she is unquestionably a "hero."

However, Snow White is, like Homura, consistently limited in what she is actually able to achieve. The moment she becomes a magical girl, she is described as being incapable of larger-scale activities:

That day marked Snow White's debut. Every night she'd sneak out her window to look for people to help: a middle schooler who'd lost her house key, a university student who'd had their car stolen, and a businessman under pressure for money, to name a few. There were also many troubles she couldn't do anything about, like concealing adultery, a boy unsure of whether or not to confess to the girl he had a crush on, or a retiree desperate for their pension.

Of the three troubles listed that Snow White can't help, the last, about the pension, sticks out to me. The pension, of course, is a problem that cannot be solved on the individual level, and would require some kind of systemic change. Snow White's limitations are delved into later by another magical girl, Ripple:

Sightings of the white magical girl were leaps and bounds ahead of sightings of the others. She wasn't even doing anything spectacular. Her assistance came in small, everyday actions like picking up dropped change, ferrying forgotten lunches, and reminding people to zip up their flies. Was helping with mundane difficulties a magical girl's true purpose? Or was she simply not capable of undertaking greater issues? [...] It wasn't that Ripple didn't want to serve the community, but she was too embarrassed to say otherwise. However, maybe boldly declaring "I want to help others!" and actually doing so was the correct way to be a magical girl, she mused.

This quote is one of the first instances in MGRP of a character wondering what the "correct way to be a magical girl" is, and this question will eventually become core to the series as a whole, with competing ideological notions leading to much of the conflict. For many, Snow White is the "ideal magical girl," morally pure and always performing selfless deeds. Even when she turns from random acts of kindness to tracking down and arresting criminal magical girls, this sense of moral purity remains with her. Yet Snow White is fundamentally incapable of fostering lasting change.

The biggest example of this inability comes in the fourth arc, in which Snow White squares off against a high-ranking but corrupt Magical Kingdom official named Grim Heart, who is attempting to cover up and profit off of illegal experimentation to create stronger magical girls. Grim Heart is not only the leader of one of the Magical Kingdom's three factions (basically, political parties), but she is also a quasi-theocratic figure said to be an incarnation of an ancient deity. Because Grim Heart is an individual, Snow White is capable of fighting and ultimately defeating her. Her criminal actions are exposed and brought to an end. Yet the removal of Grim Heart does not fundamentally improve the government as a whole in any meaningful way. Grim Heart is scapegoated by her faction and epsteined while under arrest. The faction continues its shady activities under new leadership and harangues Snow White and others as early as the very next arc.

Never, not once, does Snow White accomplish any lasting change in the Magical Kingdom. She dispatches individual villains, but that does not resolve the core problems that face her world. She is positioned in contrast to magical girls whose goals are, explicitly, to reform the Magical Kingdom itself. These characters lack Snow White's moral purity, and even the most heroic of them are willing to murder innocent people under an "ends justify the means" philosophy. Again, MGRP inverts what was established in PMMM; rather than the morally pure character being the one who attempts to correct the system and the morally ambiguous character being the one consumed by individual conflicts, the situation is flipped. Snow White is pure but ineffectual; other characters are ambiguous but capable of practical change.

Madoka's preternatural goodness eventually leads to her fantastic ability to fix almost everything. Her goodness redeems Homura as an individual, which causes Homura to struggle endlessly for her sake, which provides Madoka both the power and the understanding to fix the system at a universal scale. Boiled down, PMMM is a classic story of "good triumphs over evil," with the primary difference being that "evil" has transformed from a cackling villain to a complex, unknowable system. For a modern audience, living in an increasingly complicated world where difficulties stem less from the strong subjugating the meek and more from, say, tax brackets, it's easy to see why this modification of a classic theme was so powerful and why PMMM fundamentally works as a piece of fiction.

But MGRP seems to make a counterstatement: Moral purity is unquestionably good, but it cannot alone change a system. I could probably go on for another few thousand words detailing the various characters in MGRP who attempt to fix the system and what their position in the story adds to this theme, but to do so might be better suited to a second post more specifically focused on MGRP.

What I wanted to illustrate in this essay, and which I have probably done far too longwindedly, is that these shows possess a core focus on fighting systems over fighting individuals. Probably the most frequent criticism levied at these shows is that they are exploitative, that they revel in the suffering of innocent young girls. The second most frequent criticism, levied specifically at dark magical girl shows that came after PMMM, is that they are mere imitators of PMMM. I think neither criticism is valid. PMMM and MGRP take the traditional, morally pure concept of "magical girl" and counterbalance it against corrupt systems to make statements on the value of moral purity and the possibilities for systemic change. These themes are not incidental to the type of story but rather molded to it. They are themes that could not be easily explored in either traditional magical girl storylines or even traditional storylines in general, where the focus is primarily on a single hero fighting a single villain. On top of that, works that follow PMMM are not doomed to mimic it mindlessly, but can actually comment upon, challenge, or expand PMMM's themes.

Obviously, PMMM was not the first story to ever situate a system as its antagonist rather than an individual. But the vehicle of "dark magical girls" is particularly conducive to that type of story. After all, a "dark magical girl" story already undermines an understood set of practices and beliefs via the subversion of genre conventions. The thematic content is wedded to the semantic content.

#puella magi madoka magica #pmmm #madoka magica #mahou shoujo madoka magica #magical girl raising project #mgrp #magipro #mahou shoujo ikusei keikaku

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otogetranslations · 6 years ago

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A Sasazuka Essay

Written by one of our most beloved translator: khikari AKA Kujouhikari!

She completed translating mostly all of Sasazuka route in our on-going translation project: Collar x Malice Unlimited!

Here is the link to the original post: Reddit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LUA27Rhfe3vyf1Ug_Qi5U1RZXvzwMZ1dT8hX8bEy_RM/edit?usp=sharing

Greetings.

To discuss Ichika in donut's route, we would have to discuss donut himself as well. It is something unavoidable. I have a generally favourable opinion of donut, to be point of being extremely biased towards him. As such, this is purely opinion with that fact established. This post will also be long because I have trouble finding 'concise' in my dictionary.

I played the game in Japanese so my experience might also differ from yours in that respect.

Also, there will be spoilers.

1.) Hoshino Ichika as a person

Basic background (Just so we are on the same page): Hoshino Ichika is a newbie police officer, quite fresh off her graduation. She is only 21 and still does not have that much experience in the workforce. She has impressive accuracy in her aim and handling of guns, however she is not a professional in it (compared to others). Her family is implied, and is confirmed, to neglect and dismiss her diligence and will in a variety of ways. She is often compared with her brother, whom she loves but is on unsteady relations with, after he moved to Tokyo.

Personality: She is an ordinary person with an ordinary sense of justice and morale, is empathetic, and not especially talented. Her most significant trait is her strong will and diligence, working hard for her ideals to come true. She faces things head on, for the better for worse, and tries to confront things that she is uncomfortable with as well. Not being a complacent person, she constantly strives for a better reality within her abilities. She understands what she can do, and what she can't do, very well. She also has extremely low self-esteem due to her upbringing, and was under a lot of stress during the X-Day incidents due to being a newbie, not going well with her family, then the collar happening.

I admire her for all this. She might not be the most powerful, or greatest, or most active, but she does what she can and tries to be true towards herself. She might fail and fall on the way, and even be a hypocrite sometimes, but she is only human. She isn't trying to save the world, she only wants her family safe, and those that she care for to be alright. I admire people who try despite knowing their limits, just as much as I admire those who are active and cause real change.

Also, I find it strange to pick at her hypocrisy sometimes. Her low-self esteem means that she is constantly unable to accept praise as what it is, yet her upbringing makes her yearn for understanding of some sort that she never received from her parents. I think critisizing her for that can be unfair.

I also personally find realistic egotism in characters to be something beautiful, influenced by the many literature I have read. I empathise with them better.

2.) Sasazuka Takeru as a person

Background Summary: Sasazuka Takeru is 24, an extremely talented hacker who moved from America to Japan due to his trauma with his mother. (In the beginning) he resigned from the police due to despairing at the police and the government's methods, in hope of trying to do something himself. He is used to the merit-based system in America, where ability influenced your input in the situation. However, Japan is the opposite, where the number of years you have spent in a corporation is prized over your ability (this can be still quite relevant in modern Japan). The ability to present your argument can be more important than the substance of it in this case, where these incidents have shook up the entire country. Thus, he is highly frustrated and running short on time with little resources to try to solve something important to him.

Personality: I personally empathise a lot with Sasazuka, as I have a similar sewage personality diluted slightly with coke. (I just wrap it up slightly better thanks to books.) He is highly pragmatic and has his priorities on a rigid hierarchy according to his personal investment, and thus can be seen as egostical. In other words, he ranks his individual needs and morales higher than what is important for the 'greater good'.

This means that he sees practical solutions to problems as more important than the decorums and traditional methods of society, and cares little about feelings he trample on. He evaluates every decision he makes with cold harsh logic, and spends no effort on things he deem 'meaningless'. (For example, society values family relations. However, if he evaluates the relationship to have no future, he'd cut it off, even if it is family. He places value on his own judgement and not general consensus.) And thus he is the most morally grey of the main cast.

He is a true neutral, which diverts from the tradition lawful good or lawful neutral protagonists society tends to value. I cannot comment on him much due to the similarities I find. He is neither good, nor bad. You can only measure that compared with your own moral compass, and whether he is against you or with you. (That's how war works, really. Nobody fights for what they don't believe in. Being the enemy doesn't make them wrong, but it doesn't make them right. It's the same for allies. Imperically, right and wrong can only be decided on how many casualties one's actions result in.)

As a person, he is extremely guarded of other people, and does not give his trust easily. There is no point spending time and effort on someon who is either going to betray you or is not worth it. However, this means that once someone has earned his respect, he will always prioritise them over other things. He has time to spare because he has cut off unimportant people, after all. He will go the extra mile to make sure they grow and can be happy independent from him while he accomplishes his own goals. This is true for both friendships and romantice relationships. This makes his relationships either very shallow or very deep, but nobody has qualified for the latter in love so far.

He is also very honest and tries not to be a hypocrite. What he says are usually logical and sound. He just doesn't wrap it up and consider the other party's feeling as much, because he wants improvement. Babying people will cause no progress. He shows his most natural self to the world because of this. Pleasantries might make co-operation more smooth, but they don't solve the actual problem.

His good parts and extra effort are reserved only for those who he deems as deserving.

(Also, this might also help you understand why he chooses to be morally grey and result based. In Australia, the the first British settlers came across the native Aborigines and judged their standard of living to be 'low'. Feeling the Aborigine children to be 'abused' in such a 'lowly' environment, they decided to kidnap the children so that they could have a better life. They brought them to these 'schools' where they are taught the skills to be a servant so that they can have a job in the future and lift themselves out of the 'poverty cycle'. They had good intentions in their opinion, but for the Aborigines, this is just them stealing their children away and throwing poop on their culture.

Doing what seems 'good' depending on societal morals can lead to these situations, and thus the best a person can do is to not betray themselves. I'm rambling sorry, but in this case, Sasazuka would value the result and say that the good intentions are not excusable. Would this make sense?)

3)Finally answering the question (I made you wait long enough.)

Sasazuka's treatment of Ichika: Just would like to address this first. Sasazuka is cold towards Ichika, calling her 'baka neko' idiot cat the first time they meet. The Japanese wording is less harsh than the English equivalent. (There is even a saying that someone more cute the more baka they are.)

Sasazuka is harsh and cold throughout the beginning because of how badly their personalities clashed. Sasazuka is a person who doesn't value meaningless effort, while Ichika tries despite having little experience or ability. For Sasazuka, Ichika should be focusing on something else and not bother him and lower his efficiency. Explaining to her would be wasting time because she is very unlikely to grasp hold of the situation quickly and contribute to it. She may be a victim, but Adonis is a large organisation adept at manipulating the emotion of masses, so she might be just acting. The enemy formally nearly suceeded in bringing the president down...They must have had many spies in government to make that possible, so they have the resource for this little act.

Conclusion: Time spent on her is wasted, and keep information from her as much as possible. Giving her extra information might even cause her to poke into dangerous situations due to lack of experience, thus encourage her to rely on someone more capable and caring like Yanagi-san. It is a lose-lose situation to work with her.

Meanwhile, for Ichika, she knew that she was dead weight, so she wanted to try and help in whatever way she can. She wanted these incidents to stop, and her hope of restoring the gun law is her main motivation in this route. Sasazuka handled the August(?) case which was the reason for this to happen, and thus he was her best shot. Enomoto's cases were to do with internal police conflict, Shiraishi was most likely a dead end, and she knew that she didn't have the ability to keep up with all cases like Yanagi. Therefore she sorted her priorities and decided to try to help Sasazuka.

Having a lot more EQ than Sasazuka, she realised early on that he was trying to do both of them a favour by not involving her. She also knows that he is extremely independant and would find her help to be intrusive, so she opted to help in the only way that would not bother him or slow him down: health support. She tries to do what she can, and hopefully would gain his trust so that she could have other ways of helping, like gathering information the slow way. For her, it's not that she likes Sasazuka over the other people or anything, it's just that she rationally did what she could for her goal to be accomplished.

Here, there is extra tension because Sasazuka is extremely frustrated and rushed because working in the police meant slow results slow action, but working alone meant less resources. People are dying by the day and he understands those deaths as a victim himself, so he wants to do something about it but it's slow. Ichika is under a lot of pressure for reasons stated earlier. Both of them are types to bottle things up and thus they kind of take it out on each other, but Ichika is more mature about the whole thing.

The love part: As to where they both start getting drawn to each other.... Sasazuka slowly opens up to Ichika who constantly tries without overly disturbing him, which makes her comfortable to be with. She respects his abilities and knows her own limits, which he can respect in turn. She might not be talented, but she is doing what she can while taking his preferences in consideration. Her care for her brother is something he admires, because he can't do the same for someone who doesn't return his affections. She...might remind him of his own mother who treated him as more important than her own life, despite him having such a troublesome personality. Thus, he wanted to help her with her brother while getting to know Sera in the process. Win-win. He knows that he is generally disliked, and thus he could test Kazuki's reactions. If he loved his sister, great. If he doesn't, then he'll tell that to Ichika upfront.

He begins to like her because he can respect her, she is gaining his trust, and most importantly, he feels comfortable around her. The last quality is something rare for him to find. (Isn't the ideal relationship being able to eat potato chips together on the couch, watching the same movie and laugh while pointing out its ridiculousness? In real life at least.)

Thus...he kissed her. Not to start a romantic relationship. It is him trying to repay her with his earnest feelings mixed in. Words wouldn't console her, then. (He also has less reservations about it because, you know, America.)

Ichika grows to like him because of his kindness and honesty she sees through his actions. His words can be aloof, but he has never truly abandoned her or led her astray while she was partners with him. He might even remind her a little of Kazuki, who is aloof and tsun as well. Since Sasazuka is opening up to her, some of her big sisterly feelings of taking care of Kazuki seeps through. She grows fond of Sasazuka, who shows more and more of his softer parts the more she gets to know him. (Please remember that she has high EQ and has a pretty good read on him. He's not that hard to read because he is quite straightforward and doesn't lie.)

He is earnest and trying his best, and thus she can respect him too. She admires him for being both diligent and being talented, but on the other hand he is terrible at wrapping his words and taking care of health. Thus, she can't leave him alone, because she admires him and grows to like him.

His support of her helps these feelings grow, and the kiss reminded her that romance yes indeed could exist. With that in mind, she also slowly realises her own feelings of protectiveness and affection towards him.

For both of them, it isn't a sweet romance purely based on love. (Though this can be said for all of the main cast except Enomoto.) For Sasazuka, it is comfort, trust and respect which led to affection. For Ichika, it is admiration, trust and caring nature that led to affection.

However, it doesn't progress to actual romantic feelings as quickly because of this foundation. Just one step short. They have mutual respect, but haven't closed enough distance to reach a deeper relationship.

Therefore, the turning point was when Ichika tried to protect Sasazuka, Sasazuka tried to protect Ichika and his trauma was dug up. This set off the last chain reaction needed for them to close the distance. Later, when Sasazuka confesses that he was morally grey, he trusts her but is also half testing her. He would never change, and he knows that, so he wants to know if she'd be disgusted or appalled. Because of how invested he was, however, he couldn't bear for her to react negatively and cut it off completely, so he made her drunk first. So that he and her both had a way out.

But...she didn't do any of that. She said that he was kind. She asked him to not go down the dark path. She...accepted him. For Sasazuka, this is more than enough reason for his feelings to tilt to romantic affection.

Then she proceeds to cry and he panics. He doesn't want someone who did all this for him to cry, and thus this memory became important for him. Important enough that he could push down the feelings of revenge, because he doesn't want her to cry. He doesn't want to make her, who helped him and accepted him despite his sewage attitude and questionable morals, to cry again.

It is for this reason that he couldn't confess to her that easily, too, which would lead to the tragic love end. He knows that he isn't the best choice and isn't good enough for her to be happy. She makes him comfortable and is special in doing this, and thus deserves the best happiness she can get. He also has the priority of destroying the remainder of Adonis, and thus...

In the good end, his feelings overrode his other wishes and his reason. Love > Respect & Reason, basically. He planned to confess to her on christmas, but she did first, and you know the rest. From then on, his affections are more open, but at his core, he is a person who isn't made of honey, so he is honest, showing his natural dry self.

For Ichika, Sasazuka confessing is a sign of trust, but also something that panics her. Her feelings progressed to love earlier than him, and she called him an idiot for being so stupid. He calls himself mean and morally grey, but she knows the kindness hidden within him. He downplays all his positive sides and says all this to her, expecting her to push him away. Are you an idiot? (I already love you!) So, don't go off to do things that will hurt yourself!

Because of this, the...Sera event affected her deeply. She knew he was on the edge. She doesn't want Sasazuka to stray off. Desperate to keep him in the side of the light, she remembered how he was troubled by her crying, and the fact that he trusted her enough to confess all that. She then threatens him with her tears because...it's the only thing that made him halt and unsure.

But ye I don't have anything more to say on her front, the rest is all in the game, go play the game you heathen!

Ichika in comparison with other routes:

To discuss this, we have to discuss what part of Ichika shines in other routes. Enomoto - Cuteness, initiative, bravery and willing to confront what he was unwilling to face. Shiraishi - She showed her will strongly. Her EQ was high and saw right through him XD. She chooses not to give up on what is precious to her no matter what. She pointed out his wrongs actively. She was so...kind. And cute. Okazaki - High EQ, figured out what Kei actually wanted. Won't take his poop reasons for using her as a reason. Refuses to give up and self sacrificing without being overly so. Cuteness. Yanagi - Willing to face reality and not run away, whether it is with Yanagi or the last boss. High EQ. Takes initiative and does what she needs to do. Shows her compassionate nature and helps Yanagi forward, together. Cuteness.

As we can see, cuteness is the common factor in all of them. She shows the same in donut's route. Nuff said.

High EQ - As shown in my rambles, she shows this very well.

Compassion - yep.

Strong will - Yep, was willing to do anything to improve the situation, even if it meant buying donuts or doing other things.

One thing I think is special to Sasazuka's route is her grasp on her own limits. She knows what she can and can't do, and that's important. It's admirable. She doesn't shove her nose into matters that aren't hers, and she listens well. She is willing to admit that she isn't capable and that's important in the real world.

As for why she might not seem as exceptional...well. It's because Sasazuka is almost never doing the wrong thing, and is always trying to improve himself. Enomoto refused to accept reality. Shiraishi was blind to what he really wanted. Okazaki wanted meaning to his life in a destructive way. Yanagi was stuck in the past and is overly compassionate, so much that he could not move to act.

Sasazuka is always acting to solve the case, is self-motivated, and is grounded in reality. He is mostly a self-completing person. Though his words are sharp, he always does what is needed. He is honest. He doesn't hide his intentions. His main flaw is his true neutral alignment which does not mesh well with his trauma. Thus, he doesn't need to be changed or forced to change like the others. So she could never assume a super active role in this relationship.

For Sasazuka, Ichika represents comfort and somewhere he could properly breathe around. She is someone he respects, and he wishes her to grow into the best version of herself. They might not be equal in ability, but their mutual understanding, respect and admiration makes them treat each other as equals.

And isn't that enough? I find that to be admirable. I think she shines just as much as in other routes, just in a more realistic way rather than an active way. Valuing a more active and interactive heroine is great and all, but I think the writing in the game captures more realistic and...explicit? Not so pure? Love relatively well.

#takeru sasazuka #ichika hoshino #collar x malice

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sacrilegiovs · 6 years ago

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( josefine frida pettersen , cisfemale , she / her , fire emblem : three houses ) * &. i know it must be scary for you , edelgard von hresvelg , after not surviving the takeover . to turn into someone like edelle hjördis , a twenty-four year-old code enforcement officer at city hall , right here in castle town . just remember that you are as ambitious as you are relentless , and to be wary , be safe , be true to who you are : neutral through and through .

hi demons it me , a piece of garbage ! this is , uh , VERY spoiler heavy so … i’m sorry ab that JSDHFNDJDHC here’s a pinterest board for edelgard tho bc i luv my daughter !!

TW. food / drinks , blood ( pinterest ) + child abuse & death ment. / trauma ( intro ) .

BEFORE CASTLE TOWN .

edelgard von hresvelg . the fourth daughter of the emperor and out of all her siblings she was the only one born with a ( minor ) crest of seiros .

however when she was nine , edie and her mother were taken by her uncle to the holy kingdom of faerghus . unbeknownst to her back home , the insurrection of the seven was taking place — reducing her father to nothing more than a political puppet . her own uncle was one of the key conspirators . though her mother eventually married the king of faerghus , edelgard continued to live with her uncle . during her time in the kingdom , edelgard befriended dimitri and the two spent a lot of time together , unaware they were step-siblings . soon after she turned twelve , edelgard returned to the empire … without her mother .

then shit got real .

imagine going home after three years only to find that your father has been stripped of his power . imagine going home after three years only to be subjected to painful experiments with your ten siblings . the adrestian nobles supported the crest experimentation performed by those who slither in the dark , no matter the cost of it . it wasn’t them or their heirs , so why should they have qualms , right ? now , imagine your father , who was rendered practically powerless , objecting and trying to stop it with all he had left … but ultimately being unable to do anything besides sit back and watch this relentless torture of his children .

all in the name of crests .

most of her siblings were driven mad or died from exhaustion . in the end , edelgard was the only one to survive and retain the sanity that had been lost by many other hresvelg siblings . because of her success , she bore a second crest now . the crest of flames , and a major one at that . due to the stress that having two crests brought , her natural brown hair turned a silvery tone .

and her view of crests , the church of seiros , and the caste system of fódlan were altered forever .

she arrived at garreg mach monastery to complete her education when she was seventeen , and was resolved to reclaim what her father had lost . her admittance marked the first time in ages since a member of the hresvelg family sent a member to the officer's academy . she would soon become the house leader of the black eagles .

sometime before meeting byleth , edelgard took on the guise of the flame emperor , and her suit used agarthan technology to heavily distort her voice for protection purposes . believing that she would have a straightforward time unifying fódlan without the future leaders of the kingdom and the alliance in her way , she hired bandits to assassinate dimitri and claude , respectively .

a quick deviation from background telling . to be honest i feel as if this act in particular highlights just how young and , ultimately , inexperienced edelgard really is — because she’s so quick to put an assassination attempt on the table . how she made a seemingly solid enough plan , yet despite everything , it still failed . we have to remember the fact she was a teenager in the beginning . a child . yes , one willing to commit murder because she saw it as the most viable option , but a child nonetheless . however , it also showcased how ruthless she can be . ruthless in the sense that she won’t stop at anything to get from point a to point b . in edelgard’s case , she felt her goals were far greater than her own personal feelings . towards dimitri , towards claude , towards … well , everyone ( as we see during the conflict of the holy tomb , specifically during the black eagles run . she didn’t want to fight her friends , but she wasn’t above giving the order to kill anyone who tried to stop them . she was already resigned to the notion that , in order to fulfill her chosen path , she needed to do things she didn’t necessarily want to do . )

ok , back to your regularly scheduled programming .

as mentioned , she needed to strategize in ways that she may not have enjoyed . teaming up with those who slither in the dark , irregardless of her own hatred and disdain for them , was a huge one . they had a common enemy : the church of seiros . and as they say , the enemy of my enemy is my friend . with full intention of turning on them once her war against the church was over , edelgard allied herself with the very people who were responsible for her trauma . for the greater good , she undoubtedly told herself . it had to be done . in my own personal view of edelgard , she’s pragmatist . meaning the church / crests / caste system were the focal point of her takedown , and what she may logically be able to achieve . she could only wage one war at a time . plus , with TWSITD believing she is an ally , in theory it would be much easier to get to them … opposed to if they were still completely in the shadows .

equality through force . it might not be the best choice , but it was a choice that edelgard considered long and hard . it’s pretty implied that edelgard believed in meritocracy ; none of that birthright bullshit that the caste system brought upon fódlan . and certainly no more crests dictating who and who wasn’t a suitable leader ( a prime example being miklan : she outright expressed sympathy towards him , even called him an impressive leader , despite not having a crest of his own . )

now i would like to point something out . actually , a few things . i recall most clearly in silver snow , it was said that edelgard DEMANDED that her father relinquished the emperor position to her , when in fact , that wasn’t necessarily correct . we can see her coronation as emperor if byleth chose to go with her when they had high enough support . if anything , her father appeared to be understanding when she convinced him . however despite the obvious antagonistic viewpoint characters had on her in silver snow , the only route she was clear-cut painted as a true villain … was azure moon . the same route it was confirmed she had many long thoughts and presumably discussions about how to proceed with her plans , before she settled upon throwing the entirety of fódlan into a war . her declaration of war against the church of seiros and all its allies was not a whim . does that make it right ? no , i don’t believe she was right for pulling everyone into that chaos . but whether she was right in the way she went about it or not , she wasn’t entirely wrong either . the church wasn’t an innocent party ! edelgard only had half truths , which can be just as dangerous as knowing everything or nothing at all , if not more .

but that all being said , i am pulling edelgard from crimson flower . because regardless of her actions , i still didn’t feel it was right to paint her solely as the villain when she wasn’t the only one who made severe mistakes . we have seen she is capable of expressing guilt and remorse for her actions . however unlike most , edelgard knows she cannot waver from the bloody path she picked . it goes back to what i said earlier , of her being resigned to the fact . personal feelings needed to be pushed aside in matters of war , especially this far into things . for her to give up would mean all this bloodshed was for nothing . she couldn’t do that . not just for her own ideals , but for fódlan itself . even speaking beyond unification under adrestia rule , it would have been worse for her to say ‘ okay no more war ’ without any resolvement , and for things to ‘ go back to the way they were ’ despite that not being a logical reality ... it would make everything cheap , like it never mattered to begin with . no , she intended to see her plans out even if it killed her .

she dug her grave and she was fully prepared to lie in it .

in crimson flower , she was lucky to survive it , and i would call the war a pyrrhic victory in any case .

after byleth abandoned the church to stay with her , edelgard organized her former classmates into an elite task force that was known as the black eagle strike force ( although BEST , black eagle strike team , was right there … an opportunity missed , i suppose ) . despite all her efforts , they spent the next five years locked in a bitter stalemate with the kingdom and the alliance . though with byleth’s return and aid , she was able to swiftly conquer the leicester alliance . instead of killing her old friend , edelgard spared claude and forced him to go into exile .

after beating back an attempt by the church to retake garreg mach , edelgard began military operations against faerghus in earnest . she first conquered arianrhod , a fortress on the western border between adrestia and faerghus . afterwards , she began a direct march for fhirdiad . dimitri and rhea moved to intercept her at the tailtean plains , but rhea was driven off and dimitri was slain in battle * — an execution by her own hands .

the group finally arrived in fhirdiad , and rhea ordered the city burned to the ground in order to slow them down and transforms into her ultimate form , the immaculate one . edelgard , byleth , and the black eagle strike force engaged her in battle . ultimately , the empire emerged victorious and rhea was slain . with all of fódlan under adrestia's dominion , edelgard finally began the reforms she always wanted to bring to the nobility and the crest system , and began a silent war against those who slither in the dark . *

( * - basically just copypasta from her wiki because i didn’t feel like rewriting it JDHBSFCBHDHN )

AFTER CASTLE TOWN .

the memories of edelle hjördis are different . edelgard von hresvelg doesn’t exist , and there’s no reason for edelle to believe otherwise … right ?

the only child of a well-known politician , edelle is expected to follow his footsteps . and she did , sort of . it’s on a smaller scale for now , working as a code enforcement officer at city hall — she says it’s a stepping stone , solidifying groundwork for the bigger leagues . if she ever gets there . code enforcement isn’t easy in any capacity , and it renders her particularly busy .

everything is fine .

yet she can’t help feeling like there are missing pieces . like maybe somewhere , somehow , she has siblings in some form . like a hidden family that her father keeps secret from her and prying eyes of public media . maybe it’s all loneliness carved from parental absence . a scenario created in her mind to ease her from the gnawing feeling of solitude . that must be it — there’s no other explanation .

everything is alright .

there’s this dream that haunts her so frequently . perhaps if she finds a name to the face , she can lay him to rest properly . there’s an indescribable sorrow that follows the execution of this man — one she doesn’t understand , one she doesn’t know if she even wants to understand — but it’s one she can’t seem to shake . it’s persistent and makes its presence known in her mind , and all she wants is for it to vanish . farewell , king of delusion . she remembers saying those words ( was it truly her ? ) in this vision . she doesn’t know how it can be real , it’s impossible , but it’s as if her hands were sticky with metaphorical blood that never leaves . her stomach churns in response if she thinks too much of it , so she tries to ignore it . it doesn’t easily work , but she has to try .

she remembers taking classes at castle town university as a political science major . in rare moments , she found herself doodling little portraits of people — not that they were really any good , or that she even showed anyone . but if someone looked at the back of her notebooks , they can surely find a badly drawn figure or two .

she doesn’t know what this weird crown is that she randomly has ?? unbeknownst to her , it was her — edelgard’s — crown as adrestia’s emperor . she just … had it one day , and that was that . it’s hidden in her closet at home , as she’s unsure of what to do with it . curiosity bested her a few times and yes , she has tried it on for size . it fits almost too perfectly , like it was meant for her . there’s something missing . there’s always something missing . edelle can never figure out what , though .

all in all , despite the differences , edelle is still as ambitious and relentless at achieving her goals as edelgard was . only thing is , she doesn’t realize the extent of it . stubborn until the very end , edelle can be described as a workaholic for the most part , but there are peaceful moments where she takes time for herself and those who manage to get close to her .

uh idk what else to write so that’s it for now . we’ll see what happens in the future .

FUN FACTS .

edelle’s birthday is june 22nd , aka canonly edelgard’s birthday ( 22nd of the garland moon ) , which makes her a cancer sun . as a cancer rising and water sign sun in general , myself , i’m really not surprised . this is kinda self drag lol but water signs are notorious for being manipulative and knowing when to use the cards to their advantage , and that’s exactly what edelgard does .

although this being said and being the astrology heaux i am , if i had to assign her moon + rising signs , i would probably say capricorn moon ( show a lot of initiative , in it to win it . do not want to feed into another’s beliefs about victim-hood . can excel in things that require cold blood and seriousness . ) and scorpio rising ( likely to experience life as a constant series of obstacles or crises . confronting darkness in the outside world through facing extreme situations . others may find you somewhat inscrutable , mysterious or just hard to read ; likely to play your cards close to your chest . )

she’s still 5ft 2in .. we love the shorties in this house , ok !

unlike edelgard whose hair was originally brown , edelle always had her signature white hair . although .. she does have a slightly “ goddess green ” tint if you look at her character portraits closely . personally i believe it’s due to her crest of flames , since the color is vaguely reminiscent of sothis-byleth .

the mention of her drawing little pictures of people comes from the fact she drew a portrait of byleth in crimson flower ,,,

nightmares by all time low was another song i had in mind for edelgard , i won’t even lie ...

#castletown:intro #child abuse tw/#child death tw/

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dweemeister · 6 years ago

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Joker (2019)

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot and nearly killed United States President Ronald Reagan, wounded a police officer and Secret Service agent, and permanently disabled Press Secretary James Brady (whose death in 2014 was ruled a homicide from the gunshot wound thirty-three years prior). Found not guilty due to insanity, Hinckley obsessed over Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) while planning his actions. Like Taxi Driver’s protagonist Travis Bickle, Hinckley plotted to assassinate a famous politician. Besotted with Jodie Foster (who starred in Taxi Driver) and disappointed by not attracting her attention after stalking her, Hinckley planned the assassination attempt to impress the actress.

Hinckley and Taxi Driver were both on my mind when watching Todd Phillips’ Joker. Not only do they share thematic connective tissue and similar color palettes, but both films have been plagued by discourse about whether they will inspire someone to commit horrific violence – I respect Taxi Driver as one of the best films released in the 1970s, but it is not something I could rewatch easily. Filmmakers, indeed, should have a sense of social responsibility in their creations. Joker, as a character study first and foremost, paints its politics in broad strokes – preferring to submerge, as character studies should, the audience into the mindset of its protagonist. Joker invites the audience to empathize with a tortured soul who, failed by the state and refusing to hold himself responsible for his worst actions, consciously moves beyond redemption. That point, where the Joker is beyond redemption, is found where Batman fans know him best: murdering only to see if that murder is funny. Whether he reaches that point within the bounds of this film is up for debate.

It is 1981 in Gotham City. The city belches with urban malaise. A garbage collectors’ strike roils the city; socioeconomic inequality is rife; “Super Rats” plague the streets; the municipal services are overwhelmed. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown-for-hire living and caring for his aging mother, Penny (Frances Conroy). Money is sparse and one of the few joys Arthur and Penny have is Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro in a role not far removed from his turn in 1983′s The King of Comedy) primetime talk show. Arthur suffers from random paroxysms of laughter (a real-life affliction known as emotional incontinence, among other names) that, at the very least, invites disdainful looks from strangers who then avoid him. Arthur is seeking help for his depression and other unspoken problems, but Gotham’s social services are soon defunded by the city government and various other events force him to his breaking point.

Also featured in this film are Arthur’s hallway neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and cameos from Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a young Bruce Wayne (Dante Pereira-Olson), and Alfred Pennyworth (Douglas Hodge).

The film does not glorify any of its hideous violence, but those who are not critical consumers of media will interpret this film how they will. Nevertheless, Joker is less on the side of its protagonist than the likes of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and will likely result in a similar reverence once this film has exited theaters. Within the film’s confines, there is nothing surprising about any of its violence; how the violence happens is shocking in its immediacy and realistic ferocity. It is contextualized as being the inevitable result of a sociopolitical system that cares not for the downtrodden, the mentally ill – to reiterate, Phillips is painting with broad political strokes. Arthur, who keeps on seeking professional help and ways to quell his silent rage, is attempting to stay his destructive behaviors long after his first homicide (as the film does not glorify violence, it also does not target those with mental illness; it directs its ire towards those without sympathy for the mentally ill). Those efforts are stymied by factors beyond his control – an almost-plot twist to shock even ardent Batman fans, the idolization of an unnamed clown who has executed three members or accomplices of Gotham’s elite.

It is here that Joker separates itself from the social cynicism and post-Vietnam War disillusionment and of Taxi Driver; it is here that Philipps’ film becomes just as much a reflection of the era it was released in and the nation of its origin as Scarface (1932 original with Paul Muni), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and The Dark Knight (2008) once did. Those films respectively capitalized on fears of Italian and Irish mafias making urban centers their criminal playgrounds, countercultural diehards claiming free-wheeling Jazz Age outlaws as their own, and a vast surveillance state crafted to declare war on terrorism. For Joker, the societal diagnosis by Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (2010′s The Fighter) is double-sided, damning those with and without power. The film decries individuals and groups who deify charismatic or compelling figures claiming their actions and/or rhetoric to be indicative of the common person’s interests. These revered figures incorporate grievance into their persona, weaponizing the language of victimhood not only to bring attention and (justifiably or unjustifiably) force change on a problem, but to absolve themselves of their personal sins. They are, dare it be written, populists. Beware those who invoke “the people” to vindicate their crusades.

Arthur Fleck, as an underemployed clown, does not ask for the attention of the masses. He wishes, “to bring laughter and joy to the world,” yet finds fulfillment in making a handful of children’s hospital patients smile. During Arthur’s first appearance as Joker, he assumes the accidental and public mantle that has set Gotham aflame – legitimizing the homicides he has committed and the public’s brutalization of authority figures by playing victim. He is consumed in self-pity; his words become a simplistic screed. Notice how appealing his words are, how rapidly rhetorical animosity precludes political violence. In Joker’s darkest sequence, the protagonist will destroy the last remnants of Arthur Fleck and become the popular icon of violent upheaval rarely seen in any of his depictions in DC Comics. This is Joker at its most dangerous, if only because of how violence – whether in oppression or in resistance – is as integral to the United States as political compromise.

We hear these beats of populism elsewhere, too, mixed with capitalist can-do. It is present in Thomas Wayne’s television appearance announcing his candidacy for Mayor of Gotham City – “I alone can fix it,” this man of wealth implies. This is a departure from otherwise sympathetic depictions of Bruce Wayne’s father over the decades in Batman comic books. As a plot development, it (along with the “almost-plot twist”) seems unnecessary if only to ground Joker in the Batman mythos. Contrast this to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where ill-intentioned, humorless capitalists operating within the military-industrial complex are repelled by the wisecracking “good” capitalists within that same system (see: Tony Stark). Murray Franklin, as a talk show host, concocts a scheme to bolster his ratings by humiliating someone in a worse life station – no background checks needed, let alone any semblance of attempting to understand his subject. Thus, Gotham is subject to personality- and grievance-based politics wrung through the corporate avarice of Network (1976). Joker may not have to space to critique capitalism in its entirety – it is a character study, after all – but the entire apple barrel seems spoiled here.

The least controversial element of Joker is Joaquin Phoenix’s magnificent lead performance. Phoenix has made a living playing men whose lives contend with inner turmoil and unsympathetic worlds. His work in The Master (2012) remains has career-defining role, but as Arthur Fleck and as Joker – through the pained laughter spells, his bodily contortions with his ribcage jutting from his frame, and a brooding nature tempered by an initial gentleness – this will be the role that crosses artistic and popular boundaries that segregate filmmaking. Phoenix may now be defined by this role, as Cesar Romero (a solid contract actor for 20th Century Fox despite being typecast as a Latin lover) and the late Heath Ledger (whose work in The Dark Knight overshadows the rest of his filmography) have been.

Director Todd Phillips, best known for The Hangover series, does an excellent job making Gotham City a character. So often consigned to be the faceless and unfortunate city wracked by domestic terrorism from curiously-named villains, never in a film has Gotham seemed like a place with its own history and haunts. The scenes on mass transit alone sell the city. Phillips’ indulgence for slow-motion (with cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fawning camerawork) during dance sequences and almost constant dollying can be irritating. One montage between Arthur Fleck and Sophie – specifically, when he enters her apartment, confirming how unreliable a narrator he is – displays a lack of trust in the audience to make their own inferences.

Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir has crafted a score for her second film for a major American studio. Guðnadóttir’s career has been defined by an unpleasant mix of bass strings, percussion, and synth, droning repetitively, lacking the emotional catharsis that the films she has worked on are striving for. Her work on Joker is an improvement, but this is as difficult a listen as Joker is to watch. The score is almost entirely texture, not melody – melody is for those older films with sugary sentiment and Hollywood endings that do not reflect life’s ugliness, we are increasingly told. Outside of those with an ear for experimental classical music or instrumental music that groans amelodic passages rather than combining lyrical voices, this music has almost no life outside of the movie. Finally, Guðnadóttir’s style fits the film she has scored for.

As a psychological character piece, the only way that Joker could have secured a wide theatrical release in 2019 would be to tie it to bankable comic book lore. Even as Phillips pitched the idea, Joker faced stiff resistance from Warner Bros. executives – including former chairman Kevin Tsujihara and Greg Silverman – who still had the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado on their minds (that tragedy took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises). Warner Bros. noting how poorly Zack Snyder’s vision of DC Comics adaptations was faring, needed to extricate itself from Snyder’s adolescent approach.

In the months before Joker’s release and even within the film, Warner Bros. has embraced its past. Of all of Hollywood’s major studios, Warners always seems to be the most conscious and celebratory of its history*. During the 1930s, Warner Bros. became known for the darker content of its films (its rivals MGM, Paramount, and Fox preferred spectacle, maximizing production values, and prestige pictures). The studio became the spiritual home of the gangster film and hardboiled dramas that pushed the boundaries of violence in American cinema – but not for the sake of depicting violence. Even in their musicals (a genre stereotyped as pure escapism), Warner Bros. layered progressive social commentary amid economic depression. Joker – though its own commentary could be more focused and succinct – inherits the legacy of The Public Enemy (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and its numerous Warner Bros. ancestors.

How curious that a drama with origins from superhero comic books has been little praised for not following the assembly line production methods of numerous films from similar source material. Cinephiles fret, correctly, that movie theaters are becoming a home to superheroes/villains and explicitly-for-children animated features to the exclusion of everything else. The mid-budget character piece is endangered; certain genres have vanished from theater marquees. Joker, to some consternation, has it both ways. It is an excellent, arguably irresponsible, work to be seen with wary eyes.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

* Okay, okay you classic film buffs who have already recognized Joker’s references. Modern Times (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937) are from United Artists and RKO, respectively. But both films have long been part of Warners’ library by acquisition.

#Joker #Todd Phillips #Joaquin Phoenix #Robert De Niro #Zazie Beetz #Frances Conroy #Brett Cullen #Douglas Hodge #Dante Pereira Olson #Glenn Fleshler #Scott Silver #Lawrence Sher #Hildur Gudnadottir #My Movie Odyssey

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abbottsharma57-blog · 6 years ago

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Articles, Tagged With "New Business".

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glitchinthesystemspiderbyte · 7 years ago

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[38] Glitch in the System - The Sound of Silence (Crossroads pt. 1)

By E.

A 3-parter based on a prompt by @thatoneshortbandgeek. It’s not EXACTLY what you asked, but we have a similar story in the works so I tweaked a few details. Hope you enjoy it! :)

Some hard truth happens. _

“You’re sending me to go get paperwork?”

Sombra stood before Akande, face contorted in indignation. It had been almost a month since their failed infiltration, and she’d beenatoning ever since. She got it; she fucked up. Even she agreed that she fucked up. What else did she need to do to prove her penitence?

Akande sat at his desk, fingers steepled in a typical show of removed professionalism, regarding her distantly. “I am. Locate, acquire, and destroy. That’s your mission.”

She looked at him petulantly, reflexively unwilling to perform a task so glaringly below her abilities. “You want me to scan a repository of old files,” she repeated slowly back to him, “and then what - set it on fire? Tear them up piece by piece?”

“I am certain you’ll figure out a creative method for removing the evidence,” he replied evenly, unfazed by her annoyance. “Once you have acquired digital copies.”

“Then you need an omnic and a cleaning crew, Akande, not me.”

“I want you on this mission specifically, Sombra,” he insisted, not cracking in the slightest.

“I’m the world’s best hacker.”

“And the world’s worst teammate,” he replied without missing a beat. The tide of guilt she’d been slowly dealing with over the past few weeks, that she’d tried to ignore for the sake of the holidays, came flooding back from the cave she’d banished it to. It was, perhaps, the only thing strong enough to override her indignation at the task given her: collect literal paperwork from a thousand-year-old German castle Talon once employed as a base of operations in its post-Omnic Crisis infancy. It wasn’t even important paperwork - Akande just wanted someone to clean up an old mess, and was using it as a way for her to prove her loyalty. Truth was, as always, that she didn’t give two shits about Talon, but she did care about Widowmaker, and right now she couldn’t see much of a difference between the two.

She took a deep breath to steady her voice.

“Fine.”

The trip was easy, but long. So as to avoid any unwanted attention, Akande sent her on a train from Venice through the north of Italy, then Austria, before eventually landing in a small secluded village in the northwest of Germany. It was a 15 hour ride and she’d thought that, perhaps, it would have afforded her a nice break. It was almost like a vacation, and it may have even been enjoyable had she not been dining on a steady diet of frustration, boredom, and guilt. The country was vibrant and the weather ideal as she curled up in an isolated train car, and instead of the respite she’d hoped for, all she could think about was how badly she’d screwed the pooch.

She should have just taken a plane anyway and gotten it over with.

The castle was not difficult to get to, but it also wasn’t a particularly easy trip, either. It was not a tourist destination so much as a place that saw occasional foot traffic, and as a result had largely functioned as a historical site maintained by locals with some funding from the government for the past several decades. It had little to offer in the way of intel and even less to offer in the way of a challenge.

Sighing, Sombra hiked her bag up onto her shoulder and stepped inside the grounds.

If nothing else, the castle was a sight to behold: huge and strangely colorful with sharp angles both inside and out. There was none of the carnage here that had destroyed most of Germany; just typical entropy found in a building that had been standing for a very, very long time. Still, it was a picture of symmetry typical of Renaissance architecture, and something about the stark geometric framework appealed to the hacker’s logical mind. Were she not so deeply frustrated with having to be there in the first place, she may have been inclined to spend more time exploring its depths. As it was, however, she planned on getting in and out as quickly as she could.

“Hello?” she called out, expecting there to be a guard or two stationed at the front door. Akande had implied that she might face some minor resistance, but hand waved it away as “nothing you can’t handle.” Usually, that meant she had carte blanche permission to shut up any witnesses on a permanent basis, but after loudly making her presence known, there didn’t appear to be anyone in the building, so she continued on with only the smallest nod to caution.

The stonework stairs were crumbling - not dangerously, but unappealingly so. Sombra had never been a fan of ancient history. It was cold, dead, and the stories housed within the stone foundations were secrets she couldn’t hope to extract through manipulation or interfacing. The world around her was silent, and there was nothing Sombra hated more than information she couldn’t take for herself.

Looking at the map Gabriel had drawn - literally - on a piece of paper, she couldn’t help but think that this entire mission was just one giant, frustrating trick. Give the hacker a paper map and send her into a glorified library to bring back information that was so unimportant no one had bothered to transcribe it into digital form? She hadn’t thought Gabriel to be quite so petty, but they’d found their personalities intersected in stranger ways before.

Frowning and turning the paper around, she found her general location on the map and headed down the stairs.

The subterranean basement was dark, damp, and deeply uncomfortable. Sombra kept her hand on the wall to guide her until she hit a patch of slime that nearly made her retch; after that, she simply activated her screens and used the light coming off them to better illuminate her passage.

“Thank God,” she muttered as she cleared the last step and into a dimly lit corridor. Someone had strung up a basic network of electric lights. Waving her screens away, she squinted at the map again and continued on.

The archive was easy enough to find: it was the most modern-looking room, with a sign on the door reading “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.”

“That’s me,” she sighed, tentatively pushing it open with her palm, wary of reprising the previous slime situation. The door was dry, and she proceeded inside where she immediately noticed that there were boxes and loose papers lying around the room.

Everywhere.

“Well, I’ve come this far,” she sighed. Pulling a chair over from the wall to sit at the desk, she got to work.

Trying to make the best of what was far from an ideal situation, she glanced over the paperwork before her. It was mostly blueprints and old personnel reports filled with names and places that were unimportant to her, but apparently important to Talon. There had to be something in there. Penitence aside, they wouldn’t send her out for nothing. She scanned them dutifully, setting the data aside for the long trip home in which she’d have more than enough time to parse over any nuggets of interesting intel that might be located therein. For the time being, though, she was just a collection bot: flip, scan, store, destroy, repeat.

She worked for hours, diligently marking and shredding the documents she’d looked over while pointedly ignoring the sheer number she hadn’t gotten to yet. Sorting through the papers, she couldn’t keep her exasperated sighs to herself, even though there was no one around to appreciate them. The things she did for…

Well, she wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing this, but here she was regardless.

She was starting to get hungry and considered packing it in for the day and taking a trip to the village for dinner when she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps echoing down the barren hall.

“Finally,” she hissed under her breath, unholstering her weapon. “Thought the only casualty in this little adventure was going to be me.”

She stayed at the desk, unconcerned about the approaching footsteps. Flipping through the paperwork before her, she didn’t even bother looking up when the door opened; she just pointed her gun and yawned.

“I’ll be out of here in a moment, amigo,” she said, scanning in one final paper. When she looked up, she expected to see a terrified guard.

Instead she found herself face to face with three Vishkar.

“Huh,” she said, dropping her weapon in the face of the vastly superior firepower now aimed at her. “Well, shit.”

They put her in the dungeon; in one of the cold, barred cells dotting the subterranean catacombs of the castle. It would have been hilarious had it been anyone else, in any other situation, and with any other niche. Instead, it was perfect, if only in its efficacy in keeping the hacker locked up with no real manner of escaping.

Turns out technology didn’t exist 1000 years ago. Who’d have thought?

Despite this knowledge, Sombra ran her hands along the walls, searching for any frequency at all, any remodeled tech to latch into and exploit, but what she found was pitiful at best. The thick walls of the castle and the remoteness of their location were really cramping her style. She was certain there must have been tech there at some point, but the castle had been unused for so long that it looked as though someone had forgotten to pay the wifi bill. Despite her best efforts, she found nothing save for some tendrils of a connection coming from the village and her own ineffective hot spot hitting dead air.

Still, it was something, and Sombra prided herself in making even the worst situation work in her favor. Using every ounce of finesse she had, she managed, for a brief moment, to hitch onto some connection and make the link to Talon.

“Hey, guys?” she said into her ear piece, reminding herself to be succinct in case the tenuous line she’d leeched onto dropped. “I’m kind of in the shit.”

“Sombra?” came the raspy voice, made harsher by the terrible connection. “What’s wrong?”

Sombra held back a shout of joy. “Gabe? Thank God, there’s practically no connection here. I’m going to need an extraction.”

There was a pause Sombra wasn’t sure to attribute to the poor connection or the palpable incredulity emanating through the call. “You need an extraction,” Gabriel said, voice dry, “from an 11th century medieval castle?”

“They put me in the dungeon. It’s embarrassing.”

She could hear him pinching the bridge of his nose. “You need an extraction from the dungeon of an 11th century medieval castle?”

“I mean I’m not exactly happy about it, but -” “What did you do?”

Sombra frowned, still on her tiptoes and struggling against a growing cramp in her foot. “What do you mean? I did as you asked, Gabe - I went into the woodland of Germany to dig through old papers.”

“I mean what else did you do?” he asked, the unspoken again ringing in her ears.

“What else?” she said, her elation at having reached her team shifting abruptly into anger. “Nothing. I followed the plan, Gabe. Your plan, if I remember correctly. To the T, in fact. No variations on a theme, no heroics, no deceit - I did everything I was told and you sent me into a sleeping den of Vishkar.”

“Vishkar?” he asked, and she could hear him beginning another sentence when their connection was abruptly cut off.

“Ya valió madres,” she hissed, wishing she had something to slam down in anger. She settled for a petulant kick at the dungeon wall, immediately loosing a cascade of dirt and stones. For a moment she wondered if she could somehow dig herself to freedom, but the thought passed as quickly as it had arisen when she realized she was a hacker with no tools and not an excavator.

Finally giving up, she groaned loudly and flopped to the floor, doing what she could to ignore the cold, filthy ground and the chill in the castle air. One of the Vishkar had set up a teleporter, and the glowing portal lay just beyond her reach, the closeness of the lifesaving tech frustrating her all the more. She didn’t know her captors well enough to know whether this had been performed as an act of pettiness or not, but the result was the same regardless. Sombra was, without question, deeply annoyed.

Even worse: she was bored.

With little else to choose from, she began sifting through the files she’d scanned in from the store room, idly flipping through them one after the other, not paying much attention to them as they passed until one in particular caught her eye. She paused after flipping past it, scanning backwards to reexamine it. It was a photograph from the early years of Talon’s infrastructure, showing all the formative members around a table.

And there, at the center, next to Moira O’Deorain and Maximilian, was Sanjay.

“No mames,” she exclaimed under her breath, fingers flying as she cross-referenced the old photo with the rest of her database. Of course she’d suspected it - she’d been through Talon’s database ten times by that point - but she’d never seen actual, undeniable proof.

It was almost enough to distract her from the rumbling her her stomach. Cackling to herself, she perused the rest of the files, bookmarking things to come back to and backing everything up when she was done. Maybe this little trip had borne fruit after all. All she needed now was to get out and savor it.

It seemed like forever before she finally heard the soft whoosh of the teleporter being activated. A woman stepped through: tall, elegant, head held high as the man who came after her spoke in low tones, all the while casting Sombra several not so subtle looks.

“Thik hai,” the man said, sighing loudly enough that Sombra could hear him, “lekin jaldi karo.”

“Zarur,” she replied. The man looked over at her once more before stepping back into the teleporter, the ethereal blue mist within grasping his body and pulling him out of sight in the space of a second.

The woman approached her cell with little concern, knowing full well Sombra was harmless in her current state. Her gun, of course, had been taken, and there was little she could do about her situation. Her translocators were too big to fit through the bars and she certainly wasn’t squeezing out herself. No, she was right and truly stuck, and it was obvious to an embarrassing degree.

“Sombra,” she said, hands clasped behind her back. “It appears as though you are somewhat - how should I say?” She paused, tapping her chin. “Ah, yes. Impotent, in your current situation.”

“You don’t have to be crass about it.”

Satya smiled; her mouth set in a thin, pert line that was equal parts prim and pretentious. “I would have figured the world’s greatest hacker might be a bit more difficult to capture.”

“Yeah, well, I would have figured the world’s greatest hacker wouldn’t be digging through dead trees for data no one actually gives a shit about, and yet here we are,” she said, standing and walking slowly toward the cage, emphasizing each step. “Face. To. Face.”

Curling her hands around the bars, she brought her face as close as she could get to the gap between them, smiling mischievously. “You know we can talk a lot more easily without these bars in the way,” she said, tapping her nails against them as she spoke. “Woman to woman. Let me look at that fancy teleporter over there.” She nodded her head at the glowing portal and winked. “Oye, I could make it sing for you, Satya.”

The woman flinched at her name, looking at her with such a deep distaste that Sombra couldn’t help but laugh. “What did I ever do to you?” the hacker asked, half facetiously. She knew what she’d done and she knew why the Architech wanted to speak with her.

“You stole my technology.”

At least they were on the same page.

“Stole is such a harsh word. You clearly still have it,” she said, pointing through the bars at the teleporter. “So what’s the big deal?”

Satya was trying her best to remain impassive, but the physical effort it was taking to maintain her composure ruined any chance of her appearing nonplussed. She took a step closer, hands still held stoically behind her back, approaching just within Sombra’s reach. Sombra had no intention of harming her, but Satya didn’t know that. It was a power move.

“You took my creation,” she said, hitting each dental with the harsh plosive nature of her native tongue. “You took it and you changed it.”

Sombra narrowed her eyes thoughtfully at the Architech, assessing the creases in her brow and the slow dawning anger in her face for the truth behind her words. It was there, dancing in the cracks of her expression - she just needed to catch it.

“Sí, verdad - a few tweaks here, some alterations to the base code and hard light structure. I just fixed a couple errors was all,” she said, shrugging casually while keeping her eyes fixed to the woman’s face. “Nothing’s perfect.”

It was the final jab, she figured, that got far enough under Satya’s skin that her true feelings showed. Her expression flickered the slightest bit, her eyes shifting for just long enough for the hacker to realize what was actually bothering her.

It was not that Sombra had stolen her tech; it was that she had deigned to improve upon it.

“I mastered the art of manipulating hard light,” Satya said, voice low and steady, but with a nearly-imperceptible quaver to it that Sombra picked out like the melody of a complicated orchestral piece. “There were no ‘errors.’”

Sombra laughed, stepping back from the bars to place her hands on her hips and regard the woman with no small amount of incredulity. “And people say I’m conceited.” She smirked, leaning against the wall to continue picking the Architech’s brain. “Tech is only as good as the user; I just needed it to work harder for me is all. Don’t get bent out of shape about it.”

“Its purpose is to help those who cannot help themselves,” Satya maintained, her course set. “To further the Vishkar goal of creating a better world.”

“A better world, huh? Like the favela you leveled in Brazil?” she laughed, and this time Satya didn’t even try to hide her surprise. “Good job there, by the way. Talon loved that. Really sowed some discontent among the masses. Something to pick at down the line.” Looking down at her nails, she shrugged as she casually dropped her bomb. “Helps having friends among the Vishkar, I suppose.”

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, her arms crossed now. Sombra watched the movement of the jewelry dangling around her wrist, a subtle fashionable departure from the austere nature of the Vishkar uniform.

The hacker regarded her for a long moment, trying to figure out how best to leverage what she was about to say next. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said at last, testing the woman’s investment in their little chat, and seeing just how easily she was baited by the promise of a good secret.

Satya, she could tell, did not want to bite. She remained silent, regarding Sombra coldly for a long time. It was only the two of them there, though, and she really had little choice in the matter unless she wanted to engage in a standoff she couldn’t hope to win.

“What?”

Sombra grinned, pushing off the wall again to get closer to the other woman. She tossed her hair and crossed her arms to mirror her. “Sanjay,” she said, raising one notched eyebrow to enunciate her words, “sits on the board of Talon.”

“Chup raho.”

Sombra shrugged, inferring the meaning of her words by the sharpness of her tone and the blaze of anger in her eyes. “No one ever appreciates when I tell them the truth.”

Satya shook her head and looked away, but before she did, Sombra could see a glimmer of doubt in her expression. There was something keeping her from completely disregarding the hacker’s words; something she remembered that made her think, perhaps, there was a grain of truth to what she was saying. It reminded her of the time she played Zaryanova like a pawn, watching the light of reluctant realization dawn in her eyes as she tore down her idol in one quick truth. It just never, ever got old.

Yet again, the seed of doubt had been planted, and Sombra was going to have one hell of a time watching it sprout from afar.

If she ever got out of there, of course.

“You are lying.” “Usually, yeah, but not this time.” Sombra shook her head. “That was a really good one, too, and you got it for free. Can a girl get some dinner in exchange for international secrets, maybe?”

“No.”

“Cruel,” Sombra sighed. “Anyway, if you need some proof, I can give it to you. Just say the word.”

“I do not need your ‘proof,’” Satya said after a long pause, not looking at Sombra as she spoke, and not waiting for her to respond. She turned abruptly and stepped through the portal, leaving Sombra alone with her thoughts and nursing a particularly vehement curiosity.

“See you soon,” she chuckled. Smiling to herself, she sat down on the ground and waited.

*Read from the beginning or check out our intro post! All stories tagged under #glitchfic. Table of contents located here.

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amitbwadhwani · 4 years ago

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Whither RERA? Three years on, rough edges need ironing out

The Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) was brought in to crack the whip on dodgy builders taking unsuspecting homebuyers for a ride. The results are mixed

In March, 2016, Parliament voted into law the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act—RERA—a legislation that held out the promise of placing consumers at the center of a new rules-based framework for India’s property market.

RERA, midwifed by two governments—UPA II and the NDA II—between 2009 and the 2016, was necessitated by the growing misery of tens of thousands of harried homebuyers.

Unsuspecting individual customers often complained about getting the short end of the stick, as many builders, some dodgy and some reputed, exploited regulatory gaps by not delivering promised apartments on time or reneging on size and quality, or sometimes, simply vanishing after collecting funds.

RERA’s primary purpose, apart from defining rules, was to build trust among buyers and builders in a market where opaque deals thriving in grey payment systems operating outside the legitimate financial system had become commonplace.

For instance, customers would often find that the actual size of an apartment would be about 30% smaller than what was originally promised. The reason: “super built up area”, an arbitrary concept that builders used to charge customers for shared spaces such as common passage area, stairs and other areas.

Fund diversion had become a rampant practice in the realty sector. Many builders, large and small, would collect money from consumers for apartments, a part of which would then be channeled to buy land for another project. The net effect: never-ending project delays. This was going on without any checks and balances, and builders had developed the `consumers- be-damned’ attitude. For the banking sector too lending to realty projects became a risky proposition, as project delays resulted in mounting loan defaults.

RERA was brought in to address these. Three years later, experts reckon, the results, at best, are mixed.

RERA RULES

Under RERA, builders are required to disclose details of “carpet area”, which is the actual apartment’s size, design, structure, layout, time of completion and other project specifications well in advance.

The rules make it mandatory for any project exceeding 500 square metres with eight or more apartments to register with a state’s real estate regulatory authority (RERA) before launching or even advertising a housing scheme.

Also read: Where’s my house? NCR’s Notorious Construction Record

Registration of real estate agents or brokers have also been made mandatory with clear responsibilities and functions. The punitive provisions include de-registration of the project. If the builder defaults on promises made at the time of the launch, the buyer can approach consumer fora in case of disputes with real estate developers. The penal measures were aimed at serving as a deterrent for builders to short change customers and ensure timely project delivery.

It is also now mandatory for builders to park 70% of funds collected from buyers in an escrow account, implying that these funds can only be withdrawn for the specific project for which these were collected.

Under the central law, each state was required to set up its own RERA that can draw upon central rules applicable in union territories.

Maharashtra was the first off the block with MahaRera in May 2017, with other states soon following suit with their own institutions.

MORE THAN A REGISTERING BODY

RERA’s role is not limited to just as a registering agency for realty projects, but was designed to evolve into a body empowered to even complete stuck projects or even allow buyers’ groups to take over unfinished projects.

Three years later, experts say, RERA’s record on this front remains below par. The RERA Act’s Section 8 empowers the authority, buyers’ association or an appropriate government organisation to execute unfinished projects, but arranging funds and buyers’ cooperation remain a critical challenge.

The Amrapali Group, which has unfinished projects peppered across Noida and Greater Noida, is a case in point. The Supreme Court, which which is hearing a batch of pleas of 42,000 home buyers against the embattled group for failing to give the possession of flats, had asked the Noida and Greater Noida Authorities whether they will be able to complete the projects. The authorities responded that they did not have the capability to handle projects of such big scale, but suggested that perhaps UP RERA could take these up.

“While it (UP RERA) certainly cannot complete projects by itself, it can find appropriate solutions by approaching competent authorities or even appoint a project management consultant to finish these,” said Kumar Mihir, lawyer, representing Amrapali homebuyers.

LEAKING ESCROW

Sound as it may appear on paper, in practice, however, too many instances of leaks in builders’ escrow accounts have come to light.

“The problem in most cases has arisen not because of shortage of funds but because monies collected from homebuyers have been siphoned off. This is because builders have exploited gaps in RERA rules of some states. For instance, the Uttar Pradesh RERA rules do not mandate parking funds in an escrow account for projects that started before May 1, 2017. Had it applied to all ongoing projects before May 1, 2017 the funding for most of the incomplete RERA projects would have been sorted,” said a lawyer who did not wish to be identified.

The RERA rules framed for the union territories had categorically stated that promoters of ongoing projects are required to set aside 70% of funds collected for specific project in a separate escrow account.

Some states such as Uttarakhand, Orissa and Bihar have adopted the central RERA rules. Maharashtra and Gujarat rules stipulate that only 70 percent of funds collected in the future, after May 01, 2017, have to be kept aside in an escrow account. The Uttar Pradesh RERA rules are silent, which builders have taken advantage of to siphon off funds.

BUYERS AS BUILDERS

Exasperated buyers are now beginning to come forward to turn builders themselves. RERA rules allow this and the few cases, if successfully tested, can well serve as the proof of concept for this model.

The Maharashtra real estate regulator has already come with a standard operating procedure (SOP) that allowed homebuyers to remove a developer in case the project is not completed on time.

The SOP allows a homebuyers’ association that enjoys the backing of at least 51 percent of its members to remove the developer from a much-delayed project. It even empowers the association to even cancel the developer’s registration under the MahaRERA Act.

Last year, the UP RERA decided to consider a proposal by defrauded homebuyers to take over and complete a project in Noida that had been delayed by several years.

“Prima facie, this appears to be an excellent move and will also set a very good precedent. But, it is also very important to know (a) how the project will be funded and (b) if the builder has taken more money than what work has been done by him and how RERA plans to recover the excess money from him,” said Abhay Upadhyay, President, Forum For People's Collective Efforts.

Experts, however, sounded a caveat. Authorities taking over incomplete projects should be an exception, rather than a norm because under RERA a builder should adhere to the rules, with strict penalties for violation. Also, it may be difficult for RERA to undertake a project from scratch.

“Doing something from scratch is very difficult. We will not advise it. It all depends on the size of the project and should be taken up on a case-to-case basis. It is not something that can be applied across the board,” said a lawyer who did not wish to be identified.

CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

RERA’s institutionalisation was predicated upon customer centricity. The state bodies were expected to play the role of a strict referee that would instill the fear of law among deceitful builders.

Three years later, customers say, the job remains half done. The two main issues that homebuyers face today are to do with lack of confidence about execution of RERA orders by realty companies, and multiple forums for grievance redressal.

A mere RERA registration does not guarantee that a project will be delivered on time. An under-construction project, therefore, continues to remain a risky bet despite RERA.

“This is because RERA authorities are not taking proactive steps to ensure that all provisions are being complied with by the builder, nor are they monitoring the progress of the projects. They should ensure that projects are granted extension only under exceptional circumstances”, said Upadhyay, president of Fight for RERA, an umbrella body of homebuyers.

There are also instances where realty companies have given different timelines to homebuyers and the authority. “A builder cannot change timelines. At best, he can only ask for a one year extension from the regulatory authority. If the builder changes timelines he is liabile to pay penalty. Authorities should be on their toes to address the issue,” said lawyer quoted earlier.

What is needed are speedier clearances and cutting down of bureaucratic red tape.

“The government should expedite a single window clearance mechanism for the real estate sector. The clearance and approval process for residential real estate projects has been an impediment for a long time. After RERA was launched, it became all the more important to facilitate smooth clearances and approvals so that there are no execution delays due to procedural hindrances,” said Amit Ruparel, managing director, Ruparel Realty.

Most contracts with homebuyers were changed after RERA came into effect from May 1, 2017. This has complicated timeline commitments.

“For most projects those timelines are almost ending. It is for RERA authorities to now start mapping those projects to see if there are delays and to start sending out show cause notices to developers. RERA’s job is not merely to register a project but also to map the projects and ensure that their timelines are being met,” said the lawyer who did not wish to be identified.

That said, the process is evolving in the right direction, albeit slowly, expert said.

“Things are changing for the better. Generally, players are far more accountable and cannot easily get away with breaking the RERA rules. While the redressal of complaints is not satisfactory for many, consumers are coming forward in large numbers to register complaints across states. The Wild West days of Indian real estate are definitely over”, says Anuj Puri, chairman, ANAROCK Property Consultants.

Project and real estate agent registrations have been rising steadily. For instance, in Andhra Pradesh as many as 307 projects were registered under RERA as on date, a five-fold increase from 61 in November 2018.

Maharashtra is currently the most active state having the highest project registrations with more than 20,718 projects under MahaRERA so far, and nearly 19,699 RERA-registered real estate agents.

Project registration in Karnataka currently stands at 2530 projects and 1342 RERA-registered real estate agents, says data shared by ANAROCK.

Gujarat has 5,317 RERA-registered projects and 899 registered agents and agencies.

“RERA, accompanied by reduced GST rates, has helped in bringing back consumer confidence and the trust factor which the industry lacked,” said Rahul Grover, president, Sales and Operations at Sai Estate Consultants.

This article was originally published in English www.moneycontrol.com

All rights reserved. Any act of copying, reproducing, or distributing this newsletter whether wholly or in part, for any purpose without the permission of Amit B Wadhwani is strictly prohibited and shall be deemed to be copyright infringement.

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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Why the World May Never Truly Be Rid of Dongles

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

As you may guess from the stuff I write about, I have a lot of computers, of various shapes, sizes, and functions.

Some of them I only mess with occasionally; some are frequent companions; some (like my Pinebook Pro) are destined to be frequent targets of tinkering for me. But the one thing that they have in common is that they encourage me to plug in a rat’s nest of cabling to plug into the various gadgets I own. The monitor I got late last year I purchased specifically because I needed a USB hub to go with my high-resolution screen.

But despite all these efforts to simplify my cabling life, dongles rule everything around me. And around you, too. It comes with the territory.

Ultimately, the problem the dongle solves may never truly go away.

“We don’t know much, for sure, about the word that has been a source of so much frustration and controversy and, regardless, ubiquity. But that hasn’t stopped people from guessing.”

— Megan Garber, in a 2013 essay in The Atlantic discussing the origin of the word “dongle,” which she noted was fairly unclear. A 1984 article from The Guardian, in reference to Clive Sinclair’s ill-fated Sinclair QL computer makes a reference to dongles as “an ancient piece of computer jargon,” despite the fact that it’s one of the earliest references I can find in a mainstream newspaper. It suddenly showed up in newspapers around 1984, as did one of the earliest patent filings regarding dongles, in the United Kingdom. In technology publications, the first references I see date to October 1981, in issues of New Scientist and Byte, both in reference to antipiracy technology.

An example of a parallel-port dongle. Image: Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons

The dongle’s original legacy as an antipiracy tool

Last year, when the latest iteration of the Mac Pro came out, one thing that may have confused observers looking at this machine, which they will likely never use, is the unusual placement of a USB-A port on the machine’s motherboard.

To those that only lightly follow technology, the existence of this port likely made no sense. But it reflects a decades-long legacy of tying security to actual hardware that, for some programs at least, persists to this day.

A 1984 New Scientist piece explained the dynamic that led to the growing popularity of dongles throughout the period, but noted that despite their goal of security, they ultimately were seen as easy to break by technical users:

The dongle is a small plastic box which plugs into one of the ports at the back of a computer. A program protected by a dongle contains a routine that asks a computer to check whether the dongle is present and sometimes to read a code from it. If it has not been plugged in the program will not run. Most dongles do not prevent programs from being copied, but they stop the copies from being used, since each copy needs a matching dongle to work.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent the owner of a dongle-protected program from displaying the program code on his computer screen and removing the dongle check from it. One expert says this task takes about two hours.

The dongle system has been refined by some companies. Instead of supplying a program in plain computer code, some or all of the instructions are scrambled. The key to this simple encryption is held by the dongle which passes it to the computer’s operating system (the program which coordinates the computer’s operations). Once unscrambled, the program is loaded into the computer’s memory and runs in the normal way; but it is not difficult to remove the built-in checks.

For games, these approaches were eventually replaced by copy-protection schemes inside manuals or by different distribution approaches, like shareware. But dongles for more high-end or specialized software products, along with employee security, never really went away. In fact, they got more sophisticated, adding their own processing capabilities that interacted with the software being used.

Of course, people aren’t aware where they actually came from in the first place, as The Atlantic_’s Garber implied. This has led to fun stories, the most colorful of which was invented by the tech company Rainbow Technologies, which, in a 1992 advertisement than ran in _Byte, invented a character named Don Gall who they claimed the device was named after.

“He wasn’t famous. He didn’t drive a fancy car, but dressed in his favorite Comdex T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he set out to change the course of the software story,” the fable started.

While obviously totally made up, it nonetheless became something of an urban legend.

These devices generally hooked up to serial or parallel ports throughout the 1990s, with adapters that allowed users to continue to plug in devices such printers. In terms of video games, cheat tools like the Game Genie could be thought of as dongles.

But in the late 1990s, these devices were able to shrink thanks to USB. These dongles, while less prominent than they once were, have largely stayed in common use in a handful of industries, specifically those that sell computer-aided design or manufacturing software, and those that offer software for digital audio workstations. ACID and Autodesk, two manufacturers that specialize in are probably two of the best-known companies that rely on hardware security dongles in the modern day. These are the kinds of devices for which the Mac Pro has an internal USB-A port.

More common, however, are devices intended specifically for two-factor authentication, such as the YubiKey, which serve a similar security function, but for the user or the organization for which they serve, rather than to prevent piracy. These tools work in similar ways to the dongles of yore, perhaps with additional security mechanisms.

Speaking of USB, the switch of formats, which was ultimately a good thing for technology, helped create a pretty big market for dongles big and small, many of which connect to all variety of objects, from printers to TV sets. (Apple, the company that moved to USB early, is responsible for many of our dongles.)

The USB thumb drive is a great example of a dongle, and perhaps the most prominent example of flash disks around.

Similarly, video standards have a way of adding dongles to our lives. Ever converted HDMI to DVI to VGA to composite to RF? (No, just me?) Then you’ve lived the dongle life.

It’s a fact of life, and one that has only become more of a fact of life thanks to the rise of USB-C creating natural incompatibilities for dongles.

Five of the weirdest dongle connectors I’m aware of

USB-C to MagSafe. As is well-documented, I have issues with the design of the Mac’s default power brick, which I think has serious deficiencies because, prior to its conversion to USB-C, its primary cable is both thin and non-removable. For years, Apple made this port proprietary and failed to allow for alternative devices to be made, but after moving to USB-C, Apple took its eye off the MagSafe ball. I bought this adapter off of eBay, delivered straight from China, and use it with the adapter that comes with my HP Spectre x360, which supports USB-C by default.

Jawbone UP24 to USB. Despite the fact that most people associate exercise bands with the brand Fitbit, it was Jawbone that really set the stage for the category’s success with its UP series of fitness trackers, which actually pulled off the neat trick of looking cool without being showy (a credit to its designer, Yves Béhar). It helped to build a market segment … which Jawbone’s competitors quickly took for themselves. For this discussion, though, The interesting thing about this device is how it charged: You take off the cap and a 2.5mm headphone adapter appears. You plug that into a USB-A dongle with said jack, that isn’t useful for anything else.

DVI to ADC. While VGA is a far more memorable adapter for those looking to get a signal onto a video display, DVI has been a more consistent part of the video experience in recent years, appearing on video cards even today, while DisplayPort and HDMI are locked in a battle for supremacy. But ADC? This was a relatively brief attempt by Apple to try to minimize the number of cables needed to connect cables to its monitors. It was arguably ahead of its time—it took USB-C 15 years to make this capability common across the computer industry—but the problem was that the port was proprietary, and if you wanted to use a computer other than Apple’s G4 towers (say, a PowerBook), you needed to break apart those signals—which required a really big dongle. Apple’s official dongle, released in 2002, is both extremely expensive and as large as a standard laptop power brick, and while there is a smaller third-party alternative, it’s harder to find. At least one hardware-hacker has gone to the trouble of creating a reasonably sized version.

Crazyradio PA USB Dongle. This dongle, an open-source device, is essentially a USB radio that works on the same open 2.4-gigahertz as early versions of Wi-Fi. Why would you want this? Well, it’s effectively a wireless mouse dongle for everything else, except with a much larger antenna. Highly hackable, open-sourced, originally developed for a tiny drone, and with a massive range, it can be used for any manner of weird stuff, and is a popular choice for hardware hackers, though some have gone to the point of hacking those wireless mouse adapters for whatever they want.

The Shugru-covered wireless mouse connector. For those with wireless mice, Apple’s move to USB-C on laptops has made life a lot more frustrating because it requires the use of a dongle with your dongle. Rather than be stuck with that state of affairs, the YouTube channel DIY Perks pulled apart one of those mouse connectors, soldered it onto a USB-C breakout board, and covered the whole thing with Shugru, the moldable glue popularly used for DIY projects. A little hacky, but it totally worked.

There was once a massive dongle for sale that could Hackintosh your system

The very nature of dongles means that they come and go, and no dongle, perhaps, has come and gone as quietly as the EFiX USB dongle.

Unlike the security keys used to protect software from installation, EFiX literally does the opposite—it allows users to install software that its maker would prefer users didn’t.

A gadget modern enough that it was featured on websites such as Engadget, the EFiX (also known as EFI-X

, with both names referencing the UEFI firmware that is common today but Intel Macs were relatively early to) harkens back to a time when installing MacOS on a non-Apple PC wasn’t particularly easy. This object, produced by a firm named Art Studios Entertainment Media, was what the company called a “Boot Processing Unit,” which essentially took all the complicated parts of building a hackintosh (all the messy code and what have you) and hid those from the user.

“EFI-X

is not for everyone. It is not for who wants to save money, at all. It is for enthusiasts that put expandability and extreme performances before anything else in their computing needs. We heard those voices, and we answered,” the company that built this device stated on its website.

The device, which plugs directly into a USB header on a motherboard rather than a single USB port, essentially handles all the messy parts of installing Mac OS X on a standard desktop PC. (The key word there is desktop; laptops tend not to have user-accessible USB headers.)

A 2008 Gizmodo review of the device noted that while you did have to open up your machine to plug it in, it was incredibly simple to use:

If you’ve got the hardware, the whole process is simple, so that even if you’ve never cracked your desktop before, you could still get this done with a quick search online for the requisite know-how. I plugged the EFiX dongle into a USB header on my motherboard-not, as you might have assumed, to a USB port on the outside. That’s really it for getting your hands dirty, though. I restarted my computer, selected EFiX as the boot device-it was listed under hard drives, actually-and was greeted with a drive selector. After selecting the Leopard disc, it started installing without a hitch.

But those who did get more technical were fairly skeptical about what they found. One Hackintosh blog doing an autopsy of the device in an effort to come up with a software-only solution said that despite the flashy looks and the use of an ARM processor on the module, it was not particularly novel.

“The whole thing, inclusive PCB, case, cable and packaging should cost less than 10 dollars, I guess,” the author wrote.

If this all sounds fairly gray area, it’s worth noting that this device came to life around the time that the Florida company Psystar was getting some negative legal attention from Apple after announcing plans to sell a Mac clone system—a battle Psystar ultimately, famously, lost.

The USA seller of the EFiX dongle, EFiX USA, at one point announced plans to release a clone system of its own … but then quickly changed course, realizing it would probably put them in a world of legal hell.

EFiX and its manufacturers faded away eventually, and the Hackintosh community came up with other solutions for easily turning a computer into a Hackintosh—no proprietary dongle necessary.

The thing with ports is that there is never a shortage of choice in terms of what you can do with them. But when you try shopping for cables with a specific use case in mind, things get confusing, fast.

Last fall, I made a trip to Micro Center, in part because I heard it was the best computer store chain in the country and I was utterly curious about this Mecca to silicon and circuitry. Overall, the experience was fairly positive, but I felt strangely claustrophobic in one section of the store—the section around KVM switches, which are devices (glorified dongles, really) that allow users to swap between different computers.

So many cables. So much switch. Image: Priwo/Wikimedia Commons

These products, generally, require a lot of cables. An absolute ton, a level that will make you never want to see another cable again. And there are a lot of them, of different shapes, sizes, and use cases. Despite the fact that VGA is a dinosaur of a technology, the vast majority of KVM switches that handle video seem to rely on VGA in the year of Our Lord 2020.

The perfect KVM switch is often hard to find if you have a specific need—and they can get ungodly expensive if you’re not careful.

I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I remember vividly that I not only didn’t find it, but I suddenly had a strong desire to leave this store I went out of my way to visit. Again, I’m the guy that loves computers enough that I wrote an entire article about dongles, and I couldn’t take it. I psyched myself out.

The good news is that USB-C has the potential to simplify the use of KVM switches entirely, at least eventually, as they will only require one cable from each device that you’re switching from. The bad news is that USB-C has confused the spec significantly, in some frustrating ways.

By way of example: Recently, I set up a wall stand next to my desk (a floating shelf for DVD players, essentially) that I set up to allow me an easy place to put my laptops and use them without taking space on my desk. Conceivably, I could plug in my USB-C-based laptops using a single cable and get going. The problem is that USB-C adapters have short cables that are embedded into the device.

So, what do you do to resolve this? First, you find a USB-C hub that doesn’t have a cable built-in. Great; here’s the only one I could find that cost less than $50 that had good power-delivery capabilities. But now this cable has to pull double-duty. It needs to be long enough that it isn’t directly next to your computer, able to transmit high-speed data, but able to charge a laptop. This is harder than it sounds. My HP Spectre x360 relies on a 90-watt charger; most cables with the ability to transmit power and high-speed data top out at 60 watts. Want one that supports 100 watts, powerful enough to handle the latest MacBook Pro? In most cases, the speeds will max out at USB 2.0 levels, meaning you may be better off with Thunderbolt 3, which costs even more than USB-C does. I want USB-C for compatibility for multiple devices.

So it took quite a bit of digging to find the right hub and the right cable to make this setup possible. But now I can plug in a single cable to my laptop and start working. (OK, technically two, because the hub transmits HDMI at a slower speed than the port on the laptop itself. Can’t win everything.)

So why am I telling you about the complications of all this? Simply, I think it’s important to point out that we’re replacing dongles with ports that can theoretically take basically everything, but that have specifications so inconsistent and hard to follow that, once USB-C becomes the one port to rule them all, we may be replacing the physical hell of dongles with a sort of technical hell of inconsistent standards, where the value of a specific cable is defined by what it can do rather than what it looks like.

You can buy a working system for a lower price than you can this cable.

We’re already seeing this. Recently, Apple drew a lot of attention for selling a Thunderbolt 3 cable for $129. It was very much a weird-flex-but-OK situation, but part of the reason that it sells for so much is that it’s relatively long (2 meters, or 6.6 feet, or $1.63 per inch), but supports the full Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 specs. Most cables of that type only support certain elements of these specifications; Apple’s expensive cable supports the whole thing, making it an extremely valuable cable for someone who prides maximum compatibility, maximum speed, and maximum flexibility in a single span of braided black cable. This kind of consumer, apparently, exists.

All of this raises the question: Are dongles as bad as they look? Probably not. But they sure look weird.

Why the World May Never Truly Be Rid of Dongles syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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netstripes · 6 years ago

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5 Important Things Every Entrepreneur Must Consider Before Starting A Business

Making the decision to start your own business is always daunting. There’s no guarantee of success, and no way to really prepare yourself for all the obstacles, known and unknown, that you’ll face along the way. However, in spite of all the hardships that new entrepreneur’s face, pursuing your own business can be extremely rewarding.

Before you set off on your entrepreneurial journey, it’s important to think through several factors to ensure you’re well prepared. For that reason, here’s our list of 5 important things to consider before you start a business.

Have A Clear Goal In Mind For Your Business This is a must for any aspiring entrepreneur. Before you start your business you must have a clear idea of why you want to start it and what you expect to achieve from it. You need to have clear goals to successfully create and stick to business plans, make budgets, and block time for developing your business.

Try the mind-map method to outline the processes that you need with timelines to motivate you and set priorities. This exercise will not only help you to align your goals but also prepare you for any issues you have going forward.

If you find yourself lacking in discipline, this is something you will need to work on before you make any big changes. A strong mind-set is essential if you want to succeed in business, whether it’s your own, or someone else’s. You have to be ready to make personal sacrifices and put the time and effort into moulding a company from the ground up before you begin your venture.

A Clear Strategy Is The Road To Success Once you’ve made the decision to follow your dreams and have aligned your goals, it’s time to start creating a clearly defined strategy. Aside from planning around your own goals, it involves getting to know your target customer. You need to consider what value you are adding to their lives and how your business can help them? Below are some techniques you can use to create a good strategy:

Unique Value Proposition: Your potential customers may have several other options to choose from. You need to find what makes your product/service stand out from competitors despite offering the same service or product. Market research and product testing groups are a great way to get an idea about your UVP.

Unique Selling Point: Simply take a solid UVP and turn it into something that resonates with your intended target market and Voila! You have a good USP. The difference here is that a UVP describes who you are, while you USP tells your customers why it is the best choice for them.

A good USP comes from a deep understanding of who your customer is and what they desire. A great example of a USP is FEDEX. When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight – is the USP that drives Fedex. It created a sense of confidence in Fedex while adding doubt to any alternative. Its USP implies that if you don’t use FEDEX, you won’t get your delivery on time.

Product-Market Fit: A common concept in start-up companies – a product-market fit essentially means that your product/service has a good market share and satisfies that market. An example of a bad product-market fit would be if a new business launched a product assuming that it’s solving a huge problem in the market, when in reality, there was never much of a problem to begin with, and customers saw no reason to buy it. This is a sign of a poorly calculated product-market fit.

It doesn’t matter how good you think the product/service is. It’s about whether people need it and whether they are willing to pay for it. If the business satisfies a large market demand, then you have a successful product-market fit. The product-market fit is an indicator of growth, so you will need to track and measure your products and services from the perspective of product-market fit to ensure your business keeps growing.

All of these are just three of several ways to create a killer strategy. If you think you need help with any of these, it’s always good to get advice from professionals to put things into perspective. They can offer insights that are valuable to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Innovation for a small business is key to standing out Innovation makes any business more competitive and better placed to capitalise on opportunities. We tend to think of it as a complicated process, but innovation is really just an embellished word for invention and improvement. Something we can all do!

So how do we go about building small business innovation? Include it into your business development and strategy by creating goals that focus on improving processes. For example: one goal could be to find a faster way to communicate with your customers.

Another option would be to invest in digital technology that not only improves your operations but makes it more competitive. Keep yourself up to date with the latest innovations by attending seminars and Digital bootcamp events that are aligned with your business goals. For example investing in digital marketing courses can increase efficiency or introducing a new software can give you an edge over a competitor.

Marketing isn’t just an important part of a business – it is the business! The core of every successful small business lies in its marketing. If you don’t have a good marketing strategy, you can offer the best products/services in the world but no one would ever know about it.

Although traditional forms of marketing are still prevalent in the business community, digital marketing has increased in focus due to its affordability and ability to reach targeted audiences.

Digital marketing for a small business can include either paid or organic platforms such as Google and Social Media, or a combination of both depending on your digital strategy and where your ideal customer base is found.

Your digital marketing strategy should involve multiple digital strategies, each with different goals such as increasing conversions via your website, or growing engagement on your social media platforms every month. The benefit of an effective digital marketing strategy can provide a business with new and evolving opportunities to reach new customers and expand the reach of its products or services.

People, Systems & Technology – three elementals for any successful business With a new business comes new systems, technology and skilled staff to apply the new tech. The effective integration of people, systems and technology is critical to support the holistic success of any business’s initiatives. In reality, most businesses only do one or two well, which in the end fails the entire equation.

Below is a quick run-through of how the people, systems & technology equation works harmoniously in a business.

The People: Having skilled people in your business who work according any system and are skilled with tech are key to supporting a holistic environment. This doesn’t mean you need to hire several employees either, just one or two can that effectively manage the work if they have the right systems to follow and training to use them.

The Systems: Systems are created around your business’s goals and help drive successful initiatives to reach these goals. They need to work in harmony with the people using them and the technology implemented to enable an effective business process. Systems for small businesses could be used in data tracking, transaction management, project development cycles, customer experiences, and marketing campaigns.

The Technology: Modern technology that can help achieve your business goals offers major return on invest if implemented and used correctly. Technology reduces, in some cases removes, the dependency on manual processes and accelerates those that would otherwise have taken longer to complete.

In order for your start-up to truly optimise development, deliver value to customers, and sustain its growth, these three areas need to be addressed. Think of your business as an ecosystem, all elements need to work in harmony to thrive.

Conclusion There’s clearly a lot more that goes into starting a business from scratch then it looks. If you really believe in your business, and know there’s a market eager to buy your products/services, it will make you more resilient and determined when faced with obstacles.

Make sure your idea is something that you’re passionate about and tick off all the essential points when developing your business plan. In addition to making you more motivated, it will also enhance your ability to sell your idea to potential investors.

#Digital Marketing Course #Digital Marketing for Small Business #Digital Marketing Strategy #Business Goals #Entrepreneur #Netstripes

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kaioshin-sama · 8 years ago

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Osekkaiyaki, it's time for Chopped!

my opinion on;

character in general: As I told somebody else once in one of these review memes, in playing an OC, you already are operating on a deficit compared to canon characters, in that your information pages (and perhaps the first few pages of your blog) have to be enough to get people interested in your character to the point of wanting to stick around and put the effort into learning about them. It can be an uphill battle to be an OC among canon characters; and I confess, even as someone who has played an OC, I know I’ve lost interest in plenty of OCs before for reasons as petty as info pages that I found lacking, blog set-ups that I happened to find aesthetically irritating, etc. So, you’re in a tough spot right out the starting gate – you have to work much harder to get yourself even semi-established as an OC blog than someone who runs a blog for a popular canon character (even if they are, frankly, mediocre at best).

All of that said–? Girl, you rise to the challenge, don’t you? Venan is easily one of my favourite OCs that I’ve encountered in years. Something that I perceive as one of her great strengths as a character is the fact that she, despite fitting neatly and unobtrusively into a space in the canon lore (up-and-coming kaioshin), her very nature challenges that system and raises questions about it which aren’t necessarily raised by any of the canon characters. What I mean is, she is clearly not equipped with a temperament conducive to handling such a duty, but, by virtue of simply having been born of a golden fruit (which of course was entirely beyond her own control), she’s stuck with a title and position which are far too large and restrictive for her, regardless of her own feelings on the matter. Not only does this put her attitude and behaviours into an interesting light – basically, she acts out both against this role that has been chosen for her, as well as against herself for failing to uphold the ideals thrust upon her – but also heavily implies criticism toward the hierarchy, training process, and social climate among the kaioshin. Given then that I’m a big ol’ slut for the kaioshin and their whole weird-ass way of life–? Is it really any wonder that I’m super into this OC?how they play them: At this particular point, the overwhelming majority of what I know about her – and the majority of my impressions of her – are based off of talks that we’ve had and OOC content that I’ve seen about her. I haven’t seen a great deal of her IC content, but that’s far from a criticism on my part! If anything, you’ve managed to impart a solid impression of what she’s like to me, even without my having seen her extensively in action via RP yet. It’s clear that you care about her – you’ve thought carefully about her backstory, why she is the way she is, etc., and you allow her to be flawed in ways which aren’t necessarily flattering or cute. You allow her to have ugly traits, which I find is one of the things that sets apart great OCs from forgettable ones – a balance between positive and negative, such as what any real person possesses. Venan is one of your babies, but you love her too much to let her off the hook, you know? She’s a solid gal and you’ve got a solid handle on her.the mun: You delight and charm me and I swear I’m sorry for being incredibly slow and not chatting one-on-one with you more often! You’re a thoughtful, engaging, funny person, and I always come away from what chats we do have with something to laugh about, something to think about, or (very often) both. You’re also encouraging of those around you, as well as a wonderful artist to boot. I’m glad to have met you!

do i;

follow them: Yes!rp with them: Not yet. (I know, I know, I’m slow as hell. I suck.)want to rp with them: Of course!ship their character with mine: All I can imagine right now, faced with this question, is that scene in The Emperor’s New Groove where Pacha, doing the right thing but also grossed out and absolutely not wanting to do it, leans in to perform mouth-to-mouth on Kuzco, who regains consciousness at that precise moment and lets out a yell, so of course they both leap back from each other in surprise and disgust, then hesitate, furtively glance at each other once more, and simultaneously cringe back into themselves with a final ‘eugh!’

The point is, I don’t see this happening under literally any circumstances. I’m pretty sure that Shin and Venan are both the exact opposite of what each might be inclined to consider their 'types’.

what is my;

overall opinion: bitch shut up i love venan and i love chey

want to break the ice and get chatting with me? send me your url!

#OOC #osekkaiyaki #ask meme #long post

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emorphistechno · 5 years ago

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IoT App Development: A Perfect Blend for Better Mobile Industries

Introduction

Nowadays, the success factor of any booming business relies on how it markets its products and uses appropriate technologies to enhance its utilities. Furthermore, many business enterprises fail to realize the decision of making the right choices for the effective marketing of their product that will take them to the top of the world.

Have you ever heard of the Internet of Things (IoT)? If the answer is straight no; then you must get to have a thorough understanding of the same.

IoT is a software system with the amalgamation of machines, people, or objects with some exclusive identifiers that can transfer data over the network with no need of human-computer of human-human interference.

How IoT influences the realm of Mobile App Development?

IoT is one of the trendiest technologies which are in great demand in the world of automation right now. In recent times, the world of mobile applications has also come under the sway of IoT. Furthermore, a survey report from Statista has shown at least 31 billion connected devices will be available worldwide by 2020; all thanks to IoT technology.

As IoT is no longer a new name in the IT domain, many software-based industries want to secure the best mobile app development. For this to happen, they are looking towards the given technology to enhance their business prospect.

Despite the immense popularity of IoT, most of the app development companies are opting for integrating their app version into their framework. It has all been happening due to lack of information and also ignorance related to the given new technology (IoT of course).

With that said, various ways will prove that mobile app development for IoT will create a ruckus in the world of app development. Let’s went further into it…

7 Ways IoT is Impacting Mobile App DevelopmentA. Lower the Time Needed for App Development

For business-minded people, the impact of IoT is becoming more prominent in their daily lives. Likewise, it has also gained high prominence among mobile app developers due to the lowering of their app development time. No doubt about it!

One must be eager to know the revealing fact about IoT and how it lowers the time of the app development. Well, IoT has a methodology which aids communication between machine and internet which, in turn, minimize the efforts given by app developer in building a custom app. In this way, there is a savage of lots of time much to the delight if the developers.

What’s more, there is a special aspect of the given technology in the form that it helps the developers to add creative and interactive features in the given app. It has been possible because there is a provision of ample time for them to create an advanced and result-oriented app for their users.

B. Less Requirement of Human Efforts

The most beneficial aspect of IoT devices on the mobile app is that there is less human intervention that helps in developing a robust app for the users. What’s more, a single mobile application is capable of catering to multiple tasks to reduce the need for the development of multiple applications for various tasks.

In such a scenario, developers are free to concentrate on other applications that will help in reducing the room for error and increase the level of optimization among them. Besides, IoT development services can create applications to accomplish a plethora of tasks to save time for the users and focus on the working of a single application for different devices.

Therefore, a decrease in human interference will boost up the prospect of machine producing the best results, and the companies will be able to connect with the customers most appealingly without slashing their satisfaction rate.

C. IoT Devices helps in Reducing Marketing Cost

There is a saying-”Better application means less spending in the marketing of your business products.” The given phrase stands true for IoT app development services. In such a manner, there is no reason why users will not be attracted to the given centralized application. It will ensure to solve their issues with a single stroke and offer a better business perspective at your doorstep.

Besides, it also permits a rapid communication session to address all the grievances so that they can get assured that all these problems are impossible to solve if the customers use mobile apps minus IoT. What it also helps is getting access to social media approval, which implies that IoT can connect with the social media account of the customers with great ease.

However, one question arises-”How marketing cost gets slashed using IoT software?” The answer lies in the fact that the showcase of business is what is displayed by the internet and after receiving the info from the users; the company will be able to offer the best services on social media so to reduce the cost of marketing.

D. Provision of Offering Tailor-Made Experience

There are two backbones of feature-rich mobile applications namely; tailored experience and custom responses. There has been development of user-friendly and innovative mobile app, all thanks to the amalgamation of IoT in the mobile app development.

IoT devices have the habit of collecting information about the user’s behavior which is analyzed to offer a more precise response in the most user-centric way. Furthermore, IoT technology is capable enough to create an app that can use the location of the customers using real-time data. In this way, it will be easy to offer customized app experience to the users.

E. IoT Prompts Emergence of Innovative Businesses

There are various apps such as Uber, which comes with seamless functioning- that is nothing but the work of IoT. With assistance from the given system, Uber collects data from all the connected devices (taxis in the given case) and the app users (customers). By this, the users can call for a cab with just dial from their phone.

Such innovation in any business could not be possible without the helping hand of IoT and sooner, all enterprises will rely heavily on enhancing their mobile services via IoT. With IoT at the helm, you can focus on finding a convenient solution to the pressing issues of customers appropriately. Besides, there will be the creation of more real-time services to the customers to solve their problems and provide the best available services within the given time.

F. Make your Business more Efficient than your Rivals

Do you know the hallmark of a thriving business? It is that it produced more with less time consumption. It is the reason many organizations want their application to connect with IoT. So with IoT, it is possible to connect multiple devices and software and allow them to interact with themselves.

Moreover, it allows the users to choose the mode of operating their working merely through a mobile application courtesy of the IoT. Besides, IoT development services assist in personalizing the content as per the need of the customers and thus allow them to have far greater accessibility to enhance their performance.

G. IoT Offers Great Data Security to Mobile Development Apps

Numerous organizations across different industries always come up with different applications to develop their business. Nevertheless, many mobile applications remain susceptible to the online threat and data breach and mobile apps are more prone to them.

There has been significant growth of data compromising incidences which have affected the success rate of mobile apps. But there is no need to worry because the IoT system knows how to manage the sensitive personal data of the users well.

IoT app Development Company has the caliber to safeguard their applications efficiently by utilizing the services of the extra layer of IoT. Furthermore, there are various entry points and encrypted information that help the users to remain safeguard. Thus, IoT is committed to heighten app security and safeguard the essential business information most effectively.

The Final Words

Hopefully, the viewers after reading the given article have got a clear idea about the importance of IoT and how effectively it can be utilized in the smartphone industry most appropriately. Moreover, the domain of IoT can prove to be of immense value in mobile application industry.

In addition, a combination of mobile app development with IoT can bring out a major breakthrough in the app development industry that will not only benefit the current generation but will bring cheers among different business sectors as well so to lead them towards better business prospects.

Originally published at – https://medium.com/emorphis-technologies/iot-app-development-a-perfect-blend-for-better-mobile-industries-31502f08b9ce

#IoT Application Development #IoT App Development

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simonconsultancypage · 5 years ago

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Guest Post: 7 Steps for Ensuring Director Oversight During COVID-19

Brent Ashley

In a recent post (here), I reviewed the steps that well-advised companies can take in light of the current coronavirus outbreak to try to mitigate their risk of management liability claims arising out of the pandemic. In the following guest post, Brent Ashley of the Hirschler law firm takes a look at the steps corporate boards can take in light of the COVID-19 pandemic to try to insulate themselves against claims based on alleged breaches of the duty of oversight. I would like to thank Brent for allowing me to publish his article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Brent’s article.

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A corporate director is obligated to make a good faith effort to oversee company operations, legal compliance and financial performance. This obligation involves more than reviewing general operational reports from management. To satisfy the duty of oversight—a tenet of corporate governance cabined within the fiduciary duty of loyalty—directors must attempt to ensure a reasonable, board-level system of monitoring and reporting is in place, and monitor it. Where directors fail to make that good faith effort, or consciously ignore the proverbial red flag signaling material noncompliance, they breach the duty of loyalty to the company and expose themselves to liability.

Marchand v. Barnhill: A Cautionary Tale

In 2019, the Delaware Supreme Court issued a decision elaborating on the standard of conduct required by a director under her duty of oversight. Marchand v. Barnhill involved an action against the board of Blue Bell Creameries USA, Inc. Blue Bell, an ice-cream manufacturing company, suffered a listeria outbreak in early 2015, causing the company to recall all of its products, cease production at all of its plants and lay off a significant portion of its workforce. Based on the unfortunate consequences that followed, including financial fallout and consumer deaths, a stockholder sued the company’s directors for breach of their fiduciary duties of loyalty by “knowingly disregarding contamination risks and failing to oversee the safety of Blue Bell’s food-making operations.”[i]

In their defense, the directors argued that a reasonable reporting system had been in place, along with routine monitoring protocols. They highlighted the fact that the Blue Bell board met monthly; regularly reviewed reports relating to manufacturing operations from the company CEO and VP of Operations; engaged a third-party laboratory and food safety auditor to test facilities for dangerous contaminates; and had distributed a sanitation manual with standard operating and reporting procedures. In addition, the directors asserted that the company was subjected to regular and intense regulatory inspections.

Failure to Monitor “Intrinsically Critical” Compliance Issues

Despite these protocols, the Court ruled that the plaintiff had alleged facts at the pleading stage sufficient to establish the board’s bad faith conduct in failing to try to implement a reasonable system to oversee issues “intrinsically critical to the company’s business operation.” For Blue Bell, this meant board-level oversight of the company’s food safety compliance. The decision noted that Blue Bell board minutes reflected “no board-level discussion” of the negative contamination reports received from the third-party laboratory and food safety auditor. Further, the fact that “Blue Bell nominally complied with FDA regulations,” and management discussed general operations with the board, “does not imply that the board implemented a system to monitor food safety at the board level.” The Court emphasized that no board committee had been commissioned to address food safety, and no regular process had been established to require management to update the board as to food safety compliance and risks. Despite management’s knowledge of the listeria contamination, the “information never made its way to the board, and the board continued to be uninformed about (and thus unaware of) the problem.”

Your Checklist for Ensuring Oversight of Mission Critical Issues during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Marchand decision includes a number of lessons for corporate boards operating in today’s uncertain environment. Of utmost importance, is the requirement that a board attempt to implement a reasonable system of monitoring and reporting about the company’s “central compliance risks” and “mission critical” issues in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. To satisfy this obligation, directors should consider taking the following, proactive steps related to oversight and monitoring:

Identify, evaluate and regularly update “intrinsically critical” compliance issues specific to the company. This is especially important for a company that operates in an environment subject to external regulations that govern its “mission critical” operations, and monoline companies, who rely on a single product.

Designate a board committee specifically charged with overseeing pandemic-related matters and evaluating how these concerns impact the company’s “central compliance” issues.

Confirm the implementation of protocols requiring senior management to provide regular updates and reporting to the board about the impact of the novel coronavirus on the company’s operations, financial position, compliance risks and COVID-19 response. As an example, directors should have a firm understanding of the company’s capital structure and liquidity position, upcoming debt service requirements, compliance with shut-down orders, the status of company workforce and facilities, cybersecurity risks associated with working remotely and employment law compliance.

Develop a crisis response plan centered on preventative measures. Include pre-crisis guidelines, as well as post-crisis evaluation of the plan’s effectiveness.

Hold virtual board meetings often. Add discussions of COVID-19 concerns to the agendas for regularly scheduled and special board and committee meetings. Invite management to participate.

Record detailed COVID-19-related actions and deliberations in board committee and full-board meeting minutes. Brief minutes on general topics of discussion are not sufficient. Thoughtful consideration should be reflected in the minutes, without having them read like a transcript.

Maintain documents relevant to and evidencing the existence of a reasonable reporting and monitoring system. If the Company plans to participate in a governmental relief program, such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the board should document the information on which it relied in reaching its decision to apply, as well as the appropriate board resolutions. The board should review routine payroll reports to monitor the probability of loan forgiveness.

Though Marchand was decided under Delaware law, it serves as prudent guidance for corporate governance best practices. Retaining outside legal advisors to assess a company’s reporting and monitoring protocols is also best practice.

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Brent A. Ashley is an attorney at Hirschler in Richmond, Virginia. A member of the Virginia and Delaware Bars, Ashley’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions involving privately-held middle market companies across the U.S., and corporate counseling. He can be reached at [email protected].

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[i] Marchand v. Barnhill, 212 A.3d 805 (Del. 2019).

Guest Post: 7 Steps for Ensuring Director Oversight During COVID-19 published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

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chartistrioter · 5 years ago

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How should the Labour Party respond to the government’s handling of the corona virus crisis?

The corona virus crisis is emphasising that Universal Health Care (UHC), the provision of health care to all members of society at the time of need without the need for them to incur personal cost, is one of the most important hallmarks of a civilised society. In the past, the UK has been lucky in this respect: the founding principles of the NHS made it one of the finest UHC systems the world has seen. Unfortunately, these principles, while held dear by the British people have always been anathema to the ethos of the Tory Party, especially to its neoliberal wing who have been in the ascendancy since 1979, and in total control since 2019 when Boris Johnson vanquished the last vestiges of "One Nation Toryism" under the guise of "Getting Brexit Done". Over forty years, because it is held so dear by the majority of the population the Tories never dared to mount a frontal attack on the NHS but they have chipped away at its structure and brought in creeping privatisation. Sadly, even during the years of Labour government, 1997-2010, some of the damage done was not repaired, and in some ways even made worse.

The corona virus crisis has clearly shown how ill advised these strategies of undermining the NHS over many years have been. Now is surely the time for the Labour Party to be driving home its message that the country needs a well-run and well-funded NHS, yet the current Labour leadership seems reluctant to do this, all it can produce (as of yesterday, 15th April, at the time of writing) is a mealy-mouthed request for a more detailed "exit strategy" from "lockdown".

The appalling way in which the Tories have handled the crisis is a clear consequence of the neoliberal economic philosophy they espouse. Central to their "market based" economic strategy is the notion that money should, as much as possible, only be spent ('traded') in a way that will bring a rapid profit. Expenditure on state infrastructure is seen as "wasting taxpayers' money"; Margaret Thatcher's infamous remark that "there is no such thing as society" is a clear statement of the position. Of course the NHS, one of the major areas of government expenditure, is a constant target of their attacks, especially as the insurance industry, one of the strongest supporters of neoliberal economics can see what huge profits could be made if we moved to a US-style health system (or rather lack of system).

The general cutting back of state infrastructure, and especially of the NHS, can clearly be seen as an underlying cause of many of the worst features of the government's response to the corona virus crisis in the UK hitherto. Without going into detail of exactly how each problem has arisen, this hollowing out of state structures can be traced back as contributing significantly to such things as these (this list is not intended to be comprehensive, just to give some examples):

- The failure to provide adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) to frontline staff, especially in the NHS, but also in care homes, public offices, etc.

- The woefully inadequate testing programme; a description of the failures in this respect warrants an essay in itself, there are just too many for a detailed analysis here.

- The failure to issue accurate figures of the impact of the disease by producing reliable mortality statistics; the omission of deaths outside hospital, notably those in nursing homes, is one striking example of this.

And so on...

The government's failure is starkly revealed in the horrific mortality figures that are published daily (and still omit a very substantial percentage of the true figure - see above). The UK is almost certainly heading for the highest number of deaths in Europe. This can only be interpreted as a failure of government policy, and one that is rooted in their neoliberal ideology. And there should be no doubt that, despite Boris Johnson's praise for the NHS after his recent discharge from hospital, the damage that has been done by previous Tories will be escalated as and when some recovery from the crisis occurs. Defence of the NHS should go hand in hand with reasoned criticism of currently failing government policies.

Why then has the response of the Labour leadership been so muted? Why are they not metaphorically screaming from the rooftops about this? Most disgracefully of all, why have they only spoken up so weakly about the scandalous inadequacy of the PPE being provided for health workers? Defence of workers at their place of work is surely one of the basic duties of the Labour Party? This is a gross dereliction of the Party's duty.

A comparison has been drawn between the condition in the country now and those at the time of the Blitz in World War Two. "We are at war with the virus" is the sort of phrase that is commonly used, and such military comparisons have been used to argue for a muted response by the Labour Party, on the pretext of "rallying round" at a time of crisis, not being too critical of those who are "leading the battle". This is a false approach - the "war" against the virus is not a war in the proper sense, and mitary analogies are false. Efforts to counteract the effects of the virus are NOT a military campaign: the virus is not a sentient creature that is engaged in a tactical struggle, it is purely a biological structure behaving according to its biologically determined nature; any mutations it might undergo would be random events, not "tactics".

To deal with the virus, it is not military tactics that are needed but the best scientific strategies. Science does not advance by "rallying round the leaders". Scientific progress is achieved through open, frank, and often fierce debate. The Chief Scientific Officer often claims that government policy is "science led" - but this is disingenuous, or worse. Science can only give probabilities of particular outcomes, probabilities that are influenced by many, often-unquantifiable factors. Political actions are an important part of such factors, so what the science can predict is highly dependent upon what outcome the decision makers wish to achieve. Although it is now denied, there is no doubt that at the start of the crisis, one aim was to achieve "herd immunity". The outcry about the inevitable death toll that such a policy implied caused the politicians to change their priorities, adopting a less inhumane strategy, and resulting in imposition of lockdown - at a stage in the epidemic (already over 300 deaths) much later than had been the case in many other countries. Science, especially social science, does not operate in a vacuum; its predictions are heavily influenced by political decisions. A scientifically based, socialist counter-perspective to Tory policy, one centred around saving human life and protecting the NHS and its workers, is what the Labour Party should be vigorously advocating.

#covid19 #Labour

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