#In The Original Footage. no idea why. no idea how to compensate for it

[putschki1969]

“Sono Saki e” Random Thoughts (Review?)

Please be sure to ❗SUPPORT Wakana❗ in any way you can! Especially if you decided not to order any physical copies. You can purchase and stream Wakana’s 3rd original studio album “Sono Saki e” on various sites (mora, iTunes etc) and streaming platforms (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, etc). • ————— ¤ ♫ ¤ ————— • BUY the album on mora (TUTORIAL here) BUY it in your local iTunes store • ————— ¤ ♫ ¤ ————— •  

Phew, this post is long-overdue. I’ve actually had this “review” sitting around in my drafts since May 30 but I wanted to wait till my physical copies arrived (unfortunately, my package took forever T_T). We have had multiple opportunities to listen to the tracks (or at least snippets of them) and of course I also listened to the digital album as soon as it became available. I’ll be honest with you, my initial reaction to the snippets and later the full tracks was rather lukewarm but in the past couple of weeks, most of the album has grown on me. So far my TOP 5 in order of their track listing are “Rapa Nui”, “標 (Shirushi)”, “希望(Kibou)”,“明日を夢見て歌う(Asu wo Yume Mite Utau)” and “Flag”.  Here are some random thoughts on the album as a whole and the individual songs ┗(•ˇ_ˇ•)→

Vocals: I’m not gonna write an analysis on Wakana’s vocals since I obviously lack the technical knowledge for that sort of stuff but I would still like to vent a little. In recent times, Wakana has talked a lot about how she is constantly refining her skills, working with a vocal coach and discovering new ways to use her voice, however, I fail to hear any real results of those efforts. I have to wonder if her vocal coach (or Takebe in his role as producer) are even giving any sort of effective advice because it certainly doesn’t seem like they do. The Japanese mindset probably keeps them from providing proper constructive criticism. This has always been an issue in the Japanese music industry but I am noticing it more now that Wakana, Keiko and Hikaru can no longer compensate for each other’s weaknesses. I don’t mean to bash or anything, you know I would never do that. I can still appreciate their solo vocals and for the most part I definitely enjoy Wakana’s vocals in this album but sometimes I get frustrated when it’s clear that the girls are not reaching their full potential or are using styles that are absolutely unflattering. I mean, who is telling Wakana (and Keiko for that matter) it’s a good idea to over-affect her voice or to sing in a register that is simply too high? Pretty sure this stuff is up to her so I guess it is a conscious choice and no one is guiding her in a better direction. I know for a fact that Wakana is capable of using a fuller, steadier voice but for some reason she often falls back on singing styles that don’t do anything for her and make her sound quite generic or borderline amateurish. It’s a shame...Rant over.

Visuals: The botanical and watery backgrounds/colours fit Wakana’s image perfectly. I wouldn’t say it’s a good match for the theme of the album but I don’t really mind. These are probably not my favourite looks for her but there are still some super lovely shots included in the photobook and lyric booklets. I originally thought all those light spots were a filter but they really used strings of light for the shoot. Not sure yet if I am a fan of the finished look.Something about it doesn’t really work for me.

Bonus material: No idea why they decided to add a DVD instead of a Blu-ray but I am just grateful we got footage from the Christmas live. It’s a solid concert with many good performances so I am happy there’s official footage. Too bad they cut the Christmas songs though, I remember enjoying them a lot. The audio tracks are a nice addition but I think instrumental versions of the album tracks would have been a nicer bonus. The exclusive fan club track is nothing to write home about, wish they had included footage from the after-talk instead or maybe the Christmas tracks.

Editions: As always, I appreciate that we get different booklets for every single edition. Makes it so much more fun and worthwhile to collect different editions. Overall I would day that all versions were reasonably priced for the content we got. And I am glad they once again decided to go for an LP-sized package with a big photobook. They look so good on my Kalafina showcase/shrine. Small nitpick: The quality of the large photobook isn’t what it used to be, it’s much thinner paper now T_T Makes it easier to scan though so I guess it’s not that bad.

Promotion: As far as the promotional campaign is concerned, I would say it’s sufficiently wide-spread on the media front but it feels a little lackluster in terms of in-store presence. Many Japanese fans have complained that the store promo for Wakana’s “Sono Saki e” wasn’t up to par with all the displays that were prepared for Keiko’s “Cutlery”. Thankfully we got the release events which added a bit of hype. Altogether, her performance in the Oricon Charts wasn’t too shabby either (#28) so the marketing team must have done something right. On a side note, I still very much appreciate the relatively high production value of Wakana’s solo works (especially compared to Hikaru’s and Keiko’s stuff). It’s clear that a lot of money is still invested in Wakana so YAY for that.

Overall thoughts: "Sono Saki e” has been a long time in the making so despite my best efforts, certain expectations have been building up. I know of course that getting my hopes up too high is a stupid thing to do because it will inevitably set me up for disappointment but I am only human and after three years of waiting, I was in a serious Wakana drought. However, now that the album is finally here, I feel a surprising sense of indifference (?) towards it. My reaction to Keiko’s latest album should have been indication enough but I think it’s becoming more and more obvious that I am suffering from a serious case of Kalafina-solo fatigue. It seems like I am steadily falling out of love with their solo music which makes me incredibly sad but I guess it was bound to happen at some point. I am not even saying that I dislike the album but there is just a lack of sparks I guess? Objectively speaking, I would say that Wakana’s 3rd album is quite good, I thoroughly enjoy around 60% of it and I’ve been listening to a lot of the songs on repeat. But I am just not as invested as I would like to be. On a side note, is it just me or does the album feel a little too rushed (despite its long production period)? I would have wanted the album to reflect the three years worth of thought and effort that were supposedly put into it but that’s honestly not the vibe I am getting here. I mean, they decided to include an instrumental of one of the tracks AND a literal copy-paste version of a previous album track, that just screams last minute decision to me. I guess it’s because the actual production didn’t start until much later so ultimately, there was a lot of rushing involved but still, it’s a shame.

●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～●～ ●～●～●～●～

M1. Butterfly Dream: I feel like everything has already been said about this. It’s fun with the visuals of the PV but without those, the song loses a lot of its charm for me. Even though it’s the leading track of the album, I find it a bit underwhelming, maybe because the melody isn’t really resonating with me? Also, not a huge fan of how Wakana seems to over-affect (if that’s the right word?) her voice during quite a few parts of the song (especially during the chorus) to sound cute/innocent. She sometimes does this for certain types of anisong covers but it’s honestly not the most flattering singing style in my opinion. I guess the outward “cuteness” of the vocals appeals to a wider audience so it’s not a bad thing per se. I mean, there must be a reason why they picked this as promo track for the album (Rating: 2.5/5) M2. Rapa Nui: Definitely the most exciting and refreshing track on the album. The Celtic(?) sound matches Wakana’s voice perfectly. Kinda sounds like something you would hear at a medieval festival. Reminds me a bit of Kalafina’s “Moonfesta” or Hikaru’s “Fili”. Based on the title, I would have expected the song to sound totally different but I am honestly not mad about how it turned out. It’s great that they used the Rapa Nui language for some lines, spices up the whole thing. I initially believed that the song could have benefited from a stronger chorus but by now I’m literally obsessed with it, can’t get the melody out of my head :P Some of those ultra-high notes don’t sound pleasant to my ears but it’s not on a level where it takes away from my enjoyment. Contemplated taking half a point off for it but at the end of the day, it’s not worth it. It’s such a superb track (Rating: 5/5) M3. 標 (Shirushi): Sometimes this song doesn’t really affect me all that much and other times it makes me cry like a baby (especially when Wakana sings “この先も力に歌うから”). In many ways, it reminds me of “Ai no Hana” which has a similar theme and is one of my favourite tracks from Wakana’s first album but I need to hear it live to get the full experience. The same is the case for “Shirushi”. And I also have to be in the right mood for it. I am not 100% sold on the melody but Wakana’s vocals are gorgeous and the emotion she puts into her singing is just out of this world. On top of that, we have beautiful lyrics and a precious backstory, I can’t help but give this song a high rating (Rating: 4/5) M4. 希望 (Kibou): With the exception of “Rapa Nui” this is probably the only track that instantly clicked with me. Even when we just got a snippet of it, I immediately fell in love. The melody is just the right amount of cheesy in a good way, it hits me right in the feels. I think it comes closest to a standard power ballad or a 90s pop ballad. I am a huge sucker for those and it is obviously the type of song I love to hear from Wakana. Is it just me though or could Wakana have used a more flattering singing style for the chorus? She is going very high and it tends to sound a bit strained. For me, this is on the very edge of sounding screechy, a little higher, a little flatter and I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it. It’s clearly a challenging track but not necessarily something that Wakana can’t handle imo. Really curious how she will be handling those parts during a live performance. Hopefully she can tweak her style a bit to make it more suitable for the song. Another tiny nitpick is the bland bridge, I wish it had a little more oomph, it’s neither here nor there but oh well, I am so smitten with this song that I can’t really focus on any of the negative aspects (Rating: 4.5/5) M5. 殻 (Kara): Who thought it was a good idea to do a “Tsubasa 2.0.”? I really wish they would have come up with something else. They had more than enough time to look into other options. I understand the intention of course, “Tsubasa” is solid and highlights some of the grittier parts of Wakana’s voice but that doesn’t warrant a blatant rip-off. Enough complaining though, I feel like I am way too harsh on “Kara”. On its own merits, it’s actually quite fun and yeah, just like its predecessor it works flawlessly to highlight Wakana’s voice in a different way, I like her more feisty singing style. Objectively speaking, I really can’t fault this song but it still doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. Thankfully, Wakana’s singing makes up for it (Rating: 3.5/5) M6. そのさきへ(Sono Saki e)～Interlude～: The melody is not striking enough. I am usually a sucker for a good instrumental piece but this one falls a little flat unfortunately. Wakana keeps saying that she cried when she first listened to the demo but I really wonder why...However, I will have to say that the gorgeous piano playing of this interlude does appeal to me more than the melody in the normal version of the song (Rating: 2.5/5) M7. KEMONO feat.清塚信也: I’ve said it before and I will say it again, every cell in my body is rejecting this type of song. I know that’s a me-problem and I feel horrible judging Wakana’s work based on such a personal preference.This reminds me way too much of some of Keiko’s city-pop (or whatever) tracks. The singing is too fast, there is no proper flow, the melody is all over the place, it’s just outright chaotic. I am sure there are people who can appreciate this new experimental style but I am unfortunately not one of them. I generally don’t like giving low ratings but it is how it is, please know that this is purely subjective (Rating: 1/5) M8. 明日を夢見て歌う(Asu wo Yume Mite Utau): The melody right at the beginning and sprinkled in-between the verses is what initially attracted me to the song, so pretty. However, the rest of the song didn’t leave a huge impression when I first heard it during the Christmas concert. I remember I compared it to “Boku Dake no Stage” because it was also composed by Takebe and I thought it was similarly bland. I realise now that this was a very unfair comparison because those songs have absolutely nothing in common. “Asu wo Yume Mite Utau” is much better imo and aligns more with my preferences in terms of music style. Maybe a comparison to “Toki wo Koeru Yoru ni” would have been better even though Takebe didn’t compose that one... Anyways, after letting the song marinate for a while, I’ve surprisingly come to love “Asu wo Yume Mite Utau”. I’d even go as far as to say it has become one of my favourite tracks from the album. The arrangement is lovely and so are the lyrics. Also adore Wakana’s singing here (Rating: 4/5) M9. Flag: This is probably the most Kalafina/FictionJunction-esque track on the entire album so I understand why it is so popular among YK/Kalafina fans. Personally, I have never been the biggest fan of YK’s more generic anisongs so this track initially didn’t impress me all that much, it was just okay for me, nothing too outstanding. But after hearing it performed live multiple times, it has significantly grown on me. It’s a really solid song and it works perfectly with Wakana’s voice. Even though it might not be the type of music I naturally gravitate towards, it’s still a banger. Especially when you take the Kalafina nostalgia into account. Fun fact, the most recent version with Sakurada has made me add 0.5 points to my initial rating, it was just so good (Rating: 4/5).  M10. そのさきへ (Sono Saki e): Ughhh, I really wanted to love this song but so far my attempts have all failed. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to get into it. I mean, there must be something to love about it when I hear Wakana rave about the demo tape as if it were the best thing since sliced bread. What exactly is it about the melody that made her cry so much? It still baffles me that this was written by the same person who was responsible for “Kinmokusei” which I absolutely adore. There are some tiny similarities but all in all, “Sono Saki e” feels rather uninspired in comparison to “Kinmokusei”, at least in my opinion. Hearing it live during the release event has also not done anything to make me appreciate the song more. I am afraid it is a lost cause... (Rating: 2/5) M11. あとひとつ (Ato Hitotsu): Nothing much to say here aside from the fact that I adore this song and I am really glad that it’s finally included in an official release. I prefer to hear it live but the studio recording is surprisingly touching too. So understated and yet so charming. I like how Wakana keeps referring to it as prayer, it’s a fitting description. Perfect delivery, as always (Rating: 5/5)

[bi-demon-ium]

SQ's ART

⤷ are there any mediums this boy doesn’t dabble in

[centrally-unplanned]

Serial Experiments Lain: A Guide to Proper Mindfucking Procedures

(I finished Lain! I originally wrote here “will jot down some thoughts, maybe I can write a full essay sometime later”, reviewing it now this is absolutely a full essay, so scratch that lets commit)

Serial Experiments Lain is a starring member of the pantheon of 90′s “mindfuck” anime, those shows that supposedly blow the mind with esoteric philosophy and trippy visuals. Current-me has frequently sallied against this notion, particularly the idea that any of these shows (or most any show) are that philosophically dense - the nature of television & film is such that they almost never are, which is normally a good thing. But young-me watched Lain around the same time I watched the original Ghost in the Shell film, and I had that halcyon experience for both: intriguing, but also on the border of incomprehensibility. As such I held little opinion of either of them, not trusting my hazy memories, until I saw them again much later. Ghost in the Shell, by the way, is a terrible, painfully boring film, precisely because it tries to be that philosophy-mindfuck concept. Which can work when you are young and stupid, but once you have read literally anything, anything at all, a single op-ed will do, about “AI and Identity” or the like its ideas are trite and shallow while it has sacrificed characterization, plot, and pacing in pursuit of that failed dream. 

Lain on the other hand is a brilliant show that succeeds at that concept far better than media like GitS ever could precisely by not even trying to be that. The thematic foundation of Lain is actually quite simple; the openness & inter-connectivity of the internet is not just utilitarian but can offer a way of living that is seemingly brimming with unlimited freedom and emancipatory potential, but that promise is found fundamentally to be a hollow (ahem) shell, with reality being not only inescapable but desirably so. Or something like that? I mean maybe. Lain never spends that much time on answers, because those are boring; instead focusing on the actual experience of the titular Lain herself as she navigates these concepts. All of the content it throws out are lateral moves around this core, details to mull over as opposed to attempts to “go deeper”, which makes it not-that-hard to follow once you understand that is what is happening. There is even a scene where the, let’s say “villain”, tries to go full-philosophy on Lain: who is the real her? What is identity anyway? Plays that whole entire hand, and she replies:

Which, given that those themes are absolutely the themes of GitS, made me laugh out loud and yes is 50% of why I am comparing them. I am certainly not saying that Lain doesn’t have philosophical concepts, it clearly does in spades. Stitching those concepts together into a grand thesis, however, is just not the focus. 

What is Lain’s focus is mood, and I have never seen a show use so many varied animation concepts and narrative approaches all towards capturing a singular mood; that of the free-wheeling hacker-for-truth aesthetic of the early internet. It is of course famously filled with glitchy shots of Lain flickering on CRT monitors and horror-shadowy power lines, damn does it have so many shots of power lines. But that is covered ground - instead I want to note how often the narrative approach itself just goes off the walls in service of its goals. Episode 9 is the peak of that approach, where scattered throughout the episode is a fully-fledged documentary that starts with the Roswell incident, which it then admits is fake, nevermind! before pivoting to discourse about Schumann Resonances and the Earth as a decentralized Neural Net and...

Just a screenshot from an anime here folks! Vannevar Bush better have a Danbooru tag 

All of this information is “true” by the way, as in real concepts and thinkers and crackpot ideas...until the end, when suddenly its someone from Tachibana Labs adding Schumann Resonance Integration to the 6th Protocol and wait-a-second that’s the show-canon, Tachibana Labs isn't real. As a ~youth~ you might be foolish enough to try to figure out how say ELF bands might be critical to understanding the plot of Lain, which is a classic “philosophy mindfuck” mistake; its all bullshit, the ideas only matter in the most loose way that does not require understanding them. Yet, this is *exactly* what that early hacker internet felt like; crazy ideas being stitched together from low-pixel edited docu-footage repurposed to utopian futures or secret conspiracies, and by sliding this stream-of-consciousness braindump right into the canon of the show it makes Lain feel like a perfect simulacra of that age. To spend any amount of the runtime of an episode on this and to actually pull it off is queering the madness/genius binary in the hottest way. 

The reason Lain can pull this off is its other source of strength I alluded too - all of these visual elements are in service of a very human story, that of Lain trying to figure out her place in the world. And this arc hits one of my sweet spots for media, what I have called the “multifaceted arc” in the past, where instead of a show having multiple independent arcs for characters it instead has one seemingly-completed arc that proceeds to be refracted, challenged,and altered over the run of a show. I mentioned in my previous Lain essay how the show was using the visual language of exposed skin to communicate Lain’s digital emancipation, becoming Lain of the Wired. In those early episodes that is what is happening, and this process peaks around the halfway point with a confident, powerful Lain. She spends much of episode 6 looking like some variation of this:

Total badass. That confidence and power then proceeds to be abused, manipulated, revealed as a false identity, and then stripped away over the latter half of the show - being Lain of the Wired turns out to be a curse as much as a blessing, and for the very human reasons of the connections to real people she loses through that process. This emotional core does an amazing job of keeping you grounded - in the same episode as that conspiracy documentary, Lain has her first kiss! (Its a bit of a dud, but still). And by the end of the show she is at the apogee of her digital empowerment, and also riddled with despair, loneliness, and in desperate need of help, looking like this:

Note the withdrawn pose and the positioning of Lain backgrounded and way below her friend in the frame, to imply a state of weakness despite her capabilities. That is some classic visual language by the way: no crazy shot effects, no weird narrative devices, just straightforward emotional communication. Lain spends 50% of its runtime going full avant garde, but never (okay, rarely) lets that overwhelm its arc, and threads the needle to make that arc one of the deeper and more moving arcs I've seen in a show.

Serial Experiments Lain is far from perfect, despite all the praise I just put on it; Episode 6 for example has some dumb midichlorian-style “you are trying to explain something no one needs an explanation for” plot, and half of the crazy visual effects are compensating for the fact that its budget was like 10 dollars. But it peaks far exceed its valleys, and I am exceedingly happy to have watched it; I have always struggled to name my “Number 5″ on my top 5 Anime list with a lot of contenders for the slot, but Lain might have just snagged the title.

(Which would make my top 5 list *entirely* composed of anime from the second half of the 90′s, and not due to nostalgia as I only saw the majority of them in the past few years. Certainly a question worth answering, but for another time...)

[ayankun]

Ok, if you haven’t already (I say this to be polite, I know you haven’t) go put your eyes on this episode synopsis first.  Why?  Because it’s a good time.  But mostly because I want you to be tangentially familiar with certain topics so I can better explain what happened to my brain while watching this one.

oh, right, this post is a synopsis of the VR Troopers episode 2x13 “Kaitlin Through the Looking Glass” btw

4

3

2

1

WE

ARE

V

R

Now that you’ve got this far, here’s some housekeeping before we start:

I watched this show sporadically as a kid and have very fond memories of it “being better than Power Rangers” but really didn’t know anything about it at the time.  I am watching it as an adult partly due to nostalgia but mostly because I genuinely enjoy it.  Not necessarily because of the reasons they intended, but, you know.

As an adult, with a different understanding of the world than when I was seven, I willfully misconstrue the main characters as being in a polyamorous relationship.  OT3 baybee

On a similar tangent, Ryan “Trooper TRANSform” Steele is obviously trans.  (transgent??)

Hell, maybe they all are.  The more the merrier amirite.

They all call the Professor “Puhfessor,” so I will, too.

Still with me?  Let’s begin.

(first up, though, the title sequence is over a minute long, when really they only needed like, maybe 15 seconds to get the point across.  there is also a ton of footage used that portrays events that never occur and also the song is not catchy enough to warrant any of this and I love it)

So in Ryan’s flashback intro, he muses about how, as a kid, he felt the need to prove himself.  He expresses this to his dad by asking when he’ll get a black belt, and his dad is a good supportive dad who tells him:

“It’s not the belt that’s important, son,”

Ryan’s dad says trans rights.

Ryan’s VO goes on to say "My dad taught me that it’s not outward appearances that really count, and that was an important lesson that would come in handy time and time again.”

Ryan really loves memories of his dad.

Which I think is a sweet lesson to learn when you’re young and other youngs (and olds) are going to give you crap about how you look, but it’s also hilariously phrased considering how superficial the concept of “outward appearances” is to this episode.

So we jump into things down at the ... Voice Underground Daily idk what the newspaper is called, I’m just trying to read the sign on the wall tbh.  We’re at Kaitlin’s place of business, and Woody (I think his name is Woody LOLOL how many episodes have I seen) shows Kaitlin this front page article which appears to have the headline:

ZIKTOR DEFEATED AT CITY HALL -- NO TOXIC WASTE DUMPING AT CROSS WORLD PARK

Ok, a couple of things.

Kaitlin and Percy are just ... chilling out at the copy machine like they’re friends and this is where the cool kids hang out.

Which can’t possibly be true because the actual cool kids are there in the back, just reading newspapers like Actual Cool Kids do.

They’re an indie paper, right?  How can they afford to print headlines that verbose?  ... Or full color glossy, for that matter

THEY ACCIDENTALLY PLAYED THIS LIKE THEY WERE EXCITED ABOUT THE NEWS ITSELF AND NOT ABOUT KAITLIN DOING A GOOD JOB ON AN IMPORTANT FRONT PAGE PIECE

Environmentalism was No Joke in kids’ media in the 90s.  I specifically remember learning the word “toxic” from a Power Rangers episode where Billy tested the lake water.  I literally had to look it up.

and they say you can’t learn nuffink from tv

Anyway, part of the excitement is that this article is the follow up to an expose of Ziktor, also authored by Kaitlin, which inspired the city officials to veto his waste-dumping proposal.  So we’re proud of Kaitlin for doing a good job at journalism and for protecting the world!

JB does what JB does best and attempts to arrange a date.

The line is, “Hey, let’s celebrate!  With lunch!  At Hamburger Hutch” but I guess someone at Netflix got lazy for a second.

I forgot to mention, in my HC he’s our token ace (as my favorites often are), so he tends to go overboard with the romance.  You don’t have to compensate for anything, JB!

Kaitlin appreciates the gesture.

But then Woody interjects and I let my adult sense of humor get the better of me...

come on, the man’s name is Woody I can’t be the only one with my mind in the gutter can I

Also the line is “I don’t want you boys filling up my star reporter” so what am I supposed to thINK

--WITH JUNK FOOD.  Dodged an FCC bullet there.

So I just now gave it 2 seconds thought and the discrepancies with the subtitles probably have something to do with the expectation that children would be watching this show and can’t read that fast.  BOY DO I NOT FIT THE DEMOGRAPHIC

Ok well.

Where Woody’s going with this is that he wants to impose a health shake on Kaitlin for godknowswhy.  But it’s all good because as he todders off to get started on what will surely be a monstrosity, we get this ADORABLE moment where Kaitlin tries to get JB to come to her rescue.

She just runs up and grabs him.  I’m all a-flutter.

But JB is of no help.  Instead, he calls dibs on her fries.

There’s a weird, under-baked joke going on here that seems to be rooted in the idea that if one is dieting then others benefit from this self-sacrifice by gleefully picking up the slack?  Anyway Kaitlin’s not on a diet?  This vitamin shake angle literally came out of nowhere?  Is against her will???

Just one burger, please.  Protein style :<

et tu, Jeb??

Anyway, this weird exchange just passes the time to get Woody all set up.  He turns on the blender and THE WHOLE WORLD STARTS SHAKING. 

Percy runs over to be the hero, demanding Woody turn the blender off, while everyone else just rumbles around looking distraught and not practicing anything resembling safe earthquake response.  Percy manages to get a hold of the blender, lifting it off the counter, and -- you guessed it -- the lid comes off and purreed-carrot-baby-food-looking goop gets all over his nerdy white button up.

The shaking stops.  Percy’s very proud of himself (and disdainful of the others who didn’t come to his heroic conclusion).  End scene.

I’ll be real.  At this juncture, literally thought that the blender HAD caused a natural disaster, and it was just a wacky 90s gag that went on for far too long.

More on this story as it develops.  We’re moving on.

How many cities in the world do you think have ominous buildings in them that aren’t secret headquarters for supervillains?

Our good buddy Karl Ziktor is reading -- wait for it -- Kaitlin’s article.  It has a headline so long they had to dedicate the full front page for it.  I’m pretty sure that’s not how newspapers are commonly formatted.

That is literally just a couple of newspaper clippings taped to a big piece of paper.

Oh he’s mad.  He tells Juliet all about his evil plan for revenge, which is to “steal her virtual image and create a second Kaitlin Starr [that serves him]”.

Same, Juliet.

Off that yikes, a henchwoman comes in to appraise Ziktor of the status of phase one, which is underway.  A so-called Stingbot is “in the basement of the Underground Voice” so that’s what the paper’s name is, anyway.

Anyway so Stingbot was the one responsible for the earlier tremors.  And, yeah, I mean I know they were new cobbling stories together from old footage, but What The Hell do “sting” and “earthquake” and “outward appearances” have in common?

And that is how a Stingbot do.

My question is partially answered, in that Stingbot’s earthquakes are a distraction so that some skugs can plant the “Virtual Mirror Transmitter” on Kaitlin, which is the nefarious device that will create the aforementioned Kaitlin-2.  Bold of him to assume that just because Kaitlin’s a woman that she 1) carries a purse 2) stores a mini pink mirror in the purse 3) will look at herself in the mirror unprovoked.

It’s such a wildly twentieth-century concept.  Here in good ol’ 2020, I, for one, have not looked in a mirror in months.

Ugh more gross than this use of outdated stereotypes is this weird tongue thing Ziktor does while almost literally salivating after his upcoming revenge.  You’ll have to go see it for yourself, I’m not going to watch it again to cap it.

(This guy gives his 200% to this role, though.  What a legend. RIP Gardner Baldwin)

So Ziktor blue-skadoos into his virtual stronghold and gets an update from his generals.  There’s this new guy that I’ve already also forgotten the name, and since he has a human face, there’s a lot of awkward cuts between him and his Japanese counterpart in the footage that’s already ten years old at the time.  It probably looked great.  I was an adult before I found out that Rita Repulsa was the original Japanese actress in the original dubbed Japanese footage.

Anyway, he looks great.

I think I read that for season 2 they had access to and/or recreated the costumes used in/matching the source material, so there’s a noticeable uptick in cool-looking sets with American actors wearing cool-looking costumes, like this one.

You said it.

That’s about it for this scene, but before we go to commercials, Grimlord says this nonsense:  “I will destroy Kaitlin Starr with the one weapon she cannot defend against -- herself.”

Confirmed: Kaitlin is a deadlier weapon than, say, a homing missile.  (she can defend herself from those)

Ok we’re back at the Underground Voice and there’s still an earthquake going on.  Also, and let me tell you this with a large amount of regret of my life-choices, I’ve been sitting here for just about two hours and we are only five minutes into the episode (and that includes the minute long opening credits.)

Let’s roll!

JB gets off the phone with who knows who, having learned that there’s no earthquake registering anywhere, it’s a localized mysterious incident.  Ryan recommends they clear the building “just to be safe.”  My boy, why wasn’t that everyone’s first thought?  Are they really just standing around waiting to be told?  We had drills for this for a reason!

(Actually, I’m not sure where Cross World City is located.  Maybe they’re not on a fault line and do not actually do drills)

In any case, there’s a brief PSA where Woody wants to collect his valuables to take with him, and everyone has to inform him that that’s ill-advised behavior in an evacuation scenario.

He responds in classic Woody nonsense, by putting on a captain’s hat and insisting he’ll go down with his ship.  AND OUR BOY JB SAYS

He’s still thinking about that date.

LOOK.  There’s no rule that says asexuals can’t make dirty jokes.  Because we can and do.  Let me have this.

So our heroes herd everyone out of the building and then stay behind to call the Puhfessor.  Just as they get him on the computer, the earthquake stops. 

It’s not all good news, though.  The Puhfessor taps into some kind of impossible CC feed and they watch Stingbot undermining the structural integrity of the building.  Stingbot, by the way, has one of those creepy child laughs that is insane.  It’s so good.

Ryan decides to check out the basement himself while Kaitlin and JB keep everyone else outside.  He finds some creepy janitors down there, and they head on up like creeps normal janitors.

Maybe they were just hotboxing down there.

Stingbot’s also in the basement!  Who knows what he was doing down there, because

Murder hornet, colorized, 2020

Which is a weird thing to say until you remember the slight, throwaway “yummy!” he says earlier while drilling into the building.  I had forgotten it in the 40 seconds it took for me to get from that moment to here.

Ryan insults Stingbot’s outward appearance, which is odd because I thought he learned that lesson as a kid.  Either way, it’s time to

WE ARE V R

Only to spend about half a second on recycled footage just to have Stingbot go “lol, later loser.”  Because those perfectly normal janitors are upstairs swapping Kaitlin’s purse mirror with the evil thing.

Can you imagine trying to pull a stunt like this today?

Outside, things have calmed down enough that JB thinks Ryan’s got it under control.  He’s gonna go back in “to see if the building’s safe enough to reenter.”  I know he knows it’s not a real earthquake, but also I don’t think I’d trust a non-professional to assess my office’s structural integrity.

Kaitlin’s going to join him, which causes Percy to pipe up, Pavlovianly ... just to chicken out and stay put.  GOOD JOB PERCY.  USING YOUR HEAD FOR ONCE I SEE.

(kids, don’t volunteer to check that a building is safe after an incident where its safety may be in question.  it is not cowardly to leave it to Someone Who Knows What They’re Doing)

So JB and Kaitlin come back in to find the Normal Janitors shadily stealing a floppy disk from Kaitlin’s desk.  (kids, a floppy disk is a real object that looks a lot like the “save” icon)   BUT OF COURSE THEY’RE SKUGS SO JB AND KAITLIN HAVE TO THROW DOWN.

Let’s just say there’s a good thing they have an earthquake to blame all this property damage on.

JB’s a little snippy.

All he wanted was to go to lunch with his girlfriend and boyfriend.

The gold skugs do their fusion dance thing and turn into the oni-mask skug variant, which I’m assuming is a constraint of these later episodes where they used footage from a show that did not have the gold ones in.

FLIRTY BATTLEFIELD BANTER UGH I SHIP IT

Once that’s handled, we find out what Ryan’s been up to in the basement by himself this whole time.

Um.  I’m not touching that one with a 10-foot ... wait.

Ohhhh

Ryan heads back up and swaps notes with JB and Kaitlin.  Stingbot said that its work was done, so what exactly was it trying to accomplish?  Ryan then runs from there outside to check on everyone else.

Kaitlin then decides she needs to freshen up, which is something I don’t recall her ever needing or wanting to do after any other natural disaster/fight portrayed on this show.

But look how cute they are with their mutual post-fight shoulder-pat.  JB even gives her this cute little look as she darts off.  He is smitten.

He is smote.

Kaitlin gets her mirror out of her purse, as planned, and checks herself out.  You know.  Like how woman do.

She gets it.

This is it!  Grimlord’s chance to strike!  He will have his revenge, Juliet, just you wait!

for great justice

We are treated to a brief bit of delightful 80s Japanese sci-fi, all flashing lights and chonky beep boop buttons.  It works!  A tastefully gendered laser light shoots out of Kaitlin’s mirror and STEALS HER FACE OFF HER FACE

FACE/OFF

The experience seems highly unpleasant, but she’s mostly ok...

But wait, who’s this ...

It’s not really the Mirror Universe unless someone gets a goatee.

Kaitlin’s freaked out, but we don’t have time to see her process what it was that just happened.  More beep boop 80s lights (seizure warning much), and the virtual replica Kaitlin is 3D printed in Grimlord’s lair.

lol he’s got a play date

So this Kaitlin is the same exact person as real Kaitlin, with one major difference.

So this got dark, right?  This is different from that time they cloned Ryan, because that was just a DNA clone man baby with evil sunglasses; this is actually Kaitlin, the person, just with some programming differences, who’s gonna go back out there and hurt her boys herself.

Needless to say, Grimlord is delighted.

Check out that disgruntled wall snake, tho.  “I thought I was your lovely child”

Now Grimlord’s plan is to send Kaitlin into the wild with a device called the “fissicator” which is a “sTUn ray!!” (you have to hear him say it, it’s so good) as well as a thing that will reprogram the Trooper’s “contact disk.”

I didn’t mention it earlier, but that’s the disk that the janitors skugs were trying to steal, and it was also how Kaitlin called up the Puhfessor on her work computer.  I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen it before and we never see it again.  It’s Not A Thing.

So Kaitlin goes to Tao’s, where Ryan’s just chilling there by himself.  I guess everyone was okay after the earthquake, then.  (It is unclear how much time has passed)  Maybe it’s been hundreds of years, because Ryan acts like he’s not sure who she is.

Wait, hold on.  I did NOT pay close enough attention the first time, but -- either it’s much later the same day and/or they missed a scene.  They’re still wearing the same clothes ... and Ryan says he thought she was heading (back?) to the paper ... and then she says ....

Ryan.exe has stopped executing

Wait so WHAT.  What workout.  We have not been to Tao’s yet this episode.  ???

It’s really just a ruse to get Ryan to fight her, though.  But also.  Why need ruse?  Evil clone?  Just attack tho, right?

But also no NO.  DONT attack.  We’ve already seen JB be beat up by his evil clone boyfriend.  It’s rough.  (spoiler alert, this one’s gonna be rough, too)

So Ryan tries to let her down easy by saying he doesn’t have time -- and I can’t tell with this video quality, but I don’t think he’s wearing a watch but he does the “look at wrist” technique and it’s p good.

Kaitlin-2 refuses to be let down easy.

Them’s fightin words

Ryan ends up splayed out on the desk but seriously, now is not the time.

He rightfully wants to know what’s up, but she keeps taunting him to fight her.  She takes the first shot, which he dodges and blocks before disengaging.  Remember, kids, just because somebody picks a fight with you doesn’t mean you don’t have any other options!

She won’t stop coming for him, though, so he gets her arms pinned so he can try talking her down again. 

This technique backfires.

no more mr nice kaitlin

So in the other clone episode, this scene was staged in a room full of people, and even though JB was blindsided, he and Ryan are ostensibly evenly matched.  It wasn’t nice for JB, but at least someone was there to break up the fight.

This time though, Ryan’s been gently if firmly trying to diffuse a confusing situation where someone without his training is behaving irrationally and is going to get both of them hurt.  So far his attempts to de-escalate have failed, and there is no deus ex intervention incoming.

AND THEN she goes and plays the superpowers card on him.  Black belt or no, the whole point of having the Trooper alter ego is that they come with amazingly OP combat powers capable of defeating all manner of monsters.

And Kaitlin, a very very very dear close friend has just walked up out of nowhere and dropped a nuke on him.

Okay, so she throws him over a table, it’s the principle of the thing.

This overkill maneuver knocks him out cold.  She lifts Ryan’s Trooper communicator (so he can’t call for help when he comes to -- omg this is so chilling) and then uses the fissicator to call Grimlord for further instructions.

Gotta catch ‘em all

New Kaitlin, who dis?

So he now wants her to steal the disk, reprogram the disk, and use the reprogrammed disk to break all the Trooper computer stuff.  She reads his order back like

Close enough, I guess.

She gleefully moves on to her next task, leaving a helpless Ryan struggling and failing to regain consciousness.  :<<<<<<<

At the paper, real Kaitlin gets a message from JB on her little Trooper video phone and secretly Trooper TRANSforms out of there from inside the darkroom.  This was the point where I realized they had different ones!  Hers and JB’s are red and white, while Ryan’s (that just got stole) is red/blue.

Also, you can just see under all those crayons, but that’s the “contact disk” that Kaitlin-2 is coming for.  (how many crayons does a professional journalist need, anyhow?)

So there’s a joke in there were Percy sees Kaitlin go into the darkroom and then Kaitlin-2 walks in, and then also when he checks the darkroom, it’s empty.

Oh, so that means Kaitlin-2 successfully steals the contact disk, btw.

Back at Tao’s, Ryan has woken up and some how his backpack has, like, crawled down to see if he’s okay?  Which is helpful because that’s how he is able to quickly identify that on top of assault, there’s been a robbery.

I hope she doesn’t delete my save files

And this was the moment (right now, doing the caps) that I realized the little phones are called VRVTs!

But seriously, imagine being knocked out cold by a loved one, with no reason, no hint at an explanation, and not only has she left you for dead, she’s taken your phone so you can’t call for help.  He has no idea that she’s an evil clone!!!!  This is a real tragedy of a thing.  A gutting betrayal.

It looks like Ryan has his own contact disk, tho?  And he uses this on Tao’s PC to call up the Puhfessor.

spelled it rong

Just as a note, this subtitle comes up WAY too soon, so for a couple of frames it just looks like some kind of meme.  A++

 Ryan starts to relate his traumatic experience to the Puhfessor, but luckily he’s cut off with the good news that his “sensors” somehow correctly identify Ryan’s assailant as Kaitlin’s virtual double.

geez, you guys, look at how Ryan deflates hearing this.  I mean, it’s not great that he was probably concussed, but it’s a relief that his world still makes some kind of sense.

poor bb

Also, you can’t tell as much here, but there’s a really subtle punch in as the moment progresses, bringing us closer and making the moment more intimate as he grapples with this new information.  There’s a lot of dumb half-assed stuff in this show, but I gotta call attention to the stuff that is excellent for any era.

Also it’s so efficient from a time-management perspective.  Just look at the opening shot, which was a medium type establishing shot so you can picture Ryan in the space, but the PC’s right there for both the viewer and Ryan to reach.  Then we slowly zoom in, which serves double duty in that it provides the appropriate emotional impact, and at the end we’re on a nice close up of Ryan as he jumps into action.  Three shots with just one set up (and probably done in one take, with room to splice the PC shots in)!  I’m very pleased with this.

Down to brass tacks

The Puhfessor ominously tells him that they have their own troubles and we go straight from there into some source footage of them fighting some skugs and what I think is General Ivar.

After about three seconds of that, we cut back to the lab, where Ryan busts in on Kaitlin-2 just as she’s hacking up a storm.

im in ur base, haxxoring ur mainframez

Kaitlin-2 shows him the contact disk, which is now “encoded with a self-destruct program” that she’s going to use to overheat the lab’s power core and destroy like all the things.  Ryan is noticeably concerned, but Kaitlin-2 points the fissicator at him to get him to stay in line.

Ok ok ok ok so here’s where we get to the point where, when I watched this today, I fully turned away from whatever it was I was doing to go wwwwwwwwwwwwtf

Kaitlin-2 has a disk that will blow up the lab -- and there’s nothing Ryan can do to stop her--

huh

bruh what are you

bro srsly what

is happening

You’re trying to tell me that Ryan “killed his own clone with no ragrets” Steele is trying to make an emotional appeal to this clone in order to undermine her sense of purpose?

...did she ever think that Grimlord cared about her?  As a person?  I feel like that wasn’t in the contract when she was 3D printed with the sole purpose of serving her dark master, and she shouldn’t have any emotional reaction to this assumed expectation being challenged.

And .... did they ... did they read my other post?  The one about wanting to keep the clone around ..... ??????

what is happening right now

Ryan leans hard into this “embrace your humanity” tactic and has the Puhfessor show them a live feed of JB and Kaitlin’s fight.

“...She sure could use our help...”

wait for it

When she balks, he gives her one last over the top inspirational blurb that despite of whatever it was Grimlord did to her, she’s still the same (good) person as Kaitlin.

It starts to sink it.

(also just check out these sweet eyelines, you can tell that the screen they’re watching is slightly to his left,  sort of behind her to her right, which makes sense!)

He keeps at it.

Looks like it’s working?  She starts to reconsider her whole existence ...

...considers Kaitlin’s ...

... moment of truth ...

And it works!

BUT IT DOESN’T STOP THERE YOU GUYS

“NOW GO HELP HER” RYAN COMMANDS

AND

OMG

CLONE KAITLIN-2 IS ALL

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess, I mean, obviously Ryan’s evil clone did that whole thing where he stole Ryan’s virtualizer and started flying the Skybase, so if this Kaitlin is the same as the other Kaitlin then obviously she’d be able to do this, too.

But like!  She was the main villain until like four seconds ago, somebody who did Ryan dirty.  Just another of Grimlord’s nefarious tools of warfare.  And Ryan, a man who’s killed his own clone before, who took a beating from her only hours prior, is suddenly the bigger man who is capable of seeing past all that in order to turn an agent of his enemy.  And to go do his job, no less!

This has never happened before.  This show’s always been kill or be killed.  There’s a good reason for this, and we’ll get to that in one moment.

But I like to think Ryan learned from his mistake.  He didn’t even try to to connect to his evil clone.  He just got beat up and went back for revenge.  (I’m looking back at my caps for that episode, and it seems it was the Puhfessor’s idea to kill the evil clone, and maybe there was a MacGuffin reason why it was The Only Way, I forget.)  Maybe he thought long and hard about the repercussions of his actions -- maybe he thought that, had he been able to better understand his evil self, that maybe that shadow version of him would have liked to have been given the benefit of the doubt?

At the end of the day, I can think whatever I want.  But why we never get any other reformed villains until now is only because

It’s almost like they recycled footage from a different show(s) and just had to roll with the punches.

So then JB and the Kaitlins fight some skugs and there’s a big explosion and a lot of jumping.  JB and Kaitlin get caught up with the SparkNotes version of who tf extra Kaitlin is and then they fight Stingbot, teleport to a quarry, you know, all the everyday stuff.

Back at the lab, Ryan’s feverishly trying to undo Kaitlin-2′s handiwork and keep the core from melting down.  Can he do i-- well yes.  He can and he does do it.  Then he TROOPER TRANSFORMs away and ... flies off to fight ... some jets ... I guess? 

pew pew pew

In the quarry, JB is going toe to toe with Stingbot.  Stingbot has some cute little wasp drones that electrocute everyone.  They’re having a good time out there.

it’s super effective

Ryan shoots some more jets ... JB dislodges his wasp and slices one off a Kaitlin with a sword ... the third one just .. pops off on its own *shrug*

Stingbot shoots some acid (oh he did that before, too, in the basement, but it was irrelevant) which evaporates a boulder ... Kaitlin goes back to her battlefield quips but they’re not nearly as flirty as the last time ...

JB gets out his lightsaber and GOES TO TOWN on the remaining bad guys.  That thing makes the BEST wvungwvungwvung sounds, just btw.

And that’s it!

Almost.

Grimlord spends his obligatory seven seconds ruing the day he ever met a VR Trooper and swearing revenge.

ya it’s called being a parent

Turns out he still hopes that the two Kaitlins will destroy each other!  Very optimistic guy, our Grimlord.

Back at ol’ HQ, JB and the Kaitlins stroll in and explain the sitch to Jeb.  Kaitlin-2 seems fully reformed!

yee gurrl

But oh-hoho, does the Puhfessor HATE clones.

buzzkill, emphasis on kill

So it turns out, and I quote, “two Kaitlins cannot exist in the same reality.”  I guess technically she’s not a clone, but a virtual double from the mirrorverse/VR land, so that kind of makes some sort of sense.  This dimension is too small for the both of you!

The stakes are that if the two Kaitlins are not rejoined within 24 hours, both Kaitlins will byte the dust. 

Oh no!!

This was the point where, having a pretty good internal clock as well as a refined sense of story structure, I literally smirked at the screen thinking “soooooooo what.  you have like two minutes left and you’re gonna fix it in time for the credits.  overdramatic stakes are overdramatic.”

AND

THEN

THE

KICKER

OH-HOHO

I WAS

SO WRONG

SAME THO?1

:D

[angryangryaces]

Poison

The air smells of rain, burning fuel, and the countless small poisons that circulate in the city, and my scars ache in the cold, a filigree of pain tracing out the lines of my skeleton. My damned, addicted brain is hissing for me to press the button. I don’t listen to it. I throw my bag into the transport and pick a seat.

“Caller” walks us through the job on the way in. It’s straightforward: get in, grab a prototype from the testing labs, get out again. Minimal casualties, which is why he told us to bring hammerblow rounds. Ideal for a pack that doesn’t want to make the news.

One of the others looks at the chain holding my gun to my wrist. Must be a rook. They’ll learn. You can always tell a seasoned wolf; they stop looking at your little tricks and secrets and just let you get on with your job.

As we come in for a landing, I pull my hat down and make sure my kerchief is going to hide my rebreather. Combined with the goggles and the coat, it should be almost impossible for the watching gargs and other cameras to tell who I am. I’ve already checked my gear: submachine gun, machete, grapnels, a few kinds of blasting charge, a couple of different poisons.

***

The windows break the neon light from outside into rainbow fragments, which play over my coat. The stylised illustration of a winged figure giving gifts from heaven isn’t spiritual; it’s marketing. The gifts being dispensed have brand logos on them for the corp’s subsidiaries.

One of them has the stylised atom of Nucleus Energy on it, and my scars flare into pain for a split second. I know it’s psychological. I grit my teeth behind my collar and carry on.

Phase one is a cakewalk. “Caller” had some inside intel that this part of the building was going to be low-security, and that seems to be working fine: the rook, who I’ve learned is called “Mooch”, is keeping the cameras under control, looping some footage so none of them pick us up. It’s not going to last forever, but it doesn’t have to; we’re not under any given eye for too long, and most of the gargs are outside.

The next corridor is wrong. The walls are riddled with bullet holes and carved with a filigree of blade marks.  The mutilated bodies of corpsec guards are everywhere, limbs wrenched from their sockets and throats ripped out. Even through my rebreather, I can smell blood and gunfire, mingled with another smell: a thick, animal musk.

I’ve heard the rumours – everyone has, everyone knows this is happening, no matter how hard corpsec try to suppress it – but I hadn’t expected to see it here. You never do, right? It’s always a friend of a friend that runs into this shit.

This is going to suck.

***

“Mooch” is the first to pull the trigger. Not wise, exactly, but I can’t blame them; the dead guards are mute testimony to how deadly these things are, and it’s not like a full pack in tac gear is exactly subtle. Within seconds, everyone else has joined in. Hammerblow rounds patter off its hairy, gore-spattered skin like rain. A couple of them provoke flinches, leave a mark, but don’t slow it much.

It looks like someone took a very large, feral wolf and mashed it up with a man. Its head is mostly canine, although its teeth are larger than any reasonable animal’s, but the rest of it is chimeric: its apelike stance and powerful arms are human, or at least close to it, but its tail and hair are lupine, and its clawed hands aren’t really either. It’s also covered in blood and shreds of what might, once, have been a corpsec uniform.

It howls in fury and leaps at us.

***

According to “Mirai”, it’s all the fault of the veins and the other rich bastards. Says some conspiracy site put her onto it. Supposedly, the reason corpsec guards are so loyal to the veins, so weird and bootlicky, is that the labs figured out some kind of gene treatment, isolated the stuff from dogs that makes them so loyal, and the suits give it to the  When it goes too far, they change, when the scum at the top finish draining their humanity.

“Sigismund” says she’s full of shit. Genetics don’t work like that, and even if there was some secret tampering going on, it’d be more likely to lead to cancers than monsters. Mind you, he thinks it’s magic, so I’m not sure how reliable he is on the science. (He’s got a wild set of ideas about that, too. According to him, the beasts are nature unfettered, lashing out at the corp-choked world in a violent frenzy. Says he’s trying to figure out how to use that power constructively. Hasn’t gotten anywhere yet.)

Right now, though, the cause isn’t particularly critical. It doesn’t matter if it was made by mad science or black magic or if creatures like this are just a thing now. It’s bearing down on me, and there isn’t much I can do to stop it.

I hit the button.

***

Not a literal button, of course; jek doesn’t use physical controls. Instead, I mutter the activation phrase, and a pain like cold fire stabs into my veins as the injectors pump poison into my bloodstream. My whole body convulses, and the cold fire begins to heat up. The part of me that’s given in, the addict in my mind, it tinges the whole process with an edge of lust that shames me. Even so, I’m not stupid enough to pick this fight without it.

The effect is almost immediate. My gear feels like it’s made from cotton candy. My original bones would have already shattered from the convulsion, but the substitutes are doing their job. My vision fogs around the edges, but it’s almost supernaturally clear at the centre – I can make out the beast’s individual hairs, and the shattered remnants of a corpsec radio headset dangling from its neck like a collar.

I give it a burst in the face before it hits me. I can tell it felt the impacts, but it barely slows before tackling me to the ground and knocking my gun out of my hands. Fine by me; the bullets aren’t helping much anyway. The others will have to go on, take care of the mission while I fight. It’s probably best; jek isn’t just physical, and it’s poison for a pack. Nobody on jek is a team player.

The force of the tackle rolls us into the last corridor, but my armour protects me from the impacts. Coat’s not going to be salvageable, though; it has claw marks in it now. Without the jek, I’d have been knocked a lot sillier than I am.

As the beast lunges for me, I bring up my machete. It doesn’t dig deep, but jek-fuelled muscles drive it through the skin. The beast’s blood is surprisingly bright – what little of it comes out, anyway.

It seems to have decided I need to be tenderised before I’m eaten. It scoops me up and slams me into the wall. My goggles dim; the beast has its back to a window, and the neon light from outside would be streaming into my eyes, so they’ve compensated.

Then it all comes to me at once: the window could be my solution here. The beast is recovering quickly; it’s already stopped bleeding. I’m not going to win this one-on-one, and if the pack know what they’re doing, they’ve already headed for the objective. I have to do something unexpected.

I fire one of my wrist grapnels. It hits the window, and the motors whirr. It’s designed for heavy loads, and after a frozen moment while it calculates the weight, it retracts, dragging both of us into the window.

The beast is surprised, but not enough to disorient it. It thrashes around, its rage twisting metal and driving tinted duraglass out of its sockets.

The window gives way, and we both go over the edge.

***

On impact with the wall, one of my charges goes off unexpectedly. My spine doesn’t enjoy it, even through the pain-deadening haze of jek, but it doesn’t do serious harm; it just blasts a chunk out of the wall and flings us into traffic. The beast sinks its jaws into my left arm, and I let go of my machete; it disappears, never to be seen again.

As we tumble, I try and find some weakness. I can’t go for its eyes with any kind of accuracy, its bones are nearly as tough as mine, and even striking at the stomach only seems to make it angrier.

Our descent is bluntly interrupted by a corpsec lighter. Our impact with the cockpit shatters the duraglass canopy, so we must have been going down pretty hard – but, fortunately, the beast hits it first. The impact solves two of my problems at once. First, while landing still hurts like a bastard, even with jek, the beast takes the brunt of the impact. Second, the beast’s breath is laden with pink froth. After a moment, the rage flees its body, and it goes limp. Probably had some of the canopy driven into its lungs; not a pleasant death, but a final one.

The lighter skews wildly off-course, and I realise after a second that the pilot is either unconscious or dead. Corpsec lighters do have autopilots, but some people prefer the personal touch or are worried about reprogramming (a valid concern; “Mirai” once sent a half-dozen corpsec troopers on a routine patrol out of state as a prank), so not everyone uses them.

I don’t have a chance to get to the controls, but luckily, we’re headed towards a window. The pain in my entire body worsens a step as I see a giant Nucleus Energy logo, and then we hit.

***

I stagger to my feet, somehow still conscious. It’s almost impossible to break my bones now, but my right leg is definitely not as straight as I remember it being.

The window in question was right next to a meeting room, apparently. A stunned silence hangs in the air, but in a few seconds – even ones drawn out by jek – people are going to start yelling and running.

The big logo on the wall confirms it. This is a Nucleus Energy office. The bastards whose strontium leak cost me everything. Their poison had seeped into my bones, forced me to get them replaced. Left me with a debt I could only pay off by taking wolf jobs here and there. All my scars, all my wounds, this growing addiction to jek – all their fault. I can’t tell if I’m hurting worse because I know it’s them, or if my body is already redlining my pain receptors.

My jek-focused perceptions show me that one of them has a refrigerator briefcase here. A vein, then, carrying his supply of transfusions around with him. I can’t tell which of the others are veins, but they all might as well be: even if they haven’t had the treatment, they have the same kind of mind. The suits in this city are all the same: cold, bloodsucking bastards, they only care about themselves. The veins took a treatment that would strip their empathy and didn’t even notice. Even before that was developed, they gutted the land, poisoned the water, pumped fumes into the air. We’d be better off without them.

The weight of my gun dangling from my wrist is still there, and with jek reflexes, I could do a lot of damage here. Start at the door, work my way across. Even a vein’s boosted body can’t take a good hit to centre mass, and none of them look to be wearing much armour.

It won’t solve much, but it’ll be a little less poison in the city’s bloodstream.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Primez!

hell yeah thankyou!!! [2, 5, 17 been answered]

(3) maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did?

i’m that theatre gay who’s never Really been in any theatre production. and there was an archery place like 10 min from where i grew up and i was like “ooh archery how cool” b/c i’m a gay but never tried it

(7) amber - share an unpopular opinion that you may have.

hardly unheard of but i Don’t Like the approach to astrology that ppl have been getting in the past few yrs like. the Joke someone on twitter had that we’re like, on the verge of some astrological discrimination lawsuit……..and idk ppl get like pseudo-christian-style Smug about it like, don’t apply this to everyone??? and it’s just strange to like. tell people what they’re like. or explain their characteristics via this really strange westernized vague concept of astrology rather than like, tell me about the life experiences that affect the way that you are. like it’s almost condescending and ppl are being way too serious about it sometimes in (see: the on the verge of the lawsuit thing lol)…..anyways and i guess some of my Killjoy tendencies make me like, haha i’m the Hater b/c idk i’m real opinionated. but a lot of the times it’s not Really b/c i hate other’s joy or some shit, it’s just crap along the lines of like, “these ideas abt love which are meant to be Very Romantic actually strike me as being the Less ideal interpretation of love between people and the potential therein? and colder? and unhealthier / more unpleasant / not as nice / etc etc etc as my ideas on romance which i guess seem like i’m wanting to just shoot down some Lovely Concepts but i’m like. that doesn’t seem lovely. i’m on the very of launching into another essay abt Isolation Isn’t Romantic and Romance As Very Human And Ordinary And Even Mundane Seems A Lot Better Than The More ~Magical~ Approach and did i mention romance should be the Opposite of isolating and yet it’s so taken for granted sometimes that you’ll know it’s True Love when you [bass boosted DIE FOR EACH OTHER] and stop giving a shit about anyone but this one other person and etccccccccc [me screaming for hours]”

and a lot of times things that i guess are would-be Cute / Charming / Wholesome / Positive / Etc start to grate on me if i have to see it too much and i’ll probably end up hating or resenting it but like, not because i hate happy stuff, but b/c it just like. is like, i like things to be Genuine, and it will just feel like this is Performing genuine…ness………..which i don’t like. b/c it’s being Not genuine to try to appeal on the grounds that it’s genuine? yknow. which also extends into the realm of “i hate this Cute music over this cute animal video. don’t tell me how to feel about it” and when something tries to be Surprising in the realm of like, pseudo-dissonant like. oh this is a cute harmless white girl on the ukulele but she just said “fuck” and “std’s” or some crap!!! whaaaaaat!!!!! like, i hate this actually? can i die

i could give a ted talk just showing vines that make it into plenty of people’s compilations and being like “this is why this vine is Not Funny (Enough)” 

(also i do sometimes hate Having Fun. doge speak was so awful. of Course gop congress adopted it briefly in its original heyday. even now i hate the derivatives. i’m not about to rb something that contains the word birb. can i die)

also i think star wars is boring. i think cargo pants are fun and fine. 

(11) orchard - share one thing that you’d like to happen this autumn.

we get confirmation that any Winston Footage is filmed for billions s5. soph i know that like, fitting in almost 3 hrs of subway travel / going into nj and back / probably having to do all this on a weekend / having like a 5 second window maybe makes it difficult but we all agree it’d make another epic gamer moment if you got to see lihn

(13) bonfire - describe your dream house.

lol being in my teenz in 2008 i haven’t thought about it much tbh. i think i’d like a pretty cozy (smallish) bedroom and just a lot of physical Niches yknow. i like to frequent very specific spots which are not too out in the open. and really everything would be kinda Cozy Smallish but not the kitchen. get some space there, and like, raised counters like for julia child being 6′2″ b/c Standard Height is not comfortable for me either at my tender 5′11″ or 6″ness. and i always think that those sitty spaces that are like, Depressed into the floor are fun. i know there’s a word for that, but whatever. there’s a bunch of very disparate color schemes i’d think i’d like, so like, idk if i’d just go for totally different Aesthetic Approaches from room to room to try to cover all of them lol

(19) pumpkin - do you think that humans are inherently good or bad?

i mean i think it’s more important to recognize that anyone is entirely capable of Doing good or bad, and arguing about what they Truly Are In Their Hearts is beside the point. but i also think the idea that like oooh if Polite Society crumbles enough we’ll all just be roving in bloodthirsty packs, looking to kill each other and loot / probably eat the corpses, etc etc ~dark gritty bold~ apocalyptic material that’s like wow yeah that’s really confronting the Uncomfortable True Nature of society. like, capitalism is already a brutal and inhumane situation to exist in, but it’s not some emergent expression of Human Nature like, oh, life is just like this, empty and alienating and unfulfilling unless you [physical violence b/c it is Genuine], or that people would turn on each other if we were in survival mode, like…..no. survival mode always entails helping others to survive like. yeah not for necessarily Every individual? but that’s just more of anyone’s capacity to Do good or bad. but humans as a species are not solitary, we’re social b/c that’s how we all exist in relation to each other, society is innate to us and not some Luxury that distances us from our True Natures. we communicate with each other and want to work together even beyond helping each other survive and want to connect to each other and total / imposed isolation is Bad for anyone. and i think that love and altruism are Human Nature too. like, it’s weird when it’s treated like some evolutionary mystery why humans (or individuals of other species) would exercise altruism and/or self-destruction (or the risk of it) for the sake of others? like “but it doesn’t make sense b/c for us survival means Passing On Genes, we protect ourselves and our ability to exist and procreate, and we protect those most genetically similar to us, down the line to favoring your most distant cousin over a random stranger,” etc etc What A Mystery Why We Are Altruistic!!! but it’s not?? like? we don’t just see ourselves as individuals and we recognize the self in the other, and that we are all just Arbitrarily the self that we happen to be, and are all The Other to everyone else’s Myself…..and why would humanity not Preserve itself beyond just individuals looking out for just their individual existence? we just like. don’t only prioritize the preservation of our own genetic code. why should it be a less Survivally Successful approach for any individual to look out for any other individual? of Course we give a shit about other randos who don’t have any familial or even any other personal connection to us at all b/c we just care about the survival of other humans. 

anyways! no yeah so i think that Love and Altruism are intrinsic human nature. like creativity and communication. we aren’t like, always doomed to destroy each other b/c That’s Humans For You. denying the humanity in others inherently requires actually just reducing one’s own humanity, yknow??? re: human nature anyways. i know we’re all still technically human regardless of how we act. and that the self-destructive destruction of others is a feature of humanity, but i don’t think it’s one which is Inherent or Inevitable. i.e. the Self-Destruction thing. capitalism is out here threatening everyone’s existence and just so happens to require placing the Wealthy Few above the worth of the lives of all the rest, who are the cheap labor force rather than Just As Human as the richest. anyways. mostly Good! but the point is still that anyone can do Bad regardless so like, who cares if you have some good in your heart, bitch we all do.

(23) ghost - is there someone that you miss having in your life?

still a bit effed up on missing the theoretical concept of an in-person group of people who are consistent in genuinely enjoying / being enthusiastic about time spent with you. one reason it’s theoretical is that i’ve never Really had a whole in-person friend group exaactly. and it’s theoretical b/c idk, it’s not easy for me to feel comfortable Being Myself around others and like, i like being in groups as a rando amongst strangers really easily, but if it’s like, we’re all in a group and talking and stuff, i can just go into [stifled mode] real easily, idk, it’s hard to say whether the times i’ve been Uncomfortable in groups like that is just like, it not being the right people, or that i just will always like smaller groups or just one-on-one or smthing i dunnooooo. either way i get depressed about Wouldn’t It Be Nice though so idk? i guess i would still ideally seek it out. but i also can’t feel like i can actually expect this to happen. on a related note i forgot to mention Briony Atkins as this minor character who is very like me in being someone who is outwardly v withdrawn and quiet and comes across as not speaking b/c she has nothing to say but in reality she’s a passionate and boisterous person who just rarely shows / expresses it around others. i’m out here never talking (and getting the chance to talk aloud and it’s like a mile a minute all at once trying to compensate) and being pretty quiet and people get surprised when i have An Opinion even though i’m super opinionated lol and i just find it really hard to be myself around others unless i’m operating completely on my own and beholden to no one, but even then. anxious

[orpheus-type-beat]

shrek

1. Before I came to college I had never moved before. When I woke up on my last day at home, I remember thinking that what was so uncanny was how normal of a day it was. I woke up in the same bed and got ready in the same way I always did. It was a completely normal day except that it was also the last day where this routine would be what I considered normal. Even when I went back home, I knew there would be a different idea of “normal.” It was a very uncanny feeling, knowing that what normal meant to me was about to completely change. 

This is also how I feel about watching Shrek.

2. Ew

3. Also what a cast tho

4. We’re starting in the 3rd act of beauty and the beast. 

5. This is maybe a commentary on late stage capitalism and maybe like weirdly the scalping of Native Americans? And like systemic genocide/internment camps? This is a high concept movie.

6. I get it, donkey’s singing is like a parody of Disney musicals and the unreality of breaking into song.

7. “Doesn’t that bother you?” “Nope”. Wow, true friendship

8. Where did the name Shrek come from? No one knows. They walked into work one day, and every whiteboard was erased except for one, with the name “SHREK” written on it in huge block letters. The security footage from that night was mysteriously corrupted. All attempts to erase that whiteboard since have failed.

9. Farquaad = Fuckwad in a Mike Myers accent. Cool

10. Also, Google Chrome autocorrected Farquaad for me, because that name is just part of the English language now.

11. Farquaad’s got an impressive chin. 

12. And commentary on waterboarding? George Bush doesn’t care about gingerbread people?

13. The Muffin Man thing was a good joke.

14. The Bachelorette thing is pretty funny too. 

15. She’s a female werewolf basically.

16. The compensating joke is also pretty good.

17. His castle is like the magic kingdom? I never knew that this is an interesting development. 

18. “Where is everybody?” Everybody’s at Universal because of Harry Potter land.

19. The thing about perfection is interesting. It’s like celebration / disney land all at once which is interesting. This is not the angle I was expecting. I was expecting a parody of Disney movies, not the theme parks.

20. The champion will have the “opportunity” to rescue the princess. We love corporate speak.

21. This soundtrack is pretty fire too. My favorite part so far.

22. This is also maybe about indigenous peoples land rights? (Editor's Note: not really)

23. “Ogre’s are like onions. They have layers.” It is so surreal to see the origin of this meme.

24. Haha the location. Property values. Curb appeal. I have watched too much HGTV. 

25. As someone with a fear of heights, that was rough. 

26. I know so many lines from this movie out of context wow.

27. “She’s inside, waiting for us to rescue her” “I was talking about the dragon, Shrek” We see you Donkey, ok. I know you and the dragon have kids I’ve seen the merchandising. 

28. Guys gender and femininity are a performance, as evidenced by the princess performing the damsel in distress role.

29. “You’ve had a lot of time to think about this haven’t you” 

30. Donkey, with Dragon, is a bottom, which is funny because he’s also an ass (see I can make edgy puns too Dreamworks)

31. Poor dragon just wants some love.

32. It’s super obvious that Shrek’s an ogre. How can she not know that. He has green skin. And looks like an ogre. It’s obvious.

33. “Take it off” 

34. “Measuring” == Farquaad’s short and has a small penis.

35. Fiona should lean into the assertive thing.

36. This takes place in the Minecraft universe, which is why Fiona puts a door on a cave to spend the night. 

37. Why Do We Build the Wall? To keep the fairy tale creatures out. The enemy is poverty.

38. Shrek has attachment issues (feel u bud).

39. Aww poor Shrek. There’s real pathos in this movie! 

40. Farquaad drinks martinis in bed. Just an observation

41. Donkey remains a bottom, and an ass. I’m just saying I called it.

42.  I prefer the fox Robin Hood.

43. Badass Fiona is way cooler than boring princess Fiona.

44. “Hold the phone” == PG “What the fuck”

45. Now Fiona is going to build a crafting table to make a healing potion.

46. Fiona and Shrek’s first alone moment occurs over an object that is inserted in Shrek’s butt. No other comment.

47.  Soundtrack remains fire af.

48. Donkey is third wheeling hard rn. He’s finna drunk text Dragon 

49. Aww she’s gonna visit him. Adorable. Farquaad is a side piece at best.

50. Shrek lost the courage because of a history of abuse. There is real pathos in this movie!!! 

51. Wake up and smell the pheromones haha

52. There is a lot you could do with a queer studies reading here, with both Shrek and Fiona. 

53. “This is not how a princess is meant to look” see (52)

54. Noo!! An overhearing misunderstanding plot that actually makes sense and isn’t totally stupid (still kinda stupid but).

55. The misunderstanding plot still actually works ok... wtf

56. It’s not like it has feelings ouch oof ouchie

57. He’s so short

58. Damn Hallelujah is used pretty perfectly.

59. “I used to live alone before I knew you” Did they write this movie around that line lol

60. Ooh that table fade transition between Shrek eating alone and Fiona eating alone is fantastic.

61. This last scene is basically the ending to the Princess Bride

62. The crowd laughing at him HURTS ouch

63. Wait Farquaad dies?? The dragon just eats him?? Wtf that’s pretty intense

64. Awwwww

65. The Monkees???? Great choice. Though why the cover lol. Is Eddie Murphy singing? That would make sense since Donkey’s been trying to have a musical number the whole movie and now finally does, confirming that this is a happy fairy tale despite the subversions.

67. This movie is about the way that monomythic fiction affects the way that we relate to other people, and ultimately hurts real connection. Huh. Not the theme I was expecting. 

68. I liked it.

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 073

Episode: Futari wa Precure Max Heart 23 - “Repel the Power of Darkness! New Power gives Hope!!” Date watched: 6 October 2018 Original air date: 17 July 2005 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/cllELjq

You’re not seeing things, I did post the same picture twice

Following Intelligen’s advice, Nagisa, Honoka, and Hikari head back to the lake that they first found the Prism Hopeish. They look around a bit but it’s overcast so they can’t use the sun to help them find a mirrored spot. Intelligen pulls out some more clues about a “sleeping lion”, which turns out to be a rock formation, and while they’re atop that looking around the sun finally comes out and they follow the shadow of the lion rock to their true destination.

The girls, fairies, and Heartiels do some chanting that links the temple in the Garden of Light with this place, but before they can really do anything, the wind picks up, the water recedes, and a waterfall flows upward to reveal Baldez. After throwing the girls around a bit, he makes a telling remark that they haven’t even seen the limit of his power to destroy all things. (Remember who else had the power to destroy all things?) Luminous tries something that they haven’t yet, hitting him with Heartiel Action to freeze him, but although he’s hampered he manages to overpower his way out of it. Unlike Circulas before him, he’s still able to fight after doing this. Black and White are terrified but they can feel that the Earth itself is afraid of Baldez’s power, so they vow that there’s no way they’ll lose. This clearly strikes a chord with the Earth and the Prism Stones, as the girls are powered up with the Sparkle Braces. (I’m skipping some small details here, forgive me) Suddenly the tables are turned. Baldez finds himself on the losing end of the fight and he is FURIOUS. After giving him what for, the di-chromatic duo hit him with Marble Screw Max. He scoffs at this and blocks it, but with the power of the Earth and rainbows they upgrade the attack to Precure Marble Screw Max Sparkle. This is too much for Baldez to handle and he gets caught in a huge explosion that seemingly destroys him.

When the dust is cleared, Nagisa and Honoka ponder their new Power of Hope given to them by the Earth itself and Intelligen reminds them that they earned the power through their unending will to protect the world and refusal to give up, and then states her business is done and she’ll be returning to the Chairect. We close out on a beautiful sunset over the lake.

This episode was almost great. Almost. The only thing holding it back is the animation, which is okay but not as good as the show is capable of. Faces seem bland, proportions are slightly off, and the first half of the episode just seems a bit cheap. I have to assume this is compensation for the new stock footage of Black and White receiving the Sparkle Braces, which is very long and features a lot of superfluous arm spinning. And yes, as I referenced in the top caption and way back in my FW30 review, these are very much the same thing as the Rainbow Braces from last season. I mean sure they’re different designs but they’re still large chunky bracelets that they wear on their wrists which power them up and are available on store shelves at around this time. They have a bow this time, though, so that’s cool. Anyway I was extremely cynical of the Rainbow Braces last season so just assume most of my criticisms from there carry forward, and I’ll talk about the positive aspects instead. Due to the bow, these look a bit less jarring on their outfits. The way that they earn them is much more meaningful than in FW: the Earth itself cries out for help, and the girls can hear it. They vow to protect it and it’s through the combination of the Power to Create All Things stored within the Prism Stones and the power of all living things on the Earth that they receive the new power. Not to say that FW was bad, but just look at “the Earth granted us this power because we stood up to an immensely powerful enemy” compared to “We were losing and Porun was afraid so he tapped into power he didn’t know he had.”

If you needed a demonstration of how much more powerful the girls are now compared to last season, look at their foe: Baldez is so powerful that nature itself was afraid of him, and the girls were able to keep up with him before getting the braces, even if they lost. No enemy in the first season was capable of this level of menace. Then when they do get their powerup, they destroy Baldez completely. That’s strong!

Despite some silliness with trying to find their way, the journey is as important as the destination and the girls really worked hard to find this location and earn their new power. It’s not a trial by fire like Heartcatch, but it’s worth it in the end. The message about never giving up despite the odds is empowering and they truly live by it here. Sure, Nagisa gripes a little, but as I’ve said before, when push comes to shove she always pulls through, and Honoka is right there beside her to help show her the way.

Hikari is there but honestly she didn’t have much purpose to this episode. She gets her own powerup later in the series but given her abilities she doesn’t have a lot to contribute to this fight. Cure Black even has to push her out of harm’s way at one point because she’s not much of a fighter. The most she contributes to this battle is trying to stall Baldez with Heartiel Action, which doesn’t work. After Nagisa and Honoka power up she just stands off to the side commenting on the power of nature. I’ve said before that I like the idea of a differently abled team member but they took it too far with Luminous and it seems like the writers or directors didn’t know what to do with her a lot of the time. In Yes GoGo, Milky Rose has the opposite problem: she doesn’t seem any different from the Precures in terms of skillset. This might be why they dropped the idea of having non-cures on the teams, but I’d really like for them to revisit the idea and give a powerful ally a different role on the team without making them feel like dead weight half the time. But I’m not holding my breath.

That’s kind of a downer note to end on for an overall positive episode and I’m sorry, but I'm out of things to say so I’ll end it here. Next time: the return of an old friend!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: Uhhhhhhh I forgot to count. Maybe 1?

[mynexthouseprojectideas]

Small Basement Remodeling Ideas And Tips

Space is really a frequent home issue specially in big city alive. Whilst the song popularized by Frank Sinatra goes, I would like to be part of the... New York, ny. Most everyone wants to live and experience through the activity of this never-sleeping metropolis. Therefore, should you reside in New York, then there's another choice to consider apart from simply learning how to live with what matters are. The reply to your distance crunch is different through considering the chances rancid areas needs to offer you. This leaves small basement remodeling just one of their very best do it yourself projects to tackle.

 Why toilet remodeling?

 - If thinking about adding square footage into a household's living space, it can be really a cheaper alternative compared to owning a home addition at which you'll have to expand. This will cost you just a portion of that which you'll be shelling out for the later with many or all the exact capabilities. Some of the factors for its fantastic savings would be the structural essentials are there enjoy the ceiling, floor, and walls.

 - Still another benefit for project a little cellar remodeling will be the perfect location of the area which promotes fewer hassles introduced by do it yourself works into your family's day to day living.

 - Because the essence of the distance is underground; it really is on average warm during rainy months and warmer . This variable can help you like the little basement remodeling job results in less power expenses.

 There are several ways you might develop an end your small cellar remodeling also this is dependent upon your own personal requirements and preferences. The solitude and originally compact design of this place may make it ideal to be changed in to a house office, play room for younger kiddies, game or recreational place, home theater or a workout room. Because plumbing is easily available and readily accessible, the neighborhood may additionally compensate to get a sauna, additional bath, or large custom made shower. Other hot smaller basement remodeling ideas contain: a wet bar, kitchenette, along with additional room for your guests.

 As soon as we think of our little bathrooms, the very ordinary situation ahead to out heads is their dungeon-like capabilities. To draw the maximum in our renovation job, you also can play certain elements to produce the area too inviting, more comfortable and much more spacious to check at.

 - This area could naturally need heavy light in contrast to the majority of areas from Small basement ideas your home. You're able to offer fixtures boosting intense lighting in addition to maximize the employment of windows to allow more natural lighting.

 - Carpets are a favorite selection but do you know that tiles can do better as floors? Besides the durability it includes, it's also non invasive. Since your small basement is more prone to water and moisture issues, this might function as best alternative. To compensate to your hardness and also help with the mid-century layout, you may even put beautiful rugs carpeting.

[sust334]

Nuclear Issues in New Mexico Documentary Progress Update

Mixed Waste Landfill:

I worked on mining for good information in the resources I previously found. I also used some images and wording from Citizen Action New Mexico, which had a useful amount of photographs and documents during the 90s when this issue was being addressed. I remembered what I learned in class, that there was a similar landfill (in Beatty Nevada) which had blown up recently. So I looked into that issue and found that Citizen Action also made an article with the necessary information I required. I cited David B McCoy for his article “Albuquerque’s Endangered Aquifer -- Sandia National Laboratories Mixed Waste Landfill” since that has much-needed info and graphic representations. That same class period showed off the previous students' work, on the spread of nuclear fallout and contaminants if there was indeed an explosion like the one at Beatty Nevada within the mixed waste landfill.

With the information I gained, I went ahead and made a cohesive storyline of the MWL. From the start of it to the closure on the MWL and then to the repercussions and lasting effects. I also delved into the potentially catastrophic damage incurred by the slow leakage of radioactive waste into the groundwater. I made sure to detail exactly what alpha radioactive decay does to a body and how it gets into humans. I also detailed that there are federal laws protecting the Sandia National Labs from being held responsible for anything to happen to the MWL as well as being protected from being forced to clean it up. Then I intend to end my piece of the documentary by stating that there’s been an explosion at a site very similar to the MWL that has blown up recently because of a mere 2 inches of rain that seeped into the stored metallic sodium. I will then end it with a quote “ [due to the explosion] it will spread large volumes of radiation into Albuquerque’s air, soil, and water - the equivalent of a dirty bomb” - Citizen Action New Mexico

Since I now have my piece of the storyboard, I intend to get B-footage of the MWL. If I'm unable to then I'll make some infographics about the MWL and potential for harm, to use for my section. I also plan on helping edit, especially for the beginning and conclusion to the documentary. I can definitely help teach my group some basics about editing, importing video, formatting and exporting in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Trinity Site: I collected research from various sites about the history of the bomb and the impacts the test has left on the residents of New Mexico still to this day. I am going to lay out a timeline of events pretty much starting with the test itself, including when, where, how, and why the test was done. After that brief timeline of history, I want to include information about the Tularosa Downwinders, whom I learned much about when listening to Tina Cordova speak in the Nuclear NM class. This group formed in response to a lack of compensation and acknowledgement from the government regarding the test for the residents in the area who were affected. A large population has experienced terrible health impacts from radiation that resulted from the explosion, many of which were generational. These illnesses were a huge inconvenience and caused strife across the state. I want to make sure this is highlighted in the documentary, along with other health impacts. This nuclear test was the first in history so I really want the audience to understand that importance, and how it's affected the state as a whole. Along with each transition, I have pictures and videos I want to be shown during the narration of my section that is pertinent to keep the audience engaged. I wanted to include a possible interview, but I’m unsure when I’ll get a chance to visit the Alamogordo area, let alone find someone who is able to remember the events. I have found quite a few videos online of the trinity site and interviews other people have done, so I may use that video footage, and cite it, in our film. 

Some pictures I plan on using:

Along with video clips of the detonation from https://www.atomicheritage.org/tour-stop/trinity-test-1#.Xbjx8FVKiUk

WIPP/Holtec:

From the extent of research I have done, I have learned that first and foremost, the implementation of Holtec is illegal, along with the company itself pushing false claims that the company's who are in direct correlation with the landmass Holtec has it’s eyes on, have agreed to allow Holtec to settle on their land. Along with this they’re a lack of funds for the infrastructure or jobs that must be put into place for the new site, and to transport materials from around the country to the area. Along with this, we can look back to the WIPP mishap in which, the facility was shut down for a time on end, as the lid of a barrel had exploded. With this, it is only common sense to look to the idea of a new implementation in radiative waste, and the simple truth that humans are prone to accident. The Holtec site, however, is supposed to hold 80,000 tons of radiative waste, more so fuel cell rods which are terribly radiative. With this, given it is supposed to be located 37 miles south of Carlsbad, human accident is not impossible, and when dealing with radiative entities such as spent fuel rods, the idea becomes exponentially scarier. 

 With the compilation of this information, I have also gained information on the aspect as simple as infrastructure wise, and the amount of jobs that are relatively understaffed right now, as there aren't enough working people in the Carlsbad area to sustain the Holtec site. Along with this, new railways would need to be implemented, in order to efficiently transfer the radioactive waste to the site itself. Yet this then pushes back into Holtecs falsified claims, as the company does not hold the rights, more so mineral rights in order to build rail systems that would bring the waste as close to the site as possible.  This then doesn’t even begin to investigate the economic and infrastructure effect it would have on the society of Carlsbad. Due to lack of jobs, more people would need to move to Carlsbad in which, before the oil boom, was a town of roughly 30,000 people, in which the boom caused it to average 60-80,000 people. The implementation of such a site would cause more people to come in, in which it could essentially affect the economy in a worse direction, as Carlsbad's infrastructure wasn’t originally made to hold thousands of people nearing the 100 thousand. We can then also look to the idea of years down the line, saying the jobs begin to dry up in Carlsbad, it will essentially become a massive ghost town, as there won’t be any true infrastructure to keep Carlsbad's economy afloat.  

Then even looking further past this, back to the idea of accident being prone to happen as humans aren’t perfect, the rail system resides right along a major highway, more so the Hobbs highway in which, if a barrel full of the nuclear rods were to open up or bust in some way mid-travel, then due to the rail line or one rail line residing amongst a major highway, the vehicles passing by will be prone to unintentionally aiding in the expanse of radioactive waste. The WIPP site is not terrible overall, yet the implementation of another major waste site would, or more so could be terribly detrimental in the long, or even short term. Past this abundance of information I have gained, I'm hoping to bring a guest speaker into the class, one whom would know the gist of Holtec and WIPP in which they could probably go into much more extensive details, and how it is essentially linked across the board of waste throughout the US. I’ve also gained video footage of the landscape, and the railway along wide the Hobbs highway in which it will give a more so real feel as to how it could truly be detrimental in the aspect of waste leaking and being spread further than originally intended. Ultimately I hope to have more interviews and possibly bring in multiple knowledgeable sources on the system of nuclear waste at hand. 

Laguna- Pagaute Jackpile mine: I have gathered information on water resources in the laguna-paguate area after the mining and plan on attending a tour put on through the sustainability minor degree program on November 17th and the corresponding nuclear new mexico class. Filming will take place when allowed and questions will be asked to further the understanding of the environmental, social and societal impacts and changes since the mining was halted in 1982(after 29 years). This photo is of the superfund site currently and is located on the laguna pueblo land, consisting of 3 former tribal leases. The raw uranium ore was transported via the Santa Fe railroad and brought detriment to people on highways and those living in Grants. The storyline will follow a narrative of long term suffering and regrowth as a changed society. Beginning with the superfund site and quick background, transitioning to a “‘ceremony’ by Leslie Silko” perspective of people and their connection to land and ending with Christine talking about her personal experience with the mining adjacent to her family home, giving an inside look to the impacts the mining had on surface water, agriculture and social culture.

Group goals:Storyboard work has begun, including pictures/videos and narration text, for the documentary which we are keeping track of in a shared google slide presentation. Research has been completed, and site access has been planned. We aim to compile this in one document to begin the editing, narration, and overall organization of the documentary. What we have to do now, as a group, is to come together to create the final storyboard. Once that’s done, I can get to work on narrating everything with the audio equipment that Terry Horger will lend us. Then finally we can get together to create the rough edit of the documentary, in which I plan to get Eileen Shaugnessy to give feedback so as to make a polished final version of our Student Made Nuclear Issues in New Mexico Documentary. Filming and editing will take place in the month of November.

Jahro, Zhanna, Kyla and Josh 

[nikki-reuclife]

Superhero

Need to purchase X-Men t-shirts on-line? Whether or not you have got a love for The Avengers, Unbelievable Four, Thor, or X-Men there are a lot or t-shirts and different merchandise to personal. My childhood included a love for 60s and 70s Marvel and DC comics, and my capacity to attract originates partially from learning the tales I learn in those days. We labored for a yr collectively on the piece to plan and draw it. Toy corporations like Hasbro and Kenner used to produce hundreds of Batman motion determine than is launched every year with some variation in it. Transformers 2, the science-fiction film is the latest sensation, and is the most awaited movie of the yr. Let's take the film Avatar for instance. Now and again I went again to the game to take just a few more screenshots to increase a plot. Inside a couple of minutes, I started making comedian strips. Unlike his different comic strips, in Battling Boy, the hero is a child, who's on a mission to save the town.

In truth, the opposite sequence of battling boy grew to become well-liked. To conclude on this matter, I feel it's an excellent idea to offer our children the humorous comics created manner-back-when, comics from your and my childhood. To learn a narrative in adventurous manner is quite thrilling for all the kids. You have to overcome the limitations of speech bubbles and the issue of telling a narrative frame by frame. Admit it you've got! I’m certain you have heard this standard on-line retailer. Since Kids's Graphic Novels are actually simply an outdated concept with a fancy new title, why should not you discover taking old successful comicbook ideas and reinventing them for a brand new technology? The idea was to convey the same which means with phrases that I instructed by way of colors, textures and pictures. Fashionable On-line Comics solidify a which means of a phrase because footage help meaning to phrases. The nomination was a serious achievement for an artist who had - fairly actually -started out small, drawing Post-it be aware sized comics and hiding them in different people’s work in bookshops. The primary comic strips appeared in Germany in 1865. It was about two boys who're getting punished for at all times entering into mischief.

Moreover, if we're sincere with ourselves, we all know that loads of mischief is downright funny. Why are old coins worth more than right now's coins? Full collections will fetch too much greater than random individual comics. Our goal is to provide our readers a great piece of entertaining and academic comics on which is able to develop up not one of the long run generations. These blockbuster motion pictures plays an important function in the comeback of comics. People who need to cherish their childhood memories with the comics; they'll easily discover cheap comics to start their comic assortment. In this day of "I need the newest and latest," we actually discover that a few of the actual treasures are things of outdated. Comedian books are detailed tales. Other than conventions, yard sales and used guide shops can also be extremely value efficient sources for collectible comic books. A comic book adaption as well as a novel publication is being finished for the film's promotion. That assumption is unsuitable and is an insult to the entire comic book neighborhood.

These comic guides give you the type of data you want like the place to get the rare and valuable comics and where you will get first situation comics as properly as the back subject ones as properly. By selling and trading comics you might be there have been the art work is most loved and valued. Moreover, that's where you get the meet fellow enthusiasts and catch up on the most recent within the comic books world; info that can show invaluable. Some comic books editions are collector's items and if preserved in mint quality situation. Books are restricted because the reader cannot bodily see what the writer envisions. Are these behaviors to be condoned? Eyes turn into circles or dots, mouths are reduced to curved lines, and noses or ft are triangles. Get the newest news. Those that already consider extensive abilities of our website, confess that it is actually probably the most handy and simple approach to be in touch with the newest innovations of the world of comics.

Effectively conscious of the benefits that come from reading comics. Which Marvel comics must you read before (or after) Captain Marvel? Repetition. Go back to your day by day newspaper and look at the comics’ page. The cartoonist is utilizing repetition to identify the character. Due to this fact, we may say that it has nothing to do with a altering traits, whatever is new and trendy, photograph to pop art print remains within the midst of its recognized usability in subject of art. I appeared, and there before me was a pale horse! There really is something for everyone. Cosplay additionally means costume play and the followers typically come to the comic conventions dressed in costumes. Eight delectable Expansions that followed added to the joy of the sport play. Then by all means, use it. By the use of these exaggerations, it doesn’t matter what other details I embody. The possessed doll first hit the screens in the 1988 horror classic 'Kid's Play'. Corey Haim, the lead of the unique horror movie, and Corey Feldman, the 2 Coreys, reprise their unique roles. Nevertheless, in 2003 Hasbro would relinquish control to Batman's rights to Mattel. You additionally get preferential therapy in some instances and entry to particular events and performances. Is Bronze Age Comic Investing A Good Choice? The Future of Bronze Age Comic Book Investments!

When we speak about superheroes, something that comes into thoughts are Batman. This crime fighting, caped crusader has become a section of us because it was released in a Superman very comic book series. Most of us have few ideas about him like his name, his sidekick, villains, with his fantastic cool gadgets. But only a number of us learn about certain details of the dark knight. In this article, will speak about who is Batman based on more interesting information about this superhero. 1. The Hulk - This teammate is brilliant and analytical, but moody and temperamental. At her best she tackles probably the most difficult difficulties with precise analysis. She has a grasp of complicated issues and has a reasoned and systematic procedure for them. She is, however, easily upset and will become quite the "monster" when angry. The best approach for that team is to allow her to work alone, whenever you can. Solitude permits her to pursue potential solutions because they eventually her. She ought to be needed to keep another teammate appraised of her work. Because of her logical nature, she'll usually respond positively while confronting facts that disprove her position. However, when she flashes her temper, teammates informed about her will simply get out of just how. After she has calmed down she should be made conscious of the unacceptability of her angry behavior.

While becoming an adult there were this extremely tiny comic shop inside the town I spent my youth, also it was alone in the city. I remember seeing an Amazing Spider-Man #1 about the wall as well as an X-Men #1. Both were in great (VG) condition, without doubt. I remember specifically that the Amazing Spider-Man #1 was being sold for $800 and The X-Men #1 went around $300.

With this as a reboot, each goes straight away while on an origins story. If you're a fan of Spider-Man otherwise you know his beginnings, then you certainly ought to know a number of what you should expect. I'm sure the creators on this movie are stored on to the fact so in retrospect they've added some wrinkles for this existing comic classic. By adding some unfamiliar parts towards the story and subtracting a few of the things we've grown familiar with, the movie is allowed to feel fresh as well as new in some ways.

Superhero comics are becoming a fundamental element of modern pop culture, along with their popularity shows no signs of fading in the near future. As more and more people familiarize yourself with these characters from their appearances in blockbuster movies, the requirement for comic books featuring these heroes has risen. With these affordable reprint volumes, anyone can easily compensate for numerous years of a common hero's adventures.

[saleshoesggdb-blog]

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[updatedc-blog]

New Post has been published on https://www.updatedc.com/2018/11/23/internet-copyright-the-wild-west/

Internet Copyright – The Wild West

The internet is still a bit like the Wild West when it comes to copyright. There’s the occasional sheriff wondering around enforcing the law, but for the most part, it’s every man for himself. With so much material on the internet, it’s almost impossible to think that everything and everyone can be regulated and checked when it comes to copyright infringement.

Original work can be just about anything, a video, a design, a book, a photograph, or even a web page. In the case of a photograph or video it’s pretty easy to prove copyright, but what about when it comes to a website or original content from a website. If you create original content and then someone just reposts it, even quoting the source but doesn’t ask the original owner or author of that website for permission, is that infringing on copyright? Well, there are a lot of determining factors and plenty of grey areas. Was it one of your websites direct competitors, or was it what is commonly known as a “scraper” – someone who takes original content and reposts it on their web page.

A lot of websites walk a fine line by using what is called “Fair Use”. Under United States copyright law, “Fair Use” allows creators to incorporate copyrighted materials into their own work without obtaining the permission of the copyright owner when certain conditions are met. Fair use is sort of a lenient interpretation of copyright laws that are designed to not stifle creativity or innovation. Creators should have the freedom to criticize, critique, and comment on the works of others. They should also be able to remix and reuse artistic material in inventive and new ways. This is what “Fair Use” is all about. The problem is, there aren’t any hard and fast rules governing “Fair Use”, it is a very grey area.

No one really wants to get involved in a legal battle, especially with “Fair Use” being such a grey area. If everyone who owned a website, photo, or video spent time filing complaints against work that was republished without their permission, no one would get any work done. I personally don’t have any problem if someone emails me and asks for permission to use an article or a video, especially if it’s educational or informative. The only time I do have a problem is when people are making money directly off your work. We have had numerous instances where individual monetarized YouTube channels were posting up and using our videos without our permission. Yes, you can complain and file a complaint with YouTube but this is time-consuming and tedious.

Whether to file a complaint or just let it go is a hard question for content creators to answer. You really have to ask yourself, is the extra exposure hurting or hindering me? In a lot of cases, I think people are happy to have their work published on other people’s websites even if they didn’t give direct permission because of the extra exposure it gives them. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself is it fair that someone else is making money off my hard work, or is it a fair trade off that I’m getting increased exposure which will help me out. It really is a catch-22.

Has it just become morally acceptable?

I think a lot of the problems stem from the fact that it has almost become a socially acceptable thing on the internet to just reuse or repost other peoples work. You wouldn’t walk into a store and just take something without paying for it, but on the internet, it seems to be socially acceptable to take someone else’s work and use it without paying. If your video, photograph or work is used without your permission and someone is using it directly to make money, shouldn’t you be getting a piece of that pie?

Again, there are so many factors as to why a lot of people don’t complain or demand payment. The main reason is exposure. If you are a YouTuber who is making your income directly off views then you probably don’t care who reposts or reuses your work. The more views, the more money. Look, I get it, not everyone cares about having their work reused or republished without being asked or compensated, but seriously, is it morally right that there seems to be one rule in the real world and another for the internet.

It’s not just individuals ripping off others work

The Selfish Ledger, a concept video produced within Google in late 2016, used a ton of stock footage in which some of it wasn’t properly licensed by Google. Philip Bloom had snippets of vision from 7 of his short films used in The Selfish Ledger without any license or authorization from him. This is just one of many cases where very large companies have used content without any license or authorization from the owner of that material.

  Vimeo

Recently there has been a lot of anger online with people having their Vimeo accounts completely deleted due to copyright infringements. This is usually to do with the use of music. Music is a hard one, with so many stock music sites and so much music out there it is very easy to have a video flagged as breaching copyright. If you have used music for a personal project is it really harming anyone? It also seems to be a big problem for music video directors. Multiple music directors have had their Vimeo accounts suspended simply because they are posting up videos that get flagged by recording labels.

Vimeo’s 3-strikes and you’re out DMCA policy is fairly ruthless and it has lead to a lot of users having their accounts completely deleted, and by deleted, I mean everything vanishes as if your account never even existed. All of your videos, all of your statistical data, all of your views, all of your viewers, and even the ability to download your videos- gone, gone, gone.

This is not a new Vimeo policy, it has been in place for quite a few years now, but it’s enforcement seems to come in rolling waves rather than be consistent. A lot of this may have to do with various recording labels suddenly deciding to file copyright complaints.

The situation has become dire for a lot of music video directors that some have started up petitions. Jason Filmore Sondock of Rubberband is one of those directors. The online petition states the following:

“To whom it may concern,

We as short form filmmakers in the music video industry have recently come to a crossroads. We direct music videos in the continually dwindling music industry and as of this week have seen a large legal sweep of our work across the video streaming platform Vimeo. Vimeo has served as the main hub to showcase our work for nearly 10 years and our hosting of work, which (at least, in the case of music videos) we make for little to no fee whatsoever. The simple fact is that pitching music videos today is the wild west, which has no regulation of any kind, unlike most advertising work that is done in some type of bid structure. We don’t know how many directors we are pitching against. We don’t know who they are. We don’t hear back from commissioners for many weeks. Budgets are tiny. Most can not make a living. The list of grievances go on and on. I understand that some of these things are unfixable, maybe primarily the budgets. We may not be able to demand more money from an industry that simply doesn’t have more money to spare, especially as much more videos get made, the slices of the pie get much smaller. Additionally, while we have been discussing unionization internally, this letter is not about that.

Our ability to simply present our work as our own is coming under fire. This is perhaps the most basic reason why any of us do music videos to begin with, beyond the fact that we love them.

We put our blood, sweat, tears, and in many cases our own money into these videos because we love music and we love the idea that we can have creative freedom (in some cases) to create things and have a platform for people to see them on a large scale. Sometimes (often) this is the first step a budding director has to get noticed because we can directly attribute the work we do, on a public scale, to ourselves. This seems like something that should be a right of a creator. We create to reach people. This is a director’s job, to emotionally connect with an audience, and to be attributed to that work. We can not have this ideal be put into jeopardy, as this is the core tenant of why all of us ever wanted to be directors in the first place.

We are writing this letter to ask Vimeo, our reps, production companies, record labels, commissioners, artists, and media companies to allow us to have a reserved right to be able to publish our work under our names and to be free from prosecution and removal, in a public space. We have as much right as the artists to the work we make for them. We are artists too.

Please don’t further alienate directors in the music video industry. We want to keep creating.”

Sincerely,

International Music Video Filmmakers

So far almost 3,000 people have signed the petition.

What is DMCA?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) is a U.S. law that limits the liability of online service providers for the copyright infringement caused by their users. To qualify, online service providers must do —and not do — certain things. The most well-known aspects of the DMCA are its requirements that a service provider removes materials after it receives a notice of infringement and has (and implement) a policy to deter repeat infringement.

Too harsh?

Look, I’m all for making sure that copyright infringement is upheld, but come on Vimeo,  deleting someones entire body of work when they are paying for your service seems a little over the top. Surely just deleting or banning the actual individual video(s) that are deemed to have breached copyright regulations is enough.

Vimeo has around 70 million users, which pales in comparison to the more than 1 billion that YouTube has. Here at Newsshooter we primarily use Vimeo because it’s an ad-free platform and it is primarily used by working professionals. YouTube has far greater reach, but it’s also full of ads and very hard to moderate comments.

I tried reaching out to Vimeo via both email and Twitter to find out some answers about why accounts have been deleted and if they had a response to the open letter from music video directors. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive any replies.

Vimeo’s DMCA Policy

This is Vimeo’s official DMCA policy:

VIMEO respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. Each user is responsible for ensuring that the materials they upload to the Vimeo Site do not infringe any third party copyright.

VIMEO will promptly remove materials from the Vimeo Site in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) if properly notified that the materials infringe a third party’s copyright. In addition, VIMEO may, in appropriate circumstances, terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers.

How does Vimeo handle trademark complaints?

According to Vimeo, “Once we receive a trademark complaint, we will investigate the alleged trademark infringement. In most cases, we will provide the alleged infringer with an opportunity to respond to the complaint. If we believe in good faith that a user is infringing a valid trademark, we will take corrective action, which may include deleting the infringing content (such as a video, profile name, or custom URL).”

What can you do to defend yourself?

So if you have had material removed from Vimeo and believe it didn’t infringe on a copyright claim, what can you do? Well according to Vimeo, you can do the following:

Filing a DMCA Counter-Notification to Restore Removed Content—for Vimeo Users

If you believe that your material has been removed by mistake or misidentification, please provide VIMEO with a written counter-notification containing the following information:

Your name, address, and telephone number.

A description of the material that was removed and the location on the Vimeo Site (e.g., the URL) where it previously appeared.

A statement UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification.A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located, or if your address is outside of the United States, any judicial district in which VIMEO may be found (which includes the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York), and that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the original DMCA notice or an agent of that person.

    4. Your electronic or physical signature.

You may submit this information via:

Online: Our DMCA Counter-Notification form Email: [email protected] Offline: VIMEO’s Copyright Agent

Please note that we will send any complete counter-notifications we receive to the person who submitted the original DMCA notice. That person may elect to file a lawsuit against you for copyright infringement. If we do not receive notice that a lawsuit has been filed within ten (10) business days after we provide notice of your counter-notification, we will restore the removed materials. Until that time, your materials will remain removed. We will provide a copy of the original DMCA takedown notice upon request.

Vimeo goes on to list their repeat infringer policy and a warning message.

Repeat Infringer Policy

VIMEO will terminate user accounts that have been the subject of three (3) separate DMCA notices. In the event a user’s materials are removed due to a DMCA notice and then subsequently restored due to the filing of a DMCA counter-notification, VIMEO will treat the underlying DMCA notice as withdrawn.

VIMEO reserves the right to terminate user accounts that are the subject of fewer than three (3) DMCA notices in appropriate circumstances, such as where the user has a history of violating or willfully disregarding Vimeo’s Terms of Service.

Warning

In filing a DMCA notice or counter-notification, please make sure that you have complied with all of the above requirements. If we request additional information necessary to make your DMCA notice or counter-notification complete, please provide that information promptly. If you fail to comply with all of these requirements, your DMCA notice or counter-notification may not be processed further.

In addition, please make sure that all of the information you provide is accurate. UNDER SECTION 512(f) OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT, 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), ANY PERSON WHO KNOWINGLY MATERIALLY MISREPRESENTS THAT MATERIAL OR ACTIVITY IS INFRINGING OR WAS REMOVED OR DISABLED BY MISTAKE OR MISIDENTIFICATION MAY BE SUBJECT TO LIABILITY.

Vimeo may disclose any communications concerning DMCA notices or other intellectual property complaints with third parties, including the users who have posted the allegedly infringing material, and may provide DMCA notices to Chilling Effects

If you have questions about the legal requirements of a DMCA notice, please contact an attorney or see Section 512(c)(3) of the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), for more information. If you have questions about the legal requirements of a DMCA counter-notification, please contact an attorney or see Section 512(g)(3) of the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3), for more information.

What is Vimeo’s end game?

Vimeo has publically stated that they are trying to move away from being a being a streaming platform to being more of a tech company. This is probably not good news for people in our industry who use Vimeo primarily because it is a streaming platform without ads. Even though Vimeo claims that they will continue to support the existing video platform, as soon as a company pivots its business direction that usually means manpower and resources are directed to other areas. Vimeo already has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to customer service, and their facebook page is always littered with complaints from users.

YouTube

YouTube, unlike Vimeo, is completely free. As YouTube has so many more users than Vimeo, it’s in their best interests in a lot of cases to leave videos up that directly infringe on music copyright. In late 2017  YouTube signed a deal with Universal Music Group and Sony Sony Music Entertainment to establish royalty rates between YouTube and rights holders for professional music videos and user-uploaded clips. YouTube has for a long time been criticized by the recording industry for its lackadaisical approach to enforcing copyright and failing to compensate artists appropriately. The thing is, YouTube is probably making millions and millions for artists indirectly just from the extra exposure they receive from their music being used on the site. Recording companies are in a bit of a catch-22, they want the extra revenue that they aren’t currently getting, but they don’t want to pull their music off YouTube because of how popular the site is.

Just like Vimeo, YouTube also has copyright infringement policies, and just like Vimeo they also have a three strikes and you’re out rule.

Below is YouTube’s policy on copyright:

You should only upload content (including music, videos, and artwork) that you created or that you’re authorized to use; otherwise, this could result in a copyright violation. Learn more.

If you use someone else’s content on your YouTube channel, the copyright owner can submit a takedown request. If this is a valid request, your video will be removed from YouTube and you’ll get a copyright strike. You can wait for a copyright strike to expire, seek a retraction, or submit a counter-notification. If you get three copyright strikes, your channel is subject to termination.

Alternatively, if you upload a video that contains copyright-protected material, you could end up with a Content ID claim issued by the party who owns the music, movies, TV shows, video games, or other copyright-protected material. A Content ID claim may result in a takedown or lost revenue depending on the actions specified by the copyright owner (but you can dispute a claim you believe is wrong).

We believe it’s important to keep YouTube a platform that inspires vibrant creativity and protects creative rights. If another channel uploads your content without your permission, you may file a copyright complaint via our web form.

Note: Some countries have rules for “fair use” (or “fair dealing”) of copyright-protected material under certain circumstances. If you’re not sure about your situation, you should get legal advice.

  Despite having a similar policy to Vimeo, YouTube seems to be a lot more liberal and easy going when it comes to copyright. They even have a video using non-threatning puppets to explain everything.

Music that won’t get flagged by YouTube

Musicbed uses a system called YouTube Clearance with SyncID. So what is Sync ID? SyncID is a Content ID clearance system created by Musicbed and offered as an exclusive benefit to members. SyncID provides a smooth, streamlined process to clear videos of ads and allows you to monetize your YouTube videos. In the past, claims from YouTube have been a source of frustration for filmmakers, but now, when you receive a claim from YouTube, SyncID should in theory sort that problem out for you.

Here is more of YouTubes answers that can be found on their website when addressing copyright issues:

What is a Content ID claim?

If you upload a video that contains copyright-protected material, you could end up with a Content ID claim. These claims are issued by companies that own music, movies, TV shows, video games, or other copyright-protected material.

Content owners can set Content ID to block material from YouTube when a claim is made. They can also allow the video to remain live on YouTube with ads. In those cases, the advertising revenue goes to the copyright owners of the claimed content.

If you have received a copyright strike, get help with copyright strike basics instead of using this article.

Where do I see my Content ID claims? To see if you have any Content ID claims on your videos, go to the copyright notices section of your Video Manager. We may also email you when you get a Content ID claim, if your video or account is affected.

Am I in trouble? Probably not. In most cases, getting a Content ID claim isn’t a bad thing for your YouTube channel. It just means, “Hey, we found some content in your video that’s owned by someone else.”

It’s up to the copyright owners to decide whether or not others can reuse their original material. In many cases, copyright owners allow their content to be used in YouTube videos in exchange for having ads run on those videos. These ads may play before the video or during it (if the video is longer than 10 minutes).

However, there are some actions copyright owners can take if they don’t want their material reused:

Blocking a video: Sometimes, copyright owners may block your video, which means people won’t be able to watch it. They can decide to block your video worldwide or just in certain countries.

Muting a video: If your video contains copyright-protected music, the owner may choose to mute it. This means that people can still watch your video, but they won’t be able to hear the soundtrack.

Blocking certain platforms: Sometimes, copyright owners may restrict the devices, apps, or websites where their content can appear. These restrictions won’t change the availability of your video on YouTube.com.

In some cases, you can’t monetize a video that has a Content ID claim. Instead, the copyright owners can choose to monetize your video. But in other cases, like if the music is claimed in your video, you may be able to share the advertising revenue with the music’s copyright owners.

What can I do about this claim? If you get a Content ID claim, there are a few different things you can do, depending on the situation:

Do nothing: If you agree with the claim, you can just move on. You can always change your mind later if you disagree with the claim. Remove the music: If you get a claim for a piece of music in your video, you can try to remove the song without having to edit and upload a new video. Learn more.

Swap the music: If music in your video is claimed, but you still want to have music in the background, you can swap out your audio track with one of our free-to-use songs. Learn more.

Share revenue: If you’re a member of our YouTube Partner Program, and you’ve included music in your video, you may be able to share revenue with the music’s rights owner(s). Learn more.

Dispute the claim: If you have the required rights to use the copyright-protected content in your video, or if you think the system has somehow misidentified your video, you can dispute the claim.

How to dispute a Content ID claim Sign in to YouTube. Go to Creator Studio > Video Manager > Copyright Notices. Click the link to the right of the video’s Edit menu. This will take you to a page with information about what’s been claimed in your video and who claimed it. You’ll see an option to dispute the claim. If you dispute a claim without a valid reason, the content owner may choose to take down your video. If this happens, your account will get a copyright strike.

Will anything change or should things stay the same?

Opinions are always going to vary when it comes to anything to do with the internet. Copyright is a very grey area in a lot of regards, especially when it comes to the internet. With somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 billion websites existing on the internet enforcing copyright equally and fairly for everyone is literally impossible. Whether you think its ok to use someone else’s work with or without permission is more of a moral decision than a legal one in a lot of cases.

What are your thoughts on the internet and copyright? We would love to hear from you in the comments section.

[hauteroutehiking]

Haute Route Trail Report

PREPARATION

The Haute Route hike kept coming up as one of the best hikes in Europe, as well as being recognized as the 'classic' Alps hike. I think every hiker is drawn to the Alps for its natural beauty and concentration of incredible trails that range in length and difficulty. Because of the 180km distance, we needed to find a sufficient time period over summer that would fit our work schedule. Luckily, in April 2017, Susan got a new career opportunity that gave us 2 weeks vacation between leaving London and relocating to Amsterdam. This was our window!

We started our detailed research by buying a guidebook and reading the many personal accounts online.  The first challenge we faced was working out how we could complete the hike in 9 days, starting mid-June. The guide only presented a 14-day itinerary and we were unable to find an online account of someone that had completed the hike in the 9 days.  Without having enough detailed trail information to create an evenly spread hiking plan, we decided to double up 10 of the 14 days in the guidebook.

The second challenge was securing alpine hut accommodation for our itinerary.  Most of the huts do not have booking, availability or opening times available online. Some of the websites and contact details weren’t in English, so this added another level of complexity! After many hours of research and back-and-forth in broken French & German, we were able to book 7 of our 9 nights. Given we weren't taking our camping gear and some parts of the trail are very remote, we were concerned that closed huts could prevent us from completing the hike. We decided to visit tourist information offices along the way to determine if the remaining huts were open.

Armed with the best hiking plan possible we packed our bags and headed for the Alps.

There are already many great trail reports from fellow hikers, recounting the details of their trips.  Rather than following the same approach for my report, I've decided to focus on the four challenges we faced and what we did at the time to overcome them.  I hope this gives you some ideas if you face similar circumstances on the trail and the background to why I've created the various solutions to help future hikers better prepare and hike the Haute Route with confidence.

OUR SELF GUIDED ITINERARY

Our plan to hike the Haute Route by combining stages outlined in the guidebook, lead us to have 3 days of 30km+. Although we’ve regularly hiked this distance in a day, we haven’t done back-to-back days over a longer period. This worried us in the lead up to the hike.

However, as we travelled along the Haute Route, we discovered a lot of open huts and different trail options. If we had more detailed information while planning our hike, we would have been able to build an itinerary that was more evenly spread.

Our original 9-day itinerary was as follows:

Day 1: Chamonix to Refuge Les Grands

Day 2: Refuge Les Grands to Champex (via Fenetre d’Arpette)

Day 3: Champex to Cabane Mont Fort

Day 4: Cabane Mont Fort to Cabane De Prafleuri (via Col Termin)

Day 5: Cabane De Prafleuri to La Sage (via Col De Riedmatten)

Day 6: La Sage to Cabane De Moiry (via Col de Torrent)

Day 7: Cabane De Moiry to Gruben (via Forcletta)

Day 8: Gruben to Grachen

Day 9: Grachen to Zermatt (via Europaweg)

Keep reading below for accommodation details and why we ended up staying in Verbier and Refuge La Barma on our third and fourth night instead of the Cabanes listed above.

The major implication to our trip was that the swing bridge on the Europaweg was not yet being built! We didn’t want to miss hiking the Europaweg as this was one of the sections that hikers raved over. So we decided to still do the Europaweg trail until the Europahut and then head down the valley to continue up to Zermatt. We found some information online before our trip that said this was possible, however, we weren't aware that it would add 4 hours to our day! Hiking up the valley floor into Zermatt wasn’t ideal as it was near the road and train line. Therefore I definitely recommend hikers complete the full Europaweg now that the swingbridge is built.

Despite Europe having a mild 2016/17 winter, we still had snow on nearly all of our mountain passes.  It wasn’t enough to change our planned route, however, we did need to use our crampons coming over Fenetre d’Arpette and climbing up to Cabane De Moiry. I recommended hikers take crampons with them whenever they have decided to complete the Haute Route, given it can snow at any time of the year in high alpine areas.

As I hiked along in 2017 (and subsequently 2018), I recorded detailed information on all the subsections of the trail. I’ve now created a tool for hikers to plan their itinerary with more accommodation options and alternate routes to meet their needs. Click here to find out more details on what I've done.

MAPS AND DIRECTIONS

As this hike did not require any wilderness or alpine route finding, we decided to use a guidebook and trail signs, rather than also bringing topographical maps.  We felt this was appropriate after reading many times during our research that the Alp trail system is one of the best in the world with fantastic signage. What the online comments fail to mention, is that the Haute Route is not marked on any of the 180km trail.  Yes, you heard right, it does not have dedicated markings or signage.  There is a maze of trails through the Alps and unlike the Tour Du Mont Blanc, that has its own symbol painted along the trail, the Haute Route picks and chooses from the variety of trails to enable hikers to travel from Chamonix to Zermatt. Hikers will always need to know the next village/peak/point of interest to use the signs effectively.

Wading through the guidebook text usually helped with this, however, sometimes the descriptions weren't enough for us, particularly when trying to find our way out of towns. Small yellow triangle or diamond signs with a picture of a walking person are provided in towns. These confirm you are on a walking trail, but it doesn’t tell you which trail.  After navigating the high alpine, we thought this would be the easy part but, embarrassingly, this is where we would often get lost! Thankfully, we had a mobile data package so would use Google maps to navigate our way through the towns. The same cannot be said for all hiker though. I met a couple from the USA who became lost navigating their way out of Sembrancher using only the guide and signs. They added an extra 2 hours and 500m ascent to their day. Needless to say they were tired and frustrated by the time they reached Verbier!

We found that fellow Haute Route hikers brought with them an overload of information to compensate not having one trusted source.  Their arsenal included guidebooks (sometimes multiple!), topographic maps, GPS trackers and printed out notes from online blogs/resources.  Comparing and contrasting this information was time-consuming and confusing when all you really want to know is whether to go left or right!

The other challenge we faced was planning our water re-fill points, bathroom breaks and food stops.  Some of this information was listed in the guide, however, you need to keep wading through the text to find it and then try to estimate how far it is from your location. This brought us unstuck on one of our ~30km double stages from Refuge La Barma to Le Sage. I ran out of water as we climbed up the hot boulder field to Col de Reidmatten. Unfortunately, the glacial streams noted in the guide were filled with rock flour from the erosion so I chose not to refill.  The next spot for water was on the way down to Arolla, but the damage had already been done. I was hit by a combination of heat stroke and dehydration which lead to a very uncomfortable afternoon and evening. It was my own fault for not being more prepared for that section, however, it made me think that there must be a better way to help hikers see the location of important points on the trail like water refill locations.

With advances in mobile phones and mapping technology, there is a better way to present the key information and directions for the Haute Route. Click here to learn about the offline mobile maps we've created to help future hikers.

SHORTCUTS

I had never taken a shortcut when hiking before, however, I hadn't completed a hike as long as the Haute Route either. With 3 days of ~30kms in distance, we weren't sure how we'd cope. As our bodies began to tire over the first few days, we decided to look for opportunities to either shorten or shortcut our days.  This was difficult to do on the trail as we didn't always have an internet connection or could confidently translate remote timetables into English.

Our first shortcut opportunity was a blessing after finding out that Cabane Du Mont Fort was closed. This meant we had to stay in Verbier instead, which added appropriately 8km and a 700m climb to the following day.  We discovered that a gondola was running from Verbier to Les Ruinettes which would cut out most of this additional distance and elevation gain. However, it did come with the catch of only running for 15min at 10.30am.  Considering we were aiming to make it to Refuge La Barma for that night, this was a late start but we thought the legs would appreciate it in the end.

On another one of our 30km days, we weren't as successful with our shortcut.  We wanted to catch a bus from parking Du Glacier (near Cabane De Moiry) to Zinal in order to reduce the day to 5-6 hours instead of 10-12 hours.  Our translation of the bus timetable wasn't good enough as we discovered that it actually hadn't started running for the summer season. The best we could do was a hitchhike along Lac De Moiry to cut off about 4kms from a lovely German filmmaker who was taking some drone footage of the glacier. This short hitchhike helped us make it to Gruben, just in time for dinner.

Having an uneven hiking itinerary caused us to look for shortcuts, however, others we met used them to rest their tired legs, avoid wet weather or simply give themselves more time on remote parts of the trail when hiking up or down ski-hills. Fellow hikers wished they had information on shortcuts ahead of time rather than stumbling upon opportunities or desperately searching for them when in need. Click here if you want to see what we'have done to make this information available.

ACCOMMODATION

Due to hiking in mid-June, securing accommodation was difficult in some spots.  As I mentioned above, most of the alpine huts do not have ways for hikers to check availability and book online. This meant it took a lot of time and effort to secure each nights accommodation via email or phone, sometimes only in French/German. The tricky bit is the juggling act to check the availability of all your selected alpine huts, adjust hiking dates due to some being closed or fully booked on your target night, recheck availability of others with new dates...and repeating until you've booked a series of dates that line up with your hiking plan.

We secured most of our nights ahead of time, however, did not receive a reply from Cabane Du Mont Fort and Cabane De Prafleuri.  The tourist information office in Verbier told us that Cabane Du Mont Fort wasn't open yet, although they didn't know about Cabane De Prafleuri. We adjusted our plan to stay in Verbier and take a shortcut the next day, however, we headed for Cabane De Prafleuri without knowing if we could stay there.  Our backup options were to come down to Grande Dixence where there was a hotel or continue on to Cabane des Ecoulaies or Refuge la Barma. Chatting with others coming towards us on the trail, we were told the Refuge La Barma was open so decided to head there. In the end, it turned out that both Cabane Du Mont Fort and Cabane De Prafleuri also had winter rooms open where fellow hikers had stayed in, so we could have stuck with our original plan.

The lack of consolidated information online made the booking process harder than it needed to be, as well as caused us to carry risk in our itinerary that we wouldn't be able to stick to our overall plan. It's not easy for some for refuges to bring their availability and booking systems online but click here to find out what we're doing to help future hikers with this process.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Haute Route is the best multi-day hike I have done and lives up to its reputation as one of the top in Europe. Check out more photos from our trip in the gallery.

You can certainly complete it with the current resources available and information you cobble together online.  Our trip in 2017 and the many other personal blogs you've read are testaments to that!

But just because it is possible, does not mean that you need to settle for carrying the same uncertainty we did into your trip.  I have the best hiking experiences when I'm confident in my daily itinerary and trail information in my hand. Not when I am worried about getting lost, whether my plan is achievable and not knowing if I'll have a place to sleep at night!  I've tried to do something about it and am keen to share it with others so they can hike the Haute Route with confidence.

I'm giving everything away for free until the end of October 2018 in return for feedback, improvement suggestions and words of encouragement, so I know the effort has been worthwhile!

Happy Hiking

Brendan

[inaneinthenextplane]

American Amnesia: A Case For Why Trump’s Administrative Evils Do Not Make bush Good

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/357109-poll-dems-have-favorable-view-of-george-w-bush

It's come to my attention lately that my fears have been verified, that a bunch of nice celebrity guest appearances and speeches condemning the obvious evils of white supremacy has worn away at American contempt towards one of their most vicious and prolific abusers. The news cycle has noticeably begun to handle this assassin of American moral character with kid gloves and in the ire & fire of public outrage against out current manchild-in-chief, his image has been successfully re-rehabilitated.

This is not okay.

Lets just go over some things this man has done:

The authorization of military force that has been used for years well into the Obama and now Trump administration to 'fight the war on terror' was tasked originally with hunting down Osama Bin Laden and deconstructing Al Quaeda, both of which were adequately accomplished. This same declaration fresh after 9/11 has been used to justify the executive branch occupying the countries of Afghanistan, Niger, Iraq, Libya (during the ousting of Ghaddafi), and many other countries. Normally wars have to be authorized via a congressional declaration of war, but the lawful lawlessness of every executive branch in the use of military force since Could Not have happened without this man.

This man also capitalized on 9/11 to push through the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, an act which has effectively suspended habeus corpus & our fourth amendment rights, allowing the government clearance to access our personal information via a rubber stamp covering large swaths of many millions of Americans or if just suspected to be an enemy of the state.

The deployment of the Cuban naval station Guantanamo Bay as an extra-judicial prison designed to hold (largely foreign) captured enemies of the state in cruel conditions, & often subject to periods of torture during interrogation, began in 2002 not long after this man was elected. Part of Obama's path to the whitehouse was the broken promise of closing this HellHole, which stands in opposition to anything we ever say about human rights on an international stage.

This man was the progenitor of the drone program which left mechanized aerial warfare to what are fundamentally death machines in the sky. A military tactic we've used for taking out targets of interest, & that has resulted in the murder of many thousands of people unrelated to threats to our national security, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time & they are used to murder doctors, rescuers, and mourners after the job is sloppily done

https://www.salon.com/…/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_…/

I normally hate a lot about Salon.com, but Glen Greenwalds article & the information presented in it can be corroborated by many sources.

The double-tap drone strike designed to hurt civilians is a war crime, it threatens our safety on the world stage, and it is us allowing our government cannibalize any sense of honor we hold claim to.

Footage of helicopters killing 10 men in a street of Baghdad (including two journalists for Reuters) were leaked by the private Bradley Manning to Wikileaks and published under the title 'collateral murder'. A van stopped to assist the wounded and was fired upon, two children were wounded and their father was murdered. Nothing happened to the people who committed this act.

Private Manning was imprisoned under conditions of solitary confinement, subject to torture & humiliation, and was essentially until the ass end of the Obama administration thrown away for life for bringing to light this and other leaks to inform the American people of a war crime committed by their government.

During the election that 'won' him the presidency, the state of Florida (then governed by Jeb Bush) purged 50,000 black votes in an election that was critically close in terms of delegates. The supreme court would decide the outcome of the lawsuit that would follow, filed by Al Gore, two court judges both having been appointed by this mans father George H.W. Bush. Not to mention, this man attempted to appoint his own personal lawyer as a SC justice.

This man infected the educational system of the United States with curriculum centered around unscientific ideas such as intelligent design in direct opposition to evolutionary biology, abstinence only sex education which resulted in continued upward teen birthrates, and with the institution of No Child Left Behind the emphasis on education was placed upon student performance on standardized testing. This resulted in failing students dropping from public school, low scoring schools being punished in terms of funding, and the general destruction of well rounded educations designed in part to teach critical thinking skills.

This man carpet bagged someone whose primary experience was in the Rodeo Show business to be the head of FEMA who would then oversee a failure to appropriately respond to the disaster of hurricane Katrina. Chaos would ensue in New Orleans & it was a dramatic blow to American confidence in disaster repose.

This man withdrew from the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gasses & undermined American regulation on the environment by defunding enforcement agencies, & disbanding a pledge to tax carbon emissions. This has set the United States back basically a generation in terms of the environment on top of what we now have with Trump.

This man had the audacity to cut funding for veterans he was sending out to war, gutting services to them by billions of dollars.

In fact, this man so skyrocketed the use of mercenaries that at the height of the Iraq war there were more private military contractors in Iraq than actual army soldiers. These mercenary companies like Blackwater would be implicated in various war crimes, where civilians would be, again, slaughtered by men who would face no fucking punishment or trial.

This man used false evidence through then defense secretary Colin Powell to justify an illegal war in the face of UN opposition, implicating Iraq in the events of 9/11 and as having amassed weapons of mass destruction with intent to kill Americans on the US mainland. Also using the testimony of an acrimonious political prisoner of Saddam Hussein code-named 'Curveball' to implicate the regime in Iraq further in falsified WMD claims.

This man had twice as many CIA (not FBI) agents fighting the failed war on drugs than he did tasked with even investigating terrorism.

This man was the first president to initiate 'free speech zones', not content to just monitor our speech but to tell us how we were allowed to protest and where.

This man assaulted abortion rights for women, defunding family planning institutions designed to help those who needed abortions. An actual ban was instituted on stem cell research, which set medical research back for years (they even made a South Park episode about it). He opposed gay marriage and continued DACA, maintaining the homophobic-ally motivated national ban on same sex marriage.

the bright side of his being president was the fact that he decided to leave when he had to.

This man was a national embarrassment, his capacity for constant gaffes even created the popularization of the 'bushism', these brought us humiliation whenever we made the mistake of turning on the news-you could look them up but I'll link here a compilation that demonstrates his capacity to fuck up worse than even Trump https://youtu.be/Be6tunbRcs8

This man is now LIKED BY THE MAJORITY OF DEMOCRATS & I know what this is, this is that Democrats are typically younger and don't remember what went on. And hey, nobody has to agree with me that as far as impact on social/economic/legal/foreign issues his administration is worse than currently is Donald Trumps by miles, & definitely the Obama administration.

But he's not 'good'. If there is a hell, this man is as good as there already. The evil shit that he was up to, I mean, you just aren't informed to me if you have a positive opinion of him at this point. I question your political judgement in all things if you like the shit was doing, or think at all that some bullshit speeches taking swipes at the man that tossed his brother around like a RagDoll compensates for the institutionalized suffering of human lives & the environment committed by him. I don't even think you can have sincerely held liberal or even libertarian principles if you like him, he appeals to a very authoritarian and ultra-conservative side of politics and exercised those tendencies in the ugliest of ways. He is a war criminal who should remain shunned by all media circles, & you should be distrustful of Anyone who gives him a platform in the media.

I don't even capitalize his name when I type it, this man is and will always be george w. bush to me. This borderline illiterate moron with his entire family dynasty has ruined much of what actually made our country great.

I don't normally like to make posts this long and drawn out in details, but I just found out about this & its verified my fears about the re-calcification of positive sentiment towards bush in the mainstream media, & this is just intensely demoralizing for me on a visceral level. I am frustrated with the political amnesia of my countrymen, and also their underlying lack of political principle. I don't want to harp too much on this but let this post be a testament to the fact that I have no tolerance for this man & neither should any of you Even if you have political beliefs aligned with him on some of the social issues or on things like taxes, (which I didn't even mention the bush tax cuts) but there's probably like a thousand ways this guy could have fucked up in a single year I could talk about.

Bottom line: things are ugly right now.

[lorrainecparker]

CREATING YOUR OWN DCP’S – DAVINCI RESOLVE 14 SETUP

In this article, we’re going to talk about DaVinci Resolve, when it comes to creating DCP’s. What makes Resolve interesting, and different from the other NLE’s, is the fact that you can use it as your editor to, not only edit your project, but you can use it as the intermediary between your NLE and your DCP creation software. Now, keep in mind that Resolve has EasyDCP functionality built into it, but for the purpose of this article, we’re going to assume that, much like in the other lessons, the goal is XYZ color space and creating JPEG2000 sequences to send to your DCP creation application. Let’s get rolling!

We’re going to use the newest version of DaVinci Resolve for this article, because I figured “Why not? It only came out yesterday, so let’s take it for a spin!”, and to be perfectly honest, as of me writing this article, Resolve 14 was released just yesterday, and we can see if the workflow for all the previous versions of Resolve (which has been the same), can be carried forward. We’re going to get things rolling in this article by talking about bringing your footage in from your other NLE’s like Media Composer, Premiere and Final Cut Pro X. Once you’ve launched Resolve 14 (R14) you’ll be brought to the project creation window. Go ahead and create a new project. What I normally do is create one project per DCP.

Once you’ve created a new project, I’ve called our’s Waterfalls for the sake of this article, R14 will immediately open, and you’ll be now sitting at the editing screen.

We’ve actually gotten a little ahead of ourselves, and I want to get in first, and set up our project for the DCP creation. The first thing we need to decide, is Flat or Scope. Now, I’m not going to go too much into Flat and Scope formats, as you can read all about them in a previous article about DCP creation. We’re going to assume Flat for this article. Let’s hit SHFT+9 on the keyboard on both Mac and Windows, to call up the Project Properties window. In here is where we’re going to set up our final resolution for creating our DCP. Don’t worry about the raster dimensions of your clip, as we’re going to set that here. We’re going to set our timeline resolution at the top to be 1998×1080 DCI Flat 1.85, and we’re going to leave our frame rate at 24. Keep in mind that your frame rate might change, based on the frame rate you exported your clip as, but you’ll want to keep it as one of the supported FPS’. We’re going to leave ours as 24, as we’re going to do the 23.98 to 24 frame conversion in R14. Once you’ve got your project settings the way you like, simply hit “Save” and we’re ready to bring some footage into R14.

Alright, so let’s back up and bring our footage into R14. Click on the “Media” button at the left side of the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Once here, you can right click on the Media Pool or Master window, to call up the menu, and navigate to the “Import Media” option. Once there, you can import the clip (or clips) you need to create your JPEG 2000 image sequence from. Once you have it in the Media Pool, you can drag the clip directly into your timeline. You’ll notice that once you do, R14 will immediately tell you that your clip and the timeline’s frame rate/raster dimensions don’t match.

Don’t change anything. We already have everything set up the way we want them in our project settings, so we’re going to conform our clip to our Project’s settings. Once you select “Don’t Match”, your clip will appear in your timeline. You’ll notice that in our case, we’re working with 5.1 audio, which will come into play in just a second. Let’s talk about the video right now. If you look closely at the left and right sides of the record window, you’ll notice that our video is slightly pillarboxed, which we will need to fix. Remember, we’re going from 1920×1080 to 1998×1080, so we’re actually working with a slightly wider frame, and we need to compensate for that. Let’s make that fix right now. If you head over to the Color Tab, we can make the necessary adjustment. Now, don’t get panicked when you see the Color Tab, as we’re only going to deal with a very, very (and I mean very, very) small portion of it, and if you look towards the center of the screen, you’ll notice some buttons that change up the tool(s) that you’re working with. The tool we want looks like this.

This button will bring up the Sizing tools, and you can make a very minor “Zoom” scaling adjustment, to make sure that your footage fits into the frame correctly, and essentially remove the pillarboxing.

With all of that being said, we’ve been talking about working with a single clip that has been brought in from another NLE. If you’ve decided that R14 is going to be your NLE, you have to make an important decision about how the workflow you’re going to use. You can use the technique we’re using here, which is to edit in the raster dimension and frame rate of your broadcast master, export, and re-import a single clip to work with in your R14 timeline, OR you can just set your project up for a DCP delivery (Flat or Scope), adjust all your clips so they fit inside that frame, and then follow the workflow from the second half of this article. Whichever way you choose to work is up to you, but for me, the best way to work is to export a master that you can re-import, and then set up your DCP from there. Again, my own personal opinion.

Now that we have our video sized correctly in the Flat frame, let’s now talk about everyone’s favorite topic, and that is the XYZ color conversion. It’s something that I’ve received a few e-mails about, and it’s from readers who thought that my tip about adding the XYZ LUT into your timeline, and then adding the XYZ>REC709 LUT to see what the conversion process looked like, was a clever idea. This way you can make necessary alterations to the luma and chroma of your footage, and make sure it’s going to look exactly what you expect it to look like. Now, something that’s important to keep in mind is that R14 ships with the REC709 to XYZ LUT built in, but you’ll need to download and install the XYZ to REC709 LUT yourself. To find that LUT, you’re going to head over to Michael Phillips’ 24p.com, and find this link. You’ll notice immediately that you’re brought to the blog entry for exactly what we’re talking about, and can download not only the XYZ>REC709 LUT, but also the REC709>XYZ LUT, if you happened to need it (which we don’t). To install the LUT, so it’s ready to use in Resolve, you’ll navigate to:

Mac: Library>Application Support>BlackMagic Design>DaVinci Resolve>Support>LUT>DCI

Windows: C:/ProgramData/BlackMagic Design/DaVinci Resolve/Support/LUT/DCI

Once you’ve copied the XYZ>REC709 LUT into this (these) location(s), either launch R14, or if you’re already in the application, we’re going to need to tell R14 that we’ve updated the LUT’s, and it needs to add this new one to the list, so we can add it to our clip. Head to your Project Settings, and to the “Color Management” section, by clicking on it on the left hand side of the window. Once here, simply hit “Update Lists” at the bottom of the window, and you’re all set.

This is how you add LUT’s to work with them in R14. Once you’ve done this, we’re going to head back to the “Color” module (this is where we did the zoom in on our footage), and we’re now going to add both LUT’s (XYZ and REC709) to our footage. First thing’s first, since i don’t want to alter the main image, in case we want to do some color correction to it, let’s add two new nodes to our image. We can do that by simply hitting ALT (Win) or OPT (Mac) on the keyboard, with the main node selected. Your node layout should now look like this:

Now simply hit the same shortcut to add a second node. You can see where I’m going with this. Select the first node you added, labelled in R14 as Node #2, right click on it, and head down to 3D LUT>DCI>REC709 to DCI XYZ (or P3 or sRGB, whichever color space you’re working in).

This does the conversion to XYZ color space. Now do the exact same thing to Node 3, except this time, do the conversion back to REC709. Now that you’ve done this, you’ve essentially done the color space round trip, and to get an idea of what the “Before” and “After” images look like, you can simply hit OPT/ALT and D to turn the color space nodes on and off, and get an idea of exactly what is going on with the luminance. Now, you can simply make any adjustments you need to make to Node #1, so this way when the conversion happens, the “re-converted” image will match more of the original look, that it would have if you had left it alone. One thing that is exceptionally important for me to point out is that once you have your image color corrected the way you want, taking into account the shift if luminance, is that you’ll want to remove the LUT’s from your video, as we will be adding the XYZ LUT back onto our video, when we do the export to JPEG 2000 towards the end of the article.

Alright, that takes care of my video, now what about my audio. Many people don’t bring their audio into R14, as they figure that since it was fine in their NLE, it will be fine here. That, for the most part, is true, but for me, I like to make sure that all my audio lines up and is in sync, and the best way to do that is to bring it around for the R14 process as well. AND, since we are doing a frame rate conversion, as well, I like to make sure that my audio follows the same pipeline as my video. Something else that’s exceptionally important for me to mention, and that is that BlackMagic Design has drastically changed how Resolve handles audio in this release (Fairlight), so if you’re reading this article, and using a different version of R14, this section might not make a lot of sense, so keep that in mind.

The first thing that I normally like to do with my audio is to “unlink” it from the video, and that can simply be done by right clicking on the audio portion of my clip, and simply hitting “Link Clips”. The next thing I like to do is to make sure that all my audio tracks are “Mono”. Remember, even though we are talking about a 5.1 audio mix (CH1:L CH2:R CH3:C CH4:Lfe CH5:LS CH6:RS), this is not one 5.1 audio clip. It’s six mono channels that make up the six channel 5.1 mix, so technically, each of these tracks is Mono, and we’re going to make sure we set them back to be Mono, so when we output, that’s what we get. The next thing you’ll notice is that beside each of the audio tracks, you’ll notice a number like 2.0 or 5.1. This represents the type track your audio is on. For us, 1.0 or Mono is what we’re looking for. Simply right click on the on the left side of the track itself, and select “Change Track Type To”, and select “Mono”. You’ll notice your track ID changes to 1.0. Do this for all the tracks, and then you’re ready to export your 5.1 audio as a single audio track containing your surround mix.

EXPORTING

Alright, here’s where we get our JPEG2000 image sequence, as well as our 5.1 audio set up and ready to go. Please keep in mind that I am aware that you can export directly for EasyDCP right from within R14, but I’m not going to cover that in this lesson. We’re going to save that for the actual DCP creation article(s). Okay, let’s get started. Head over to the “Deliver” tab, and the first thing you’re going to want to do is to set an output location for where you want your audio and JPEG2000 image sequence to go to.

IMAGE

Once you’ve done that, we’re ready to set up our video and this is where, in many cases, things fall off the rails. The Format and Codec drop downs are pretty self explanatory. We want JPEG2000 as the Format, and you’ll notice that as soon as you select it, the Codec immediately changes to 2K DCI, and most people think that’s fine, and they continue on with the output process but, if you happen to actually drop down the Codec menu, you’ll immediately notice that there is actually a codec for DCI FLAT, SCOPE and FULL, which means that you do need to set your codec (once you’ve selected JPEG2000) to match the raster dimension of the project you’re working on. In our case it will be DCI FLAT.

Something that I also want to point out is that if you are working from an “editing” master, meaning you’ve cut all your footage in R14, and are now ready to export, you’ll want to select “Single Clip”, which is the default export type. You will also notice that once you select JPEG2000 as your export type, it will immediately disable your audio export, which is fine for now. We’ll come back and take care of that in a second. By default your timeline will default to the maximum bitrate of 250 Mbit/sec (which is what we want), and your timeline will also have a frame rate of 24 fps. You can ignore the Advanced Settings, as we don’t need to set anything in there, for the purposes of making our DCP. Okay, Let’s head to the “File” tab to give our export a name, we’ll call it “Main DCP Waterfall Export”, and we’ll add this to the Render Queue.

Since R14 doesn’t like to export it’s JPEG2000 sequences with audio, we’re going to do this as a two step process. Head back to the video tab, and deselect “Export Video”. Now, the audio tab becomes active again, and we can select it, to set up our audio for export. Again, because we’re using R14, this step is a little different than it would have been done previously. In the Audio tab, we’re going to select WAVE and Linear PCM as our Format and Codec respectively, and we’re also going to make sure that we keep out bit depth as 24.

Now here’s where things are a little different than in the past. You’ll notice that there’s an “Output Track” drop down option below the Bit Depth. By default it’s set to “Main 1 (Stereo)”. We want to take the tracks that we made Mono in our timeline, and export it to one clip, that we can then take and import into our DCP creation application. With the layout the way it is now, we’ll be exporting one stereo clip. What we want to do is to take that Output Track (1), and assign it to the first audio track in our timeline, by dropping it down to “Timeline Track”. You’ll notice immediately that R14 defaults to choosing track 1, and it’s identifying it as Mono, which is exactly what we want.

Once you’ve set up all your tracks (one through six), you can add this export to the Render Queue, and you’re all set to export both your video and audio for DCP creation.

That’s it!  Your work in Resolve 14 is done, but before we wrap up, there is something that’s important for me to point out. Assuming that you’re not using a DCP export option in an application like Media Encoder, Premiere or even Compressor (for all you FCPX editors out there), you are going to need to use an intermediary application like R14 to do your conversion to not only JPEG2000, but also to XYZ color space.  To be honest, Resolve is my go to application for doing this, and I use it on every DCP project that I create.  If you’re not familiar with working with Resolve, or this write up seems a little complex, there is a way to do this technique inside of Adobe’s After Effects, which we’re going to talk about in an upcoming article.  For that technique, a third party plug-in is required.  It’s old, but it’s free and works in both After Effects and in Photoshop as well.

And last, but certainly not least, I’ve been getting a lot of people commenting on these articles in regards to what I’ve been saying about taking your DCP to a reputable post facility to check your DCP, and many people have been posting (and sending me e-mails directly), telling me that that is not necessary, and you can just check it on a computer, and you’re good to go.  Please, don’t do that.  The whole point of taking it to a facility to check it is to make sure that, not only does it work, but so you can sit down, and watch it to make sure that it looks and sounds exactly the way that you expect it to look and sound.  You want to experience your project, like the audience will experience it.  Taking it to a facility will get you that, plus let you check to make sure that the DCP ingests into a playback machine properly, so you have piece of mind know that when that DCP is sent out to theatres, it will playback exactly the way you expect it to.  In our next article, I’m going to walk through the process for the last of the big NLE’s, and that is FCPX, so look for that article in the coming weeks!

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