#basically being one of these guys in the modern era means youre a living symbol of your parent family's hubris and excessive wealth

[weirderscience]

doodle of some first generation style genelines that prioritized style over function. you can still see these patterns emerge in the modern era, and its not unheard of for well preserved citadels to still have the technology to make designer babies like this. however a lot of loamcats find it impractical, wasteful, and sacrilegious (or adjacent) to use the technology for something so surface-level

[davidmann95]

Sooo… Superman and the Authority?

magnus-king123 asked: Your thoughts on Superman & the authority Give it to me...lol

Anonymous asked: Seeing Bezos take his little trip into space the same day Morrison puts out a Superman comic that touches on how far we’ve fallen from the days when we dreamed of utopian futures where everyone explored the stars was a big gut punch. Not used to Superman being topical in that way.

Anonymous asked: What'd you think of Superman and the Authority#1?

This is far beyond what I can fit in the normal weekly reviews, so taking this as my notes on the first six pages, with this and this as my major lead-in thoughts:

* Janin's such a perfect fit for Morrison - the scale, the power, the facial expressions selling the character work, the screwing around with the panel formatting as necessary to sell the effect, the numinous sense of things going on larger than you can fully perceive amidst the beauty and chaos. It's a shame he wasn't around 25 years ago to draw JLA, but I'll take him going with Morrison onto other future projects.

* His intro action sequence is such a great demonstration of why Black actually does have something to offer, and also how he's such a dumbass desperately needing Superman to save him from himself.

* While Jordie Bellaire didn't legit go with an entirely monochromatic palate the way early previews suggested, it's still an effect frequently and excellently deployed here. And glad to see Steve Wands carry into this from Blackstars since there's such an obvious carryover from its work with Superman.

* "Gentlemen. Ladies. Others." Great both because of the obvious - hey, Superman's nodding at me! - and because it's a phrasing that reinforces that this take on him (and let's be real Morrison) is old as hell.

* I'm mostly past caring about whether this is an alt-Earth Superman until it becomes indisputable one way or another, this and Action both rule so what does it really matter? But while there are still a couple signs in play suggesting some kind of division (the Action Comics #1036 cover, Midnighter up to time-travel shenanigans) the "lost in time" quote clearly thrown in after the fact to explain how he could have met Kennedy outside of 5G that wouldn't be necessary for an Elseworlds, the assorted gestures towards Superman's current status quo, the Kingdom Come symbol appearing in Action, and that Morrison would have had to completely rewrite the ending if this wasn't supposed to be 'the' version of Clark Kent going forward as was the intent when they first planned it all say to me that no, no fooling around, this is our guy going forward one way or another.

* Janin and Bellaire making the first version of the crystal Fortress ever that actually looks as cool as you want it to.

Anonymous asked: I like that Superman and The Authority is basically the anti-All-Star; instead of the laid back, immortal Superman who is supercharged, we have a stressed, ageing Superman whose tremendous powers are fading. The former will always be there to save us, but the latter is running out of time and needs to pull off a Hail Mary. Also, he mentions in his monologue to Black that he was "lost in time" when he met JFK, so maybe he is the main continuity Clark. Or he's the t-shirt Supes from Sideways.

* You're absolutely right - the power reversal is obvious and the ticking clock in play seemingly isn't for his own survival but everyone around him as he wakes up and realizes all the old icons grew complacent with the gains they'd made and he's not leaving behind the world he meant to. Both, however, are built on the idea of preparing the world to not need them anymore - it'll still have a Superman in his son, but that'll only work because of the others he empowers and inspires. The question is what happens to Clark if he's not going to live in the sun for 83000 years.

* Clark's 'exercise' here does more to sell me on the idea of Old Man Superman as a cool idea than however many decades of Earth 2 stuff.

* Intergang being noted alongside Darkseid and Doomsday speaks to how much Kirby informed Morrison's conception of Superman.

* This isn't exactly the most progressive in its disability politics but at least it makes clear Black's being a piece of shit about it.

* It's startling how much Clark can get away with saying stuff in here you'd never expect to come out of Superman's mouth. "I made an executive decision" "Privacy, really...?" "You have nowhere to go, Black. Nothing to live for." "There are few people in my life who I instinctively and viscerally dislike, and you've always been one of them." It only works because there's zero aggression behind it, he's just past the point of niceties and being totally frank while making clear none of these assessments preclude that he cares and is going to unconditionally do the right thing every time. He is absolutely, per Morrison, humanity's dad picking us up when we're too drunk to drive ourselves home.

* The story doesn't put a big flashing light over it, but it's not even a little bit subtle having the material threat of the issue be a ticking timebomb left by the carelessness and hubris of generations past.

* Manchester keeps trying to poke the bear and prove his hot takes about Superman and it's just not working. The front he put up under Kelley is gone after decades of defeats, and as Morrison understands what actually conceptually works about him as a rival to Superman underneath the aging nerd paranoia he's exposed as what he absolutely would be in 2021: a dude with a horrific terminal case of Twitter brainworms. I was PANICKED when I heard there was an 'offensive term' joke in this, I was braced for Morrison at their well-meaning worst, but it's such a goddamn perfect encapsulation of a very specific breed of Twitter leftist who uses their politics first and foremost as a cudgel and justification to label their abrasive, judgmental shittiness as self-righteousness (plus it's a killer payoff to a joke from way back in his original appearance). Cannot believe they pulled that off when they're so very, very open about basically not knowing how the internet works.

* @charlottefinn: Manchester Black using his telekinetic powers to force someone he hates to fave a problematic tweet so that he can screenshot it and start a dogpile

@intergalactic-zoo: “Once they cancel Bibbo, Superman won’t be *anyone’s* fav’rit anymore!”

* Friend noted this issue had to be fully the conversation because the whole premise stands on the house of cards of these two somehow working together, and with three 'silent' inset panels the creative team pulls off that turning point.

* So much of this feels on the surface like Morrison bringing back the All-Star vibes with Clark, but when he drops a "That's all you got?" in a brawl you realize what's underlining that bluntness and confidence in the face of failure is that deep down this is still the Action guy too. This dude ain't gonna get wrecked in his Fortress while the other guy chuckles about him being A SOFT WEE SCIENTIST'S SON!

* Bringing up Jor-El made me realize that Morrison already spelled out that this is the final threat to Superman, what he faces at the end of the road:

"Now it's your turn, Superman."

* A l'il Superman 2000/All-Star reference with the Phantom Zone map!

* There's so much intertextuality going on here even by Morrison standards - Change or Die with the old hero putting together a team of morally nebulous folks out to 'fix' everything, Flex Mentallo with the muscleman trying to redeem the punk, Doomsday Clock with the fate of the world hinging on whether Superman can get through to a meta stand-in for an idea of 'modern' comics cynicism, DKR and New Frontier and Kingdom Come and Multiversity and Seven Soldiers and What's So Funny and All-Star and Action and the last 5 years of monthly Superman comics and Authority and probably Jupiter's Legacy and Tom Strong - but none of that's needed. You could go in with the baseline pop cultural understanding of the character and not care about any of the inside baseball shit and get that this is a story about a leader of a generation that let down the people they made all their grand promises to as inertia and day-to-day demands and complacency let him be satisfied with the accomplishments they'd made long ago, looking at a new era and seeing the ways its own activists are dropping the ball. The only thing that fundamentally matters in a "you have to accept you're reading a superhero story" sense is that because he's Superman he's willing to own up to it and listen to people who might know better about some things and try to set things right while he and those who'll take his place still have a chance. And yes, the oldster looking back on their legacy with a skeptical eye and hoping for better from the next generation, hoping most of all that their little heir apparent can fulfill the promise inside of him instead of being a provocating little shitkicker, is obviously also autobiographical.

* The overlaying Kennedy reprisal is such a great visual of a sudden intrusive thought.

* The Kryptonite secret is the obvious "This is going to matter!" moment, but "He lied about his son" is a bit that doesn't connect to anything going on right now so maybe that's important here too? More significantly, the Justice League can't actually be the villains here but that Ultra-Humanite's crew are in an Earth-orbiting satellite makes pretty clear what's up.

* I've said before that between Superman, OMAC, and a New Gods-affiliated speedster this was going to use all of Morrison's favorite things. King Arthur playing a role isn't exactly dissuading me.

* Love the idea that all the antiheroes have their own community in the same way as the capes and tights crew. They definitely all privately think the rest are posers though and that they alone are Garth Ennis Punisher in a mob of Garth Ennis Wolverines.

* Manchester's fallen so far he's gone from trying to convince Superman to kill to convince him to dunk on people for their bad takes and Clark just doesn't get it. Official prediction of dialogue for upcoming issues:

"According to these bloody Fortress scans, the only thing that can restore your powers is an unfiltered hit of dopamine. Don't worry, Doctor Black has a few ideas."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll plant a nice tree?"

"...fuck you."

* Ok I already talked about how great the Fortress looks in here but LOVE this library.

* A pair of pages this seems like the right spot to discuss from Black's original appearance that underlines both his and Superman's inadequacies up to this point:

Responding to the problem of "the government and penal system are hopelessly corrupt" neither of them has any actual notion of what to do about it in spite of their respective posturing beyond how to handle individual outside actors - each is in their own way every bit as small-minded and reactionary as the other. Clark's coming around though, and he's holding out hope for the other guy.

* Superman: Have a lovely mineral water :) proper hydration is important :)

Manchester Black: *Is a dude who can get so mad he vomits and passes out. At water.*

* That last page is the one to beat for the year, and does more to put over the idea of this as an Authority book than that Midnighter and Apollo are literally going to show up. It also feels like Morrison tacitly acknowledging all the ways the premise could go or at least be received wrong - from Superman saying 'enough is enough' to who he's bringing into the fold to go about it - in the most beautifully on-the-nose fashion imaginable. Maybe they'll save us all! Or maybe they'll drown us in their vomit.

[lady-plantagenet]

What hasn’t already been said: The Spanish Princess 2

Episode 1: CamelNOT

[Lively Music Plays]

I shit you not... that’s what it said in the CCs.

Tower of London (?)

*Catherine looks at the array of crowns like a museum curator and the proceeds to strut down the halls*

Wolsey: *gives her this strange look which is a mixture between damn girl and the eagle is my spirit animal.

Then Catherine gets fake detained and taken to Henry in what must be a strange variation of the whole Robin Hood/Maid Marian roleplay they historically engaged in.

... did she just call his erhm manhood his kingship? Well that’s original, I’ll give them that. Also funny how Bessie Blount initially looks on in fright... don’t worry girl that will be you soon.

———————————————————————

*the four ladies have a brunch friendship moment together*

I see Blount is among them... I see they are setting her up as Catherine’s friend in order to play up the whole betrayal.

Alright. Jokes aside, I realised how much I’ve played myself. I was inspired by @melusineloriginale ‘s sporks (which if all this TSP episode posts got you in the mood for PG show mockery I urge you to check out here - you’ll thank me later). In truth, Henry VIII’s early reign is a bit too late from my main area of focus for me to make intelligent jokes.

I’ll content myself with just bullet-pointing random thoughts that came into my head, and if some intelligent thought gets through, well that would be the pinnacle. In any case I’ll aim to not parrot some of the stuff that’s already been said, repetition can get annoying.

This image embodies this post, but maybe not the show. I’ve noticed those Starz productions get better by the end.

First Scenes:

- The recap just reminded me how much I will miss Margaret Beaufort in the coming episodes. I know her portrayal was innacurate but Harriet Walter just made everything better.

- They are making such a big deal out of this whole ‘we were crowned together, we rule together’ thing in this episode - it makes no sense. Catherine was an influential Queen but she was definitely no more than a consort and never saw herself as more.

- Ruairi’s new haircut is pleasing to my eyes.

- When she says ‘Abuelo’ it’s super adorable awww

The Ferdinand and Charles V scene:

- Bessie Blount looks so much like Ursula Pole lmao. Also they totally got the Pole children’s birth order wrong and UGH WHERE IS GEOFFREY POLE???

- I like Mary Tudor’s actress and her facial expressions. However, this whole polyglot image they are representing is innacurate. I am fairly certain she knew no spanish and I recall reading a contemporary account which said that she was not very learned.

- I’m pretty sure it would be considered bad luck to prematurely crown your son ‘Henry IX’ while you’re still alive.

- I actually like the whole Grape motif in this episode. It’s probably the smartest thing they’ve come up with so far for this episode. I know a lot of you will be all like ‘there’s no record of Ferdinand being abusive’ but this choice sort of makes sense when you recall Joanna’s treatment. Also I appreciate them for not being tacky and showing flashbacks of more overt abuse eg physical. The sugared grape is also fairly symbolic (the sugar is like a gilding, the grape easily crushable)

- OMG the guy from Garrow’s law is playing Thomas More!

- AND PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME IM NOT SEEING THINGS? Margaret Pole x Thomas More is happening?? Please god that is a historical crackship I am getting behind. Yes. This is what I’m most invested about.

Margaret Tudor and Scotland Scene:

- The whole ironic cutaway to Margaret being all depressed after Charles Brandon’s statement about her charming Scottish king is such a cliché movie technique.

- If this were a more artsy film I would think the whole setup resembling a stereotypical middle-class family breakfast was done on purpose for humorous effects or to create a link with the past. But here I don’t have as much trust in the producers. I think they just failed to capture the time period accurately.

- The modernisms continue: ‘Negassi please stop playing’ idk, there just something so modern about this for some reason ahaha

- Also again, I’m getting tired of all this ‘Catherine is basically queen herself’, ‘Catherine is a political genius’, ‘Catherine Catherine Catherine’ ugh. I don’t think the producers understand that Henry VIII was a very autocratic and traditional ruler. He didn’t make any show of joint-rulership (correct me if I’m wrong).

- The teeth thing is funny, smart and I liked it.

Back to Westminster:

- I like Ferdinand’s actor!

- Also Catherine’s response to ‘who are you loyal to?’ was not that smart. I feel like the producers wanted us to be impressed. What if Spain and England’s interests conflict, ey??

The Joust:

- I care too much for the whole Margaret Pole plotline. I’m so invested.

- I could watch a series of More and Pole just exchanging lines. I love the actors too and this is my hope for this series. The whole frustrated parents is SO CUTE.

- I didn’t know More tutored Reggie, I would be curious to know more.

- The way compton says groom to queen’s stool is freaking hilarious. He looks like a pervert.

- Henry Pole is a darling and must be protected at all costs.

- Oh Christ oh Christ that eyeball shot was just... good job on the special effects guys. Don’t know what the point of that choice was.

- I found the whole armour mentions after interesting, it looked so set up as a PR campaign because Stafford speaking about the armour just sounded like a statement agreed on beforehand ‘should have worn the same’ and the Catherine with ‘steel in the bones’ and Ferdinand’s impressed face (it was him playing them?)

- Am I giving this show too much credit?

- Also whats up with “God save the Queen?”

War Counsel:

- Henry VIII’s actor is quite charismatic in this scene. It’s almost as if Catherine is the hothead and Henry the wise one that speaks less but more significantly. It almost feels like they gender-swapped them.

The Bedchamber:

- Did Catherine breastfeed the baby? I thought it was Anne Boleyn. Doubtful... I’m tired of the trope of ‘you’re a good woman if you insist on breastfeeding the child yourself despite social conventions’. For a feminist show, the writers seem very attached to some 1950s perceptions of motherhood.

- I feel like the age difference between Catherine and Henry is well conveyed.

Scotland Again:

- ‘All the sheep were pregnant’ 👀 oh touché Margaret. oh my. Did she just?

- I know they are playing out this disenfranchised Margaret arc to reinforce how great Catherine and Henry are (cheap technique) and to build up to her involvement in Flodden (innacurate historically but I know what the show will do). But I will say this: the humour is pretty good in the Scottish scenes! But I know it’s unintentionally so... (I highly doubt they wanted us to laugh at Margaret hitting James or calling Alexander a pig).

Westminster and the baby chamber:

- What’s are those red splotches on the babies face??

- Oh that shot of Margaret and silent Reginald :((( it makes me sad.

- And now the Poles are at church! I just love the look of them.

- That scene of Maggie and Catherine was needed, as we didn’t get the best friends vibe much in this episode. The whole thing looked a bit pagan though, but it was nice :)

The whole Ferdinand’s betrayal segment:

- The grape motif again was fitting, him snapping the fruit right before she gets to it even despite her knowing what he’s like and what he’ll do, was a good parrallel.

- I’m tired of hearing of this ‘Camelot’. Even in the novel, Camelot was Catherine and Arthur’s dream and... can we just live it up with Arthur?

- Ursula Pole’s, Bessie Blount’s and Mary Boleyn’s actresses look way too similar.

- I fail to see why Catherine thinks she’s turning into her father... she doesn’t strike me as much of a game-player or subtle two-facer.

- I’m intrigued what will happen with Oviedo and Lina... I feel like they won’t stay in England long.

- He was made knight bannaret... nice... but why does he thank Catherine publicly for this? It was in Henry’s gift that he was made a commoner Knight.. if this transpired irl Henry would have been gravely insulter.

Catherine’s Dead Baby and thereafter:

- Guys. In all seriousness, I don’t think the TV series is trying to imply that Catherine killed the baby with her negligence. I mean, they are so bent on us liking her they wouldn’t do that. It would be a bit too ballsy anyway. Remember the red splotches I mentioned earlier? Could those have been a sign that he was already ill but no one noticed/was in denial?

- The pebbles in hands would have had more emotional payoff if it had been established earlier if you know what I mean. Basically, this episode is too fast and entire arcs begin and end within it which extinguished any build-up.

- Oh man Henry is so sweet in this, how will they build him up as the tyrant he was historically if they keep this up?

Scotland Again:

- I must admit, I don’t like all those nicknames they keep using. But somehow James calling Margaret ‘Meg’ is nice and seems fitting.

- What’s a hermana sister?

England Last Mourning Scenes:

- YOU DID NOT BUILD CAMELOT ughhh

- Why is Catherine giving the speech and not Henry?? It turns out Catherine was more emotional historically then the whole perception of ‘perfect queen of stone’ to which some people hold her. However, I doubt it would have been proper of her to give a speech in such a emotional manner.

Conclusion:

6.5/10

Some of the dialogue was stilted, the costumes are confused as to which era they’re supposed to be (aesthetically distracting) and many other characterisation issues.

I don’t have high hopes for this series in terms of cinematography or art but I sure as hell expect it will be entertaining. So far, everything is just getting set up and I find some aspects promising. As you can tell I am truly excited over how the Margaret Pole plotline. I am also interested in how Henry will be portrayed, with Catherine being so OTT and pushy this episode Im starting to Stan him more. In this show he appears sensitive and serene and kinda... adorable. Kind of like a little brother hanging onto his sister’s skirts.

But in a way that is a disservice to the real historical figure which would not tolerate such a representation. I am very irritated by this whole ‘joint-rulers’ thing which is just sooo innacurate. These STARZ shows have an obsession with showing women turn into men for the purposes of feminism - I see.

Catherine overpowers Henry too often and it sometimes feels like he’s HER consort. Of course, the feminism in this show is schizophrenic as we get the overemphasis of Catherine as a 1950s motherly ideal with the whole breastfeeding angle (“you’re better than other noble woman who would find this beneath them”, “they’re not as motherly as you”).

So the relationship dynamic between Henry and Catherine is a bit off at the moment, but oh well.

Mary Tudor is a bit distracting with her dark hair but I find the actress extremely endearing and promising. I know there will be emphasis on her storyline too and I hope they’ll not be clichéd with it.

[dippedanddripped]

Watching Aminé’s “Caroline” music video can evoke vivid high school memories of the days when a freshly minted driver’s license conferred upon its holder the freedom to meet up with friends and do anything — or nothing. The video, like the song, is bubbly and carefree; it documents Aminé and his friends riding around town in a Honda Sedan stocked to the gills with bananas, lounging around in the grass, and watching each other play video games. In that 2016 summer of #BlackBoyJoy in hip-hop (when Chance the Rapper, Lil Yachty, D.R.A.M., Anderson .Paak, Rae Sremmurd, MadeinTYO, and Desiigner also flourished), “Caroline” went quadruple-platinum and helped make Aminé the first rapper ever from Portland, Oregon to become a national star.

The video for “Shimmy,” the lead single from Aminé’s forthcoming album Limbo, is a collage of Portland-specific flexes, a tribute to how far he’s come. He cheeses for the cameras while flanked by a phalanx of lawyers and dances midfield at Providence Park. He stands, perhaps symbolically, on the roof of Mike’s Drive-In (the burger joint where “Caroline” was shot) and trades the Honda for a speedboat zooming up the Willamette River.

Just as importantly, “Shimmy” is a subtle homage to the heavily gentrified areas of northeast Portland, where Aminé — born Adam Daniel to Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants — grew up. In the video, he meets up with other members of the Portland rap scene plus Yosief Berhe and Jonathan Ressom, his two friends who co-star in all of his videos, to bike en masse down NE Alberta Street. He stops by Kee’s, a popular soul food truck, and heads to Woodlawn Park, his old stomping grounds located a few blocks from his childhood home.

“Woodlawn is the neighborhood that I grew up in,” he tells Highsnobiety over Zoom. “It used to be very much a part of the Black community. It’s kind of turned into a hipster park now, but it’s definitely the first place I got jumped. The first place I had my first fight in. Woodlawn represents a lot of good memories for me and my friends. Like our innocent adolescence.”

Rapid gentrification continues to gut Portland’s Black community, which accounts for less than six percent of the city’s total population. Aminé alluded to the transformation of Woodlawn on his 2017 song “Turf”: “Flipping through my past like I used to flip the phone / They kicking out the Blacks and all the houses getting clones.”

“The gentrification is insane,” he says. “I used to have only Black neighbors. And now my parents only live next to white people. The only reason my parents are still on that block is because, you know, I pay for everything. But it’s not the same for a lot of Black people in Portland.”

His friends Yosief and Jonathan echo this sentiment during a phone interview: “You’re getting chains of dispensaries on the same corners where police would try to nail people for weed,” Jonathan says. “I can go in there, and it’s gonna be a girl in a skirt giving me a dub. Meanwhile, no lie, like six, seven years ago, homies getting locked up doing the same shit on that same corner.”

“People in Portland sometimes have the right intentions,” Yosief adds. “But it really irks my nerves when I go down Mississippi or Albina or through historically Black neighborhoods, and it’s 85 percent white. All the houses have Black Lives Matter signs on the lawn but displaced a bunch of Black families to be there. It’s unfortunate.”

Limbo arrives four years into Aminé’s tenure as a major-label rapper, at a point where he’s established himself, but is still unsure of where to go or how to proceed with his career. “The title came from where I’m at in my life,” he explains. “There are two meanings behind it. I feel like I grew up thinking that once I achieved one level, the next level would be easier to achieve. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to realize that with every level that I achieve, every level gets harder, just like the game of limbo. It just doesn’t seem to change for me, and it’s honestly made me feel like I’m completely in limbo. I thought the older I get, the wiser I’d get. But I’m figuring it out.”

Bittersweet nostalgia for high school and college years has been a recurring theme in Aminé’s music. In this sense, Limbo picks up where his 2017 debut album Good For You left off. Co-executive produced by Aminé and “Caroline” producer Pasque, it features one song that is entirely dedicated to Woodlawn Park, another to Aminé’s mother. Other songs, including his recent release “RiRi,” wistfully revisit past romances that sputtered. That era, which saw the first, fitful yawns of Aminé’s music career, is fertile terrain for storytelling. “I miss being naïve. I miss hoping, not knowing what your future was looking like,” he told Pigeons & Planes earlier this year. “Just being in your room in college, broke as hell.”

Aminé’s rap career began in the booth of Benson High’s radio broadcasting program, where he and his friends once rapped over Flockaveli beats. “Then we actually realized that Adam was pretty good,” Yosief tells us. He spent summers in New York, working youth camps in the Bronx and holding down internships at Complex and Def Jam — staying with his aunt in Harlem, eating plain leftover rice out of her fridge when food money inevitably got low. After high school, he started putting out mixtapes into a localized scene that Pasque describes as “stuck in the golden age.” Casual co-signs from Damian Lillard (who came to a show) and Kaytranada (who sent free beats) were good omens that also helped him stand out. All the while, he matriculated at Portland State University and lived at home with his parents. PSU is where he met Pasque, and where they made “Caroline.”

“We found out about this classroom inside of the music building that was always left unlocked,” Pasque says. “We had a schedule. I would go to work, and then after I clocked out, I would go immediately to school and work on music all night, basically. And it was like that for about five or six months. And then, eventually, it got to the point where we had a good amount of music, and our manager, Justin, was like, ‘You guys gotta put something out.’ We decided to put out ‘Caroline.’ And after that, it was no looking back.”

“I remember him putting out these little mixtapes, trying to get stuff retweeted, putting freaking fliers on corners, and [getting help from] all our friends in Portland,” Yosief says. “The slow grind. I remember Adam was trending [on Twitter] just in Portland, and it was like a big-ass deal. I remember him having like 1,000, 2,000 views on SoundCloud, to him going like, ‘Hey, this song got two million plays on Spotify, we’re about to make a music video for it.’ All of us still broke.”

Weeks after “Caroline” came out and started racking up gaudy streaming numbers, Vevo offered to fly Aminé out to New York to record a video performance of the single. He was in his senior year, and the video shoot conflicted with a finance final, but he decided to go anyways.

“I literally was told that if I failed this final, I would fail the class. So, I was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ I just didn’t care,” he says. “I hated college. I knew it wasn’t for me, but I still kept doing it because I have strict African parents that I lived with. There was no other alternative for me to live under [their roof] without going to school.”

Aminé’s affable, low-key charm and new deal with Republic Records facilitated his smooth entry into the mainstream. The summer after “Caroline” blew up, Malia Obama requested to meet him after his set at Lollapalooza, and Young Thug called him a “young legend” backstage at a European music festival. “I didn’t even know if [Thug] knew who I was,” he says. He relocated to Los Angeles, where he has lived a charmed life, ensconced in a network of the city’s coolest, smartest, and most famous young artists. Late last year, Issa Rae — who co-starred in his 2017 “Spice Girl” video — asked him to guest star in Insecure as a dumb guy named Darnell. “I moved to LA just because, like, half of the features I get are just because me and the homies are in the studio,” Aminé explains. “Like, I can text Vince [Staples] and he’ll pull up to the studio. Money can’t buy timing. That’s pretty much the only reason I’m here.”

Still, to a great extent, Aminé strives for anonymity rather than celebrity. “When people want to go to, like, 1 OAK, or the club, I’d rather just go to a small bar with a couple of my good friends and chill,” he says. He adds that “normal things” have helped him stay sane during quarantine — like meeting friends in the park with food, or his morning ritual of smoking a joint and walking his 11-month-old goldendoodle Oliver.

This aversion to the limelight extends to his relationship with Portland, where he is something of a modern cultural icon. He doesn’t go out to restaurants with his parents anymore, for the sake of their privacy. He expresses his hope that he could signal boost Portland’s Black businesses and the city’s overall profile in the music industry, rather than don the cape of Captain Portland: “I’m just such an indoor person, and I don’t love that kind of pressure on me. Like, I was never really prepared for this type of career.”

Aminé intends to eventually build a massive compound in Portland, with a studio and acres of land. It’s likely to happen one day — just don’t hold him to it. Public expectations can be dangerous. “The main thing to take away from [this album] is, I’m still just a guy figuring it out,” he says. “I don’t have the answers. And I don’t want fans to look at me for every answer. I’m just a guy, literally. I’m just in limbo.”

Limbo is out August 7 via Republic. Pre-order the record here.

[janiedean]

Why do people think grrm is anti targ + targ incest? Do you think he is?

with the premise that I don’t care for the targaryens at large either way, I’m not invested in that side of the story at all and I haven’t read fire and blood yet:

I don’t think grrm is anti-targ. grrm obviously likes them or he wouldn’t be writing prequels on prequels about them nor would he have made dany a main character nor he would have had them as the house that sorta merges the political and magical plots. there’s characters grrm created he obv. doesn’t feel fond of, but it’s not daenerys;

also - GIVEN THAT IDC ABOUT HER EITHER WAY AND I’M NEUTRAL - I think personally that george writes dany in a sympathetic light where you have to understand that she’s not perfect, that her methods aren’t always good and that her good intentions don’t mean automatically good results nvm that she’s a deconstruction of the revolutionary-who-saves-all trope and not a reinforcement of it, but like... grrm likes dany. who’s the main targ for now unless you decide jon is one but that’s beside the point;

I also think grrm is definitely not the biggest incest fan as it should be because there’s a reason why you don’t have kids with your relatives naturally ie that it’s a genetical lost bet and the only other incest ship he has in those books is toxic as hell and doesn’t shy from showing it, but like....... guys:

I mean. but like while no one judges anyone for shipping fictional incest I don’t really think we have to go much further when it comes to INCEST IS BAD IRL and there’s a reason why it doesn’t fly (ie that incest automatically implies that there’s a power imbalance or abusive situation going on)

that said if grrm had the targs narratively marrying each other it was to a) get to the point where they collapse, b) rehashing some historical facts that he obv. based himself on while writing asoiaf, c) pointing out that absolute monarchies lasting centuries where people marry each other in between relatives are a bad idea, which....

is actually a main plot point because like... guys, the throne is a negative symbol. the point of these books is that political power at all costs corrupts people, power corrupts people, kingship isn’t good and you can’t be halfway decent at it if you actually crave it or if you don’t care for the people you should be ruling, and as much as grrm himself likes dany as a character/presents her as sympathetic there is no way he’s doing targ restoration through her because then we’d be back at the beginning just with maybe a more enlightened monarch and I don’t think that’s where he’s headed;

now imvho the overall political ending is headed towards splitting and having westeros move into full-reinassance era leaving the absolute monarchy behind (also grrm is a pacifist and a liberal in american terms I really doubt he’s much of a monarchy stan) and the fact that technically the person with the better claim if recognized is actually jon ie a character who had no idea he was royally descended, lived his entire life as a bastard and went into the nw which guys is basically a glorified prison for criminals and the last hope for last sons who can’t make a living otherwise, is imho very telling because if he gets kingship it’s... someone who has tasted the other side of the barricade and almost died in between commoners and *wildlings* more than once, which is exactly the contrary of the monarchs that came until now and who wouldn’t be a *conqueror*;

re dany I honestly think she’s going to go back to essos and give it up on account of the fact that a) she’s obv. unhappy ruling in mereen and westeros would be that just worse, b) she’s doing it because it’s what viserys raised her up believing was their destiny but imvho if you look at it she just wants to go back home to the house with the red door and is more in it because she wants to help people than because OMG I REALLY NEED TO SIT ON THE IRON TRAP;

also, sitting on the iron trap or wanting to out of lust for power is automatically a recipe for a) not ending there eventually, b) not being narratively on the good side, c) bad news happening to you, which is why imvho wanting your fave to be on the iron trap as their achievement is not really a good premise to approach the text, which is why I think that if the iron trap survives (debatable) or is substituted (more probable) by something less daunting, whoever ends up on there won’t want the job.

so: I personally think grrm likes the targs a lot as his literary creation but he made them flawed for very specific narrative reasons, I think he likes dany a lot as a character and he won’t be horrid to her but I also don’t think he’s planning for a full-on targaryen restoration and I also think he doesn’t want to send the message that absolute monarchy is the solution to all the problems as long as the monarchs are enlightened. but I also don’t buy the ‘dany as a revolutionary who’ll save everyone’ narrative bc I think she’s there to challenge the concept that you can save everyone with revolutions and good ideas - bc irl it’s a recipe for disaster. when you overthrow a society and make it go from 1 to 10 without passing through steps 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 it never ends up well or the way people dreamed it would and I think he’s very well-aware of that and I think he’s moving towards the ending where the system is changed from within and there’s the cripples, bastards and broken things in power (ie: the only thing that felt right-ish about the show’s ending) who will then move it to a more modern system, but that’s my three cents. but that doesn’t make him anti-targ. he hasn’t written one character that’s faultless, doesn’t mean he hates all his characters.

that said, he sure af doesn’t support incest as a practice and tbh I don’t think there should even be debate about that because there’s nothing in these books that tells you ‘hey incest is a good thing sometimes maybe we can make exceptions’ and it’s valid for the targs and for everyone else.

if this meant ‘do you think he’s anti jon/erys’ my answer is that idc for that ship and idk how grrm means to spin it if it becomes canon and I wouldn’t put my money on its endgame value if it did so I can’t help you there with any sensed reply because I don’t have any meta-ish thought on that and it’s not really an aspect of the story I care about so much I actually want to theorize about it rather than wait and see what he writes himself.

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

One Punch Man 13 (S2 Ep 1) | Afterlost 1 | RobiHachi 1 | Kimetsu no Yaiba 2 - 3 | BSD 25 - 26 (S3 Eps 1 - 2) | King of Prism - Shiny 7 Stars 1 | Shield Hero 14 - 16 | Double Decker! EX 3 | Sarazanmai 2

The shows that have made it this season will be getting their tags...soon. Because I fell behind early in the season, trying to read ahead is nastier than it really should be...

Update: I forgot to roll out the tags...! Sorry about that.

One Punch Man 2 1

This season’s name…sounds counterintuitive, to say the least.

I love how Genos is carrying a box of hijiki (which looks like hair) and Saitama’s wearing a shirt that says “hair” (in kanji) all over it. It’s funny for a bald man and his “work of modern art”.

I never knew Genos was so blunt. Maybe because the last season was a good 2 – 3 years ago…and was by Madhouse and Shingo Natsume, and so this feels slightly different.

Oh, Sonic…! I didn’t realise how much I missed you! (Not to mention, you look hot with the off-the-shoulder shirt, y’know?)

“Enoki” is a type of mushroom.

Oh, Garou!...Oh wait, there isn’t much more of the episode left, is there…?

Afterlost 1

Oh great…this is the second time the subs don’t work on my device of choice. Then again, it seems to be a problem with the ad blocker and not the video…Okay, fiddling with the ad blocker worked.

Let’s play Spot the Main Character Amongst All the CGI Guys! Yay! (obviously sarcastic)

Without the volume…this OP is, to not put it lightly, s***.

Shoumetsu means “extinction”, not “lost”.

And the reward for Jankiest CGI this season belongs to…

Okay…this is stupid…if it f**ks up even more, I’m out of here!

I know the horned owl is your mascot, but that doesn’t mean you needed a real owl.

Waittttttttt…how did the scientists know Yuki’s father was responsible for this stuff anyway?

I feel like Takuya was shoehorned in. I mean, there’s a better example of this character type in Naofumi (Shield Hero).

This guy’s name, as we know it, is Geek. Wow (sarcastic). Also, I find it funny Takuya has a “ta” on his licence plate.

“…she’s just a package.” - Welp, you don’t get any more blatant than that for female denigration! I think Anime Feminist had a field day with this one.

Come to think of it, I saw some helmets back at Geek’s place but Takuya never seems to use one…

You had one job, Takuya…*sigh*

I swear I said a few previews ago I don’t like 1st person cam…no one ever listens to me, do they???

Not dis shitto agen!

Okay, enough complaining. It seems Yu-no wasn’t bad enough, so they had to produce something like the Chaos Dragon and Seisen Cerberus of old…

RobiHachi 1

It’s Takamatsu being Takamatsu again. Also… I forgot to mention this earlier, but…Taiga Umatani seems to be related to Kurari Umatani (who is credited for Boueibu), so…I wonder if it’s a collective writer’s name for Studio Comet, like Izumi Todo for Toei? The only thing that goes against that is the fact “Kurari” existed during the Diomedea days of Boueibu. Also Isekandar seems to be related to Yamato’s Iscandar (which Takamatsu seems to like, based on the fact he once used Matsumoto metres as a shorthand for being in space). If you don’t understand, Yamato’s endgoal contains a place called Iscandar and that’s by Leiji Matsumoto.

Okayyyyy…what are these rabbit creatures…? But yes, it does smack of Boueibu simply because the episode layout’s the same.

Hmm…? So Robby seems be En (the do-nothing life) in spirit, but Kinshiro in background, but also he runs away from his fortune. “Hmm” indeed.

Oh! That’s what this string of misfortunes reminds me of! The monsters of the day from Boueibu.

Acrymalide.

Hatchi is a Kinshiro in looks but an Atsushi by being a goody-goody.

Hmm…they actually bother to show girls now…apparently Takamatsu went to a boys-only school, which is why his original works focus on dudes (as in, you can pick out when Takamatsu is adapting someone else’s work because it has a heavier focus on girls as supporting characters).

Mechs and spaceships are probably two of the only ways I accept CGI…and you, Takamatsu sir, have just done it (the latter)!

Aw! Lookit his (Hatchi’s) face light up like a Beppu’s! It’s cute!

Hatchi getting out the hatch…lame, but still somewhat effectve on me (because that’s my wordplay game you’re playing, Takamatsu…!).

LOL, it’s a transforming mech. It seems my words from a few comments earlier were basically foretelling the future.

Kimetsu no Yaiba 2

Yikes, “Sakonji Urokodaki” has a lot of strokes…

My Little Sister Lives For Headpats…hey wait, don’t all anime kid sisters do that(?)

For some reason, I know the “Don’t Lose Your Way” meme from Kill la Kill and yet I’ve never…watched KlK…?(!)

I swore that was Giyu (it’s the haircut, I swear), but it’s a random demon…

When all you have is a hatchet…use your head. (LOL)

Ooh, nice eyecatch!

This is really black comedy, in a sense. (I remember this demon fight from the manga which is why I say that.)

Hmm…this wispy stuff wasn’t in the manga.

Come to think of it, I don’t know how Tanjiro got his scar…

If you squint really hard, you can see CGI Urokodaki and Tanjiro…

He probably has no footsteps because of his shoes. Or the fact he’s a ninja. Were there ninja in the Taisho era…? Update: Tanjiro has the same kind of shoes…oops.

Come to think of it, Daisuke from DN Angel had to dodge traps every day before he became Dark…(thinking of this because I reread the first volume of DN Angel recently)

Oh! Manga panel preview! That’s quite fun, really.

Kimetsu no Yaiba 3

I just really like how Tanjiro’s eyes grew larger with what was clearly resolution before he closed the door.

Why do the non-descript hunters look like Giyu too…?

I’ve never seen KnY so comedic…and that’s coming from someone who thought the Head Demon fight from last episode was funny.

Welp, this is…kinda interesting (<- says a fan of Touken Ranbu).

This letter writing…it reminds me of Kekkai Sensen somewhat.

This realistic water…it’s beautiful, but it looks like it came straight out of Niagara Falls. Is that…too realistic for anime?

“No matter…”

It’s a fox version of Speed of Sound Sonic! Then again, the real Sonic is around this season and probably won’t be happy about that comparison…

Is “that guy”…Giyu? Or the demon who slaughtered Tanjiro’s family?

Spider lilies! I didn’t mention it last time, but the symbolism of the spider lily makes the ED real cool.

Bungou Stray Dogs 26

I’v read the wiki page for Chuuya enough to know the next few eps involve the LN Fifteen, so even though I haven’t read a translation of the source material, I know some of the ins and outs of it already.

Ooh! Kitty! (If you’re a manga reader, you’ll know the cat’s significance.)

I think at this point in time, all viewers are used to Dazai’s bulls*** by now.

Is it just me…or did Bones use CGI for the city? It actually looks kind of good…! Sasuga Bones!

I have a fic that predates Fifteen and could be set in the same period (the fic’s vague enough that it could’ve been them at 15, 18 or even 12)…and basically the only thing I got wrong was the fact Chuuya doesn’t have his hat (because I wrote Chuuya as having his hat in the fic). Also, the banter is tenser than I imagined it, but that’s subjective and something only I, the fic writer, can compare.

I wonder who the yellow-tinted Ability holder is…? Update: That’s Randou. Spoke too soon.

There was a box in the subs…I wonder what symbol that might’ve been.

“…closest to the explosion.”

BSD 3 2

Oh, so that’s what Randou was for! I see now.

Chuuya may be OP, but he’s one heck of a fun character…also, he’s not as OP as Saitama, so…yeah.

Oh, the ED from last time is the OP. I should’ve known.

I like the almost storybook-style of this episode!

I thought Dazai was faking releasing the hostages…I was wrong.

Face-stealing aliens return! (They were around last ep too, I think, but they were harder to see then.)

Again, watch for the cat!

Well, with only one suspect (or 3, if you count the Sheep kids), it was quite easy to figure out one of them was behind it. I kind of suspected Randou, anyway, considering what I’ve learnt from all the mysteries I’ve read.

Because I was watching this episode with the volume down low (so I could hear the OP and ED), the volume really did work wonders for the plot this ep…!

King of Prism – Shiny 7 Stars 1

This is the final debut of the season, so basically how this and Shield Hero perform will decide what will stay and what will go. Oh, yeah…apparently this is the companion to a movie, but the movie and TV series have slightly different content.

This dude’s (the one at the very start’s) so grumpy.

…welp, I didn’t expect it to be that much CGI.

This chunk of exposition…makes me feel like I missed something. It was probably in the previous movies, come to think of it…

Basically, this is…uh, Makura no Danshi or Room Mate all over again??? I’m noping out of here…! Bye!

Shield Hero 14

I’m putting this on the chopping block…just so you know.

…uh, age gap romance? It’s hard to tell at this stage, but they (Filo and Melty) sure act like it is romance.

Welp, this survived the chopping block. “Raphtalia backstory” is a good enough reason to stick around for, isn’t it?

Double Decker! EX 3 (FINAL)

I always miss the OP when I’m not watching Double Decker, but I miss the ED even more…

I can’t believe they tried to get away with a Spirited Away parody…!

I can’t believe I get to see Dr Apple all buttered up like this…

I love how Kirill is censoring himself. (At least he can prove he’s not a girl, unlike Valery/Milla, whose entire shtick is the confusion between genders.)

Oh! I think I know the answer to the case already! It was Kirill’s soap, so Doug is the “killer”. But then…why is it Derick, of all people???

LOL, the angles were so reminiscent of Detective Conan…

Underwear-stealing sextuplets…? Why does that kind of sound like Osomatsu-san…?

Ahh…I really am going to miss this ED. See you next time!

Shield Hero 15

I never thought Raphtalia would be so angry…that’s Naofumi’s job.

Okay…it’s the age-old question: do demis listen with their animal ears or their human ears? Do they even have human ears??? (That’s 2 questions, isn’t it…?)

Uh…CGI dinosaur, much?

Shield Hero 16

…and of course, the Queen is a loli. Of course (<-sarcastic).

“Why’d I even have to feed this KFC farm?” – LOL, but I wonder what it sounded like in Japanese…? (i.e. I didn’t listen to it and when I try to do that, there’s always something over the top of it…)

Sarazanmai 2

I wonder if I’ll ever get used to watching Ikuhara on a weekly basis…?

Kappamaki…geddit?

Wait…y’mean, Keppi’s breath smells like cucumbers? Uh…okay, TMI.

Enta’s Japanese house kind of looks like the one in Mawaru Penguindrum.

Wait…why does the Japanese word for “Fish Buffet” (Osakanazanmai) end in –zanmai? Does that mean Sarazanmai is…Dish Buffet?! (LOL)

Notably, one of the signs said “Union” in katakana. It must be an English play on words…y’know, trade union and union = connecting with each other? I’m surprisingly enjoying myself a lot with Sarazanmai, by the way. I didn’t think I would, but I am!

I think that might be Irohassu water. Or Dasani. I saw both those brands in Japan, but I don’t remember which had the green flowers.

Oh…my goodness! Nekoyama (Cat Mountain) Mokichi (written with kanji for “hair” and “luck”). It’s a Boueibu monster! Frick, I’m laughing too hard!

It’s very small and very thin, but the word next to the cat in the eyecatch is neko.

“…Meow God!” – It’s a pun on “Oh, My God!” but with a “meow” in it. It’s pretty forced, but it does get the nuance of the joke across…

Why the heck did the subbers choose “herb” as the word for weed in this? “Weed” is sufficient, right? Right…?

Well…if that spurt of water wasn’t symbolic…I don’t know what is.

The title translates better as “…but I want to steal”. Y’know, add a little force into it.

The two As and the “sara” below it seem to make a zombie face, huh?

Ooh, that ending…

[raccoonpatriotism]

260 [Random, Useless Headcanons 📂] from @homeofthevan | Part 2 Explosive Boogaloo

1-100: Here

101: He’s always had an, uh, ‘excellent’ temperament with old women - starting from being forced to help out at Old Folks Homes to get him out of the Orphanage. 

102: He yells to show he cares. 

103: He also yells for the sake of it.

104: You have to constantly say his name if you want him to continue to be part of the conversation.

105: that’s why he so often repeatedly uses names, nicknames, a simple ‘son’ when speaking to people.

106: He assumes everyone’s just like him until proven otherwise.

107: Along with what I said earlier about him not being empathetic; he really isn’t able to visualize himself in someone elses shoes unless he’s been walked through, like, a specific a few times. 

108: He respects Miss Pauling the most out of everyone he knows. 

109: Smissmas and Thanksgiving are tied for his favorite holiday.

110: Jane really likes Halloween though, and isn’t a grump on Valentines day. 

111: <- Jane’s password for anything he owns that requires a password. More 1s if necessary.

112: When he’s thirsty he’ll go to the nearest form of water for hydration - catch him just drinking out of the bathroom sink - leaning up as he wipes his mouth, chirping, “Hello, private.”

113: He guzzles coffee like it’s fuel, but he has a very strict, No Caffeine after lunch protocol.

114: Decaff is for WIMPS.

115: Jane plays the trombone.

116: Subsequently, in most music, he appreciates and hums along with the bass parts.

117: Modern AU-Jane may be a Call of Duty fanboy, but he respects Halo for being another accurate depiction of life on the battlefront. 

118: Speaking of modern Jane, the Military didn’t accept him in the 80s either.

119: His love for the military lead him to believe for sure he’d be accepted he was the Perfect Patriot and his enlistment would be a surefire way to help fund his transition--

120: But of course, as strong as he had become he’d spent his youth very sick and with the possibility of the illness to return along with a terrible psyche eval and 80s typical transphobia that lane was firmly closed.

121: At least he had DOOM to fall back on. And he was physically strong enough to hold down jobs to at least pay for testosterone.

122: And then Call of Duty came out and he became an early era streamer. (Went viral as one of those guys who basically RPs being an actual soldier in the voice chat.)

123: BACK TO CANON JANE because those headcanons just.. plain, aren’t useless. canon jane doesn’t have to deal with transphobia. tch.

124: He’s not the best to have on your football team as menacing as he is. He’ll start tackling everybody. Running the wrong way. Trying to steal the ball from his teammates.

125: If you tell Jane something’s American after he criticizes it, watching him backtrack is really fun.

126: Jane doesn’t get sick often, which is good because he is insufferable. Either goes full isolation straight up outside somewhere. Or is whining to everyone and everyone how it’s not allowed that he can’t be burrowing somewhere outside.

127: His hands are always warm - if they’re cold he’s probably having an Episode of some sort. 

128: Rock and Roll helps his tinnitus, though he’ll still refer to it as Hippy Garbage. Like most music.

129: Jane could probably tapdance if given proper shoes. Mmm no, he’d stomp through the floor. Horse level clomping.

130: He’ll be the hype-man for anyone on his team.

131: Despite not being a fan of mint flavoring, he loves himself a candy-cane.

132: His thumb isn’t double jointed - seeing someone showing off their double jointed-ness would have Jane proclaiming magic was necessary.

133: LT. BITES lightning round!! Lt. Bites sees jane as its “General” 

134: It got the bite taken out of its ear fighting over sour cream - it won.

135: Jane doesn’t give any raccoons a higher rank than Bites.

136: Lt. Bites doesn’t crave human flesh or anything, but it likes the sensation of biting people!

137: Jane has tried to get his raccoon a job at RED.

138: You can tell when Jane is having a really good day on the battlefield because you’ll round the corner and there’s Naked Soldier.

139: He’s waxing poetry about the beauty of the Male Form, take it in you soft quivering maggots. 

140: I can’t get the image of Jane crowd surfing out of my head? That’s, like, his ideal dream for being recognized for his heroics. Medals and a mosh in his Honor.

141: Anytime he sees a Bald Eagle he entirely stops what he’s doing to place his left hand over his heart.

142: Jane loves The Art of War and is still awaiting Sun Tzu’s next book.

143: [ Alcohol ] Jane only sees ghosts when he’s starving, drunk, or suffering from a concussion. And it’s merely a way for such a boar minded guy to internalize what’s going on around him.

144: He can touch his toes keeping his knees straight.

145: Jane has minor ice-skating knowledge, as most growing up in the midwestern united states do. He’s not, good, though, he’s really intent on Taking Steps instead of gliding.

146: Put him in front of a piano and he’s holding out on finger and pressing down on one key at a time like an old man at a desktop keyboard.

147: Jane is ready to beat up your father. 

148: Especially if your dad is shitty, unleash good ol’ Solly on him.

149: While he favors picking his nose with his pinkies, neither of his pinkie pads have any feeling.That makes them a little less dexterous when the time comes.

150: He’s always aching to be active, his brain will take things literally if it means he’ll be doing something.

151: Rum pineapple juice and malibu caribou -- Er. He doesn’t like pineapple flavoring. Isn’t a fan of mixed drinks in general? 

152: He’s capable of staying out of the picture and not picking his nose, often times if things aren’t focused on him he’ll just sorta.. Stand out of the way playing with his hands - rifling through his pouches. Some times he’ll even, *gasp* pay attention. 

153: He really likes to but in with his opinion is the thing.

154: He’s an American and his ideals must be heard.

155: Merasmus out here having doing the most for Soldier, in helping him reintegrate back into society. You think he’s bonkers now?? Psh. You should’a seen him fresh home from Poland.

156: He’s shown up to Civil War reanactments with a real gun.

157: Jane is incapable of yawning silently.

158: Stairs are overrated.

159: Catch Jane with a lukewarm mug of water pouring coffee grinds directly into it and saying “Damn, that’s a fine cup of Joe.”

160: Only. 100 left? Sweet Joseph Wetnurse of Jesus He’s got dirty blond hair leaning toward brunette.

161: Any righteous death deserves a warrior’s burial - That’s why you’ll find Jane, helmet over heart, giving a stirring eulogy about the Toilet from the Men’s Restroom that Got Unearthed and Shattered By... Nobody In Particular. 

162: He will just join in large groups of people  - like protests? He’ll just fall in line and preach his own stuff which sometimes doesn’t exactly align with the group at large.

163: i asked myself, would jane pick someone else’s nose? Yes.

164: His hugs are always really warm.

165: He would notice his wallet being pickpocketed - unless it was replaced by something the same weight. He’s like a temple from Indiana Jones.

166: Mentally? Jane’s fine with being alone, but. That leads to him living in a box or a room straight out of that “Damn, bitch, you live like this?” comic.

167:  Despite deep cold being triggering to him (SEE HC, 67.), he loves snow-forts and hot chocolate because those are great American past-times.

168: next one is this post’s 69 brace yourselves! Jane’s never truly in silence, the constant whistling in his ears will see to that. That’s why sometimes, when it is quiet, you’ll catch Jane looking into space like he’s trying to see where the sound is coming from.

169: Important to note, he ain’t popping a boner any time he’s fighting nude. Or, really, fighting any time. Intent is really important for him. (If he gets all rubbed up on, though, Well,)

170: Jane is under the assumption that everything he comes up with is ingenious and people like Red Spy are holding society back by ignoring such wide plans.

171: He’s secretly soothed by everyone on his team’s voices.

172: First off, himself. He loves to hear himself talk. Mostly fueled by self-important intent, the tenor of his own voice also soothes his eardrums.

173: Pyro’s is muffled yet energetic - and never fails to get Jane pumped up.

174: Scout’s got that accent that is pure and simple, American. Soldier may not listen to half of what he says, but for background buzz and funny colloquialisms 

175: And, Engie's accent garners a whole other sort of American respect out of the Soldier. As far as soothing goes? Engie’s is like butter.

176: Soldier hate’s Heavy’s accent on principle, but below his American Stubbornness is a love for the deep, thoughtful symbols Heavy provides. Plus, y’know, he appreciates a fellow loud guy.

177: Demo’s voice makes Solly a happy man. It used to make him furious, an all Scottish accents did, but more recently it makes him feel nostalgic. 

178: Jane would swear up every mountain he can that there’s nothing positive to be found in Spy’s accent, but zoning out to such poised speech patterns and rounded vowels is a common occurrence. 

179: When Sniper gets that gravelly tone going on, when he takes things really seriously? Jane like that.

180: Jane can’t find it in him to be really put off by anything Medic says during surgery, so his voice only causes a feeling of safety throughout the Soldier. He can’t get enough of hearing Enthusiasm in the Medic’s voice.

181: He doesn’t believe the Police can arrest him because they aren’t the official Government.

182: He looks at a baby and is like “What animal is this?”

183: Big hands.. talented at giving massages.

184: BEWARE HIM BREAKING YOUR SPINE - just specify ‘and don’t kill me’!

185: Jane doesn’t gossip so much as, be around people who are gossiping which makes him want to make up some Hot Goss. Also, he’ll act like every rumor someone else shares is spoken truth.

186: Jane picked up finger guns from Scout. He either uses it constantly or doesn’t use it for weeks at a time.

187: He lifts, broskis.

188: Jane will talk about trucks because the Average American Male is expected to. He knows nothing about cars.

189: He’s an impulsive liar, so caught up in in his web of ‘things he says to impress people’ that he believes everything he says. So are the woes of being an adult with ADHD.

190: He goes between being smell-blind and having the scent skills of a bloodhound. It’s probably a mental thing, because there’s no in between, but Jane doesn’t know anything.

191: i’ve been working on these for 5 days at this point... i hope they’re appreciated JANE prefers..soft food. jane Does Not lov the cronch.

192: Which is what makes cashews his favorite nut. they’re soft-ish. and they have just enough crunch to not gross him out.

193: He loves immediate gratification. 

194: Beyond joining the Military? Jane’s never had a solid plan for his future. Lives too in the moment. 

195: As long as he’s having fun, Jane’s a pretty content guy.

196: Any artistic skills he may have once had go into making Maps for war planning sessions.

197: He’ll fall victim to Sleep Paralysis occasionally and, once able to move, will spend the rest of the day curing ghosts and Merasmus’ magic.

198: He was SUPER into Howdie Doodie Time in his youth, and being put in front of any reruns will have him basically hypnotized into silence.

199: He’s proud of his ass.

200: Jane can keep marching pace for hours at a time. And if he’s not lugging around his rocket launcher he can keep marching for an entire day no pausing. 

201: Jane isn’t shy about telling jokes, because he believes everyone has the same sense of humor as him.

202: He knows karate but refuses to use his knowledge because it is not an American Form. He will stick to brute strength and loud yelling thank you very much.

203: He’s the type to state every time he’s going to use the bathroom. Like, people can be having a serious conversation and hes like, “I am going to take a shit now!”

204: Jane’ll go a week without washing his hair, but he always brushes his teeth two times a day.

205: He gives a damn good kiss.

206: All Human Nudity is safe for work. As it was God’s Intention to make people strongest when not held back by fabric.

207: All he wants is recognition.... for his good deeds...

208: He’ll have staring contests with the Sun. He’s yet to win, but that damn star shouldn’t get too comfortable.

209: Much like his pinkies, his feet have been crushed, blown up, and bruised so many times that he doesn’t have much feeling in them either.

210: He’s never washed his bellybutton.

211: He prefers savory to sweet, but he prefers sweet to sour.

212: Half assing is not in Jane’s vocabulary.

213: His brain will get stuck on simple Math - like, he tries his best to figure it out, it’s just.... Numbers..... they are a construct. And so he’ll end up pondering what 5+7 is for, like, 5 minutes.

214: Jane is constantly torn between wanting to be a Figure of Authority and also being a man born in the trenches following orders.

215: Have I mentioned lately Jane fucks? 

216: Jane’s room is sparsely decorated, but it’s only because he’s not materialistic and doesn’t generally receive gifts.

217: He’s more than willing to strip Right This Moment and fight something.

218: Jane’s not afraid to call other people losers.

219: He crops his own hair once a week. Same day he’ll do his wash.

220: Jane’s stubble grows in really fast, but he can’t deny the feeling of having a freshly shaved jaw is amazing.

221: If a teammate is struggling emotionally..... Jane walks away.

222: If they’re struggling again, /then/ Jane will give them some uncalled for American Advice. Like, meaningfully yelling “GET OVER IT, YOU SLOBBERING FOOL.”

223: He has a very, very high pain threshold. 

224: He accidentally walks into walls all the time.

225: He can’t magically see through his helmet - he just knows everyone’s feet super well.

226: It’s good that Lt. Bites is a wild, self sufficient animal because Jane is terrible at pet care. And child care. And any sort of care.

227: On the very rare occasions Jane gets overwhelmed with depression he’s a shadow of his former self questioning the sanctity of American Ideals and wondering aloud if War really is the answer to his problems.

228: Next day he’ll be fine and forget he was ever upset.

229: He’s never gotten a real back massage before, if he were to get one he’d probably literally melt? Some women he’s slept with liked to say sensually ‘oh what a big tense man you are’ and, like, weakly rub his back. they didn’t get paid to fix this man’s back muscles LMAO

230: Any backwards period-typical beliefs about women went out the window upon meeting Miss Pauling.

231: His love for America is truly as pure as it gets.

232: Jane’s pretty xenophobic, but he can learn better, I’m sure. he’s gotten his ass kicked for being ignorantly racist and he grew to be a better person.

233: He takes really well to learning things through violence, the only issue is.. dealing with Soldier Being Violent.

234: There’s nothing a fist to the face won’t fix.

235: He’s not much of a napper, his brain being far too active to let him rest during daylight hours.

236: He’s constantly moving, even in sleep.

237: Hell, give him a few hours after being knocked unconscious and he’ll start wiggling something around.

238: He doesn’t stop to smell the flowers, because if they wanted to be smelled they’d approach him.

239: He believes in the good of all humans, it’s just buried down past his Fight Everyone radar.

240: He only likes musicals about fighting Hitler.

241: His biggest regret is not punching Hitler.

242: He does not fear death, he does not fear punishment. He lives for his ideals and if he’s taken down believing in himself? Then that’s okay.

243: Jane needs deodorant reminders.

244: He takes personally being betrayed as people betraying the country of America.

245: (oh shit i slacked off it’s been like two days since i wrote something, Who Is Soldier?) CEREAL THEN MILK, MAGGOTS

246: Jane doesn’t know the word migraine so he really can’t describe how he feels.

247: Look, he loves his friends, he loves his guns, but he’s stingy with the word.. Love because that’s what he feels for America and the country will always be number one.....

248: Jane’s not too partial to sarcasm outside of combat, but it’ll find it’s way into his speech. His tone is usually hammed up to signify he’s joking around or being cruel.

249: He’s like a cartoon character, he can only understand sarcasm if it’s Funny to at the moment.

250: Jane likes his hair being pet.

251: He likes his hands being played with as much as he likes playing with other people’s hands. (A lot.)

252: He loves dogs, but is more of a cat person. Dogs and him just echo energy and HYPE feelings back and forth at each other until they pass out and then Jane feels more emotionally exhausted than hanging out with people.

253: The weirdest parts of rom-coms make him cry. 

254: He appreciates a good non-american explosion, but he has his preferences. 

255: You show Jane genuine kindness and interest and he’s like, Yours. Jane vc: Are you the vice-president?

256: If he were to have a reptile for a sidekick instead of a raccoon, he would have a turtle.

257: He can be delicate when he needs to be, but cracking eggs is a different story.

258: While not too partial to sugary beverages - he has a figure to maintain, root beer and ginger ale are his go-tos.

259: He can appreciate a salad! Jane Doe will eat his greens!!!!

260: Soldier has no tattoos, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be open to getting any. Just never crossed his mind.

SWEET SPIRIT OF JOE BIDEN AM I FINISHED?

thank you,... for reading my garbled thoughts.. for respecting The Soldier... and for being a creative individual. But mostly the respecting Soldier thing.

[fathersonholygore]

They Live. 1988. Directed & Written by John Carpenter. Based on the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson. Starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George ‘Buck’ Flower, Peter Jason, Raymond St. Jacques, Jason Robards III, Sy Richardson, & Norman Alden. Alive Films/Larry Franco Productions Rated R. 94 minutes. Action/Horror/Sci-Fi-Thriller

★★★★★ John Carpenter is king of genre cinema. His work transcends any type of value judgements people try placing on horror movies or science fiction. He imbues his screenplays with very real, often times prescient social themes and commentary, even in the stories of his you might not expect to find them. In They Live, those themes are painfully apparent, though done in a way Carpenter doesn’t feel like he’s hammering us over the head with sociopolitical imagery. He makes the whole thing tongue-in-cheek, rather than going entirely into a spectacle of horror with his sci-fi madness. He uses a well-known wrestler, the late Rowdy Roddy Piper as his central character, John Nada, whose literal and figurative journey through the Los Angeles urban landscape becomes our own experience with modernity. Using the premise of the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, Carpenter eviscerates American consumerism and materialism, Reaganomics, as well as questions the vast class divide which exists in most American cities. The best part about They Lives is it could genuinely have been made this year and it’d barely need updating. It’s so relevant to the state we’re in today. Given Carpenter made this in 1988, his and Nelson’s respective prescience about American society is downright stunning.

“Our owners, they have us, they control us.”

There’s another world beneath our own— one of class differences, economic divide, racism. It’s not even particularly hidden deep, just below the surface. Carpenter opens the movie with the title, then superimposes it onto a mural of graffiti in Los Angeles. We’re embedded in the city. Moreover, we immediately step into a world of duality. We also see the decay of the urban landscape. Parts of the city are clean, other parts – ones occupied by the homeless, immigrants, various people of colour and economic situations – are in a process of decay. It’s fitting our lead, John Nada, is revealed behind a passing train coming over the tracks into the city. He’s a man without a home. An itinerant worker coming to L.A. so he might find work. He left Denver, which “lost 14 banks in one week,” letting us in on the economic decline of 1980s USA. He later meets Frank (Keith David), another character symbolic of the socioeconomic situation many tradespeople found themselves in during the era, taken advantage of by Ronald Reagan’s terrible policies and a general uptick in capitalist greed across the country. Both men sleep in shelters by night, work on a construction site during the day. Their little bit of time in between work/sleep is taken up wandering the city, or being a part of the homeless community. They’re both part of a transient work economy— separated from themselves, their families, and their homes. However, Frank and Nada are completely in different in terms of race. Whereas John believes everyone’s got “their own hard times these days,” Frank can’t afford to be so understanding as a black man. He tells his friend later: “I‘m walking a white line all the time.” Nada is a white guy, so no matter his circumstances he doesn’t have to worry about his race and what that means socially/economically/politically. In opposition, Frank’s blackness forces him to live under a Panopticon of whiteness. For this reason, he has a harder time letting go of the ideological control in the city later in the movie.

“It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don’t need pessimism. There are no limits.”

Eventually, Nada stumbles onto the truth of the city, discovering an entirely other existence right behind the Los Angeles he and Frank and other lower class citizens know. He finds a pair of glasses allowing him to see through what amounts to the ideology of the upper class: capitalism, consumption, and materialism. The glasses also help Nada see the bourgeois ruling class as they truly are: predatory and decaying aliens. They’re “free enterprisers“— intergalactic capitalists monetising modern planets. Suddenly he sees the city stripped of its advertisements/media, revealing subliminal messages. Such as an ad for a transparent computer, basically selling a lack of privacy + erasure of personal barriers, revealed through the glasses only to read OBEY. Also interesting that the ideological world of media is colourised while, after putting on the glasses and cutting through the state control, the subliminal messages display in basic black and white on top of a grey city background. This is what Kanishka Goonewardena calls “mediation of ideology by urban space,” the adverts and media serving to collectivise “the patterns of consumption,” in turn acting as a measure of social control (Urban Space & Political Consciousness). The movie shows L.A. as built around the rich and powerful— all those ads are mainly aimed at the lower classes, to entice them into becoming agents of consumption and keeping them focused on material culture. The famous fight in They Live is important for more than just getting to see Piper and David duke it out— they famously choreographed it themselves, fighting for real except for the groin stuff. It’s also significant because Frank’s blackness – controlled by the American economy’s whiteness specifically – has forced him into a space of self-preservation, and the ideology of that economy’s imprinted on his mind. Then there’s Nada – his last name = Spanish for ‘nothing’ – who comes into L.A. as a vagrant, though one privileged to be white, so he’s, essentially, a blank slate— a tabula rasa, onto which everything is written, nothing’s been pre-imprinted. He hasn’t been controlled by whiteness in the way Frank has, nor does he have a home like Frank, who hopes to go back one day when financially feasible, so he’s not been indoctrinated in the same way. This means it’s easier for him to wear the sunglasses and let ideology go. Not the case for Frank, which is why Nada has to physically fight him. In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Žižek discusses this scene particularly in regards to how it represents the process of leaving ideology behind and that to “step out of ideology, it hurts, it‘s a painful experience.” Eventually, after Nada beats Frank enough, he forces the glasses on him and his friend finally sees the real world without all the ideological influence on the city, erasing the “invisible order” influencing him.

“They are dismantling the sleeping middle class”

Another important part of the movie involves the concept of ideological and repressive state apparatuses (ISA + RSA), best exemplified by how the bourgeois aliens all communicate in a horde through the use of “two–way radios” built into fancy watches. The watches are class symbols, serving a dual function as a way of communication about class: in one sense, the watch tells others the wearer is upper class, and in the other, the watch allows the upper class to communicate amongst themselves, plus those who aren’t wearing them become subject to further state control. At one point, Nada is caught ‘seeing’ through the veil, so an alien calls for backup. Around the corner in an alley he’s confronted with cops, who happen to be bourgeois aliens themselves (even the human cops are turned against human citizens via fear of the dreaded American boogeyman: Communism!). Here, the connection between the ideological state apparatus – a “material force of ideology” (Žižek) represented by the watches – and the repressive state apparatus – law enforcement – is evident, a direct line between ideology controlling the city v. physical force of law and order controlling the city. All brings to mind the numerous idiot white people in America as of late calling the cops on black people for simply existing. Then there’s the idea of the two-way watch, conjuring 2018 issues of Facebook spying on our calls through the smartphone app, Alexa listening to all your conversations even while it’s off, and other similar postmodern tech predicaments. Again, an eerie Carpenter prescience rears its head.

“I believe in America. I follow the rules.”

Several Carpenter movies are on my all-time favourites list. His entire filmography, even the couple lesser entries, is a dream. He’s touched on so many different issues, stories, and themes there’s something for every kind of viewer, so long as you dig genre movies. They Live is Carpenter the Master at the top of his game. Because each time you watch this one, there are different things to take away, and the movie’s power grows stronger all the time. This is a condemnation of America consumerism and materialism, attacking an economy which was a result of Ronald Reagan’s horrible policy decisions. The media, the bourgeois owners of production, the government, and the police are all criticised throughout, more often than not with tongue firmly planted in cheek. We see all the cogs of capitalism and all the destruction its left in its wake across American cities. Carpenter, through Nada, strips advertising and media of all its creative, devious nuance and lays bare its function as a tactic of social control through consumer culture. They Live is decidedly a story of the USA, rather than the Western world as a whole. While there are extremely similar struggles all over the postmodern world, America’s struggle is so glaringly obvious, and painful, due to the fact it’s a country based specifically on a dream. Carpenter dismantles it in many ways. He also warns the American Dream is named as such because it’s an illusion, a method of manipulation by the ruling class. There’s no more American Dream— only in its citizens waking economic/social/political nightmares.

Prayers to a Consumer God: American Decay + Ideological Control in THEY LIVE They Live. 1988. Directed & Written by John Carpenter. Based on the short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson.

[buttonholedlife]

Andrew Yang: The Techno-Populist Prospect

No 2020 presidential applicant offers the clean Technocrat plus true Democratic platform better than Andrew Yang. He is actually notably various than the harsh socialist or leftist applicants and also need to be recognized as a Techno-populist. TN Editor

Andrew Yang is an uncommon prospect for the presidency; not simply has he no previous political expertise, but he has actually also placed great importance on concerns that have performed the fringes of mainstream media political discourse normally reviewed through scholastics or YouTube individuals. It is a credit rating to him that topics like computerization, the definition and also value of job, the concentration of elite skill in to slim career pathways, and certainly, UBI, have possessed an odds to be touched upon in the course of this project pattern.

The most provocative facet of the Yang campaign, and of the guy themself, is the uncommon stress in between a technocratic importance on competence and performance, and the democratic rhetoric he uses to denounce remote best enclaves, as well as to call for a revolution that, in the words of Bismarck, our company carry out rather than go through. Yang perspectives himself-- or even a minimum of ventures themself as-- people's technocrat. An expert that the standard Joe may rely on.

Yang as Technocrat

Technocracy is actually government through pros. The term is actually Classical in origin, fusing tekhne (explaining fine art or skill) and kratos, suggesting energy or rule. But the actual meaning of this particular word is certainly not its own significant present-day point. Modern Technocracy (as well as through extension technocrats) generally back government by a specific kind of pro, utilizing a certain type of technique. The technocrat is normally (though certainly not constantly) versed to some degree in STEM (Scientific Research, Innovation, Design, as well as Arithmetic) and social scientific research domain names, and often tends to want governments to bring into play medical techniques and also results, say coming from information and also reducing upper hand research studies, as well as market value performance and also organized rigor. Social concerns, to the technocrat, are actually assumed to come even more from incompetency, misuse, or even negligence than coming from belief or even malignance. As Zbigniew Brzeziński eloquently put it in, "Social problems are actually found less as the effect of intentional wickedness and even more as the unforeseen consequences of both intricacy and also ignorance; solutions are not sought in mental simplifications yet in making use of guy's accumulated social and accurate knowledge."

To recap, the technocrat is someone that supposes that:

Federal government as well as policy would be much better off if they were commanded and/or dictated by specialized specialists.

The issues of national politics are largely issues of effectiveness and managerial problems.

The use of the end results as well as strategies of the sciences and/or other specialized industries is the most effective way to handle our political problems.

There should be actually a source of unassailable truths that politicians utilize as the manner of disagreement which exists outside of the realm of viewpoint.

One of one of the most striking aspects of Yang's newest book, The Battle on Usual People, is actually only the amount of technician forerunners, start-up masters, business owners, as well as hedge fund managers this guy is in call along with. Countless web pages use anecdotes of Yang jetting to dinners using this Silicon Valley leader in San Francisco or even that specialized pro in the Northeast. Yang, due to the very firm he always keeps, signs that he belongs to this technocratic class.

More considerably, the thesis of Yang's manual is both analysis as well as authoritative. He says that much of the present projects that act as the backbone of our economic situation will certainly either be rendered obsolete by speeding up computerization, or will definitely be performed by a small group of technological pros leaving several unemployment and also languishing in economic despair. According to Yang, the readily available information reveal this procedure is currently properly underway as well as will definitely remain to worsen in the coming years. Yang phones this advancement the Great Displacement. As well as the inescapable truth of automation, he states, will definitely push the government to implement brand-new financial and social policies in reaction. Universal Basic Profit-- what Yang contacts the "flexibility returns" of $thousand a month-- is Yang's popular methods of dealing along with this looming crisis.

Whether or not one agrees along with this sight, it is actually precisely obscene of Yang's technocratic perceptiveness. He supports his insurance claims and concepts along with data from the UNITED STATE Bureau that show low manpower involvement, the current eradication of creating projects, as well as an enhancing discrepancy between productivity as well as remuneration. His claim that elite skill is clustering in to a few geographical regions as well as techniques depends data from the occupation workplaces at those very exclusive organizations.

For Yang, information are actually the primary source along with which he structures his photo of what is actually failing in our country. A reliance on records to recognize problems and also make plan actions is actually symbolic of the technocrat. Yang intends to offer every grownup in the United States $thousand a month (changeable for rising cost of living) which are going to set you back concerning $1.3 mountain by Yang's own estimation. He pressures that his program will certainly be more reliable than the current system of authorities help programs considering that:

One program is going to be capable to accomplish the work of 126.

Straight monetary payment has actually been presented, in some research studies at the very least, to have more beneficial end results than mediated kinds of charitable organization or alleviation.

The expense of the system may be balanced out through a supposed BARREL tax obligation which will definitely increase the price of some individual products, as well as UBI will certainly lead to job growth.

Yang really wants to reveal that his signature system are going to tidy up administrative dump, increase effectiveness, as well as that it is actually vouched for by pros. In relations to Yang's rhetoric, the list below movement particularly abridges his technocratic sensibilities:

We possess an indebted condition rife along with infighting, disorder, and out-of-date tips and bureaucracies from past ages, in addition to a population that can easily not settle on general truths like vote total amounts or even environment modification. Our public servants deliver apathetic answers that will at finest soupã§on beside the concern. The budget experimentation in the Team of Work is only $4 million. Our team have a 1960s-era authorities that possesses couple of solutions to the complications of 2018. This have to change if our lifestyle is actually to continue. Our company require a refreshed, compelling authorities to climb to the difficulty positioned due to the biggest economical change in the history of mankind. The above may appear like sci-fi to you. You're reading this with a supercomputer in your pocket (or reading it on the supercomputer itself) and Donald Trump was selected president.

Yang concentrates on the out-of-date and inefficient state of our contemporary authorities and the technocratic answer of reducing side methods to present day issues, as well as he is annoyed due to the incapability of individuals to settle on general facts-- especially medical ones-- that must carry even more body weight than simple opinions. Because of this, technocrats like Yang tend to favor a quasi-evangelistic outreach to the social concerning clinical education and learning. As well as finally, there is actually the wrapping up reference to the benefits of technology and also to its own inescapable potential innovations.

Technocracy, being more of a procedure of governing than a market value body or even worldview, is often used by a prevalent belief to make its own ideological schedule even more reliable. Thus in China, which has up until recently been actually controlled as a technocracy comprised virtually specifically of developers, the technocrats hold communism, yet in America it is actually commonly used to produce neoliberal plan a lot more successful. This being actually the case, cream of the crops are certainly never actually frightened of a technocrat: They understand that the procedure may be utilized to fulfill just about any sort of master. Technocracy additionally possesses the perk, at the very least in the States, of complementary the ego of the middle training class. Assisting a technocrat can signal seriousness as well as knowledge on the component of the updated voter that cares regarding "serious plan issues and medical data." Therefore technocracy, by itself, is never definitely a difficulty to the status. However this explanation performs not, through itself, entirely illustrate Yang or even his initiative.

Yang the Populist

Populism is actually a facility as well as opposed phrase. Some commentators have recognized it to suggest the combination and mobilization of the individuals into the political procedure. This understanding includes most movement-based dynamic political leaders. For the purpose of this particular essay, nevertheless, populism will definitely be understood as the inverse of well-known liberal democratic organizations. In a political atmosphere where the general will of individuals (prominent prepotence) is found as the steering force in public lifestyle, an institutional business that proclaims to exemplify individuals's rate of interests are going to do this miserably-- frequently looking to serve the enthusiasms of the establishments themselves as well as the individuals within all of them as opposed to the public for whom said companies were actually developed. This branch in between the basic can of the folks, and also the organizations established on their account, enables a politics of populism to emerge.

Go through full tale listed below ...

This content was originally published here.

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Essay on Simulation

Jean Baudrillard argues that the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (1983: 10-11). With reference to specific examples, consider the role of simulation in contemporary media practice.

In this essay, I will be talking about simulation in the modern context and examining certain media that uses simulation in an effective and meaningful way. I will investigate whether or not Jean Baudrillard was right in saying that there is no true reality remaining in the “real” world - which is an interesting thing to say, especially in the nineteen eighties before the golden age of video games, The Matrix and social media.

The most obvious example of simulation in the modern era is video games. In 1983 when Baudrillard argued his point, video games were relatively new and primitive. Nowadays, we have technology such as virtual reality (probably the best example of simulation in video games) however I will discuss this fully later on. For now I would like to talk about a recent video game and a favourite of mine called Red Dead Redemption 2, and how the gaming industry is pushing constantly to make games more “realistic”. I find Red Dead Redemption 2 a really interesting game considering its success at this point in history. In the developed world we are at the most technologically advanced we’ve ever been, with our society not being that different from speculative cyberpunk dystopian realities, complete with touch screen magic technology and sprawling cities; yet despite this, the most successful piece of fiction of last year was a video game in which you got play as a frontiersmen at the turn of the 20th century, at a point in history where “society” wasn’t even fully formed and civilisation and technology were limited to say the least.

I think a lot of people like to lose themselves in this world because our modern world is, well, complicated - and going back to the simple life and playing make believe of an outlaw in the old west is enjoyable. But why? Not only is it the polar opposite of our society now, but the developers even incorporated incredibly realistic mechanics to make it closer to a cowboy simulator than to any kind of video game as we know. Details such as taking care of your horse, whistling for it to return to you in real time, your horse not being able to hear you if you are too far away, eating and drinking, hair growth across time, slowly traveling across a natural landscape that hasn’t yet been dominated by skyscrapers and environment not yet ruined by pollution. They went to great lengths to make every detail of the game realistic, sacrificing fun at certain times, yet it is still such a great and immersive experience.

“Red Dead Redemption 2, a new video game about an outlaw gang on the American frontier in 1899, has been met with huge adoration. Journalists have lauded it as a “landmark” title, a “technological masterpiece”, even a “watershed moment” in entertainment. Much of the praise has focused on how developer Rockstar Games has coded a “living” game world that oozes character and aesthetic richness. However, now that the digital dust has started to settle, that same world has come in for criticism. Gamers have dubbed the title “boring” and “slow,” with their enjoyment of the game noticeably impeded by “clunky controls” and the lack of easy “fast travel” between destinations.”

Matt Reynolds for Wired recently complained that Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately:

“Feels like a chore. Unfortunately, performing work-like tasks and living the “every day” in games can easily test our patience. The closer a game gets to any semblance of reality, the greater the player notices its flaws. In “reality”, most of us (at least on a basic level) can choose when to do things, perform tasks freely and organically, and process multiple sensations while doing them (such as the weight of an item, or our own limited strength). In ultra-realistic games, those expectations are quickly frustrated: we push a complex sequence of buttons to perform simple actions (such as drawing a gun), we lose authorial control (and voice) to orchestrated story arcs (Red Dead’s set missions), and narrow visual cues become an excuse for human experience. In-game realism is quite a different property, then, to the world outside.”

Returning to the historical significance of its creation, I find it interesting that the game is set at the point in history that it is, perhaps some kind of parallel between the America of the past and the modern political climate of America is being made. A time in American history of great change in both society and politics, something maybe modern Americans can relate to. And what’s the difference if you can recreate a reality that is better? Why wouldn’t you choose the simulation? And if there really is a fine line between the two, then why focus on this imperfect world when in the simulation the problems are manageable, despite the fact that in video games, scenarios are usually higher stakes? Perhaps real life just isn’t good enough, but it's strange that we are constantly trying to recreate it.

Nothing is an original - just a copy of something else, an idea of something that was once reality but now a recreation used symbolically to communicate with us in a familiar way.

I had a strange moment the other day when I was watching my friend playing The Sims 4, a video game where you can create your own character and simulate your own day to day life. You can do whatever you want, be the person you’ve always wanted to be. It sounds like Black Mirror episode. Anyway, I hadn’t been feeling very good that day and I looked up to find that my character (who was, yes, more handsome, had a nicer house so and so on) was also depressed, moping around his house in his bed wear. She had recreated us in the video game and my character was doing exactly what I was doing: moping around the house in my pyjamas. It was eerie and kind of creeped me out. I thought to myself “Great, now even in a situation where I could create my own perfect scenario, I’m still depressed. What kind of simulation is this?”

Video games are a strange simulation, especially when we try to capture life so desperately within them, something video games didn’t try to do just several decades ago. We even have virtual reality. It’s in the title. A way in which you can utterly block yourself off from wherever you are and immerse yourself in a totally different world, saying goodbye to the classic TV and couch set up. As a species we seem to avoid reality more and more, yet we can’t help but desperately try to recreate it. Perhaps real life just isn’t good enough.

“Lost, like tears in rain” says the android that Deckard has been tracking down in the final scene of the cinematic masterpiece Blade Runner.  An android; a man simulated, recreated to change the imperfections of man into the optimised machine. However, not all is good, as their life span is nothing more than a couple of years. A downfall on trying to simulate the real, an imperfection. But what is truly the difference? The androids have developed feelings and demand their right to live. They may be the “bad guys” of the film, but in the final act the “evil” existential android talks about his emotions in a beautifully poetic way, expressing that his memories don’t mean a thing and will be lost like tears in rain along with everything else. This beautiful monologue illustrates that this simulated person is in fact just as human as anyone else. If you can recall memories as reality, and they appear to be real, then what truly is difference? The movie was based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the title in reference to the sought after android animals that people buy in the book as proof that they can feel empathy - having a real one is considered a status symbol and are way too expensive for the common person. It is implied that androids can in fact dream of real sheep and this questions the line between man and android.

Another cinematic example is The Matrix, which is influenced by the ideas of Jean Baudriallard himself. The main character, Neo (an acronym of “the one”, can even be seen reading his book Simulacra and Simulation towards the start of the movie.The Matrix is a cyberpunk science fiction film directed by the Wachowski siblings, about a hacker who is taken pulled from his own “reality” and told that the world he lives in is a simulation, and that the remainders of the real human race are all hiding out underground, as evil A.I are making farms out of humans. Neo is prophesied to be be the one who saves humanity using the ability to manipulate the simulation he was brought up in with the knowledge that its just that; a simulation. He receives guidance from a man named Morpheus, also a reference to Baudrilard’s Simulacra and Simulation. It is possible to view the movie as foreshadowing of the internet age, referencing the desert of the real and the symbols we use as a society.

Scientists even considered the idea that the world we live in is in fact a computer run simulation, in one instance saying that "We are almost certainly characters living in a computer simulation”. In some way, I believe that’s true.

“In 2001 Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, circulated the first draft of a paper suggesting that a highly advanced supercomputer — with a mass on the order of a planet — would be capable of running a simulation on a humanity-size scale. Bostrum told Vulture that he hadn't seen "The Matrix" before publishing the paper. “

Nick Bostrum went on to say: “This computer would be capable of doing 10 42. calculations per second, and it could simulate the entire history of humankind (including all our thoughts, feelings, and memories) by using less than one-millionth of its processing power for just one second. By this logic, all of humanity and our entire physical universe are just blips of data stored in the hard drive of a massive supercomputer.”

I’m sure everyone after 1999 questioned it too, which was an interesting year for the movie to released, especially with the paranoia of Y2K, an apocalyptic event that would mean machine would turn on their creators and rule the  world at midnight on New Years’ Eve, 2000, although obviously this turned out not to be true. But you could say that the machines do in fact control us, just in a different way. Jean Baudrillard himself said that The Matrix had nothing to do with his work and he did not approve of the film. “The odds of us living in reality are a billion to one, some say”. The simulacrum is true.

This brings me to the famous 1929 painting The Treachery Of Images by Rene Magritte. What is this image? It’ a pipe. No, it’s not. It’s a picture of a pipe. A simulated pipe. In reality, it is not a pipe, but an image of one. The same way a map is not a picture of a place but  something that represents the place that we perceive.

The society we live in currently is one big simulation. I mean, we have fictional “better" versions of ourselves plastered over the internet, simulating friendships, success and faces. We live in a world where the line between reality and simulation is being blurred more and more so with every passing year. There’s not a time of day we’re not looking at a screen, being somewhere, projecting into a different kind of “hyperreality” - even if we perceive it to be real, we are desensitised to non-reality. Once you start looking for simulation it is everywhere. Anything digital is a simulation and representation of something else. Email simulating post, emojis simulating facial expressions, editing software simulating old school film editing, everything seems to represent something else that is no longer common place in the modern world. Even as I type this I am writing on simulated paper. This page is not really here, it's not in my hands. It’s digital. It’s not real, yet it still functions just as well, if not better than actual paper.

Bibliography

John Wills , J.W. 2018. The Conversation . [Online]. [6 July 2019]. Available from: https://theconversation.com/red-dead-redemption-2-can-a-video-game-be-too-realistic-106404

Alyin Woodward, A.W. 2019. Business Insider. [Online]. [6 July 2019]. Available from: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-matrix-do-we-live-in-a-simulation-2019-4?r=US&IR=T

Fandom, F. no date. Matrix Wiki. [Online]. [6 July 2019]. Available from: https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Simulacra and Simulation . 2019. Simulacra and Simulation . [Online]. [6 July 2019]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

The Treachery of Images. 2019. The Treachery of Images. [Online]. [6 July 2019]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Washowski. Hollywood: Warner Bros.

Blade Runner. (1982). [film] Directed by R. Scott. Hollywood: Warner Bros.

Rockstar Games. (2018). Red Dead Redemption 2. Video Game. Sony, Microsoft.

Maxis, Electronic Arts. (2017). The Sims 4. Video Game. Sony, Microsoft, PC.

Philip K. Dick, P.K.D (1968). Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. (SF Masterworks ed.). United States: Doubleday

Baudrillard , J.B (1981). Simulacra and Simulation . (1st ed.). France: Éditions Galilée.

[skewedcard-blog]

wtf are these tarot cards anyway?

i'm rude and weird and here is what i would have liked to read when i first got into tarot. these are just my opinion, obvs, maybe somebody will find all of this useful, maybe not. i enjoyed writing it, though, so there. also english is not my mother language. or aunt. or distantly related cousin, really. wtf are these tarot cards anyway? in two words, they're a deck of cards. well, that's more like five words (six words?), but anyways. the birth date of The First Proper Tarot Deck Ever is kind of unknown, we have decks dating from italian renaissance era that likely evolved from some other earlier card games, but eh, it's whoever's guess where those came from. unless you buy into the "ancient egyptian wisdom that was very luckily passed down onto us", which again, eh. i mean, go for it if it's your thing, i'm just going to be right overe there with my "they were a game drunkard nobles played in their abundant free time, the bastards" even though the "egyptian wisdom" thing leaves me abundantly perplexed, due to an unlucky brain disfunction commonly known as depression, i've had the chance to come into contact with this guy named Carl Gustav Jung, and the way he deals with systems of divination, eastern, western, wherever whenever *hips shake*, is much more to my liking, and makes sense to me. (just as a disclaimer, this is just my opinion on the whole subject, not gospel or anything. in case you didn't notice the informal prose e liberal use of vocabulary and puntuation.) now our man CGJ never mentions tarot cards ever, as far as i know, but he was very into the i-ching, another divination technique. now, without delving too much into collective subsconscious, archetypes and synchronicity, what i took away from Jung is that sometimetimes your mind interprets something as a sign because it somehow triggered your unconscious at the right time and place. so something meaningless and random (like hey, fishing a card out of a deck!) con become really meaningful to you even though it escapes standard cause-effect correlations. and that's basically how i see tarot cards, very helpful triggers for fishing out things that consciously or subconsciously have ben swimming right below the surface of my mind, either because i didn't want to see them or because at the moment i couldn't. now, you could argue that you hardly need a deck of cards, or coins, or dice, to do this, you could assign some random meaning to some random things that speak to you and use those as triggers. and hey, you'd be right! tarot cards to me are easier to use just because there's already a set of associations made with each card, so i can be lazy and read up what other people thought about them and then decide if i agree with them or not; they are quite pretty to look at, and with unusual imagery that helps me make unusual connections, unlike those i would make if i were just normally thinking about something; they *are* quite pretty; and also they are link with a centuries old tradition of mysticism and old wise women and whatnot that really puts me in the mood for deep, emotional thinking, and also make me feel quite cool while doing it. what, i am shallow, ok? now, for the deck: traditionally it's divided into two parts, major arcana and minor arcana, which is a fancy way to say bigger mysteries and smaller mysteries. the minor arcana are the bits of the deck that evolved into modern playing cards, while as far as i know major arcana kept being used only by tarotists/cartomancers/what have you. different decks can belong to different traditions (you know the ones, rider-waite-smith, marseille, crowley's toth tarots), but generally speaking most decks are still split into two this way. the division between major and minor is not just some archaic separation from a dark past that still somehow survives today because we collectively decided that yes, we liked it like that and didin't want to change, it's actually meaningful for readings. as in, when a major arcanum pops up in one of your readings, it may be to suggest your subconsciuous something that has to do with The Grand Scheme Of Your Life. it's not telling you that you forgot again to put the milk back in the fridge after you were done with it, it's probably kind of nudging you torwards some character trait that you have, or experiences that are really meaningful to your existence. less "put away the damn milk" and more "stop living with your heads in the clouds or you're going to get it lost up there, and then we'll see how you'll go about things, miss." now, that's not a hard and fast rule, sometimes a major arcanum is just about mundane things, and a minor arcanum coul be the card that's truth-bombing all over your reading, being a bubbling cauldron of symbols a lot depends on card position and card relationship with the other cards in the reading, so it's all a matter of interpretation. speaking of interpretation, books are super useful to get a general idea of what each card is about, but if "the jolly book of tarot reading" is saying that the two of swords inevitably means "somebody will stab you in the back twice", and your gut feeling is vehemently protesting and insisting that, really, it means " two people will stab you in the back one time each", go with your gut feeling. we're talking about symbols that are meaningful to the specific subconscious mind that you have. let it have its say! also, *do* read for yourself. i mean, you are biased and you will likely misinterpret half of what the cards are trying to convey, but they will convey something to you, and more often than not that will be useful, wether you'll be making a learning mistake or get it right. also, it's good practice for when it comes to reading for other people, at least in my experience.

[robotnik-mun]

Robotnik Retrospective Part Six: Rage Against The Machine

Hello again, everybody, and welcome back to another exciting (*coughBullcrap*) addition to the Robotnik retrospective! Well folks, you’ve stuck through five of these things already, and really I thank all of you for that, but the reality is that this crazy train is swiftly reaching its destination- this post here will be the last of the proper retrospective posts. After this we will conclude our series with an afterward, a summation, what have you, and at last this insane party of Robotnik fan obssession will come to an end. Been a fun ride folks, but all good things must come to an end.

So far we have covered how I came to enjoy this Robotnik so much, his design and the history behind it, an in-depth look at his character, a look at how he as a character is shaped by his relationships with others and how they are in turn shaped by him, and most recently we examined the other Robotniks that were spawned from this one and featured in both Archie Comics and Sonic Underground. Sufficed to say, over the course of the retrospective we’ve covered a loooot of ground regarding ol ‘Buttnik, and it is here that we cover one last little area regarding this Robotnik.... namely, the criticisms.

Oh yes. Within the Sonic fandom all things tend to be a matter of contention, and this model of Robotnik is no different. One thing I notice across the fandom is a certain set of criticisms, criticisms that I feel tend to ignore certain contexts with this guy, or rely upon certain double standards- especially since more often than not, when these criticisms are made, it’s almost always done in relation to the Eggman of the games, despite the fact that more than a few of those criticisms can be leveled at Eggman himself, and often treat personal opinion as an objective fact.

Now obviously, this is not a demand for people to love the guy- it’s patently impossible for everyone to agree on everything. I just feel though that a lot of these criticisms are a bit lopsided, and so, I am offering up counterpoints to at least provide an alternative view or to contextualize things, and to perhaps debunk a few here and there. I’m actually kind of nervous about this one because of how easy it could be to slide into pathetic fan-whining, so hey, here’s hoping we get through this without me getting personal.

Let’s get it on.

As I said, everything in Sonic is a subject of contention or controversy to somebody. One man’s favorite is another man’s mistake of the franchise. That’s just covering the games- the various spin-offs and adaptations the games have enjoyed over the years tend to attract a particular amount of controversy. Differing interpretations, utilization or lack of utilization of materials and lore from the games, the precise nature of the world Sonic lives in, interpretations and use of characters, whether or not humans are included beyond Eggman... all of it tends to be scrutinized rather harshly. I do earnestly believe that at some level, spin-off media gets more criticism than it warrants due to the fact that, by its very nature, it is viewed as being ‘less legitimate’ than the games proper, despite existing with SEGA’s endorsement and approval each and every time. Even Sonic Underground, the most radically different Sonic adaptation out there, couldn’t get made unless SEGA gave the okay.

Another layer to all of this is the fact that the overwhelming majority of these spinoff materials were made in the USA, for American Audiences, based upon the localizations of the games. This adds another factor to the Legitimacy Debate, given that SEGA of Japan runs the show, and Sonic Team’s lore has always differed from the localized takes. Much like the ‘Subs vs Dubs’ debates within Anime fan communities, the merit of the differences and interpretations between regions is something of a warzone in itself, resulting in a very weird situation where you often see the Adaptations derided purely for being a Western invention rather than springing from the ‘true’ source of Sonic, which is Japan. The irony of this logic is that Sonic has been incredibly popular everywhere BUT Japan, and the sorts of people who espouse this viewpoint are often from Western countries themselves.

Ah, but I must digress, lest this turn into a dissertation about the nature of the fan-divide and becomes even longer than it is already shaping up to be. Point of order- the spinoff adaptations that once speckled the franchise of the 90s tend to rack up a lot of strong opinions for good or ill, and due to the sheer number of designs and interpretations Eggman/Robotnik underwent between each adaptation. In some ways it’s almost symbolic of a lot of the arguments about Eggman himself these days- how evil is he, how humorous, does he have good traits, what should his exact relationship with Sonic be, and so on and so forth. A lot of these spinoff takes often seem to embody one end of the scale or the other to varying extremes, and that is particularly evident in the SatAM model of Robotnik.

So, having brought all of that up, it is *finally* time to take a look at the most common criticisms I find of the SatAM model Robotnik, and to offer up a few rebuttals. Thank you for your patience.

Now then... on with the criticisms.  

“He doesn’t look like Eggman!”

This one comes up a lot, and really, it’s quite indisputably true.

Yeah, pretty fair observation there- these two are pretty far apart design wise, and even accounting for the artistic interpretations that were used on Eggman in Western box art during that time, it is nakedly apparent that the SatAM Robotnik is veeery different looking to the guy from the games, whether in the classical era or the modern era. So yeah, there’s no denying it- he really doesn’t look like Eggman.

However... is it really *that* big of a deal?

SatAM Robotnik is pretty far removed from Eggman from a design standpoint, but in the end, he does actually share the same basic features- bald, obese, huge mustache, and a red, yellow and black color scheme distributed by the top half being dominated by red while the bottom half is dominated by blackm and of course shaped like an egg. In this, Robotnik isn’t straying that far- he does in fact possess all the iconic features that make the Eggman design, simply re-interpreted to other extremes. Heck, Robotnik accentuates the Egg motiff in his look even more than Eggman himself! An irony I rather appreciate.

I find it hard to believe that THIS aspect of Robotnik is really *that* much of a dealbreaker, particularly since the Robotnik who first started this design trend in AosTH never seems to receive the same criticism.

Yeah, not exactly a loyal replication of the game design there, now is it? If Adventures Robotnik can get a pass for his own divergent design, then I feel that the same courtesy can be extended to SatAM Robotnik.

It’s actually a bit of an ironic twist that SEGA themselves toyed with the idea of making Eggman into a cyborg as well.

While clearly they didn’t go with this, it should be noted that Sonic Team themselves didn’t seem to think it was that much of a stretch for Eggman himself to have cybernetics as well. Just something to consider.

Heck, for extra irony points, consider SEGA themselves don’t seem to be all too concerned about whether ol’ Eggy looks the part of a man called ‘Eggman’ these days.

‘He looks like an upside down egg!’ 

My hairy butt he does. 

A buff Eggman is arguably a far, far more drastic divergence than what SatAM Robotnik’s got going on, given that it completely inverts one of the core design aspects of the character, one that has been utilized by every other incarnation out there- his obese, ovoid physique to which he owes the name ‘Eggman’ to begin with.

So yeah, I rest my case. You’re free to like or dislike a design, but this claim specifically doesn’t really seem to hold much water with regards to being a strike against him.

“He’s practically a different character!”

Weeeelllllll.... yes, and no. This is one of those criticisms that kind of misses out on certain contexts and makes a pretty big assumption- namely that Eggman has always existed as we now know him. Cause the thing is, up until Sonic Adventure? “Eggman” never really existed in the West. Confused by what I mean? Well, allow me to elaborate a bit.

While Dr. Eggman was always such back in Japan, when it came time for the games to come over to Western shores, the story and characters of the game were localized in the hopes of making the game more marketable to local audiences. As such Dr. Eggman, who had evidently already been an enemy of Sonic’s for a while before the events of the first game, now became “Dr. Ivo Robotnik”, and was given a more detailed background- that once upon a time, he was a good and kindly scientist called Ovi Kintobor, who was a friend of Sonic’s until an accident involving CHaos Emeralds and a rotten egg transformed him into the evil Dr. Ivo Robotnik, who immediately set off to conquer Mobius.

Various bits and pieces from Sonic of America’s official documents consistently characterize Dr. Ivo Robotnik as being ‘pure evil’, and his design was altered in the cover art for the games to reflect his sinister nature.

You know, I never really noticed that the Sonic 2 Cover Art made it look like he had a beard going on along with that mustache. Funky. 

Anyway!

This was to form the basis of the character in the US, and thanks to the open-ended nature of his actions in the game proper, said actions became cast in a more sinister light due to the more openly obvious and malevolent nature of Robotnik that was presented. It is from all of this then that SatAM Robotnik, and all the other Robotniks introduced in the spinoff materials at the time derive their character from, and since all the details provided painted Robotnik as an evil, evil person, it was up to the writers for these spinoffs to interpret whether they should be played for laughs or for chills.

In short? Eggman didn’t exist in the West when SatAM Robotnik was created. The criticism that he is practically a different character from Eggman is reliant upon a false premise- he cannot be faulted for being a different character to Eggman when he was created at a time when “Eggman” wasn’t even a part of Sonic as far as Western Audiences were concerned, until Sonic Adventure happened and things changed to better fit how things had always been in Japan. Similarly, the scant details we know about Eggman’s life hadn’t even been conceived of at the time.

It is at this point though that I feel compelled to point out though that while Robotnik’s differences from the current understanding of Eggman is simply a result of the time he was created, it should be noted that Robotnik is still a pretty inaccurate representation of the Robotnik from the games. SatAM Robotnik’s real name is Julian, his backstory doesn’t utilize the Chaos Emerald accident at all, he’s already the ruler of Mobius and has been for a while now, and his robots are completely different. While he still turns animals into robots, the concept has been re-interpreted so that rather than using people as batteries for his robots, the Roboticizer converts flesh and blood creatures into mechanical slaves for Robotnik’s empire.

Now these are all traits that I personally quite enjoy, but I’d be an idiot to suggest that it isn’t a pretty huge divergence from the lore that the games themselves establish. The thing of it is though, that SEGA themselves were not particularly interested in enforcing the aforementioned lore. In the earlier Adventure series, bits and pieces of Robotnik’s backstory were revealed, and much like the later SatAM , there’s not a lot that aligns with what the games had presented- Robotnik here was evil from the moment he was born and had a family in the form of an even more crazed and evil mother who constantly berated him for not destroying Sonic. Similarly, Game!Robotnik’s schtick of ‘turning animals into robots’ didn’t come up all that much, if at all.

The simple reality is? SEGA of America didn’t really care to enforce the lore it had created, and SEGA of Japan didn’t see fit to do similar. SEGA desiring a more universal approach for the setting it had created was something that came about with the advent of Sonic Adventure, and before that? Well, the most game accurate Robotnik out there, was the Robotnik from Fleetway.

Yeah, THAT terrifying bastard.

And don’t think for an instant that Sega of Japan themselves were any better at this. Back in Japan they released a series of Manga to tie into the games. Wanna know how that turned out?

Gotta confess, I don’t recall any of this happening at any point in the game. Cool robots though!

Another Manga would take it a step further and give a wholly new story- Sonic was the heroic identity that a shy hedgehog boy called Nicky could transform into. Nicky would have a family consisting of a mother, a father and a little sister, as well as having a girlfriend who would later form the basis for Amy Rose.

And then there was a manga that was released to tie into Sonic 2 for the game gear. Being a direct adaptation meant to promote the game, this would surely do a more than sufficient job of accurately portraying-

JESUS.

... so...

...uh...

...yeeah, long story short, Sonic on the whole didn’t really have a set idea, whether for Robotnik/Eggman or anything else. I once used the term ‘Jungle Law’ to describe how things were for the franchise in the 90s, and I must once more reiterate that that was precisely the case during that time, both in the US and everywhere else. People are of course free to feel about SatAM Robotnik and how he relates to the games (or rather doesn’t) as they wish, but one thing I would ask when doing that is to at least consider the time in which he was created, and to understand that even if he had been made to be game accurate at that time, he’d still be wildly, wildly different than the Eggman everyone is now familiar with.

 “He doesn’t invent anything!”

I honestly have no idea where this one came from... well, actually, that’s a lie, I know exactly where it stems from- the fact that Robotnik stole the Roboticizer from Uncle Chuck rather than inventing it himself wholesale. I can see why that would be a turn-off. Heck, I myself find it somewhat diminishing that he stole the invention rather than creating it himself wholesale, even as I love the horrible, horrible twist that it was a medical device created by Sonic’s own uncle, and the blood on Charles’ hand because of it. On that front though, I would point out that innovation is not just a matter of wholesale creation, but of taking things that existed before and taking them in new directions, and while maybe as not as grand as him being the sole creator of the Roboticizer, he still took the device and modified it towards a capacity it was never intended towards. I would argue then that it’s still pretty ingenious.

That being said though, 'never’ invents anything?

That just isn’t supported by anything seen in the series. Every last machine and robot witnessed is created by him. Taking precisely one incident and then declaring that he 'doesn’t invent anything’ because of it is a preposterous exaggeration built upon a premise thats overblown and inaccurate to begin with. No, he didn’t 'invent’ the original technology, but as I said, he took it in a direction never dreamt of before by its original creator- that’s still an application of intelligence and scientific skill.

It’s a particularly baffling accusation given that it’s not as though the games themselves dedicate huge amounts of time observing Eggman in the process of creating his machines, whether in the present time or back in the 90s. The reason I bring this up is because at times, part of what seems to fuel this criticism is that Robotnik is only rarely seen constructing his devices. Rarely however is not the same thing as ‘never’, and even then common sense would decree that the scientific genius does in fact make stuff even if you don’t see it happen.

It’s one thing to be annoyed by the fact that roboticizer isn’t his own- that’s quite understandable really. Going off of that to claim that he ‘invents nothing’ though? That’s just blatantly untrue.

“He’s lazy!”

Now unlike the last one, this is one that I just legitimately do not get. He runs an empire and personally oversees all operations from his command room. Of course he’s not going to be running around everywhere at all times, and even then, there are several episodes where he personally investigates things or direct operations personally. There’s really not a lot that can be said about this one because it’s probably one of the weakest criticisms out there, and ironically enough is itself very lazy. 

“He’s unoriginal/derivative/a ripoff!”

Well I mean, yeah? He’s literally the re-interpretation of a character from a video game, he’s quite derivative by default-

Heh, okay, okay, I’m being facetious here. I know what the actual gist of the criticism is, and to a degree it’s quite correct- Robotnik is a character who fulfills a very specific character archetype, that of the Evil Overlord. He’s big, he’s evil, he’s got a cape, and he’s got a hankerin’ for some oppressin’. Though I suppose calling it an ‘archetype’ is being a tad kind given that whenever this particular one is brought up the word that enters the vernacular more often than not tends to be ‘cliche’. Comparisons that often follow tend to accuse him of being a dime store version of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget or Darth Vader from Star Wars (not sure why that’s a negative comparison- those two are awesome!), and I can see that to a certain degree. This character type is an old one, and Robotnik himself doesn’t exactly break new ground.

Thing is though? This criticism is almost always made by drawing an implicit comparison to his counterpart from the games, with the implication being that Robotnik is the derivative creation/concept, as opposed to Eggman. This, even more than the criticism itself, is what particularly bothers me, because frankly? This assertion is a pretty big double-standard, one of the two major double-standards that tend to arise when SatAM Robotnik is compared to his games counterpart. More than anything, I find the both of them to be incredibly rankling for precisely those reasons- we will cover the other one once we are finished with this one.

An Evil Overlord isn’t exactly a big innovation... but neither are mad scientists who are out to conquer the world with robot armies. That one had been done to death long before Sonic, and will continue to see use long after the franchise is dead and gone.

Many of Eggman’s traits are not exactly unique to him, even within video games. A bald mad scientist with a big mustache, who primarily travels around in a hovering machine, who uses armies of robots with cartoonish features and big goofy looking eyeballs? Where have I heard that before... wherever have I heard that...

Oh, hey there Dr. Wily!

But wait, I can do it across two mediums! Bald scientist, bushy mustache with mechanical engineering skills who exploits animals for his evil schemes and is constantly thwarted animals that are much smaller than himself.... remind you of anybody at all, hmm?

He’s even voiced by Jim Cummings!

Yeah, an unkind soul might accuse ol’ Eggman of being an off-brand version of Dr. Wily, and an even less kind soul might simply dismiss him as the end result of tossing Nimnul and Wily into a blender and hitting puree. Before you get worked up though know this; I do not *actually* think this, and it would be ludicrous to think of Eggman as being a ripoff or being overly derivative of those two (the traits are there, undeniably, but these are not to the detriment of the character or his originality in the least). I would be incredibly incensed at anyone earnestly suggesting that Eggman was unoriginal or a ripoff of those two or anything along those lines... but the thing is, I feel the exact same way about similar statements being hurled towards SatAM Robotnik with regards to his originality as a character. There are things that are similar to what other characters have done, sure, but there is more than enough that is distinct about him, whether its his look, his personality or M.O, that calling him a copy or derivative is fairly unwarranted, and I would say the same to anybody declaring such things about ol’ Eggy.

In conclusion? This criticism isn’t invalid by itself as we all have different tastes and such, but given the context of how it is often used, there is something of a double-standard at work- traits that would be regarded as cliche or derivative are perfectly acceptable within Eggman, but a similar courtesy cannot be extended to the SatAM Robotnik. It’s a rich thing to call one incarnation ‘a ripoff’, when the character that spawned him was most famous for using a parody of the Death Star as an ultimate weapon prior to Sonic Adventure.

Which brings me to the very last criticism I keep hearing, this one a... personal favorite.

“He’s boring/lacks depth/is uninterestng/doesn’t have a personality!”

One thing I’ve established is that some criticisms tend to be made with a direct comparison to Eggman in mind, and this one? This is the one that tends to come up the most frequently and is the most insisted upon, and often the one most loudly declared (in as much as anything on the internet can be ‘loud’). Many times when this one is made, it is done with the obvious implication that this Robotnik is deficit in these areas when compared to his game counterpart. Depth is what makes a character more than what we see on the surface- its things like history, facets of personality, flaws, strengths, weaknesses, how they express their world view through words and actions, who they are related to and how they relate or do not relate to the people in their lives, and how they develop. In short, it’s a matter of how realized a character is.

It’s also one of the most singularly *baffling* accusations to use, not because of Robotnik himself, but because of the nature of characterization within the wider Sonic franchise and the fandom’s somewhat tortured relationship with it.

One of the very ugly truths about Sonic as a series? Is that precious few of the characters can truly be seen as ‘deep’ or ‘developed’, largely as a consequence of the way this series operates. Character developments from past games are rarely if ever built upon, past details are scarce and only barely referenced after initial introductions, and personality traits are either ramped up or dialed back based on the demands of the games, which are not always written very consistently. There is nothing particularly wrong with this- this being a long running video game series with no planned end, it is to be expected that each of the characters would more or less be the same person they were the last time around, frustrating as it is when more intriguing details are waylaid as a result (looking at you, Knuckles).

The only noteworthy exception to this trend, ironically enough, is Shadow the Hedgehog.

On paper Shadow should be a rather terrible idea- a black and red furred hedgehog with a brooding attitude and powers that match Sonic’s, along with a few extra abilities Sonic doesn’t possess, who is involved in Eggman’s own family history that was never mentioned before that point? Everything about Shadow screams ‘baby’s first fancharacter’. Yet despite that fact, Shadow is ultimately the biggest recipient of character development and evolution in the series- his backstory is the most explored, he has undergone the most development, and is the only one to have grown out of the role that initially defined him. It’s all rather astounding given that he debuted explicitly as an ‘Evil Twin’ to challenge Sonic, only to ultimately wind up having more concrete details than the hero he was created to challenge.

Otherwise though? There’s not really a lot to most Sonic characters beyond a few traits that give a teensy amount of depth. This includes our good buddy Eggman.

Eggman has no real past and no real motive for his goals of world conquest, nor are any details provided with regards to what his precise vision for the world is. Since he gained the ability to talk Eggman has frequently displayed himself to be a bellicose, immature egomaniac who has never done a single genuinely selfless thing throughout the entirety of the series, nor are we given a lot of indication as to what he’s like when he isn’t actively plotting against the world. He has all of exactly one detail that gives him any kind of depth beyond being a by-the-book video game nemesis, and that’s the fact that when he was a child he admired his grandfather Gerald Robotnik and wanted to be like him. This admiration however never leads anywhere, and the last time it was mentioned was in Shadow the Hedgehog, and even then only because the plot revolved around Shadow and Gerald’s actions in the past. Contrary to what he claimed in Sonic Lost World, Eggman isn’t really a ‘complicated guy’.

Otherwise we are never provided any insight as to how the ARK incident impacted him or how it factors into his motivations, if at all- one can theorize that the treatment of his grandfather might be one of the stronger motivating factors of his mission for world conquest, but on the other hand, one can just as easily come to the conclusion that while he indeed respects and admires his grandfather and was probably upset over what happened, his goals are disconnected to that incident and his motivations are purely ego driven. Could be one, could be the other, but the fact of the matter is that there is not definite answer because it is never actually explored in the games. We don’t even have a clue as to what his thoughts or feelings about Maria and her death were.

You see where I’m getting at with this? 

Much about this franchise is what we can take from what we are provided with, what we can interpret and how we can explore mud puddles as if they had the depths of the ocean. It’s about looking past what’s set in stone, peering through the cracks and wondering what more there could be. It’s about exploring the aspects that the games themselves don’t see fit to elaborate upon. There are thousands of interpretations and ideas for how things came to be the way they are, thousands of ideas about what we *aren’t* shown or told about the characters and how they are when we do not see them in the games. It’s what makes this fandom so diverse and so wonderful.

So with all that in mind, you can imagine how I feel whenever I see this particular criticism, accusing Robotnik of being ‘boring’ or ‘lacking depth’ or anything of the like. Especially given that the character he’s being compared to when it comes up isn’t exactly a vast ocean of depth himself. People are free to disagree with the direction or the interpretation, but in a lot of cases this is one of those times when a personal opinion is being treated as an objective fact. It’s hypocritical and utterly maddening, and it carries with it a certain degree of ‘your shit stinks and mine doesn’t’.

And you know, if SatAM Robotnik DOES come off as less developed... well frankly, what do people expect? He is from a series that was made twenty years ago with a run of twenty six episodes, and no more. He is literally stuck in  time, a time when his existence was perfectly acceptable according to SEGA’s policy and marketing strategies. Otherwise? He isn’t used. The universe he is a part of isn’t used. He’s not even really referenced in a meaningful way anymore. There is literally no way for him to go any further than when the series ended. By contrast, Eggman will always be used for as long as the games are made and always be allowed to try new things, use new machines, commit new acts and rise to new heights or sink to new lows. For this though, SatAM Robotnik is innately lesser?

And you know, I can understand where a good portion of it comes from, beyond the game purists who kinda hated all the spinoffs for not matching the games by default. For the longest time this version of Robotnik was touted as the ‘best’, and for those who were not fans of this depiction it could get impossibly grating to hear it over and over again, this endless praise of something they couldn’t get the appeal of to begin with. When you’re told something is great over and over again when you don’t like it, or if something you might otherwise feel neutral about is similarly shoved into your face constantly, you start looking for flaws out of the simple resentment that it almost seems like you’re being *forced* into liking something. Heck, even when you might be neutral about a subject, having it overhyped can sour you to it.

So, having said aaaalll of that? The point of order is that I do not agree with this criticism, nor do I agree with the bulk of the mentality behind it. It frames things in such a way that makes it seems like the two incarnations are actively competing with one another, which is ludicrous given that the Games Eggman is... well... Games Eggman. He’s never, ever going to go anywhere or be replaced, so long as the games are made. I like Eggman, and I like SatAM Robotnik, and I like the fact that they are distinct from one another. I don’t need Eggman to become more like Robotnik- and for the record, I don’t think he’s a pussywillow or anything, even limiting his actions to the classic games. As outlined here, Eggman is a pretty nasty character beneath all the goofiness, having a bevy of truly horrible deeds to his name. I find complaints about him being ‘too evil’ in Archie to be fairly ludicrous given all of his actions across the games. What was the Death Egg gonna do thenm if it had successfully carried out its purpose? Pop open and spray confetti over everything while a big banner unfolded with the words “GOT YA!!” written on it, complet with a doodle of Eggman blowing a raspberry? Eggman is pretty damn nasty as is. I just feel that his SatAM counterpart is *nastier*, and as the many posts preceding this have established, I have a heavy appreciation for that fact. 

In sumary- we all have different tastes, we all have different likes, and it’s impossible to get everybody to like what they like. These are acceptable. What I don’t find acceptable is when facts are ignored or details downplayed in order to make the things that I enoy seem flatter or more limited than they actually are. Especially given how, when used, this particular criticism is often based more on opinion. As such, I heavily, heavily dispute this particular argument regarding this incarnation of Robotnik’s value as a character.

With that, the academic (for a loose definition of ‘academic’) portion of the retrospective officially comes to a close. All that remains now is to post the next installment, which will conclude the entirety of the retrospective.

Until next time, folks!

[criticalotterstudies]

As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields.

Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.

In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches.

The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference.

...

These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was "postmodernism." The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a "postmodern" story was like belching in class.

But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do?

At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

...

What was he talking about? He probably didn’t know exactly. Soon Engle would make the Communist conversion; soon after, he would convert back. His youthful exuberance could fit itself to the ideology nearest at hand. Sway, image, ethos, and glory attracted him: the raw power of words. In American Song, in 1934, when he was still a darling of the conservatives, he envisioned the American poet launching poetry into the sky like a weapon:

What did this even mean? It meant that the poetic and the public, the personal and the national, could still fuse in the right words. It was a dream that, after 1939, would vanish almost as quickly as Communism in America.

When Engle got back from England, the figure of T.S. Eliot—his hard poems, his oblique criticism, his antagonism to dialectical materialism—had long since embarked on its path to ascendancy on American campuses. The United States, the last power standing, would need some high culture of its own, and Eliot set the tone. The New Critics, his handmaidens, were waiting to infiltrate the old English faculties.

Within 10 years, modernism would win an unadulterated victory, and difficult free verse would sit alongside epics and sonnets on the syllabi. The day would belong to Robert Lowell, writing as a latter-day metaphysical. Engle—in his commitment to soaring iambic lines, to the legacy of Stephen Vincent Benét, to the open idiom that had so recently remained viable—would look like a has-been.

But it was not in Engle’s character to stand still or look back. His gut told him something that most educated citizens would have to learn from sociologists: that the postwar era belonged to institutions. The unit of power was no longer the great man but the vast bureaucracy. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" had satirized the bold lyrical speaker; that voice now sounded hushed, tiny, tragically diminished, none of which appealed to a mind as brawny and sunny as Engle’s. The unit of power was no longer the poem.

But it could be the poet as a concept, a figure, a living symbol—and therefore, implicitly, the institution that handled and housed the poet. Engle began working long hours at Iowa. His new poems, when he wrote them, merely burnished his credentials as an administrator, patriot, and family man. Many were sonnets, earnestly passé, and his audience included political patrons, present or prospective. (The politician W. Averell Harriman received flattering sonnets; after Kennedy was assassinated, and despite the advice of candid, unimpressed first readers, Jackie Kennedy received memorial verses.) Between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, Engle transformed the Writers’ Workshop from a regional curiosity into a national landmark. The fiery spear-shaft of American song would take the form of an academic discipline. The fund-raising began.

Engle constantly invoked the need to bring foreign writers to Iowa so they could learn to love America. That was the key to raising money. If intellectuals from Seoul and Manila and Bangladesh could write and be read and live well-housed with full stomachs amid beautiful cornfields and unrivaled civil liberties, they would return home fighting for our side. This was what Engle told Midwestern businessmen, and Midwestern businessmen wrote big checks.

Engle borrowed tactics from the CIA long before their check arrived in 1967. At the time, the agency sponsored literature and fine arts abroad through the Congress for Cultural Freedom to convince the non-Communist left in Britain and Europe that America was about more than Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola. The CCF underwrote Encounter magazine and subsidized subscriptions to American literary journals for intellectuals in the Eastern bloc. Some of the CIA guys were old Iowa graduates from the early 1950s—including the novelists John Hunt and Robie Macauley—and Engle probably first connected with the CIA through Hunt.

By the mid-1960s, Engle had grown remote from the domestic workshop, and so lost control of it. He let it go its own way and founded the International Writing Program with the help of the Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh, who would become his second wife. In retrospective accounts, Engle presented this founding as a sudden idea, a spontaneously good one. But it marked the culmination of the logic of 20 years of dreaming.

...

What did Conroy assault us in service of? He wanted literary craft to be a pyramid. He drew a pyramid on the blackboard and divided it with horizontal lines. The long stratum at the base was grammar and syntax, which he called "Meaning, Sense, Clarity." The next layer, shorter and higher, comprised the senses that prose evoked: what you tasted, touched, heard, smelled, and saw. Then came character, then metaphor. This is from memory: I can’t remember the pyramid exactly, and maybe Conroy changed it each time. What I remember for sure is that everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as "the fancy stuff." At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.

Although you could build a pyramid without an apex, it was anathema to leave an apex hovering and foundationless. I’ll switch metaphors, slightly, since Conroy did too. The last thing you wanted was a castle in the air. A castle in the air was a bad story. There was a ground, the realm of the body, and up from it rose the fiction that worked. Conroy presented these ideas as timeless wisdom.

His delivery was one of a kind, but his ideas were not. They were and are the prevailing wisdom. Within today’s M.F.A. culture, the worst thing an aspiring writer can do is bring to the table a certain ambitiousness of preconception. All the handbooks say so. "If your central motive as a writer is to put across ideas," the writer Steve Almond says, "write an essay." The novelist and critic Stephen Koch warns that writers should not be too intellectual. "The intellect can understand a story—but only the imagination can tell it. Always prefer the concrete to the abstract. At this stage it is better to see the story, to hear and to feel it, than to think it."

Since the 1980s, the textbook most widely assigned in American creative-writing classes has been Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. Early editions (there are now eight) dared students to go ahead and try to write a story based on intellectual content—a political, religious, scientific, or moral idea—rather than the senses and contingent experience. Such a project "is likely to produce a bad story. If it produces a bad story, it will be invaluably instructive to you, and you will be relieved of the onus of ever doing it again. If it produces a good story, then you have done something else, something more, and something more original than the assignment asks for." The logic is impeccably circular: If you proceed from an idea, you’ll write a bad story; if the story’s good, you weren’t proceeding from an idea, even if you thought you were.

...

Why has the approach endured and thrived? Of course, it’s more than brute inertia; when institutions outlive their animating ideologies, they get converted to new purposes. Over the past 40 years, creative writing’s small-is-beautiful approach has served it well, as measured by the discipline’s explosive growth while most of its humanities counterparts shrink and cower. The reasons for this could fill many essays.

For one thing, creative writing has successfully embedded itself in the university by imitating other disciplines without treading on their ground. A pyramid resembles a pedagogy—it’s fungible, and easy to draw on the board. Introductory math and physics professors like to draw diagrams too, a welcome analogy for a discipline wishing both to establish itself as teachable and to lengthen its reach into the undergraduate curriculum, where a claim of pure writerly exceptionalism won’t cut it.

Specialization is also crucial, both for credibility’s sake and to avoid invading neighboring fiefdoms, and today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory. The safest material is that which the philosophers and economists and sociologists have no claim on, such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.

And it’s easier to teach "Meaning, Sense, Clarity" than old literature and intellectual history. Pyramid building fosters the hope that we can arrive at the powerful symbol of a white whale, not by thinking it up ahead of time, but by mastering the sensory details of whaling. "Don’t allegorize Calvinism," Conroy could have barked at me, "describe a harpoon and a dinghy!"

The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York). The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation—and from using vibrant literary communities to foster this phenomenon. In our workshops, we simply accept it as true that larger structures of common interest have been destroyed by the atomizing forces of economy and ideology, and what’s left to do is be faithful to the needs of the sentence.

To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.

Of course, we live in an age that cringes at words like "greatness"—and also at the notion that we’re not all great. But ages that didn’t cringe at greatness produced great writing without creative-writing programs. And people who attend creative-writing programs for the most part wish to write great things. It’s sick to ask them to aspire but not to aspire too much. An air of self-doubt permeates the discipline, showing up again and again as the question, "Can writing be taught?"

Faced with this question, teachers of creative writing might consider adopting (as a few, of course, already do) a defiant rather than resigned attitude, doing more than supervising the building of the bases of pyramids. They might try to get beyond the senses. Texts worth reading—worth reading now, and worth reading 200 years from now—coordinate the personal with the national or international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and long history. It’s what the Odyssey does and what Middlemarch does and what Invisible Man does and what Jonathan Franzen’s and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels try to do. But to write like this, you’re going to have to spend some time thinking.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531

[hasansonsuzceliktas]

The Creative Power of Being a Female

The two poles of creation and existence, the masculine and feminine, are seen in all planes of existence. The emergence and continuation of life depend on the cooperative union of the masculine and feminine powers. Without this union, nothing emerges. Throughout history, examples of this union have been expressed using different symbols and conveyed in the folk tales of various traditions. Symbols such as earth and sky, water and fire, night and day, yin and yang, Adam and Eve, and protons and electrons are essentiallytelling us about the masculine and the feminine. These are the “positive” and “negative” forces that are inherent to existence. Of course, when we talk about positive and negative, our minds tend to associate the positive with good things and the negative with bad things. However, creation is only possible when these two forces are in balance. Therefore, creation emerged only through the cooperation of these two polar opposites, the masculine and feminine forces, and this balance is intertwined with all aspects of our lives. Despite appearing to be opposing forces, they are actually two sides of the inseparable whole of existence. One could not exist without the other. Our modern civilization tends to emphasize the masculine force through its mostly patriarchic societies. The imbalances in the world, and our civilization’s march to the brink of collapse in many ways, are due to a lack of balance between the masculine and feminine forces, with the scales being heavily weighted in favor of the masculine force. New technologies are developed without proper balance, and Mother Nature’s delicate balance is disturbed, because society overly emphasizes masculine qualities and mentalities. Most of the problems we suffer today come from the masculine force becoming increasingly dominant and consequently disrupting the natural balance. Yet when we look at nature and the cosmos, the masculine and feminine forces are in a perfect equilibrium. After all, this state of perfect equilibrium allows the continuation of existence. If we delve into the atomic level, we see how the structure of matter is based on the balance between masculine and feminine forces. Likewise, in sexual reproduction, life continues through the balance between men and women and their masculine and feminine forces. Looking at the level of the psyche or the spiritual, we see the “masculine” and “feminine” forces that were called “animus” and “anima” by Jung. These two very different energies exist in both men and women, ideally in balance. Of course, the “masculine” tends to dominate in men and the “feminine” in women, and this is all natural, but it’s important to have a certain balance. When not balanced, a dominant “masculine” in a woman brings out the character of a “ball-busting woman,” while an excess of the “feminine” in a man brings out an “effeminate” character. The ideal situation, of course, is for the masculine and feminine sides to be balanced in everyone, regardless of gender. Keeping this in mind, I would now like to talk about the creative aspect of the “feminine” force. My aim is to show you that femininity is not exclusive to women. Men should also develop their feminine sides, because they will become more creative. Of course, when seen from a wider perspective, these are nothing but symbols, but it is a fact that the feminine side of  existence is a significant part of creativity. In feminine creativity, the female part contributes a piece of herself to the creation and feeds her fetus with her own blood. The masculine force contributes as well, but he does not give up something of himself. The female nurtures her offspring with food she produces herself, allowing the baby to develop. These examples in nature demonstrate the self-sacrifice and true creativity of the female as she contributes to the creation. This is why we think of creativity as a “feminine” quality. Of course, it’s impossible to leave the masculine force out of the equation. However, the masculine force has an advantage in terms of “power,” while the feminine force has the advantage of “creativity.” We all know the saying, “Men make houses; women make homes.” This succinctly expresses the creative and constructive qualities of the feminine force. What’s more, as more men get in touch with the “feminine” force within themselves, they too will become more creative and constructive. When a person balances the masculine and feminine energies inside and acknowledges them both, it means he or she has become whole. When this wholeness is reached, everything is all right. The problems people experience are mostly caused by them repressing or rejecting one of their two inner sides. The suppressed side becomes a “shadow,” and we then start projecting  it to others. We start to say things like, “Look at how emotional that woman is!” or “Look at how rude and mean this man is!” The annoyance we feel when we face such traits is due to the masculine or feminine side that we suppressed within ourselves. Therefore, when we make peace with the situation and integrate both of our sides, things become much easier. However, this integration takes time and may require some specific exercises. The contribution of the masculine force to creation is momentary. The male’s intervention simply involves fertilizing the egg, but nurturing and caring for the egg after fertilization is left to the female force. In nature, there are many examples of this. When we focus on mental creativity, we see the same feminine and masculine forces at work here. In this case, the masculine force starts the action, let’s say by bringing up an idea. The feminine force subsequently nurtures and grows this idea, because every creative idea goes through an incubation process. All creative geniuses begin with a germ of an idea and then incubate it. The feminine force effectively dominates this process by nurturing and growing this idea until it becomes just like a comely pearl in the dark waters. Afterwards, the “masculine” force brags about what he created, just like the average family guy does. When we study the lives of all the creative geniuses, especially the male ones, we see how their feminine sides were very strong. They are creative because they utilize their “right brain” very well. Sometimes their feminine sides may become too prominent, so they may display a female character in a psycho-sexual sense. This is a pathological state, of course, but keep in mind that creativity needs the feminine force to be in the greater extent. Every manifested object needs an empty space to exist within. Without emptiness, nothing can exist. So, we may take the existing matter as masculine and the emptiness as feminine. Nothing can exist without emptiness. Likewise, we always need a certain emptiness for creativity to fill. For ideas to pop into our minds, again we need emptiness. Without it, we cannot create anything. And this emptiness is the symbol of the feminine force. Usually we focus on what already exists and ignore the empty spaces where objects do not yet exist. However, we should remember that a huge proportion of every atom is empty space, just miniscule particles moving in the emptiness. That is why all geniuses create emptiness in their minds, and as they create things for this empty space, they do it using the power of emptiness. You cannot create something without empty space. This is another example of how important the feminine force is. Our civilization has conditioned a society that emphasizes the qualities of the left brain, such as consumerism. This imbalance has led to the masculine qualities becoming more dominant while also suppressing the feminine qualities, hence the imbalances. With such an arrangement, even the women have become more male-like to fit in. The new period we are about to enter is a time for rebalancing the masculine and feminine forces and restoring the feminine creativity to its rightful place. The state of unity that will come from this integration will form the basic reality of humanity’s new era. There are so many things to talk about when dealing with masculine and feminine forces, but for the time being, I will stop here and leave the rest to your imagination. Read the full article

[godlessgeekblog]

Facebook News Feed Dies, What Marketers MUST Know

The Facebook News Feed is dead. It’s official.

Gone. Extinct. Poof. Nada. Oblivion.

In this article, I’ll tell you why I’m making this assertion, the conspiratorial events leading up to the death of the News Feed, what it all means for the future of Facebook marketing, and four solid takeaways that will superpower your marketing in a post-News Feed era.

After reading this article, you’ll be light-years ahead of most marketers. You’ll learn the unicorn moves in the brave new world of Facebook Messenger marketing — a world where the News Feed is a relic of history.

Facebook’s News Feed Is Dead: Here are the Facts

Let me lay out the issue in a single sentence: Facebook is restructuring all the leaders of their business to support a new focus on messaging and privacy.

The News Feed has been in decline for years. It’s final, gasping moments are at hand.

The ones to suffer most from the demise of News Feed are publishers — us, marketers, storytellers, businesses.

We get it. People don’t see our organic posts anymore.

But why this new round of outrage about the News Feed’s demise?

In the past, when the News Feed got dinged, it was usually preceded by a Mark Zuckerburg jeremiad about the loss of “friends and family at the core of the experience,” or a variation on that theme.

  Of course, these laments masked the cold, hard truth for us publishers who got screwed by the algorithm changes.

But now, it’s more than laments. It’s more than algorithm tweaks.

It’s people.

Zuckerburg has made moves. Bold moves.

What kind of moves? Here’s the Facebook shuffle that has all taken place within the last year.

These names may not be familiar to you, but basically, a whole lot of billionaires were just let out to pasture. Taken together, they tell the shocking story about how Facebook is changing.

WhatsApp Cofounder Jan Koum Left Facebook a While Back.

Koum mushroomed into a billionaire when Facebook bought his and co-founder Brian Acton’s startup, WhatsApp.

Now, Koum is spending more time playing ultimate frisbee than he spends tweaking his app. And Brian Acton jumped ship, too.

It was no secret that Koum and Facebook’s old guard crossed swords when Facebook started tinkering with WhatsApp’s most notable feature — ironclad encryption.

Chris Daniels just Resigned (March 14, 2019) after Recently Being Installed as the Leader of WhatsApp.

Daniels became Koum’s replacement but not for long. On the day that Fast Company called “ugly Thursday,” Daniels cleared out his desk and walked out the door.

That’s a pretty big move for a guy who just got the equivalent of a Facebook corner office.

Chris Cox, Third-highest at Facebook also Resigned.

This is big news.

Cox was engineer hire number 13 at Facebook and he spent 13 years at Facebook. (Let’s not go all superstitious about the string of 13s.)

However, Chris Cox is the highest ranking company officer ever to resign. He held the Chief Product Officer role, just one door down from Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s COO.

  Chris Cox was a legend at Facebook — one of the most admired, and most trusted leaders the company knew.

His leaving is no morale booster, that’s for sure.

Those are just some of the changes that have been going on in Menlo Park. In his typical saturnine style, Zuckerburg described a few of those changes in a Facebook Newsroom post.

Fidji Simo now heading up the Facebook app.

Chris Cox’s role remains unfilled!

Will Cathcart is the new head of WhatsApp.

Javier Olivan is behind the plan to integrate Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram.

The VPs of Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp will all report directly to Zuckerburg.

Zuckerburg doesn’t upset the applecart for no reason.

As one Facebook insider reported, this “was a burn the boats moment — a symbolic point of no return intended to rally the company around a new existential imperative.”

The News Feed has reached the end of its influence as a Facebook feature. The Verge explained, it “[has] already peaked, or will soon.” And since Zuckerburg knew this, Zuckerburg killed it.

Folks, this is a very big deal.

What Does All of this Mean?

To put it simply, these organizational changes indicate a massive new shift in Facebook’s direction.

News Feed will most likely disappear entirely and be subsumed by the primacy of messaging.

The News Feed has been a fixture of Facebook almost since the very beginning.

Thus, its sunsetting seems to make zero sense. Why would they bury it? It’s like Apple killing off the iPhone or Coca Cola discontinuing their Coke product.

One reason needs to be stated right off the bat.

The News Feed is really controversial.

If you think back on some of the momentous and headline-making news in recent years, Facebook’s News Feed has been caught up in it.

Russian meddling in the United States elections

Mental wellness and healthful social relationships

Privacy controversy

Live streaming horrific acts of hatred

The rise of fake news

It’s hard to blame the News Feed directly for the outcome of the 2016 United States elections or as the cause for bloodshed in New Zealand. But the News Feed was there all along, and it’s no longer viewed as the bringer of truth and connection that it was intended to be.

And that needs to change. An algo tweak isn’t the change we’re talking about.

A dead News Feed is the kind of change that Facebook needs.

The News Feed is an existential legal threat to Facebook’s ongoing viability in the modern age.

So, that’s the negative side of things.

But obviously, Facebook is presenting a more positive standpoint.

Zuckerburg explained it (sort of) in his newsroom note. Here are the highlights from that release that shed light (sort of) on the rationale for the shakeup:

…we organize our company to build out the privacy-focused social platform

…new product efforts

…clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience

…the next chapter of our work [is] building the privacy-focused social foundation

In his rambling shpiel, Zuckerberg used derivatives of the word “privacy” seven times, and derivatives of the word “messaging” four times.

Is it beginning to make sense?

We saw this coming. We called it.

Look, as much as Mark Zuckerburg talks about human connection and family and friends, Facebook is a business. Businesses have to make money.

Facebook makes money, not from grandmothers fawning over photos of their grandbabies, but from businesses — the institutions that want to sell stuff.

And we businesses fork over a load of cash — billions of dollars each year.

The shift to privacy and messaging will contribute to a bigger and more solid revenue stream for Facebook. It has to. It’s the nature of business.

Instead of the News Feed, Facebook offers businesses the potential to use messaging to more effectively reach their customers. And, with all three messaging apps merging under a single infrastructure, businesses can reach more customers than ever before.

What’s more, as we’ve recently seen, Facebook is testing a business-exclusive messaging inbox.

That’s a major nod to business revenue being the driving force for Facebook’s epic change.

It just makes sense. Business sense.

But there’s another reason, and it comes as no surprise to Facebook. Email as a marketing channel is slowly dying.

Every email marketer that I know is disgusted with abysmally low open rates and clickthroughs. Email is just not working.

Who’s responsible for poisoning the well of email marketing?

Messaging apps.

And the biggest culprit? Facebook Messenger.

Rather than get all huffy about it, though, smart marketers are out there churning out Facebook Messenger chatbots, creating Messenger drip campaigns, sending chat blasts, and basically living in unicorn land.

What does this mean for the future of Facebook marketing?

The future is not dire. The future is bright with unicorns prancing in fields of delicate purple and pink wildflowers.

In fact, if you’re using Facebook Messenger marketing with chatbots, you have absolutely nothing to fear.

(But if you’ve been hoping that organic Facebook posting is going to cut it, then you’ll have to adjust your expectations.)

We’re in a new era of marketing ruled by Facebook Messenger, not the News Feed.

Facebook Business Marketing Tips

Here are four Facebook Marketing Power Tips that will add unicorn power to your marketing efforts.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #1: Start using Facebook Messenger Chatbots Immediately

If the News Feed is dying, what are you going to do?

Find a way to reach your customers that does not involve the News Feed, right?

Yes, and the most effective way to do this is through Facebook Messenger.

  And the most effective way to use Facebook Messenger is with Messenger chatbots.

Chatbots are the future of marketing. And the future of marketing is now, especially as the News Feed sails into the sunset.

Sign up for MobileMonkey, and you can start creating Facebook Messenger chatbots today for free.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #2: Do not Rely on Organic Facebook Posting Any Longer.

The days of getting tons of clicks, likes, and engagement from your organic posts are gone.

Yes, gratefully, there are loopholes that allow you to stay alive.

  But the hottest opportunity of all is Facebook Messenger.

Quick disclaimer: Boosting posts is a legitimate method for maintaining your Facebook marketing presence as long as the News Feed gasps its final breaths. However, you need to be strategic about this.

Don’t just boost a post for kicks.

Boost posts that have a comment guard on them.

With a comment guard, also known as a Facebook post autoresponder, anyone who comments on your post is invited to join your Facebook Messenger list.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #3: Aggressively Create and Deploy Messenger Chatbots to Supplement and Outdo Email Marketing.

I’m not suggesting you fire your email person or delete your email list.

I am suggesting that you start using Facebook Messenger marketing in addition to email marketing. (And if you have to back off of email marketing to do it, go ahead.)

The reasons for this will become obvious if you Google “facebook messenger vs email.”

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Anything you can do with email marketing, you can do with Facebook Messenger marketing only better.

Drip campaigns? Check.

Start a drip campaign and nurture your contact list on through to conversion.

What’s that? You’re staring at the read rate of 81% and the response rate of 53%?

Oh, nbd. That’s typical for Facebook Messenger drip campaigns.

What about using a chat blast instead of or in addition to an email blast?

Also possible.

Easily create a blast that pings your Messenger contact list with news, tips, or a topic that’s on your mind.

Once again, with engagement rates like these, it’s unfathomable that you would not use Messenger bots.

The death of the News Feed signals a new beginning for messaging. Facebook’s pivot to messaging is concurrent with the nadir of email marketing’s effectiveness.

Now is the time to jump into messenger marketing like your marketing success depends on it.

Because it does.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #4: Supercharge Your Facebook Messenger List Building.

Back in the day, email list building was everything.

I spent enormous amounts of money getting potential customers’ email addresses in exchange for free apps, trial memberships, data, reports, analytics, ebooks, and newsletters.

Those days are long gone.

Today, I focus on Facebook Messenger list building.

It’s easier, cheaper, and the results are far more effective.

Every month, I gain around 5,000 new Messenger contacts. For free.

Most of this happens on autopilot. I’m sure you’ve seen the chat widget in the lower right-hand corner when you’re on the MobileMonkey website.

Opening a conversation adds you to my contact list.

If you have a WordPress site, you can add the chatbot to your website for free.

Messenger list building is the new frontier of marketing because that’s where your audience is, that’s where they’re most active, and that’s where you’re going to have the highest engagement rates and conversions.

Build your Facebook Messenger contact list using chatbots.

It’s as simple as that.

The News Feed is Dead. Long Live Facebook Messenger Chatbots.

One of the most innovative and powerful tech companies in the history of humankind is shifting its focus right before our eyes.

Facebook is killing off its most innovative and enduring feature.

They are pivoting to messaging.

This reality shapes the way that you engage and connect with your customers. Stay ahead of the curve by building your presence on Messenger, creating Facebook Messenger chatbots, and making marketing progress like you’ve never experienced before.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Shutterstock

More in: Facebook, Publisher Channel Content

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[unixcommerce]

Facebook News Feed Dies, What Marketers MUST Know

The Facebook News Feed is dead. It’s official.

Gone. Extinct. Poof. Nada. Oblivion.

In this article, I’ll tell you why I’m making this assertion, the conspiratorial events leading up to the death of the News Feed, what it all means for the future of Facebook marketing, and four solid takeaways that will superpower your marketing in a post-News Feed era.

After reading this article, you’ll be light-years ahead of most marketers. You’ll learn the unicorn moves in the brave new world of Facebook Messenger marketing — a world where the News Feed is a relic of history.

Facebook’s News Feed Is Dead: Here are the Facts

Let me lay out the issue in a single sentence: Facebook is restructuring all the leaders of their business to support a new focus on messaging and privacy.

The News Feed has been in decline for years. It’s final, gasping moments are at hand.

The ones to suffer most from the demise of News Feed are publishers — us, marketers, storytellers, businesses.

We get it. People don’t see our organic posts anymore.

But why this new round of outrage about the News Feed’s demise?

In the past, when the News Feed got dinged, it was usually preceded by a Mark Zuckerburg jeremiad about the loss of “friends and family at the core of the experience,” or a variation on that theme.

  Of course, these laments masked the cold, hard truth for us publishers who got screwed by the algorithm changes.

But now, it’s more than laments. It’s more than algorithm tweaks.

It’s people.

Zuckerburg has made moves. Bold moves.

What kind of moves? Here’s the Facebook shuffle that has all taken place within the last year.

These names may not be familiar to you, but basically, a whole lot of billionaires were just let out to pasture. Taken together, they tell the shocking story about how Facebook is changing.

WhatsApp Cofounder Jan Koum Left Facebook a While Back.

Koum mushroomed into a billionaire when Facebook bought his and co-founder Brian Acton’s startup, WhatsApp.

Now, Koum is spending more time playing ultimate frisbee than he spends tweaking his app. And Brian Acton jumped ship, too.

It was no secret that Koum and Facebook’s old guard crossed swords when Facebook started tinkering with WhatsApp’s most notable feature — ironclad encryption.

Chris Daniels just Resigned (March 14, 2019) after Recently Being Installed as the Leader of WhatsApp.

Daniels became Koum’s replacement but not for long. On the day that Fast Company called “ugly Thursday,” Daniels cleared out his desk and walked out the door.

That’s a pretty big move for a guy who just got the equivalent of a Facebook corner office.

Chris Cox, Third-highest at Facebook also Resigned.

This is big news.

Cox was engineer hire number 13 at Facebook and he spent 13 years at Facebook. (Let’s not go all superstitious about the string of 13s.)

However, Chris Cox is the highest ranking company officer ever to resign. He held the Chief Product Officer role, just one door down from Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s COO.

  Chris Cox was a legend at Facebook — one of the most admired, and most trusted leaders the company knew.

His leaving is no morale booster, that’s for sure.

Those are just some of the changes that have been going on in Menlo Park. In his typical saturnine style, Zuckerburg described a few of those changes in a Facebook Newsroom post.

Fidji Simo now heading up the Facebook app.

Chris Cox’s role remains unfilled!

Will Cathcart is the new head of WhatsApp.

Javier Olivan is behind the plan to integrate Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram.

The VPs of Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp will all report directly to Zuckerburg.

Zuckerburg doesn’t upset the applecart for no reason.

As one Facebook insider reported, this “was a burn the boats moment — a symbolic point of no return intended to rally the company around a new existential imperative.”

The News Feed has reached the end of its influence as a Facebook feature. The Verge explained, it “[has] already peaked, or will soon.” And since Zuckerburg knew this, Zuckerburg killed it.

Folks, this is a very big deal.

What Does All of this Mean?

To put it simply, these organizational changes indicate a massive new shift in Facebook’s direction.

News Feed will most likely disappear entirely and be subsumed by the primacy of messaging.

The News Feed has been a fixture of Facebook almost since the very beginning.

Thus, its sunsetting seems to make zero sense. Why would they bury it? It’s like Apple killing off the iPhone or Coca Cola discontinuing their Coke product.

One reason needs to be stated right off the bat.

The News Feed is really controversial.

If you think back on some of the momentous and headline-making news in recent years, Facebook’s News Feed has been caught up in it.

Russian meddling in the United States elections

Mental wellness and healthful social relationships

Privacy controversy

Live streaming horrific acts of hatred

The rise of fake news

It’s hard to blame the News Feed directly for the outcome of the 2016 United States elections or as the cause for bloodshed in New Zealand. But the News Feed was there all along, and it’s no longer viewed as the bringer of truth and connection that it was intended to be.

And that needs to change. An algo tweak isn’t the change we’re talking about.

A dead News Feed is the kind of change that Facebook needs.

The News Feed is an existential legal threat to Facebook’s ongoing viability in the modern age.

So, that’s the negative side of things.

But obviously, Facebook is presenting a more positive standpoint.

Zuckerburg explained it (sort of) in his newsroom note. Here are the highlights from that release that shed light (sort of) on the rationale for the shakeup:

…we organize our company to build out the privacy-focused social platform

…new product efforts

…clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience

…the next chapter of our work [is] building the privacy-focused social foundation

In his rambling shpiel, Zuckerberg used derivatives of the word “privacy” seven times, and derivatives of the word “messaging” four times.

Is it beginning to make sense?

We saw this coming. We called it.

Look, as much as Mark Zuckerburg talks about human connection and family and friends, Facebook is a business. Businesses have to make money.

Facebook makes money, not from grandmothers fawning over photos of their grandbabies, but from businesses — the institutions that want to sell stuff.

And we businesses fork over a load of cash — billions of dollars each year.

The shift to privacy and messaging will contribute to a bigger and more solid revenue stream for Facebook. It has to. It’s the nature of business.

Instead of the News Feed, Facebook offers businesses the potential to use messaging to more effectively reach their customers. And, with all three messaging apps merging under a single infrastructure, businesses can reach more customers than ever before.

What’s more, as we’ve recently seen, Facebook is testing a business-exclusive messaging inbox.

That’s a major nod to business revenue being the driving force for Facebook’s epic change.

It just makes sense. Business sense.

But there’s another reason, and it comes as no surprise to Facebook. Email as a marketing channel is slowly dying.

Every email marketer that I know is disgusted with abysmally low open rates and clickthroughs. Email is just not working.

Who’s responsible for poisoning the well of email marketing?

Messaging apps.

And the biggest culprit? Facebook Messenger.

Rather than get all huffy about it, though, smart marketers are out there churning out Facebook Messenger chatbots, creating Messenger drip campaigns, sending chat blasts, and basically living in unicorn land.

What does this mean for the future of Facebook marketing?

The future is not dire. The future is bright with unicorns prancing in fields of delicate purple and pink wildflowers.

In fact, if you’re using Facebook Messenger marketing with chatbots, you have absolutely nothing to fear.

(But if you’ve been hoping that organic Facebook posting is going to cut it, then you’ll have to adjust your expectations.)

We’re in a new era of marketing ruled by Facebook Messenger, not the News Feed.

Facebook Business Marketing Tips

Here are four Facebook Marketing Power Tips that will add unicorn power to your marketing efforts.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #1: Start using Facebook Messenger Chatbots Immediately

If the News Feed is dying, what are you going to do?

Find a way to reach your customers that does not involve the News Feed, right?

Yes, and the most effective way to do this is through Facebook Messenger.

  And the most effective way to use Facebook Messenger is with Messenger chatbots.

Chatbots are the future of marketing. And the future of marketing is now, especially as the News Feed sails into the sunset.

Sign up for MobileMonkey, and you can start creating Facebook Messenger chatbots today for free.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #2: Do not Rely on Organic Facebook Posting Any Longer.

The days of getting tons of clicks, likes, and engagement from your organic posts are gone.

Yes, gratefully, there are loopholes that allow you to stay alive.

  But the hottest opportunity of all is Facebook Messenger.

Quick disclaimer: Boosting posts is a legitimate method for maintaining your Facebook marketing presence as long as the News Feed gasps its final breaths. However, you need to be strategic about this.

Don’t just boost a post for kicks.

Boost posts that have a comment guard on them.

With a comment guard, also known as a Facebook post autoresponder, anyone who comments on your post is invited to join your Facebook Messenger list.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #3: Aggressively Create and Deploy Messenger Chatbots to Supplement and Outdo Email Marketing.

I’m not suggesting you fire your email person or delete your email list.

I am suggesting that you start using Facebook Messenger marketing in addition to email marketing. (And if you have to back off of email marketing to do it, go ahead.)

The reasons for this will become obvious if you Google “facebook messenger vs email.”

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Anything you can do with email marketing, you can do with Facebook Messenger marketing only better.

Drip campaigns? Check.

Start a drip campaign and nurture your contact list on through to conversion.

What’s that? You’re staring at the read rate of 81% and the response rate of 53%?

Oh, nbd. That’s typical for Facebook Messenger drip campaigns.

What about using a chat blast instead of or in addition to an email blast?

Also possible.

Easily create a blast that pings your Messenger contact list with news, tips, or a topic that’s on your mind.

Once again, with engagement rates like these, it’s unfathomable that you would not use Messenger bots.

The death of the News Feed signals a new beginning for messaging. Facebook’s pivot to messaging is concurrent with the nadir of email marketing’s effectiveness.

Now is the time to jump into messenger marketing like your marketing success depends on it.

Because it does.

Facebook Marketing Power Tip #4: Supercharge Your Facebook Messenger List Building.

Back in the day, email list building was everything.

I spent enormous amounts of money getting potential customers’ email addresses in exchange for free apps, trial memberships, data, reports, analytics, ebooks, and newsletters.

Those days are long gone.

Today, I focus on Facebook Messenger list building.

It’s easier, cheaper, and the results are far more effective.

Every month, I gain around 5,000 new Messenger contacts. For free.

Most of this happens on autopilot. I’m sure you’ve seen the chat widget in the lower right-hand corner when you’re on the MobileMonkey website.

Opening a conversation adds you to my contact list.

If you have a WordPress site, you can add the chatbot to your website for free.

Messenger list building is the new frontier of marketing because that’s where your audience is, that’s where they’re most active, and that’s where you’re going to have the highest engagement rates and conversions.

Build your Facebook Messenger contact list using chatbots.

It’s as simple as that.

The News Feed is Dead. Long Live Facebook Messenger Chatbots.

One of the most innovative and powerful tech companies in the history of humankind is shifting its focus right before our eyes.

Facebook is killing off its most innovative and enduring feature.

They are pivoting to messaging.

This reality shapes the way that you engage and connect with your customers. Stay ahead of the curve by building your presence on Messenger, creating Facebook Messenger chatbots, and making marketing progress like you’ve never experienced before.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Shutterstock

This article, “Facebook News Feed Dies, What Marketers MUST Know” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post Facebook News Feed Dies, What Marketers MUST Know appeared first on Unix Commerce.

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