#i watch this show exclusive through the scenes with watts in them

[ghost-of-diogenes]

A Llewellyn Watts centric episode AND The Urca de Lima treasure? Like from Black Sails!? This episode of Murdoch Mysteries was made for me specifically.

[batgirlridingaunicorn]

An Essay on Watcher Entertainment

Watcher Entertainment is a, "[...] production studio from Steven Lim, Ryan Bergara, and Shane Madej. [...] company that is focused on creating television-caliber, unscripted series in the digital space." The three personalities joined forces after their success at Buzzfeed. They have been providing viewers with content since January 2020 and found prosperity with various shows such as Puppet History, Ghost Files, Are You Scared?, etc.

Watcher Entertainment recently announced that they would move all of their content onto their own streaming platform that fans could subscribe to for $5.99 a month. This garnered immediate backlash from a majority of their audience. Within three days, the company made an update... they would no longer go through with their plan. Instead, their content would be available ad-free in advance of their normally scheduled YouTube release.

I have decided to voice my opinion about the situation in the hopes that I can express my frustration, confusion, and guilt.

I have been an avid follower of Steven Lim, Ryan Bergara, and Shane Madej since their time at Buzzfeed. I have watched almost all of their episodes many times, been to a live show, and have a plethora of merch filling up my home. When the announcement was made that Watcher Entertainment would be pulling their content from YouTube, I was shocked.

I did post a comment on the 'Goodbye YouTube' video expressing how I felt betrayed, and I don't think that is necessarily fair.

They want entire creative freedom over their content. At the end of the day, those three are artists. They can decide to make their art however they choose. We, as fans, cannot force artists to tunnel their creativity. Do we want better production? No... I, for one, watch Garrett Watts and Andrew Siwicki walk into a haunted location with one camera and a package of Twizzlers every other month for Pete's sake.

If that is what they want though, that is their prerogative. If ads are too cumbersome for what they would like to accomplish, then more power to them to try and find other avenues to find success.

However, their strategy to get to this point is baffling to me.

To advertise new content...

To countdown the days until an exciting announcement...

To promise better and better videos...

Then to announce that none of that will be available to long-time fans unless they pay? That is what was unacceptable to me. You cannot build a fanbase with free content only to rip it away from them at a moments notice.

Were there no other ways to build this concept?

Maybe I am delusional. However, I think they should have built up the content before trying to force fan's hands towards something that doesn't seem bulky enough to be worth it.

Start by putting behind the scenes footage behind the paywall.

Start by putting how it's made footage behind the paywall.

Start by putting podcasts behind the paywall.

Start by putting newer, exclusive videos behind the paywall.

They could have done all of this with their already formed Patreon, or they could have moved their Patreon to this streaming platform.

Most individuals are not going to pay for content that used to be free unless there is proof that there is more to come. There is not more to come right now. They announced it with nothing to show besides videos we have all already seen...

I feel bad for being upset? I want them to do what they want to do without being burdened by so many things, but where does that get me in the end... It is a selfish take, but you can't say the fans helped create the show and then not try to understand their perspective. Is there a middle ground somewhere?

I feel as if I have run out of steam... maybe I'll edit, or maybe I will just delete this late. It is all just a rant anyway.

In the end, I want them to have creative freedom. However, as a business there has to be a strategy where your fans win as well. Right now... the fans aren't winning. They are paying to see the same videos they have seen before. Where do we go from here?

[lee-rambles-about-rwby]

Non-plot things i loved about Volume 7 (since i’ve yelled about the story a lot but there’s so much more i loved): a rambly, bullet-point list

I may think of more if I get around to rewatching the volume, but this is off the top of my head I’ll throw it below a cut just because it’s getting really long (as usual) and I don’t want to clog people’s dash. 

TL;DR i love a lot about this volume lol

Let’s get this one out of the way: M U S I C

like not just how hype I am for the vocal tracks but I didn’t think any score would top my faves from last volume and damn almost every episode had something in the score that literally caught my attention over the drama because it was so good

also so many additional vocalists!! like that’s so cool, I lost my shit when I heard Caleb Hyles IN a rwby episode

On that note (pun intended), sound design in general, yes, hell yes. War abruptly ending with a thud as Harriet runs into the ice? The dramatic shift in tone after Weiss says “Who are you?” and it hard-cuts to Watts with an ominous thunderclap?? The screeching sound over the shots of Summer??? Too much to list

SPLIT SCREENS, like I’m so glad the couple uses of it from last volume became a more regular thing, it’s so cool

The sheer amount of times the voice acting alone could have sold a scene. Like wow the amount of improvement so many of the VAs have had throughout the series is beautiful. Cinder’s desperation and screams in the finale? Top. Ironwood’s increasingly chilling demeanor?? Hell yeah. Willow sounding so realistically broken?? My fuckin’ heart. Oscar, Nora, Ruby, Ren, Qrow, so on and so forth. Again, too many to list

Literally anyone’s outbursts felt so real. I could go on and on with just how many of the especially emotional or tense scenes were made so much more by the VAs, kudos to all of them

The new(?) animation effects!!

Yang and Neo’s semblances are the first thing I think of. This is another thing from last volume, in The Lost Fable and later during the mech fight, I loved how the 2D smoke animation (when the castle is destroyed) and the mech fight explosions looked. Yang’s effect especially reminds me of that. 

Same with just general fire and explosion effects. Someone said they thought it was hand-drawn and tbh it kinda looks it

If this isn’t new I’m just dense as hell, but the flickering of aura in fights instead of it just breaking after a while. I love that we see it flicker when they take hard hits. Tbh it makes more sense for it to do that. Then the little particle effect when aura finally does break! If you’ve ever played the mobile puzzle game Two Dots, it reminds me of the fireflies animation and i love that

OH also that Yang’s eyes seem to glow a bit now when she uses her semblance instead of just turning straight red. It’s so pretty

This is almost plot-related but I’m including it anyway. The general pacing of the volume felt nice. Like a lot of things were happening but it didn’t feel like a clusterfuck trying to keep track of it. Even just in individual episodes. The last few episodes were a lot of fights cutting back and forth and it never really felt messy or annoying (frustration because you want to see the end of the fight sooner doesn’t count lol). I wanna assume that’s in the writing/directing but either way it worked well

CINEMATOGRAPHY! Damn there was some solid camera work. Long tracking shots were so cool (Ruby’s in chapter 1, the one following the grimm invasion, so on), the framing of things for subtly foreshadow things (the political posters and poll numbers, having several seemingly inconspicuous shots of Watt’s bag, etc etc). 

the wide shots in any scene by the vault were beautiful but so were like most of the wide shots in any scene. I know i’m forgetting so many camera shots that probably caught my eye when I watched but there were a lot

OH a specific thing I wanted to mention is the Ironwood vs Watts fight. That wide, rotating shot when Ironwood launched them both off the platform back into normal gravity was so good I had to rewatch just that clip a couple times

Also the fight choreo was fucking great. This isn’t exclusive to this volume, but wow there were some cool moments. The RWBY vs AceOps has to be my favorite, but it’s only barely above Ironwood vs Watts or Cinder vs Winter and Penny, and even still, all the other fights are so close behind that it’s less a ranking and more a “If I had to choose one..”

Lightning round of some other animation things I really loved because this post is too long already:

the gravity in the Ironwood vs Watts fight, but also in Cinder vs Penny and Winter. Like any time a character was flying (or falling) it never felt too floaty or unnatural. Like they still had a realistic weight to them, as much as they can for unrealistically flying lol

being able to really really see how hefty the mammoths were just by how they moved. Grimm animation in general tbh

Honestly the weight of everything felt very realistic; characters, grimm, etc alike

Ruby’s semblance animation looks improved too

Neo, who doesn’t talk at all, still conveying so much in every scene she was in

not technically animation, but the matte paintings used and just a lot of the background designs were beautiful

probably more i’m forgetting 

OH the beautiful use of the whole “Show, don’t tell” concept. Like telling is fine, but this volume did so well with showing things through the animation that foreshadowed other things. Off the top of my head: like how they made sure to show how exhausted Oscar was from fighting Neo, or during several of the scenes in Ironwood’s office being able to just gauge a tone of a scene purely through silent, background facial expressions

Last thing, out-of-show thing: the amount of concept art and behind the scenes stuff crwby has been sharing!! Like i love so much getting to see early designs for character’s redesigns, or concept art for settings, concept paintings for scenes, etc etc. That video going from storyboard, to mocap, to playblast, to final render of Ironwood vs Watts was so fucking cool to watch

[valeriannnn]

if youve ever wanted to think about what almost every major RWBY character would main in professional overwatch, then today is your lucky day! brought to you by hiatus, return of owl, and 3am delirium

RUBY - Star DPS.  Extremely flashy, always on the highlight reel.  Will play whatever is needed to pound the enemies into dirt, but also the type to say "fuck it ok guys trust me im gonna pop off" and swap to her signature widow/tracer to Pop Off.  Works unfailingly.  Team captain and emotional core.  Prefers mobile heroes and an unpredictable playstyle.

WhiteSnow - Flex Support/Flex DPS.  Put her on any sniper (including and especially Ana) and watch all hell rain down.  Methodical playstyle, favors high-utility heroes.  Aside from snipers, can often be found on Baptiste/Mei/Symmetra.  Enables teammates to make big plays, but often sacrifices her own presence in the killfeed for the benefit of the team as a whole.  Loves to maker opponents' lives a living hell with CC.  Line em up, knock em down.

Belladonna - Offtank.  Extremely attentive to her backline, constantly running interference and peeling for allies.  Impossible to catch off-guard.  Delights in thwarting the enemy team's plans and preventing them from making the plays they want to.  Excellent map awareness and always the one to touch point to preserve overtime.  Shotcaller.  Struggled with committing to risky/aggressive plays, but being on a reliable team has made her more comfortable performing her role and trusting her teammates to have her back.  Prefers mobile heroes but will adapt to any situation to work in perfect tandem with...

YangXiaoLong - Main Tank.  Could have been a DPS main but early on committed to tank role to enable her duo parter (and little sister) to pop off (and have shorter queue times).  Developed a real knack for controlling space and being a brick goddamn wall between her squishies and the enemy team.  Extremely aggressive playstyle, but has cooled down in recent years to be more of a team player.  Still loves to thrash about when given the opportunity.  Known for bold plays and phatty shatties.

Arc - Main Support.  Tried for years to be a DPS hotshot but was determinedly mediocre and got hard stuck in plat.  Persuaded by Pyrrha to pocket her for a few games, and discovered the depth and fulfillment of playing support to a well-coordinated team.  Nurtured his aptitude for assisting from the backline and quickly rose through the ranks.  Will play whatever is meta but will always be a Mercy main at heart.  Played Brig during GOATS.  Shotcaller.

Valkyrie - Doomfist.

Nikos - Main Tank.  Extremely methodical player, reknowned for big brain cerebral plays and unflappability.  Can be slow to push advantages, but never makes mistakes.  Loves the mind games in a Rein v Rein matchup, and unfailingly blocks the enemy shatter (delights in cucking the enemy Rein).  Will play Orisa For The Good Of The Team but takes no joy in it.  Terrifying on defense; takes a strong position and allows time pressure to force enemies into missteps.  When you make a mistake, she will be there.  Strategic backbone of the team.

RenLie - Flex Support.  Bloodthirsty support.  Likes the balance of damage potential and support capacity in Zenyatta, but puts forth strong showings on Moira and Ana as well.  First priority is of course keeping his team alive, but flankers trying to dive him in the back line tend to get sent home in tears.  Big Jjonak energies. :uwuknife: Can be susceptible to tunnel vision/desperation, and occasionally needs teammates to re-ground him.  Always nanos Nora.

PPolen - Offtank.  D.Va one-trick.  Absolutely notorious for eating ults; absolutely infuriating to play hitscan into.  Flawless mechanical skill.  Occasionally struggles with communication, but honestly so on-the-ball that it doesn't usually come back to bite her.  Always has gold objective time.

Qrow - True flex.  Exclusively solo-queues on ladder, just plays the leaderboards.  Played just about every role at some point (except main tank, fuck that), but currently on a flex support kick.  Holds world records for gravs/blizzards/immortality feels clipping through the geometry and falling out of the map.  The sort of Ana who will singlehandedly take out both enemy DPS when beset by flankers only to immediately die to an errant Moira orb.  Gamers can we get an F in chat.  Accustomed to playing on 200+ ping and is deeply unsettled when he moves somewhere with good internet and has to re-learn all his timings.

RWBY+JNPR+P All form a single 9-man roster.  Sub out roles with redundant players for map set strategies and for flexible plays.  Probably called the Beacon Huntsmen or something generic like that, who cares

Winter - Main Tank and Offtank.  Excellent mechanical skill.  Unparalleled when allowed to execute her set strategy, but struggles with adaptability.  Extremely self-sacrificial, and knows exactly how to leverage her health pool to buy time and/or space for her allies to make the plays they need to.  Will unflinchingly act upon callouts, good or bad, because the worst outcome is a split decision.  Especially fond of a quick reset.

Whitley - Doesn't play Overwatch, but holds several championship trophies in international Pokemon tournaments.  Minecraft youtuber.

Adam - Widow one-trick.  Highly overrated, inexplicably popular streamer.  Mechanically talented but poison in a team environment.  Picked up and quickly dropped from several professional teams.  Teabags.  Looks impressive on stream but crumbles against opponents with any semblance of coordination.  Eventually blacklisted from professional environments after one too many scandals in his personal life.

Ozpin -Franchise owner.  Has never actually touched Overwatch, but used to be a respected Starcraft player back in the day.  Took on a coaching role for a time, but now largely manages from afar.  Has a sparse and cryptic social media presence.  Makes business decisions largely at random, unbeknownst to all his subordinates.

Salem - Hates videogames. Will unplug the router if you piss her off.

Ace Ops - High profile roster hand-picked for perfectly complementary hero pools.  Hyped to fuck in the preseason.  Unparalleled individual play but poor communication, incompatible playstyles, and truly abysmal coaching staff keep them from being a top-tier team.  Widely considered a disappointment considering the talent and money backing them.

Harriet - DPS.  Exclusively plays flankers and extremely mobile DPS.  Tries to solo-carry; in her defense, it often works.  Unironically brags/complains about having gold medals.  Quick to tilt but often uses the negative energy to pop off even harder.  Overtime clutch god.

Marrow - Flex DPS.  Cautious player, often hesitant to commit to risky strats.  Flawless positioning, both personally and for thrown abilities.  Talent for projectile DPS; probably contributed not-insignificantly to scatter arrow being removed from the game.  Prefers to understand the enemy's strategy before acting.  Shotcaller.  Nobody listens.

Elm - Main Tanks (Except Reinhardt), Zarya.  Aggressive tank player, frequently found with gold damage.  Generally good natured but vulnerable to tilt if on a losing streak.  Highly momentum-based.  Makes tutorial videos on strategy and positioning for her youtube channel.  Wants to see the competitive scene develop and flourish, but sensitive to feeling threatened by new talent.  Helps them anyway.

Vine - Flex Tanks (except Zarya), Reinhardt.  Unflappable, regardless of quality of games or recent performance.  Good at reading enemy team and tracking ults.  Generally calls enemy plays before they happen.  Always sticks with Elm, largely out of obligation to bail her out when her aggression puts her in a dicey position.  Understated player, rarely in highlight compilations, but extremely consistent performance.  Plays off-meta in scrims so as not to reveal strats.

Clover - Main Healer. Can play any support, but Lucio main through and through.  Suffers from Reddit Lucio syndrome, but usually good enough (or lucky enough) to get away with it.  Loves to deny enemy followup.  Peel master, boop god.  PMA to a borderline-irritating degree.  Gives great pep talks at half time.  Tends to overcommit to strategies that are dead in the water; sometimes it's better to call it and switch comps while you still have time on the clock. Despite this, is opportunistic in the moment-to-moment sense and quick to capitalize on enemy vulnerabilities.

Flynt Coal - Lucio one-trick.  I mean, come on.

Wukong - ???  Exclusively plays off-meta heroes and weird shit.  Talented but remains on ladder because he doesn’t like the rigid structure of tournament play.  Refuses to be confined to a single role.  Hates role lock cause he can’t swap mid game anymore.  Despite all this, somehow tends to be more of an asset than a detriment.  Definitely a team player.  PMA king.  Occasionally finds legitimately competitive strata for underutilized heroes.  Nutty with hammond movement, godawful with mines.  Has the Winston skin equipped, of course.

Ilia - DPS.  Popular streamer.  Tried going pro for a bit, but didn’t like the schedule and retired shortly.  Frequently plays with the community and does weird custom game modes for a laugh.  Loves Daddy Rein Chases Tiny Torblets.  Refuses to open loot boxes, much to the dismay of her stream.  Plays Golfing Over It during long queues.  Draws all her own custom emotes.

Watts - DPS.  Mains Widow, Sombra; plays anything that lets him avoid ever actually engaging the enemy at close range.  Thinks the game stopped being good when Sombra GOATS stopped being a thing.  Spends all day on twitter heckling pro players and declaring Overwatch a dead game.  Suspected of cheating.  Considers himself a shotcaller but isn't very good at it.

Tyrian - Plays Junkrat and Roadhog exclusively.  Thinks it's bullshit that the game doesn't have friendly fire.  Thinks it's bullshit that Junkrat doesn't deal self-inflicted damage anymore.  Master of the bounce shot.  Tends to treat the game like a TDM and forget the objective in favor fragging out.  Targets a single enemy player and tries to get them to tilt.  Uses voice chat but only laughs.  Never makes callouts.  Trash talks in all-chat.  Considers it a personal victory if he gets someone to rage quit.

Hazel - No Role.  Doesn't really get the idea of the metagame; knows it's generally good to have a balanced team but thats about as deep as he chooses to go.  Was one of the old guards of PC gaming but now that it's a mainstream hobby has to refuses to confront that he's hot garbage at them.  Can't really parse everything that's happening onscreen in a fast-paced game like overwatch, so he just picks Torb (regardless of map or attacking/defending status) and uses the turret as a security blanket.  Godawful turret placement.  Still has a good time somehow.

Cinder - Main Tank.  Likes the importance of the role, and especially the way her team has to follow her calls for any chance of success.  A nice balance of aggression and craftiness, she makes a fearsome opponent.  Callouts could be more frequent/detailed, but her directions are always good when given.  Very susceptible to emotional ups and downs, and often takes out frustration on teammates.  Takes losses very hard, gloats about wins.  Happiest with an Ana pocket.

Emerald - Offtank.  Would be much happier on DPS or Support, but desperate to show off and live up to Cinder's expectations.  Sticks with her main tank except when it's absolutely necessary to peel for the back line.  Tends to be overcautious with ults; she's good enough mechanically to earn them relatively quickly, but fear of whiffing one makes her reticent to spend them.  Flawless bubble timing on Zarya.

Mercury - Support.  Still considers Symmetra a support.  Quick to whip out the blaster and try to fight off flankers instead of calling for assistance.  Knows all the angles for a narsty biotic grenade.  Plays as though he's got better positioning and backup than he does; frequently gets opponents to back off just by winning the mental game.  Will let allies die on ladder if they piss him off.

[blackcatmanor]

RWBY V8 Ep 8 Photo Review (SPOILERS)

Overall a cool episode with some issues, big and small (Spoilers below)

The good:

Story and structure of the episode:

The structure of the episode was really great. The very beginning and end being one small story, but not lingering too long was perfect. The main story of the episode being Ruby and Co’s horror adventure was awesome!

After some planning and setup, there is a tussle with the hound outside, where once again it shows its greatest power: The ability to immobilize licensed huntresses in sheer confusion. 

However after the initial tussel, I LOVED when it became a horror movie-style suspense story. Wondering where it was going, who it’d run into next was pretty well done.The Schnee family working together was well done also, with Willow watching on the cameras, then defending Whitley, followed by Weiss coming to save them. A+ Schnee family interactions.

I am also taking the summoned boarbatusk attacking the hound as a Willow glyph, because the summon comes after she tries to warn Whitley about the hound and he ignores her, and she appears directly after to rescue Whitley. The Glyphs are a Schnee family trait on the mom’s side, so I think Willow has the abilities, but is too drunk, depressed, and worn down to ever use them, nor does she usually need to. But Whitley being in danger left her no other choice. 

The ending of the horror arc was….spooky yet kind of expected? A lot of people expected that Summer was the hound, and it turned out to be indeed a person but not Summer. Thank goodness. Summer should just be dead, plain and simple. She followed Ozpin’s futile fight against Salem and it cost Summer her life (It would also be cool if this is part of the reason Raven turns on Ozpin. Perhaps Raven knows the truth behind Summer’s death and it caused her to abandon Ozpin). I’m a little nervous that the confirmation that Salem can make people into Grimm, and the fact that this guy was a silver-eyed warrior is a possible foreshadowing of Summer being a grimm, which would be super lame. It would be SO melodramatic to almost cringeworthy status.

Nonetheless, the ending was kinda eerie and emotional, and shows the depths of depravity Salem plunges in her twisted quest to get the relics.

Fun fact: For a hot second I thought the Hound guy was Yuma.  😆  They look too similar. But then I realized this guy was a cat faunus soooo….ya. Maybe you could have made him a little more unique looking or something, CRWBY.

 Fun fact #2- People don’t have three knuckles on their thumbs. It should have been 2. 

 Friendship moments:

Blake’s speech is really cute, if a little forced into the situation. Arryn has always been the best voice actress of the main 4 and this is one of the best ones. She seems earnest and sincere and gives Ruby a reason to be a doe-eyed optimist even in rough times. It’s also cute to see Ruby how Blake sees her, and it’s way more meaningful and thoughtful than as a beacon of “purity” like in Volume 5’s Blake Speech about her friends. I will say it doesn’t really fit here in the middle of a war, and the speech seems a little pre-planned as it doesn’t actually respond to what Ruby was saying that nothing they’re doing seems to be helping, but I still liked it. 

Nora’s speech to Penny to help her overcome the influence of the Watts hack was nice, too, if a little predictable. I am just glad it wasn’t Ruby who said it, because Ruby has been the exclusive Penny friend for the last two volumes. It’s nice to see other people forming friendships outside of their established single BFF or love interest. 

The bad:

Shot composition.

The shot composition of the jailbreak was SUPER weird. We start from Qrow’s perspective and Robin is behind him in shot. Then they hear a breach and Robin turns into Watts.

Then there is the explosion and the camera shows a fireball and dust cloud. The shot makes it seem like the camera simply zooms out but where Qrow should be is now Robin,

Then Robin looks to the source of the breach and sees….Qrow in bird form? I’m going with Qrow in bird form even though he’s now on the other side of the room. It took me like 7 re-watches of the scene to make this call.  

The reason it was hard to discern th is is Qrow is because the composition is so confusing that on first watching, I thought it was Raven. This is because: 

1. This bird is on the entire other side of the room in relation to where Qrow was in the preceding shot 

2. I thought the person in the zoomed-out shot after the blast was STILL Qrow, as he was the preceding focus. It would then smash cut to Robin looking confused as to why a Raven would be the source of such an explosion (turns out the small figure in the zoom out transforms into Robin)

3. I thought Maybe the directors wanted there to be a misdirect in thinking it would be Cinder that causes the jailbreak, but make it Raven instead because she saw Ruby’s message to Remnant in the previous episode. 

But then I realized that would be kinda dumb because Raven’s entire motivation is to NOT fight Cinder. That and, after re-watch and noticing the person in the zoom-out changes into Robin, (though it’s hard to see), I guess the intent is that she’s looking at Qrow squawking at her about the soon-to-be falling debris.

The composition of the Mama Schnee summon is kind of the same. We don’t see her summon it and that’s for suspense reasons, but we also have never learned that she CAN summon, only that the abilities run on her side. I have to assume it’s her because she tried to warn Whitley, was ignored, and took off from her own room to intercept him. She saw she was too late and summoned a boarbatusk to distract the hound before immediately appearing in the door after the summon to get her son out. 

I don’t think this could be a Weiss summon because Weiss presumably didn’t know where they were at the moment, and they had to run down two long hallways before they met back up with her. It also has never been established that Weiss can just summon things and send them on their own way, a summon has to be in eyeshot and directed by the summoner. If this IS a Weiss summon, the fact that it can be mistaken for a Willow one is more proof that the composition of this and other scenes could use some work and polish. 

  The RWBY Hamster Wheel, AKA Ruby and Co still not really doing anything:

Ruby dead-on saying they haven’t done anything, and May having to ease her guilt was kind of 4th-wall breaking. After the launch of Amity, Ruby’s team have done nothing while Jaune and Co are the ones presumably about to engage with the main battle. Even with Amity Ruby and Co did that super half-assed. The feed cut because the thrusters can’t keep it in the air, and they have zero desire to try and find a way to get the communication tower back up. The hobbled tower, Pietro and Maria have been abandoned by the plot so the girls can sit around and do little side quests like fixing Nora and Penny, and having a horror adventure. 

Although I really did like their horror adventure, it still didn’t add much to the plot because the hound fails and dies (by NOT the huntresses, no less), so the threat of Penny getting the staff for Salem against her will still relies on Watts’ hack of her systems. If you’re going to have an attempt fail, why not move it up a little and cut out the time Ruby and Co spent sitting around drinking tea? 

It is getting hard to ignore that each episode of V8 has the main protagonist, a licensed huntress, and her group of fellow licensed huntresses not actively doing anything other than power cycling things, and then sit around drinking beverages waiting for the next thing to do to fall into their lap (literally). This episode was hamster wheel, implying motion without actually going anywyere. It starts and ends with Penny being unconscious at the manor, with a fight for her in the middle. This kind of story was okay with the Apathy arc in V6 because a kingdom wasn’t falling, but Ruby and Co’s sitting around not engaging with the plot unless being forced to by the script is getting to be a problem. 

I just wish there was a sense of what Ruby is going to do!  Before she had to wait for plot to fall into her lap, but now Penny has revealed explicitly what she is going to do, and there is still no indicatoin that a plan will be hatched to keep her from delivering the staff to Salem. We are more than mid-way through the season, and there was a 2 month hiatus and we still have zero clue what Ruby’s plan for anything is. 

You know who they should ask what to do: Whitley. Whitley comes up with more of a plan of action in 5 minutes than Ruby, Weiss, and Blake did in 7 episodes. Does the inclusion of his plan to save Mantle mean that Ruby and the team will do THAT? Though they mentioned the ships will be flown with drone bots, so do they need to be a part of that? Are they going to try only to be sidelined by evil Penny? No one knows. At least team Jaune have a plan of action. Can’t wait to see that next episode. 

Overall score: 7/10 Though RWBY is never truly suspensful IMO, the horror movie aspect was still pretty fun to engage in. Seeing the writers make a lot more effort to make these characters actual friends is nice to see as well. Some technical hiccups and more importantly the frustration that Ruby isn’t actually doing anything hinders this episode a lot, especially after such a long hiatus. 

Bingo update: I’m giving myself mama schnee summoning, though only half a jailbreak right now because we only saw the bad guy get out. Robin and Qrow still TBA. 

[newstfionline]

I Ignored Trump News for a Week. Here’s What I Learned.

Farhad Manjoo, NY Times, Feb. 22, 2017

I spent last week ignoring President Trump. Although I am ordinarily a politics junkie, I didn’t read, watch or listen to a single story about anything having to do with our 45th president.

It wasn’t my aim to stick my head in the sand. I did not quit the news. Instead, I spent as much time as I normally do online (all my waking hours), but shifted most of my energy to looking for Trump-free zones.

My point: I wanted to see what I could learn about the modern news media by looking at how thoroughly Mr. Trump had subsumed it. In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press.

But as the week wore on, I discovered several truths about our digital media ecosystem. Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever. The reasons have as much to do with him as the way social media amplifies every big story until it swallows the world. And as important as covering the president may be, I began to wonder if we were overdosing on Trump news, to the exclusion of everything else.

The new president doesn’t simply dominate national and political news. During my week of attempted Trump abstinence, I noticed something deeper: He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.

Obviously, just about every corner of the news was a minefield, but it was my intention to keep informed while avoiding Mr. Trump. I still consulted major news sites, but avoided sections that tend to be Trump-soaked, and averted my eyes as I scrolled for non-Trump news. I spent more time on international news sites like the BBC, and searched for subject-specific sites covering topics like science and finance. I consulted social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and occasionally checked Twitter and Facebook, but I often had to furiously scroll past all of the Trump posts.

Even when I found non-Trump news, though, much of it was interleaved with Trump news, so the overall effect was something like trying to bite into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.

It wasn’t just news. Mr. Trump’s presence looms over much more. There he is off in the wings of “The Bachelor” and even “The Big Bang Theory,” whose creator, Chuck Lorre, has taken to inserting anti-Trump messages in the closing credits. Want to watch an awards show? Say the Grammys or the Golden Globes? Trump Trump Trump. How about sports? The president’s policies are an animating force in the N.B.A. He was the subtext of the Super Bowl: both the game and the commercials, and maybe even the halftime show.

Where else could I go? Snapchat and Instagram were relatively safe, but the president still popped up. Even Amazon.com suggested I consider Trump toilet paper for my wife’s Valentine’s Day present.

All presidents are omnipresent. But it is likely that no living person in history has ever been as famous as Mr. Trump is right now. It’s possible that not even the most famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past--say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler--dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.

Consider data from mediaQuant, a firm that measures “earned media,” which is all coverage that isn’t paid advertising. To calculate a dollar value of earned media, it first counts every mention of a particular brand or personality in just about any outlet, from blogs to Twitter to the evening news to The New York Times. Then it estimates how much the mentions would cost if someone were to pay for them as advertising.

In January, Mr. Trump broke mediaQuant’s records. In a single month, he received $817 million in coverage, higher than any single person has ever received in the four years that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, according to Paul Senatori, the company’s chief analytics officer. For much of the past four years, Mr. Obama’s monthly earned media value hovered around $200 million to $500 million. The highest that Hillary Clinton got during the presidential campaign was $430 million, in July.

It’s not just that Mr. Trump’s coverage beats anyone else’s. He is now beating pretty much everyone else put together. Mr. Senatori recently added up the coverage value of 1,000 of the world’s best known figures, excluding Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 million), Kim Kardashian ($36 million), and Vladimir V. Putin ($30 million), all the way down to the 1,000th most-mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant’s database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ($1,001).

The coverage those 1,000 people garnered last month totaled $721 million. In other words, Mr. Trump gets about $100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together. And he is on track to match or beat his January record in February, according to Mr. Senatori’s preliminary figures.

How do we know Mr. Trump is more talked about than anyone else in the past? There are now more people on the planet who are more connected than ever before. Facebook estimates that about 3.2 billion people have internet connections. On average, the people of Earth spend about eight hours a day consuming media, according to the marketing research firm Zenith. So almost by definition, anyone who dominates today’s media is going to be read about, talked about and watched by more people than ever before.

“From a media perspective, it’s pretty clear,” Mr. Senatori said. “The sheer volume, and the sheer amount of consumption, and all the new channels that are available today show that, yeah, he’s off the charts.”

On most days, Mr. Trump is 90 percent of the news on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and probably yours, too. But he’s not 90 percent of what’s important in the world. During my break from Trump news, I found rich coverage veins that aren’t getting social play. ISIS is retreating across Iraq and Syria. Brazil seems on the verge of chaos. A large ice shelf in Antarctica is close to full break. Scientists may have discovered a new continent submerged under the ocean near Australia.

There’s a reason you aren’t seeing these stories splashed across the news. Unlike old-school media, today’s media works according to social feedback loops. Every story that shows any signs of life on Facebook or Twitter is copied endlessly by every outlet, becoming unavoidable.

Scholars have long predicted that social media might alter how we choose cultural products. In 2006, Duncan Watts, a researcher at Microsoft who studies social networks, and two colleagues published a study arguing that social signals create a kind of “inequality” in how we choose media. The researchers demonstrated this with an online market for music downloads. Half of the people who arrived at Mr. Watts’s music-downloading site were shown just the titles and band name of each song. The other half were also shown a social signal--how many times each song had been downloaded by other users.

Mr. Watts and his colleagues found that adding social signals changed the music people were interested in. Inequality went up: When people could see what others were downloading, popular songs became far more popular, and unpopular songs far less popular. Social signals also created a greater unpredictability of outcomes; when people could see how others had picked songs, the collective ratings of each song were less likely to predict success, and bad songs were more likely to become popular.

I suspect we are seeing something like this effect playing out with Trump news. It’s not that coverage of the new administration is unimportant. It clearly is. But social signals--likes, retweets and more--are amplifying it.

Every new story prompts outrage, which puts the stories higher in your feed, which prompts more coverage, which encourages more talk, and on and on. We saw this effect before Mr. Trump came on the scene--it’s why you know about Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla--but he has accelerated the trend. He is the Harambe of politics, the undisputed king of all media.

In previous media eras, the news was able to find a sensible balance even when huge events were preoccupying the world. Newspapers from World War I and II were filled with stories far afield from the war. Today’s newspapers are also full of non-Trump articles, but many of us aren’t reading newspapers anymore. We’re reading Facebook and watching cable, and there, Mr. Trump is all anyone talks about, to the exclusion of almost all else.

There’s no easy way out of this fix. But as big as Mr. Trump is, he’s not everything--and it’d be nice to find a way for the media ecosystem to recognize that.

[its-just-like-the-movies]

I Heart Huckabees (04, A-)

Why this film?: Because I’ve heard too many good things about Huckabees to pass up the chance to watch it for a project, though I might have gone for a different film had I known about the smallness of Jenkins’s part beforehand. I’d like to say Flirting with Disaster, Let Me In, and Bone Tomahawk were the runners-up, but it was over once I saw that Huckabees was in his filmography.

The review: What’s the meaning of life? What’s the point of it all, in a world that can be both incredibly generous but perhaps even more cruel? Who are we, and how are we not ourselves, and how are we connected to the people and things and universes around us? I Heart Huckabees is premised on these questions, with a plum mix of earnest exploration as its protagonists undergo severe identity crises and rivalries, as well as the utter absurdity of these questions and the length folks will go to to engage with them or avoid them entirely. All of this is wrapped in an ensemble comedy stuffed to the nines with delightful performances, a bananas script, and some wittily used technical elements, every artist contributing their own distinctive flavor to the film while operating within an impressively light tone and assured directorial hand from David O. Russell. Everything looks effortless, and yet the seams never show or get tangled in each other even as the film hops between sincerity and skewering, never coming off cruel or too serious with its heady subject matter.

Jason Schwartzman is our entry point into the film, as an environmental activist and poet names Albert Markovski who believes that running into the same African teenager three times over the course of two weeks is definitely a sign of something. Scrambling to figure out what it could possibly mean, he hires Existential Detectives Bernard and Vivian Jaffe to help him out, though it becomes pretty obvious that his request won’t work out for a number of reasons. For one, the detectives don’t see this as a meaningful coincidence, and they start worrying that Albert is choosing to prioritize this over the far more serious and impending threat that his activist group is about to become victim to corporate takeover from the superstore chain Huckabees, spearheaded by the charismatic Brad Stand. Even as their methods for Albert to connect to himself  - and by extension, the universe - prove effective, their philosophy about the beautiful interconnectedness of all things do not give him the answers he wants and drive him further towards the allure of Caterine Vauban, a French nihilist who may have already turned one of the Jaffe’s clients to her way of thinking. Soon it seems as though most of the important people in Albert’s life are involved in this case either as new clients or people of interest, and it’s never entirely clear how much progress any of these investigations are making.

All of this reads as a dizzying amount of plot to traverse inside of a film waxing philosophical about the purpose of existence, so thank god for the film’s oddball sense of humor, alternating between earnest contemplation and having a laugh at how ridiculous all of this actually is. Dustin Hoffman, wearing a hideous oversized gray bowlcut of a wig as Bernard Jaffe, can shove Jason Schwartzman’s confused but eager client into a human-sized gym bag to help Albert unlock his connection to his own subconscious, and it’s allowed to be an insightful step forward to the man’s self-actualization and just plain silly. Conversations with the universe are realized at a level just above basic graphic design skills as characters inhabit fake environments and have their faces disassembled into rectangular floating bits that intermingle with other bits of other faces. The same swimsuit photo of Jessica Lange floats in a black void with whole or disembodied characters who repeat the same phrases directly into the camera over and over again. One technique to connect to your innermost self is called Pure Being, and is performed by whacking yourself in the face - by yourself or others - with a giant rubber ball until enlightenment is achieved. This does not stop a firefighter named Tommy Corn from falling into an even deeper pit of despair than the one his nihilistic ideologies were already courting, and he expresses his dissatisfaction by turning his hose on his fellow firefighters rather than the blaze they’ve already put out without him. Sometimes the film’s best joke is simply to put Vivian Jaffe in the middle ground or background of a frame as she’s following a lead, and sometimes that joke is made even funnier by showing Caterine Vauban skulking behind her with no one seeming to notice her.

But these examples lead more towards the silly than to the sincere, and the heart in I Heart Huckabees is more than worth defending, especially since it blends so well with the eggheaded comedy that the film somehow carries off light as a feather. Tommy Corn’s drop into despair is treated with the same level of care as Albert Markowitz’s, as Brad Strand’s and his girlfriend Dawn Campbell undergo their own reckonings after Brad hires the existential detectives purely as a slight against Albert and with no belief they’ll accomplish anything until they confront him about the persona he’s constructed for himself at work. “How am I not myself?” he asks, and which Bernard and Vivian parrot back at him, turning over the statement while gently mocking it after Brad had been so cheerily resistant to the mere concept of everything the Jaffes stand for. This statement is made even more dizzying not just by the corresponding crises of everyone else but perhaps most weirdly dramatized by fans, boys we’ve met before, getting autographs from an advertiser on photographs of the woman who had that position before her a few scenes after Brad makes this declaration. Caterine Vauban may be bottomless wellspring of nihilism, but she’s still able to provide a massive insight into Albert’s neuroses once he accepts her tutelage, though she’s just as willing to stir up trouble for the sake of proving a point. By comparison to her immediate action, the Jaffes come across as both the infinitely cuddlier option but perhaps less effective as they force clients to come to terms with startling truths about themselves, their rejoinder that it will all work out because everything is in sync with everything else seeming less concrete next to Vauban’s insouciance and conviction. The battle for Albert’s soul, dichotomized between the universal interconnectivity of the Jaffes and the universal emptiness of Vauban, is fought between two worthy opponents, and yet the film concludes with Albert and Tommy having found solace in a place outside of both worldviews that Albert would nevertheless have discovered without them.

It is tremendous that any film is able to find such a welcome solace between the absurd and the intelligent, earnestly exploring its very conceptual ideas about the world while still finding room to set that all aside and make fun of what these folks are doing to themselves for the sake of understanding themselves or refusing that understanding. Jon Brion’s score is operating on this wavelength, floating between loony and contemplative like a Regina Spektor album and deliriously entertaining throughout. It’s snazzily edited, shot with elegant simplicity, and smartly dressed its characters for the job they have, unless they’re wearing a bonnet in complete repudiation of said job. As bananas as I Heart Huckabees frequently is, David O. Russell and Jeff Baena have written it so that we’re always able to track what’s going on narratively and philosophically, giving the actors hilarious lines and even more hilarious characters for them to follow through so many spiritual crises. It’s miraculous coherent in tracking long-term arcs and one-scene scenarios, in glorious tandem with Russell’s direction and the enervating efforts of the cast. And what a cast it is; everyone in tune with a bizarre and slippery tone while contributing their own flourishes to difficult material. Jason Schwartzman is an ideal straight man for the film’s wackier characters to bounce off while charting his own arc, and Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman smartly alternate between being the voice of reason and absolute loons. Isabelle Huppert is ideally cast as Caterine Vauban, crafting an unsettlingly poised and competent woman yet wholly in on the joke of a character whose dialogue reads like a parody of a Michael Haneke film. Jude Law and Naomi Watts are alarmingly chipper and even more alarmingly frayed as the corporate yuppy and his model girlfriend whose lives are unexpectedly changed by the arrival of the existential detectives, though her transformation is more sudden and pronounced than his is. Actors confined to only a few sequences like Richard Jenkins, Jean Smart, Talia Shire, Tippi Hedren, and Shania Twain are just as compelling as the primary cast members in the time allotted to them, but the very best, most brilliant performance comes at the courtesy of Mark Wahlberg as Tommy Corn, whose inability to get right with the universe is the funniest crisis of them all but just as weighty as the film’s most earnest breakthroughs. It’d be the kind of performance that’d make someone rethink their perceptions about an actor if his career wasn’t littered with so, so, so many nothings, but this is still the kind of artistic achievement that few actors can just pull out of their hat. The ensemble work is almost endlessly delicious, but Wahlberg has the honor of being its crowning achievement.

As much credit is owed across the board, none of this would be possible without Russell’s directorial vision. His handling of actors, juggling of tone, and navigation of theme is so smartly. If I’ve focused too exclusively on how I Heart Huckabees handles its philosophical leanings, its aim is just as sharp with how the game of hypocritical corporate bullshittery is played, how easy it is for lefty activists to get suckered by that game, and how quick they are to fracture without unity of approach even with unity of message. These ideas are able to fully inform its central themes as embodied by the character’s arcs, allowing them to be shaped by their careers and social standing rather than limply hanging off the central storyline. Russell is able to shape all of this without letting his control get in the way or become the actual focus of the film. Huckabees thrives on its looseness and spontaneity, and Russell is able to keep an unfathomable number of elements in play while making them as different as they need to be to rub against each other even as they’re all completely in sync with the overall tone of the picture.

So what does one walk away from when they finish watching I Heart Huckabees? Well, there’s the almost endless barrage of stellar performances, working magnificently with the heady and hilarious ambitions of a writer/director who’s able to balance the zany and the sincere without undermining any of the concepts that the film is contemplating, all while playing the whole thing as completely effortless amidst so many disparate yet magically cohesive parts moving together. Maybe you walk away with news ideas about life, if not new ideas about filmmaking. Maybe you go out and buy a big rubber ball or a human-sized gym bag. Maybe you wonder why there aren’t more films that are able to sustain such a bizarre premise through such an astonishingly light touch and with this much energy coursing through every last second of it. It’s a movie that makes you think about any number of things, sure to provoke any number of responses from the oddball behavior and hardcore debates about the meaning of all things, so get in touch with yourself and the universe to see what you thought of it. Or, yourself. Or, the concept of how no being can view anything outside the prism of their own relationship to it. Or, just have a good time. That’d be good too.