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innuendostudios · 5 years

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Thoughts on The Witness

[no spoilers... this game would be nearly impossible to spoil in text]

Where do I even start?

I guess one thing to know about The Witness is that you can watch the famous 9-minute tracking shot from Nostalghia - where Oleg Yankovsky tries to walk a candle from one end of a drained pool to the other without extinguishing it - in its entirety. (I think it’s the entirety, I left before the clip was over; yeah, Jon, I get it.)

How do we interpret this? I haven’t watched Nostalghia, but I know that scene. Every film major knows that scene. Tony Zhou cited it in discussing lateral tracking shots, how they emphasize environment and create emotional distance from humans in the frame, and how Tarkovsky uses this to make the sequence lonely and arduous. Kyle Kallgren cited it in discussing how YouTube makes critique of certain types of art difficult, and Content ID essentially decides for us what film as a medium is even for.

Jon Blow plays the clip in full with no commentary - or, rather, the game itself is the commentary. There’s a sequence in Indie Game: The Movie where Jon Blow expresses some pain about how his game Braid was received, how he felt no one who played it ever really understood everything he was trying to say with it. That feeling might be ameliorated if he weren’t such a constituionally obtuse motherfucker.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between Yankovsky’s dedication to a task that is simple yet difficult and the game’s puzzles, built, as they are, around complexity-through-simplicity. Except, Yankovsky’s Andrei has a personal investment carrying this candle, one Tarkovsky has spent the entire film setting up. I was about five hours into The Witness when I found this clip - more than twice the duration of Nostalghia - and I still didn’t know why I was solving the game’s puzzles or what they were trying to communicate.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between the patience it encourages in its audience and the calm, meditative mode all The Witness’ allusions to Buddhism are seemingly on about, to give yourself over to the time investment the game demands of you. Except, Nostalghia asks you to spend nine minutes thinking about one thing; zen Buddhism encourages you to think of nothing; The Witness asks you to spend between fifteen and forty hours thinking about a zillion things. It is not a game about clearing your mind, it’s about filling your mind up. There is little continuity between the thoughtless peace of meditation or Yankovsky’s emotional collapse and the game’s intended “aha” moments.

But the ambiguity, the contextlessness of the scene’s inclusion, means you can’t be sure whether it’s contradictory. If we assume it’s about dedication, and we find a flaw in that worldview, maybe the problem is that we didn’t assume it was about meditation. And vice versa. If it fails to communicate, maybe the problem is us.

The only thing this scene communicates for sure is that Jon Blow wants me to know he watches Tarkovsky.

Jon Blow wants you to trust he knows what he’s doing. That the game is saying something. He also never, ever wants to tell you what it is. (If he could just tell you, he wouldn’t have spent eight years making it into a game, I suppose.) But this operates on completely opposite rules to the puzzles. Puzzles in The Witness are maze-drawing panels with increasing numbers of rules, all conveying their rules nonverbally, through gameplay. You see a symbol you don’t recognize, or a shape you don’t know how to draw, and you try things out, you make assumptions, you fail repeatedly, and then something works, the panel lights up, and you know you got it right. Now you understand what the symbol means.

The theming doesn’t work that way. Whatever theory you have as to what the game’s about, there will be no moment of clarification. Blow has an incredible talent, in fact, for constructing imagery that is hilariously blunt yet still ambiguous. As with Braid, where he crammed a straightforward narrative about memory and regret with allusions to quantum physics and the atomic bomb, The Witness references Einstein, the Buddha, Richard Feynman, romantic poetry, tech culture, game design, and - most of all - itself.

I realize I’m dancing around the subject here, because what the gameplay is (or isn’t) in service of is far easier to talk about than the gameplay itself. The Witness is a big island full of touch screens where you draw lines on grids. That’s it. The island is dense with structures and biomes, impossibly having a desert, a swamp, and three different kinds of forest which appear to be in four different seasons. What it doesn’t have is any reason why you’re there or a justification for solving ~600 line-drawing puzzles other than because Jon Blow wants you to. I was wrong in my video from 2015 to call The Witness narrative-based; the game contains narrative but it is not a narrative game. The island is very pretty, meticulously crafted, and not trying in the slightest to look like a real place. It is Myst minus everything people like about Myst.

Absent a reason for my character - if I’m even playing a “character” - to solve the puzzles, why am I, the player, solving them? The short answer is, “Because they’re there. You knew what you were buying. You solve the puzzles because it’s a puzzle game, do I gotta draw you a diagram?” (No, you need me to draw 600 diagrams.) That is unsatisfactory because the island is clearly more than an elaborate menu system.

Do I solve them because they’re interesting? I mean, they’re not bad, if you’re into Sudoku or, like... cereal boxes. In and of themselves, they’re not my cuppa. People told me about a repeated sense of epiphany the game provoked for them, but that’s not the way I experienced it. Every puzzle is so carefully tutorialized that I never felt I was making an intuitive leap. There is no lateral thinking in The Witness, it is strictly longitudinal. You get a row of puzzle panels, and you take them one by one (you are, in fact, prevented from jumping ahead), each one building on what it taught you. And they get hard, certainly, but each is the logical progression of the one before. And each is a marvel of nonverbal communication, but that’s more Jon being clever than it is me. This is not to judge people who did get a feeling of discovery; one person’s “aha” moment is another’s “yeah, Jon, I get it.”

(Aside: I did get a proper “aha” moment when I came to a panel that could be solved two ways. It controlled a moving platform; draw one line, the platform moves right, draw the other and it moves left. And I thought, “Huh, I guess I get it, but those shapes seem kind of arbitrary.” But then, while it was moving, I realized the platform itself mirrored what I had drawn; the two designs were what shape the platform would take when connected with each endpoint! And I went “oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s clever, that‘s really clever.” My first epiphany. It was the most Myst-like the game got, it was clearly not the kind of experience Jon Blow was interested in recreating much, and it took place 7 hours in.)

Do I solve them because I’m compelled? In the first play sessions, I asked myself several times, “Do I even like this?” The game is often tedious and frustrating and I regularly muttered “fuck off, Jon.” But I kept playing. I got annoyed when people interrupted me. I got a hideous case of Tetris effect. They’re not the kind of puzzles you can spend the day thinking through, like you would with Myst or Riven; they’re too abstract to visualize without them right in front of you. And the world is pretty but it’s not a place I wish I could visit, like I would with, again, Myst or Riven. But I kept going back. I solved puzzles less because I found pleasure in finishing them than I found displeasure in them being unfinished. Jon Blow has given talks on how game design focused on being “addictive” is basically evil - his word, not mine. And yet... it felt more like I was playing his game because I was hooked than because I was enjoying myself.

Do I solve them because I trust Jon Blow? Because I believe this will all amount to something? Jon certainly expects me to trust him. The game blares PROFUNDITY AHEAD constantly. (I remind you it quotes the Buddha.) But, in the years since Braid, I have grown less impressed with Jon Blow’s “art game genius” shtick. One fun bit about playing The Witness so late is finally reading all the discourse, and, well before finishing the game, I had read the thoughts of Andrew Plotkin, and Liz Ryerson, and Andi McClure - all of whom are brilliant - so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. What’s surprised me is, having gotten to the first ending - not the secret ending - what the game is up to still isn’t clear. There are enough allusions to heady ideas that you can infer some stuff, but the default ending - while pretty enough - adds nothing and reveals nothing. And getting the True Ending means completing the In the Hall of the Mountain King section, something many will never find and precious few will ever complete. (Debating whether I’m going to even try.) If Jon Blow wants you to trust that he’s going somewhere with this, he makes you wait a long time before finding out if it’s worth it. [EDIT: turns out the secret ending comes after a different set of obscure puzzles than Hall of the Mountain King.]

Which leads me back to my original conclusion: I am solving the puzzles because Jon Blow told me to.

I suspect the arc Jon wants is for me to begin solving puzzles because I want to know what they’re in service of, what point Jon is trying to make, and then spend so long on them that I forget about the destination and just wrap myself up in the work, and, after dozens of hours on the hardest of the hard puzzles, Jon will finally reveal that the point he was making was about the labor I have just done. That he couldn’t tell me what it was for until I’d already done it. That the labor was its own reward. And how much you like The Witness is going to depend on whether or not you feel ripped off.

The overall impression The Witness left me with was less of meditation than discipline. (I have joked that playing The Witness feels like being in a D/s relationship with Jon Blow and not knowing the safe word.) Jon presents a simple concept and then expects you to solve every. single. permutation. of that concept. You do the work to find out what it’s about, and then what it’s about is the work. That game is about itself. The subject of The Witness is solving The Witness. It’s about purity of design, about simplicity, about slowly mastering a set of skills. (That these skills are neither inherently pleasurable to perform nor applicable in any other context seems not to matter; the point is, you learned them.) It’s hard not to read a game fixated on the beauty of its own design as all kinds of smug.

I allowed myself to be spoiled on the True Ending, and it seems, in the eleventh hour, if you draw lines til your fingers bleed, the game makes room for self-critique, questioning whether all this dedication to design actually is, in any way, meaningful or useful to us. Which, just a little bit, smacks of an artist spending two years making a sculpture of himself, chiseled to make him look a perfect Olympian beauty, only to label it “EGOISM.” Ooo. Make you think.

I suspect, in the end, I played it to (partial) completion because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily buy Jon Blow’s hype, but his hype is intriguing. As a portrait of a certain mindset, a monomaniacal obsession with design for design’s sake, the folk-religion of salvation through technology, and the critique of same, it is fascinating. I know people - smart people - who genuinely love this game, and, if the above is any indication, I clearly love talking about it. I have no regrets.

But, word of advice: if you don’t a) love the puzzles, or b) love the discourse, just walk away. Everything will be fine.

#capsule review #Adventure Games #the witness

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

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The Lexicon Issue: A Retrospective

by Dan H

Tuesday, 15 March 2011Dan is up to date as ever~So a little while ago a concerned citizen popped up to say that they (I'd say she from the LJ handle but one doesn't like to presume) felt they should tell me that they had “laughed so hard at my cluelessness” in this article. She/he also kindly provided me with some links to discussions of the case, which I duly read and from which I was forced to conclude that, in the language of this commenter “cluelessness” means “being broadly correct about everything.”

What I objected to at the time was the fact that Rowling's objections were stupid and irrelevant, and people who have a better understanding of the law seemed to agree. There's a rather good list

here

of the various points people brought up at the trial, conveniently broken down into “stuff that is legally relavent” and “stuff that isn't”. You might notice that high up on the list of things that aren't relevant is “how lazy, sloppy or inaccurate JKR considers the Lexicon to be”.

Now this is mostly water under the bridge, the verdict is in – although it's possible there's appeals going on. A lot of people had good reasons to think that the court's rulings were a bit shonky in places (several people with actual law degrees were confused by the fact that the court ruled that the Lexicon wasn't a derivative work) but to be honest I think it all came out right in the wash – some decent analysis

here

sums up the key points pretty well and what it boils down to is “the Lexicon copied too much.”

Ironically, the Lexicon was – as the judge observed – a victim of its own enthusiasm. The basic concept was legitimate but it used too much original language (a good example from one blog is describing the sounds made by the “clankers” - the things that scare away the blind dragon in Deathly Hallows – as “like tiny hammers on anvils”). If Vander Ark had been more willing to mess with the Holy Writ, he'd probably have been absolutely fine.

But mostly, what I want to talk about here is copyright law, because I think it's kinda cool, and I'm kind of on a roll here with articles about stuff I know jack shit about.

Derivative Works

One of the most peculiar things about the Lexicon ruling was that it held that the lexicon was not a derivative work. The basis for this is rather obscure, but it seemed to be that a compilation of information about a work was considered sufficiently transformative that it was not considered a derivative work. This seems reasonable to me, but also seems to conflict with US legal precedent (specifically with

Castle Rock vs Carol Publishing

in which a Seinfeld trivia book was ruled to constitute a derivative work, and therefore to be in violation of copyright).

I suspect that this basically comes down to that old aphorism about laws and sausages. The definition of a derivative work is unclear (and the definition of fair use even more so). The strongest interpretation seems to be that even making reference to copyrighted material makes a work derivative – this seems peculiar to me, unless you're going to argue that “derivative” means “contingent upon the existence of”. This seems to be the logic that held sway in Castle Rock - the court ruled that the “fictional facts” of Seinfeld were protected by copyright. This is a peculiar idea in and of itself and one to which I will return shortly.

Of course the weakest definition of a derivative work – a direct adaptation to another medium – is also unsatisfying. Intuitively, it seems reasonable that fanfiction, for example, be considered derivative (in the legal as well as the literary sense), and certainly few people would dispute the fact that only JK Rowling has the right to produce an eighth Harry Potter book.

Where this becomes problematic is that “derivative work” is actually an extremely powerful term in copyright law. Authors are assumed to have an absolute monopoly on derivative works. This is a big deal – monopolies are generally a bad thing and it's relatively rare for them to be protected by law. Given the stakes, it's entirely predictable that while one court feels that Castle Rock Entertainment has the right to control the production of Seinfeld trivia books, another feels that JK Rowling does not have the general right to control books of information about her fictional world. It's a murky area of law and one with no clear right answers. Most people would – I think – accept that JK Rowling has the right to decide who can make movies out of her books (although Derek Bambauer argues

here

that she shouldn't – at least from an economic perspective) but I suspect most people would also accept that she has no right to decide what people write about her books.

Fictional Facts

One of the strangest aspects of US copyright law I dug up in my recent trawling through the intarwebs was the notion of “fictional facts” - this was a key element in the Castle Rock case, in which it was ruled that authors (or in this case entertainment companies) do retain copyright over matters of fact in their fictional worlds.

I have a policy when it comes to matters of law, which is to assume that if it looks like the law is made of stupid that it's probably covering up something else which is even more made of stupid.

Because on the face of it, the idea of “fictional facts” seems – well it seems pretty made of stupid.

We'll leave aside for now the fact that it's an oxymoron of the highest order, and focus on the weird implications. If I'm understanding the precedent correctly, the statement “Harry Potter is a Wizard” (or for that matter “Dumbledore is Gay”) is protected by copyright, due to its being a “fictional fact” created by JK Rowling. Now most uses of that statement will wind up being protected under fair use but it still seems to be based on the principle that authors (at least in theory) have the right to control information about the contents of their books, which seems perverse.

I don't want to go too far into slippery slope arguments here, but it does strike me that treating “facts” as copyrightable puts spoilers in a difficult legal position. I don't actually think that anybody will ever get sued for spoilering, or that any court in the land would uphold an anti-spoilering case on copyright grounds, but by a strict application of logic, spoilering looks a lot like it breaches copyright. A spoiler consists of the repetition of a fictional fact (which is copyrightable material), the act of spoilering cannot be said to have transformative value (indeed many argue that spoilers detract from the value of the original work), and a case can be made that spoilers directly compete with the author's original product (insofar as a person could, quite reasonably, decide not to read a book or see a film as a result of having been spoilered for it). A sign bearing the legend “Snape Kills Dumbledore” is, in essence, a derivative work which – since it consists only of copyrighted material repeated without commentary – may not be protected by fair use.

Again I should clarify that I don't necessarily think this is a problem. In America at least, a Snape-Kills-Dumbledore sign would be protected by freedom of expression, and the constitution trumps copyright last time I checked, but it does highlight some of the weirder implications of this idea of “fictional facts”. I also suspect that the distinction between a “fictional fact” and a – for want of a better term - “factual fact” is a narrow one. Part of the reason that the Castle Rock ruling went against the defendants seemed to be that their Trivia book had focused exclusively on episode content and not on questions about (for example) the cast or sets – such questions would clearly have been matters of factual fact and not protected by copyright. So perhaps what it boils down to is that while “Dumbledore is Gay” is a fictional fact protected by copyright, “JK Rowling declared in interview that Dumbledore was gay” is a factual fact and therefore fair game. This seems like a silly distinction, but it probably matters rather a lot.

For a start, people will in fact pay for fictional facts. One of the biggest points against the Lexicon back in 2008 was the fact that it had reproduced a lot of information from Quidditch Through the Ages and – that one about magical beasts the name of which I can't be bothered to look up – both of which were sold primarily as books of fictional information. The fact is that people do like to know More Stuff about fictional realities, and they will pony up real cash to find out More Stuff. The Harry Potter Lexicon does tell the reader a lot of Stuff about the Wizarding World, and much as I hate to admit it, some people really do read novels purely or primarily to acquire facts about a secondary reality (I think these people are culturally moribund, but they seem to exist) so from a certain point of view it does make sense to see the “fictional facts” of the Potterverse as having value and requiring protection.

On top of this, if “fictional facts” are not protected, then it becomes very difficult to see how the law protects authors from things like unauthorised sequels. If “Harry Potter is a Wizard” is not on some level protected by copyright, then it becomes difficult to see why I cannot write a book about a Wizard called Harry Potter with as much impunity as I could write a book about, say Napoleon Bonaparte or Abraham Lincoln. If we accept the (seemingly common sense) idea that the basic facts of fictional settings should be fair game for use and commentary we tacitly allow people to recreate other people's work from whole cloth. If I have unlimited license to refer to the facts of somebody else's creation, then in practice I have unlimited license to reproduce their work (since after all, any text is just information about the content of that text).

All of this leads to a rather difficult situation. Copyrighting facts seems dangerously close to copyrighting ideas (which would be a terrible, terrible precedent), but not copyrighting facts seems dangerously close to not copyrighting anything.

Who is Copyright For Anyway

Copyright is one of those areas of law that everybody thinks they understand but in fact nobody does. Intuitively we all get it. You create something, it's yours and you get to control it. A lot of people take this as a kind of moral axiom: these are the people who literally believe that JKR has the right to call the shots in all things Potter related, be it the production of reference guides, Dumbledore's sexuality, or whether or not Snape was redeemed. This is the “it's her world, we're just playing in it” doctrine.

The thing is that this is a naïve approach to the law. We can't just say “playing with other people's toys is naughty, so ban it”. Copyright exists for quite important economic reasons and, contrary to popular belief, those reasons have comparatively little to do with stopping people from bootlegging stuff.

Copyright is generally considered necessary because in a perfectly competitive marketplace, the price of any good tends towards its marginal cost of production, the price of creating one more unit. As long as you can sell a unit of a good for more than you spent to make it, you should and somebody will. This works great for bananas, coffee tables, bricks and door handles, but it doesn't work so great for books, music and video games. The marginal cost of producing a copy of a book is very small indeed (and the marginal cost of producing a copy of an ebook is effectively zero). If authors were not allowed a monopoly over their work, they wouldn't be able to sell it, because any price they could sell it for, somebody else could sell it cheaper.

Just to be clear here, this very much isn't about piracy. Piracy is a crime (well actually it's probably a tort, but let's not split hairs here) and crimes, sort of by definition aren't prevented by the law. Copyright doesn't stop people illegally reproducing copyrighted material because, well duh. FACT and its associated bodies would have you believe that Copyright Is Good because it Protects Authors from Bad People. This is stuff and nonsense. Copyright is good because it protects publishers from other, better funded publishers.

Consider: you are Bloomsbury, on the verge of bankruptcy you discover a promising children's author by the name of Rowling. These books get inexplicably popular. You celebrate.

Consider: You are every other publishing company in the world. You notice that Ms Rowling's books are getting extremely popular, you also notice that Bloomsbury, having paid the author an advance, paid the salaries of editors and proofreaders, hired cover artists and so on, has incurred a great many costs which you can avoid, simply by taking their product and reproducing it (using the resources which, as a large and established publishing company, you most certainly possess). The resulting competition drives down prices, which is fine for you but not so great for the company that has paid the substantial setup costs. Every other publisher in the world makes a tidy profit, Bloomsbury goes bust.

Worse, nobody wants to pick up the option on the next book in the series, because everybody knows that their competitors can sell flawless copies of the book more cheaply than they themselves can afford to sell them. Even if JK Rowling wanted to sell her next book, nobody would buy it, because everybody would know that whoever published first would incur large costs for little reward (this is true even given the substantial first-day sales for popular books, many ordinary customers would rather wait a couple of weeks and pay half the price).

Conventional publishing and distribution models are founded on the notion of copyright. The problem is not, as many assume, that people wouldn't write books if they weren't sure they'd make a lot of money from it. Thousands, probably millions of people are working on novels right now with no guarantee of financial reward. Thousands of people put their work online for free as a matter of course, and an awful lot of people actually pay vanity publishers for the pleasure of seeing their work in print. Copyright isn't there to reassure authors that they'll be paid, it's there to reassure publishers that they'll recoup their losses.

Now of course you can argue that the conventional distribution model for novels and the like is inherently broken because, well take your pick, information should be free, corporations shouldn't tell us what to like, whatever. Speaking personally, though, I actually have a lot of faith in the conventional models of publishing, at least for the mass market. Indie and self-publishing is great for niche materials (the indie-RPG industry, for example, works well because it services a small community and everything it puts out is effectively peer reviewed by the community it serves) but not so great for novels and the like. Anecdotal evidence

here at Ferretbrain

supports the observation that self-published books really are less good than those that are published conventionally.

The public interest is generally served by allowing authors, and by extension publishers, to control distribution of their work. This means that the commercial interests of publishing companies are served by seeking out high quality authors (allowing them exclusive control of a valuable resource) rather than by seeking out more efficient means of distribution (allowing them to better exploit the resources developed by others). It is not so easy to see how the public interest is served by allowing authors to control derivative works, particularly if the term is defined so broadly as to include things like reference guides. Put simply, I do not believe that one single person has ever been dissuaded from writing a novel by the fear that somebody might write a reference guide to it at some point in the future. Nor do I believe that any publisher has ever refused to publish a book on such grounds.

From this perspective, derivative works rights are a lot harder to justify. While it feels intuitively right that you shouldn't be able to make Harry Potter tie-in material without JKR's say-so, it's not immediately clear why: sure it might make her upset, but “it will upset people” is generally not a good reason for legislation. A hard economic argument would say that if there is a market for something, and the production of that thing will not be generally detrimental to the public good, then people should be allowed to make that thing. Ultimately, shouldn't it be up to the Invisible Hand to decide whether – say – a fan-made guide to a fictional setting is worth producing? This might lead to a market inundated with trashy cash-ins, but if there's a market for trashy cash-ins then those cash-ins have real economic value. Of course they might harm the value of the individual property but to my (admittedly limited) understanding, that becomes a trademark rather than a copyright issue (I can't go around putting the coca-cola logo on things, but that isn't because it's copyright, it's because it's a trademark which is a subtly different thing).

This article doesn't really have a conclusion beyond “good lord copyright law is complicated and unintuitive”. I shall end, therefore, by sharing the irrelevant tidbit that “uncopyrightables” is the longest word in the English language which uses all of its letters exactly once.Themes:

J.K. Rowling

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Arthur B

at 15:40 on 2011-03-15

This is indeed an oddity, and to be honest I think it's something that could happily have been avoided. UK law has evaded this by and large by looking at the work done by the producer of a copyright work, and considering how much the person producing the allegedly infringing work is freeloading off that.* In the case of someone writing a book, the effort involved entails

does

entail cooking up a bunch of fictional facts if you're writing fiction or researching a bunch of actual facts if you're writing nonfiction, but the key isn't whether you've replicated the same facts so much as whether you're using someone else's brainstorming or research to make your own job easier.

Two cases which help illustrate the point are Ravenscroft v Herbert and the Da Vinci Code case. In Ravenscroft v Herbert, James Herbert lost because

The Spear

was found to have infringed the copyright on a pseudoscientific book of kook history by Trevor Ravenscroft about the Spear of Longinus, because he took the narrative presented by Ravenscroft in the book and used it as the basis for the background and prologue of his novel. How Ravenscroft came up with his facts (a mixture of conjecture and psychic mediumship, as it turned out) wasn't relevant: the fact was that Ravenscroft had put in all this effort to put together this narrative which he put forward as being nonfictional, and then Herbert had simply taken that narrative and copied it wholesale without attribution or permission to get the basis for his novel.

In the Da Vinci Code case, on the other hand, the guys who wrote

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

sued Dan Brown on a similar basis and lost because they didn't show that Brown was freeloading off their work - the court deciced that he wasn't simply taking their narrative and replicating it in the book, but was using those facts and combined them with others (from other sources and of his own invention) to come up with his own work.

The point is that the "fictional facts" - or nonfictional facts - aren't the issue, the issue at stake is the effort that authors put into obtaining/inventing those facts and stringing them together. The Castle Rock guys would have probably lost in the UK too because all they did to make their trivia book was to pick answers out of the scripts and they didn't really put in much in the way of original effort of their own. Rowling can't sue you for making a sign saying "Snape Kills Dumbledore" because the amount of effort it actually took her to come up with that fact is trivial. A sign with extensive quotes from the actual death scene? Now you're talking.**

* This is also relevant to derivative works. If Vander Ark was writing all the text in all the entries in the Lexicon from scratch then it would have been extremely unlikely that Rowling would have been able to make anything stick if she'd sued in the UK. If he directly copy-pasted great swathes of her text, he'd be obviously trying to make a quick buck when she in fact had put in almost all of the work in producing the text in the first place. Obviously there's a big grey area between those extremes, which is why these cases are decided by judges and not machines, but one of the considerations would be how heavily Vander Ark relied on the effort Rowling originally put in. If he wasn't very, very clear about where he was quoting from the original text and where he was making up his own stuff that'd probably also count against him.

** It's actually interesting whether you'd fall down on copyright if you wrote a book about a wizard who happened to be called Harry Potter but who didn't actually have that much in common with the actual Harry aside from the name. Also academic, since Rowling would have a much easier time suing you for "passing off" - because you wouldn't be freeriding on the effort she'd put into establishing her characters and setting so much as you'd be trying to freeride on the reputation she had established surrounding the Harry Potter name.

the constitution trumps copyright last time I checked

Actually, it doesn't.

The Constitution in article 1, section 8 empowers Congress to, amongst a whole lot of other things, "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Granted, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and of the press too, but both copyright and free speech are conceptually enshrined in the Constitution; neither can necessarily trump the other. (Also the "limited Times" bit is getting increasingly laughable...)

In my professional experience the better someone understands the copyright system, the more embarrassed they are by it. At the moment it is a complete shambles.

Also, bravo for coming up with the best explanation of copyright I've ever seen from a non-IP professional. I'll have to kill you to protect the Guild's aura of mystery but I'll keep it painless. :)

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

at 23:41 on 2011-03-15

While it feels intuitively right that you shouldn't be able to make Harry Potter tie-in material without JKR's say-so, it's not immediately clear why

Maybe this is a case where it's more similar to a trademark: too many fictional works set in the Potterverse by people other than Rowling could constitute "brand dilution" or however they explain that. Although I'm trying to remember how it works for fictional characters/locations - you can have a cartoon mouse, but you can't make your own Mickey Mouse movie even if you give him entirely different adventures from his Disney* original, because the totality of the character is copyrighted. Or possibly trademarked. I'm not sure which. *really should remember this since I know I learned it*

*Speaking of the limited times bit "getting increasingly laughable..." Disney really, really doesn't want any of their copyrights to expire. And what a coincidence - copyright duration keeps getting extended, and Mickey is still private domain! This makes it even funnier that someone has made an educational film about copyright and fair use entirely composed of Disney clips:

A Fair(y) Use Tale

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Dan H

at 18:21 on 2011-03-16@Arthur

Actually, it doesn't.

And the ironic thing is, I'm pretty sure I actually knew that. I think it's just that "the constitution trumps copyright" sounded punchier than "the American judicial system is generally pretty strongly invested in the idea of free speech, such that it seems unlikely that they would uphold the precedent that spoilering constitutes a breach of copyright, even though it might be argued to under current legal precedents."

@sunnyskywalker

*Speaking of the limited times bit "getting increasingly laughable..." Disney really, really doesn't want any of their copyrights to expire.

Yeah, so I've observed. It's difficult because I can sort of see that even really old copyrights do definitely have a *value* for Disney - the question is whether it's in the public interest for Disney to retain those copyrights.

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Arthur B

at 18:38 on 2011-03-16

To be fair it is kind of an oddity because the First Amendment says that Congress absolutely isn't allowed to curtail freedom of the press, but then the powers it does invest Congress with to give authors copyright protection can't exactly be exercised or enforced without curtailing freedom of the press. It's almost like the Founding Fathers were fallible human beings who were kind of making it up as they were going along or something.

There is probably precedent law I'm not aware of which settles the contradiction.

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Dan H

at 23:09 on 2011-03-16Presumably a big part of it is that "freedom of the press" is quite hard to define. I mean you could argue that requiring journalists to have any kind of ethical standards at all goes against freedom of the press.

I suppose the thing about it is that "freedom of the press" is all about the government not being able to stop particular stories or ideas from being published, there's a big difference between that, and trying to stop them from being published by *specific people*. I mean it's not censorship for the law to prevent newspapers from publishing articles which have been copied directly from other newspapers.

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

at 17:54 on 2011-03-17I guess that goes back to the debate over whether stopping people from shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater is not really restricting freedom of speech in some technical sense, or whether it is but it's an okay kind of restriction. If one newspaper copies another's articles verbatim, then stopping them doesn't actually kill the articles - they're still out there in the original publication. And sense it wasn't the copier's speech in the first place, their speech isn't being restricted. Or something.

One of the complicating factors with Disney is the person vs. corporation issue. It's much easier to see how an author benefits from a copyright which lasts for a certain percentage of his or her lifetime (or, if it's "life plus x years," the family can pay funeral costs, I suppose). Since individuals have limited lifespans, it's easier to grasp what might be a reasonable limit for copyright. It's a lot less clear when the copyright holder is a corporation which could exist indefinitely, other than "well, it would be better for the public for it to expire... sometime..." Although if they're legally supposed to be treated much like people, then they'll just have to suck up losing their copyright after 120 years max.

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Robinson L

at 15:15 on 2011-06-01

Speaking personally, though, I actually have a lot of faith in the conventional models of publishing, at least for the mass market.

Fair enough Dan, but I don't think much of your reasoning, as evidenced by this article.

Anecdotal evidence here at Ferretbrain supports the observation that self-published books really are less good than those that are published conventionally.

For the purposes of argument, I'll agree self-publishing tends to foster terrible writing a lot more than professional publishing. On the other hand, we've had plenty of evidence here at Ferretbrain that professional publishing also tends to foster terrible writing (check the first theme handle on this article). Professional publishing is less prone to it, but surely we can do better than this.

I'll go one step further. In response to one negative review of “Deathly Hallows” (I think it might've been Mike Smith's recap) somebody posted a link to a guy relating a conversation about editing. Basically, Party A argued that Stephen King's writing has gone to shit in recent years (anecdotal evidence

here at Ferretbrain

supports this observation) and that a good editor could make it much better. Party B rejoins that a good editor isn't going to touch a big name author because they'll rake in the cash anyway, and an editor's meddling might make the author sell less (or might coincide with the author's loss of popularity), or might piss the author off and convince them to take their business elsewhere. So now we have an example of a situation where the professional publishing system as it stands now actively blocks improvement rather than just enabling mediocrity.

Self-publishing obviously is not an improvement, but surely there's another possible system which could do better?

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Dan H

at 15:59 on 2011-06-01

On the other hand, we've had plenty of evidence here at Ferretbrain that professional publishing also tends to foster terrible writing (check the first theme handle on this article). Professional publishing is less prone to it, but surely we can do better than this.

Except that there's actually a world of difference between bad professionally published literature, and bad self-published fiction. Very little professionally published fiction is *actually incompetent* in the way that self-published fiction so often is. J.K. Rowling actually *isn't* that bad a writer - she's written a great many books that I personally dislike, and her writing is often pedestrian, frequenly overwrought and on very rare occasions actively clunky, but it is still genuinely head and shoulders above the vast, vast majority of amateur fiction.

The fact that somebody once said that Steven King had gone downhill and that somebody else suggested that this was because he'd got too big to edit is not evidence of any flaws in the publishing industry.

Once again, I'm very, very leery of any argument which assumes that popular things are only popular because the people who buy them are stupid sheeple. The publishing industry is not broken just because things I don't like are sometimes more popular than things I do like.

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Arthur B

at 16:10 on 2011-06-01@Robinson: If you think another system would work better would you care to propose one? I'd argue that the number of authors who, like King and Rowling, could pretty much dictate terms to their publishers are in fact quite small. And the reason they got that way in the first place was that they gave the reading public what they wanted.

The problem isn't instituting a system which prevents crap books from being published, because you can't, not in a way which isn't totalitarian. The problem, as a reader, is in tracking down books which you personal would enjoy and want to read. The world of professional publication is actually quite good at helping you do that, because publishing houses want to target the books they publish at those sections of the public who'll pay money for them, and even if your particular niche isn't catered to by the major publishing houses there will be niche small press publishers who are more than happy to crank out the sort of book you want. And on top of that, the more widely distributed a book is, the more likely it is that you'll have reviews to use as a guide.

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Robinson L

at 00:00 on 2011-06-02Okay Dan,

that

strikes me as a more compelling argument. I'm not really interested in arguing the the merits of the current publishing industry versus a hypothetical alternative model – I just found your argument as presented in the article rather unconvincing. Thank you for clarifying.

#Ferretbrain #J.K. Rowling #Harry Potter #The Harry Potter Lexicon #Copyright law #Dan H

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berniesrevolution · 7 years

Link

With their huge improvements in special elections across the country, it looks increasingly probable that Democrats will win big in the 2018 midterms, and perhaps take control of both Congress and the presidency in 2020. That raises a logical question: In an ideal world, what should they do?

American society is in dire straits, and things will likely be even worse by the time a Democrat takes office. They will have a brief window to fix multiple screaming policy emergencies, and reform American political institutions to prevent a resurgence of the diseased Republican Party.

Below, I will outline a draft platform that would both accomplish worthy goals and provide political benefits. Since the conventional wisdom on political feasibility and popularity has proved to be highly unreliable of late (see: President Donald J. Trump), I have focused on things that will provide immediate and concrete partisan benefits, while strengthening democratic liberties. The ideas are grouped under three headings: political reform, domestic policy, and foreign policy. Let's get cracking.

Political reform:

Now, Democrats should not cheat like Republicans do. It would be wrong to do a reverse Kris Kobach, and suppress the votes of old white people by making Fox News watchers present 14 different forms of photo ID before they can vote. However, there is nothing wrong with strengthening America's democratic institutions — making it simpler and easier for allAmericans to vote and obtain political representation — in part because it would provide a partisan benefit. To wit:

1. Make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states.

This step would both address the greatest structural violation of democratic liberties in American society and provide the largest tangible partisan benefit to Democrats. D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are quite literally oppressed colonial subjects, taxed without representation.

In D.C.'s case that creates frequent dysfunction and annoyance, but in Puerto Rico's case it is a full-blown emergency. It is obvious that the Republican government's ongoing failure to rebuild the island after it was flattened by Hurricane Maria (much less address its ongoing debt crisis) has a great deal to do with the fact that they have no congressional representation. Instead of futilely appealing to Paul Ryan's nonexistent conscience, actual Puerto Rican senators and representatives could vote, grab the ear of national media, trade favors, argue with other national politicians, and credibly threaten to gum up the wheels of Congress if their state was not fixed. (In other words, they would have power.)

2. Abolish the filibuster.

Many big and controversial bills will need to be passed very quickly. Democrats cannot afford the swing vote in the Senate to be some quisling Blue Dog in the pocket of Wall Street, as Joe "The ObamaCare Hamstringer" Lieberman was in 2009-10. This should be done at the earliest possible moment.

3. Resurrect and strengthen the Voting Rights Act.

Republican vote suppression and district boundary cheating has become their ace in the political hole, hugely enabled by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Roberts' decision struck down the preclearance portion of the VRA — which forbade certain jurisdictions from making any changes to their voting procedure without first getting federal certification that they would not disenfranchise minorities — on the grounds that Jim Crow was a long time ago and so it was an unfair burden. That obstacle removed, Republicans immediately set about disenfranchising as many minorities as possible.

Roberts' "reasoning" was obviously 100 percent partisan pretext. But one solution that fits with his logic is to extend preclearance to the entire country. In keeping with Article Four, Section Four, an inalienable right to vote for all citizens and legal residents should be established, including for ex-cons and current prisoners, and all jurisdictions should be required to submit a plan to the federal government ensuring easy and universal access to the franchise. (This can be made easier by establishing a federal template for all levels of government, which would include universal mail-in voting, if people would rather not bother.) Any changes will have to be pre-cleared. Election Day itself should also be moved to a Friday and made a national holiday.

Incidentally, this will have the salutary effect of sharply improving the voting rights in many blue states like New York, where the corrupt Democratic regime is none too eager to have millions of poor people casting ballots.

Finally, as part of the voting rights package, both national and state-level district boundaries should be taken out of the hands of partisan legislatures, and put under control of nonpartisan committees required to draw maps which produce a legislature whose partisan composition at least approximates the raw vote totals.

All this aligns high moral principle with grubby partisan motives. It would mean probably four more Democratic senators and several representatives, and sharply improve Democratic prospects in several states with preposterously unfair gerrymandering or where a huge proportion of minorities have been permanently disenfranchised. However, that is no reason to get squeamish about it. On the contrary, the likeliest way that D.C. residents and Puerto Ricans are going to get their freedom, and the effectively tyrannical aspects of many American political institutions are going to be expunged, is if it can be successfully clubbed into the heads of the Democratic leadership that it is in their partisan interest to do so.

Domestic policy:

1. Climate change.

This is one area where politics absolutely must take a back seat to principle. If Democrats believe what they're saying about climate science, and they accumulate some political capital with the above program, this is where it must be spent first. As I've argued before, this is by far the most important problem facing American society, because it is a serious emergency that will require a top-to-bottom overhaul of society. Trump's climate denier presidency almost could not have come at a worse time. The next administration will have to cut emissions as fast as it possibly can, both to slow climate change and to avoid the risk of tripping feedback loops that could push warming into an uncontrollable self-sustaining spiral.

People can and do argue all day about precisely the best way forward on climate, but one simple way of thinking about it is to take what China is doing with decarbonization, energy efficiency, and renewables, and aim to beat them by 50 percent. That both gets in the right ballpark of what needs to happen (China's climate policy is extremely aggressive, though still not good enough), and indicates the international nature of the issue. Such a "competition" — in reality, a mutually-beneficial international coordination — would be both excellent policy and a worthy national project. If we're lucky, it might even inspire China to up their game even more as well.

2. Health-care reform.

This has been the main policy axis of mobilization for lefties during the Trump presidency, and it's not hard to see why. The ObamaCare policy approach has proved to be a massive headache with multiple pitfalls and unforeseen consequences. Its political bargain — that a more conservative, free-market road to universal coverage would be more politically stable — turned out to be wrong. Though Republicans have not managed to repeal the law outright, it is suffering major damagewith the repeal of the individual mandate and regulatory attacks. Tellingly, the market-oriented part of the law — the individual exchanges — are doing the worst.

Democrats should aim for something like an upgraded Medicare-for-all system, with complete medical coverage and no cost-sharing. It both makes the best policy sense and has steadily increased in popularity. What precisely that should look like is not to be hashed out now — the Sanders and Ellison bills and the "Medicare Extra" plan from the Center for American Progress are reasonable — but the best direction to head is obvious: away from markets, and towards traditional social insurance.

Doing so would both address an ongoing humanitarian crisis and deliver a major win to Democratic base voters who have been advocating for this for generations. Moreover, after the dust settles most people would be immensely relieved by being permanently placed on a high-quality Medicare-type system. Democrats should have the confidence to ignore the lobbyists and simply ram through as good a bill as possible.

3. Family policy.

The structure of American society is deeply hostile to parents even very far up into the upper class. Paid family and sick leave, a child allowance, universal pre-K, and some kind of universal daycare would go a great deal towards ensuring parents don't have a near-impossible struggle between raising their children and being forced to go back to work. This would further advance the U.S. welfare state and deliver meaningful goods to an important Democratic voting bloc: young people.

And while one can't say for sure what people would think about this, the fact that the United States is literally one of two countries in the world (the other being Papua New Guinea) without paid family leave shows you how much of an outlier we are on this. Like Medicare for all, once they figured out how great it is, people would love a family benefits package.

4. Sharp tax increases on the rich and corporations.

It's not immediately obvious that this would be a win in terms of public opinion, though polls do consistently find a large majority of people saying the rich pay too little in taxes. But it would help pay for Democratic priorities, and may well end up strengthening growth by diverting money away from shareholders and executives, and towards workers and investment. And in tangible political terms, it would definitely take money out of the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, who spend ungodly sums subsidizing right-wing propaganda and dirty tricks operations.

5. Labor law reform.

Again public opinion is muddled on this one, since unions barely exist throughout much of the country. But passing a pro-union legal package — by, for example, banning so-called "right-to-work" laws at the national level, passing card check, or, most aggressively, mandating what's called sectoral bargaining to unionize whole swathes of the economy at a stroke — would benefit workers and raise wages.

It would also directly benefit Democrats, as newly-revitalized unions saw their power, money, and influence grow by leaps and bounds. They would surely direct their votes and campaign donations to the party that secured those benefits, as they did in FDR's time.

6. Antitrust and other corporate regulation.

Concentration is a grave problem in the American economy, where a handful of businesses have rolled up control over everything from computer chips to chicken. Breaking up these business will both provide more options for consumers, push economic activity into places other than a handful of very large cities, and help workers, who face labor market monopsony and hence lower wages. That could assist the genuinely left-behind Americans in rural areas and smaller towns Trump championed in his campaign but utterly failed to help as president.

Wall Street should come under special attention. The biggest banks should be broken up, and heavy new regulations, deliberately designed to keep financial businesses small and less profitable, should be levied. In contrast to Dodd-Frank, these should be simple and difficult to avoid, not complicated and take years to implement. This would benefit not just the actually productive parts of the economy, from which much financial profit is parasitically extracted, but also sharply reduce the risk of another global financial crisis.

Politically, antitrust and financial regulation would knock out one prop of reactionary politics. As we've seen in President Trump's Cabinet, Wall Street has been eager and willing to help along a truly vile president, so long as it get its tax cuts. Cutting finance's share of GDP by half would considerably reduce the amount they could dedicate to electing the next future conservative lunatic.

Meanwhile, vigorous antitrust in the media space, coupled to regulation of platforms like Facebook and YouTube, will also help break the influence of deep-pocketed right-wing propaganda. Restrictions on the number of TV or radio stations any one entity can own will further prevent reactionary businessmen pushing pro-Trump propaganda throughout the nation. It would not completely disable the grifting machine that is eating the Republican Party alive, but it would help quite a bit.

Foreign policy:

1. Defense spending cuts.

The easiest step to take on foreign policy is to cut the bloat and waste in military spending. Back in 2016, The Washington Post reported that a study commissioned by the Pentagon itself had found $25 billion per year in pure administrative waste at the Defense Department, which it then suppressed due to fear of budget cuts. Even if that's overstated, there is still the psychotically expensive and dubiously necessary B-21 heavy bomber, the even more expensive and already outdated F-35 fighter jet, the $1 trillion-plus earmarked for new nuclear weapons and upgrades of the existing stockpile, and much more burning through government cash for little or no benefit. Every big-ticket defense project needs to be examined with acidic skepticism, to see what might be scaled back or canceled outright.

2. Imperial rollback.

Further savings can be found by ending the hundreds of pointless overseas operations throughout the world. U.S. troops should be removed from Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries, Special Forces deployments largely ended, and the enabling of the Saudi war in Yemen should cease immediately. The drunken colonialism of the so-called War on Terror must end.

All this would free up immense resources for Democrats' other policy priorities. Just the $80 billion military spending increase passed in 2017 would more than pay for free tuition at every public college across the country. Returning to a pre-Iraq War spending level (if anything, a modest ask) would free up another roughly $200 billion per year.

And far from harming national security, it would probably help. At a minimum, it would remove U.S. troops from several places where they are inflaming violent anti-American extremism. And forcing the Pentagon to economize might actually get them to focus on genuine needs rather than expensive, useless toys.

(Continue Reading)

An incomplete blueprint for a progressive landslide.

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lurkingcrow · 7 years

Note

Obi-wan shaves the beard... and no one can recognise him. Later once people finally figure out who that clean shaven, auburn haired Jedi is they continue it as part of some elaborate joke, Obi-wan doesn't know wether or not to be amused or annoyed.

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thetygre · 7 years

Text

Dark Souls Lore Ramblings #5

Well, fuck. Given that I’ve said ‘I’ll talk about it later’ in every other of my Dark Souls ramblings, let’s talk about it now.

Magic!

So way back in Demon’s Souls, magic was kind of a big deal. I’d go so far as to say that it was even one of the driving parts of the game’s narrative. @soulsmusings could probably tell you more about it, but the crux is that God (a real one, singular, with a capital G) granted humanity magic in the form of a giant world tree. Magic derived from the soul, and the soul derived from cognition. So when people started abusing magic and acting like butts, the giant world tree turned into the Old One and started making demons and devouring the world. A deist God’s fail-safe against sin.

One of the signs of the end times in DeS is that priests can cast miracles again, which as they take as a sign from God. At the same time, sorcery and witchcraft are making a comeback, which is viewed as a sign of demonic corruption. The truth, of course, is that all of it is the same magic coming from the Old One. Big revelation. Requires you to kill a good NPC to get it. Totally worth it. Nets you one of the best items in the game.

Since in Dark Souls the soul proper is split between the Soul as animating energy and Humanity/whatever as cognition, there’s obviously some differences. But I still think there’s still some similarities too; all magic is magic. It’s not different kinds of energy, but the same eldritch force being manipulated different ways. Magic’s ‘material’ is Soul, the energy of life, and can be performed by anything with Soul.

The exact process works like this from how I see it. The caster’s intelligence or faith is the initiating force in their being for magic. It not only starts the process of magic, but how it is to be formed specifically. Maybe the caster says a prayer, maybe they conjure a spell. However they do it, this recitation draws on the caster’s Soul to produce the energy needed to actually perform the magic. Finally, this internal process is directed to the external world through a focus.

I imagine that focuses are necessary so that the caster’s own body doesn’t act as the focus. That could lead to all sorts of nasty effects; head explodes Scanners style, spontaneous combustion, nasty mutations. All kinds of gnarly Warhammer shit. (It’d be freaking sweet.)

The most common form of magic is (arguably) sorcery. Sorcery draws on and projects the caster’s own Soul energy, plain and simple. It’s based on Intelligence, which I take to mean that spells are based in reciting rituals, formulas, magic words, all that stuff. There’s definitely a Vancian element to all the spellcasting in Dark Souls (which makes me miss the mana bar from DeS) i.e. the caster prepares their spells beforehand like bullets in a chamber. When the caster runs out, that’s that; they have to rest before they can ‘reload’. It’s the classic magic system from Dungeons and Dragons. (And by ‘classic’, I mean ‘nearly everyone hates it’.) Anyway, what this has to do with Intelligence is presumably a connection between memory capacity for spells and the ability to comprehend just exactly what the magic is doing and how it works in the universe.

Seath is credited as being the creator of sorcery in Lordran. I’m assuming that doesn’t mean he created magic itself, but rather that he was the first being to come up with the formulae and methods of sorcery and, more importantly, that he taught it to humans. Kind of reminds me of those old myths about fallen angels who taught humans about make-up and astrology and everything else. Seath gets remembered in a big way since the Dragon School of Vinheim is the Souls’ world’s number one prestidigitation destination. Dragon School’s sorcery is focused mostly on practical uses, like offense and defense. Of course other schools have other specialties; Oolacile focused on illusions and mind-tricks, for instance. I get the feeling that Vinheim doesn’t really allow much room for other schools by the time Dark Souls rolls around. They’ve become kind of THE authority on magic, and anyone outside of them is looked down upon.

The focus of sorcery is the catalyst. It’s a wand, it’s a staff, it’s whatever. I can’t really add much that doesn’t exam each catalyst item-by-item or gets into the entire history of why wizards and witches use staves and wands. But for basic, universal magic-users, the catalyst is the perfect item for channeling energy and acting as a focus.

Dark/Abyssal magic is where things to start to get interesting. Like I talked about when I talked about the Dark, dark magic has a tangible, physical force to it. It isn’t just energy like soul sorcery, but a worldly material. Even if that material is just the same kind of nebulous half-stuff that the Dark and Humanity are made of, it still packs enough of a wallop to add some extra damage.

Dark magic works by drawing not just on the caster’s soul like regular sorcery, but also their Humanity; hence, it is a school exclusive to humans. The actual process used is a projection of the Jungian shadow or the Freudian id, to use them there fancy academical terms. Dark sorcery is a projection of malice, envy, or desire; the base things that the Dark is made of. By drawing on their own Humanity, the sorcerer is essentially drawing on a piece of the Dark and, therefore, drawing on the Dark as a whole to empower their spells. This begins an interesting trend in magic that we see where casters get their spells not just from their own Soul, but by channeling a Lord Soul. Which brings us to our next topic...

Pyromancy! Or, more precisely, true pyromancy. As you’ll recall from the opening cinematic and the Izalith catalyst description, pyromancy originally began as an extension of sorcery. But why fire in particular? First reason I can think of is that it’s a sign of alliance to the First Flame. Heck, it would make more sense for sorcery to be based off of true pyromancy instead of the other way around, all things considered. Second reason goes back into my theory about channeling Lord souls. If dark magic draws on the Dark Soul, or at least little bits of it, than true pyromancy might have been drawn from the Life Soul, or whatever you want to call the Witch’s Lord Soul.

There’s a morphological debate about what the precise scientific definition about what ‘life’ actually is. One definition states that life is anything with a core temperature, that must consume resources to survive, and is capable of reproduction. The definition was immediately refuted when it was pointed out that, by this criteria, fire is a life form; it certainly has a core temperature, must consume tinder to sustain itself, and is capable of reproducing itself by fission. The point of this little anectdote is to demonstrate that, out of the natural elements, fire is the closest to being its own life-form. So it only makes sense that the Life Soul would produce fire when it is used for magic. Fire is alive (in a sense), and life cannot survive without the things that fire is associated with providing (light, heat, etc.), including on a broader civilized scale.

Whole thing’s rather moot at this point. Witch of Izalith took the Life Soul and true pyromancy with it and sent it all to Hell in a handbasket. Now the Witch, the Life Soul, and true pyromancy are swallowed up by the Flame of Chaos. I have to think that every original true pyromancer was affected by the Flame of Chaos, and only a select few made it out alive without either being burned to crisp, mutated into a demon, or both. Quelaana is, as we know, the founder of all modern pyromancy. And the very nature of a pyromancer’s flame lends it to being spread across the world.

There appear to be different attitudes to pyromancy across the world. In the Great Swamp, pyromancers are looked down on as weird swamp hermits with destructive capabilities. By contrast, in Lordran, even modern pyromancers are still given some respect for carrying on the legacy of Lost Izalith. I have to imagine that Lordran is the exception, not the rule. Outside Lordran, the Dragon School and the Way of White are still the primary organizations for magic, and pyromancers operate outside that organization. The Dragon School might look down on pyromancy as a corruption of ‘true magic’, and the Way of White might even demonize pyromancers as witches or demon worshipers. This is dark fantasy after all, and what’s dark fantasy without a good inquisition?

The pyromancer’s flame is probably the most fascinating out of all the magic foci. It is, in essence, a piece of the Flame of Chaos, a sprite that fissioned off of the corrupted Life Soul. What Humanity is to the Dark Soul, the pyromancer’s flame is to the Life Soul. (More or less.) Like Humanity, it can be grown, split apart again, and distributed even further. Pyromancers literally hand their students a little bit of their own flame as they pass it along. In the process, the flame draws from the pyromancer’s soul and cognition; each flame carries a little bit of whoever is passing it on. Just think; the pyromancer flame you have has a little bit of Quelaana and the Witch of Izalith in it by default, and all the people in between you and them as well.

The sheer potency of the pyromancer’s flame means that it doesn’t need an initiating force like intelligence or faith; it is active on its own volition. It is both the focus, the Lord Soul being drawn on, and the projector itself. True pyromancy was magic that drew on the Life Soul; modern pyromancy is magic projected into a fragment of the Life Soul. Kind of switched around.

That being said, modern pyromancy still draws on environmental sources like true pyromancy might have done. The main place pyromancers come from is the Great Swamp. A swamp, in perspective, is the perfect place for pyromancy, especially if it draws on life. Swamps, especially in dark fantasy, are generally pictured as these stagnant rotting holes filled with mire and decay. The truth is, swamps, from an ecological point of view, are cradles of life, and host an immense variety of species of flora and fauna. When you are in a swamp, you are immediately surrounded by life. Ergo, a swamp is an ideal place for anybody wishing to draw on life energy to fuel their magic.

There’s also the practical advantage of a swamp for pyromancy. Swamps produce gases that naturally ignite; philosophical pyromancers might hope to gain some insight from observing this natural process on how nature produces flame. More importantly, swamps are damp; any accident that happens with a fire in a swamp will be immediately contained. This is in contrast to say, a forest, which is also full of life. But one stray spark in a forest can set the whole thing ablaze. Probably how pyromancers got such a bad rap for themselves outside Lordran.

Finally, there’s miracles. Miracles are supposedly magic powers drawn on from the gods themselves. Given that the term ‘god’ is somewhat nebulous in Dark Souls, it’s hard to figure out what that could actually mean. Maybe miracles are magic that draw on the Light Soul or even the First Flame itself for power? I’m kind of doubtful about this theory; the whole crux of Dark Souls is that the First Flame is dying and Gwyn is portioning out the Light Soul just to keep it alive. He probably wouldn’t want humans endangering it in any way, and the Way of White would have stepped in and quit teaching miracles and rites.

Which leads me to think that this is all like Demon’s Souls again; it’s all magic. Miracles are the same as sorcery, just through different methods. And really, how different are miracles and sorcery? Miracles are generated by the spellcaster reciting stories and psalms in their mind. (Which I actually think is really cool, especially when it’s revealed that weaker miracles are just abridged stories or fragments of them.) But in the end, it’s still memorizing a formulae and drawing on Soul to bring magic into the world. The only notable difference between sorcery and miracles is the nature of spells; miracles focus on healing, divination, and protection. But as we’ve established, different schools of magic focus on different effects. It’s entirely within reason to conclude that the miracles of the Way of White are nothing but another school of sorcery. There are even items that let you trade out what you the caster uses to initiate magic; Velka’s items let a cleric use intelligence for magic, for instance.

The focus for miracles is talismans. Talismans strike me as being a kind of fetish more than anything. When looked at with a certain eye, they look kind of like little dolls, even if it’s just a simple head and body. So the caster might use the talisman as a kind of totem, having it represent themselves as a focus for the miracle they invoke. Sympathetic magic kind of deal. The relative simplicity of talismans means that they are available to all members of the Way of White, from poor lay practitioners to arch-clerics. And that really speaks to how far-reaching the Way of White is across social strata both within Lordran and in the broader world outside of it.

So... I shrugged this off for a while. Anybody want to hear about anything in particular for the next one?

#dark souls #dark souls lore #magic #soulsborne #souls series #dark souls lore ramblings

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gadgetsrevv · 5 years

Text

Why Sergino Dest should represent Netherlands instead of the U.S.

Edwin van der Sar speaks exclusively to ESPN FC about Sergino Dest’s international future.

Oct. 2 was quite a day for Sergino Dest. First, Ajax’s 18-year-old Dutch-American right-back was unexpectedly missing from the U.S. men’s roster announced for the upcoming games against Cuba and Canada. These are competitive matches, in the CONCACAF Nations League, so if Dest had played, he would have been bound to the USMNT rather than the Netherlands for his career. That evening, he played all 90 minutes in Ajax’s 0-3 triumph at Valencia in the Champions League. After the game, he appeared on Dutch TV.

Dutch fans hoped he would announce that he had decided to play for their national team. Instead, he said he hadn’t chosen either country yet. “I still need to think longer about both options … It is a decision I have to make for the rest of my life and I want to handle that carefully.”

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He said he hoped to have a decision by next month. Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach, who had previously found Dest “enthusiastic” about playing for the USMNT, now sounded guarded. “I’ve had conversations with Sergino. The conversations were positive, and the content of these conversations is going to remain private,” Berhalter told the Washington Post.

The cautious conclusion must be that the Netherlands are favorites to win this race. Certainly, they would be the rational choice for Dest. And though it’s far too early to tell, he may prove a prize worth having for the next 15 years.

Dest was born and raised in Almere, a working-class town just outside Amsterdam, with a Dutch mother and a Surinamese-American father from Brooklyn. The first time he set foot in the U.S., on a visit to his dad’s hometown, was in 2014. “At home in Almere we just spoke Dutch,” Dest told the Ajax website. “In fact, a couple of years ago my English was still very mediocre. And I wasn’t thinking about my American roots [until] I started to play in U.S. youth teams. From then on my English improved, and I kept feeling more American. I realised: hey, this is my nationality too. And the U.S. passport is one of the most beautiful in the world.”

Dest had arrived at Ajax from Almere City as a child winger in 2012, and gradually transformed into an attacking right-back. Other Dutch boys’ teams enduring the ritual humiliation at Ajax’s youth complex, De Toekomst in those days, recall him flashing down the touchline, while his teammates queued in the box shouting “Serra,” each begging Dest to grant them the final touch. After every cross, Dest would trot tirelessly back to position and resume his tackling, dribbles and “pannas” (Dutch-Surinamese slang for nutmegs). He was the Everywhere Back, sometimes popping up at center-forward, but for all his activity he made few mistakes, despite being a year younger than his teammates.

Yet the Dutch federation didn’t pick Dest for its national youth teams. “I never got a chance,” he says. The U.S. Soccer Federation pounced after Dutchman Dave van den Bergh, then one of the federation’s youth coaches, heard from Ajax about the boy’s American passport. Dest represented the U.S. in the Under-17 World Cup in 2017 (Ajax didn’t wanted him to go) and excelled in the team’s run to the quarterfinals of this summer’s Under-20 World Cup.

For a long time, Ajax seemed ambivalent about Dest, possibly because although he’s dedicated, he was also rather headstrong. Even last fall, when he was already 18, he looked headed for the exit in Amsterdam. Only in December did Ajax finally come through with a professional contract.

Dest is an aggressive full-back that a high-pressing side like Ajax needs, though his defending remains a work in progress.

This summer, his career took off. After the Under-20 World Cup, Ajax head coach, Erik ten Hag, requested that Dest be given just 10 days holiday. Ten Hag had plans for him. Dest made his first-team debut in late July, and since then has become a regular, usually as a starter.

You can see why, because he is the full-back that a high-pressing modern side needs. Ten Hag says, “A back at Ajax has to be able to function as a midfielder and winger, too. It’s a very dynamic role. We want to introduce a lot of variation into our game, to surprise opponents.”

That’s Dest’s way. He told Amsterdam’s Het Parool newspaper, “I think of myself [as someone who has] a good technique. I don’t get frightened when I get the ball — also not when under pressure, or on the opponents’ half.”

His high-risk game gives Ajax an attacking threat from right-back that they lacked even in their extraordinary last season. “Maybe in the past, when I first got into a higher team, I’d take it easy,” Dest says. “But I’ve stopped doing that. Now I show at once what I can do.”

In Ajax’s opening Champions League game in September, a 3-0 win over Lille, he produced a roulette through two opponents from the full-back position — a showboating move that Ten Hag may not have enjoyed as much as the fans did. Dest also has the good fortune that his partner on Ajax’s right wing is Hakim Ziyech, a world-class player whose continued presence in the humble Dutch league is a mystery.

Dest’s main shortcoming, for now, is that for a defender, he isn’t great at defending. Being the speediest member of Ajax’s back four, he’s essential in snuffing out counter attacks, but he sometimes gets caught out of position. (Ajax’s opening two clean sheets in the Champions League are above all down to keeper Andre Onana, surely headed for a giant club next summer.) Ajax demands that players “defend forward,” that is, charge into challenges to try to win the ball back fast rather than sit back and cover space. Dest has yet to master this difficult art.

The consensus in the Netherlands is that he isn’t ready for Oranje. Still, the Dutch federation knows it has to act fast. In September, Berhalter gave him his debut for the USMNT, starting him against Mexico and Uruguay. But these were non-binding friendly games; Dest retains the option to switch to the Netherlands. The Dutch would like to give him a full cap in a competitive match to claim him for life, then let him mature in the under-21s side.

The Dutch federation still laments missing out on Ziyech, who trained with Oranje in 2015 before choosing Morocco. It’s determined not to make that mistake again. It is focused on recruiting Dest and the possibly even more talented 17-year-old Dutch-Moroccan Mohamed Ihattaren, PSV Eindhoven’s playmaker who is tearing up the Dutch league.

Like the U.S., the Netherlands is short a top-class right-back: PSV’s Denzel Dumfries, who has been filling the role with Oranje, lacks the technique for international level. Netherlands’ coach, Ronald Koeman, and the Dutch FA’s director of “topvoetbal,” Nico-Jan Hoogma, sat down with Dest in September. Hoogma reported afterwards: “You can’t promise someone a first-team place, but you can indicate who their rivals are. Based on our story, Dest has to make a decision.”

Koeman said, “I’m not promising anyone anything, but I indicated to him that I see a future for him with the Dutch team. He decided to take his time. That he hasn’t travelled to the U.S. now shows that the issue isn’t decided for him.”

The Dutch have a good story to tell. Since the U.S. returned to World Cups, in 1990, the Americans have progressed further than Oranje at a tournament only once, in 2002. (Of course, both countries failed to qualify for 2018 in Russia.) Moreover, if Dest chooses the Netherlands, he won’t have to spend his career making disruptive exhausting trips to play second-rate national teams from the CONCACAF region.

On the other hand, Dest has an emotional attachment to the U.S., and the USSF was good to him at youth level when the Dutch FA ignored him. The Americans have a chance. But as battles for binationals become the norm in international soccer, the Dest case ought to be a prompt for the U.S. to ask itself: Why does the tiny fraction of American passport-holders raised in western Europe still produce such a disproportionate share of this giant country’s best players?

Meanwhile, in a joint interview on the Ajax website with the U.S.-Mexican Alex Mendez, who plays for Ajax’s reserves, the conflicted Dest turned to Mendez and asked: “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

These decisions are always in part matters of the heart, but the betting must be that Dest chooses Oranje.

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#Uncategorized #Ajax #Netherlands #Sergino Dest #US Why Sergino Dest should represent Netherlands ins

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carlen374gaming-blog · 5 years

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bobsmasters · 7 years

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Presentation script

[slide 1 project Morpheus] Hello my name is robert spence, and this is my presentation of the Final Major Project.

[slide 2 presentation outline] I will be going over various points in the presentation. The Synopsis, aim of the project, a flythrough the environment, influences, group work, challenges , evaluation, learning over the project, and aims for the future.

[slide 3 synopsis] Originally I had a different idea for the project. To produce a modular asset pack that could be used to create a star ship interior. The point of the pack being that it could be customised to fit different hulls. After sharing this idea with fellow course members and friends, a few professed interest in working on such a project. After that is was a couple of meetings and we had a completely different idea prepared. Group members mentioned wanting to create a whole backstory for the project. This is where we came up with the idea of project Morpheus. A third person game that uses an alien threat and exploration game mechanics, using the alien threat as an inhibitor for exploring. Establishing the genre, story and game mode gave us a good starting point to plan out our respective projects.

[slide 4 Aim and target audience]

One of my goals for this project was to create a portfolio piece that takes into account the learning I have done over the course. Using the skills I have developed and improving on issues brought up in previous projects. Using this learning I would create an explorable environment to show to potential employers. This includes designing, modelling, and texturing each of the assets as well as applying collision, placement and lighting. Limited interactability was a second concern.

[slide 5 the video]

The hydroponics department. The part of the station that handles multiple important functions. Water recycling in the vats, photosynthesis based air recycling, growth of edibles, and research into new strains of plants.

[slide 6 Influences] The industry has a few prominent games that use similar ideas and styles to the ones we were looking to create. Tripple A Games like Alien isolation by creative assembly and Prey by Bethesda both use implacable alien threats in open, explorable environments. We wanted to go more for Preys look and feel, because alien isolation was too much into the horror genre. One of the other main references was the Station in Mass effect andromeda. It has open environments with a clean look. In terms of other media we looked at films like Passengers and The Martian for their visual design. Most of my reference came from artists like Robert hodri, Brian Sum, JB Banks, Tor Frick, Eren Vasquez, and Sungwoo Lee.

[slide 7 Working in a group]

Working in a group was an interesting experience. Part of the reason I wanted to work with people on a project was to experience the good and bad aspects of group work. The other part was to narrow our focus. To work on a similar goal with the restriction of getting our art styles in line with each other. Getting this experience will better prepare me for work in proper teams. I know that our group worked in a vastly different way to how an actual studio works but that dosnt mean to say that the experience wont help. Getting feedback from people trying to achieve the same goal is helpful.

[slide 8 challenges]

Scope was one of the biggest issues we faced. The character artists did well keeping to schedule for their side of the project. It was the three of us environment artists that struggled the most. Setting out to create two versions of the environment was a mistake. We might have been able to keep to schedule if we were experienced artists in a proper work environment. In this case we overestimated our working capability. Something that should have been focused on every few weeks. it was about half way through I realised that it would be challenging if not impossible to get all the features I wanted implemented in time. Talking with team mates and lecturers we agreed that scaling back would be an idea if we did not have time to implement the extras. Focusing on quality over quantity. Some of my problems stemmed from lack of communication. Perhaps if I had revealed that I was struggling early on I could have rescheduled or scaled the scope earlier, avoiding stress that caused more problems.

[slide 9 evaluating criteria]

Time spent…12 weeks. Not including planning. It is hard to gauge what is an appropriate time for creating an environment. Much of it depends on how many assets are needed for the scene, what quality they need to be, and how efficiently they are created. Originally I had estimated 4-5 weeks per environment. With the last couple of weeks reserved for interactability and lighting. Finding out later that artstation environment challenges are given 8 weeks, I might have planned to focus on producing just the one environment. The industry expects artists to be able to optimise their work as much as possible. The less memory an asset or environment uses the more can be put into a game. I think I did quite well in terms of optimisation. A couple of issues were pointed out early. One was the transparent textures in the floors and another was how open the environment was. Due to placement of the assets within the scene I couldn’t wall off many areas. But in terms of the transparent textures a lot of the issues were caused by using boxes rather than planes, doubling the rendering needed through those surfaces. The tanks were also causing an issue for much the same reasons compounded by the fact they had a particle effect inside each of them. One of the key skills for any artist is composition. The main composition itself was sorted in the planning stage but there were minor adjustments to balance everything within the engine.

[slide 10 successful or not?]

The environment is at a quality where I can put it up on my portfolio. Which might note have been the case had I chosen to split my focus. This way I only need to tweak one environment a little for show rather than heavily redoing two. There is more I would like to do but I will talk about that at the end.

[Slide 11 what I took from the project]

Scope and scale are important. So is communication. Not just between team mates but in terms of getting feedback from others. It is also important to take a step back relax and take a look at the greater picture. Too much time was spent in a rut focusing on things that did not matter. I am not a leader. Being able to both focus on my work and on managing others at the same time is not a skill I possess…yet. In terms of the positives I have noticed that I am more likely to read into new 3d techniques and try them out. My general art skills have improved. Texturing, baking, composition, and lighting were things I struggled with more than the modelling but I feel more confident now in what I can do. I have also gotten more comfortable with posting my work up. Not as much as Id like but im getting better.

[slide 12 future plans]

My main focus over the next few weeks will be on the artstation beyond human challenge. I have been putting minimal effort in to get the FMP done. I will also be working on all the projects I posted on my portfolio. Including this one. Improving where needed and culling where necessary. Making the portfolio as strong as possible for job application.

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nico-in-space · 8 years

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Sunny/Bright/Winter/Night

This is an original story of mine that I’m working on. I figured I could post the rough drafts online so I could get probable feedback on them! :) They’ll just escape into the void of Tumblr, so it’s not like it really matters, but I’m putting myself out there anyway, just for the hell of it.

Summary: For each situation, there are at least a hundred different perspectives. Naturally, when the aliens invade Earth, there are a few different perspectives on that event. One is in favor of the operation. It will, in the end, benefit Earth's prosperity, and add more diversity to the already incredibly advanced ecosystem. Another couldn't care less if aliens are invading. She's currently in the process of writing her application for MIT. It's not going so great. Also, she just had a MASSIVE fight with her best friend, who's been unusually grouchy lately. What's up with that? Not that it really matters, at this point. Now, what to study next... One wishes that the aliens would beam her up, as she's feeling lost, alone, and depressed for many, many current reasons. But maybe she's been feeling like that for longer. Another has been trying, fruitlessly, to defend Earth from the eventual capture of its people, but really wishes she had a helping hand in her project. Her co-workers don't seem to understand that a battle cannot be won with only force. You need knowledge, too, which is something she has quite enough of, thank you. How do their stories intertwine? Find out in Sunny/Bright/Winter/Night.

Also cross-posted on Wattpad here! I update there more regularly. :)

CODENAME: AGENT S1143

I sigh, leaning back in my chair. It protests at the action, squeaking unpleasantly, the sound reverberating in the large domed room that my cubicle, along with many others, is situated. I'm done working for the day, finally. It always feels like my work is never-ending, but my job is important, at least in the eyes of the Overseer.

I flex my feet, hearing the joints crack. Us menial workers "run the show," according to the many posters hung up around the satellite base. We are the backbone that run the hypothetical "body" of the Earth Mission #024. At least, that's what the Overseer tells us to make us feel better.

My work consists of an infinite amount of paperwork. Well, fairly recently in terms of history we've gone digital, so it's all computerized work. My older co-workers often complain about the supposed "laziness" of folk my age because we never had to sort physical paperwork like they did. It's really fucking annoying, to be honest. But I digress. My job is basically to scan over the documents which detail, in exactness, the birth of a Human, and all their medical "traits." I run the document through diagnostics to make sure there are no glitches. It's just some debug program, one that I could probably program myself if I had the desire, but I'd probably get in trouble with my Local Leader. As much as I don't give a literal fuck what my Local Leader thinks, I don't feel like being electrocuted to death anytime soon. After the document goes through diagnostics, I click the confirm button, and the next document pops up. It's all I live for, basically.

It's menial; almost an insult to my intellect. I pride myself on being a fairly smart Ki'golian these days, though I was fairly rebellious in my youth, and didn't spend much time at the Academy. I preferred to spend my time in more...lucrative ways.

I get up, rubbing my shoulders. Terror above, they're sore... What I wouldn't give for a sauna in this damn place. Not like I'd ever be able to use something like that, as a folk of my status.

Feeling rather sour, I leave the Dome to head to my apartment. I swipe my card, entering my apartment Block, then find my room number and swipe to enter that. Alone at last. I recline on my bed, looking out the small window to the view of Earth. The planet is large, and I am currently viewing the Pacific Ocean. It's the largest one, which is the only way I can remember it. It's incredibly blue, even covered with clouds, and I find that I can't look away. The sun's light reflects on it even from my vantage point, though the clouds cover most of it, swirling gently, circularly. Actually seeing it in person is kind of a shock to me still. I've done boring work before, in boring places, so I figured the Earth Mission, when they reached out to me, would be no different. But the scenery, at least, is incredibly extravagant, even if the pay isn't.

...it really is a beautiful planet. I suppose there are things that don't have a monetary value. Scenery like this, I suppose, can be counted as one of them.

-----

GAMER-ID: BETATESTER 112

"Dammit!" Tasha exclaimed, slamming her controller on the ground. Next to her, her friend Leila yelled in success, punching the air with fervor. She was at Leila's house, playing video games with her together after school. The room was brightly lit, and Leila's screen was massive. It was a video gamer's heaven.

"Fuck, Leila, you're way too good at games. Seriously," Tasha groaned, rubbing her temples. She continued, "you'd be real good in the robotics club. I could use a friend there."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Leila reiterated, setting down her controller and pulling a hair tie off her wrist, using it to pull up her hair. Tasha couldn't help but watch the motion, watched Leila's tan, toned arms as she fixed her hair. "You hate that the guys there think your sexuality's a challenge." Tasha blinked, focusing back on Leila's face.

"You think the teacher's wishy-washy for letting that shit happen. But you want to go to college for Rocket Science, so you're sticking with it anyway." Leila scoffed. "If I were you, I would'a quit the moment one of 'em started hitting on me."

"Not all of us have a career in lucrative hobbies, Leila. I gotta work for that future degree, y'know?" Tasha grumbled, annoyed. "Which means I have to be in a shit ton of clubs, even ones I'm...less fond of, and I've gotta do well in my classes, so that MIT might even consider me. I just wanted a little more support, that's all I was asking. It's not that hard to join a-"

"Stop." Leila's voice was tight. Her shoulders had tensed up. Tense herself, Tasha leveled her gaze at Leila, not about to back down now.

Outside, a bird trilled. Leila's robotic butler rolled to its charging dock and hooked itself on, shutting down for a quick nap, it seemed.

Leila scoffed.

Tasha blinked.

"Video gaming is hard work, okay! It's an actual skill."

Tasha glared at Leila. Leila was changing the topic again, like she always did when Tasha brought up her tendency to slack off.

"No, it's not," she responded, annoyed with herself for encouraging this particularly irksome behavior of Leila's.

"Fuck you. It is," Leila growled, giving Tasha the respective finger.

Tasha groaned, frustrated, throwing her hands up in the air. This is how their conversations have been going lately, and Tasha can pinpoint it starting during the week that Tasha and their mutual friend Akane began casually dating, three months ago. Ever since then, for whatever reason, Leila has been really tough to be around, especially with applications for college starting up this month.

Tasha knew Leila was sensitive about her grades in school. No matter how much Tasha tried to reassure her it was just a letter, it didn't mean anything towards her intellect, it was still a touchy subject with her, for whatever reason. Leila wasn't planning on going to college, and college was all Tasha could think about. It was, in hindsight, a recipe for disaster.

"You know what," she began, getting up from her seat. "I'm getting a little tired of your attitude, Leila."

Tasha grimaced, before flicking her off. She hated to do it, but Leila seriously needed a taste of her own medicine."Wait, Tasha," Leila whined, but it was too late.

Tasha had walked out of the door.

Tasha strode purposefully to her car, parked in front of the Horton's mansion. Leila was just another nobody who spent all their time gaming. A nobody who had once been special to Tasha, but not anymore. Tasha had bigger things on her plate, and that plate didn't have room for Leila's rich girl problems.

Tasha gunned the engine, tasting the delicious feeling of knowing that Leila, right now, had heard that, and was probably upset.

It was almost like freedom.

-----

LEILA

She yearned after those Saturday nights spent drinking strawberry lemonade and watching the clouds, sun bright, in her eyes, in Tasha's eyes, the bright summer sky turning everything a shade of gold. Flittering, fluttering, old dandelion fluff from spring still in the air, making her nose itch.

She loved to watch as the white puffs blew in the slight breeze. She wished, oh God, did she wish, that she could fly like them, free, warmed by the sun, dancing against the wind.

And when she looked into Tasha's warm hazel eyes, she was part of the way there.

But all she felt now was the deepest chill, winter's chill creeping up her bones and settling in her spine. It froze her. She couldn't move, as her dearest friend and one-sided lover walked away, for what looked like the last time.

-----

DIARY LOG 10/10/40

Today's mission went pretty rough. Those damned beasts keep making the chase harder. I keep hacking into their mainframe to try and disable their cloaking device, but they change the security every time. And it's always so God...damned convoluted. Ugh, I have the worst fucking headache right now. Boss keeps telling me I need lasik, or contacts, or even old-fashioned glasses, but there's no time for that. Not when I'm the only hacker on the Resistance team. We really need to get someone else who can program. Jesus.

End log.

#nicowrites #sbwn #original story #original character

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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #483

Top Ten Non-Predictions About Not-Quite E3

So E3 is upon is at last! Nearly. Almost. Sort of. A bit. But after a year in which the world-famous videogame trailer convention and Keanu Reeves meme factory was sidelined by this virus thing (Google it), it’s nice to have a major entertainment landmark back in the calendar.

Last year was a bit frustrating, but also interesting. For a long time I’ve wondered about the need – as a consumer – for huge conventions such as E3. It makes sense for the industry, sure, the same way Sundance or something does for film: it’s a way for creators to showcase their wares and hopefully secure deals or employment. But as a way of showing to the public games that are in development, or announcing new things, it’s seemed old-fashioned for quite a while. It requires developers and executives to turn into PT Barnum or something, hawking their wares on elaborate stages, titivating their offerings with dances and celebrity appearances. Sure, sometimes it’s genuinely excellent and entertaining, but most often it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons. With many companies now engaging directly with fans by releasing curated videos that announce their games in their own way, in their own time, would that not have been better? If last year is anything to go by, then no, not really. What we got – and this may have been in large part due to 2020’s unique circumstances – was a long, long summer and autumn filled with rumour and conjecture, and occasional, uninspiring videos, often featuring CG trailers, often for games that were literally years away. On the one hand, lots was announced; on the other, it all felt vague and woolly, and the slow drip-feed did nothing but build anticipation to unrealistic proportions. Without E3 serving as some kind of anchor point – in time, if nothing else – then the spray-gun smattering of videos, trailers, and announcements felt disparate and a little disappointing.

And so it’s back! But not quite. Because, understandably, the huge convention aspect is gone, replaced by a wholly online event. And whilst this may be detrimental to people who want to secure a distribution deal for their game, it might actually make for better showcases for us, the unwashed masses. Instead of a ninety-minute stagebound light entertainment extravaganza that ends up feeling like a ten million dollar school play, we’ll (hopefully) get tightly edited videos that highlight the games, alongside trimmed-down and relevant talking head interviews from developers explaining what we can expect and just how many bumps they’ve managed to map this year. At least, that’s what I hope will happen.

Of course, exactly what E3 is nowadays is a bit weird anyway, and this year exacerbates that. Loads of companies seem to shun the show itself but schedule their presentations for the same week or thereabouts, giving us, what, a fortnight (with a “gh”) or so of things to look forward to. I mean, it feels a bit weird putting this list out a full week before E3 formally kicks off, but I wanted to try to pre-empt any interesting amusing reveals that might occur in the days preceding (at the time of writing, Nintendo haven’t announced a new Switch, despite everyone on Twitter saying it was due any minute now). To be honest, I always like to look for the random stuff anyway, as the huge games tend to be known about or heavily rumoured well in advance (it felt like an open secret for at least a year that Playground Games were developing a new Fable, for instance, and we were just waiting to see when Microsoft would announce that). So I’ve tried to make these predictions daft, wish-fulfilment, or at least offer some kind of personal spin on the sort of thing we might expect. And, of course, as someone who tends to prefer to play on Xbox or Nintendo, there will be a skew towards those companies (anyway, Sony don’t really have a presence at E3 nowadays). And like I’ve said before, the really personal wish-fulfilment stuff I always used to “predict” in these things have started to come true – we’ve got Fable and Perfect Dark on the way, and we had Crackdown 3 a couple of years ago. If it goes on like this I’m just going to have to start wishing for loads of old Amiga games to get rebooted.

You heard it here first: E3 2022 is when we get the third-person open world Ruff ‘n’ Tumble reboot we’ve all asked for.

Anyway, here are ten predictions for E3 that probably won’t happen.

Halo Infinite multiplayer beta: we know Halo will be there, because it’s front and centre of Microsoft’s little announcement picture thing (along with what appears to be a bit of the Starfield logo). As the image also seems to show multiplayer Spartans, I imagine this will be the focus rather than more campaign gameplay. I actually think this is a big risk, as the main criticism of Halo last year was that its graphics weren’t good enough; typically, I’d say, the campaign visuals are stronger than the multiplayer portion, which tends to focus on elegantly designed levels and fast-moving gameplay. I wonder if there’ll be another, longer look at the campaign sometime later in the summer, in a dedicated Halo presentation. Anyway, one thing I think MS will do to curry favour is announce an imminent multiplayer beta. Maybe there’ll be a sign-up, but I think it would be cool if it was available for anyone in Game Pass Ultimate. It’s a way to get people to sign up for the service, and that seems to be Microsoft’s main goal right now.

Games ready to play RIGHT NOW: Psychonauts 2, Age of Empire IV, and the Xbox version of Flight Simulator have all been given age ratings recently, something that only happens relatively close to a game’s release. I think that at least one of these – maybe all three! – will be shown at the Xbox presentation, and then declared to be available immediately on Game Pass. Again, it bigs up Microsoft’s service, and would also be a cool mic drop moment for games that might be anticipated but aren’t quite the triple-A behemoths of Halo, Fallout, or Gears.

All the rays, nicely traced: one thing that’s been a bit frustrating as an Xbox Series X owner is the lack of genuine next-gen feeling experiences. I’ve really enjoyed the upgrade from a base Xbox One, and playing a game like Gears 5 feels like a huge improvement (and it’s gorgeous too). But I want to see crazy stuff that the old box couldn’t do, and not just in higher resomolutions. One of the things that I’d love to see is more ray-tracing; this is a next-gen graphical treat that, to me, feels like when I first saw games with dynamic coloured lighting twenty-five years ago. So I hope we get a proper reveal/release date for the ray-traced Minecraft expansion, but I’d also love it – now that Xbox owns everything – if the ray-traced version of Quake 2 was announced for the console. Give me them rays, Microsoft!

Quaking: speaking of the Quake series, it’s the first game’s twenty-fifth anniversary this year, and I think it needs some love. Now, id are working on their Doom reboot trilogy thing, so I don’t expect to see a fully-fledged reimagining for a few years yet, but how about re-releasing the original game on modern consoles? Doesn’t need anything fancy, just like the ports of the first Doom that are ten a penny. Quake is a bit more complex to port, it’s true, but I still think it’d be amazing to see it on consoles before the end of its anniversary year.

Nothing but Star Wars: outside of the Xbox-Bethesda conference, I hope we see some lovely, lovely Star Wars goodies. There are a few projects in development, but I’m gonna stick my neck out and say that we’ll get a fairly long look at the Knights of the Old Republic remake/reboot, a very vague teaser trailer for Fallen Order 2 (maybe even just a title reveal), and a teaser for the open-world game from Ubisoft. I don’t, unfortunately, think we’ll see anything of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga until the Lego livestream later this summer, but for what it’s worth I’m not expecting that game till Christmas now.

Old games on Switch: I think one of the things Nintendo is going to announce is a bunch of older games coming to the Switch. We already have Skyward Sword coming, but I think we’ll hear about other classic Zelda games coming in the anniversary year. Maybe remastered Metroid Prime games too? And I think they’ll do another one of those battle royale-style versions of their classics, maybe the first Donkey Kong?

New games on a new Switch: the sheer weight of “New Switch” rumours seems to suggest it is real, but when are they announcing it if their E3-ish Direct is all about software? I wonder if we’ll see some new games for Christmas ’21 going into ’22 that are then revealed to be enhanced by this mythical Super Switch. We’ll probably see a bit more of Breath of the Wild 2 (although I think there’ll be a bigger Zelda-focused Nintendo Direct later this year). I’m gonna predict Pikmin 4. And vague teasers for both a brand new Metroid Prime game, and also for Mario Kart 9. And all of these will be designed to run better on Switchy McSwitchface. Whenever that comes out.

Microsoft buys more companies: I just think this is inevitable, and I reckon we’ll get another announcement next week. Which companies? God knows. The Flight Sim guys maybe, or The Medium developers. Or, I dunno, Team 17. Probably not Sega, as funny as that would be. Maybe a medium-sized Japanese developer. So, yeah; Microsoft’s spending spree isn’t quite over.

Sony’s not-E3 announcements: Sony appears to be skipping E3 altogether, again. So when will they have their next big video presentation? I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long personally. So what will they talk about? I’d have thought we’d see the next Spider-Man revealed this year, but the big chitter-chatter at the moment is the whole “cross-gen” conversation (my opinion is: who cares?), and also when their games will come out. well, call me pessimistic, but I think Horizon: Forbidden West will end up being early 2022, with the new God of War and Gran Turismo ending up as late 2022 releases.

Crazy talk: I think this has ended up being a relatively straight and rational list, which just won’t do. So let’s get some wild ones out of the way here at the end. Sony announces remastered versions of Lemmings and Lemmings 2 for PC! Microsoft is making new games starring their Avatars! Double Fine release a PC version of Scurvy Scallywags for Game Pass! A brand new Duke Nukem! Lucasfilm bring Ron Gilbert back to oversee a reboot of Monkey Island! Nintendo announces Switch Sports! Gabe Newell announces VR support for Xbox Series X with an exclusive port of Half-Life: Alyx! Peggle 3! Phew, glad to get that out of my system.

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endenogatai · 4 years

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10 Poland-based investors discuss trends, opportunities and the road ahead

Poland is becoming an important European tech ecosystem after experiencing record levels of investment and growth in recent years.

It’s the largest economy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), is known for its technical talent and has now nurtured a number of large startups that have raised multiple rounds of funding. In 2019, investment in Poland’s startups — with Warsaw being the biggest startup hub in the country — grew eight times year-on-year to reach €294 million. This was more than the combined amounts of the nine years prior. While investment has slowed due to the pandemic, it has not stopped. And of course, COVID-19 has only accelerated the pace of digital adoption inside the country itself.

A July 2020 report by Dealroom found over 2,400 Polish early- and later-stage startups, 97 venture capital funds and cataloged over 1,600 funding rounds in 2019. The country has over 401,000 engineers (twice that of Romania at 139,000). It also had twice the number of venture capital rounds in the region (823 compared to Estonia’s 477).

Polish startups are on a funding roll, as the average cheque size for pre-Seed-stage investments has almost tripled since 2013. At the same time, it’s attracting foreign investors. Codility and Nomagic were two startup investments that stood out this year so far. Nomagic, a smart “pick and place” robotic solution, attracted investment from the U.K.’s Hoxton Ventures and Khosla Ventures in the U.S.

Key, later-stage startups include Booksy, Brainly and Docplanner, while significant recent exits include Fibaro, PizzaPortal and Frisco. Poland has a sophisticated banking system, meaning there is an increasing number of fintech startups in the space.

Meanwhile, the startup ecosystem has, in recent years, been spreading outward from the capital, Warsaw, to Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław and Gdansk.

The country has also developed into a leading video game exporter. CD Projekt’s Witcher series was a big hit, based as it was on a series of best-selling Polish books, which were also the basis for a Netflix show.

According to data from PwC, Poland’s video game and esports market was worth $664 million in 2019 — up from $400 million in 2014 — and is predicted to climb to nearly $850 million over the next four years.

We asked 10 investors, principally based in Warsaw, to give us their take on where things are right now.

Bryony Cooper, managing partner, Arkley Brinc VC

Anna Wnuk-Błażejczyk, investor relations manager, Experior.vc

Rafał Roszak, investment director, YouNick Mint

Michal Mroczkowski, partner, Market One Capital

Marcus Erken, partner, Sunfish Partners

Borys Musielak, partner, SMOK Ventures

Mathias Åsberg, partner, Nextgrid

Kuba Dudek, SpeedUp Venture Capital Group

Marcin Laczynski, partner, Next Road Ventures

Michał Rokosz, partner, Inovo Venture Partners

Bryony Cooper, managing partner, Arkley Brinc VC

What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally? Deep tech topics including food and agritech, industrial IoT, media tech, cybersecurity and energy tech.

What’s your latest, most exciting investment? We just closed a follow-on round in CyberHeaven sp. Z o.o., bringing the total investment to 4 million PLN ($1 million). Together with their partner company UseCrypt, they’re setting a new standard in data security with a complete ecosystem of tools to ensure the highest possible level of encryption. Trusted by major corporations, military and government organisations, they are soon to announce a partnership with a major TV network.

Are there startups that you wish you would see in the industry but don’t? What are some overlooked opportunities right now? I had a funny conversation with a friend the other day; we wondered how come cats and dogs can get a simple, six-month treatment to protect against ticks and fleas, but no such solution exists for humans?! Many food and bio tech startups we see are in early/MVP stage; we’d like to see more in pilot stage, trialling/testing with customers.

What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? We’re looking for experienced founders who have demonstrated their ability to execute and succeed in business, with beneficial strategic partnerships/network in place and a viable exit strategy. We’re particularly interested in deep tech startups with a physical/hardware aspect, at pilot stage.

Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about? I’ve seen so many B2C home food growing/urban farming startups (hydroponics) — a nice idea, but I don’t believe it will take off. I’m also weary of consumer electronics and wearables that don’t deliver real value and are rather a gimmick.

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less? We focus heavily on Poland (our local ecosystem), especially because our fund was created with the PFR Starter FIZ program from PFR Ventures (the Polish Development Fund). However we can invest into startups from any European country, and we review applications Europe-wide.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders? Of course COVID-19 has altered the answer to this question. Regardless of region, industries that are not affected by (or are benefiting from) the pandemic are best-positioned to thrive. That includes health and medtech, certain mobility sectors, remote work tools! As for Poland, there’s a strong resource pool for software and hardware capabilities at very competitive rates, so a wide range of industries can thrive here.

How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city? In Warsaw and Poland, many new VC funds have been set up over the last 1-2 years, so there’s a lot of competition to find great startups. We differentiate ourselves by focusing on deep tech and hardware-related sectors (many others only invest into software/SaaS). Many Polish VCs are optimistic, but are focusing only on the current situation of companies — not thinking long term (i.e., exit strategy). I would definitely say the startup ecosystem in Poland is growing and should be considered as “one to watch” by global investors.

Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work? Yes, I do believe it is becoming less important to be located in a major city. More and more companies are making remote work possible, with more tools available for remote work and communication. Therefore location is no longer paramount to successful networking and meetings. The world is going virtual.

Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times? Many industries that require manufacturing of hardware or physical products have been affected by factory closures, putting time delays on production. Also, B2B food tech companies have struggled with the downturn in restaurant business, with supply chains and distribution channels affected. They have to rethink their business models. Whereas ordering take-out food and any on-demand/home delivery services are on the rise, opening up new opportunities (though this trend began years ago).

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now? The main concerns are about delays in production, or that B2B customers are less open to making new investments/purchases at the moment with so much economic uncertainty. Some of our portfolio companies (such as Cyberheaven, mentioned above) are going full speed ahead. The global discussions on data privacy raised by health-tracking apps have opened up many opportunities for them, as more corporations and individuals are prioritising protecting personal data.

Are you seeing “green shoots” regarding revenue growth, retention or other momentum in your portfolio as they adapt to the pandemic? We see some acceleration, some slowing down but no stopping!

What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two. Seeing our team consistently keep up momentum and adapt so quickly to remote work has given me hope. Also seeing our portfolio companies assess and adapt to “the new normal” with total confidence in achieving their goals.

Any other thoughts you want to share with TechCrunch readers? Startups should not lose faith due to COVID-19. Consumers and businesses still have needs to be fulfilled. Opportunities may change, but there are still plenty out there. And let’s not forget the importance of fighting climate change and the UN Sustainable Development goals! We’re happy with how our Q4 pipeline is looking :)

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judefan818-blog · 4 years

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pedrorsmith · 4 years

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What are Values in a Socially Distanced World?

It’s hard enough to live your values at the best of times, but when you’re being forced to socially distance yourself from the rest of the world, it can feel downright impossible! How do you connect with what matters to you when you’re not allowed to connect at all? While the world is in a locked-down state, it may feel like everything is on “hold,” including your values. But, with a little planning and a lot of flexibility, we can still find ways to connect to what’s important to us.

A Quick Review: What are Values?

Values are the guideposts that help you to make decisions about your life. In the good-old days, when going out was a thing, how would you decide what you want to do: go out to the bar with your friends or come home for dinner with your family? While one part of you says that you should go out with your friends, because that’s more fun, there’s another part of you that says that your family really matters to you a lot and that’s where you “should” be.

Here is an example of your values playing out in your life. They are pointing you towards what matters to you. Values are different from goals because they are not something that you can achieve, rather they are ideals that you strive for in your life. You can’t check the off a check-list (for example, you may value spending time with family, but you can’t say that you’ve achieved spending time with them, there’s always more time to spend!), rather you’re always working towards your values. And every decision you make has the ability to move you towards, or away from, your values.

Why Values Matter

Choosing to live your life according to your values can have some real benefits. This is best exemplified when you look at someone who lives life according to the goals, and not their values. Living life based on your goals means that you’re only rewarded if and when you achieve your goal. If you are planning to run a marathon, then you’re only truly rewarded if and when you finish the marathon. Each run that you take in preparation can then become a chore, something that only has value based on if you are able to complete the marathon. So, if the marathon got cancelled, then all of those practice runs were for nothing! What a waste.

Let’s contrast that with someone who lives their life based on their values, in this case the particular values of health and fitness. Now, each practice run is, in itself, a victory – a movement towards your values! With each run, you can focus not on how this will help you in the big race (even though you know it will!), but rather on how you’re getting more fit, or healthy, and how you notice that you’re progressing in this arena. Even when the race itself got cancelled, the whole journey was a success, and moved you in the direction that you wanted to go in your life.

Values in a Distanced World

While it is pretty hard right now to think about marathons and going out with friends, these can also be important ways for you to think about your values. To live life according to your values, you may have to be more clear about what your values are than you had to be when many more options were at your fingertips.

To do this, begin by asking yourself this question: what matters most to me right now? Does it matter to me that I don’t get sick? Or maybe that I don’t get anyone else sick? Or even that I am just doing my part to help “flatten the curve” and I stay at home because I value civic duty more than I ever realized. Or perhaps what I value has nothing to do with illness or wellness, and is more focused on connection. I value connection with others. Take some time to think about what matters most to you and write down your values. Try to think of somewhere between 5 and 10 values that matter to you in this moment.

Next, think about the many ways that you could live out those values. Sure, there are going to be a lot of ways that are not available to your right now (no going to the gym for those who value health!), but if you can be creative, you could come up with some alternatives (setting up a livingroom gym). Creativity and flexibility are the names of the game here, as you might need to think through unique solutions that will work for you, and be flexible enough to try out something that isn’t exactly what you would normally want to do.

Finally, don’t spend time reinventing the wheel. One of the biggest benefits of this time has been the amazing amount of creativity that people are sharing all over the world via the internet. Whatever you want to do, there are people out there who have been coming up with ideas and solutions about how to do what’s important to you from your own home.

This period of time is hard on us all. Living your values will not change the reality of just how difficult it is to be socially isolated from friends and family. But it may help you to feel like this period of time is much more tolerable, and that you’re coming away from it with a deeper connection to the life you want to live.

The post What are Values in a Socially Distanced World? appeared first on The Center for Motivation & Change.

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legit-scam-review · 6 years

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Why Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Entire Crypto Market Are Down in Value

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Cointelegraph.com.

The way I see it, investors in 2017 — and specifically in Q4 — wanted to buy Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) for the sole purpose of exchanging it for specific ICO tokens they wanted to invest in. The buyers of Bitcoin and Ethereum did not want to own Bitcoin or Ethereum. They wanted to buy the newly issued initial coin offering (ICO) tokens, but they needed to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum as a short way to get what they ultimately wanted. The owners of Bitcoin and Ethereum did not want to sell. They were watching the price of their holdings increase, so why would they? They were also believers in Bitcoin and Ethereum. So, in a “bid-ask world,” the price went up.

Then, those startup companies that completed their ICOs became whales, which began — as a group — to unload their tokens in December and January, thereby flipping the dynamic of the huge demand for Bitcoin and Ethereum to all sellers of Bitcoin and Ethereum. After the New Year’s hangover faded, the startups needed to exchange their crypto for fiat in order to pay engineers and build their startups.

Then, it was a run-on-the-bank panic. Pressure from the United States regulators in Q3 and Q4 of 2017 resulted in a slowing and near total halt of ICOs by early 2018. After that, ICOs either stopped or radically slowed. New token issuers began to accept fiat without the need to pass through Ethereum, which killed more demand and left only sellers and “hodlers” and no buyers. In a “bid-ask world,” the market tanked. An interesting dynamic of the current market is that the prices of all cryptocurrencies are highly correlated to each other. Just look at the price of any token on CoinMarketCap, and you will notice a perfect correlation among the prices of most of them. Bitcoin and Ethereum go up and down together, and most other tokens are correlated in the same way. It shouldn’t be that way, but without any banks analyzing and reporting on these startups — the way they do for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. — that’s the way it is for now. So, Bitcoin can raise or drop the price of your token, but it now appears that gravitational pull works in both directions.

In 2018, something else developed. It became clear that all of these funded ICOs were not diligenced by real tech experienced angels or VCs — they were mostly not tokens you would really want to invest into. Previously, all of these coins were correlated to the rising price of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but now it is dragging them down. They are all correlated, and the big section of the overall market cap is sinking the ‘crypto ship’ in general.

What will happen is that all of these weak startups will eventually be flushed out, and we will be left with some decent and even amazing companies. Today, the consumer retail investors of Southeast Asia and around the world are no longer gambling and throwing cash at the latest ICO to pitch at some blockchain event — or at least not at the volumes of Q4 2017. It used to be 20 percent institutional (VC) investors and 80 percent retail. Now, it’s 80 percent institutional investors, if not more. It makes sense to me that, if strongly branded VCs like a16z, Pantera Capital and 7BC.VC invest into a startup from their wide funnel of investments after conducting VC-grade due diligence, consumer retail investors will want to invest — following the VC’s lead in jurisdictions where this complies with local securities law (or, in the U.S., if the startup filed an S1, Reg A+, etc.).

Now is the time for the arrival of experienced VCs to raise real VC funds, generate large volumes of deal flow, process that deal flow with fully centralized and decentralized teams qualified to conduct proper due diligence, fund the best ones, as well as help these portfolio companies execute and manage investor risk via diversification and portfolio construction. We have seen a return to sane equity funding — and not just for tokens. Investors now own equity and tokens. Some “pure play” decentralized cases require only tokens — but again with real, old-school due diligence — before just throwing money around. We are also seeing a return to market valuations, rather than a team of high school dropouts seeking a $50 million or $100 million pre-money valuation without ever having met a payroll or accomplish any substance prior to getting that kind of valuation.

The new companies to be funded in 2019 — and to be listed in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — will be far better on average than the 2017 cohort, resulting in a rebound in the market. Experienced VC-backed entrepreneurs are now working on blockchain startups, which means the population of management teams has evolved beyond the original Bitcoin anarchists.

Bitcoin itself is resilient, proven by its survival of multiple Mt. Gox-type events and numerous up-and-down cycles. The long-term curve for Bitcoin is up and to the right. After the infamous coins run out of cash and disappear, the market will become much more robust. Many of the managers became delusional due to their experience of traveling the world and completing their ICOs, thinking that BTC and ETH would only go up and up while failing to exchange enough of their crypto for fiat. Not only did they have startup risk, but they foolishly added FX (foreign exchange) risk.

So, the good news is that these weak, never-should-have-been-funded startups will run out of cash sooner than expected, because their crypto is worthless when converted to fiat than they thought at the time they completed their financings. The flushing out of these coins currently weakening the market will drive the market up. Today, startups exchange their crypto into fiat the moment they get it.

I also predict that we will see a few killer startups take off and generate mass adoption, which will bring mainstream users into the crypto world and — in a gravitationally correlated world — this will lift the tide of the entire market. We will probably see some video game become a huge sensation — like Angry Birds — or something that will drive the adoption of a token. I expect to see something else come along that no one ever thought of — like Skype — that everyone begins to use, which will pull huge populations into the crypto world, as the value will just simply be there.

It is imperative that all businesses move onto the blockchain so that no party can tamper with the numbers of how many “widgets” were sold or with who gets paid what. All business, government and health care data should be on the blockchain — and pretty soon, it will be unacceptable without it to enter into a business agreement and trust the other party to tell you how many widgets were sold in China, the U.S. or Africa. Once these business transactions or elections are on the blockchain and no one can tamper with the data, all sides can trust each other. The big picture here is that the market will see a major rally and long-term trend up and to the right.

2019 might be an excellent time to invest in a blockchain-focused VC fund or invest into blockchain startups taking on-board lessons from top-performing VCs that have a strong entrepreneur-experienced investment team with experience in achieving top-quartile venture capital IRR performance and cash-on-cash performance.

Andrew Romans is a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist at 7BC.VC and Rubicon Venture Capital as well as an author of two top-10 books on Venture Capital on Amazon and Masters of Blockchain.