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charlieharry1 · 5 years ago

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Getting geared up for the general information protection regulation

The affect team were inundated with requests from clients, buddies and companions over the previous few weeks as the general records safety law (gdpr) cut-off date looms. In this weblog Digital Marketing Agencies in London post, i don’t intend to provide felony recommendation, but more of a technique i’d suggest you recollect on your corporation. As with any new laws, the precedent from case law has not but been set, so what’s presently taken into consideration “best practice” (in april 2020) won't be the case months from now. We grouped some of the extra normal questions and have offered up our fine (non-felony) recommendation below;cookies if ‘legitimate hobby’ exists, certainly note this in your privateness coverage, no similarly consent required. If ‘legitimate interest’ does not exist, you want explicit consent. Either way, record this to your privacy policy. Bureaucracy if ‘valid interest’ exists, or records is being collected out of contractual necessity (i. E. To finish a cart buy), no further consent is needed. If ‘legitimate hobby’ does now not exist (i. E. Robotically signing someone as much as a advertising e-newsletter once they entire a shape), specific consent is required. Keep in mind the purpose of a form – a publication subscription shape doesn’t want separate advertising consent, as that’s its cause, but a e-newsletter subscription on a “create an account” form does as that’s a separate motive. Website / crm statistics you have to set an expiry date for any records you shop – you cannot maintain it indefinitely. You must have a plan in area for dealing with any facts breach. You need to be able to expose the information concern what facts you preserve on them, and be capable of get rid of it at their request. You may save enough records after removal to make certain you do now not contact them once more, i. E. An e-mail deal with on a suppression list. Privateness coverage a must for all businesses documenting their compliance with gdpr and other laws.

This document will country your business information at the side of the way to communicate along with your information protection officer. This informs records subjects what you do with their statistics and how they could access or do away with it. Audience lists and client fit information you are the information processor, the advertising and marketing platform is the statistics controller, so the onus is at the controller to attain consent, and on the way to use the facts in step with that consent. If importing information units for custom suits and so on, you want to have amassed that information in a gdpr compliant manner — beneath a felony basis, which can consist of ‘legitimate pastimes’. E mail marketing lists use double decide in to make sure consent and the gdpr deadline as a very good reason to cleanse your lists now. Any lists you purchase ought to have been collected in a gdpr compliant manner. Inner strategies report all information storage, flows, inputs and outputs. . Teach staff on records protection. Be organized for a information breach with a clear plan. In this publish

we’ve addressed major angles of thinking with admire to cookies; cookie notices and the specified changes to cookie guidelines. The requirement for internet site cookie notices is extensively unchanged due to the fact that its felony requirement began in may additionally 2012, however its uptake has been low, inconsistent and now not actively enforced. Except a cookie is a purposeful cookie (consisting of to replace a buying basket or hit upon which usa a tourist is browsing from), consent is required to area it. A few organizations search for a effective decide-in to setting cookies and a few display handiest notifications in their presence. The gdpr mentions cookies most effective once in the modern-day literature (recital 30), and classes them as personal statistics in which they may be blended with specific identifiers or server records that could then discover someone. Cookies classed as non-public statistics (consisting of as logged in cookies or patron identification cookies) can be processed either with consent or under a “valid interest” under the gdpr. The gdpr offers us the potential to manner statistics under a “legitimate interest” whilst;

the processing isn't required by way of law however is of a clear gain to you or others;

there’s a restricted privateness effect at the person;

the character must moderately count on you to use their records in that way; and

you cannot, or do no longer want to, deliver the man or woman complete prematurely control (i. E. Consent) or bother them with disruptive consent requests whilst they're unlikely to item to the processing. A number of huge agencies are in reality already processing at least useful and advertising analytics cookies under this “valid hobby” method and it could be that that is the route the majority of businesses will select to take. If you are collecting any records under valid interests then make sure to encompass this in full for your privateness policy. To conform, at present, many websites are not placing for my part identifiable information in cookies on preliminary web page loads. They they display a clear message or opt-in form depending on their preference, whereby cookies are then set after consent. Till we see better examples of implementation, or case regulation to set the expectancies further, the complete industry is being led by way of this “first-class practice”. For the ones agencies currently with out a cookie policy, it’s in reality really useful to generate one from a reliable template, and then to audit and write up the beginning and purpose of each cookie set by way of your website within the policy. Similarly, ecu law offers statistics subjects the right to be forgotten, so site visitors should be able to withdraw consent simply as without problems as they gave consent. Wherein viable, signpost your clients to suitable locations to disable marketing and advertising and marketing carriers from 0. 33 events and additionally make certain your internet site honors “do now not track” browser requests. Paperwork

internet site paperwork throughout a internet site frequently serve a large number of functions – from advertising automation and publication subscriptions to simple one-time contact forms. This spectrum is mirrored via the requirements under the gdpr to benefit express advertising consent from your customers whilst they're filling them out. Any statistics you collect from a form should be processed lawfully. There are three relevant lawful bases, and you have to determine which is maximum relevant for your shape information:

consent. If a shape handiest collects non-public facts to conclude a agreement, inclusive of in a checkout shape, no action is important to make it gdpr compliant because the facts is processed as a contractual necessity. As a substitute, if a form carries out moves which might be fairly expected, inclusive of a contact shape sending an e-mail to your commercial enterprise and recording the shape data in a crm machine, it's far likely that the information is processed with a valid hobby (inclusive of to perform advertising and marketing activities). If that is the case, your privacy policy need to document this. If there is neither a contractual necessity or a legitimate interest, consent will be required. As an example, a user wouldn’t fairly anticipate a contact form to signal them as much as weekly marketing emails, so consent, inside the form of a tick container which the user have to undoubtedly tick, would be required. It’s also properly practice to get e mail information thru a double decide-in affirmation which all properly e-mail platform providers will provide. In case you want to market in your lapsed or previous clients, you need both express consent or a terrific argument below legitimate pursuits, and once more those should be unique to your privateness coverage. For pre-gdpr records, recollect how the statistics was amassed. If it changed into gathered in a way similar with your gdpr-compliant strategies (marketing company double opt-in, for instance), you then is probably inside the clear. The safest course for masking your lower back for preceding records wherein you're unsure as to whether or not it become collected according with gdpr is to ask for consent previous to can also twenty fifth and cleanse your lists before this date for records for that you do now not have consent. If you go down the consent direction, make certain you have got a log of the consent (i. E double choose in date) to your statistics. Storing records on your website or crm

if private information is to be saved, then you must keep in mind what the average consumer may count on you to do with it. You cannot shop this records indefinitely so an expiry records ought to be determined. If it's miles to be stored then this must also be sincerely defined to your privacy policy, at the side of instructions on how a information difficulty may also carry out a statistics access request and/or request its everlasting deletion. With gdpr, transparency is prime. If there is a information breach, you will want to alert the ico who will then probable look at your employer to test for compliance. A minimum of, there are six gdpr data safety ideas which you must adhere to, which the ico has laid out here. If at gift you are not storing information in a relaxed crm, then this have to be a key attention going ahead, as there are plenty of gdpr and other great motives for doing so;

centralised lead garage,

managed lead get entry to,

availability and simplicity of website integrations,

ease of appending advertising source/medium information,

typical stepped forward facts excellent, and

simpler gdpr compliance via method

if you obtain website leads thru email most effective, it’s first-class education to permanently delete those as soon as you have got handled them or moved them to a greater at ease carrier, like a crm. If you can not exchange this technique, element it in your privateness policy under a valid hobby or gain consent on the factor of facts introduction – and hold a document of this consent date. To save digging round on your e-mail inboxes and website databases, it’s worth the funding of a crm to make sure destiny information subject get admission to requests are painless. Privacy policy

cookie and privateness rules are sometimes intertwined, although the real requirement beneath the gdpr regulation is your privateness coverage. Your privateness coverage is one of the most important public going through documents you will need to create to reap gdpr compliance as this information to your customers and customers what you save and for a way long, in addition to how they'll carry out a statistics get admission to request. Privacy regulations might also take some of paperwork and be primarily based on a number of templates, however the ico have helpfully created a tick list, which if accompanied, will make sure you’re compliant come may 25th. Get right of entry to the ico checklist here. As with many legal documents, complexity grows with the size and complexity of your business, so in case you recognize you save data in silos throughout your corporations, for exclusive purposes, then it’s simply well worth looking for prison advice to make certain each eventuality is blanketed. Audience lists and customer healthy data

maximum advertisers in 2020 could be processing audience data thru massive aggregate information controllers/processors like google analytics, adwords or facebook ads for the reason of remarketing and retargeting. The marketing giants, led by using facebook and google, have currently asked customers to verify their consent for the usage of non-public records to form marketing alternatives (this turned into required on facebook, for instance) because of this the facts they're “controlling” is amassed in a gdpr compliant way. Advertisers are then information processors in this relationship, as facebook explains in addition on its gdpr advisory page right here. This covers the usage of tracking scripts and tracking pixels as the individual customers could have consented to offering this data to the controllers and it’s the controller, now not the advertiser, who's using that facts within their platform to operate the advertising characteristic. Advertisers can continue to submit additional records to those controllers via the usage of “custom audiences” or “purchaser fit” records sets via appointing them as a records processor — for which you need a legal foundation to achieve this. Again, this relies upon to your personal legal interpretation of valid interest vs. The requirement for consent for sharing this statistics and this can nearly usually come again to the method wherein the records become accumulated in the first area and the expectations of an affordable/common client. Email advertising lists

e-mail marketing has been ruled inside the united kingdom by way of separate rules considering the fact that 2003. The gdpr does now not alternate the requirements drastically, however once more affirms the need to gather “freely given, particular, informed and unambiguous consent” for the collection and storage of personal statistics (article 32). Therefore, if you have been amassing statistics below a double decide-in method and your customers or customers are waiting for to obtain advertising messages from you, you could already be absolutely compliant. Your particular moves for full gdpr compliance may additionally range but so that it will decide this, you have to first audit the geographic unfold of your email marketing database (looking for all eu member country international locations) and make sure you have a clear audit trail of double decide-ins, suitable marketing consent and importantly a method for consumers to without difficulty withdraw their consent. Importantly, the gdpr rules applies to all data whether or not it was amassed before or after the may additionally 25th cut-off date, so this complete audit method is vital for compliance. It’s nevertheless possible to purchase electronic mail advertising lists from professional providers after the gdpr cut-off date however quite a few care ought to be taken to make certain listing records changed into collected in a gdpr compliant way. Your duty to allow the easy withdrawal of consent still applies. Additionally – it’s well worth bearing in thoughts that just because purchased lists can be compliant, they will no longer be the exceptional direction ahead for advertising efforts and your e-mail marketing approach; as many electronic mail carrier providers have advised for some time — simply because it’s felony doesn’t imply it’s nice to your commercial enterprise. For simple programs, like an e mail publication signup, you should make certain that customers undergo a double choose-in manner and save the date in their consent to acquire your e-mail marketing messages. Double opt-in isn't always required, however it is a accessible manner of recording the date of consent — all correct email companies and crms will provide this. For extra complicated uses, or whilst there are more than one effects associated with the action – as an instance developing an account and subscribing to a publication, separate consent is required for sending customers advertising messages (privacy and electronic communications rules will exist alongside the gdpr). Inner strategies

Read Also:- Google clears that it is not slowing crawling sites because of Covid-19

apart from making technical adjustments in your website or internal software program, the most important burden created by using the gdpr is the inner procedures you'll need to comply with after the may additionally 25th closing date. The uk ico have released a easy infographic tick list which may be discovered right here to get you started so this is a great starting point. You have to make your team of workers privy to some key modifications to statistics processing and storage – namely;

the proper to be forgotten

statistics difficulty get admission to request rights of data subjects

facts portability

facts breach reporting responsibilities

go-border statistics processing prohibitions

you have to additionally be addressing a lot of these new worries with a brand new privacy policy in addition to updating your cookie coverage to make sure cookie statistics is transparent. Your privacy coverage must nation the usage of cookies and digital advertising monitoring offerings you’re using and detail how customers can opt out of this. If you do now not yet use a crm for marketing and income purposes, however as a substitute rely upon (for instance) an e mail inbox for dealing with enquiries, it's miles truely well worth considering this now. There are plenty of easy, unfastened, integration answers to be had to get you began. A crm will make sure safe garage, permissioned access, and easy deletion/removal of facts not less than. You must create a file in coaching for use ought to you be within the unlucky position of reporting a information breach. The ico offer a checklist to get you started out here. Internally you should map the information flows inside and out of your employer, together with the facts stores if you want to create a information audit/map. This useful workout will pick out everlasting data stores, in addition to insecure or much less premier processing/controlling strategies. For every, check your gdpr compliance. Without a doubt placed, as a controller, you want to:

make sure you manner the information lawfully,

make certain you have a privacy policy in place, and

exhibit compliance with policies thru your audits and documentation

in case you are best a processor, you have to:

ensure you're appearing within the bounds of what your facts controller allows you to do. In case you are storing records in any manner which isn’t absolutely secure, then you definately have to address this at once. As with every new regulation, we look forward to case regulation developing a extra subtle “satisfactory exercise” for some extra trivial sme problems indexed above. However till then, appearing lawfully and being prudent is your first-class wager. For any complexities now not extensively mentioned in this put up, separate criminal advice can be required. If you have any queries, check out my colleague jamie’s blog post gdpr: an action plan for corporations and entrepreneurs.

>>>28. Your virtual possibility: insights for entrepreneurs and enterprise proprietors

growing a commercial enterprise without a digital advertising and marketing method is like jumping out of a aircraft with out a parachute – it’s just not going to paintings. But knowing where to apply advertising and marketing price range and efforts can be a assignment. Much like identifying the satisfactory parachute to get you competently to the floor, entrepreneurs want to review the variety of options available to pick those which might be most probable to help them acquire their goals, in the framework of ways their enterprise works, who they’re attempting to talk to and the position in their marketplace. We have been thrilled to host a workshop in which our virtual marketing professionals shared their pointers and recommendation for corporations investing in digital advertising and looking for the subsequent way to sculpt their techniques for max impact. You’ll discover the slides from our speakers right here. For more bespoke advice to assist your business supercharge its digital marketing strategies, get in contact with our crew nowadays. The today's updates affecting seek marketing

pete jovetic opened the event with a precis of those things affecting digital marketers today:

the trendy updates affecting seek advertising

search engine optimization exceptional exercise for growing online agencies

sean burton, search engine optimization strategist at affect, took to the degree to share his tips for agencies across the seo journey. For those simply beginning out, basic pointers and recommendation for search engine optimization foundations furnished essential first steps, whilst extra advanced marketers will had been able to evaluation their personal foundations and begin considering extra complicated approaches to boost their search visibility:

research greater about our search engine optimization offerings. Getting more bang on your greenback in percent advertising and marketing

lauren capon, senior % government at influence, talked our target audience thru the big opportunity, and plenty of nuances, of paid advertising and marketing on-line. In a digital landscape in which ‘pay to play’ appears ever greater ordinary, the range of ways to increase your attain via shrewd paid marketing is growing:

learn extra about our percent services. Developing sales via conversion charge optimisation (cro)

our very last speaker changed into edd wilson, search engine optimization strategist and cro expert at impression. Getting site visitors to your website is simplest the first step, and as superior Digital Marketing Companies in Leeds marketers will recognize, it’s converting that visitors that may be the biggest venture – specifically in extra competitive markets: research extra approximately our cro services. A huge thanks to anyone who attended. Look out for more events from affect, coming quickly.

#digital marketing companies leeds

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rosecorcoranwrites · 6 years ago

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When a Plot Hole is Not a Plot Hole (or, at Least, When It Doesn't Matter)

Much like 45 million other people, I have recently viewed Bird Box. I also watched The Ritual and re-watched A Quiet Place. All of this got me thinking about the horror genre, yet again, but it’s too soon for another “Thoughts on Horror” post. Thankfully I also watched a Youtube video about world building in the Divergent series, which gave me an idea for a more far-reaching analysis not just of horror, but of genre and plot holes in general.

A Matter of Genre

The fact of the matter is that Bird Box, A Quiet Place, and Divergent have gaping plot holes (The Ritual doesn’t. The Ritual is great… but freaking horrifying, so watch with caution). These plot holes, however, are only a problem in one of those stories, and this is due to genre, and I will climb onto my genre-soapbox for as long as it takes for people to realize that different genres work differently, and need to be read or watched differently.

Let’s step back a minute, and I'll explain what I mean. In my senior year of high school, we read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My class loved it, not least because it was a welcome break from all the depressing literature foisted on us throughout our high school career. I was also a student aid in another class that read the same book and got to eavesdrop on their class discussions. I sat in the back, filing papers, and heard the students say they didn't like the book because, quote, "It was so unrealistic." The Little Prince? Unrealistic? You don't say! I'm not sure I have ever heard a more idiotic critique of a book. Yes, The Little Prince is unrealistic. It's a children's-book-esque fantasy/fairytale about a prince from another (tiny) planet who's in love with a rose. It's not supposed to be realistic!

A similar phenomenon happens when people—both Christians and atheists—treat the entire Bible as one genre. It's not! It contains poetry, myth, history, genealogy, letters, biography, parables, apocalyptic visions, and law codes. If you read poetry like you would read a law code, or a letter the way you read a myth, you're probably going to miss out on most of the meaning.

Back to my point, different genres require different ways of being read or watched. There are varying amounts of belief one should be required to suspend. Fantasy requires more suspension of disbelief than sci-fi, because the audience needs to accept that magic and magical creatures exist, whereas sci-fi only needs them to accept that humans have advanced to some future scientific point. Both genres, however, need internally consistent world building, no matter what other wonders we are shown. Otherwise, the audience will be taken out of the story, and the point of these genres is to immerse the readers or viewers into a believable, if fantastic, world. If magic works a certain way, it always needs to work that way. If smaller spaceships can’t use FTL, then no little ships should be shown using FTL unless you make a point of saying they have some new type of FTL drive. There is some wiggle-room in this, since "fantasy" and "sci-fi" are big labels that cover a lot of things. Fairytales or magical-realism stories tend to be a little looser about what is and isn’t allowed. These stories still shouldn't break their own rules, but they also don't have to explain themselves as much as other fantasies. Sci-fi that bleeds into fantasy, such as that which incorporates time-travel, other dimensions, or robots with kokoro still needs internal consistency, but don't need to be as scientifically accurate as hard sci-fi.

On the other hand, genres which rely on audience reaction can get by with much less in the way of tight world building and well-thought-out backstory. The two genres to which I am referring are comedy and horror. Obviously, these can intersect with fantasy/sci-fi, but taken as their own thing, they are a different species of genre altogether. They rely not on immersing the audience into a believable world, but on eliciting a reaction from the audience. A comedy is only a comedy if it's funny and horror is only horror if it's scary. Those are the requirements. Thus, a comedy or horror doesn't need unassailable world building to be a successful comedy or horror. Comedy, in particular, often relies on pointing out or playing with plot holes in whatever genre it's in. Horror, on the other hand, often focuses on the scary situation at the expense of backstory and world building.

Plot Holes in Horror

Thus, we come to Bird Box, or A Quiet Place, or Signs, or any other horror that, frankly, doesn't hold up if you think too much about it. People critique these movies by asking things like, “Why doesn't everyone in the world just blind themselves to be immune to the phantoms?”, “Did no one else in all of society think to use sound against the creatures?”, and “Why don't the aliens wear waterproof suits?”. These are valid criticisms for sci-fi or fantasy stories, but… these stories aren’t really meant to be sci-fi or fantasy. They are meant to be horror. Specifically, survival horror. For this genre, backstory is utterly irrelevant. In survival horror, a person or group of people are put into a deadly situation and need to use their wits and whatever they can find to survive it. The end. That's it. Are Sandra Bullock, the family in The Quiet Place, and the family in Signs put into a deadly situation? Check. Do they attempt to survive it? Check. Is it scary for the audience to watch? Check. All three movies pass the survival horror test. They aren’t trying to be good sci-fi/fantasy; they’re trying to be good horror, and do a pretty good job.

As a side note, I’m not some Bird Box apologist. Of the four horror movies I’ve mentioned in this post, it’s my least favorite. But the issues I take with it are not with the world-building (unlike some critics, I thought the rules regarding the phantoms were fairly well spelled out), but with the choices on how to induce horror. (SPOILERS INCOMING: SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU CARE) From the beginning, we know the rest of the people in the house don’t survive because only Sandra Bullock and the two kids are alive in the current time; that undercuts most of the tension in the house. Also, I thought the first phantom-acolyte they encounter, at the supermarket, was horrifying, as he appeared to be stuck forever in his place, doomed to coax unsuspecting souls to their death. One character even commented, “How is that guy still alive?”, so I wondered if he even was, or if he was sort of an undead thing controlled by the phantoms. Scary! Unfortunately, the rest of the acolytes (aside from the one in the house, who we knew John Malkovich would kill because how else would Sandra Bullock and the kids be alive in the future? The structure of the narrative seriously undercut the tension!) are pretty much your run-of-the-mill murderers in any post-apocalyptic movie. Not scary! Finally, I took issue with the last few minutes, after their boat capsized; I felt it was unnecessary for them to run around in the woods. It would have been scarier if she reached out of the water to feel a person’s foot, making the audience think it’s an acolyte, until he taps a cane on the ground and it’s revealed he’s blind. But, I digress. I don’t mind that the story has a few plot holes; I do mind that it wasn’t as scary as it could have been.

Plot Holes in Dystopia

Where, then, on this spectrum of genre does dystopia fall, and why do so many YA dystopian novels seem to fail? Could not "dystopia" be a sort of parable, requiring little explanation and thus little scrutiny, in the same way that comedy and horror and fairytales can get by on little to no explanations of what, exactly, is going on? Yes. I'll say it again, yes. I think dystopias absolutely could get a pass on world building... if they wanted to. The problem with books like Divergent or Hunger Games is not that they explain too little, but that they explain too much. If they simply set up their messed-up situations—everyone is sorted into a Hogwarts House faction, innocents must fight to the death for the enjoyment of the rich—and left it at that, I think it would be fine. The problem arises when these authors, usually in subsequent books, attempt to hash out the reasoning behind these horrible societies which... kind of couldn't arise for any real reason, or if they did, wouldn’t last very long. The explanations we are given don't make sense, or are at least are very, very full of holes and inconsistencies.

To be fair, other dystopias also offer explanations for why the world is the way it is, but they don’t dwell on it. 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 offer lip service for how society got so bad—whether that’s due to government rule or human complacency—but then move on. We don’t need to think too hard about how Eastasia or Eurasia were formed; we need to care that the government keeps switching which one we’ve “always” been at war with. We don’t need to know who’s running the world in Fahrenheit 451, because they’re not the ones who caused Montag’s wife to O.D. or who hit Clarisse with a car or who made Beatty hate books; the society of that book is twisted because individual people are twisted. Though they contain sci-fi elements, these stories are not sci-fi books. They are much closer to horror, in that their events are supposed to provoke a sort of cautious fear in the audience. The idea is that this could happen here, and maybe it’s already happening.

Again, YA dystopia’s could do this, but that’s clearly not what they’re going for. If Hunger Games was only a nod to the dangers of media and decadence, I could get behind it. Instead, it decided to become a story about revolution, with a somewhat Chosen-One-esque figure. It went the sci-fi-fantasy route, following the epic story of a hero who attempts to save society. If Divergent only concerned itself with the idea that humans are sorted into groups based on a single personality trait… well, I would still think that was pretty silly, but I could see a skilled writer making it work. It goes beyond this, though, into this whole backstory involving genetic engineering and human experimentation. It’s a sci-fi. And because both of these stories have decided to be sci-fi, rather than only dystopias, they fail. Because sci-fi stories require a somewhat believable backstory and set-up and current world building, and the worlds of Divergent and Hunger Games could not happen, or at least would not happen like that, even if there were rebellions and mutations and human experimentation. There are too many inconsistencies and plot holes that strain belief, and sci-fi needs to be somewhat believable.

With that, I hoped I’ve converted some of you to my genre-focused cause. Before you criticize a story for having a plot hole or being unrealistic, first consider the genre. Consider what the story is trying to do, and if it does it well or not. The plot holes might not be as big of a problem as you thought.

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serimizani · 6 years ago

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True Essence/ Importance of Storytelling.

Here’s an evocation of my year 2018.

Let me tell you something I know about myself; Yes, I am crazy. I am a fire and I do things I shouldn’t do, I venture here and there, breaking every law resembling the commandments. I listen to everyone and talk to no one. Sometimes it feels like I’m a visual learner moulded an adolescent mute or maybe just a vicious violent vows on the silent. I get undressed inappropriately, I run away to places only I know of– like where I am right at this moment– while hyperventilating through hypnosis snap out like a toaster. I lose myself in a long car ride, I always take the long way home when driving, I build walls in people’s faces and destroy them when I feel comfortable around them, I take routes that lead me to people I love, I play songs I fall in love with on repeat for weeks, I go on mandatory reading for mental calmness, I yell of happiness, I laugh too loud,... Yes I am crazy because I can’t be contained. I am crazy because I am curious about this world. I don’t fear the break, I send mind on a plate. Recipients are used to games. I am, however, fiercely straight-forward, with self-confidence coated in uncertainty, vanity and candy. Recipients simply run from me. This is why I focus on me, expired of all of my romances. What I’m trying to apprise is that; it’s okay to let yourself flow once in a blue moon.

Guarded yet free, I am hard to know. Confident yet sensitive, compassionate yet hardhearted. Impossible to understand yet so full of glee and inside my heart hide both peace and plea. Yes you were right, easy to talk yet hard to catch by. Nervous and nimble, curious and controlled. Taking many risk, living life bold. Intuitive but careless, life is a game I hold an intellect that is to quick to exclaim.

This year I learned that apologies won’t cut it nor will excuses, and even if they did, there wouldn’t have been any true reason to find yourself to begin with. Scurry on, hurry on, carry on with yourself, like life-giving rivers ever-flowing, or else you will slip on by into an ocean of anonymity. Don’t forget to nurture your roots either because of them, it will be as if you have blossomed right before their eyes like the first flower of spring. The hardest thing about finding yourself is everything. Everyone, you or anyone else ever thought you were, is either more of your prior existence or an empty reflection of all that has passed by them, and you didn’t miss it, they did. There are things people want from me but some things cannot be. I just want to be me. I don’t want fame nor glory but with these hands i’ll tame the expression within me. Read my words imagine my world but never see me in it. I’ll share a new point of view but only the open minded few can understand the work of hand, pen and paper. Is it a talent to write such raw feelings, only you, the being reading this can judge? Judge my words, my flaws and my ideals. Do I hit you deep in the feels? Do you relate? Is this fate? Maybe you and I are looking for our inner selves. It feels like digging through a book shelf. But as we age we find our greatest collection of stories and just as many worries. A pile of imperfections but there are still perfect moments. Similarly I apologise to those I hurt and will be hurt and I love back all– well maybe one or just none– those who fell in love with me. But most of all I hope I grow through it all and being the fire that eats everything it meets and grows bigger and bigger without burning, without leaving ashes behind, only bringing heat to those who have been feeling cold for a long while.

No, I was not finish. Confused by the tittle? Of course you are, here��s the anatomisation of this post.

You see, the reason I’m telling you my story is because our words have power. Our story is important. I think it’s important to remember that, and I know people forget it sometimes– I know I do– and some people don’t believe it at all, but I believe that even if nobody is listening, even if there’s no one to tell your story to; it is still important.

Sometimes it’s all we’re left with and we have to cling to it with all our might. We’re lucky enough to be main characters in a lot of other people’s stories and that is a hell of an achievement. We get the chance to influence other people’s stories, and they in return influence even more people’s stories. Without us, everyone else’s stories get shortened and there end up being less variation in the story telling world. If we don’t add to the storytelling process then the whole world slows down.

Every single relationship we establish with someone gives them more of a story to tell. Even if you don’t make a story of your own you’re still a vessel for other people’s stories to travel through and that’s amazing itself. The tiniest detail can change everything– the memory of holding a hand, a snippet of information, recommending a favourite ice cream, falling over in a hilarious manner– it travels through other people’s stories, and without you that story doesn’t get told, or gets told at a later time by someone else, by which time the person you could’ve shared your story with has missed out on the chance to pass that story on to a whole host of other people. That changes the whole storytelling world. Every future chain of events in which you could have but didn’t tell your story becomes different– there’s less of a story, it’s not as full as it could have been, and everyone, albeit unknowingly, suffers a little more for it. Most of us aren’t wise enough or powerful enough to be the true “wise man” that our species name sapians implies, changing the world in a dramatic way in one fell swoop with a single action or in the course of our lifetime but we’re certainly capable of being pans narrans (story-telling apes) and injecting a bit more variety in the lives of others. I can’t think of a better person to exist other than mattering so much that the whole future of the world becomes less varied and slightly less impressive, if we simple cease to be. Every moment of joy, every moment of anger, rage, suffering, jealousy, euphoria and even numbness contributes to the stories we end up telling other people even if we’re not talking about those moments specifically. We learn from them, we change because of them and the stories we tell evolve with each new experience. You don’t even need to write yourself, sooner or later, somewhere down the line, someone will write something that never would have been written if you had not existed, and their work will be all the more glorious for the stories you helped to pass on. You are literally part of a bunch of great works yet to be written. You are a poem. You are a play. You are a song. You are the beginning, middle and end of several bestselling novels. You are the first sentence in a book that grabs a publishers attention and the last in one that spawns a whole franchise. You are important and without you the whole literary world loses a masterpiece that would make a whole bunch of people feel like they weren’t alone in the universe. You are their comfort as they lie awake at night with nothing but a book, and the inspiration that causes a child to believe in themselves. I can’t think of anything more important than your words, your thoughts and the story you have to tell, but I know that, without them, the world never becomes as glorious as it could have been. I love you, I know that others love you as well, and I’m certain that a part of the love that people feel for you will travel throughout the stories they tell, eventually end up in a famous book, song or an artist brushstrokes and cause someone else to love that piece of a story you helped create. - seri mirza mizani mustaza, 21.

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nessiana · 6 years ago

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thoughts about the hs epilogues

this discussion post will contain spoilers for both the Candy and Meat routes of the homestuck epilogues, so read at your own risk (also there’s discussion of heavy topics like suicide and genocide, so please take notice of this Content Warning)

My takeaway from the epilogues

In Homestuck, there are many doomed timelines that are seen or referenced, which are all different in some way from the main timeline, but are still essential for the plot. Some character from them or an event that occurs is necessary to further the plot in the main timeline, and as a result the doomed timeline remains significant to the plot, even if it's never revisited.

That's what I think is the case with the epilogues. Terrible things happen in both timelines, yes, many of which I'd certainly hope would not occur in the real, canon timeline. But the mere fact that there are two parallel timelines in this story, each with references to the other, means that neither is the real timeline. However, I believe the events described in the epilogues are real within the structure of Homestuck, even though they are framed as outside of canon, because they set up certain things that are necessary for the plot of whatever is coming next. (Davebot in candy, and Rosebot in meat, as a major example).

The duality between the meat and candy decision is a deception. Those are not the only options possible for John, because he doesn't have to choose between following Rose's instructions, or not doing anything at all. He can, as @wakraya pointed out, go find Terezi and bring her back, which would probably solve a lot of things. He can muster up the energy to resume interacting with his friends again, without having things go down the way they do in the Candy route. For one, he doesn't have to bring back Gamzee. If Calliope asks him, he should refuse to consider the idea. That alone would solve a lot of the issues with Candy.

This would create a hypothetical pumpkin route, or "veggie route", as I like to think of it, which would be sort of a hybrid route combining elements of the two epilogue routes, but with all the worst stuff fixed. That's what I hope happens.

My thoughts specifically regarding Dirk's fate in the Candy route

As we learn later on in the Candy route, and experience firsthand in the Meat route, we have to be aware when reading the epilogues that the narrator's voice shouldn't always be trusted. Dirk's death in the Candy route is described as a Just death, but is it really? Since he is a godtier, and from the context of the rest of the route, where he remains dead, we know that his death must have been either Heroic or Just, since those are the only conditions under which a godtier can actually die. But again, we are only presented two choices, as if they were the only ones! How can we know for sure whether these are the only two options? Heroic is equally as repulsive an explanation to settle on as Just, because both options imply that the right decision for Dirk to make was to kill himself. But as we saw in the Meat timeline, he has accumulated power over the narrative for years, internalizing and growing his powers as Rose tried to ignore her own powers, which led to her condition we saw her dealing with in the prologue. Dirk, if it is to be believed grew control over the narrative in the Meat timeline, also had that same control in the Candy timeline. Why, then, would he commit suicide? Perhaps he saw that if he remained in the narrative, he would become an antagonistic force. Perhaps he feared that he would renounce his humanity, and with it any shred of being a good person. Perhaps he feared becoming the monster that poor Dave had to grow up with, who caused much trauma that Dave is still dealing with, something Dirk is well aware of.

These reasonings still do not justify suicide. Nothing does. Dirk's death in the Candy timeline should, by all accounts, not have been either Heroic or Just. But perhaps what may have occurred is that his suicide caused the clock to malfunction. His death could be seen as Heroic in one way, because he was preventing the birth of a malevolent god, whose unbridled power and selfish intentions can be seen in the Meat timeline. In another way, it could also be seen as Just, because Dirk himself would have been that malevolent god. If the clock determined that his death could be construed as both, or neither, it may have failed to make any decision at all, and left him dead without any real justification.

Both options, Heroic and Just, presume that the only possible future for Dirk in the Candy timeline is that he becomes evil like he does in Meat. But if he knew that he would become evil, and killed himself to prevent it, would that mean that he could have remained alive and attempted to keep himself from becoming evil? Well, yes, but that would result in a different timeline.

I'm going to try to wrap things up on the topic of Dirk's suicide. First and foremost, there should've been some kind of warning about this specifically, because it's a lot more traumatic than anything else in the epilogues, especially for people (such as myself) who struggle with depression, and certainly for those who struggle with self-harm or have even attempted suicide. Just something as simple as a small warning at the top of the page would've sufficed, such as "this page contains a graphic depiction of self-harm, continue at your own risk."

But as for the event itself, within the narrative, it is necessary for the rest of the events of the Candy route to occur - and I personally believe that the events of both epilogue routes need to occur in their own timelines, so that certain characters from each can come into the true timeline.

I don't like it. I don't like thinking that Dirk's death is something that needs to happen, even in a single doomed timeline. Dirk isn't my favorite character by any means, but I would never wish death or injury upon him or any of the eight Homestuck kids. I like Dirk, and I think that in the true canon timeline, he - as well as the rest of the eight - would always be always capable of redemption, of seeing his own faults and being a good person. But, I suppose, it is reasonable to theorize that there are timelines where even the Homestuck kids do unspeakable things and become irredeemable, a glimpse of which we've been subjected to with these epilogues. Is Jane still redeemable in the Candy timeline? I really doubt it. Jane had been my favorite character in the comic, but I can never see her in the same light again. I know that the epilogues are merely a couple of doomed timelines, but seeing that version of Jane, that possibility that she becomes xenophobic and turns against her friends in two timelines, and even becomes a genocidal maniac in one, has ruined her character for me. The epilogues' treatment of Jane is a whole other can of beans that I might get into someday, but for now I'm just focusing on Dirk.

Suicide is not a subject that should've been approached like this. I don't agree with the writers' decision to include something as dark as this in the story, canon or not, and on top of that, putting it so early on in the Candy timeline, before most of the bad things happen. But then, Dirk's death is the catalyst for much of the horrible things that occur in the Candy timeline. So as much as I hate to admit it, within the context of the Candy timeline, Dirk's death had to happen the way it did.

Further thoughts about the epilogues in general

I don't really know what to think about the epilogues. Whether to like them, or to hate them. Some who embrace them claim that "everything in them is necessary and canon." I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I wouldn't disregard them either.

They're written by Hussie, with the help of a couple other writers. They have a lot of really great dialog exchanges, many of which capture the same feeling as the dialog of the original comic did. Both timelines are continuations of the main timeline from Homestuck. But the very nature of there being two equivalent, opposing timelines means that neither of the two timelines is the Real, Empirically True, Actual Homestuck Canon. As Rose said in the prologue, all of the events on Earth C take place outside of canon, which mean that neither the Meat nor the Candy timeline is as real and true as the events depicted in the original comic.

But they do both build up to something, implying that there will be a continuation of the story, where certain things from both (such as Davebot and Rosebot) enter into the real timeline. In this hypothetical "real timeline," John doesn't go off to fight Lord English the same way he does in Meat, but he also doesn't do what he does in Candy. There has to be a third option, a third timeline where things don't all go to shit, Lord English is defeated, and none of the characters we know and love from the main timeline have to die.

#homestuck #epilogue spoilers #homestuck spoilers

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team-jpde · 7 years ago

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JPDE's 2nd Birthday - The Birth, the End and the Break

Hello, thar, Meinos Kaen here… And today is JPDE’s 2nd birthday.

By birthday I mean the day I first had the idea for the overall story, thanks to a good long-time friend of mine that on the JPDE Discord server goes by the name of Penny –sic-. I had debated about maybe considering the birthday the release of the first demo, or of Version 1.0 but I thought I’d be completely honest and true with you guys. Also so I can weave you the tale of the game’s origins.

THE BIRTH OF JPDE

I didn’t get into RWBY until after the end of season 3. I was aware of its existence, I had heard about Rooster Teeth but I never got into any of their products. I knew of RvB but I was never into Machinima videos. Achievement Hunter? I prefer playing videogames instead of watching people play them –but I will tune in for good commentary even if I don’t always completely agree with the points made, shoutout to Jim Sterling, Yathzee and TotalBiscuit (rest in peace)-.

The first contact I had with RWBY was actually the Yang VS Tifa Deathbattle, a video with an outcome that even RWBY fans pretty much all agreed was bullshit and immediately made me not interested. I had friends who were fans, though, one of which was Penny. She tried many times to get me interested in RWBY, to the point that I pretty much knew the whole plot before even watching an episode. Still, she never managed to stir the embers of interest.

Until she showed me Penny –the character-. A fan-art of her, then her official sketches, and damn. Penny is still, by far, one of the best character designs I have ever seen in animation. Then she showed me the episode where she appeared and I was hooked. So cute! So freckly! So pure! So OMGGIANTLASERWTF!

Then, after getting me on board… She told me Penny was dead, after I had already gotten to Season 3! THAT CHEATER! So I got moody and eventually turned to my favourite coping mechanism… Imagination.

Hitting ideas off my friend and just shooting the shit about how Penny deserved more friends, maybe her own team, maybe someone who loved her, and a partner. Those talks gave birth to the concepts for David, Evelyn and Jack, and eventually to Team WHIT too.

Those conversations actually turned to a roleplay, but I have always been a writer first and foremost so I thought ‘hey, this could actually make a nice fanfiction’. Been writing fanfiction since I was 14, so the progression was natural.

Then, I remembered something else. I had been experimenting and using RenPy randomly on and off for years but I had never actually put my ass in gear and just made something… Then I realized I wanted to make a Visual Novel out of it. I wanted to make a story where Penny didn’t die and I didn’t just want to write it, I wanted to code it.

I started thinking about making monthly releases of it right off the bat, budgeting certain amounts of money out of my own pocket. That only lasted for a couple months before I opened the Patreon for JPDE and, my god, the support I received has been unbelievable. All for a little fan-game born out of love for a redheaded row-boat. I’m humbled every minute of every day by the all too real support I’ve been getting.

Two years later, JPDE is still going strong and I’ve even managed to start working on original projects of mine. I can’t thank you guys enough for the support you’ve been showing me…

And today, as year two comes to a close, it’s time to discuss year three. It’s time to discuss the road to the end-game.

THE ROAD TO THE VYTAL TOURNAMENT

As you may already know if you've been playing the game, the School Life part of JPDE will end with day 183, which is going to be the weekend of the Vytal Dance, corresponding to the RWBY Vol2 episode Dance Dance Infiltration, and then the events of the Breach of Vale City. On that weekend it's when the end-game starts.

On the weekend of the dance, instead of choosing who to go on a date with, you'll be asked who to bring to the dance out of all the characters you've been on four dates with. Once made, that choice can't be changed, and other than the dance it will influence how certain events will play out in Breach and during the events of the Vytal Festival.

The choices are mutually exclusive, meaning that once you've chosen one character it will be like all the other dates won’t have happened –unless it’s a threesome/moresome route, ahem-. If you choose Silhouette-chan, it will be like you will always only have gone on dates with her. I’ve stated in the past that JPDE’s route dates are like schrodinger’s cat. The dance invitation is like opening the door.

There are however, certain exceptions, which I will refer to as complementary characters. The dates of these characters will still count as having happened even if you choose someone else for the dance and will influence some events during the end-game. So far, those characters are:

Neopolitan

Qrow Branwen

Pyrrha Nikos (Optional)

Cinder Fall

The more dates you get with these characters, the more they will influence the end-game, even if you decide to not bring them to the dance. Also, they will interact with other certain characters’ stories in certain ways if you bring those other certain characters to the dance.

Got all that? Good, because now we come to…

END GAME DEVELOPMENT

Once we hit day 183, I will change how I release content for the game. Since I won’t be able to measure the progress in weeks any longer, I will just release as much as I can manage each month. But there’s also something else that is specific to the ‘date routes’ part: I will only ever work on one character’s end-game at any given time, exception made for the complementary ones.

What does that mean? It means that, when we first hit day 183, I will have a poll asking you to decide which character out of the ones currently at four dates you want me to work on. I will then work on that character’s end-game only until completion, then open another poll to decide which character to work on next.

This, of course, on top of the usual two dates a month and the story progression, provided that we keep a sufficient level of Patreon funding.

IN CONCLUSION

At this rate of releasing and updating, we’re going to reach day 183 probably on JPDE’s third birthday. So you have one year to get as many people as possible up to four dates before the final battle to decide who’s going to get the first end-game focused round of development. That final vote will be PATREON EXCLUSIVE. I repeat, ONLY PATRONS WILL BE ABLE TO VOTE ON THAT POLL AND ANY SUBSEQUENT ONES REGARDING END-GAME CONTENT.

And with that, I now officially declare fourth dates available to be nominated and voted for in New Route Events polls. All other rules, particularly the ones regarding Team RWBY and Team JPDE characters, stay in place.

Papa loves you, papa thanks you and I will talk to you soon. Put a mark on your calendar, prepare, plan, look for allies… Because we’re now entering Year Three of JPDE. And the stakes have never been higher…

- Meinos Kaen

Ah, also...

P.S. - SEPTEMBER BREAK

BunnyVoid, our background artist, has recently suffered a death in the family. ArsonicArtz is going to Japan and Papa is going to France and Poland in September.

Considering these circumstances, there will be a small break in September. Meaning that the September release will only contain the new dates.

#Project JPDE #JPDE #Meinos Kaen #rwby #rwby fandom #rwby fan art #rwby fan game #rwby visual novel #rwby dating sim #dating sim #visual novel #devblog

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transcending-chaos · 7 years ago

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Writing Religions 101

Okay, so I’m not just gonna bitch about this tonight, here’s a quick 101 on writing these things. This is one heck of a long post, but hopefully it’ll explain things well enough.

CLASSIFICATIONS

There are measurements and rules as to what classifies/what is considered a religion, especially if you want to write an Organized Religion. As such, here are the definitions again, as well as what they entail:

Religion is a group of collected beliefs passed down either through generational storytelling, instruction, or conversion. These beliefs have significance, importance, and prevalence in the adherents’ society, social activities, personal lives, relationships, and world views

Basically, religions are (often) archaic or long-standing, established beliefs that have weathered the passage of time or transformed along with it. They spread via common story-telling, through writing, generational teachings, familial traditions, are have bearing in an individual adherent’s life in some form, even if it’s mild superstition. It is a cultural tool used to help inform a worldview, and teach the uninformed or uninitiated. Yes, this can be bad, and yes it can be good, but it needs to have impact that resonates with the masses- even if it’s contained to one area. The resonance and personal value is what quantifies it as a religion in the first place; yes this varies from person to person, but without that quality, validity, attachment, and lens to help view the world through, it is not considered a religion or faith.

If this sounds strange, that’s because you’re trying to measure and quantify feeling, emotional and spiritual attachment, and give it value to be measured by. It’s a hard thing to do, but it can be done. It’s the attachment of people and principles, their devotion, their community and connection with a cause and ideal that is bigger than themselves.

So, that’s the broadest definition I can give, now to the sub-categories.

Organized Religion is a religious structure, narrative, values, and set of beliefs specified in a formally established doctrine that has interpreters, leaders, and systems. These are post-literate, meaning written or containing documents, and can be read or translated.

Any religion with definitive text and interpreter (preacher, spiritual leader)

This means that the religion has been written down and there is a structure and format to the members. Be it a hierarchy with different tiers, a community with a single speaker who reads, defines, and provides context for the text, or a structure where people take turns, Organized Religions have to be organized. There are systems to keep order, often for the sake of keeping the message of the text clear and unified, and this is what allows Organized Religions to spread so easily when compared to their counterpart. They often have community outreach or influence, they have a tendency to be much larger than Folk Religions, as well as considered more ‘valid’ in the eyes of the law because of their prevalence and the beneficial value they bring to the masses.

Please note that Organized Religions do not always mean Theocracies, though if you’re going to make a believable theocratic structure, you might want to use this one because it’d be a larger threat.

Folk Religion is/are social concepts followed by groups of people often determined by old superstitions and regional practices.

This one is harder to define because it can be offensive or insinuate that a group’s customs or traditions are not a ‘valid’ religion. Everything from tribal religions, forgotten ancient customs that few still practice, to civil religions can be considered Folk Religion.

Folk Religions are like old wives’ tales that are specific to regions or smaller territories than Organized Religions, as well as not usually written down. These have a far greater emphasis on oral storytelling and generational teachings, and of the two, are the ones with more malleable symbols and structures, but ultimately the morals and messaging should reach the same conclusion. These tales are more like superstition, often subtle, and often very simple. Considering a black cat crossing your path as bad luck is an example, throwing salt over your left shoulder if you spill it is another. Heck, if a town has ghost stories that are shared and reiterated over generations, than that’s a form of Folk Religion.

Cult as a term used to refer to those devoted to certain sects of larger religions. (For instance those who were devoted to a certain Saint in Catholicism would be considered a cult, but they still followed the larger practices and doctrine of the Catholic teachings.)

New movements within larger religions were usually classified as cults before becoming established sects.

In the traditional sense, Cults really were just smaller facets of larger religions that were devoted to another god within a pantheon, a saint within the host, etc. Also, anything new or not established were considered cults, as they were not formally organized, as widespread, or long-standing as the other two types of religions.

In the modern sense, cults are groups that practice a predatory method of recruitment and extremist ideals. Cults can rise to the level of organized religions, but doing so takes great periods of time, devotion from followers, outreach, influence, etc.

WHY DO CLASSIFICATIONS MATTER?

Quite simply, it determines structure, influence, validity (as determined by law), acceptance by outsiders, and the gauge your characters’ faith will be measured by. These criteria are put in place so that no one can make up something and then just say it’s a religion to get out of doing something else or breaking a law; it’s a way of categorizing and verifying that something is indeed intrinsic to one’s way of life.

Religion *has* to matter to your world if you give it one; it must have impact in some way. Does this mean your character has to have faith? No, absolutely not. But if you mention religion or begin to hint at one, be prepared to at least write the basic ramifications/effects of it existing in your world.

WAYS RELIGION HAS IMPACT/THE ‘WHY’ OF HAVING RELIGION

Religions are forms of mythology, ways that were established to explain the world when people did not know much about it.

Religions pass down traditions and connect multiple generations of people

Religions can unify nations and create peace/community through common belief

Religions dictate morality, good conduct, bad conduct, and consequences for actions

Religions were used to maintain order during periods of great social change

Religions offered entertainment for the masses or distractions from hard work as most are filled with parables

Religions offer comfort, solidarity, and purpose to those who need/seek it (ie. ‘finding faith’)

These are all explanations of why we have religions to begin with; whether it’s an old mythology that was once used to explain the world, or a collection of stories that withstood the test of time and slowly was transformed into something greater, these are reasons we have religions today. You must have a why, be it because of people trying to make the world into something they could fathom, actual divine instruction/intervention, or something someone made up and established a long time ago to create an empire, there has to be a reason. There must be a catalyst: a prophet or leader, an event, an object, something that still holds great relevance and meaning in the current day and age.

If you want an old-world religion, then go with the myth, tradition, and morality reasons.

If you want a religion that’s being used to manipulate the way a certain group of people thinks and interprets the world (via a theocracy), then go the route of choosing unification, morality, maintaining order (to repress change), and comfort.

If you want more of a Folk Religion path, choose something more like morality and entertainment.

Yet whatever the case, keep in mind that in order for your religion to stay around in your world, it must have a redeeming value. This is why ‘comfort’ is on the list. People will ignore reason and fight for what makes them feel good. It’s a good scapegoat if you’re struggling to come up with other reasons.

IMPACT AND SYMBOLS

Here is where you let your creative side go nuts. Because your religion has relevance to groups of people and their worldview, it’s obviously impacted how they interact with the world. Your doctrine can be as broad or specific as you like, but it needs to have bearing on the world and/or it’s people. THERE MUST BE EFFECTS.

Symbols can be anything, for instance:

Christian Symbols:

-Christian Symbols focus predominantly on morality and the superiority of God

--Depending on what sect is using the symbols, certain images and techniques are more common

--Typically triumph Christian morals and viewpoints but these change based on the sects

-God Conquers All narrative

-Crosses (St. Peter’s Cross, the Crucifix) -humility, sacrifice, martyrdom, faith, carrying the weight of one’s sins

-Saints, Humans -servitude, reward, dedication, devotion, the images of God

-Angels -protection, devotion, messengers/heralds, divine interaction

-The Color Red -blood of Christ, sacrifice, fire and brimstone, hell and damnation

-The Color White -innocence, purity, virginity, perfection, divinity

-Theme of Unity and Edenic Worlds

-Theme of Virtue over Sin and/or Hypocrisy

-Theme of Conversion

Pagan Symbols

-Spirals and Knotwork -Pantheism, connection to all things

-Elements -Nature is Holy, Nature is God/powerful

-Magic -Transformation is necessary and natural, everyone and everything has power and importance

-Animals

--Predators are representative of savagery and forces greater than man

--Prey are humility, representative of humans, and how even the seemingly insignificant have important roles

--Sacrifices to or embodiments of God(s)

These symbols are highly malleable and change through the years to keep their relevance, but this is a rough outline of some very basic concepts.

Ultimately, choose your symbols with care and relevance to your created faiths.

WHY HAVE RELIGIONS AT ALL IN A NARRATIVE?

Aside from being a way to increase the scale of conflict to unfathomable and ancient wars between the very embodiments of good and evil, it’s a very easy way to get morals across as long as you’re clear in your messaging. Religions are very personal beliefs that are transcendental from culture to culture, relating themes in a concise manner (parables), and are often very human -because they have to relate to humans (I mean, in our world at least). They exist to fill needs, and whether those needs have gone and past are up to you in your narrative. Once again, they are cultural tools used to help inform a worldview, and teach the uninformed or uninitiated.

The possibilities are endless, but treat them with care.

For instance Religions can impact:

-Arts: fashion/visual arts/music/poetry/writing

-Sciences: the progression of how fields go forwards/sponsoring new fields of study

-Humanities: social structures/hierarchies/types of (un)favorable behavior/values of society

Literally anything and everything can be affected by religion, entire societies rise and fall with it.

These are just the most essential elements you need to write something that qualifies as a religion in your works. The broadness of the terms gives you a lot of room to explore, but it has to have substance, meaning, relevance, and an effect. Remember, you’re trying to validate and quantify things that are, by nature, unquantifiable.

#thoughts on writing #i will fix any typos later but holy heck man #this was long

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atrocitycl · 8 years ago

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Drama Review - “Fight My Way”

(Official Trailer 2)

Lee Najeong (Director) – Fight My Way

Reviewed on September 3, 2017

I highly recommend this drama. While it is not perfect at all and does contain—in my argument—certain, significant flaws, I find that this drama is still one of the best I have ever seen. Furthermore, as I will focus on in this review, this drama’s main strength lies in how it is incredibly versatile and this reason is, perhaps, why the drama was incredibly popular—both in South Korea and even elsewhere. After all, Fight My Way arguably flourishes in the two main aspects of dramas: it appeals to a wide audience; and, it contains solid theatrical features in order to maintain said wide audience.

Personal Message: Edit: As one can tell, I intended to post this review far sooner. I am incredibly busy with university, so I hope for readers to be understanding with the lack of content lately. It has been two weeks since the prior post, but I will sincerely attempt to still be active with this blog despite how hectic my university schedule is. In fact, just finishing this review was incredibly fun and rewarding and it is moments such as these that I regret not writing every day.

Apologies for the lack of content. University has indeed started as of this sentence and thus, I will be busy with upcoming classes. I expect this semester to be by far the busiest, but I will do my best to post around six or so reviews per month. I also will still try to catch up on other reviews from the summer that I have not reviewed: GFRIEND’s “Love Whisper” and Blackpink’s “As If It’s Your Last.” But, considering there are recent comebacks that might be more relevant to review such as PRISTIN’s “We Like,” those mentioned reviews might have to unfortunately be skipped.

Regarding this review, this will be a “bonus” review: a review that still attempts to bring critical, thoughtful discussion but one that will ultimately be hindered by lack of experience. Therefore, readers should feel free to openly challenge this review’s take to the drama or at least interpret the review lightly. After all, while I do enjoy watching dramas from time to time, I am exceptionally inexperienced with the theatrical aspects that are involved. Lastly, for the remaining clarification needed, while it should be noted that there are many to praise and credit for the production of a drama, in this review I will explicitly credit and oftentimes refer to Lee Najeong—the director of Fight My Way. I have decided on doing this as, if I am correct, the directors are the ones in charge of directly guiding how each scene appears in the drama—this being akin to, say, an author of a novel. As a result, she will be who I explicitly credit but of course, in the overall scheme of creating a drama, I hope to remind readers that all staff members deserve credit.

With all of that, let us head into the review for Fight My Way.

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Recommendation: I highly recommend this drama. While it is not perfect at all and does contain—in my argument—certain, significant flaws, I find that this drama is still one of the best I have ever seen. Furthermore, as I will focus on in this review, this drama’s main strength lies in how it is incredibly versatile and this reason is, perhaps, why the drama was incredibly popular—both in South Korea and even elsewhere. After all, Fight My Way arguably flourishes in the two main aspects of dramas: it appeals to a wide audience; and, it contains solid theatrical features in order to maintain said wide audience.

Plot Summary: Summarizing this drama is a bit difficult. Overall, Fight My Way focuses on four main characters: Aera, Dongman, Seolhee, and Jooman. Rather than a singular event being the driving force of the plot, this drama differs in that it is solely minor events that move the plot. For example, the drama might focus on how Aera and Dongman are developing romantic feelings towards each other and the comedy that such brings, or it might opt for a more serious route with showcasing how the two—and even Seolhee and Jooman—constantly face failures with their careers. Ultimately, what can be most appreciated is how relatively tame the plot is and yet how deep and impacting it can be upon viewers; it truly is a drama that addresses “life” in of itself—though in a comedic, romantic, and serious manner.

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Analysis: One distinct aspect to the drama, and perhaps its strongest point, is how it manages to capture a wide audience. This is a surprising point given the typical trends of dramas: targeting a specific audience and then complying with that very audience’s desires. However, with Fight My Way, despite the drama being explicitly labeled as a romantic-comedy, Lee Najeong’s directing is not limited to fulfilling the ideas such a genre encompasses. Without spoiling too much about the drama—hopefully, that is—let us home in on a scene that perhaps best illuminates Lee Najeong’s and the drama’s versatility with genres. (I will be vague so as to not spoil moments.)

During one specific scene and episode, we find that Aera fails to acquire a certain job role due to unjust decisions. In her defeated state, she ends up running into Dongman. Fast forwarding, we find the two sitting together on a bench as Aera eventually reveals that she did not in fact get the job. After Dongman’s insightful, lingering quote of how, in summary, pretending to be fine and refusing to cry are not “cool acts,” Aera finally sheds tears—though, comically, she mentions that if anyone sees her cry, Dongman will become her murdered victim. And, for the remaining details, as avid drama watchers might predict, Dongman indeed shields Aera with his jacket before finally pulling her head into his chest for her to cry into.

Now, for what makes this scene so momentous, it is due to how well the director balances various tones and even genres if we dare go that far. Simplistically, the director could have opted to focus on one specific tone and flesh it out—a simple example being heavily emphasizing the romantic aspects to this scene. But, instead, Lee Najeong includes the three main points to the drama: seriousness, comedy, and romance. With the serious take to this scene, for example, Aera’s depicted situation is far from merely being “only in dramas”; her being rejected of that dream job had a lot of social commentary if we dare analyze Fight My Way in this lens. For what occurred, Aera lacked—or more accurately, lacks—“social capital”; she is not young nor deemed pretty, she lacks formal education via college degrees, and she lacks “experience.” The most upsetting aspect, though, is that she is skilled and has the passion and work ethics. Sadly, none of those traits matter when her overall social capital does not suffice—“capital” that is hard for a lower-classed individual to have due to their circumstances.

And so for what this reveals, Fight My Way despite being a romantic-comedy does at times become incredibly solemn—a feature that not only helps balance out the drama, but is one that attracts viewers who otherwise would be repelled away by excessive romance and comedy. Likewise, though, the director still accommodates for those who are watching primarily for the romance and comedy—such as, admittedly, in my case. Quite clearly, those aspects are also fulfilled within this very episode and scene given Aera’s remark of threatening Dongman’s life to maintain her tough persona and how Dongman does very sweetly hold her close and comforts her. All in all, this versatility is arguably why the drama does well in terms of having a very broad yet loyal audience: it simply captures the spectrum of viewers who care more for serious aspects such as social commentary (be it gender or class as the drama tended to focus on), but also for viewers who merely want to gush over the romance.

Moving on to focusing on the drama in a theatrical sense, we will transition to this point as while we understand why the audience is broad, we now need to understand why that very audience remains loyal to watching the drama. The answer, then, is we need to focus on how the drama plays out in a technical, theatrical sense.

For what initially caught my attention and perhaps many other viewers, Fight My Way’s aesthetic appeal—this ranges from the overall setting to as specific as what the actresses and actors wear—entirely goes against the average drama: it is humble. In fact, even Park Seojoon, the actor who portrays Dongman, addresses this point and embraces it as he finds that this allows the drama to focus less on sheer visual appeal and more on the actual acting that occurs. But even without the added bonus of the acting having a greater presence, there is another benefit to the drama’s lack of exquisite fashion or a setting that is luxurious: the drama unveils the beauty of “normal”—that there is, indeed, beauty to sceneries that would seldom exist in dramas. From simple t-shirts and sweatpants to smaller apartments to a roughly established rooftop hangout spot, Fight My Way boldly challenges the way many other dramas utilize their settings. In many cases, gorgeous settings are used to help viewers escape reality but with this drama, Lee Najeong seems to want viewers to see reality—to see that their own lives, to certain degrees, are reflected in the drama.

For another theatrical aspect that I do wish to cover, as with any drama, we definitely need to spend time covering the acting—the skill that brings dramas to life akin to vocalists bringing a song to life. Regarding the acting, as stale as the following will sound, I find that the actresses and actors have all done an excellent job. There were minimal—if at all any—moments where I found the acting to be far too exaggerated or simply unfitting. To perhaps best explain why the acting is quite impressive, I think we ought to look not at emotional scenes—scenes that typically are used to gauge acting—but rather we need to look at comical scenes. After all, emotional scenes are easily manipulated beyond just acting: music; mere empathy; tears on everyone; and so forth. In other words, I find that it requires much more acting to make someone laugh versus to make them cry and hence why I believe that focusing on comical scenes is important if we are to gauge the acting.

Once again to prevent spoilers, I will be extremely vague but I do wish to refer to a certain scene. There is a time where Dongman finds that Aera is dating someone, and in short, much laughter is to come. Most impressively, though, is that the humor has less to do with witty scriptwriting and more with Park Seojoon’s performance (and, of course, Lee Najeong’s directing). Through purely facial expressions for example, viewers are able to gather many details: that Dongman’s world has shattered. It is through his horrified look that viewers not only get basic comedy out of such, but it is also when viewers could start piecing together that, perhaps, Dongman does have a crush on Aera and thus we are able to laugh at Dongman’s regrets and poor decisions of being mean to Aera. Similar types of acting-based comedic scenes also occur—a notable one being when Dongman begins to finally notice how Aera is attractive to him and seems to be struggling for breath as he wonders why her legs are now pretty despite, quite obviously, Aera’s leg never physically changed at all. (And, this is even more comedic when we factor in how, in many prior episodes, Dongman was extremely repulsed at having to touch Aera’s hair.)

(That said, for a serious moment and digression, readers who know what scene I am referring to might have found it disturbing—and that is not due to sexual undertones as that was not there. Rather, I refer to Dongman controlling Aera’s fashion. In terms of what viewers need to understand, this is where viewers need to be aware of cultural context—that, indeed, Dongman’s act was less of being oppressive and more of protecting, though that can and should be openly challenged or even defended depending on one’s argument. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind why such a very stereotypical drama romance scene was used there, and of course that it added the comedic element of, as explained, Dongman acting as if Aera’s leg had suddenly changed.

Ultimately, how viewers interpret that scene is up to individual ideas: one can find it disturbing and offensive and rightfully so, but equally one has to bear in mind different cultural takes and how the “fashion control” that occurs is, in the appropriate cultural context, less about a man controlling a woman and more as merely “protecting” an individual. And, overall, I hope this single scene does not entirely detract from the drama’s otherwise very positive messages about gender equality and feminism—after all, both Aera’s and Seolhee’s depicted characters offer the most balanced perspective one could ask for and I admire the drama for offering what I argue is true feminism: that a woman should behave how she wants. Aera’s character presents the typical “strong woman” that many appreciate and love when it comes instantly thinking of feminism, but Seolhee’s character also presents the side that is oftentimes forgotten: that there is nothing wrong with desiring to be a stay-at-home-Mom and that her main dream in life is “to be a mother”—though I have now arguably just spoiled a very powerful line from her as viewers who watch the drama will see. Without this tangent getting any further, I simply wish to end it with the drama’s message about feminism: that it is not just only about a “strong woman” like Aera; feminism also means giving a voice to women who do not want to be like Aera but instead are more like Seolhee. And, before men are dismissed, much is also to be appreciated for the drama showcasing that a man crying, being emotional, and showing moments of weakness is, as Dongman would say, in fact “cool.”)

On topic, now that we have covered many reasons for why the drama is a stronger one, I unfortunately cannot end the review here. I recommend Fight My Way and will claim it is by far one of the best dramas I have seen, but it would be erroneous to claim it was objectively the best. It does have, as any drama does, many flaws—some of which, I will argue, are too significant to ignore.

One prominent problem that the drama struggles to handle is that towards the last four or so episodes, the drama’s tone and genre versatility disappear. Suddenly, Lee Najeong’s impressive directing where there is a balance of seriousness, romance, and comedy becomes predominantly just serious. Much of the comedic aspects are lost, and given how central humor is in the drama, having it entirely put aside—while understandable as the drama is attempting to conclude neatly—leaves a noticeable void. Likewise, many of the romantic scenes are lost—though if heartbreak counts, then perhaps “romance” in a distorted sense does still remain. (And readers should watch the drama to understand this supposed “heartbreak” that occurs towards the last episodes. Before readers claim I spoiled the ending, I will say that is far more complicated.)

Even so, while one could indeed dismiss the prior point, I find that what ultimately prevents me from claiming that Fight My Way is the best drama is due to poor character developments that occur for non-lead characters. Many supporting characters are simply far too one-dimensional, and this does hinder the plot and complexity of the drama. One key example is Hyeran, Dongman’s ex-girlfriend. Her character exists to cause tensions between Aera and Dongman but, the infuriating part is Hyeran lacks reasoning for her heinous acts. The drama, in essence, simply did not develop her character enough for there to be understandable reasons—or at least, I personally do not count “Hyeran became divorced and now wants to go back to her first option: Dongman” as a thoroughly developed character. It would have been far more interesting as a character and plot if, for example, Hyeran was actually a typical, well-behaved human and that she had a deeper past with Dongman. Instead of relentlessly and disturbingly chasing Dongman after being divorced, what if the two were previously in a very respectful and close relationship and ended on good terms and that she now wonders if they could get back together? This route not only prevents Hyeran from being a superficial character, but it also suits with the drama’s realistic style and causes conflicts not due to, essentially, being stalked but because Dongman has feelings he needs to address if he is to understand how he truly feels about Aera. Other characters such as Moobin are also one-dimensional and positioned as antagonists merely for the sake of having antagonists. Rather than relying on generic, binary characters of “good versus evil,” the drama would have been more appealing by having actions that are centered as moral dilemmas rather than the characters themselves. A good example of what I mean is if we look at one of our leads, Jooman: a man whose heart is, without doubt, full of love and helping others. The “evil” that exists, then, is whether too much kindness can ironically become bad.

In Jooman’s case, I argue he was an example of excellent character development and of straying away from the generic, “good versus evil” archetype. For his situation, his kindness with a new co-worker, Yejin, has led to some misunderstanding with Seolhee, his partner—more so as Yejin begins developing feelings for Jooman and is unaware of his relationship with Seolhee (or at least initially). Certainly Jooman never did anything inappropriate with Yejin at all, but as Aera presented, the problem was not focused on that: “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t sleep (have sex) with her or not.” The problem was Jooman constantly lied to Seolhee when helping Yejin as he did not wish to cause mistrust or create suspicion of an affair that did not exist. Now of course, Jooman’s true mistake was simply the lack of open communications and being truthful, but if it took a lie of how he was meeting his friends in order to get an incredibly intoxicated Yejin home safely, Jooman valued doing “what was right” even if it meant having to lie to Seolhee. The main takeaway, overall, is that Jooman’s character presents a situation where he is innately a good person and yet it is his actions that prove complex. He never intended to betray Seolhee’s trust but, in difficult circumstances of wondering what is ethically right—of caring for the safety of a co-worker at the cost of having to lie—we find a character who does away with the typical “good versus evil” setup that Moobin and Hyeran and other character rely on. This level of depth in characters—even for the supporting ones—would have made the drama far more insightful and pleasing. As it stands, many non-lead characters are simply far too one-dimensional and lack convincing, realistic reasons for what we would perceive as inappropriate and cruel behavior.

In the end, I still find Fight My Way to be an incredible drama and the best I have seen. I recommend it to both those familiar with Korean dramas or for those who might be watching one for the first time. Assuming one can overlook poor character development in supporting characters and how the drama becomes excessively serious towards the final episodes, Fight My Way is easily one of the better dramas produced. For me, I personally came for the romance—and rightfully, bawled so much at the most climactic kiss scene I have yet to witness—but ended up very much embracing its serious aspects and social commentary about class and gender and even other aspects such as family. Dongman’s relationship with his father, for example, mirrored my own life: while my father and I are at times somewhat distant, we still do express our love. A particular scene that I heavily related to was despite Dongman and his father having a hefty argument, in the end both left each other gifts and realized they both are the same—and comically, Dongman’s father questioned where Dongman gets his behavior. And of course, there is always the romantic aspect to delight in—though for me, love is still distant. That said, I also feel similar to Dongman with developing a crush for someone but this is definitely far too embarrassing to elaborate on. All in all, as Fight My Way has proven, it truly is a drama about “life” and thus, many readers would most likely find it a worthy drama to watch.

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Apologies for the lack of content for the past two weeks. University is incredibly busy, and with other technical tasks I need to handle—scholarships, working as a writing tutor soon, and so on—it has become hard to find time to write reviews. Given that this review is, despite being a “bonus,” is exceptionally lengthy, the next post will come in a week or so. Song reviews will come as usual, but I ask for readers’ understanding and patience—and likewise, for those waiting for Fiestar subtitled videos.

Until then, look forward to usual song reviews and as always, thank you so much for reading or skimming this review.

#Fight My Way #Korean Drama Reviews #Show Reviews #Park Seojoon #Kim Jiwon #Ahn Jaehong #Song Hayoon #Lee Najeong #Im Sangchoon

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deusnatura · 6 years ago

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Mamoru Nagano On 'L-Gaim', 'Gundam' And The Fractal Nature Of 'The Five Star Stories'

One of the foremost creative people in manga and anime that I have always wanted to talk with has been Mamoru Nagano. A wonderfully polite and thoughtful polymath, I was finally able to sit down with him and discuss his extensive creative output. 私がいつも話したがっているのは、マンガとアニメの最もクリエイティブな人々の1人です。素晴らしく丁寧で思いやりのあるポリマスで、私はついに彼と一緒に座って彼の広範なクリエイティブな成��について議論することができました。 For fans of Nagano’s work, you’ll know that he has an incredibly involved and detailed approach to things. However, it’s interesting in how that manifested when he was growing up. 永野氏の作品のファンにとって、彼は物事に対して信じられないほど複雑で詳細なアプローチを取っていることをご存知でしょう。しかし、彼が成長したときにそれがどのように表れたのかは興味深いです。 “I am from Kyoto but not the city itself, outside the city, is an area called Maizuru. This is a town that has a Navy base, it's a port town. It was also really in the countryside, so information was pretty limited and as I was growing up. I was very much a country boy. That meant if everyone was watching TV and hooked on baseball, then I would also be obsessed with baseball. When the Olympics came along and volleyball became popular, then I would follow volleyball. Then came tennis, it was just like that. So I was quite an ordinary child. 「私は京都出身ですが、街の外ではなく、舞鶴という地域です。これは海軍基地がある町です、それは港町です。それはまた本当に田舎にあった、それで私が成長していたので情報はかなり限られていた。私はとても田舎の男の子でした。つまり、みんながテレビを見ていて野球に夢中になっていたら、野球にも夢中になるでしょう。オリンピックがやってきてバレーボールが人気になったとき、それから私はバレーボールに従うでしょう。それからテニスが来た、それはちょうどそのようでした。だから私はかなり普通の子供でした。 “When it came to hobbies, I was very interested in things like plamodels. However, as someone that was born during the 60s, as a person from my generation that was something everyone experienced simply because there was a craze surrounding making plamodels. In addition, when I was younger I used to listen to the Beatles and American pop music. So I was into music but again, at the same time, everyone else was listening to things like that. 「趣味になると、私はプラモデルのようなものに非常に興味がありました。しかし、60年代に生まれた誰かとして、私の世代から来た人としては、プラモデルを作ることに夢中になっていたという理由だけで誰もが経験したことでした。また、私は若い頃、ビートルズやアメリカのポップミュージックを聴いていました。だから私は音楽に興味がありましたが、同時に、他のみんながそのようなことを聞いていました “However, when I was at high school I seemed to listen to this kind of music in a way that no one else did. In that, I wasn't listening in a passive way but I really dug down and got really into it. Maybe that was a little bit different. 「しかし、私が高校に通っていたとき、私は他の誰もしなかった方法でこの種の音楽を聴いているようでした。その点で、私は受動的な方法で聞いていませんでしたが、私は本当に掘り下げて、そしてそれに本当に入りました。多分それは少し違っていた。 “So when everyone was listening to the Beatles, everyone knew them and their songs but in my case, I knew which member of the band did exactly what at what time. I had very deep knowledge, almost encyclopedic, compared to my friends. The same went for things like fighting vehicles, as in which model did what. I had all this deep knowledge, whereas my friends were more passive. I suppose this is just my character. 「それで、みんながビートルズを聴いていたとき、みんなが彼らと彼らの歌を知っていました、しかし私の場合、私はバンドのどのメンバーがまさに何時に何をしたか知っていました。私は私の友人と比較して、ほとんど百科事典の、非常に深い知識を持っていました。どのモデルが何をしたかのように、同じことが車の戦いのようなものにも行きました。私はこの深い知識をすべて持っていましたが、私の友人はもっと受動的でした。これは私の性格だと思います。 “With tanks, I did have a specific interest and the amount I knew was not normal. It was hardcore. Looking back, if someone could count he knew what the best in this area I reckon I would be quite near the top. 「戦車では、私は特別な興味を持っていました、そして、私が知っていた量は普通ではありませんでした。ハードコアでした。振り返ってみると、もし誰かが彼がこの領域で何が一番良いのか知っていたならば、私は一番上にいるだろうと考えています。 “For instance, in terms of plamodel, there is a company called Tamiya. When I was in high school, Tamiya hosted a contest and I won a prize. I also loved music and I actually wanted to become a musician, to the extent that I could make a living out of it. I would devise ways to become a musician and get out of Maizuru. During those days, in Kyoto and Kansai if you chose to leave the area, perhaps the biggest city would be Osaka or Nagoya for University. In my case, I wanted to go to Tokyo instead because I thought it was the center. Admittedly, during that period both Osaka and Nagoya were cultural centers as well, but for me, Tokyo was the real center. Specifically, for music Tokyo was the place to go. That meant when I went to University, I studied music and when I left University I played music for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy at the Atsugi and Yamato Bases. 「たとえば、プラモデルに関しては、Tamiyaという会社があります。高校生の頃、タミヤがコンテストを主催し、賞を受賞しました。私も音楽が大好きで、実際に音楽家になりたかったのです。私はミュージシャンになって舞鶴から抜け出す方法を考案するでしょう。その間、京都と関西でこの地域を離れることを選んだ場合、おそらく最大の都市は大阪か大学の名古屋でしょう。私の場合は、東京が中心だと思ったので代わりに東京に行きたかったのです。確かに、その間は大阪も名古屋も文化の中心でしたが、私にとって東京は本当の中心でした。具体的には、音楽のために東京は行くべき場所でした。それは私が大学に行ったとき、私は音楽を学び、大学を出るとき、私は厚木と大和基地でアメリカ陸軍、アメリカ海軍のために音楽を演奏したことを意味しました。 “With manga though, it's quite difficult to describe exactly how I got into it but like how everyone was interested in building plamodel or listening to the Beatles as a kid, everyone was also interested in manga. That meant while I was growing up Osamu Tezuka was a big figure. Anyway, with music, the records had these large 30cm slipcases and on the cover, there was normally an illustration of one kind or another. I was very interested in that.” 「漫画では、私がどのようにして学んだかを正確に説明するのは非常に困難ですが、みんながプラモデルを作ることやビートルズを子供の頃から聞くことに興味を持っていたようです。手塚治虫が成長していたころは、それは大きな人物でした。とにかく、音楽では、レコードはこれらの30cmの大きなスリップケースを持っていました、そして、カバーの上には、通常何らかの種類のイラストがありました。とても興味がありました。」 Starting Out With Cosplay And Building Friendships With Future Anime Legends I am always curious how people get into things like manga and anime and Nagano’s route is especially interesting. With a unique approach to cosplay at a time when it wasn’t at all commonplace. “While I went out to Tokyo, not all of my friends did and I used to gather information for my friends back in Kyoto, in terms of music and things like doujinshi, these weren't like fanzines by the way. “For anime, I always thought it was something beautiful and during that time, Space Battleship Yamato by Leiji Matsumoto was on, there was a film as well. When I was in Tokyo, through the doujinshi friends of friends I was involved in drawing and I was quite skilled at it. In that, I would draw something almost photorealistic. Throughout my 20s, music and anime existed in parallel for me. So I was doing both. “In Kyoto during this period, there were a group of friends who were supporting Mobile Suit Gundam, that was in 1979. So to support that they would do activities as part of the fan club. There were also a lot of women in the fan club and I was amazed at the power of women when they got determined to do something. “So there were members of the fan club that wanted to do a film showing of Mobile Suit Gundam in Kyoto and they would get in touch with the film company and do all sorts to get things organized. They contained this enormous amount of power and energy I felt. So I got involved and I wanted to help them. When they discussed what to do, they decided to include cosplay and through that doing some kind of play with acting. That meant I would get involved with the comic market as well. In those days, there was really no one that did performances on things they admired in front of an audience. So it really stood out. To the extent that various anime and manga magazines would cover the events we did and show photos. Due to the fact that we were known in that way and stood out that much, somehow the record company and production company began to get in touch with us. So we would appear in events as some kind of attraction. “At the same time as I was doing all this in Kyoto, there were other guys doing Gundam related things in different places. These being Shoji Kawamori and Haruhiko Mikimoto. Separate from the comic market there were also a bunch of guys who were doing films. As in science fiction anime films in Osaka. There was a group of them, five of them altogether, and there were trying to make these anime films on their own. That included Toshio Okada and Hideaki Anno. This was Daicon. “Even we were all working in parallel in somewhat different genres, we met with each other at that time. Little did we know then that we would end up reshaping the entire anime industry. We honestly never thought that we would all be part of the same industry later on in life, we were all just University students. “At one point though, these connections that I established while at University sort of discontinued somehow. This was because the comic market was run five or six times, all of them together probably individually participated perhaps twice or so. However, as we all realigned ourselves to move onto what would come after University, we kind of lost contact with one another. I didn't think too much about this and that I would go back to music again but somehow around that time an event took place again. “My group of people in Kyoto that I was part of, were contacted for a Space Runaway Ideon event. That was run by one of the Sunrise representatives and they approached us to represent the fandom and do another performance for the event. This Sunrise guy was also making a TV program featuring the fandom. “In this cosplay group, there was a lady that went into working in animation as a professional. She joined Artland, alongside Kawamori and Mikimoto working under Noboru Ishiguro. There it suddenly became a bunch of young people learning how to make anime properly. So this group went on to make things like Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. Looking back, and while this may be a bit unfair to say, Macross did have a certain immaturity to it but it was definitely powerful and full of energy and, above all, it was new. What's more, young staff had made it and it became such a big hit. “In order to help create Macross, there was Anno who would later go on to create Gainax but before then he was there. So there was a period between 1982 and 1983 where young people were really making things happen. “Artland at that time was actually located in a building that was renovated from being a love hotel. That meant it had really small rooms but a lot of them. Anime studios used to rent out places like that because they didn't have that much money. I think this was in Okubo. So in those days, you would have people sleeping in the corridors, it was just like that and then they made Macross. “To explain, I was not involved with the production of Macross, I just watched my friends make it. However, when I joined the anime industry later one, all of these friends turned around and said: “could you actually draw?!?”. They had no idea.” Moving Onto Sunrise And Creating Heavy Metal L-Gaim What was helpful here was how Nagano broke down his early and formative months at Sunrise, which seemed crammed with all manner of different and overlapping productions. “So now I need to go back to that Ideon event I mentioned earlier. I had a friend who was organizing this event but at that point, I wasn’t sure whether to continue my studies at University or just leave. It was that critical point. At that time, coincidentally, because Macross had been such a success and produced by a group of young people, Sunrise was asking whether there was another young guy who could do something like Macross. So this friend, who knew I could draw, recommended me to someone at Sunrise and that's how I got into the anime industry. “When I got into Sunrise, I showed my drawings to Masuo Ueda, who was a producer. What I showed was really different and the way I spoke was different, so they thought I was rather unusual. So they never knew whether I could do this as a professional but they told me to try various things. From that point on, I was assigned to the third studio under Eiji Yamaura, who was the section chief. “I pretty much did anything that came my way at that point, so I did drawings for toys and all sorts of other things. This maybe was in January 1984. “From January to March of that year I was on a trial period if you like. During that time, my boss came up with a new idea for a series called Round Vernian Vifam. As there were a lot of mecha needed for this series, the third studio asked me to start drawing mecha for this new series as a form of practice. The Puppet Fighter from 'Round Vernian Vifam' was one of Nagano's first designs for anime. Credit: Sunrise “I showed the drawing of the Puppet Fighter to my boss and the design was accepted, this meant I was now useful to the studio and I was asked to join the company officially from the start of April that year. That meant my trial period was successfully completed. “Actually, when I joined it was quite an unusual setup because usually, nobody became an employee in this way. So even though I was based in the third studio, I was meant to directly with the producer and director and the requirement was that I do any work that these people ask of me. That meant it could be absolutely anything and was also in part outside of the third studio. In short, my job was doing anything and everything for Sunrise as a studio. “While I joined Sunrise as a designer, in fact, I was just told to do everything. Everything meant I was to work with the producer to do the planning, presentation and the financial side as well. I would also oversee who was doing what and effectively become a production manager as well. “While I was told to work on Vifam smoothly, I was also needed to work for all the other studios. However, not long after this Giant Gorg started under the direction of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. That meant a famous animator was making Giant Gorg but in order to do that, Yasuhiko needed someone who was knowledgeable about weaponry and mecha. So he asked about this to pretty much everyone in the company and they answered that there was someone who just joined and I was brought in front of Yasuhiko in the fourth studio. We spoke and Yasuhiko would show me the picture of Gorg and ask me if I understood this and I said "yes". I also wanted to be looked upon kindly and I told him that there is no one more knowledgeable than I am about these matters. Then Yasuhiko asked me a few questions on how would a vehicle like this move and what does it do, I seem to have answered these correctly and he then offered me work on the project, specifically to work on things like a tank. “At this point, I had to explain that I was expected to work on Vifam but the company explained that because Yasuhiko was so important, so they couldn't neglect his request. That meant I had to do both, as in work on Vifam and Giant Gorg. “What Yasuhiko needed for Giant Gorg was that he wasn't looking for someone who could just draw weapons, helicopters and other hardware. What he wanted to know was what was happening inside of this machine, specifically in the case of the large tank type vehicle called the Beagle. So things like how does it work, how does the engine function, how would it be driven. These kinds of details were what Yasuhiko wanted. In short, he wanted to know how would something work and how could it be used. With all the knowledge I had on these matters, I came up with how all this would work and function. So I drew all the inside detail of the Beagle. “That meant while the external design of the Beagle was done by Yasuhiko and the inside was me. However, because I had to change parts of the inside, that meant Yasuhiko had to change it externally to fit. “To clarify on who designed what, Yasuhiko designed Gorg and the outside of the Beagle, I did all the other weapons and vehicles. Things like the blowback you get on a real tank firing its cannon, nobody else really knew about these kinds of things but I did. So I drew that into the technical designs of things like the Beagle. “Back in those days, normally you would always have the people in charge of the art ask me "why do you need to do that?" but Yasuhiko was the kind of person was if it was that way, in reality, then do it that way in the anime. The Beagle (top) from 'Giant Gorg' had its internal mechanics redesigned by Nagano (bottom). Credit: Sunrise “On top of doing Giant Gorg and Vifam, I was called in by the second studio to submit a design for the Billbine from Aura Battler Dunbine. At that time, the second studio was also doing Dunbine and the main mecha was going to transition over to the Billbine and that meant they needed a new design for that. So I went "to hell with it" and fitted it in with all my other work. I then submitted my design to this competition and Yoshiyuki Tomino already knew of me and was looking forward to seeing what kind of thing the new guy would design. However, after submitting my design I learned later on that Billbine's design was already set at that point and that Tomonori Kogawa had done it. I didn't understand why I had to do it and the whole thing was quite heartbreaking. “Anyway, my main work around this time was for Vifam but at that point, Yamaura started to ask me to create a new series that would come after Dunbine, as Tomino would be finishing up work on that soon. All of this was around June in 1984 I think and when I asked if they just wanted me to design the mecha, they replied: "no, the whole thing". That meant I had to do all the planning, story and everything else, which was crazy. They asked me to come up with a proposal for this new series and new types of mecha that had never been seen before. At that time, I really liked Star Wars and based on that I thought about what if I did a road movie on a planet that no one knows. There would be big mecha with boys and girls traveling and by the end of June, I submitted the first designs for Heavy Metal L-Gaim, these were the early designs for the Vatshu and Auge in case you are curious. “I initially did all this work for the second studio but I obviously belonged to the third studio. However, Ueda was looking for a new project to follow-up with after Vifam but what happened was that in July, I delivered my presentation but Dunbine's sponsor, that of Clover, actually went bankrupt and then Bandai came in as a new sponsor. So I showed my L-Gaim work to Bandai around this time and they accepted it straight away. However, there was a bit of internal reorganization to do at Sunrise because L-Gaim was done for the second studio but I belonged to the third studio and Ueda wanted a new project. In any case, it moved to the third studio and Sunrise wanted me to focus on this and that I could withdraw myself from Giant Gorg and they would let Yasuhiko know and for Vifam I could ramp down a bit, but I still would have to work on it a bit. So all these arrangements were made and L-Gaim was going to start. “If you see the dates, you realize all of this was done over the course of three months. It was fun. “At the end of July, Bandai gave Sunrise the go-ahead for L-Gaim but the only staff on the project at that point was just me. This meant both Yamaura and Ueda had to figure out a way to make this happen in terms of the staffing. They initially found someone that would do the direction and the working title for L-Gaim was going to be "Explorer", so they told me to get to work. “From that point on, say around August, it was all go and I was to build on the planning as well as do rewrites. Not to mention also having to do drawings for the toys. Then suddenly in September, I was called into the Sunrise headquarters and told that Tomino was now going to direct this series. “The thing was that I had actually known Tomino for a long time by this point because back when I was doing all that Gundam cosplay and helped with all those events, I met Tomino around that time as well. However, the moment Tomino came on to direct it meant that this would now be a project for the second studio and that caused all sorts of mayhem. The upside was that this was now going to be a follow-on mecha work from Tomino, so everything went ahead with that. “I think how Tomino and I previously knew each other was unusual and unique really. When I met him for the first time at work, yeah it was unusual. So the director and the designer, or the boss and his staff, but it was also a different relationship compared to other people. I'd say now, after all this time, that we really respected one another. It was a very good relationship. “Tomino had this capacity that he could really pull up people who had done nothing before and then value them. In that, consider them as someone who could draw in a way nobody else could. That was quite special I thought. “In a way, Tomino, Yasuhiko and Kanda are very respected but somewhat feared because they were such a force within the industry. In my case, they really treated me like just another human being, always respectful. In that regard, they showed their true face I felt. “Yamaura later explained why everyone was kind to me and he explained that there was no one in the anime industry during that time who could hold a conversation and greet properly. It was always mayhem, with people doing all sorts of things simultaneously. It was very friendly obviously. However, in this busy environment, I would greet someone and say "excuse me" and be polite. Apparently, that made a very good impression.” Working On Gundam And Moving Away From Sunrise One of the more unfortunate aspects of Nagano’s work at Sunrise was how his mecha designs weren’t really incorporated properly. Famously, his work on both Gundam ZZ and Char’s Counterattack was replaced, so I really wanted to find out more about this. I already spoke with Yutaka Izubuchi about his work on Char’s Counterattack, but I obviously wanted Nagano’s viewpoint on what happened. Unfortunately, the issues started earlier on Zeta Gundam it seems, as Nagano went onto explain in detail. “L-Gaim was obviously my debut animation, I really wanted to cherish it and treat it as something special. Luckily, L-Gaim was also awarded number one in a popularity contest in Animage and it was definitely a hit animation in 1985. While I was working on L-Gaim, towards the end, it was announced to me that the next project would be Zeta Gundam directed by Tomino. Obviously, I heard about all this before the public knew and Tomino asked me to work on it. At the time, I was happy but quite frightened. This was a big project. “Before it was officially announced that I would work on Zeta Gundam, Tomino said that at the end of that year he was going to the U.S. for a convention. For that convention, he wanted to bring some new Gundam related ideas, so he asked me to draw them. This later was commonly known as one of the early Hyakushiki designs. “Towards the end of L-Gaim, the staff were beginning to think more about Zeta Gundam and in general other staff were fading away from L-Gaim's production. As L-Gaim had been my first big project I wanted to see it through with a full force of people but I saw that the energy of the team was slowly shifting towards preparation for Zeta Gundam. I also had to make new mobile suit designs, so I didn't have too much time to think about all this but I felt a tinge of sadness at the time. “Again, it's getting a bit complicated, so I need to separate L-Gaim and Zeta Gundam here. As for Zeta Gundam, I had to design mobile suits and I wanted to do something new. Kunio Okawara was going to stop work for a while and instead of his designs, it needed to move onto something else. That was the idea. From that standpoint, I did the Hyakushiki, Rick Dias and Galbaldy Beta. However, when I submitted the designs they were heavily criticized because they didn't look like typical mobile suits. I was really broken-hearted at this but at the same time really angry. Now, looking back, I can understand why they said no because, for those people, who had been surrounded by the world of Gundam, they already had an idea of what Gundam should be like. However, Tomino and I shared a view that it needed to be a new Gundam. After L-Gaim, Tomino was of the opinion that mobile suits must also change because L-Gaim, after all, proposed a different type of mecha. I was the main mecha designer for Zeta Gundam and that was supported by Tomino. That says it all. “The fact is that with anime that there are so many different opinions, there would be sponsors, the plamodel makers and for Sunrise and Bandai a series like Zeta Gundam would be financially important for them. After the project started and I submitted those three designs, following this an enormous number of mecha designs arrived on my desk. I think something like thirty-six mecha designers were hired in order to provide extra designs and I was to look at all these mobile suits designs and fish out ones that could be used in the series. “After evaluating all of these designs, I concluded that very few of these were really usable. However, amongst them were the designs of Kazumi Fujita and he could really draw. He was meant to assist me. Then it became obvious that the previous re-incarnation of Gundam was somewhat necessary, so Okawara came back and he did three designs, namely the Gundam Mk. II, Hi-Zack and Asshimar. As I was quite young, I declared that I would leave the project if it was going to be like this but I did complete the work to help out Yasuhiko because he had so many projects but at the same time was meant to be involved in Zeta Gundam. That meant he was doing the character designs but the number of character designs he submitted was not nearly enough, so I also supported him in terms of those. Once that stage was over, I left the project entirely. “This is obviously the story from my point of view, others may not see it this way but that's how I saw the situation. It was very frustrating but I think both Okawara and Yasuhiko found it similarly if not more frustrating. It wasn't a happy experience for me. “With Char's Counterattack, we need to go back before that and follow-on with Gundam ZZ. Kenji Uchida the producer came up to Tomino and I to ask to work on it. We said yes and asked on what, he said "everything". So we did all the work but again just before it was going to be shown, it was all canceled and changed. It was really strange and I don't know what happened but in Bandai, there was a guy called Shimizu and he said that my work was fine, so let's start it. In fact, merchandizing had already started and the manga version was available publicly. So my version of things like Gundam ZZ was in the public domain. Then it got canceled. I was furious. So I don't know why this happened. “After Gundam ZZ, the next one was going to Char's Counterattack. Tomino approached me again and said let's do it together. I said okay if you say so. So I started to do the designs and ended up doing all the mobile suits this time around. Tomino then came over and told me that for whatever reason I was sacked. I had to give it all up. “In short, Tomino wanted to work with me but some other force somewhere interfered and it was canceled again. “For the bulk of the Char's Counterattack designs, most of these were done by my protege, I cannot remember the name right now which is a horrible thing to happen because I should remember. “I think it was very difficult for Yutaka Izubuchi on Char’s Counterattack because Tomino had in mind a certain design that I had already done, so Izubuchi was assigned to work on something I would have done. So that would not have been easy for him at all. “I think there was some force within the industry that really disliked my version of Gundam. Like your Gundam and our Gundam kind of thing. Even with the power of someone like Tomino, it was difficult to make it all happen. Although we were really in it together. “I would imagine that within Tomino there was a certain reservation because if he used me full-on it was going to be my work. So he probably wanted to use elements of my work but not to the full extent maybe. It's not clear though. In some sense, Gundam is a work that is very complex and sensitive. Delicate. “Now it has been forty years since Gundam and we can choose which type of Gundam is your favorite in a much more open environment. However, up until Char's Counterattack, it was a very narrow approach and what Gundam was very strictly defined. “It was like Star Wars and George Lucas, so with or without him is it really true Star Wars or not? The same went for Tomino's version of Gundam.” Creating The Five Star Stories And Its Fractal Structured Story For many, the work that people recognize Nagano for is his ongoing and expansive manga The Five Star Stories. Starting back in 1986, the manga is still unfinished and Nagano has no intention to conclude it any time soon. However, his aversion to animated adaptations of his manga work is something that was both interesting and made a great deal of sense. “When I was still working on L-Gaim, especially towards the end it was changing as I said. Around this time, a publisher called Kadokawa approached me and asked me if I would like to put a storybook together because it sounded really interesting. In doing this, I decided to pour out all of the original story I planned at the beginning for L-Gaim. This formed the foundation for The Five Star Stories. “Working on anime meant I was approached by many publishers and many media as well as record companies, all sorts really. Naturally, you also had many publications about anime as well. This may not be something one would usually do but I specifically and exclusively work with Kadokawa because I found the company really interesting. When I made that decision all by myself, The Five Star Stories was born. “To clarify, there is no narrative connection between L-Gaim and The Five Star Stories. Obviously, they are both made by the same person but I consider them as clear and distinctly separate projects. “I think here I should go back to my experience with making plamodels. Mecha in anime are essentially there for toys but the mortar headds in The Five Star Stories are not. I always wanted to make something real. If it existed in the real world, how would it look? What kind of scale would be it be? How does it feel? The texture. I wanted to communicate all of that. For that, normally in manga or animation why do you pursue detail to such an extent and no one really bothers with that. However, I really wanted to. I wanted to make it exist as it were a real thing. “A good example of these is how Thunderbirds and Ultraman differ. There is a distinctly separate approach between the two on how they tackle realism. For instance, the way that airplanes are depicted in both series is starkly different. I think the difference is in things like Star Trek, they legitimately make the costumes, weapons and all of it to a high level of detail. Whereas in Japan, the approach is always simplified. In a way, it can be positive to take this approach but it can also be seen as dumbing it down. “Up to a degree I was inspired by European knights for the mortar headd designs. Of course, The Five Star Stories is aimed more at adults but at the same time, I consider it very important to take into account how these mecha would look like if children saw them. So the LED Mirage is something like a Roman Knight, with the symbol on the shield coming from things like the Crusaders or Saint George. Whereas the Vatshu is closer to a Japanese samurai but other mortar headds do have a European influence. I really studied this. The first book for 'The First Star Stories' was used as the basis for the anime movie adaptation. “When children saw the LED Mirage they saw it simply as white and red with a pointy helmet. In a way though, children are complex because, at the time of the release of numerous Gundam shapes and forms, things like the Hambrabi and Qubeley were not considered all that cool then. Now, after all this time, people think they are really great. So you really have to plant the seeds to get them to think something is really cool at a young age and that's quite important. “I want to find out why this change has occurred and think that perhaps there might be a shape that people might like or a shape that would be almost safe. Maybe my designs included quite a lot of those shapes perhaps. Also the time I spend on creating things. “There is also this too, in that it is to do with the extent that my work influenced the younger generation. Those who were influenced by my designs and my ideas, they are now in the industry making work of their own. In some ways, they are partly under my spell I suppose. So when they create something that is considered cool and then the origin of that can sometimes be traced back to my work. “I reckon it's like The Beatles, with the following generations with bands like Oasis, Coldplay and all sorts of other groups all wanted to be in some way like The Beatles. So when these new bands are successful, that feeds back to the effect of The Beatles. Not that I aimed to be anything equivalent to The Beatles or anything like that. “The Beatles were an enormous success, not only did the latter generation of musicians admired them and it remained in the cultural context. Even politically, time and time again coming back to that era, that success, that cultural context, is something that the British government would reinforce if you like. To remain as a key cultural influence. “With video games, the current gaming generation wants to create cool mecha and they are already partly under my influence so it would come back to my type of mecha. I think that is how it works. “When it comes to doing video games related to The Five Star Stories, that's a no I am afraid. The story from the manga is already complex enough and I don't want to make it even more complicated than it needs to be. This is something I have been saying in Japanese interviews, with anime and manga there is scenario but with a game, if you fix that, in the same way, it's not going to be interesting. “As for building the complexity into the stories in The Five Star Stories, the setup is actually quite simple. To start with I make the core story, I then divide that into two parts. Then again into another two parts. I keep on dividing and this process can be done infinitely. It's like a fractal. However, it always comes back to the core stories. That's why it feels complicated in terms of all the detail but is in fact quite simple. “People often say that they can never predict when The Five Star Stories will end and how it will end, and in a way it is infinite but it will always come back to the key stories. I am not thinking of ending it anytime soon though. The story is now almost self-perpetuating. “One thing I take great care with in terms of the story in the manga is not to include any religious thoughts or my own agenda. “There is no specific inspirational external source for the story as such. For instance, the first episode the aim was to make it really easy to understand. So I thought about the ending of the film called Graduation, the climax was to be like that. Really simple. There was also another idea, which was starting from the grandfather's generation and then filtering through to the grandchildren, over a fifty-year span. So the idea that it would be the following generation to generation, that was something I thought about. Other than that, it really started by making a historical timeline and then looking at it and thinking "this part could be interesting". That's it really. “There are some stories that I build really meticulously and then there are some where I don't think too much at all. While there is a part I have for self-exploration, I always leave parts for the fans, for them to play with. There are things I might plan but the rest is at it comes. I just follow what I find interesting. “When it comes to the anime adaptation of The Five Star Stories made in 1989, I actually opposed the idea. When the anime was proposed, there is almost a jinx that whenever a manga is adapted into an anime, the manga finishes. It was really to do with the fact that all the successful manga really peaked when the animated version's popularity reached its highest point and then the manga finishes, almost fades away. I didn't want that to happen with my manga. So when the anime was proposed, I felt "is this it then?". I will say that I really trusted the creative team behind the anime version, it was many of the staff who worked on Macross and they are almost like part of my family group. I actually think the anime is a compact and solid little movie. What's more, among the anime that Sunrise made it was one of the best. “It's also worth clarifying, that while the anime versions can be simplified, what would take the manga hundreds of pages to explain, an anime can embody that all at once in maybe a single scene. “This is why I gave the go-ahead for the animated version in the end because I know what each medium can do. However, the anime version meant that I had to abandon the stories of Lachesis and Sopp. So these didn't really appear again after the animation was released. I was forced to change the scenery of the manga version entirely. “For the model kits and other merchandising, in a way and particular during that time it was moving more towards smaller productions. At the same time, I always had in mind how could I keep it not to be utterly consumed.” Hana no Utame Gothicmade And The Future Towards the end of the interview, we got onto Nagano’s latest animated work, Hana no Utame Gothicmade. This is part of The Five Star Stories but set a few thousand years before the events in the current manga. It’s also a movie that has no domestic release and is only available in theaters. While Nagano has separately explained this is down to technical limitations of domestic Blu-ray and other such players, he also gave another entirely separate reason. Not to mention, he explained that the previous issue of anime adaptations ending the run of a manga was something he again wanted to avoid. “Moving on to Hana no Utame Gothicmade, it's the same thing as The Five Star Stories. It has only been interchanged from one to another. Basically, I thought that some of the original mecha in the manga had become too old-fashioned and not really usable. So I refreshed it, that was my decision. “I've not really talked about this before but my decision was based around the original mortar headd designs looking too old. Maybe I am completely incomprehensible, as no one would ever think of doing such a thing but I did. “Up until the 90s, I made twelve volumes of The Five Star Stories but my feeling was that its visuals were reaching the point where they were starting to look absurd. However, people would say that the mecha designs looked very cool and the story in the manga was amazing. “But for me, there was no more to be done with this setup and yet I didn't feel like stopping the manga, so how do I extend its life? “When I started the manga for The Five Star Stories I was working with the technology I grew up with. If it was to be a telephone, I would use something with a rotary dial. However, if I was to look out the window today, I would see kids playing with things like smartphones in a completely different way. “Within myself, I felt that why should the technology in this fantasy world I created behave in this old-fashioned way. That certain mecha joints had to work in a particular way or typing stuff into older computers or just the general movements of the mecha themselves. Everything just stopped making sense to me, so I had to change it as it became so unrealistic in this imaginary future world. “Think about it, all the things where you would have messengers arrive with letters in a carriage. That is now a text message or e-mail. Or if you read a newspaper with a large headline, that is now a blog post online. It changed and I didn't want children to read this and think it was some kind of really retrospective form of fiction. After all, modern kids would not see the older editions of The Five Star Stories and think this was the future. The updated design approach used in 'The Five Star Stories' and 'Gothicmade'. “The Five Star Stories is in the future, so I would obviously have to make further progress into the current technology available and then restart it. So all of this was the major motivation for me to restart everything and that was the foundation of this new beginning to The Five Star Stories. “When it comes to Gothicmade, there is no plan to release this on home media. A movie is a movie. However, I wouldn't want to see this released internationally in theaters either. All I want is to have the longevity of this. “It took seven years to make Gothicmade and then released in a very limited way. People may have to take a day off to come out to see it, so it's quite hard to get a viewing and yet I want it this way. At the same time, after people would see they may think that it is complete rubbish or some may even think it is great but I essentially need this pressure to continue to create something that is worthy for my fans effort, attention, love and care. “It's a road movie really, not so much a mecha anime but I want to keep it like something that is released now but in a few years later it is still touring. This I can guarantee, it is different from any anime you may have seen so far. The way it moves and the way it works. “The movie was made at Kadokawa and the two top people at the publisher were really understanding and supportive of my Gothicmade project. Obviously, I come from the background where I know how many people are needed for an anime production. So we gathered around the necessary personnel and made it work. “In animation, you might think that thousands of people are needed but it can actually be made with three to four people. So the total core team for Gothicmade was about twelve people. Producer, fund manager, three artists, two people for scheduling, two artists for coloring and another two assistants for coloring. All the other elements would be outsourced to other companies. “Doing other projects apart from Gothicmade, just let me know and I would be there straight away. “The reason Gothicmade took seven years was that we started from cold but now that we have a team, but we were to do another movie then it would take around three to four years. Having said that, Hayao Miyazaki et al makes anime movies in such a way these days. So the smaller team is nothing new but I have to admit that there are so many people in the anime industry that help me to make Gothicmade. It was almost as though there was no one left in the anime industry that hadn't helped in some way. For that, I am extremely grateful. After all, there were people that weren't really credited but they all helped. “I think it would be impossible for a regular manga writer or artist to make something like Gothicmade but because I am in the anime industry and all the people recognize me as a part of them, there was a support structure available for me. “I would like to make another movie though and that will be The Five Star Stories. “In terms of the future of my own work, after Gothicmade and The Five Star Stories, there's nothing really. 'The Five Star Stories' manga has been running within the pages of Newtype magazine since the mid-80s. “When it comes to international releases of my work, there are really few people that are truly bilingual so I can't tell how many things the translators changed in order to make something like the English release of The Five Star Stories manga happen. So many translators had to leave the project and new ones came along. There is no exact vocabulary to match and that's frustrating. “So in the case of The Five Star Stories manga translation into English, it's as though you need to fully understand the 16th century British English. The classical form of English. It's different but the understanding and feel of the terminology, the way that people connect with each other, that needed to be understood and expressed through this. Unlike some of the American interpretations that it should be easier to understand for kids, I didn't necessarily want to take that approach with this project. There really are very few people who can really command two different things from a separate time period. “I also have a problem with the way Japanese content is marketed abroad. Currently, there are schemes like Cool Japan and all of that, so manga type contents are pushed to other countries. Almost in a way to forcefully accept the point of view and the way things are from the very Japanese viewpoint. That's not the way I want to go about dealing with releasing my work internationally. I also question that methodology, so I don't really want to be complicit in this big push. At the same, there are contents that are accepted abroad. From an early age, children may like the world of something like Final Fantasy or Pokémon. So the polygonal nature or elegant nature is understood for what it is and there are fans who would support it. Taking the whole thing quite naturally. However, from something like the Final Fantasy side, there is no push to get people to understand it in a certain way. There is no dogmatic cultural agenda. “If I were to introduce the manga of The Five Star Stories to different countries and cultures, at least at the beginning you would have to understand where they are standing culturally rather than where the work stands in Japan. I would like to have this approach at least considered. “To clarify, I am fine with creating non-Japanese versions of things like The Five Star Stories manga. I would actually encourage it. However, when I do it I would like to different versions for different countries. So British English for people in Britain and American English for Americans. The Spanish version, Italian versions, etc. That's how I think it should be. “For Japan, to date, as long as they make an English version of something it's not okay, you have to consider which audience this is going to. You have to think. “Let's say if I went to America, there would be fans of The Five Star Stories. You would have all sorts of people from differing cultural backgrounds. They will all come at the manga from different cultural viewpoints. However, if I wanted to be culturally sensitive it is not as though I could title it for these different groups of people. “I have certain questions, as I understand that in America there is a movie and it is aimed at everybody. It's all-encompassing. For something like a simple entertainment type movie, that would be acceptable. However, something like The Five Star Stories I am not sure if that is the way to go. “It is an endless issue. If someone gets interested in my peculiar drawings and mecha, then obviously that's a good thing and I don't think too hard about that.” Finishing up with Nagano, I realized how long the interview had gone on and that we could easily have continued our discussion further. It’s clear that he’s still very busy and creatively occupied, so that makes me happy. Not least because we can all look forward to more work of his in the future. https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2019/04/04/mamoru-nagano-on-l-gaim-gundam-and-the-fractal-nature-of-the-five-star-stories/#5504c0d66733

#永野護

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cryptoquicknews-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published here https://is.gd/OH5IE0

State of Lightning: What’s the Path for Network Adoption in 2019?

This post was originally published here

This is a visualization of the lightning network taken at 22:29 (UTC) on Friday.

Created by blockchain analytics startup 1ML, the snapshot represents all of the nodes running lightning software and creating public payment channels atop the bitcoin blockchain.

Looks complex, right? And believe it or not, this network is getting progressively larger each day according to 1ML.

In the past 30 days alone, the number of lightning payment channels has increased by roughly 36 percent, bringing to total to roughly 22,000 channels. Active lightning nodes have similarly shot up – over 16 percent in recent days – and presently sit at around 5,690 distributed nodes.

Launched in beta last March, the layer-2 payments technology is actively maintained and developed by over six different development teams spread out across the globe.

These include Eclair by Acinq, Lightning Network Daemon (LND) by Lightning Labs, c-lightning by Blockstream, ptarmigan by Nayuta, Rust-Lightning by Matt Corallo and Lit by MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI).

And even outside of these six, Pierre-Marie Padiou, co-founder and CEO of Acinq, predicts there are half a dozen more out “in the wild.”

Highlighting that the codebase to build lightning clients is open-source and available to anyone “without asking permission,” Padiou added that a list of 30 some-odd improvements to the network were agreed upon by developers during a summit in Adelaide, Australia November of last year.

“Now, after the summit, the work will continue to formalize the decisions taken during the summit, and implement them in the clients so that they can be deployed,” explained Christian Decker – core tech engineer at Blockstream – in a former interview with CoinDesk.

Since November, one feature has already been released by CTO of Lightning Labs Olaoluwa Osuntokun enabling “the ability to send a payment to a destination without first needing to have an invoice,” as detailed on GitHub.

Explaining that each client team “has their own favorite features,” Decker added that more changes to the network would be released in “incremental” steps emerging piecemeal over coming weeks and months.

As such, lightning developers are optimistic about the continued success of the lightning network, expecting growth trends seen in 2018 to continue to rise in 2019.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Padiou highlighted:

“We have been seeing tremendous activity during the past few months and are confident that this trend is going to amplify in 2019.”

Looking ahead

According to blockchain analytics site P2SH.info, the amount of bitcoin sent through lightning channels since last June has skyrocketed from less than 25 BTC to 578 BTC.

State of the lightning network on bitcoin mainnet. Source: www.p2sh.info

Speaking to greater adoption figures in 2019, Decker told CoinDesk that the key behind developing “a very active and engaged community … building and improving lightning” would come down to its continued potential to “change how we do payments in the future.”

Indeed, the main use case of the lightning network as described on the official webpage is “lighting-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times.”

Transactions using the lightning networks takes seconds to complete, compared to the 9 or so minutes – on average, at least, with fluctuations based on block variance and miner luck – for transactions directly on the bitcoin blockchain, according to data from bitinfocharts.com.

And while payments for goods and services using a debit or credit card is done with relative ease in most developed economies, restrictions to such traditional banking services is a common struggle for marginalized populations within (and outside) first world countries.

According to a world map of the public lightning channels spread out across the globe, most of the servers running on the lightning network are concentrated in North America and Europe.

World map of the lightning network. Source: https://explorer.acinq.co

Speaking to this user demographic, Padiou explained to CoinDesk that while bitcoin’s development community has “historically been stronger in North America and Europe,” the nodes being depicted on the map did not show the number of mobile users for lightning, who may be “a bit more evenly distributed.”

He added:

“I believe that the language barrier is often underestimated, and initiatives like [Reading Bitcoin] which provide translations to Chinese, Japanese and Korean [people] are very useful.”

From Decker’s point of view, the map of public lightning channels “matches pretty closely with the map of Internet users, or the map of deployed bitcoin nodes” which is “to be expected since those are the regions that are most likely to know about bitcoin, have some bitcoins, and [are] testing the software.”

Nevertheless, Decker affirmed that developers are dedicated in 2019 “to extend the reach of bitcoin and lightning globally.”

“I’m not aware of any specific plans to foster adoption in certain regions specifically [but] we’d definitely welcome any user from those regions, and do our best to support them,” said Decker.

Since March of last year, the lightning network has seen the number of new payment channels grow from roughly 1,500 channels to over 20,000.

Growth of lighting network channels over time. Source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com

New developments

For now, there aren’t specific numeric targets on the agenda for lightning developers to reach by the end of 2019, though as mentioned there is a long list of features aimed at expanding network capacity expected for roll-out in months to come.

Standing for “Basis of Lightning Technology,” BOLT 1.0 is a common, open-source repository of code that contains all the necessary technical requirements or specifications for users to participate in the lightning network.

Not to be confused with BOLT – a lightning-inspired zcash implementation of the network released August last year by Dr. Ayo Akinyele – BOLT 1.1 is the envisioned upgrade to BOLT 1.0 that will encompass the new development work going into lightning.

Speaking to CoinDesk in a former interview, Osuntokun acknowledged that the exact roadmap for BOLT 1.1 was “difficult to put estimates on … as it largely comes down to the prioritization of the various development team for each implementation.”

“[Clients] will implement features in parallel, according to their own prioritization and to the extent that suits them best … some implementations may choose to omit some of the features,” added Decker.

The five features that Osuntokun highlighted with CoinDesk as possessing the “biggest impact to the end-user” includes:

1. Splicing: Currently, each payment channel possesses a fixed capacity only able to send the amount of bitcoin initially staked at the outset of channel creation. However, in the event that a user would like to increase or decrease channel capacity, they require opening an entirely new channel with the same participants. Requiring the same amount of fees and confirmation wait time as a regular bitcoin transaction, splicing ensures users are able to avoid the initial pain of creating a new channel by making adjustments to the capacity of existing ones.

2. AMP: Standing for “Atomic Multipath Payments,” AMP according to Osuntokun presents “a massive boost in usability” for the lightning network. Instead of payments being routed along a singular path on the network, AMP allows users to send through fragments of payments through multiple public channels in the network. Additionally, as pointed out by c-lightning developer Rusty Russell, AMP can also be leveraged by users as a “bill splitting” feature when making lightning payments to a single party from multiple different sources.

 3. Wumbo Channels: Named after an episode in an American children’s cartoon show called Spongebob Squarepants where starfish character Patrick uses the term “wumbo” to denote increases in size, wumbo channels refer to an increase on the maximum number of bitcoin that can be sent within a lightning payment channel. Put in place by lightning developers for safety reasons, the maximum capacity of a channel at time of writing is 0.16 BTC or roughly $570.

4. Static Address for/to remote outputs: Aimed at improving “disaster-recovery scenarios” on the lightning network, Padiou explains that static addresses ensure easy fund recovery for users. “This feature – the static information address – means that with only the seed to your lightning wallet you would be able to recover the main balance in your channel,” said Padiou. The seed being a mnemonic recovery phrase attached to all lightning (and bitcoin) wallets, users currently require both this information and channel-specific information to recover lost funds.

5. 2p-ECDSA: Perhaps the coolest upgrade in the eyes of Osuntokun, 2p-ECDSA would camouflage the transactions carried out on the bitcoin blockchain to create lightning payment channels. At present, transactions opening and closing a payment channel are easily differentiable from transactions on-chain. This improvement once implemented would add an extra level of anonymity for users by making lightning channel activity more difficult to distinguish from traditional bitcoin payments activity.

Speaking to all the anticipated changes to the BOLT repository, Padiou highlighted:

“We didn’t have to change very important, very low-level design decisions … It’s very good news because we could have made big mistakes and could have had to start over but it’s not the case. Going to 1.1 is just building upon the already working first version.”

Through the lens of the development agenda set for 2019, the priority, then, in Padiou’s mind, is “reliability in all its aspects” to encourage continued adoption of the tech.

“A payment network needs to ‘just work.’ It only has value if it allows you to send and receive money when you need it,” Padiou contended, adding:

“The more reliable it gets, the more companies with large user base will be ready to support it.”

Lightning storm image via Shutterstock

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/OH5IE0

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liaroflesbos · 8 years ago

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HxH and Continuing the Dark Continent Arc

So, in this awful unending hiatus of the hxh fandom, i thought i would make a post about how, from the beginning chapters that we have been given, it looks like the dc arc will shape up. I’m doing this a) because of obsessive curiosity and a need for a systematic understanding of unresolved plotlines and b) in case i or anyone else wants to write a dark continent fic that stays accurate to what canon suggests. because i know i could never write a dark continent filler fic without as good an understanding of the base text as possible to use as a jumping board. Fair warning, this is extensive and long-winded. I may go and add page references to everything at a later point.

First off, the event chunks that this seemingly massive arc will contain. So what we’ve had so far is the preparation for the launch, which will of course be discussed in greater detailed, but basically gets all the people and plotlines in place to climb on a ship towards the dark continent.

Then, we got the very beginning of the “journey to the new continent” section of this arc. I didn’t catch this until my like… third readthrough… but the HA is going to drop off all the passengers from Kakin on an island that is much closer to the normal hxh world than to the dark continent, including the princes. So this arc will contain the entirety of the Succession War, because the princes are leaving after this leg of the journey, and also include leaving the Human Territorial Waters to go to the “Untamed Waters,” which may be the introduction of some exciting magical creature things.

I’m fairly certain that we’ll get a chunk of the story happening on the New Continent, when they reach it. First of all, you have the logistical nightmare of all the people setting up camp. Then there’s the finishing touches to the Succession War and almost certainly the resolution to Kurapika’s struggle to get the eyes that the human monster Prince Tserriwhatever has collected (and god am I not obsessed with the theory that he has Pairo’s head in a jar, because I love Suffering). Then we have the possible escape of Beyond from the HA at this point. I’m having a very hard time finding the reference point I remember that implied Beyond would escape when reaching the new continent, but I did manage to reach that conclusion last time i read through. Will update with source when possible. They’ll also take this chance to change ships to one of Morel’s and guys, I am so. fucking. excited. that we’ll almost definitely have Morel and might have Knuckle and/or Shoot after this point. I loved this gang of overly sensitive hunters so much and I cannot wait to see them again.

The next stop that they make after the New Content is a relay point in the Untamed Waters between the New Continent and the Dark Waters. I don’t really know what’s going to happen here, except that we know that Knov will be helping in transferring people and goods. However, the manga does make special mention of this relay point, going as far to show us it on the map, so shit might go down there too.

After the relay point comes the border between the untamed waters, the normal realm of the hxh world, and the dark parts of the globe beginning with the dark waters. There is supposed to be some kind of Guardian here, so expect them to be having a very serious conversation with this Guardian--who I am so curious about. Apparently they’re like a separate species? I wanna know what they look like. Anyway, we’ll also have some time here devoted to Ging and Pariston’s crew going a way that has never been tread before, and so probably bypassing the normal guardian checkpoint that the HA’s will pass by. This is supposed to be even more dangerous than going the normal route, which already has an incredibly low survival rate.

And then we’re in the Dark Waters! After this point, we don’t have too much data on what will happen. However here’s what we know/is probable: first, there may be some battles/struggles against the beasts in the dark waters, which are also terrifying like the beasts on the dark continent. Then we will (finally!) get to the continent itself. They will clearly face all kinds of strange and deadly natural phenomena while out there. And they will try to find amazing things that can benefit mankind to bring back home with them. Also, we’d clearly expect tensions with Beyond’s group as both struggle to survive, to get the goods, and to return home. I’d say it would be a safe bet that Ging’s quest for Don Freecs will come up here. Otherwise, I have some thoughts on what might happen, but it’s hard to understand the shape events that far away in the story. Things like the struggle between the groups may be resolved before they actually get to the Dark Continent, or things like Kurapika’s hunt for the Red Eyes might not be fully resolved.

And then, maybe the journey home? They mention a detail or two about the return trip but I think the arc will be so long by this point that we skip it.

Alright!! So that was A Lot, but I am still not finished. I know, I know. I’m a Lot too, but I still want to go over all the plotlines that I think will be picked up by the end of the arc. Part of my thinks that most of these will be resolved because I do suspect that this will be the second to last arc. I think it’ll be another ten year arc like the Chimera Ant arc, but I think it may be one of the last, partially because it looks like a lot of these narrative threads could be tied up.

I think the biggest separate plot thread that will be tied into a neat little bow is the phantom troupe’s story. Okay, maybe not totally finished, but pretty damn close. I couldn’t find it on my last read through, but I’m pretty sure chrollo orders the whole phantom troupe on board. If not, then he definitely said that they would steal from the expedition, so the HA will have to contend with them trying to steal from whoever and whatever remains at the end. At the same time we have Hisoka looking to kill Spiders and fight a rematch against Chrollo, and Kurapika is playing a central role, so perhaps we’ll revisit revenge with a newly magicked Chrollo and a young Kalluto as troupe member. And, fuck, I certainly hope Togashi reveals why they left that Meteor City message at the site of the Kurta massacre.

It also seems likely that we’ll get a more full explanation of what happened with Netero’s expedition, and perhaps Beyond’s as well. I’m betting we’ll have something about the Ai and Zzigg Zoldyck, how it connects back to Alluka and Nanika, how it could’ve passed to this later generation and what exactly that means. And how much Ging knew about it. We also briefly met Linnet Audoble during the Election Arc as the oldest person in the association with a fierce devotion to Netero, and that may have been padding for a future role. And we got that suggestion of Netero’s connections with the Zoldyck’s during the CA arc, that I’m sure we all want more depth on.

I’ve been working on a theory that we’ll get the conclusion of Senritsu’s arc too. The music she listened to is normally translated as the Dark Sonata, I think, which has an obvious linguistic link to the Dark Continent and the Dark Waters. And she’s at least on the ship until the New Continent as one of Kurapika’s bodyguard spies. Maybe she’ll stay on after and complete her mission to destroy the Dark Sonata? Or at least learn more about it?

This is just a general thing I started wondering about: why exactly is Bisky one of the bodyguards? I got the sense that she requested to be one through Killua. What is she expecting--will she also go to the Dark Continent to find treasures? Couldn’t she do that without helping Kurapika on this? She’s obviously skilled enough to be heavily valued by the association.

We’ll clearly learn a lot about all the different Zodiacs, which I’m very excited about, especially for all the girls. And Saccho, who I don’t have a good grasp on yet but think I’ll like. And Botobai. And the sheep one--Ginta? And Mizai, of course! But I think there’s a special something in Kanzai, the tiger’s, backstory. Not only is he crazily stupid, but he mentions something about “after he woke up,” suggesting that he may have been Sleeping for a long while. Curious!

And then we have Beyond’s supposed team. Of course, we’re going to need to work out the Ging/Pariston rivalry some more, in some very interesting ways certainly. And then we’ll have Ging on Don Freecs. But otherwise, I can’t really make a guess as to what the individual stories will be for them--we don’t totally understand their relationships yet either. They all seem very cool though. Oh, and I almost forgot! It’s so interesting that Pariston’s temp hunters didn’t know about the Succession War--finally Pariston slips up, not the ultimate genius that we tend to think of him and Ging as, and sure to have big impacts on the balance between Beyond’s group and the more knowledgeable HA.

Oh, we’ve also got that undersecretary from the shadowy government agency--the travel bureau?--coming with us. Clearly he will leave his dorm at some point and come interact with the other characters--I wonder how his knowledge matches against Ging’s? With him comes the geopolitics of the newly minted v6.

There were also two mentions of the mafia so far, as related to this arc. I have no idea what they could have to do with this, but them plus Kurapika plus the Phantom Troupe makes me think that it’s a potential factor in this part of the story.

Within this first part of the arc, I think we’ll also see more of the Zodiacs trying to get a handle of the poorly planned denizens of the ship. Specifically, Mizai says that the medical teams are understaffed, so this must mean something for Leorio. I just realized that it could be an attempt to put Leorio on a bus for a while.

Finally, as a diehard Leopika fan, I think Leorio and Kurapika’s relationship is going to develop significantly. It might not be a romantic relationship, but a relationship will happen. However, I believe in my heart that they’ll get together!!!

And for the arc after this one: I think we’ll return to help Gon figure out his Nen shit and to uncover the mystery of the missing hunters which was so important to the politics of the election arc. Well, since the missing hunters probably has something to do with Pariston, it may be resolved before then.

#hxh #hxh meta #dc arc #my meta #my fanstuff #god this is so much damn #will reblog again later when i and everyone else are awake

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honestlysoconfused-blog1 · 8 years ago

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Playing a Game

I wrote a thing! Probably all wrong but eh, I had fun writing it.

Key Points

Sherlock series four was created from fandom theories

The fandom is currently playing a ‘Game’ on itself

Evidence in Summary

The number of fan predicted moments that are portrayed in the series

The larger ‘ARG’ elements that have currently been explored (TLS site, Dale Pike) have been ‘exposed’ as being part of the fandom

Foreword

Firstly, my apologies for any mistakes and I honestly encourage anyone to point out flaws or counter arguments or indeed assumptions I have made that could invalidate this argument, because I think healthy scepticism is required when looking at anything currently surrounding Sherlock. I’m also placing this in a essay like format so it should be easier to pick apart or add your own sections/thoughts.

Background - Derren Brown and Prediction Techniques

Derren Brown has always fascinated me and so I have watched a fair amount of his stuff. Certainly not all of it, but enough to start recognising some patterns. The first, of which he seems very fond of, is making things that should be random appear planned. The beauty of doing this is to create a sense of being able to predict the future, or future actions of people. This can be seen in pretty much every show he’s ever done, and I’m not going to pretend I know how he does it, but an example is when, throughout a show, he encouraged a man to take more chances and eventually to bet his savings on the roll of a die. The roll of the die should have been random but obviously ended with it landing oh-so-amazingly on the correct number and the man winning lots of money.

More details here although as it is an old episode, the link to the Channel 4 video no longer works but the comments give you a brief overview: http://derrenbrown.co.uk/derren-discusses-secret-luck/

The second of Brown’s favourites is making things that appear planned random. This I believe is the more key element and is beautifully summarised by a trick he played on a group of people (including David Tennant!) whereupon they were put into a room containing various different coloured playground objects (balls, space hoppers if I remember correctly, sticks, and so on). They were told that a counter (displayed on a large screen for the people to see) had to reach 100 within a set time limit and then they would each win some money. Cue the people running around the room, bashing sticks, grabbing certain coloured items and generally doing stupid and silly things trying to work out the pattern to make the counter go up.

Briefly outlined here (Series Two, episode title - Supersitition): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick_or_Treat_(TV_series)

The trick?

It was completely random. There was an adjudicator in a completely separate room watching a tank with two fish in, clicking a button whenever one of the fish swam over a line drawn on the tank. This is what made the counter increase. Derren also revealed that there was a briefcase containing a much larger prize of £150 000. If one of the players had decided to step away from the game, wander back a little and look up, they would have seen the a giant sign saying ‘Congratulations, you’ve just won all this money’ or words to that effect (I can’t quite remember whether it was instructions to get to the money, but the point remains the same).

What does this have to do with Sherlock?

The parallel I would like to draw is that the players (the fandom), are staring at the room (series four) full of objects (hints, clues and ‘fuckery’) trying to create an explanation and draw a pattern that will get us to 100 (the explanation, the rug pull, the truth and/or ‘The Lost Special’).

I believe it could also be an explanation as to why so much doesn’t make sense regarding series four and its aftermath.

The Game - Setting the Stage

Here I have to make some assumptions.

The first of these is that there is actually a reason behind series four being, well, bad.

I don’t think anyone can seriously defend the continuity errors, the villainous character repetition[1], the gaping plot holes, the ludicrousness that is a cameraman being left in shot and the show ignoring its own canon[2]. If this is prime-time, heavily promoted television and if there is not a greater plan then all of my argument is invalid, although I would then be questioning the state and sanity of the BBC at large.

However, for now (and frankly because it is more fun) let us believe there is a plan.

The second assumption is that series four as we saw it had not been filmed before the trailers had been released.

On this assumption I would very, very much like people to chip in to either disprove or provide evidence for as - confession time - before series four I was what you would probably call an enthusiastic casual. I certainly knew very little or nothing about the conspiracies[3] and codes[4] and predictions surrounding them[5] but I could read the surface level ones[6] and regularly picked up on the amount of romantic subtext between the characters of Sherlock and John. After series four and being very confused as to why my one time favourite show had turned, to quote, into a parody of itself[7], I sought answers and that led me, naturally, to the online world.

Of note here, I was surprised at the various levels of defence of the show there was on certain platforms (Reddit[8]) whilst anger and disappointment on others (Tumblr and to an extent Twitter[9]). This, unsurprisingly, seemed to run parallel to how much the show was, and is, analysed and the level of dedication the average user has to the show. In other words, ‘casual’ viewers picked up on plot holes but dedicated fans were more likely to be emotive (and therefore later engage in the game).

It is also here where I would like the define the term ‘stage’.

The crowd are who you want to direct, encourage and discourage but what platform this is done on is actually very important. Ethically and morally the I believe platform would have to be ‘open’ and partially anonymous. This is to provide players with an escape route should they need it so a closed platform, such as Facebook, where posts are hidden behind a login wall and are more likely to be linked with personal data, would not be suitable. It also provides the benefit of a larger audience, encouraging others to join in and engage. As Sherlock already had a stable fanbase on Tumblr, this I believe was largely left alone. However, again, as I was not ‘around’ for it, please do counteract this if there were Tumblr specific Sherlock promotions designed to encourage engagement.

The platform to be developed was Twitter, which was actively and officially encouraged first with the live tweeting event[10], then grew unofficially through the Tumblr platform by fans with #Norbury[11] and finally the ‘contact’ accounts of @contactSH and @contactJHW[12]. At present it has been stated that the contact accounts are “not real”[13].

This, in essence, is what I believe the final stage to look like; Tumblr the hardier and staple platform with Twitter as the advertising and set dressing element.

The Game - Gathering a Crowd

The crowd, to a large extent, already existed but I suspect has quietly been grown amongst ‘casual’ viewers like myself.

Much of this is hesitant guesswork but certain articles on the actor’s private lives and the rumours around Sherlock’s possible cancellation[14] which has previously never been in question strike me as a deliberate ploy to garner more attention from populist media (The Mirror, The Sun etc.).

However, as there are ‘real human lives’ at stake with this particularly on the first point regarding people’s private lives, I do not encourage further rumours or any assumptions made on my opinion. Simply take it as that - an opinion. As to the implication of my opinion - are the rumours true? - again on the first point I would actively encourage not to think about the content but rather the means, motive and opportunity of said rumours. The means by which they were reported, the motive of doing so - which I have already stated I believe to be a plot to get more people actively engaged - and the opportunities that arise.

Reaching an un-engaged audience through manipulative mediums (which populist media are, give them the hint of a scandal and they lap it up) to pull in more potential players also nicely mirrors the pointed warnings in Sherlock series three - “I don't have to prove it, I just have to print it”.

The Game - Selecting the Players and Providing Motivation

The guide the audience one must next pick key players that - knowingly or not - guide the wider mass. It is here that my assumption of series four not being filmed until after the trailer had been released comes into focus.

In order to make your audience trust the players and follow their lead, one must make them credible. The easiest way to do that regarding a television show is to validate their theories - people are more likely trust someone who has been right about a plot theory or arc before. Here I will decline to mention any specific accounts or names, and I endeavour to remember the real human lives element. However there is a startling correlation with series four following predictions made on Tumblr. [I may here ask said accounts for permission to name them, but for now out of respect I would like to leave them out but encourage others to look at who predicted what.]

At this point there is one key element missing - the motivation to play. It has to be carefully implanted and made big enough to distract and focus everyone’s attention: this is, I believe, ‘The Lost Special’[15] and possibly the affirmation of a canonical, romantic relationship between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock[16a]. On a wider scale though, the prize could simply be ‘the thing that makes the series make sense[16b].

With key players selected, validated and motivated the next step is to start directing them towards playing the game itself.

The Game - The Room of Random Objects

Continuing on the first assumption, creating a series based off fan predictions has the dual benefit of not only validating the players but providing the perfect room of random objects.

Each clue, visual or textual error becomes an object on which the players can focus, discuss and generally ‘play with’ and the potential randomness of where the mind of the crowd will turn becomes much easier to predict. The mind of the fandom has essentially been mirrored.

It also accounts for the clues that didn’t amount to anything, namely the 8th of March, which taken in this context actually provides further proof of this theory. The reveal - nothing happened - is that there is no real game.

The problem here is that using the Derren Brown room metaphor the stated prize is cheap and the potential larger reward comes from stepping away from the game. If we believe that they are using this gameplan rather than another, a reward will be given at the end but it will not be as great or satisfying as if the players were to step back. In contrast to this point, the motivation of the gamemaster must be taken in account.

In the Derren Brown series he is the gamemaster and his motivation is to make a television show, get some people looking silly on camera, and provide an important message about confirmation bias.

Is this the same message being put forward? Or is there another message?

What is the motivation of the gamemasters, if I am correct, in this case? And does the second, larger prize exist?

I do not know.

But on the off chance I am right, here I am, making the point.

In Conclusion

Series four of Sherlock was a huge disappointment and the possibility of redeeming it is very tempting. It’s dragged me here, to Tumblr actually posting this, a place I never thought I would find myself.

However, knowing that the writers are clever, and that at least one is a friend of Derren Brown (and who of course appeared in the show itself), I can’t help but think we are, or where, being played and played against ourselves. Such a thing is fun initially, yes, but at some point the game must end.

If it doesn’t, or it doesn’t exist, and if they truly, unequivocally and totally defend series four as it currently stands then I shall remember series one to three of Sherlock as being fantastic.

References, evidence bits and expansions on points

[1] Toby Jones’ character Smith is described as the most “dangerous and despicable” man Sherlock has ever come across, very nearly the exact words used to describe Magnussen. Moriarty is also described as the most dangerous man Sherlock had ever faced.

[2] In His Last Vow (series three) the character of Sherlock Holmes is shot in the chest, prompting the character of Molly Hooper to remark “It’s not like how it is in the movies. There’s no great spurt of blood and you go flying backwards.” However, in The Six Thatchers (series four) the character of Mary Watson is also shot in the chest; shown jumping in front of the bullet (flying backwards) as blood spurts from the wound. In His Last Vow, the character of John Watson is shown burning the AGRA memory stick which contains the details of Mary Watson’s life before she met him. In The Six Thatchers the character of Sherlock Holmes explicitly states “she destroyed it” referring to the memory stick and Mary Watson. There are many more examples.

[3, 4 and 5] TJLC, Tie Hell, The Elephant in the Room as examples.

[6] The mirrors between characters, of note John Watson’s girlfriend in A Scandal in Belgravia and Molly Hooper’s boyfriend ‘Tom’.

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/16/sherlock-how-the-tv-phenomenon-became-an-annoying-parody-of-itself and http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/sherlock-season-4-episode-one-benedict-cumberbatch-martin-freeman-tv-series-mary-watson-amanda-a7509261.html ��

[8] Despite pointing out plotholes, the general impression is of enjoyment with a comment thread about enjoying the episode having 2000+ points and plothole threads ranging from the hundreds to low 1000+ Whether or not this a true reflection of being annoyed by said plotholes or amused with the comment delivery could be debated: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sherlock/comments/5o6t49/the_final_problem_postepisode_discussion_thread/

[9] As Tumblr and Twitter are a more fluid platform this is harder to prove, but I saw the Tumblr reaction firsthand trying to find explanations/theories, and nearly all of the posts were pointing out plot holes or attempting to find a redemption with the ‘Secret Fourth Episode’ theory. This article notes a ‘mixed’ reaction on Twitter: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-01-17/31-tweets-that-perfectly-sum-up-the-mixed-reaction-to-sherlock

[10] http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/efwwhn/live/c36g9r

[11] I’m reluctant to link the Buzzfeed article as it was written by a user named Christopher Melas which may or may not be a reference to the BBC John Watson’s blog post The Geek Interpreter. Whether this article is then a reliable narration of events can be questioned: https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrismelas/twitter-is-destroying-bbc-sherlock-right-now-2ssvd?utm_term=.cxzeqXBgXX#.pqywAKR9KK

[12] https://twitter.com/contactsh?lang=en and https://twitter.com/contactJHW

[13] https://twitter.com/joelidster/status/821029727439900672

[14] http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/sherlock-end-because-benedict-cumberbatch-9635585 and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2017/01/17/sherlocks-cold-shoulder-could-cumberbatch-freemans-frosty-relationship/ and https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/2629818/sherlocks-benedict-cumberbatch-and-martin-freeman-cast-doubt-over-further-series-due-to-frosty-friendship/

[15] http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-01-23/steven-moffat-responds-to-fan-theory-about-a-secret-fourth-sherlock-episode

[16a and 16b] I don’t believe in demanding plots from writers and if this is truly not the story the writers want to tell, so be it. (On the one-in-a-billion chance anyone of note reads this: why not, though? Really, genuinely curious, why not?) But I will damn well demand that the plot makes sense and this series had plot holes and nonsense in abundance.

#sherlock arg #sherlock meta #my meta #first post oh god

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click2watch · 6 years ago

Text

State of Lightning: What’s the Path for Network Adoption in 2019?

This is a visualization of the lightning network taken at 22:29 (UTC) on Friday.

Created by blockchain analytics startup 1ML, the snapshot represents all of the nodes running lightning software and creating public payment channels atop the bitcoin blockchain.

Looks complex, right? And believe it or not, this network is getting progressively larger each day according to 1ML.

Launched in beta last March, the layer-2 payments technology is actively maintained and developed by over six different development teams spread out across the globe.

And even outside of these six, Pierre-Marie Padiou, co-founder and CEO of Acinq, predicts there are half a dozen more out “in the wild.”

As such, lightning developers are optimistic about the continued success of the lightning network, expecting growth trends seen in 2018 to continue to rise in 2019.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Padiou highlighted:

“We have been seeing tremendous activity during the past few months and are confident that this trend is going to amplify in 2019.”

Looking ahead

According to blockchain analytics site P2SH.info, the amount of bitcoin sent through lightning channels since last June has skyrocketed from less than 25 BTC to 578 BTC.

State of the lightning network on bitcoin mainnet. Source: www.p2sh.info

Indeed, the main use case of the lightning network as described on the official webpage is “lighting-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times.”

According to a world map of the public lightning channels spread out across the globe, most of the servers running on the lightning network are concentrated in North America and Europe.

World map of the lightning network. Source: https://explorer.acinq.co

He added:

“I believe that the language barrier is often underestimated, and initiatives like [Reading Bitcoin] which provide translations to Chinese, Japanese and Korean [people] are very useful.”

Nevertheless, Decker affirmed that developers are dedicated in 2019 “to extend the reach of bitcoin and lightning globally.”

Since March of last year, the lightning network has seen the number of new payment channels grow from roughly 1,500 channels to over 20,000.

Growth of lighting network channels over time. Source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com

New developments

The five features that Osuntokun highlighted with CoinDesk as possessing the “biggest impact to the end-user” includes:

Speaking to all the anticipated changes to the BOLT repository, Padiou highlighted:

Through the lens of the development agenda set for 2019, the priority, then, in Padiou’s mind, is “reliability in all its aspects” to encourage continued adoption of the tech.

“A payment network needs to ‘just work.’ It only has value if it allows you to send and receive money when you need it,” Padiou contended, adding:

“The more reliable it gets, the more companies with large user base will be ready to support it.”

Lightning storm image via Shutterstock

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