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grimmradiance · 3 years

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Close to Me: How the Hollow Knight's Fighting Style Reflects Their Trauma (and the Radiance's as well)

So I've been trying to actually beat the Radiance, which means I've been fighting the Hollow Knight. A lot, as a matter of fact, since I'm beans at this game sometimes. I've also been thinking about @lost-kinn's meta about how fighting styles are how Vessels, especially the Little Knight, communicate.

In trying to apply this to the Hollow Knight, I've been coming to some very interesting conclusions, especially taken in context of...Everything Else in the lore, and Everything Else implicated in this by the psychology of it.

There's a lot to cover here, and it tracks through a LOT of different places, including trauma psychology, the relationship between chronic stress and lifespan health, and shape symbolism. Two warnings first:

One: this essay is gonna get heavy. It includes fine-grained discussion of the Hollow Knight's trauma, including discussions of the real-life machanics of psychological abuse, as well as the Extremely Concerning Implications of them harming themself during their boss fight. please read with caution and when you're in a safe emotional place to do so.

Two: This post is not a place for justifying the Pale King. If you read this essay in its entirety and still want to do that, please make your own post; my relationship to the Hollow Knight themself is deeply rooted in my own experiences, so in the context of this discussion I can't promise I won't take it personally.

With that out of the way, let's talk trauma and fighting styles:

We know that the Hollow Knight is trained to be a paragon of fighting skill, through the Pure Vessel fight, and this gives us a fantastic way to compare what they were like before they were made Government Assigned Radiance Jail, and after. Or, in other words, we're given the perfect opportunity to see what the Radiance is doing (i.e. context effects), and what Hollow is (i.e. what we can conclude is reliably consistent as a part of them). Listed here, for reference:

Hollow's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Radiant Shade Soul, which launches a volley of Infection blobs in arcs

A Radiant Desolate Dive, which produces pillars of entwined Void and Light at random intervals

The Infection bursting out of them in random arcs, covering a significant amount of the aerial space of the arena

The Radiance ragdolling their body around trying to hit the Knight

Contact damage from them stabbing themself and falling over atop you

The Pure Vessel's attacks:

Three slashes

A dash slash

A Pure Shade Soul, which launches a volley of nails in straight lines

A Pure Desolate Dive, which produces nails at specific intervals

A Pure Focus, which causes circular explosions across most of the aerial space in the arena

Lashing out with a Void Arm (word choice intentional)

I've highlighted attacks from each battle that are different, since those are our points of interest here. In addition, both the Pure Vessel and Hollow are exceedingly fond of teleport-spamming in a way that is usually reserved for a specific group of bosses.

Another very important distinction between these two fights: the Pure Vessel doesn't scream. Well, they certainly try to, but no sound comes out. No voice to cry suffering, after all. All of these points have a lot to go into, so let's address them one at a time.

All That Remains: Theoretical Background On The Significance Of Constants

Making comparisons across time is important specifically because humans (and human-like bugs) change. Most personality traits aren't set in stone--they exist as an interaction of someone's internal tendencies, their experiences, and their environment. Speaking of those last two points, not all experiences and environments are created equally. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs for short) are known to have lifelong implications for a child's health, both physically and mentally. These are events that are so stressful or stressful for so long that they exceed a child's ability to cope and become toxic stress (yes, that's the term in the literature, because it actively damages your organs). They compound, as well--the stress of one ACE makes it harder for a child to cope with another, especially if they overlap.

Some examples of ACEs? Being exposed to physical danger or the threat of physical danger, deprivation of normal social relationships with peers of a similar age, being forcibly seperated from family members, witnessing a loved one being hurt or killed, chronic illness in oneself or a family member, neglect of a child's emotional needs....

Poor fucking Holly. It's a miracle they didn't disintegrate under the pressure. The only other option is that they bent and adapted under that much stress--in other words, most of their personality has been forcibly reshaped by what they've gone through. Anyone who has up-close experience with parentification or complex child abuse already knows: this was by design. I'm not saying the intent was to traumatize the Pure Vessel past several points of no return, but the intent definitely was to reshape their personality for the purpose of being The Vessel. We only see them (the Pure Vessel) in battle after this process is mostly or entirely complete, but we do see them a few times beforehand. I'd like to draw attention to the Path of Pain cutscene right now.

I've seen people talking about the look the Vessel and the King share as a sign that TPK really does love his child. That might be true, but it's definitely not relevant when it comes to how abuse works. This is, in fact, exactly how the cycle of abuse uses affection as a tool. Long periods of abuse or neglect, smoothed over by small periods of affection that placate the survivor? That's textbook love bombing, the kind that forms stubborn trauma bonds and facilitates unhealthy dependency. Forgive me for not giving the Higher Being of knowledge and prescience the benefit of the doubt on that one. (/s)

Team Cherry knows about the importance of parallels and dissonance. There's a reason the music in the second phase of the Hollow Knight fight plays in the Path of Pain. There's a reason it cuts out the moment the battle with the Kingsmoulds is over, instead of at the room transition. There's a reason it doesn't cut out in the Black Egg. Actually, there's two potential reasons, which could also coexist: either little Hollow trusts the Pale King to keep them safe, even after the borderline torture that they were just subjected to, or big Hollow is so hypervigilant that they're in full functioning-through-trauma mode even while they're at death's door.

If you don't see how much the Pale King scarred his child at this point, I'm not sure we were playing the same game.

Walking the Straight Line: How the Pale King's Teachings Show In the Pure Vessel

The Pale King loves order and control. Everything about the White Palace and every decision we see him make implies this. Everything is spotless white walls and well-maintained gardens; the only signs of disorder are hidden away, either in his workshop or in The Pit™. This also reflects in the Pure Vessel's title--pure as in holy, but also pure as in without flaw. Considering the Nailsmith's emotional state after completing the Pure Nail, TPK's fate with his Perfect Controlled Kingdom, and the Godmaster ending as a whole, attaining perfection is not a good thing in any sense.

We know the Hollow Knight isn't perfect--that's the whole catalyst for the plot. But considering their upbringing and their fighting style as the Pure Vessel, their imperfections absolutely kill them emotionally. I'll spare the lecture on how perfectionism affects neurodivergent kids even more severely than neurotypical kids, if only to keep this post to a reasonable length (look up "twice-exceptional children" if you'd like to know the theory I'm glossing over in more depth). But, in essence, the deck is doubly stacked against them--they have a higher goal to reach, and far more obsctacles in their path, including their own emotional scars.

I've already discussed how Hollow isn't meant for this kind of stress in a physical sense in other posts. They're not prepared for it emotionally, either--the Pale King wants perfection, and they can't even stand up straight (every spoonie in the audience already knows how exhausting people's obsession with Standing Up Straight is). There's another page on their stack of emotional baggage, even BEFORE you consider that the Pure Vessel knows their perfection is what bought them a ticket out of the Abyss.

Bringing Teleportation To A Sword Fight: Where The Pure Vessel Reveals Their Fears

How else are they going to cope with that need for perfection, that need to prove themselves worthy of the reason their life was spared, by being flawless in any way they can? Being a mechanical, flawless fighter puts so much pressure on them, both literally (repetitive strain injuries fucking HURT) and figuratively--if you're predictable, the only sure way to win is to mop the floor with your opponents before they figure you out. Hell, that's the way most people play their first run of Hollow Knight, by throwing themselves at the bosses over and over until they figure out the patterns. That strategy is inherently going to fail against an opponent that's, say, an immortal higher being.

There's no way that the Vessel didn't figure this out, and yet none of their TPV specific attacks are positioned randomly--the nails are always evenly spaced, and the Focus explosions are always in a specific height region of the screen. That's clinging to survival strategies even when they become maladaptive in its purest form.

Another dip into psychological theory: let's talk about disorganized attachment. Attachment styles describe how someone's relationships to their main caregiver(s) influence their understanding on relationships in general. Disorganized attachment is a result of an upbringing of inherently unstable parent-child relationships, where there's no way of a child predicting whether an adult is going to be delighted to see them, ambivalent, upset, or otherwise. If my parent woke up some days saying "all right my child, time for the Infinite Buzzsaws Obstacle Course," I'd be the same way. In adulthood this manifests as an inability to form a stable sense of self-concept as well as concepts of others. Mission accomplished, TPK, there's no will to break if you broke it yourself.

This is where the fighting styles as communication comes in--Hollow needs to keep Ghost at a distance to fight, but also wants to be closer to their sibling (the only being who has a chance of understanding what they've been through), BUT also has a trauma-rooted fear of attaching to people, as their experiences with attachment are inherently unpredictable and dangerous. Hence, both the teleportation that doesn't seem to match their fighting style any more reliably than "aim at the thing attacking you" and the second attack unique to the Pure Vessel--they're quite literally lashing out in pain to push people away. There's a reason that attack is so reminiscent of the Thorns of Agony.

Of note is that Holly does seem to teleport like the bugs of the Soul Sanctum do (favoring the edges of a screen, rather than going wherever like Dream Warriors do), which makes sense--they're the most obvious answer to the question "how did they learn how to teleport, anyways?" However, Sanctum bugs have abilities designed to capitalize on this, like homing spells and slashes from above. I can only assume this means that someone saw Holly's proficiency with the nail and assumed it translated to other forms of combat, and didn't feel the need to give them at least a bit of a primer on how to make the best use of it. There's another tally for the Hollow Knight as an autism metaphor.

Trauma Bonds: How the Radiance Speaks Through Hollow

Now, we're back to the Black Egg, and two people stuck in the same sinking ship. The thing that makes this hurt so badly is that Holly and the Radiance are at complete cross purposes here, and yet they both want the same thing:

They both want out, no matter the cost. For the Radiance, this means forsaking the pacifistic nature of the moths and nuking Ghost personally.

For Hollow, this means forsaking the way they were raised and everything that was bludgeoned into their personality: the only way out is to fail, give up control, and trust that Ghost will do what needs to be done.

Imagine how much pain they're in to actually go for it. Going against a literal lifetime of conditioning is something that takes the average person years to even consider, let alone go through with. It's a form of learned helplessness--if you try to break free and fall, again and again, it actively discourages further attempts. Breaking through learned helplessness is an interesting process, because it generally involves re-establishing a sense of control by recalling previous events where the person was able to change their situation.

Which, as far as we know of, are nothing but traumatic memories for Hollow. It's very unlikely that they'd break through it on their own, but we know they have by the time we see the second phase of their fight. This is them at their most desperate: the same music as the Path of Pain, the way they let, or can't stop, the Radiance throw their body around, the way they actively try to let the Radiance out by stabbing themself.

You'd think that giving up and learned helplessness are inherently compatible, but when giving up both goes against your core personality, and involves your active participation, they're in direct opposition. So either Holly was able to process all their trauma by themself (which I doubt, judging by how much effort the player has to go through to even see Ghost's and Hollow's traumatic memories), or someone gave them a nudge or three in that direction.

Considering that there's been someone living in Holly's head who has a vested interest in them Not Doing Their Duty, I think we know who. And the thing is, I think we watch Hollow have this breakthrough during their battle. Imagine for the first time in decades, at least, you can move. You're in pain from being in the same position, probably hallucinating from sensory deprivation, with an infection sucking at what strength your body has left. And there's this little creature who looks ready to fight you, who seems to have let you go for that exact purpose.

And you look down, and both you and the Radiance recognize them from a place rooted deeper than consciousness, in the murky depths of trauma. You see the other Vessel who just as easily could have been you, and who looks so much stronger for not being you, for being an imperfect, willful creature. And the Radiance sees history threatening to repeat itself, another one of the Wyrm's cursed children seeking to lock her away once more.

What else do you do when you're triggered? You scream, and you go on instinct, and you retreat into your head. Those first blows, with the epic music? That's the Vessel the Pale King forged, the fighting machine that will endure unimaginable stress because it knows no other way. What snaps you back out of dissociation? Usually, either the passage of the triggering stimulus, or an even more relevant stimulus (severe pain from getting beaten up by a nail, for example).

The tragedy is this: we know this isn't a triumph. I think most of us went into that fight the first time, knowing we'd be putting the Hollow Knight out of their misery. The music turns tragic, Hollow screams, and then we see the Radiance and Hollow themself break through: the Radiance trying to fight Ghost directly with the resources she has, and Hollow trying to help her along.

For what it's worth, Hollow even had the right idea, when it came to letting themself rest while helping Ghost stop the madness their father started--they were just digging for the Radiance in the wrong place. The dynamic between the Radiance and the Hollow Knight is something I could write on for pages and pages, but this has gone on for long enough. Tune in next time, where I'll presumably talk about this same topic but in reverse with regards to the Radiance.

#hollow knight #hk #the pure vessel #the pale king #the radiance #my meta #the higher being speaks #i hate fact-checking my abuse infodumps because the ableism against personality disorders is EVERYWHERE #but here this monster of an essay is #anyways the hollow knight as a character sniped my trauma on sight #so i may be a tiny bit biased here But Also I'm Right #abuse //#child abuse //#emotional abuse //#i legit do not know what tags to throw on this #also the overarching title is a reference to the song of the same name from just shapes and beats because. yeah

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ploppythespaceship · 4 years

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So I watched the Artemis Fowl movie...

Usually I make a list of good things and bad things in my reviews, but in this I literally do not have one good thing to say. Artemis Fowl fails as an adaptation, and it fails as a movie. It’s almost incomprehensible how terrible this film is -- Percy Jackson looks competent by comparison. So instead of my list, I’m gonna just talk about why it sucked.

The Plot

The movie combines the plots of the first two books in the series, with a few elements from later books tossed in for good measure. In the first book, Artemis learns of the existence of fairies and takes one hostage -- Captain Holly Short -- in order to extort them. In the second book, Artemis’s father has been captured, prompting Artemis to team up with Holly to rescue him.

The problem with combining these two is that they are fundamentally different stories. The latter relies greatly on the former to be well set up. Additionally, both are rather busy stories that need time and focus to do them well. The tension of Artemis holding Holly captive works because it lasts for a significant portion of the book. The development of Artemis teaming up with Holly works because they have hated each other for over a book now. This does not happen in the film. Everything is rushed, leading to a jumbled mess that barely makes any sense.

Artemis’s father is captured by Opal Koboi (a villain from the later books who does little to nothing in this film), who demands that Artemis give her something called the Aculos (a mcguffin that the movie made up). Artemis then captures Holly, and demands the Aculos as ransom. But when the fairies have no interest in giving him this ransom, Artemis teams up with Holly. Because it turns out her father, Beechwood, stole the Aculos years ago, and Artemis’s father knew Beechwood. The fairies send in a dwarf named Mulch to break in, and he locates the Aculos in the Fowl Manor. Mulch then teams up with Artemis, and there’s a long sequence where everyone fights a troll. Once that’s done, Holly uses the Aculos to rescue Artemis’s father. The end.

If you’re thinking that this plot makes no sense, that’s because it doesn’t. Information is presented at the strangest times, making things impossible to follow. Not to mention that character allegiances are constantly shifting for no discernible reason. There is no reason for Holly to trust Artemis, or vice versa -- yet they declare themselves “forever friends” before the end of the film. I can’t even tell you why Mulch sticks around, he just does.

The movie is also terribly paced. Despite only being ninety minutes long, it feels like it drags on for an eternity. Alternating between Artemis and Holly in the opening creates a distinct lack of tension, making it impossible to stay invested in any one thing for too long. Topping the whole thing off is the movie’s framing device -- the story is narrated by Mulch, as part of an interrogation that’s never properly explained. This setup feels so unnecessary, and it’s actually jarring every time we cut back to Mulch growling his exposition at the camera.

The Characters & Actors

I cannot think of one character that has not been butchered by the writing, the acting, or both. All of them are terrible. And across the board, the acting isn’t terribly good.

Artemis Fowl

The titular character gets it the worst of everyone. In the book, he’s a criminal mastermind. He’s cold, calculating, and eerie. He behaves so much like an adult that it unsettles people. He isn’t at all interested in typical child things, instead focusing on his own lofty goals. He’s an utter genius, learning the existence of fairies all on his own and coming up with the plan to capture one himself. Though he’s sympathetic in his own way, he’s also not presented as a terribly good person. As a protagonist, he’s almost unlikable -- it’s not until later books that he learns to have friends and become a better person.

But in the movie, Artemis is about as generic a fantasy film protagonist as you can get. He’s a more or less happy child who adores his father. He likes surfing and skateboarding. He doesn’t learn about fairies on his own -- his father tells him about them. And while he’s shown to be intelligent, it’s nowhere near the genius level he should be at. He’s so watered down and uninteresting that he’s unrecognizable as the same character. Even accepting that this isn’t the book character, he’s just boring to watch. There’s nothing interesting or compelling about this random kid. Ferdia Shaw’s performance doesn’t help -- while I’ve certainly seen worse child actors, I’ve also seen far, far better.

It’s worth mentioning that some of the best moments in the books are when something rattles Artemis so badly that the walls come down and he acts like a scared little kid. These moments work because they’re rare. This movie tosses them at you left and right. I don’t know who this kid is, but it ain’t Artemis Fowl.

Holly Short

In the books, Holly is an adult woman working an adult job -- she’s a police officer. She’s also described as having medium dark skin, with the phrases “olive” and “nut brown” being used most often. So the decision to cast a fourteen year old white actress... it boggles the mind. In fairness, Lara McDonnell did a decently good job in the role. But there wasn’t much role to do a good job with. Holly is a very bland character, with all of her drive and fire from the book simply gone. There’s also a backstory tossed in about her father, Beechwood Short, which is implemented in the strangest way and only comes up when it’s strictly relevant.

Domovoi Butler

Oh, Butler. Artemis’s bodyguard slash best friend slash pseudo father figure. A tremendously important character in the books who is barely in the movie at all. His role is so cut down that it’s absurd. I guess Nonso Anonzie was doing a fine job, but he was hardly there enough for me to tell. All indication that this man is a tremendously important figure in Artemis’s life is simply gone.

Edited to add: I didn’t initially think of anything wrong with Butler being a black man for the movie, but after seeing some complaints from others... yeah I think making a character from a family that’s been servants to a rich white family for generations now into a black man is uhhhhhhhhhh. It’s questionable.

Juliet Butler

Butler’s niece, Juliet, is in the movie so little that I kept forgetting she was there. Which is a damn shame, because I actually really liked Tamara Smart from The Worst Witch already and thought she was an excellent choice for Juliet. In the book, Juliet is the only other child around, and about the only kid that Artemis will remotely consider an equal. She’s great to balance him out and keep him more grounded. In the movie? Eh. She has a handful of lines.

Mulch Diggums

As far as being accurate to the book, Mulch is probably the closest. Though the decision to make a dwarf character not actually short boggles the mind... my main complaint is that Josh Gad likes to improvise his way through scenes, and his style of comedy is pretty grating. It gets old, fast. Throw in the fact that he’s also growling all of his lines to sound different, and you have a character that’s nearly unwatchable.

Julius Root

Speaking of growling all your lines! Commander Root is played by Dame Judi Dench in this movie, changing the character’s gender. I really don’t mind that, and the characterization is largely unchanged. What I do mind is Dench’s delivery. All of her lines are growled in such a low rumble that it sounds like she’s been smoking for eighty years. It becomes impossible to take anything she says or does seriously when she’s speaking like that. Josh Gad even pokes fun at it in a scene with the two of them, saying that they sound like “hippos with a throat infection” -- the only line to get a chuckle out of me.

Artemis Fowl, Sr.

To round it off, we have Colin Farrell as Artemis’s father. And... he’s here, I guess. Farrell mostly sounds bored in all of his scenes and it’s incredibly easy to forget about him.

Angeline Fowl

But wait! A fan of the book may ask. What about Artemis’s mother? How did the movie do her? Surely they didn’t forget Artemis’s mother! And my friends, I regret to inform you that the movie did, in fact, forget Artemis’s mother. She isn’t present, nor is she even mentioned. A major part of the books, a major force to drive Artemis’s character, just... gone. Lovely.

The Production Design

The best word I can think of is uninspired. Most things are serviceable, but unimpressive, leading to the film looking very generic. I was especially disappointed with the look of the fairy underground. A combination of magic and technology has a lot of potential to look visually interesting. Instead, the fairy police just look like the E.L.F.S. from The Santa Clause. And once you’ve seen it, you’ll never unsee it. So you’re welcome.

Additionally, the action scenes tend to be poorly shot and edited. Everything is extremely fast paced with a freely floating camera -- this makes things nearly impossible to follow. Several times I said out loud “what just happened?” because I legitimately could not tell where things were in relation to each other, and who was attacking, who was being attacked, etc. Thankfully there aren’t a lot of action scenes, but the few that do exist are pretty bad.

There are also several sequences of Mulch unhinging his jaw to burrow through the ground. In the book, it’s mildly amusing, but it doesn’t at all translate to film. It’s horrifying in every sense. The CG looks rubbery and fake, and Josh Gad’s performance doesn’t at all sell it. If there were any change from the books I would actually welcome, it’s this one. There are plenty of other ways he could dig. But nope. They stuck to that one. For some reason.

In Conclusion

This is easily the worst book to film adaptation I have ever seen. Please don’t watch it unless you’re a fan of the book and want a laugh.

#personal #reviews #artemis fowl #artemis fowl series #artemis fowl movie

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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Women and “medieval cruelty and ignorance”

Okay. So. We could probably have guessed that this tweet was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, but here we are anyway.

(Tagging @artielu because I know she enjoys my history smackdowns and this is right in her wheelhouse of interest.)

First: nobody denies that the Alabama bill and similar efforts are absolutely heinous, are designed to be test cases to get Roe v. Wade overturned, and are deliberately gratuitous in their constitutional overreach and general horrible Handmaid’s Tale nature. But for well-meaning liberals, such as above, calling them representative of “medieval cruelty and ignorance” is a) not accurate and b) counterproductive. If we insist on using “the medieval” as a conceptual category inferior to “the modern,” these recent bills bear a complicated, at best, resemblance to medieval canon law and social practice. And there was never, I promise you, any law that prescribed a 99-year jail term for abortionists. So if we want to point out how the modern Republican party is actually much worse than their medieval counterparts, we can do that, but also: trust me, this is thoroughly modern cruelty and ignorance, and we should insist on that distinction.

First, obviously, women’s bodies have always been subject to a social discourse of power, control, gendered anxiety, and attendant responses. This was certainly the case in the medieval era, but our modern interpretations of that discourse can be... iffy, at best. In discussing the feminization of witchcraft in the late 15th century, M.D. Bailey critiques how scholars have tended to take the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch-hunting handbook, as representative of a self-evident and endemic medieval and clerical misogyny. In fact, the Malleus was the equivalent of the extreme right wing today, was relatively quickly condemned even by the church itself, and was largely reworked from earlier ecclesiastical anti-sodomy polemics, because the idea of “disordered gender” was certainly one that occupied medieval moralists and theorists. I have discussed the Malleus in other posts, but while it certainly is virulently and systematically misogynist, it also was a work of rhetoric rather than a reflection of historical reality. Medieval misogyny absolutely and obviously existed, and it impacted women’s lives, but we also really need to get rid of The Medieval Era Was Bad For Women, (tm), Therefore Everything Was Worse Back Then.

The possibility of magic being used to cause impotence/loss of fertility was another concern, and one of the main anxieties about the practice of witchcraft was that it would bring “sterility” and irregular sexual activity (usually with the devil). However, an extensive corpus of contraceptive and abortifacient knowledge has existed since antiquity, and in tracing the representation of unborn children in medieval theological thought, Danuta Shanzer notes:

My findings suggest that it is overstatement to claim that from the start Christianity considered the fetus a living being from conception. Augustine is a major agonized and agnostic counter-example.

Hence, contrary to right-wing claims that the church has “always” thought that life began at conception (spoiler alert: the church has never once “always” thought the same thing on anything), it was almost never the case in medieval legal or theoretical practice. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians argued that “ensoulment” or the separation of the fetus into a living being happened at quickening, when the baby could move on its own (which medieval medical treatises had various standards for measuring, but it would be the equivalent of about 20 weeks of pregnancy). Monica Green, a leading medieval medical and gender historian, has examined a vast corpus of obstetric and gynecological Middle English texts, and in “Making Motherhood,” argues:

Texts on women’s medicine might also be concerned to “unmake” or prevent motherhood, either by preventing conception in the first place or expelling a dead foetus that would not emerge spontaneously. Abortion per se was almost never mentioned.

In other words: abortion was not paid attention to in nearly the same way we do today, and while canon law, in theory, prescribed penalties for contraception and abortion, historians have consistently (surprise!) discovered a disconnect between this and secular law and everyday practice. And while some twelfth-century (male) jurists did attempt to equate miscarriage with homicide, and to install it in canon law, these laws were almost never practically used or prosecuted. In Divisions of Labor: Gender, Power, and Later Medieval Childbirth, c. 1200-1500, Rebecca Wynne Jones surveys the extant literature and notes:

In his 2012 book The Criminalization of Abortion in the West, Wolfgang Müller documents how 12th‐century jurists' increasing tendency to equate violence resulting in miscarriage with homicide was institutionalized in canon law. Though this development led to the widespread criminalization of abortion in ecclesiastical jurisdictions, Müller has little to say about gender relations on the ground. Rather, by highlighting local communities' reluctance to prosecute, he presents laws that might once have been seen as proof of a medieval “war on women” as legislative enactments whose practical power remained limited.

Once again: medieval ecclesiastical proscriptions against abortion were, at best, sporadically enforced, communities were reluctant to actually prosecute women or to criminalize early-term pregnancy loss, and church law was not identical with secular law, which was the standard ordinary people used and were subject to. This concords with what Fiona Harris-Stoertz has found in her survey of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth and thirteenth-century French and English law:

It is striking that in these thirteenth-century English texts, no penalty was assigned for the loss of less developed fetuses. This absence flew in the face of high medieval church legislation, which, in theory at least, took all contraception and abortion seriously. John Riddle finds that the idea that early-term abortion is less serious than late-term abortion occurred in the work of Aristotle and appeared occasionally throughout the early Middle Ages, particularly in church penitentials, although it also appeared in the early medieval Visigothic code.

While late-term abortion of potentially viable fetuses was still a crime, secular law still essentially held to quickening as the moment at which a pregnancy could not be terminated. Before that, however -- anywhere in the first 4-5 months of pregnancy -- it could often be dealt with, if desired, without any penalty. Anne L. McClanan has investigated the material culture of abortion and contraception in the early Byzantine period. And Ireland, which as recently as last year remained one of the last European countries to outlaw abortion, had a medieval hagiography that actively canonized abortionist saints:

Medieval hagiographers told of Irish Catholics par excellence, the saints themselves, performing abortions as well as of “bastards” becoming bishops and saints. In hagiography and the penitentials, virginal status depended more on a woman’s relationship with the church than with a man. To my knowledge, no other country in Christendom, medieval or modern, produced abortionist saints or restored virgins, apart from the nun of Watton. Why Ireland is among the few European countries to maintain severely restrictive policies on reproduction remains an unanswered question, but it clearly cannot be attributed to its medieval Catholicism.

Last part bolded because important. Modern bans on abortion don’t relate to how these notions were conceptualized or used in the past, and they are not holdovers from The Medieval Era (tm). They don’t represent medieval concerns or medieval ideas of gender, or at least certainly not in a direct genealogy. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when ideas of childbirth, marriage, and reproduction were more strictly controlled, the period prior to quickening, or the movement of the baby, was still generally not penalized or subject to legal control or coercion. So in sum: while religious moralists and canonical lawyers absolutely did object to abortion (aka right-wing men, the same ones who object to it today, funnily enough), in secular law and daily practice, a pregnancy that was terminated prior to quickening was not subject to practical prosecution or legal punishment, and medieval women had access to a vast corpus of gynecological texts, medical practices, herbal recipes, rituals, and charms intended to accomplish a wide range of fertility goals: conception, contraception, abortion, a healthy pregnancy and delivery, and so forth. I also answered an ask a while ago that discussed all this in detail.

Also: abortion was explicitly mobilized as a wedge issue in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the religious right in American politics, and that happened not because of abortion, but in resistance to the IRS penalizing them for refusing to racially integrate evangelical schools and colleges. Randall Balmer has written about the history of the “abortion myth”; do yourself a favor and read it. The Southern Baptist Convention campaigned in 1971 for the liberalization of American abortion laws, and hailed the 1973 Roe decision as a win for the rights of the mother. (Oh how the mighty have fallen?) The right wing came together as a political force to resist racial integration, exemplified by their loss in the 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States. But since it was not a winning political strategy (yet, at least) to fly the flag of “let us be racist in peace,” they, as Balmer discusses, created the “abortion myth” to make themselves look better and to present a narrative of holy/moral concern for the lives of the unborn. The reason abortion is as huge as it is in the present American political landscape owes to modern religious conservatism and extremism, resistance to racial equality, ideological control over women, and other bigotry, and (again) not to medievalism or medieval practices.

So, yes. Let us call the Alabama bill and other heinousness exactly what it is: a modern effort by a lot of terrible modern people to do terrible things to modern women. We don’t need to qualify it by fallacious equivalences to so-called “medieval cruelty” -- especially, again, when medieval practice and perspective on these issues was nowhere near the stereotype, and certainly nowhere near this “99 years in prison for performing an abortion” dystopian nightmare. If we want to shame the GOP, by all means, do so. But we should not resort to distorting and simplifying history to do it, and using the imagined “bad medieval” as a straw man to club them with. There’s plenty on its own. The modern world needs to take responsibility for its own misogyny, and stop trying to frame it as a historical issue that only existed in the past, and that any manifestations of it must be medieval in nature. Because it’s not.

#history #medieval history #women in history #history of sexuality #history of medicine #cw abortion #long post

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nadziejastar · 4 years

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Did you finish reading that KH3: A Conclusion without a story article? If so, what did you think of it?

I loved reading it. It was a fantastic take on KH3. There was pretty much nothing that I disagreed with.

By the time you leave Olympus, Sora hasn’t learnt how to restore his powers; and the frustrating part is that he never explicitly does.

I completely agreed with this. Sora’s journey in KH3 should have been about learning the power of waking. But even in the scene where he finally does learn it, there’s no real reason why. He didn’t seem to learn anything on his journey.

Even the villains are given no progress – a subplot about Pete and Maleficent looking for a mysterious black box goes nowhere, and Organisation XIII (the primary antagonists) only put in a brief appearance, spouting their usual brand of vaguely ominous dialogue. To compound these issues, the protagonists are ultimately left not knowing where to go or what to do next. Only two hours into the game, and the plot has no sense of momentum or direction.

Yep. The black box thing annoyed me so much. The Organization was also a huge letdown. We don’t get to learn the real reason why Marluxia, Larxene, Demyx, and Luxord joined until KH4!? Something went very, VERY wrong in the Dark Seeker Saga for that to happen.

By comparison, Kingdom Hearts II’s opening was significantly slower paced – to the point that it was a detriment to some players. However, so much more was achieved in a similar space of time; II’s initial hours establish the game’s tone and major themes, as well as introduce a large cast of brand new characters (while simultaneously reintroducing old ones in new contexts).

Yep. I liked KH2′s opening, slow as it was. The prologue of KH2 felt like it had more plot than almost all of KH3.

And this is one of the core problems with Kingdom Hearts III; even if you look past a threadbare narrative for Sora and company while they adventure through the self-contained Disney worlds, there is nothing going on outside of that either. In Kingdom Hearts II, both Riku and Mickey were operating behind the scenes, aiding Sora from the shadows and setting key events in motion. In III, however, these same characters spend most of their time expositing plot points and passively waiting for the big battle at the end of the game – and that can be said for almost all of our heroes.

I also agree. This problem would have been mitigated if every character got their own time to shine using the power of waking. Riku and Mickey could have had a subplot together, showing how Riku got his new Keyblade. They should have saved each other from the darkness.

If there’s a job to do, it’s up to Sora to do it. With a couple of key exceptions, every character apart from Sora, Donald, and Goofy is presented as almost comically useless – yet our protagonist remains the butt of every joke.

Yep. Everyone other than Sora was useless. Aqua needed to save Ven, but all she did was get knocked out in the battle with Vanitas. Ven needed to save Terra, but he didn’t really do anything. Sora did all the work. Lea needed to save Isa, but he did nothing in his fight. He got shoved to the side while Roxas and Xion took over. Kairi saving Sora should have gotten more focus.

The villains reveal that the only way Sora can release Roxas is by giving into the darkness, and sacrificing his own heart. Self-sacrifice is nothing new for Sora (he did the same thing in Kingdom Hearts I to save his love interest Kairi), but this had the potential to be an interesting plot point, as it gives him a selfless reason to be tempted by, and potentially give into, the darkness. But it’s never brought up again.

Yep. Early scenes in KH3 make it seem like the game did originally have an actual plot at one point. Xigbar was luring Sora into a trap, so he’d fall to darkness. But it’s never brought up again, LOL. It’s crazy.

In fact, ‘saving Roxas’ is scarcely discussed until the end of the game (King Mickey telling Sora to “let the rest of us worry about Roxas and Naminé for now”, essentially dropping the subject after only the second Disney world). Ultimately, Roxas’ heart just leaves Sora’s body of its own volition in the final act, making the player’s time here, once again, feel largely pointless.

And yes, saving Roxas was handled very badly. This is because, IMO, saving Roxas and saving Ventus was supposed to be one and the same. There shouldn’t have been a separate “saving Roxas” subplot.

In interviews, Nomura discussed the struggle of dealing with so many characters – even citing the cast size as one of the main reasons that Final Fantasy cameos were omitted[2]. The real problem, though, is that nothing is done to mitigate this challenge.

Yes, exactly. And treating Roxas and Ventus as separate characters only exacerbated this problem.

Upon leaving Twilight Town, the player finally begins their true journey – travelling to various worlds based on Disney properties and beating back the forces of darkness. But there’s no real set up for this; no distinct reason *why* we’re visiting these worlds.

Mm-hm. I think the issue was that we were supposed to learn more about Ansem the Wise’s data in KH0.5. That was supposed to give Sora a quest in KH3: search for the “Key to Return Hearts”. Once that game got cancelled, Nomura had no idea how to write KH3′s story any longer.

So around 3-4 hours into Kingdom Hearts III, the story still lacks a clear sense of direction and purpose, and hasn’t yet established any clear themes or deeper meaning.

Yeah, it’s sad because there was an underlying theme in the Disney worlds: the power of love and its ability to restore what was lost.

Kingdom Hearts III cleverly tries to frame its story through the lens of a chess match between two Keyblade Masters, Eraqus and Xehanort, when they were young. The game even opens on this scene, highlighting its importance. But chess has rules; logic; a clear sense of direction. Kingdom Hearts III’s narrative is akin to two people who don’t know how to play chess. They understand that they have to defeat their opponent’s king, but the rules of how to move their pieces, how to actually reach that coveted checkmate, are completely unknown to them. The characters in this game feel like pieces on a chess board with no rules; aimlessly moving back and forth across a limited space, until both players finally decide enough is enough and agree to bring their match to an end.

LOL. Yep. The fact that Xehanort had “reserve members” showed he had no idea what he was doing.

Stick to your guns – don’t be afraid to explore a good idea, or to develop the plot outside of your main protagonist. When so many previously proactive characters are in play, the story shouldn’t feel so static, or entirely dependent on the protagonist’s actions. The way your protagonist reacts to events and changing circumstances is just as important as the ones they play an active role in creating.

That’s why I liked the spin-offs. KH3 suffered from forcing you into only Sora’s perspective. Even Nomura said that the Keyblade Graveyard should have had everyone fighting their own battles.

Simply put, the Disney worlds in Kingdom Hearts III have no tangible impact on the game’s core narrative.

Sad, but true.

“In the end, although I had a hand in it as well, the flow of the dialogue and the stories of each world were largely handled by the level design team.” While I very much appreciate this standpoint of ‘gameplay first’, as well as the act of involving multiple teams in the execution of the story, these statements do prove my point. Set-pieces and events are one thing, but if there was a specific story to tell – with outlined themes to be explored, character conflicts to evolve, and goals to be achieved; all developed evenly throughout the entire game (Disney worlds included) - you would imagine the scenario would be built around balancing those narrative elements with the individual tales of each level.

Very interesting. The story in the Disney worlds was largely decided by the level design team? Wow.

Despite major villains such as Young Xehanort, Vanitas, and Marluxia making multiple appearances in their respective worlds, they generally just spout off trite exposition and then either disappear or summon a boss fight. Some villains don’t even know why they’re there, while others introduce plot points (such as the Black Box or the new Princesses of Heart) that are never utilised or expanded upon. As the game features at least thirteen main antagonists, these early appearances should have been integral in establishing their personalities, motivations, and the threat they pose to the player (as well as our heroes). In execution, though, they seem like little more than after-thoughts that offer hints of personality, but never go beyond the superficial – and certainly contribute nothing to the main narrative. This, I believe, is because Kingdom Hearts III doesn’t have a story to tell, but was instead content with treading water until its grand conclusion.

Yep. I had no idea why Marluxia, Larxene, and Luxord were running around in the worlds. Why are they back? Other characters, like Saix, were given flimsy “motivation”. All in all, the organization members were supposed to be vessels by the time you fight them in the KG. Hollowed out containers for Xehanort’s heart. Victims of mind control who you are supposed to have pity for. But they never felt like it.

Kingdom Hearts III’s meandering and vapid progression during ‘the Disney loop’ supports my argument that the game lacks a complete narrative and was merely concerned with reaching its final act. I believe this is most evident by the way in which the player is made to jump from world to world without any direction or purpose. Consequently, the majority of Kingdom Hearts III feels content to aimlessly ‘go through the motions’, setting a repetitive, humdrum pace and ultimately lacking the sense of narrative depth and genuine value that is integral to a great RPG.

Yeah, I believe there was–at one point–an actual plot for KH3. But after BBSV2 was cancelled, a huge portion of KH3′s plot was pretty much scrapped along with it and rewritten.

Everyone’s heard of the three-act structure; a model that forms the foundation of popular culture’s favourite stories. Act 1 features the setup and exposition; an ‘inciting incident’ to get the narrative moving. Act 2 is the confrontation; a midpoint which challenges the protagonist, pushing them to their limits. And finally, Act 3 is the resolution; concluding the plot, along with any character arcs introduced in the previous acts. While this structure doesn’t necessarily need to be adhered to, I believe it possesses something that Kingdom Hearts III sorely lacked – a midpoint.

Yep. KH3 had no mid-point. Scala ad Caelum could have worked as the mid-point. And it could have been another hub world like Radiant Garden. KH3 probably originally had this, but it was scrapped.

This is especially a shame, as Aqua’s fall into darkness – resulting in a twisted form that externalises all of her loneliest thoughts – is one of the most dramatically compelling aspects of the game. And that’s despite lasting for all of 10 minutes (a decade of solitude and suffering are seemingly erased by a few whacks from Sora’s Keyblade).

This is true for all of the characters that needed to be saved. Nobody really used the power of waking on anyone. It’s was just whack, whack, okay you’re saved.

And this is ultimately the problem with the lack of a true Act 2 – the characters aren’t explored or challenged when they need to be. The narrative refuses to escalate until its final act, at which point it feels like going from zero to sixty in a matter of moments. But during the heat of battle – at such a late stage, and with so many heroes and villains in play (more than twenty) – it’s hard to develop your characters in a way that feels natural. Kingdom Hearts III’s solution is bizarre soliloquies that are completely disconnected from the events around them. Is Sora in the middle of a boss fight with three villains? Well, the other two will disappear while you spend several minutes casually chatting with the third. And while this is partly due to the challenge of giving such a large cast an appropriate send-off, it’s also a direct consequence of the lack of time given to exploring characters and their relationships in the previous 20-25 hours of playtime.

So true. So many characters who had so much development over the series. That’s why they needed another game before KH3. It was probably too much to ask for KH3 to be the epic conclusion as well as dive into everyone’s backstory.

On that note, having some sort of hub – a place, like Traverse Town or Hollow Bastion in the first two Kingdom Hearts games, that the player regularly returns to – can be an effective way to centre your story. It provides a home base, and a recurring cast of characters that can be revisited at any time. This kind of location helps players to feel a deeper and more personal attachment to your world.

Yeah, the game would have been so much better if you could visit RG and interact with the plot-important NPCs.

Put in Kingdom Hearts terms, we might say that the body and soul are here; it’s just missing its heart.

I’ve had the exact same thought.

This essay began with the assertion that Kingdom Hearts III is a conclusion in search of a story; a game without a tale of its own to tell. So far, we’ve examined the material impact; the effect this has on the game’s pacing, its sense of player progression, engagement, and character development. So in this topic, I want to consider the conceptual side of things; the motivations that drive our heroes and villains, the purpose of the events that take place, and finally the meaning intended to be conveyed by the story. Put simply, does the narrative of Kingdom Hearts III have something to say?

Sadly, no. I can tell it was supposed to, though. KH3′s story was supposed to be about the power of love. It was really that simple.

By the time of Kingdom Hearts III, Riku has overcome all of these challenges and been granted the title of Keyblade Master, so it was important to present him as a more mature, capable character, having regained his confidence and developed a clear identity. But ultimately, he just feels bland and stoic in this game. He has no new narrative arc, relatively few interactions with Sora, predominantly serves as a mouthpiece for exposition, and is more devoid of a distinct personality than ever. And for a game which serves as a conclusion to the story so far, it’s essential that our core group of characters, such as Riku and Kairi, reach a satisfying crescendo. The narrative should organically involve them in significant ways, and the challenges they face should provide natural opportunities for growth and exploration.

Sad, since Riku seemed like he did originally have a narrative arc. He got a new Keyblade! But the way he got it was laughably random and meaningless and contributed nothing to his overall growth or development.

As much as I’ve tried to understand it, I cannot summarise Master Xehanort’s motivation in that same, concise way. His initial speech in Kingdom Hearts III implies idle curiosity; he speculates that “If ruin brings about creation, what, then, would another Keyblade War bring?” followed by statements that he wants to re-enact the conflict and simply see what happens. He also wonders if they will “…be found worthy of the precious light the legend speaks of”, implying that his goal is to test humanity; or at least the current generation of Keyblade wielders. But that’s a pretty flimsy motivation, and it’s lacking any context or logic.

Yep. Xehanort was supposed to have another game to explore his motivations. When you get rid of that, his character just doesn’t work anymore.

And it’s not just the heroes that have this problem. During their death scenes, several of the Organisation’s members (Luxord, Marluxia, Larxene, Xigbar, Xion, Saix, and Ansem) either encourage Sora or imply that they didn’t care about the outcome; or didn’t even want to battle in the first place. Some have their reasons, but if even one of them had chosen not to fight, Xehanort’s re-enactment could have failed. Much like I described earlier, it doesn’t feel satisfying to overcome a foe who didn’t want to fight, and a war with the potential to destroy the universe should be motivated by much more powerful convictions.

I don’t disagree. But I honestly think this is because none of these characters actually wanted to fight in the Keyblade War. They were supposed to be possessed puppets. Mind-controlled vessels with no will of their own.

Let’s use Saix as an example. What makes a more engaging battle? In canon, Saix had flimsy motivations to be fighting, anyways. He wanted to atone so he was acting as a double agent in order to procure some Replicas. And he wanted look for Subject X. That’s why he joined Xehanort. That’s all the reason he had to fight.

Compare that to a potential backstory with him as a vessel, lacking free will. Isa was a human test subject who was possessed as a teen. His best friend Lea has to fight him unwillingly. Saix is berserk and nearly kills Lea without even being aware of it. But all Lea wants is to save his best friend. I know which one I find more engaging.

Ever since that first game, I’ve been trying to identify what it is that unified these two styles of storytelling – the Disney fairytale with the SquareSoft RPG. And in writing this essay, I finally realised; the secret ingredient, the unifying thread that both franchises had in common, was love. Romance is at the core of almost every classic Disney film, and every Final Fantasy from IV to X was in some way a love story. Seemingly the developers of the original Kingdom Hearts realised this too.

I’m pretty neutral about the Sora/Kairi romance. I mainly wanted Kairi to not feel like a damsel-in-distress yet again. And KH3 definitely screwed that up.

In a way, my problem was the same as that of Kingdom Hearts III’s story. We both spent so much time looking to the horizon, imagining what the future may hold, that we missed out on what was already right in front of us. I will always love and support this series, and its creativity and charm will no doubt continue to inspire my own stories for the rest of my life. But despite not being the conclusion I hoped for, Kingdom Hearts III has freed me from my own obsession with the series’ future. I no longer feel like I’m waiting for something that may never come. Of course, I hope the series gets its story back on track, and rises to new heights greater than ever before! But it turns out that I already got my ending in 2006; and now that I’ve finally realised that, I can finally, honestly say that, as a Kingdom Hearts fan, I am satisfied.

It’s sad that KH2’s ending felt more satisfying. Because KH3 should have been even better than KH2′s ending. KH2 had a happy ending. But in KH3, everyone was there on the beach. Terra, Aqua, and Ven were saved. In KH2, Axel was dead. He had a sad ending. But in KH3, he was human again and even had his childhood best friend back, too. Even Hayner, Pence, and Olette were there. Sora should have been there, too. By all accounts, I should have liked KH3′s ending the best out of any game. But they ruined it with the horrible character development and the cheap cliffhanger.

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playunderground · 4 years

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Revisiting Journey and Abzu, I Found Myself More Depressed About Our World’s Future

This is from the September edition of Play Underground’s monthly digest. In that edition, we focused on walking simulators! This edition is available for our patrons starting at $5 a month. If you aren’t a patron, $6 via Ko-fi will get you a copy.

If you like what you see here, please consider becoming a patron! Thanks for reading! ❤️- PUG! editors

As the days go by, it’s become easier and easier to lose hope. I don’t want to sound like a fatalist, but it’s true. Scientists say that climate change will be irreversible in 11 years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it seems that human civilization will crumble by 2050. Every day the world seems to be shrieking in anguish. It has become harder and harder to ignore her cries, or to know how to help.

It’s also become more common in my present day to revisit old pieces of art and media only to find that their exaggerated, absurd, or apocalyptic scenarios are simply regular, everyday life for us now in these turbulent times. My most recent experience of this was when I revisited 2 of my favorite games, Journey and Abzu. As I returned to these games with the intent of figuring out what I wanted to write about, I found myself often struck by the distinct scenarios one finds themself in when playing these games, and how much they feel like premonitions.

Journey and Abzu were released in 2012 and 2016, respectively. While neither are old games by any means, they both were released just before the moment we are currently in where we all collectively feel that nothing could possibly get worse, and then it does. Climate change has been talked about for decades now, but the painting of an apocalyptic future scientists have warned us about has been getting less and less impressionistic since 2016. Both of these games were developed and out in the world well before this moment of maximum capacity. The conversation these games have with our current culture should theoretically be over, yet upon revisiting them, I found a representation more accurate than ever before.

Let me begin with Journey, the older sibling of the two, a game praised for its music, emotional impact, and finding power in simplicity. In this game, a player controls a robed figure in a massive desert, with the goal of traveling towards a mountain in the distance. As you travel through the desert, you find relics from a once thriving civilization. Art covers the walls of ancient buildings that depict the rise and fall of the civilization that your character belongs to, which also parallels the journey of the character. The main enemies of the game that you must avoid are massive flying automatons that are left over from a war that ended the civilization.

As I finished yet another playthrough of the game, I found myself once again moved to tears. This time however, it was for very different reasons. I could not have predicted before booting up this game again in 2019 that I would be hit with such an impact upon realizing just how much this game is a potential self portrait of humanity’s future. The desert setting certainly isn’t far off from what a world ravaged by climate catastrophe might look like. What hit home for me the most was the fact that the automatons are the last thing remaining in this world after ending the civilization. The idea of military technology being our downfall doesn’t seem so fictional when the United States military is Earth’s biggest polluter. After feeling emotionally ruined in my playthrough, I went on to replay Abzu, and then fell into another emotional sinkhole. I did not know that the rug could be pulled out from under me again.

The game Abzu follows the journey of a female diver in a vast ocean. As you play the game, you explore various underwater environments, interact with sea life, and reanimate the ocean using magical springs. The story and design of the game take inspiration from Sumerian mythology and Middle Eastern culture. In the game, there are pyramid shaped devices that are harvesting energy from the ocean. It is clear that these devices are what are upsetting the ecosystem and are what caused the destruction of this game’s civilization. As you progress through the game, it is revealed that the diver is a mechanical being whose existence actually comes from the pyramid like structures that are destroying the ocean. The diver ends up teaming up with a great white shark to bring life back to the oceans, and revitalizes the world.

While the water based setting of Abzu is in stark contrast to the desert of Journey, they both seem equally accurate as potential apocalyptic futures. As the temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, it seems like we will all be living underwater very soon. Once again like in Journey, the downfall of Abzu’s civilization is due to the machinery that was created. All that’s left of the cultures in both games are the evil machines they fashioned, mindlessly continuing the uncaring and violent mechanisms they were made for.

None of this sounds hopeful, but reality never seems to be either. I do think however it would be a disservice to both of these beautiful games if I tried to argue that the main message at their cores was pessimism towards our future. Both of these games, while dystopian in nature, carry the seeds of hope within them. Journey and Abzu are both stories of sacrifice and perseverance. In Journey, you are on an emotional ride that borders on religious experience. Your character is willing to sacrifice their life for their people, their mission, and their beliefs. One of the major points of gameplay in Journey is that you can play with another player online anonymously. While this may seem like a random or inconsequential gimmick, it actually adds a comforting reality to the story: you are not alone. You are not the last of your people. There are others, and you can help one another to bring about a better future for the both of you. Your existence in the game brings a beautiful red color back to cloth based beings that help you progress through your journey as you interact with them. There is still a future and each being in the game can help you towards a good one, anonymous or not. While all of us may feel powerless in the current state of the world, none of us have to suffer in it by ourselves. By the time you reach that mountain, you are no longer the person you once were. You and your character have been reborn, for the better.

While Journey focuses mostly on what is needed for an individual, Abzu is a great companion in that the center is much more about the collective and the environment. The sacrifice your character makes in Abzu is for the greater good of the world itself. After the diver realizes that they themselves are a member of the very civilization that is responsible for the destruction of the ocean, they forego their connection to that history for the sake of a better collective future. Your character acknowledges their sins, and decides to make right with the world rather than continue down the path history laid out for them. There is a beautiful twist that occurs as you progress through the game. At first, it seems that the great white shark is one of your major enemies. You quickly realize however that the machinery you are a part of is the actual enemy, while the shark and the other natural creatures of the ocean are your true allies and friends. As you finish the game and the credits roll, you can control the diver in a pristine and beautiful ocean while swimming alongside the great white shark. The cycle of violence is broken, and the ocean is clean and teeming with life once again. I wanted to weep at the thought of a future like that, a world without something like the Great Pacific garbage patch.

It is clear to me now that the future of our planet depends on our willingness to forego everything we once knew. In both Journey and Abzu, a hopeful and utopian future only came after the destruction of a flawed present, and the depressing period thereafter. The downfall of entire civilizations in these games also meant the ending of the violent systems that had been pushing towards calamity. We must be willing to acknowledge our wrongdoings, both as individuals and as a collective. The characters you play as are all fundamentally changed by the end of the story in these 2 games. We will all have to make sacrifices, whether they be personal, political, technological, or otherwise, and learn from our past and the cultures within it. Much of the inspiration for Journey and Abzu come from non-white, non-western, and indigenous cultures, whose practices and histories are inextricable from environmental justice and liberation. War and colonialism are massive factors of climate catastrophe both in these games and in real life.

It appears to me now that we must all go on our respective journeys, to find ourselves and what our relationship to the world and one another must be. None of us will be able to come out of it clean, for none of us live in a world that is. The end of human civilization as we currently know it might just be the only option ahead of us. Perhaps though, there is a much needed future in collapse, and glory in rebirth. I pray that we all find it, if not for our own sake then for the world that comes after we are all gone.

#digest preview #journey #abzu

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rugeon · 5 years

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Breaking down the Dust: higher level design goals and challenges

Here’s that second post of stream of consciousness mechanical thoughts and ideas. Just ideas for now.

So one of the goals I have for developing this idea is creating a creatively expressive music game. When compared to other music games often times there is a great emphasis placed on technical mastery and execution. Most rhythm games focus on matching the timing + accuracy of your input; eg. guitar hero, rockband, singstar, rhythm heaven

While technique and timing are strong elements of mastery in music, there’s more the experience of playing music than simply playing the ‘right’ notes at the right time, and these prescriptive styles of matching the notes to established songs ignore the creative and expressive aspect of playing music. Often times there is more than one way for someone to express the same musical idea, which is subject to that person’s individual tastes. There is more than one way to play the same song or jam over the same idea, different notes/chords to get to the next part of a song.

More recent guitar hero+ rock band iterations, as well as other music games, will have improv breaks in the song where a wider selection of inputs are valid and contribute to score, and while I haven’t really played these games, these sections are 1. de-emphasised and 2. often result on people ravingly hammering all over their controller/ singing somewhat flippantly. This is good fun in a party setting where these games thrive on replicating the ‘feel’ of being a guitarist frenetically twisting their fingers into knots all over the fretboard to shoot thunder out of the sky, but don’t really capture that feeling in improv of musical expression + intent.

One game that I feel gets closer to this (albeit in a somewhat limited capacity is the captivating recreational program ‘Hylics’ by Mason Lindroth

Which has an optional section available near the end of the game where the player is able to assemble their band and cycle them each through various tracks to play at the same time, and then selecting from their own range of sounds and play select set of notes / chords in each style you switch to. It’s fairly freeform and without much in the way of constraints/ judgements on how you play. You can’t fail, it’s entirely optional and is sort of just a fun short side outlet of maybe improving over some pre-arranged grooves/synths/beats.

This brings up the question of how to create a musically expressive game for players that has depth and facilitates some degree of creativity, but still in the context of something that is engaging as a stand-alone experience. As much as I’m a big fan of the concert you can play in Hylics, it’s very strictly an optional part of the game and not the main focus of the experience. There is no feedback given to the player on how good they’re doing which in someways is great. As a relaxing side thing it’s nice that the player has the opportunity to just ‘play’ and decide for themselves whether they like what they did, but its ultimately something that doesn’t reflect the constraints that are an essential part of playing music.

Musicians respond to eachother, they respond to the context of where they are in a song and where they’re going, and also respond to their audience on some level while performing as well. A music game that is purely expressive without constraints while appealing to me, certainly more appealing than making something with a different note highway, runs the risk of not actually resulting in people making something recognisable as appealing music. Some constraint on when you should be playing notes, feedback on playing things is necessary to some degree to encourage players to create a performance.

This brings the challenge of creating a musically expressive game without requiring a vast musical understanding.

Something like Rocksmith which is sort of just an interface for a real guitar (complete once again with note highway) while teaching musical concepts and opening up the ability to start learning an instrument, is way too complicated in terms of fidelity of representation in playing an instrument for most people just looking to play a game. Besides that this game has some modes that offer a practice space where you can express yourself as opposed to playing the written notes (and even within the framework of songs there is some greater degree of expression in terms of strumming available) this game also isn’t really trying to convey the idea of self-expression, but start handing you some tools that could be used to make it, outside of the game, on a real instrument.

So the major challenge to take from this is how to create a fun musical or musically themed game, which facilitates player expression and depth without requiring an intimate understanding of how to play music.

If I were to guess what my design arrives at, it will probably share some more with a game like ‘Floor Kids’ the recent breakdancing game:

I haven’t played it but it judges you on score and variety of moves, while allowing for different inputs and moves to be interpreted as valid and mostly just requiring a steady tempo for inputs, as opposed to matching them to a scrolling sheet of different specific inputs at different times. In order to be able to express yourself, you need to have meaningful options.

When looking at other games that allow for some degree of creative player expression some ones that come to mind are:

Fighting Games:

[Absolver]

Sports/trick games in the tradition of series like tony hawk:

And spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry:

These games all have systems that make judgements on play that deign there is such a thing as ‘optimal play’, but still within each of these games there are vastly different types of players who will feel happy with how they play relative to their own sense of mastery and targets within their evaluative frameworks. The better scoring systems in something like Devil May Cry are designed to make the assigned value between different modes of play more even. Still other players ignore the scoring systems entirely to just make it through the game, or because they prefer their own way of playing over what the game says is desirable. Fighting games at the high-level trend towards certain styles of play, moves being completely unutilised because they are bad and others used more because they are optimal. When the requirements to pass or succeed are high the ability to self-express reduces. I think the most potentially interesting of these is something like Devil May Cry, which features distinct switchable movesets that have different strengths but are all potentially viable. Some players will specialise in one and not make use of all of its moves but develop a mastery over its core features (dodging, parrying etc.) While other players will be more broad.

The room for this specialisation and ability for several moves to accomplish the same task is tied up in the game’s enemies which are effectively challenges that prompt the player in different ways to respond to that enemies strengths and weaknesses. The utility/threat of these enemies varies massively, with some being only a threat when near another enemy or in a large number, others having more deadly versions introduces later once the player has improved in skill etc.

One of the main differences however is that in music repetition is often desirable. Things can repeat aesthetically but have a different accent, articulation or energy because of where they are in the song and still feel really effective. This is one of the aesthetic features often noted in the desert rock / stoner rock genre. They are very repetitive and focused on the trancelike nature of staying in a groove. This is not to say there is a lack of progression or movement in these genres, only that this is a feature often associated with them which runs somewhat counter to the encouraged expression in games that evaluate based on variety. How to encourage the kind of play where going on for longer is desirable?

The player’s priority of how they respond is determined by their own ability and tastes in response to the changing context of the fight/ arena/ enemy composition. As a way of expressing oneself within constraints, comparisons could be drawn to how musicians will respond based on their own tastes and experience to the changing context of the sound/performance. There is a certain rhythm, and call and response to playing these kinds of games. Even more so in iterations where the timing on certain moves is emphasized by allowing for a more effective execution.

These games have players expressing themselves spacially, while most musical games (understandably) are focused on the temporal qualities, of when sound is played. Maybe there’s a way to visualise musical context in a way which is more spatial without just being a 1-dimensional note highway?

Another aspect of the scene that I feel warrants some thought is how to create the sense of community. Lots of music games have an audience responding to the player’s ranking and the setting of something like a generator party next to a kidney pool provides a good fit for this scene but I’m curious if they could be more involved. Having the crowd and how they respond being the really visual thing you are responding to in music? Different types of people and how they move making you decide to play differently ie speed up, slow down, change style? Furthermore when playing music does the player play one musician or the whole band? Different instruments and roles have different play styles? WHat about gamifying the other aspects of this scenes experience? Putting the poster together a la. the more freeform creative stuff like building a snowman in NITW demo game Longest Night, or colouring the butterflies in Florence. The experience of following a mad map in the pitch black of a desert to get to a show. Most of this is just gonna end up being scope creep nonsense but is at least worth considering. How much to represent all aspects of the scene vs a higher fidelity representation of one style of playing for one instrument.

Only other aesthetic considerations I have for the framework are that the wind, dust and sky are all ripe for implementation, and surreal, emotive, anthropomorphic fallacy-ising. Figures + shapes in the night sky being the thing the player responds to?

Main goal for now is to figure out the main mechanic of creating some musical expressive stuff.

#gamedev #dust

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faisalkhanlove · 3 years

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What is Motion Graphics? – The Complete Guide

What exactly do 2D motion graphics mean ? And what do they actually serve to accomplish?

2D Motion Graphics is a kind of digital animation that offers motion (and the feeling of living) to pictures. The images can be directly derived by digital resources. They could be original art or photographs or vectors etc.basically any digital image can be used as a basis for. The real power is in the manipulation of the image(s) which transforms an image of a person to a dynamic persona, or even a stock photo into the form of a video clip that is pulsating or even a photograph to a moving video clip and so on. Utilizing 2D Motion Graphics, a designer can design complete video commercials, short films and more.

What is motion graphics?

What's the most important advantage of two-dimensional motion graphics?

This is a significant benefit that was not available until recently. It's possible to do this using an ordinary computer. With a PC with adequate specs and a high-quality processor, you can create quality animations. There's also advantages 2D Motion Graphics has over other forms in animation. Traditional animation can be slow and be difficult to convert to digital. Although you can make 3D animation using personal computers it will require more time, which means processing power.

What industries benefit from 2-D motion graphic technology?

Each and every individual. Absolutely. It's the cheapest alternative for anyone looking to stand out with video. 2-D motion Graphics are used in advertisements or film as well as explainer videos and technology video, television commercials and many other. Every media business requires 2D motion Graphics content.

Where to Begin

The most crucial thing you should make is to select the correct software you require learn. The majority of influencers and animators recommend learning about their Adobe program. I totally agree with the advice. It is my opinion that Adobe Creative Suite is the industry standard, and is an all-in-one solution that covers every aspect of 2D Motion Graphics Animation.

how do I become a motion graphic designer

The software you'll need to be paying attention to is:

Adobe After Effects. This is the program that you employ for animating stages.

Adobe Illustrator. It is where you can create vector images (images which can be scaled to any size, with no loss of quality) to be used for animation.

Adobe Photoshop. Everyone has been familiar with Photoshop. It is true that it permits you to modify and edit images, but it also lets users to create raster images that can become animated.

Adobe Premiere Pro. It will allow you to record everything you've done in video format by using this.

Alongside Adobe Suite Another helpful tool to master could include Cinema 4D. It's not an Adobe product, but it's a popular one and is worth keeping track of. However, it doesn't require an expert user to use it.

Selecting the right hardware for your personal computer

Is it the best motion graphics computer?

When you choose a computer to use, you'll have four main parameters to consider. When selecting the right machine there are four primary aspects to consider.

1. CPU

2. RAM

3. VGA

4. HARD DRIVE

Find out more particulars of the equipment you'll need here.

What NOT To Do

Before you dive involved, you should go through these tips. I can guarantee you that it will be the most efficient method to reduce your time, money, and frustration in the long run.

Do not just search "Top 2D Motion Graphics Animation" for advice.

It's an arduous concept to comprehend, and it's crucial to understand. Google is amazing however it's not able remain in all places at all times. This means that it isn't able to evaluate how well motion graphics are and doesn't consider written articles as the most effective outcomes. In reality, it will see results from people who are skilled at writing SEO. This means you'll receive a lot of clickbait as well as people who are SEO experts, but not examples of a great 2-D motion graphics. This is the reason why you'll start with the wrong idea that you're looking at what you must master, not what you need to learn to achieve. Instead of looking through a maze of sources, I'll present you with some excellent sources at the end of the article.

After Effects isn't "Motion Graphics" and vice versa

Some novices (and beyond) believe that they're employing motion graphics. After Effects are the same thing , and can be substituted with the other. I'm certain you'll be able to be confident that I'm here to provide you with what's real. You'll look like a novice if you switch between them. After Effects is a software. Motion graphics is a method of animation. You should learn each, but remember that it's a technique , and the other involves art.

Motion graphic inspiration 7 websites to inspire the imagination of your. Platforms, designers and companies platforms, as well as many other sites listed here that are all focused on motion-related designs, graphics and motion. Get your creativity flowing and stimulate through motion in the most efficient method using the most reliable sources.

Here's what you need to be aware of about motion graphics

Branding

If it boils to selecting the best design, layout and color for your company's brand, motion graphics play a role for making these aspects seem more authentic. The majority of motion graphics revolves around the business's values and goals and then understanding how they can be conveyed digitally and then creating the artwork that is produced.

If it comes to branding, an effective animated video that communicates the company's vision can go a long way. For instance, Google Chrome uses its attractive style of design and its four colors that create a lively tone that makes it apart from its competition. They push branding to the next level by demonstrating the way Google Chrome is a fast and reliable internet browser . It does this by using animations of a shorter time, e.g., through motion graphics.

If you incorporate motion graphics in branding strategies, businesses can rapidly improve their audio or visual appeal. This is a matter of the creation of a more persuasive place to proclaim, "We're better than the rest!" Without putting too much effort into it and using the very best creative thinking.

Telling A Story

If we were to identify the winning method of marketing, it's a guaranteed method to highlight the art of telling stories. It's because selling a product or service isn't just about the worth of the product you're selling but more about how valuable it is for consumers.

If the marketing strategy to the limits, you need to be aware that you're selling to people. People tend to be emotional and have stories to share. The more authentic your story is the more attractive it is to potential customers which will increase the chances that they will convert.

Motion graphics can assist in telling stories through the use of appropriate methods and formats that produce an immersive visual experience that is attractive and exciting. Take a look at the vast distinction between static images and the visual representation of something. Which is more efficient?

While images are sure to create emotions, motion graphics are the norm.

Explaining Concepts

At times, the topic is so complex that it's easier to present information visually rather than orally. This is because complex concepts are much easier to comprehended by looking at pictures. Many times businesses that attempt to explain how an item functions are more effective in explaining the process with animations in contrast to writing using static images.

Motion graphics can be among the most efficient ways to create engaging video tutorials and explanations. They are ideal for illustrating important concepts. For instance how bitcoin and blockchain work, and how a particular company can assist you in making better choices when it comes to investing in these options.

In addition to the development of motion-based graphics audio within motion graphics may allow businesses to give "their side of the story" and allow users to see the facts from a different viewpoint.

Raising Awareness

In the early stages of a brand's life, it is crucial to establish the brand's name. In particular what are the company or brand looking to resolve an problem? Is it an organization that is not for profit and has an issue that is of significance? Whatever it is, motion graphics should be a part of those organizations working to make a statement.

Tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects can add energy and power in any communication. It doesn't matter if the issue is sustainability on a global scale or a local issue in the community on an individual level. Leave motion graphics to stimulate actions.

Try Motion Graphics Yourself

For people who are just getting started with learning about Motion Graphics, it's crucial to begin with the basics. Learn about motion editing as well as video editing and special effects by following the right courses. We offer Interactive video editing classes along with After effects courses in NYC and can help in the process of establishing yourself using practical projects, techniques taught by industry experts , and personalized focus. Start now!

The guide here is crucial and helpful for animators who are just beginning their careers with motion graphics software

The ability to create motion-based images using personal computers is still a nascent idea. Motion graphics in 2D have been around for a short period of time, and there aren't any options for those who are only beginning. It's easy to lose track and then take a wrong path and lose a substantial amount of time in just beginning. My aim is to help you in avoiding the mistakes as best it is possible.

This is why I've put together this guide to assist you.

I've been involved with animation for more than 10 years -- basically since the moment it started becoming possible with personal computers that could make motion. I've learned many tricks and techniques, but have also made more mistakes than I can be able to count on my journey. I'm aware of how challenging it is to start up and how challenging it can be for someone who isn't experienced. Sure, you'll face some stressful situations initially, but I'm hoping that this guide will help you save considerable time as well as stress and money!

#free motion graphics software #app explainer video

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livingwithashipname-blog · 6 years

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Ermanda’s Inner Sanctum: Scorpion 4.09 “It’s Raining Men (of War)”

Happy Thanksgiving to my US peeps! Yet, let us not forget the Natives who view this holiday very differently! Anyways, this episode was awesome! We learned about a pivotal moment that shaped Cabe’s life. Robert Patrick and Eddie Kaye Thomas’ acting was superb! I have enjoyed Cabe and Toby’s time together in this arc. I also liked the mission because it talked about NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), garbage patches in the oceans, and techniques implemented to remove them. It tied well with Scorpion’s plight to book jobs where their inventions and solutions can be used long-term and fix their financial deficit. I applaud the art department for the look of the trash mound and the VFX team for the aerial view of it in proximity to the team’s rented boat! 👏🏾👏🏾 I have some interesting topics for this review, so let’s get started!

Learning More about Florence Tipton

The writers are making a very quaint distinction with Florence Tipton. She is a chemist, but she is not a genius. She can relate, but she is not exactly like the members of Team Scorpion. However, her personality is very similar to Mr. 197, which is why Toby makes that pot & kettle pun in response to Walter’s description of her. During the mission, we learn what motivates her independent work. She’s trying to redeem herself from failure and rejection. She is so eager to prove herself once again that she doesn’t take kindly to distractions of any kind. It is also why she presents her binding agent to the team when it hasn’t been properly vetted for practical efficiency. It is commonly said that pride comes before a fall and Florence falls HARD when she projects onto Paige. But Paige, acting as the skilled communicator she is, finds a way to get through to Florence in the same way she does for her geniuses! She has exposed an emotional opening that I think will become significant in upcoming episodes!

Papa Cabe

“I’ve realized recently that I’ve been messing a bit with my memories… been rewriting them over the years. I’m not gonna do that anymore. It’s okay ‘cause I got a great girl and I’ve got great friends. No matter what the future holds for me, I want to remember this moment right now exactly as it is. ‘Cause to have you all in my life… I am truly thankful.”

Cabe’s speech is so touching because of the truth it possesses and what it represents! This process has been hard for Cabe because he feels like he is failing himself and Scorpion in the same way he feels he failed his father. He completely constructs a new memory in order to cover his shame over his father’s death. It explains a lot more about why he is who he is. This is why it’s no surprise he fears old age as we saw in 3.17 Dirty Seeds, Done Dirt Cheap. His whole life is his way of subconsciously overcompensating for his perceived lack of bravery and a means to honor his father’s legacy as a lawman. The idea that his humanity while on the job could land him in prison and strip this identity is really hard for him to fathom. He is convinced that a hardened exterior keeps him objective for the purposes of his job. The most important thing he needs is support from his loved ones. The support he receives from his children and Allie give him the strength he needs to endure this legal battle. I truly appreciate this reality expressed on screen in this manner!

Walter’s Legacy: The Influence of Ralph, Happy Quinn, and Baby Quintis

Walter may not have considered fatherhood in the past, but he has always taken great pride in the development of young minds and making his mark for the next generation of geniuses. We see this when he meets Ralph for the first time in the pilot and recognizes his genius. This reality becomes more apparent in his interactions with Ralph throughout season 1. He acts as a father figure and mentor to Ralph, sometimes overstepping his boundaries out of passion over Ralph’s potential (1.21 Cliffhanger).

Walter: Do you see what you're sacrificing by leaving, by taking Ralph away from us? Paige: I have to think of his safety. W: Earlier today, you invoked the greater good so that I would team up with Cabe. But do you just throw that term around? P: My son nearly died because he wants to be you. W: Is it so awful being me? Being around me? P: I just don't want him to become you! W: What is your solution? Keep him in a cocoon? Have him watch you move to Maine to follow some guy who's already abandoned you? That's idiotic! P: That guy is his father, Walter. You are not. I... I have to go. Good-bye, guys.

He encourages Ralph’s academic pursuits and respects his intelligence, reminding him to never diminish himself for the sake of others (2.22 Hard Knox).

Walter: I couldn't understand the details in your incredibly complex code. I used to think that I-I had the fourth highest IQ in the world, but now I realized that you have dropped me down to number five. Ralph: That's what got you upset? W: (laughing) No. No, what upset me is that you were willing to slow down for me to-to let me go down the wrong road, when that would've hindered you, because I couldn't grasp your work. Never hobble your intelligence for anyone... because if you do that in this garage, imagine what you'll have to do out there... for humans. The world needs to catch up to you... because if-if it can, just a little, imagine what a... a beautiful place it could be.

However, Ralph is not the only person in this series used as a means to future possibilities. Happy Quinn's individual growth and her relationship with Toby repeatedly serve as examples of life goals Walter can achieve. Happy Quinn is his closest friend. He trusts and admires her and has a lot of respect for her intelligence and abilities (3.05 Plight at the Museum). Plus, they are alike in many ways.

Walter: I know Toby believes that I only think about myself, but I will do what is necessary to protect your family. Even if that means that I have to go back home to Ireland. Happy: You are home. We're not losing you, and we're not breaking up Scorpion. We'll do whatever it takes. You talk nonsense like that again, I'll punch you in the neck. W: Toby's a fortunate guy. You know, I know ours isn't a real marriage, but since the day I met you, you've been a faithful friend, you've come through for me when I needed it, you've helped me build Scorpion from nothing. That's loyalty, selflessness, collaboration. If those are the traits that one looks for in a spouse, then you've been a... You've been a great wife. Thank you.

At first, he rejected the notion of romantic love. He had a no-fraternization rule for his employees because he thought romance would make his employees less efficient and possibly as a means to conceal his own fraudulent green card marriage to Happy. Now he believes he is capable and worthy of love and seeks to understand it in his own way. He roots for Melvester, Quintis, Callie, and Ralph x Patty! He never thought he would have children because he didn’t think he would be a great father. But Happy’s evolution, Quintis’ parenthood quest, and his own familial bond with Paige and Ralph are slowly convincing him that he can succeed in these pursuits as well.

W: But you and Toby… I hired you. You would’t know each other if it wasn’t for me. So if you had a child, if would just be something I take a lot of pride in. H: Fine, you’ve touched my heart. Walter is on the list. Just don’t tell Toby.

I think it is by design that Toby (seasons 1 & 2), Happy (season 2), and Ralph (season 3) are the three people so far who have encountered Walter just before he makes MAJOR moves in his personal life. He may be egotistical, but he strongly desires to leave a mark on the next generation in the hopes that the hub he created for his team will continue to flourish in his absence. This is why he is so eager to be an important figure in Baby Quintis’ life. He brought Toby and Happy together by hiring them, which planted the seed. He wants a little credit, which is not surprising for a man who focuses on research, not athletics. 😂 If not by name, then maybe he could be a godparent. Yet, I have a feeling choosing godparents will turn into a competition like the one for Quintis’ Best Man & Maid of Honor! We all know how that turned out! #dejavu 😉😂😂😂😂😂

It’s Official! Toby & Amy Reunite! 😱

I don’t usually address spoilers in my reviews, but this one is EPIC! As you’ve likely heard by now, Toby’s ex-fiancee, Amy Berkstead, wife of his nemesis, Quincy, will be introduced on screen in episode 4.13 Apocalypse Nerd, which premieres after winter break (premiere date unknown right now)! The actress, Shantel VanSanten, is slated to recur this season. Given the current arcs, her occupation as a geneticist doesn’t seem like a coincidence! This news is very exciting because we are finally meeting a character who has been mentioned in the series and has a history with a member of the team. It’s logical to assume that she knows Toby in ways Happy and the others do not. Although it might not always seems as such, Toby hasn’t talked extensively about his past, except for the few quips here and there about his parents and gambling experiences. (Here’s looking at you, writers! 👀) Therefore, this development opens possibility to get more Toby backstory the fandom has craved for a while through Amy. The Baby Quintis storyline also gets interesting in the wake of this news. If Happy isn’t pregnant before Amy’s arrival, then the events of this episode in relation to this arc will provide more clues to the eventual direction of Baby Quintis’ introduction to the series (biology or foster; end of S4 or during S5). Is it possible that Toby, Happy, or both of them reach out to Amy for fertility and conception guidance? As a geneticist, she can provide a unique perspective on fertility even if that is not her specific scope of practice. All I know is things just became interesting!!! So excited!

Drabbles…

Toby smells a fish! He knows there’s more to Cabe’s story! Time for experimentation!

I love that Paige and Happy went grocery shopping together and discussed baby things! This is what I want for my ladies at this point in the series! 🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾

Really Walter? Walina? The looks from Happy and Paige… 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀

I know the fandom has really advocated for a girl named Grace after Happy’s mother given all the promptings surrounding that theory for Baby Quintis. But what significant names would you choose if Baby Quintis is a boy? My first thought is Marcus after the middle name Toby wished he had instead of Meriwether. 👶🍼

Chair of Blades… have I heard this before?! 😉😉😂😂😂

A fish-based protein shake inspired by Walter’s brain food regimen? Sounds like 2.23 Chernobyl Intentions all over again! 😂😂😂😂😂😂��😂😂😂

Wardrobe mention: What is up with Paige and these blue blouses?! Still wondering if this connects to something significant. It’s a nice color on her! This is why I keep throwing blue hearts on all my Waige mentions. 💙💙💙 Hehehehe!

Ralph was trying to prevent a problem and only created a bigger one! Oh pobrecito! Florence wasn’t having it! Insert Mama Paige!

Walter comes to Paige’s defense on her parenting skills! 😍💙🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾

Florence and Walter are having an ego-filled IQ scuffle! Something about this exchange feels like deja vu. Maybe Toby has something to say… W (to Paige about Florence): She’s arrogant… and condescending. T: Hi pot! I see you’ve met kettle. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀 #likeforeal

The formula on the board is nice, but I am shocked at how neat it is on that board. Who wrote it down? It had to be Paige! 😂😂😂

Happy with the launch gun… 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

S: I’m having a little bit of trouble dropping the anchor. H: Have you tried a high fiber diet? W: That kind of humor is Toby’s influence. (Happy smiles) S: Guys, seriously, I’m jammed up! H: I’ll let that one lie. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀 Happy Quinn, wife of Toby Curtis, everyone! This is the content for which I live! More Quintis playing with their little brother, Sly!

H: Since when does Toby force my hand on anything? W: He got you to marry him. H: Touché. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀💀

W: I’m just saying that history has had its share of exemplary Walters. F: Milwaukee North Side Strangler, Walter Ellis; Sir Walter Raleigh, founder of the doomed colony of Roanoke; and, of course, Walter Mondale. W: What wrong with Mondale? F: He lost 49 out of 50 states. (looks to Happy) So if you want your kid to grow up to be a loser, that’s your choice. W: Just spread your worms. F: Heh, my buckets are empty. H (smirking): Yeah, me too. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀 Anyone else think that “spread your worms” sounds like a funny innuendo? 😉😂😂😂

Sly and the harpoon gun… 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

W: I focus my time on research, not athletics. F: (looks Walter up and down) Yes. 😂😂😂😂😂😂 Looks like Florence’s focus on Tae Bo is helping her out today, Walter, while you’re stuck to figure things out on a quickly disintegrating island of trash! 👀😂😂😂

I was thinking about what Toby would’ve said if he was there or listening via comms the whole time Happy climbed across that rope. You know he would say SOMETHING about the possibility of Happy being a goner if she entered that water with the jellyfishes!

S: We have extra plastic balls from when we launched the binding agent. We can fill them with my protein shake. H: Paige, I will talk you through modifying the launcher so it can properly toss Sly’s lunch. F: Really? Could you people be any less mature? P: …we could be infinitely less mature. Happy could’ve easily said it was time to launch Sly’s balls, but she didn’t. S (to Florence): Hmph! Me: Tell her Paige!!! 👊🏾👏🏾👏🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

It’s so funny how Walter automatically listens to Happy just like Toby does with her. And yet, he doesn’t know how Toby does it. Um, hello pot! Meet kettle! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀

PAIGE LAID THE SMACKDOWN ON FLORENCE!!! FLO TRIED IT, BUT PAIGE SAID, “NOT TODAY, SWEETIE!” Paige is great at her job! She’s working well with Florence.

Anyone else see that smile from Florence when Paige accepted her apology? I think we have found an emotional point of entry! 😉

Florence might have failed with her binding agent, but she came through with the sealant!

Well, well, well, 👀 who decides to save Florence and acknowledges her future scientific contributions are a part of the greater good! We see you, Walter! Someone has developed a sense of respect in the midst of a small moment of redemption. 😱👀😉😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

How many zippos has Happy surrendered at this point in the series?! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

W: Oh Happy, if I ignite, will you tell Baby Walina I was a hero? H: That’s never gonna happen. W: What? Me igniting or you naming the baby after me? H: Don’t make me choose. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀

Jadyn Wong is so flippin’ gorgeous!!! That shot of her taking off that apron with her hair tossed to the side… 😍😍😍😍 I’ve got a girl crush!

Y’all… neither Toby and Happy really cook for themselves. So what are they gonna do when they have kids?! That will change real quick when the food bills for that kid start racking up! 👀😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

It’s so funny how the team has decided to say “Flo” instead of “Florence” and Florence keeps correcting them each time! 😂😂😂😂😂😂

T: Cabe, you did not fail your father. And you’re not failing us. You’ve taken care of us for a long time. Now it’s time to let us take care of you. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 I sense this will come back again later down the road… 🤔😉

I get really giddy when I see Allie with Cabe! CALLIE!!!!!!! *insert fangirl scream* ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

#ermanda's inner sanctum #cbs scorpion #s04e09 #it's raining men (of war)#cabe gallo #walter o'brien #florence tipton #scorpion cbs #team scorpion #episode review #livingwithashipname

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richmonddales · 4 years

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How To Run A Dental Office

Owning an oral practice is no easy job. Although you excel at offering your patients with exceptional oral health care, it’s easy to become so captured up in the everyday operations that you forget about the other essential aspect of an effective dental practice: an extraordinary client experience. The truth is, the way you manage your dental workplace leaves long lasting impressions on your clients and substantially impacts your retention rates.

Here are 8 pointers to assist you improve your dentist-to-patient experience: All successful dental marketing campaigns share 10 constant components , but in order to really develop your practice as the leading oral health care provider in your location, you should also identify, market The Entrepreneurial Dentist, and protect your unique competitive advantages. Whether you use an expansive array of oral health services or stress a certain specialty, your unique perspective has the power to bring in and maintain a high volume of clients.

So rather of depending on traditional marketing channels, which are frequently one-size-fits-all, you ought to think about tested techniques that highlight what sets your practice apart. Distinctively customized social networks content are just a few of the ways you can engage with higher-quality patients, construct awareness of your practice and what you provide, and promote your company as the authoritative option in the area. podcasts by Dr. Avi Weisfogel

How To Run A Dental Office

Even your workplace design and physical environment contribute in your office culture. Yes, find. Your workplace culture already exists– you just need to discover it. It remains in your personality, your leadership style, your worths, your systems, your habits, your expectations, and the way employee communicate with each other and with patients.

Practice Management for the Dental Team: 9780323065368 …

Even your workplace decoration and physical environment contribute in your office culture. When fined tuned, your distinct way of doing things has the power to boost efficiency, attract quality staff, and keep clients returning for more. To establish and reinforce your office culture, gather all of your personnel members and have an in-depth discussion about your dental workplace’s day-to-day operations as well as its long-lasting goals.

When each employee is working towards the same goal, they’ll be better and more caring and your oral practice will grow! When it comes time to grow your patient base, consider ways you can expand your services to enhance value, strengthen your competitive position, and pique the interest of potential patients.

How To Start A Dental Office

Possibly you have an interest in improving your clinic’s availability. Or maybe you’re considering presenting brand-new specializeds to fulfill your community’s growing needs. Whatever path you’re considering, ensure you do not overextend your practice! By striking the best balance of advanced technology and uncompromising quality, you will become a successful dentist with a strong reputation, faithful clients, and optimized profits.

Every effective dental practitioner offers patients with a large range of payment choices so they’ll be more inclined to accept treatment suggestions and return for ongoing oral care. In addition to insurance coverage, practical monetary choices include debit, credit, individual check and cash, plus unique funding to make sure personal monetary circumstances do not interfere with oral health care decisions.

Listen to Podcasts from Avi Weisfogel, The Entrepreneurial Dentist

Avi Weisfogel is the owner of Dental Sleep MBA, a continuing education program for dental professionals. Avi Weisfogeleducates oral methods on exactly how to run their service more effectively and make more earnings. Besides the Oral Rest MBA training course, Avi Weisfogel additionally provides business recommendations to dentists that need assistance in constructing a successful oral method. He does this via his brand-new podcast, Entrepreneurial Dental practitioner.

After all, retaining existing clients is considerably less expensive than having to put in the effort to get brand-new ones. However retaining existing clients needs more than just using passable service, practical hours, and an easy-to-access location. It has to do with engaging clients, reaching out to them on an emotional level, earning their trust, and creating relationships that last.

Dental Practice Management

Through cross-channel marketing, that includes a mix of direct mail, social networks and e-mail marketing, it’s never been easier to stay at the leading edge of clients’ minds, reveal them you genuinely care, and become the most effective dental expert you can be. When it concerns growing your patient base, nothing beats a word-of-mouth recommendation.

As great as patient recommendations are, existing patients are busy with their own lives and do not often think about supporting and growing your company. So, to assist encourage clients to inform others about your services, you’ll need to be proactive in requesting for client referrals . You could distribute referral cards at the office, tuck cards into your practice mailings, offer a referral reward program, provide clients with quick links to online review sites, or perhaps incentivize employees to encourage them to grow your practice.

It produces much better patient circulation, optimizes productivity, reduces tension for both clients and personnel, and eventually contributes to the remarkable customer service that your patients expect. That’s why you need to ensure your dental practice has the most flexible, effective, and updated scheduling software possible. A client’s experience starts with their very first point of contact, which is usually a receptionist or another member of your front desk team.

How To Start A Dental Office

Their professionalism, mindset, and interaction skills all leave an enduring impression on clients– an impression that can make or break your dental practice. That stated, professional training and continued education are vital aspects of how to run a dental practice. Make certain that everyone who greets and works with your clients, either in person or over the phone, is trained to maximize each patient interaction.

Client News is a leading Dental Marketing company devoted to helping grow your practice. Request a call 888-377-2404 for a totally free details package, or to talk with among our oral marketer.

As an independent dental professional, it is often hard to look at your oral center as a company rather than looking at it as a service-oriented issue. While your main concern is your patient’s well-being and complete satisfaction, you should give enough attention to your office too. After all, the best method to produce patient fulfillment is to ensure all treatments and services from your end are fully optimized for them! If that’s the case, then think about altering your working hours to accommodate your patients.

Should I Work For Someone Else Or Open My Own Practice

Constant schedule modifications, cancellations and new reservations are clear to an oral workplace. This is why it is worth purchasing a digitalized scheduling system to assist you manage your patients’ schedules easily and make the system as hassle-free as possible. By doing this, your employee will constantly have the ability to upgrade themselves with patient information quickly, consequently optimizing the service offered to each client individually.

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By being able to view an extensive schedule, your groups can look for circumstances of cancellations or ‘no-shows’ and book additional consultations in such slots. While most dentists neglect this aspect, stock management is vital to guarantee that you always have the best items and the ideal quantities on hand.

Dental Practice Success

By doing this, you avoid congesting your cash circulation by resting on unwanted inventory while reducing the danger of wrong orders or over-ordering. Developing an inventory management system that works for your workplace is key. Everything, from appointing stock management to a bachelor to avoid confusion to storage information, should be thought about in order to enhance the process as far as possible.

Syndicated From How To Run A Dental Office via John Brunner

Syndicated From How To Run A Dental Office via Richmond Dales

#Richmond Dales #dr avi weisfogel #sleep #obstructive sleep apnea #best dentist #dental sleep medicin

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jaygraphicarts3 · 5 years

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Final Practical Development—Brand Identity

Starting off with the branding element of my final outcome, I used my project name ‘Kinetic’ as my starting point. The first part of a logo design is the sketching process and I wanted to have a vast amount of rough sketches before starting to choose any final ideas. I used George Bokhua’s sketching technique as inspiration for my own. Roughly sketching whatever came to mind in my sketchbook in a mixture of workshop time and free time, the goal was to be as rough and experimental as I have been since the start of the brief. I have learnt that this loose approach is best for gathering ideas from early workshops and looking at artists like David Carson.

Sketching

I started my first set of sketches in independent workshop time. I found myself starting to slow down with my ideas after a while. I also found that I would have ideas spontaneously, so I started to use my sketchbook outside of workshops whenever I would get ideas. For example, when at home or travelling. I believe gathering ideas from different sources of inspiration at different times helped expand the number of concepts I had.

The next step was to refine these sketches into cleaner sketches based on what I think would be the most successful. Here, I had more of an opportunity to think about the potential of using the logos in a system as well as adding more refinements to them.

Vectorising

The next step was to vectorise these main sketches. I used Illustrator to keep the vector format of the logos. This meant I could scale them to any size without losing quality. Using Illustrator also meant I could use ratios and geometry to make the logos balanced and edit them more after making them with minor adjustments. Here are the concepts I vectorised:

By using a mixture of the pentool, the shape tool and the shape builder tool, I was able to translate my refined sketches into geometric logos with grids. I made sure to keep in mind the principles of gestalt and the rules of making a successful logo when making them. Altering the logos was made easier with a digital process as I could easily duplicate each logo to keep track of the changes I made.

From a mixture of feedback from peers and tutors, I found the most effective logo to be the one below. I feel like its success comes from its consistency in line weight, negative space and angles. Its simplicity means it works at multiple sizes and the combination of the shapes and the spacing between them subtly represents the theme of movement and energy which encapsulates ‘kinetic’.

It was also at this stage, where a tutor recognised a subtle bird figure in this K if there was an eye in the top left region. By placing a circle in the top left to act as the eye of the bird and adjusting the rounded edges I started to see the resemblance. The imagery of the bird also links to the theme of ‘kinetic’ as it represents swiftness so it fit well with the concept of the brand. However, I didn’t think the resemblance was enough to justify me using it for the logo. After asking the people around me, some saw the bird first and some saw the ‘K’ first and the top left circle became confusing. To make the logo as objectively understood as possible, I stayed with the original ‘K’ concept, but this experience taught me how some concepts can come up in different stages of the design process after the sketching and vectorising stage.s

Up until this point, I had been working with just the colour black. I highlighted a rule in my logo design research to be making sure the logo works in a single colour first before applying colour afterwards. If I were to reverse these steps, I would risk the legibility of the logo being less in a single colour. Now I had a concept I was happy with and the majority of people I asked also thought it worked, I experimented with a range of colour options.

I chose orange as the primary colour, as well as trying different shades of blue as the secondary colour. When I got feedback about the colours, the feedback was a lot more spread over the options and I found it to be more of a subjective choice. In the end, I chose this option because it implemented the vibrant, energetic orange with the contrast of the dark navy blue, without having too many colours to over complicate the brand identity.

Type

This was probably the hardest section for me as I was unsure where to find fonts that were unique, distinctive and legible. I stayed with sans serif fonts as I wanted them to work at all sizes and reflect the geometric aspect of the logotype. In the end, I chose the typeface “Exo 2″ to be the brand typeface. I thought it was the best fit with the aesthetic of the brand, mainly because of the similar harsh angles that are present in the ‘K’ icon.

Here, I got some critical feedback from a tutor who specialises in typography. This was useful because he spoke less about how the logo looked and more about how it would function. In terms of the colour, he explained the difficulties of printing colours, orange is one of the colours that may be printed inconsistently with how it looks on a screen. To solve this, I was given a Pantone colour booklet to choose a Pantone orange which ensures it will be printed as the same orange. Lastly, he gave me some minor adjustments to make in terms of the kerning of the ‘Kinetic’ type. His reasoning was that typefaces are kerned to suit read type situations, so when used for a logo they need to be adjusted so they work on a larger scale and the spacing doesn’t become too large.

I made these adjustments and then went back to peer feedback. Here, someone pointed out the thickness of the middle section of the ‘K’. I wanted this to be bold, but after looking back at this and how it affected how it was perceived as a ‘K’, I decided to make it thinner to make the overall logo fit square dimensions more. Below is the final variations of the wordmark.

Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are important to have to ensure anyone representing the ‘Kinetic’ brand does so by staying to the aesthetic of the brand correctly. This also helped on expanding my final outcome from it just being a singular logo on its own. It meant that anyone could understand the brand identity fully by looking at the brand guidelines. Below are the pages I made.

Two new things I introduced here is a secondary colour scheme and patterns. The secondary colour scheme is made out of the complementary colour of the primary orange and two other tones equally spaced out over the colour wheel. The secondary colour scheme is something I added so more colours can be used to represent other areas of the brand if needed.

Patterns were something I highlighted when looking at Bierut’s work on logo systems. I tried to follow what I learnt here and in my pattern workshops to create the brand patterns. To do so, I used the middle parallelogram of the ‘K’ as the common aspect of the patterns. This meant that the patterns were still linked to the original brand iconography but each had their own distinctive look. This is my reasoning for keeping a small number of the parallelograms orange in the patterns. This makes it more clear that it links to the logo and makes the parallelogram a more distinctive shape overall.

Review

Overall, the final outcome reflects both my personal interests in processes and how my own future could look in terms of brand identity. Animation is something I highlighted at the very start of the brief as one of my interests, which is why I created branding for a motion design agency. If I were to create this outcome again, I would put more emphasis on the typography and logo system. Although I think both elements work well in this outcome, they are not as strong as some of the examples I have looked at with Michael Bierut’s work. The main aspect of the logo system is the parallelogram and the angle its sides are at. In terms of the typography, I would experiment with creating my own type. That way, I can customise how the letters are structured and possibly use the brand system to accompany this structure. I chose to use an already existing typeface in this case simply because of time constraints.

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kaitlynblackman-blog · 5 years

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3.1 expert reports

Jesse Weser, Winthrop University Graphic Design Professor

Jesse Weser is a graphic design professor at Winthrop University who has been teaching me since my fall semester in 2016. Working with her over the past three years has given me certain mindsets to help me grow when it comes to furthering my design. I initially selected Jesse for this project as she is the faculty member that I would consider myself the closest with and feel comfortable coming to her for any issues I may have. She is well versed in the way that people are affected by design and how we can use it to our advantage to shape minds and get the user to interact with design rather than just look at it. Interaction is an important part of my planner sets, as this is something my consumer will be using daily and needing to actively interact within their own unique way, so it must be something that draws them in and keeps them attached to it for the entirety of its lifespan.

Jesse has given me a lot of insightful feedback on making sure that I am thinking about how the user experiences my product. Initially last semester she was skeptical about the uniqueness of my product overall in comparison to what is already available in the world, but I'm hoping that with this skepticism, it will help propel me towards making something that is unique and will stand out from the crowd, and be something that she can agree with. Throughout this semester Jesse has been helping me find my design voice and exploring what avenues of design and what I am capable of that are something that I can be confident in with its success, but also something that gives me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment of what I have achieved.

So far with the first couple drafts of my "minimalist" planner, I have not met with her, as I am not at a point that I feel I am comfortable seeking out critique and assistance with her just yet. I would like to have something much more refined than where I am currently at in my process and be able to get more insightful feedback from her overall. In some of my other design work from the portfolio class and packaging class, she urged me to create what I love but still try to push myself in all aspects. These are the areas that she specifically says I can shine, so I would like to take this first step to a point of which I am happy before I bring something to her that requires more thought and more critique. Overall this semester, she seems to be quite happy with what I am producing and has given me high praise on most, if not all projects thus far, so I hope that I am excelling to a point that I can be proud when I present this to her and can easily claim that it is something that I love.

Laura Dufresne, Winthrop University Art History Professor

Dr. Dufresne is a Fine Arts professor at Winthrop University. She teaches mostly art history classes but also teaches the Art of the Book class, to which I am currently enrolled in. Though this may be, I have now learned that this class, which was the original reason I reached out to Dr. Dufresne, is taught with two professors; Dr. Dufresne and Dr. Gardner. I have also learned that Dr. Dufresne teaches the history portion of the class, and Dr. Gardner teaches the actual crafting and assembly portion of the class, which is the main insight and learning that I needed.

With that being said, I have spoken with both of them, as when I introduced myself to the class as the sole graphic design student they seemed to be surprised at my presence, as this class is mostly intended on people in fine arts. I spoke to them both privately about my thesis and that this was my main intention on taking the class, and Dr. Dufresne recalled my email of which I had originally contacted her last semester. Now that interims have occurred and I have gone through half of the class curriculum, I have found Dr. Gardner to be a great source of information on binding and books in general, as it's clearly something she is passionate about. My original intention with my thesis was to have both of my planners to be spiral bound and done in almost a mechanical way, but now having experienced what potential options lie out there with traditional binding, I wonder if maybe taking this approach with one of my personas could be another interesting solution to the customization problem. I spoke to Dr. Gardner on if people use stitched books only larger scales like planners and other things. She was very adamant that essentially anything was possible when doing Coptic stitches or any other type of pamphlet book if assembled and constructed reliably. She has created an incredible amount of books from found paper, self-made papyrus, and even cat food bags. She has truly opened up my eyes to the possibilities that the book can contribute to our daily lives if we allow it, and what it can easily become if we put our minds to it.

I have also gained a distinct view into what it is like being in a fine arts class and the way that these students and professors think when creating. Many of my colleague's projects blow me away each time they present, and I really see the difference in the way that they create from nothing. I think if I can harness this and utilize it in one of my potential options for my second upcoming persona, I could truly manage to create something unique and not typically seen as a standard planner, which is my main goal for my thesis. I am hopeful about keeping her up to date and having her as a resource if I do end up tackling something larger scale and more personal than having it professionally spiral bound.

Hannah Maschoff, Winthrop University Graphic Design Professor

Hannah is my regional expert for my thesis, and also an adjunct professor here at Winthrop University in the department of design. She currently resides in Charlotte and is active in many of the Charlotte communities of designers, and interacts and collaborates with them quite often. She also owns her own design brand called Golden Rod Design and has extremely clean and clear design work that is attractive and communicates messages well. I had her as my professor for corporate identity, and through this class, I grew to know her and understand what role she plays in the Charlotte design community. She encouraged, and even forced us, into this design environment for ourselves, and through this, I learned a lot more about myself and what I would like to achieve. I even managed to meet and interact with many designers in the area that I have admired for quite some time and felt much more at ease with myself in terms of being a designer. With this in mind, having her praise on my thesis and my processes would be something that would mean the world to me. While she was teaching me, she was overall very receptive to my work and I excelled in that class, so I'm hoping that I am already on something of a right track with her, and will be able to continue this and hopefully impress her further.

Much like Jesse, I would like to speak to Hannah more towards the end of my initial drafts of both of my planners and use her critique to help me further them in a clean and simplistic manner, while still managing to communicate something that my persona would want out of a planner. I find Hannah's design style too, to be very muted and simple, all while still remaining aesthetically pleasing, so I'm hoping that when I get to the point of asking her for input, she will have a lot to share with me and I will have a lot to learn from her.

I am still somewhat unsure of what her schedule is like this semester, so it may be harder to get in touch with her when I need her, if I don't plan accordingly. Right now, I am enrolled in the VCOM seminar class which is to be set as a "design jam" style class, with Hannah leading it. This class is actually meeting on Friday and Saturday of this weekend, so I hopefully will have some small amount of free time to be able to communicate with her about what I have thus far, and maybe plan future meetings with her to where we can coordinate with each other to have weekly or biweekly meetings. At the very least I would like to be able to see when she is on campus and hopefully be able to work around that with her. I am not anticipating having a lot of time with her this weekend, but at least having the opportunity to see her face to face again and remind her of my thesis and hopefully help propel me much further than I currently am at.

Fourth Expert, TBA

My fourth expert has still been hard going still from last semester. I have been researching and trying to find someone that I would find fitting of what I wish to gain from them, but most have been unresponsive, declined, or ill fitting of what I need. I would like to find someone that is experienced with planners and agendas, potentially someone who fits within my demographic of my personas, so I can gain real life information from them, but also someone who may not be as well known as some people who initially come up within my searches. That way, they will be more easily available to accept my invitation and be able to communicate freely with me as I need them and request critique from them. The main reason that I would be looking for this person would be for them to mostly provide aesthetic tips for planners, as most "experts" on such tend to present things to the public that are generally much more appealing than a standard filled in journal. Whether it is their hand writing that is beautiful, the stickers they use, or just the way that they organize information on a page, the way that they design their planner overall, is what makes them an expert on the topic. I would also be able to like to share my designs and ask if this is something that they could see themselves using or how they would potentially make it better or even use it themselves i.e. what stickers they would use, how they would lay out the pages, or even what additions that they would like to see.

In general, I just want someone who is well versed on the subject matter, but not necessarily a professional in the field. Most people that use planners as a creative outlet, use it just as such. For most people, it is not their livelihood but some special people out in the world have.

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dostigator2016-blog · 4 years

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Practice from the Practice: A job interview with Paul Sanok, CIONONOSTANTE, LLP, LCC

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Practice from the Practice: A job interview with Paul Sanok, CIONONOSTANTE, LLP, LCC

Man Sanok is often a counselor, sub, and therapist for practitioners in confidential practice. He hosts The Practice of the Practice, often the #1 podcasting for therapists with across 50, 000 downloads per 30 days.

Kyle: I am really excited to talk on you about how Authorized Gottman Counselors and other Gottman-trained therapists can build a successful practice facilitating couples. Primary, what does a therapist essential info before cutting open a private train?

Joe: The vital thing that I generally do with clients should be to look at the a few phases regarding practice. Typically, phase an example may be from $0 to $50, 000 inside revenue.

On this first period, your main goal need to be attracting your individual ideal client— identifying these folks, understanding their pains, as well as understanding the regarding therapy these receive. You’ll want to understand exactly who they et out to within their life. In case they’re air flow to their guia, their yoga exercises teacher, their very best friend, find out how to connect with individuals that link up you in your ideal buyer?

The next phase is frequently growing your personal practice. So you’re beginning to move off from doing the entire work along with potentially bringing in some internet assistants to reply the phones, do arranging, or even bringing in other clinicians to the apply so that you can widen your accomplish beyond simply just your ability to work. This helps grow the procedure to get to in which $100, 000 benchmark.

Afterward, over $265.21, 000 ordinarily the period of your current a perform. What you are looking to do would be to continue accomplishing clinical work and look at exactly how you can effects your neighborhood beyond years ago, to $321.88, 000. Can number of tactics we can discuss for how you can do that.

I believe understanding those three distinct phases of building a process helps folks then ask, “What are definitely the tools that I need to undertake this phase and then will leave your site and go to that next phase after that? ”

Kyle: I love precisely how you’ve destroyed this along. Let’s start with phase a person and shell out a few minutes having a debate about someone who has finished Level 2 Training in Gottman Method Young couples Therapy which is opening an individual practice. Everywhere do they start? How do that they find the best couples how they want to assist?

Joe: In the very beginning, you need to set up your personal legal design. For most people practically in states, that is going to be any LLC or even a PLLC. I’d using Appropriate Zoom or Swyft Submit. It’s quick, easy, and also affordable.

Following, you will need to organise a current account for your apply. You want to finally define how to find business expenses and what tend to be personal payments.

The more clearly you do this, the easier it’s going to be if you ever get audited and also if you need to write off different facets of your internet business. You’ll also desire to set up an internet payment account— such as PayPal, Stripe, Square— so that if you’re doing any kind of virtual do the job within your assert it’ll be simpler to bill. Or possibly, if someone does not show for an appointment, it is possible to send the buyer a link to hide the program rather than should wait to get payment next time they come in. At the same time, you’ll want to setup your human resources.

After that, guitar in case you start looking with the infrastructure of your practice. For instance finding the workplace location. For all those first starting from, I greatly endorse subletting from your therapist absolutely already recognized so that you you do not have as much hazard or difficulty while you’re setting up your clientbase. Typically, you may negotiate a regular fee or possibly an agreement to be charged for about

Next, it can time to bring building a good quality website. Websites are now often the business— you ‘must’ have one. One particular resource I recommend is Whiter Vision. That is a great web page design company in whose services, including tech assistance and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION optimization.

You can also build your website. On my site, I have your walk-through which will shows people exactly how to try this.

Here’s a online video on selecting keywords that can assist you rank higher on the internet:

Next, you prefer to focus on the exact operational small business things that’s required such as custom business cards, I use Moo. You can use internet websites such as canva. com utilize those. Cause them to look amazing. With owning very few design and style skills, it is possible to go on their website and create a lot of content for the website.

When you finally get those people basics established, you’ll need to organise a mobile system. If you use a smartphone system such as Grasshopper, you do have a unique phone-number that in that case comes to your cellular telephone.

Many people employ Google Thoughts. I think that might come across simply because unprofessional because it says “Brought to you by Google Voice” when connecting the phone phone. Instead, I like to recommend looking into are just looking for phone technique.

Next you’ll want to handle records. What kind of contracts do you need for the intake course of action? Your develop notes? All the. I have 36 step walkthrough for people that happen to be at that phase available on the website.

Kyle: I frequently hear therapists who are starting off their website talk to, “What websites should I consist of? What can i put on the actual navigation club? ” I would love to get the perspective about that.

Paul: When you’re beginning a website, there are actually only a quantity of things you essential info. First, just before reading this article of your pages of content, there are solely two things that others look for when they come to your internet site. The first question: Am I in the right spot? There is so much information out there, so it’s vital that you make sure men and women know without delay that they also have found the best website.

Be certain they also realise that you’re an authorized therapist and that you do marriage counseling. Often a website will have loads of pretty pictures, but it may well just as without difficulty be for the massage counselor as a wedding counselor. All over again, it’s important to use images as well as text to restore clear that others are in the right place.

The second thought: Can your husband help me? Straightaway, you want to have the ability show are really the skilled.

You should say that you’ve also been trained by way of the Gottman Organisation, mention your own personal levels of exercise, and if you are featured in just about any local music.

Mention a bit more about your teaching so that they know yes So i’m in the right place, they can address my suffering, and the following is the outcomes belonging to the therapy. Once you’ve established that, then you will want to make confident a couple of everything else that with your header.

You always want to make positive you have your company phone number.

For the reason that on every web site you want someone to be able to find you together with pick up the phone and call. It’s really easy to program an take in. There should be control button in your upper right that says schedule a good intake or perhaps start therapy, or nevertheless, you want to figure it, however it is very apparent that this is where you begin if you want to pencil in an appointment.

Afterward, the couple of pages that you just usually really want is you need a homepage clearly. You want a get started here site so that if someone is new, that normally takes them somewhat deeper regarding kind of the actual quick concerns that people own about sessions.

Then for the air conditioning want a good about us, or perhaps about everyone, or regarding our counselors page, when you’re a group apply. Like we currently have at mentalwellnesscounseling. com/us.

Just about everyone has of our experienced counselors on one web site, then you can click and routine in dark to each just one.

Then within that, most people also have matters we offer. That’s where you would put if it’s just marriage counseling what forms of marriage counseling can it be. If you break marriage, if you undertake pre-marital, have to couples, if put the different kinds of things that everyone work on.

Kyle: As a would be the, you want to become really clear on what everyone offer to be a therapist and try to even brand your preferred client and the promise you prefer to solve for them.

Joe: Entirely. You’re going to want to make sure that there may be clarity hanging about there but also the actual SEO edge. If you aid couples exactly where one person is actually dealing with major depression, you should have web pages about major depression with newlyweds work. You ought to have a page for anxiety together with couples work.

So it is relatively clear about the website visitor to your site and that the a variety of issues that everyone specialize in will be useful to be able to higher rankings in Google.

Kyle: I would enjoy get your opinion about something I realize on hypnotherapist websites. To the about my family I see, “I help out with this particular problem, this concern, this problem, this matter ukrainiangirls, ” together with there’s 30 things stated. It’s such as, “Okay, to aid you to do every little thing, ” ; however , when I ensure, my subject is, “But which one currently really good in? Are you actually going to match for me? ” Maybe you could very well elaborate on choosing your niche market.

Joe: I think a lot of counselors are worried around niching all the way down and they fright that it’s going to limit industry. But if you think of even when people go to the health care provider, if you head over to your general physician and you call for some specialised service similar to brain surgery, you are not going to have got your general health care professional do that. While if you went along to your brain medical expert and you says, “Hey, Ankle sprain this itch. ”

They will be like, “Well yes, it’s just this particular. ” They are going to be able to perhaps speak to the main itch. We always assume that a specialist can do generalist deliver the results, but generalist can’t do specialist operate. Even a fancy restaurant, if you happen to went to Canlis Restaurant, and you simply said, “Hey, I really want a fancy burger for the father-in-law. Your dog hates this fancy food. Can you make a burger? ”

It probably will be a pretty outstanding burger during Canlis while if you popped out to some Family-owned Diner together with said I like some expensive french foodstuff, they’re most likely going to be qualified to make it.

When preparing for as a specialist, it’s really feasible for people to afterward say, “I bet they can do other things. ” In addition , i think that once you have that enormous list, it merely requires puts persons off.

A possibility how we discuss. It’s not like if you and I are talking about, I in order to you, “Let me tell you a few things about myself. ” I say, “I’m 5’11”. My partner is this older. We do this. ” We wouldn’t supply you with a list. It’s not possible how we speak anyway.

There are a transfer to even more narrative-based during the last few years and also Google enjoys that more. We should impress Google because gowns who chooses whether most people rank primary or selection 50. They might be have a narrative-based approach to that. Just back a website stuffed with keywords doesn’t work anymore towards rank high in Google, which is thats lot of men and women are trying to do. “I choose to rank to get anxiety despression symptoms. ” One million different things.

Kyle: I think that is certainly what the reward is, when you niche straight down, you can then actually write more for those specified items, and find that preferred client.

Dude: Yes, and also sketch out some sort of narrative for what that person may be going through. You’re able to say as soon as couples- as soon as someone in a couple just found out how the other person duped on them, their whole first reaction is damage, disbelief. Thereafter, often when there is is this, after which it this, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh. This person is usually reading my thoughts. ” Compared to bullet phase post event. Bullet level depression. Here’s a webinar I have all about locating your ideal client.

Where, you can actually tool in as well as say, “I get you. ” And that’s men and women make those people buying decisions, which is just what therapy mlm marketing, it’s a purchasing decision even with using insurance cover to work with you as they quite simply feel like your husband really becomes my issue.

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samuelmmarcus · 4 years

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California Home Renovation

Happy 2020, my wonderful friends! I have been working a little less than I usually do and I feel better about everything in my life. Sometimes all we need to do is take a break to feel ourselves again… and have our creative side get back to its full potential!

It’s really great to start this week with this inspiring California home renovation by Spaces Renewed (previously featured here). This was a total reno, inside and out, and the interiors were beautifully staged for sale, and although the staging company (Everything Creative Designs) wasn’t able to provide the resources for the furniture and decor, I will be doing my best to find the items or similar options so you still can get this look!

Here, the talented builder and designer Beth Booth, along with her equally talented husband, Marshall, share the details on this incredible project:

“We did this project for an investor and the goal was to make this home as appealing as possible to a wide range of buyers. We did this by not only addressing the cosmetics of the home, but also fundamentally changing the floor plan. We took overly large redundant space and made distinct, usable and versatile space. For example, the existing master bedroom and bathroom and media room took over the entire upstairs. By repurposing that area, we created a generous master bedroom and bathroom suite, a library, a media room, a game room, and a great sized laundry and craft room. These changes not only make the feel of the home totally different, but also give the investor the best return on investment regarding real estate comps. We took this 8800 square foot dark, closed off gut job and turned it into an inspired coastal style full renovation that any family would love to call home.”

California Home Renovation

This was a total gut and reno of a 8800 sf home in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

Architectural Details

The architecture, interior design, and build were done by Spaces Renewed.

Windows and front door are Jeld-Wen.

Foyer

The vibe of this home is a cool neutral pallet that still feels warm and inviting. The organic elements throughout bring texture and layered warmth. With all of this homes charm and down to earth appeal, there is still an elegance and presence that a home this size commands. I think the interior design choices, furnishings and floor plan changes accomplish all of these lofty goals.”

The interior paint color (most rooms) is “Dunn Edwards Cloud”.

Foyer Lighting: Capital Lighting Axis – Others: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Living Room

The foyer leads to an open living room. This space is perfect for entertaining because it feels connected to the kitchen, dining area and it opens to an extensive balcony.

Artwork: Available through staging company.

Side Table: Wayfair.

Poufs: Wayfair.

Fireplace

The fireplace features a geometric tile and it’s flanked by a pair of sleek French doors.

Denim & Hemp Rug: here – Other Rugs on Sale: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Coffee Tables for Every Style: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here (best seller).

Fireplace Tile: here – similar – Other Beautiful Tiles: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Wood Frame Accent Chairs: here (very similar), here, here & here.

Room Layout

The living room also features a handy wet bar with sitting area.

Metal Wine Rack: here – similar.

Counterstools: here – similar.

Bar

This bar offers plenty of counter and storage space! Custom cabinets are painted in Benjamin Moore “Chelsea Gray”.

Floating Shelves: Custom by builder – similar: here & here.

Bar Pendants: Mitzi – Hudson Valley.

Faucet: Delta.

T-shaped Island

Painted in “Chelsea Gray by Benjamin Moore”, a T-shaped island is perfect to create distinctive eating and food-prep areas.

Island, Bar, Kitchen Hood: San Diego Custom Cabinets “Chelsea Gray by Benjamin Moore”.

Kitchen Island Dimensions 105”x36” Island 45”x80” T-shaped Seating.

Kitchen Island Pendants: Capital Lighting.

Kitchen Hood: Custom – similar here.

Counterstools: Wayfair – Other Popular Choices: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Perimeter Cabinets & Backsplash

Kitchen Perimeter Cabinet: Paint Grade Maple, Artesia door style, San Diego Custom Cabinets “Showroom White”.

Kitchen Cabinet Details (wood type, cabinet style) Paint Grade Maple, Artesia door style.

Kitchen Backsplash: Ottimo #MR12 Madrid Marengo – similar here & here.

Pot Filler: Delta.

Countertop

Countertop is Daltile Carrara Veil Quartz – beautiful and practical!

Prep Faucet: Delta Trinsic Single Hole Bar Faucet.

Kitchen Faucet: Delta Trinsic Pro Pull Out Spray Kitchen Faucet (chrome).

Kitchen Sink: Kohler.

Cabinet Hardware: TopKnobs Pulls & TopKnobs Marion Knob.

Breakfast Room Lighting: Park Harbor Drum Style Chandelier.

Family Room

The Family Room features two-story ceilings and an inspiring color scheme.

Coffee Table: Joss & Main.

Sofa: here – similar.

Inspired by this Look:

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Hardwood Flooring

How stunning is this double staircase foyer?! The renovation was impeccably done! Hardwood flooring throughout the house is Galleher Reward Shores Euro Oak Aruba – similar here.

Trim Paint Color

Trim/Doors throughout: “Benjamin Moore Brilliant White OC-150”

Upper Landing

This flex area is currently being used as a home office but it could be also used as a tv room or library.

Get this Look: Spindle Chairs, Side Table, Rug, Desk, Desk Chair, Bookcase & Artwork – similar.

Master Bedroom

The master bedroom is very spacious and it opens to a private balcony surrounded by trees.

Dresser: Wayfair.

Accent Wall

Master Bedroom Accent Wall Paint Color: “Dunn Edwards Wharf View DEC799”.

Nightstands: Wayfair.

Table Lamps: here – similar.

Bench: here – similar.

Bed: here & here – similar – Other Best Seller Beds: here & here.

Master Bathroom

The master bathroom features custom cabinets, a large shower and an inspiring layout. Notice the French doors on the right opening to the master closet.

Master Bath Cabinet: San Diego Custom Cabinets “Coastal Gray” stain.

Bathroom Faucet: Delta Trinsic.

Sconces: Kichler Parker Point Wall Sconce.

Shower Wall Tile: Daltile 12×24. Pan Tile: Marble Attaché Calacatta Hex 2×5.

Floor Tile

Master Tile Floor: Daltile Marble Attaché Calacatta MA87 24×24.

Chair: here.

Kid’s Bedroom

All bedrooms in this home feel spacious and bright.

Teepee: Joss & Main.

Fun Poufs: here, here & here.

Paint Color

Paint color is “Dunn Edwards Cloud”.

Great Beds for Kids Bedroom: here, here, here & here.

Affordable Nightstands: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Bathroom

Great choices on tiles! Faucet is Delta Ashlyn.

Games Room

Who wouldn’t love to have a fun space like this at home?! Wall Paint color is Dunn Edwards Sidewalk Chalk.

Laundry Room

The Laundry/Craft Room feature custom cabinets in “Dunn-Edwards Edge of Black”. Gorgeous!

Faucet: Delta Pull Out Spray Kitchen Faucet.

Acrylic Counterstools: here.

Wall Baskets: Kazi Goods – similar here & here.

Floor Tile: here – similar here.

Backyard

This home is perfect inside and out. What a dream pool and spa!

Arial View

The property is surrounded by mature Palm Trees.

Dream Home

Beach volleyball, anyone?! Yes, this home comes even with a beach volleyball court!

Dream Location

This home really deserved to be beautifully renovated by this talented builder. What a gorgeous place!

Many thanks to the builder for sharing the details above!

Builder: Spaces Renewed (Instagram)

Furniture & Decor: Everything Creative Designs.

Photography: David Hebble Photography.

Best Sales of the Month:

Thank you for shopping through Home Bunch. For your shopping convenience, this post may contain AFFILIATE LINKS to retailers where you can purchase the products (or similar) featured. I make a small commission if you use these links to make your purchase, at no extra cost to you, so thank you for your support. I would be happy to assist you if you have any questions or are looking for something in particular. Feel free to contact me and always make sure to check dimensions before ordering. Happy shopping!

Wayfair: Up to 75% OFF on Furniture and Decor!!!

Serena & Lily: Enjoy 30 to 70% OFF on Sale Styles!

Joss & Main: End-of-Decade Dash Sale!

Pottery Barn: Buy More, Save More Sale + Free Shipping.

West Elm: End of Season Sale – Up to 75% Off.

Anthropologie: Extra 40% off Sale Items!

Nordstrom: Save Up to 50% Off!

Posts of the Week:

California Home Interior Design Ideas.

Cape Cod Lake House Interior Design Ideas.

Simple Ideas for a New-Construction Home.

California Modern Farmhouse for Sale.

Two-toned Grey and White Kitchen Renovation.

Before & After Kitchen Renovation.

Open and Airy Townhouse Design.

New California Mid-century Modern.

Modern English Country Home Design.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Interior Design.

French Country Style Home Design.

Builder’s Home.

2020 Kitchen Design Ideas.

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Modern Farmhouse.

Black & White Modern Farmhouse.

Neutral Home.

Small Lot Modern Farmhouse.

Dark Cedar Shaker Exterior.

Follow me on Instagram: @HomeBunch

You can follow my pins here: Pinterest/HomeBunch

See more Inspiring Interior Design Ideas in my Archives.

“Dear God,

If I am wrong, right me. If I am lost, guide me. If I start to give-up, keep me going.

Lead me in Light and Love”.

Have a wonderful day, my friends and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

with Love,

Luciane from HomeBunch.com

from Home https://www.homebunch.com/california-home-renovation/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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