#that while you may still be constantly steeped in as a default to take for granted i've been desperately nostalgically craving for months??

[ereh-emanresu-tresni]

People get wayyy too comfortable shitting on entire regions istg

[cardandpixel]

RocketBook Flip - a rare review and it’s not a game!

Before I go any further, I feel I must point out that I don’t have any financial connection to RocketBook whatsoever – this isn’t a piece that was requested or courted by RocketBook or affiliates and I’m not receiving any reward or sponsorship either in product or direct payment for this article. I just like the damn thing and love it when an innovative piece of tech (in this case quite low key) just works. Hi I’m Paul, and I have a bit of a problem with notebooks – A4 lined, sketch, reporters, Black & Reds (ohhhh the sheer number of B&Rs), goofy ones, serious work ones, battered ones, pristine ‘for best only’ ones – and they all fill at an alarming rate. I make notes on everything. Working as a sound engineer and designer, there’s always mix notes, soundscape plots, ideas, VO notes and scripts, SFX ideas etc etc. At home it’s a very different story – it’s much worse. Game notes; blog notes; hurriedly scribbled quiz questions spurred by watching another episode of Mental Floss’ 500 facts about cheese; RPG notes and story ideas; my own script writing; world building; sketches; other creative ideas; song/music notes and ideas; and that’s before we get to to-do lists; and the dreaded ‘things I must remember’. So my journal life is many, varied and plenty. The usual issue is… ‘what frakking journal did I put that amazing idea in????’, and that’s way before we get to the utter horror that is possibly losing a whole journal or forgetting to bring one home from work. I’m 53, I forget more than I recall, and journals help bring some semblance of order to a massively chaotic and fertile brain. What I’ve needed for a long time is some way of organising all this info or centralising it in some way. Sure I’ve looked at apps – I used Things, Evernote, Notes, and One Note for years, and they are really, really good, but they relied on either having a charged device exactly when I need it (yeah – me too) or net access, which for a new-ish theatre, is surprisingly a bit of an issue at work. And the most important part – I actually enjoy the physical act of handwriting long-hand. I still write actual physical letters to people, it’s adorable and a bit creepy in this age, but I call it charming and leave it at that. Handwriting, for me, allows me time to think and process in a way that typing just doesn’t. Handwriting is slower, I rarely cross anything out, and so I always have the whole of the thought. So what I’ve ideally wanted for years, was a reliable way of organising all my notes and storing them electronically so I have access even without the actual journal, with OCR so they’re editable, and still being a tactile handwritten experience. I’m naturally a sceptic (I actually subscribe to Fortean Times – yeah – I card carry!) and so online ads and particularly FaceAche ads are a field day for critical thinking triggers. I don’t think I’ve ever received from Wish, exactly what I ordered from Wish. And so when an ad from RocketBook constantly kept popping up on my timeline a few weeks ago, I was naturally “it’ll never work” But their website looked legit enough – they had a dedicated UK shop, it was relatively steep to buy in but not so wild that if it didn’t work I wouldn’t be crying too much about the money wasted, and at the end of the day it was a 10th the price of a ReMarkable 2 which is actually what I thought would solve my problem. I’m furloughed at the mo and though I could argue the case for £300+ notebook (test me, I could), I just couldn’t justify it now. And RocketBook had a good summer intro offer. I ordered on the Wednesday, and the impressively glitzy and graphic-design-playbook poly package was dropped on my doorstep just 2 days later by my cheery postie who yelled up the drive “Package for ya, looks very exciting!!!!” I like that our postal service is still invested in the hopes and dreams of their customers. It was exciting. All the instructions for getting started with my new Teal RocketBook A4 Flip were right there before you even open it. The main body houses the pad and a cleaning cloth, and a clever little side pocket houses the supplied Pilot Frixion pen.

RocketBooks come in several models, all configured slightly differently. I have the Flip which is a top spiral-bound softback pad with 21 double sided ‘pages’ giving 42 pages in total. The Flip has lined paper one side, and dot paper on the reverse (great for D&D maps, impromptu tables, mixer channel plots etc)

DELIVERY & FIRST IMPRESSIONS The pads are nicely made, with sturdy covers (available in some really nice colours too) and a solid, thick plastic ring binding. Initially, The RocketBook does feel a bit odd. Its ‘pages’ are actually a synthetic polyester blend and feel quite shiny to the touch. The sort of surface you just instantly feel is not going to be great for ink! Each page is edge-to-edge lined or dotted with a heavy black border. At the bottom is a prominent QR code used for scanning and some very feint icons. These 7 icons are the key to the ease of use of the RocketBook series. But more later.

THE APP

The pads work with a companion app, that is absolutely free and available for Apple & Android. In fact, RB even do downloadable printable pages so you can try the whole system absolutely free before you buy – I didn’t, I just bought one, y’know. The app allows you to set up your destination locations, your preferences and does the actual scanning. Just one quick note, I have the app on both my phone and iPad and had to set-up the app the same for both, there appears to be no way of swapping preference settings between devices, though I can see why this may be intentional.

Currently, the RocketBook allows you to choose from the following locations to send files to: GoogleDrive, box, EverNote, DropBox, slack, OneNote, iCloud, OneDrive as well as simply to an email (or multiple) addresses and iMessage. Impressively, these are not fixed either, so you could choose your 7 destinations to be 7 email addresses of team members. These 7 locations are the icons at the bottom of each page. To select a destination for your file, you just make a mark in that icon box (tick, circle, something unsavoury) and that page will be sent to whichever you select. This makes the system very flexible indeed as not every page is necessarily sent to every destination. You always decide every time you fill a page. Change your mind on a second revision? No problem, add or change icons at any time and re-upload.

There’s a really handy table on the inside front cover for you to note what icon sends what where. This is also wipeable, so can be changed anytime.

I have mine set by default to:

Rocket > main email address (either as PDF, JPG, OCR embedded or as separate txt file)

Diamond > GoogleDrive (you can specify exactly what folder too)

Apple > iMessage

Bell > OneNote

That actually still leaves me 3 spare: shamrock; star; and horseshoe.

The app took me maybe 20mins to set-up, that included decision time for destinations and setting up a few target folders. It also included a few ‘test firings’. I didn’t get everything right first time and a few things didn’t send, but crucially, a tiny bit of digging revealed very simple troubleshooting (including the aforementioned issue with no sync’ing of phone and iPad), and all in I was finding the files in all the right destinations within about 30 mins. The website, FAQs and community are immensely helpful with any other issues as well. I had a tiny issue with OneNote seeming to take ages to sync, but I think that’s an issue with my OneNote settings, everything else was almost instantaneous. You can also handily set the app to auto-send as soon as it scans, or allow for manual review.

CLEAN UP ON AISLE ROCKETPAD The main reason I wanted to look at the RocketBook was the issue of reusability. My journal shenanigans are by no means the biggest ecological disaster on the planet, but if we are to believe Tesco (who probably issue as many receipts at our local Tesco Express in a day as journals I’ve ever used), every little helps. If I could find an ecologically better solution, I should at least take a look. The RocketPads work by partnering with Pilot pens called Frixion. The really clever bit is RB’s paper technology and how it works with the Frixion ink. At present, the pads only work with the Frixion pens – except the RB Colour which works with Crayola’s dry-erase crayons. When you write on the ‘paper’ with a Frixion pen, it remains wet for a few seconds and then dries pretty quickly. There’s no smudging whatsoever in transit, which is pretty cool. From then on, it may as well be permanent, until you have transmitted your page and decide you don’t want the text anymore.  To wipe the page clean, you can dampen the supplied cloth and just wipe the surface clean, it’s weird but it works! But then damp cloth in your bag? So I use kitchen roll to dampen, then wipe dry with theirs. Others even have an adorably kitsch spray bottle in their kit. RB reckon if you are not going to use the pad for a few months, to clean the pages as the ink can get trickier to shift after a long time, but for day-to-day use, I’ve tried writing and wiping well over 20x and the page hasn’t become discoloured or tarnished at all. The only pad different in the range is the Wave which cleans by microwaving! Do NOT do this with any of the others, bad things will happen. The ink doesn’t take scrubbing or any time to come up, I clean my pages in about 10-15s. The page can feel a little tacky when it’s damp, but leave a minute or so and the page will be back to normal. RB do say that odd things can happen if the book is left near a heatsource or in a hot car, vis-à-vis, the ink can completely disappear horrifyingly enough. They say that putting the pen or the pad in the freezer for a little while will actually restore the ink, but I’ve not tried it yet so can’t confirm or deny how that goes. Handy for spies in hot countries though, so there’s another target market. If you are always going to send your pages to the same places, then don’t erase the marked icons, and the page is ready for new notes straight away, otherwise, scrub them too.

I CAN’T READ YOUR WRITING – ARE YOU A DOCTOR? Initially, the RB pads send their files as scans of the pages in high contrast monochrome (colour is available) when you snap the page in the app (which auto-frames for you and takes maybe 10s to capture). The formats are either as images or PDF. If that had been it, I would have been quite happy, but the RB pads have another trick up their sleeve. Firstly, they have a function called ‘Smart Titles’ which allows you to name your files directly from the page by writing a filename between double hashtags ie ## this is my scrawl 24/8/20 ## and the file will pop up in your destinations with the filename “this is my scrawl 24/08/20” – this is insanely handy – there’s no protocol except your own and the hashtags, and it makes your files super easy to search. You can even send groups of pages as a single PDF. But the notebooks go even further. They actually offer full searchable OCR which the app can be set to send embedded in the PDF or image, or more usefully, as a companion separate .txt file. Now, my handwriting isn’t the neatest, but it’s not bad so I was prepared for some editing to be necessary, but impressively again, the OCR was about 90-95% accurate. In a page of text it missed maybe 3 or 4 words and even those not badly. This is all considering their full OCR is still only in beta! It gets confused with diagrams on the page, but that’s to be expected.

Text Generated by OCR: ## Blog post och test Aug 2020 ## This is a little demonstration of the OCR capabilities of the Rocket Book pads and app. I've told the lovely people that the hit rate is about 90-95% so please dant let me down here flip pad. Hopefully the file name will also prove another point further up in the section and not make me look like some charlatan or snake-oil salesman.Hope you enjoyed this demonstrahen, now go away and leave me to write the next great novella.Bye!

HOW MUCH? On average, I pay anywhere from £4-8 for a decent A4 notebook/journal, so at £30-37 (dependent on model), the RocketBook pads are not a whim purchase. That said, I get through a lot of journals in a year, and given that I would expect to easily get 2-3 years out of a RocketBook pad, then I’ve saved money. Will it replace all my notebooks? No. You need to be thinking of carrying this round as a kit: pad, Frixion pen (at least 2), and cloth.  RB do a series of portfolio sleeves for the pads but it does push the price up a bit still, but for a rep, engineer or salesperson, this still makes sense. They’re less bulky than a normal A4 pad too. What I would say is Tesco and Sainsbury’s currently stock Frixion pens and at much better prices than buying them from RB directly, I just paid £3 for 3 pens on offer at Tesco compared to £10 from RB. You get one pen with the pad, but you’re going to want more soon, so stock up next time you’re shopping for truffle oil crisps. If you use whiteboards a lot, RB also have you covered. Instead of the pad, £16 will get you a 4 pack of ‘beacons’ – little self-adhesive triangles that effectively do the same thing as the QR code in the pad. You don’t have the icon options obviously, but if you’re looking to distribute quick meeting or group notes, this would be a boon. CONCLUSION Considering this was a fairly speculative purchase on my part, my early experiences with the RocketBook Flip have been really impressive. The flexibility, the ability to store every page in a different location if you really wanted to make it fantastic for organising my notes, which can save me hours of finding the right ^^$&^$&$ notebook in the first place, then scouring that for the one paragraph I was looking for etc etc. The searchable text facility, in-app history for re-sending etc and last but no way least, functional handwriting OCR, makes the RocketBook not only novel, but actually useable! Would I buy another? As a second notebook – yes. I look forward to seeing what the actual longevity of the product is once I come off furlough and start cramming my day bag with all my junk and a notepad again, but yes, I’d probably just have one at home, and one for work, but make the last 5 mins of each day, scanning and sending work notes so I have them with me wherever. Impressively, the RocketBook Flip just works and it works well. ‘Er Across The Table has already sold several folk at her work on the idea and she doesn’t even have one herself yet! I love it. It’s taking a little adjusting to, but it’s all good. The most important thing though is the writing experience, and I have to say, the combination of the Frixion pen/ink and the polymer technology of the Flip, again, just works. It’s smooth, doesn’t skip or smudge for me (I know some right to left users and left handers have reported some issues) and feels great to write on. If anything I have to slow down a bit as the contact is so smooth that your writing can get a bit ahead of you! RocketBook have produced a cracker of a product. It might not seem like much, but if practical working journals are your thing (ie not create and keep things) then I can highly recommend the RocketBook series.

[petitepistol]

headcanon;but it is very messy

oh god strap in because this is going to be 3k words worth of rambling under the cut which you don't actually have to read since i posted it at 5am so it probably does not make much sense!! also I have only just recently accepted that my elena does not follow compilation timeline to the letter because I fucking hate the fact that before crisis placed her age at being a high school student almost immediately preceding the start of the original game and I always saw elena as being at least aerith's age by the time she became a turk so please bear with me as my elena uses a floating timeline to prevent her from being...like a literal teenager for original game fuck that noise they had cissnei be the uwu fifteen-year-old turk and elena gets to be her own character when im writing her so compilation can fuck right off

so first off her dad is a military man, and that entire side of his family? kind of just defaulted into the military for generations. well before shinra at least, the old shit. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the idea that shinra is the dominant military force on the planet when as little as forty years before game them were a fledgling company, and I'm fascinated by what kind of insane shit must have gone down to facilitate shinra going from defense contractor/power company to defacto global superpower, and what they superseded when that happened. so yeah her dad is military, and even after he was put out to pasture he still wound up teaching at a prestigious shinra sponsored academy in junon and both of his daughters attended.

her mom was upper middle class and driven as hell, had a ballet career which got cut short due to injury in her late teens. then she wound up going into nursing by her early twenties and spent some time working in deepground when it was still a run of the mill army hospital where she met elena's father who was...voluntarily a candidate for some biotech stuff that shinra was doing back when shinra was still a defense contractor, go figure he was one of many early examples of mako conditioning. they didn't get along at first but did wind up marrying but never actually settling down because of the nature of his career. she retired from nursing but did medical coding part-time.

elena's sister was born in deepground (canonically from the 'midgar slums' but deepground is pretty fucking close and it makes sense to the era and background worldbuilding), and things went as smoothly as possible at this point in time. elena herself was born in icicle because lol military stationed there (elena being an icicle native was also a very popular piece of fanon in the pre-compilation era and I feel like it may have had some supporting evidence in something like kaitai shinsho but I never really managed to cross-reference that so probably not true and just a gut feeling), and by then things were getting...fishy. details being covered up about the full extent of the side-effects of mako conditioning and rumors that shinra had an egregious amount of influence over the military at large. these things all turned out to be true, but elena's father kept his head down and did his duty because he was a good soldier. he was also in wutai on and off during this, before the situation over there fully hit the fan, so he had more pressing matters to worry about.

anyway, elena was born in icicle but she and her mother and sister weren't there for more than a year or so before it was back at it again in midgar because dad was being put on some kind of assignment that had him closely working with shinra. the general implication of this is he was doing legwork for the implementation of SOLDIER in a few years, but what that means can vary by interaction from being paperwork to mk ultra style endurance testing to teaching an adolescent jenova project specimen how to integrate into military procedure before they drop him in wutai which is slated to become an all-out conflagration very shortly. it all depends but the point is it is sticky and worsened significantly when his wife is killed in a car accident. if this seems familiar it is because I firmly believe elena is the aya brea of ffvii and parasite eve featured similar background story. I'm borrowing deal with it.

by this point, elena is around eight and in school but elena is just barely four and in the vehicle when it happens. mom is killed instantly, elena survives but barely fares better. she's in intensive care for a while and there is a period where they don't even know if she is going to be brain dead or just have permanent brain damage in the first few days. her sister is basically staying at a school friend's house for like...way more than a fortnight while this got sorted out because their dad still actually has orders to carry out, even if he isn't on a battlefield. at one point on of his higher-ups implies that it could be arranged to transfer elena from the civilian hospital to the recently renovated deepground and he turns it down and feels like shit for it because yeah, deepground probably would mean a better chance at his youngest daughters survival because of that cutting edge shinra biotech, but at what cost? he knows well enough now something is wrong and justifies his willingness to let fate take its course with elena by focusing on the fact that her sister is still alive and well and he needs to keep his head down for his older daughter because she needed him too, even though they barely saw each other during the crux of this.

so lo and behold elena does recover and goes through the icky sticky of physical therapy and does just fine. great, right? well yes but the family dynamic is stupidly fucked up. dad has done either really good or really bad on his assignment, and gets put out to pasture in junon to teach at a military academy that is now nearly entirely funded by shinra (yeah so in before crisis it is all but implicit that academy is in midgar but fuck that junon is the seat of military power it would be near there if anything). this is great because it keeps him in work and both of his daughters will benefit. which they do. elena's sister is an ideal student, and the roughness of losing her mother happened at a sensitive period but a period where she was old enough to understand what was going on. she was capable of being a little trooper through all of it, but the cost of it was not being able to emotionally process the loss of her mother and the fact that her little sister was still alive when mom was not. the seeds of discord are sown there and that will be an ongoing thing throughout their childhood and into adulthood. they don't hate each other, but the relationship is fraught with tension and it is far from a healthy dynamic, especially since their father has pulled back almost entirely from fatherhood. he has no idea what he is doing without his late wife, and can't organically interact with his daughters so he defaults to being an instructor. both of them flourish despite this, but it is not a good family dynamic.

paint over this family drama with the fact that wutai is now well and truly happening. the military is effectively controlled by shinra and very very soon the propaganda blitz surrounding SOLDIER is going to push that over the edge and shinra will be accepted on a public and official level as being the army. the slogans are changing and going from an old fashioned sense of unity to focusing on becoming top class and singularly extraordinary. there is an emphasis on joining to be great rather than joining for the greater good. the recruitment plays into the deeply seated neurosis of adolescence for a reason because the younger some kid joins up the more malleable they are to both the shinra rhetoric and the by now very refined mako enhancement process that costs so much but nets such spectacular gains. in fact, it costs far too much to ever justify wasting that kind of money on doing it to women. so yeah it is blog canon that women in the shinra army is not a thing that is encouraged and like hell would they ever be in SOLDIER. the company culture is an old boys club steeped in misogyny and the only reason scarlet succeeded is because she took that and marinated in it and played the game very well. dirge era deepground operatives are little more than a consequence of years of unethical human experimentation left to rot in a basement. we don't really see women in actual military positions in the original game. sexism is alive and well and it serves my characterization of elena and her development.

so yeah it is a time of paradigms shifting and reforming very rapidly. elena's sister takes to this with aplomb, she is a perfect cadet and in elena's eyes a perfect daughter. someone easier to idolize than the SOLDIERs on the glossy recruitment posters and more available than their emotionally distant father. she is pristine and by extension beloved, things elena wants to be as well. elena is too young to realize her sister doesn't have any better of a relationship with their father than she does, but who knows if that would change anything. she emulates her ideal sister but remains a half step behind, which makes perfect sense because elena is four years younger. from a critical perspective that half step is a very close gap because even if elena doesn't realize it, she is just as prodigious as her sister is. the difference is while her sister can follow orders to the letter, elena has the makings of a maverick. not a positive thing in the strict environment of a military academy, no matter how high her scores are. idealization goes hand and hand with a quiet resentment, the latter of which her sister has also harbored towards her ever since their later mother died and elena did not.

that simmering toxicity stays at a low boil until her sister graduates. at the top of the class, even she could not become anything. or at least, to elena it looks that way, as she watches her sister back her things for midgar where she will start as a trainee for an administrative/auditing position for the shinra electric power company. elena does not know what a turk is at this point, even if her father does. he seems as impassive as ever, even if that is not the case and in actuality he is struggling to accept the reality that his oldest daughter is far too smart for his own good and is entering a profession no one would ever want for their child. despite his distance and his lack of connection and all of his failings as a father he does love his children and that will eat away at him until he dies no doubt. but all elena sees is her shining example of an older sister being doomed to desk work. when gun leaves (because she becomes gun the moment she is added to the payroll) the real constant of elena's childhood also leaves. and during adolescence, that is hard for anyone. more so when you realize no matter how sharp your skills are your future is off the chopping block and there is no path for you to take with them.

elena goes from being a prodigy prone to pesky critical thinking to a prodigy with a chip on her shoulder. her technical marks don't plummet, in fact, quite the opposite. she picks up a secondary battle specialty, close-quarters combat, which will set her apart from her sister. she flourishes with equal parts precision and aggression, despite her small size. the academic commendations feel entirely hollow to her though, and in the way teenagers tend to do she convinces herself she is not much more than nothing. the memory of her sister becomes tarnished with the bitterness of her negative self-image. her instructors must hate her for her failures, she tells herself with false objectivity. her instructors include her actual father, who is nearly clueless aside from a vague feeling in the pit of his stomach and he doesn't know if that is due to his oldest daughter going into wetworks or the fact his younger daughter is shattering academic record after record with the sheer force of what he assumes to be ennui driven spite.

at least he is clueless until in the spring just after she turns fifteen she files for early certification to leave academy, just like every other boy in her year as well as every other boy on the continent and beyond. they do it to catch the recruitment push and join the army soon enough to have a shot at making SOLDIER before they age out. but elena can't do that and he knows it and braces himself to have that conversation with her, calling her into his office where she keeps her stance formal until he tells her to be as ease and even in the chair across from his desk her posture is tense. spine straight, eyes ahead. he begins what he thinks is going to be the "you know you can't join SOLDIER" conversation but she cuts him off in what he thinks is a somewhat uncharacteristic display, but to her is just another example of how disgraceful her conduct is and how she needs to get out of academy before brings the value of the whole institution down. she tells him this, she tells him she is aware of her shortcomings and the fact she has no future in a military career and her intention is to go to midgar and learn how to be a civilian on her own terms. he signs off on it because none of her bullet points are actually wrong.

midgar is a city of industry and a city of vice and she hasn't been there since she was a child. it is good to her and it is bad to her, as she unlearns years of quasi-military discipline and figures out how to be her own person. she still sometimes wears the academy uniform because old habits die hard and it is a durable thing. she has a one-room apartment in the slums and a job tending bar in wall market. the hours are early evening to after the last train ends and her circadian rhythm adjusts from 4am wakeups and beds made with hospital corners to the distorted clock that comes from living under a plate with no natural sunlight. there are just as many fights and skirmishes to be had in midgar but none of them are like the training exercises at academy. each one is a beautiful short-lived shrine, sometimes they are fun and on her terms, and other times they are fraught and meant for survival. elena relishes them all as a skillset she once thought was a dead-end turns out to be valuable once more. the major negative point is her sister.

gun is in midgar and wears a sleek black suit along with many other people in sleek black suits. elena hears the term 'turk' for the first time. whether they are urban legends or hired killers or pencil pushers who do double duty waterboarding enemies of a power company turned judge and jury doesn't matter. what matters is the deadness she can see in gun's green eyes when she drops by the bar before closing, oftentimes with equally dead-eyed coworkers. those confrontations are never pleasant, they are a powderkeg. elena would like to reach out to her sister, chase away the exhausted look in her face the way she can with other patrons, but the sentiment gets stuck in her throat and they just snipe at each other. gun is a terrible adult and so are all of her colleagues and they are trying their best to neutralize a growing terrorist threat and they are failing. when they come around in the low light of the bar illuminates the stark futility of everything after midnight.

elena does not know exactly what is going on at the highest level of intrigue but she has a good guess. shinra is shitting the bed, and that includes the turks and SOLDIER, which seems to her to be in the middle of a massive coverup as their public-facing 1sts disappear one after another. she wants no part of it and her agenda switches from mastering the nuances of being a civilian to finding sustainability and meaning outside of shinra as the cracks in the facade split ever wider. when the sector six plate is effectively destroyed, it takes the bar she worked at with it and elena decides it is time to get the hell out of midgar.

her years in wall market set her up with some interesting connections and the owner of a small weapons shop (who she might have married for tax purposes but that isn't fleshed out) sets her up with a distinguished older gentleman who is a complete asshole and happens to run guns all across the continent. despite his immaculate coiffure he is not a people person and requires someone who is both qualified to demonstrate his product and more pleasant to deal with than him, because the market is hot right now. shinra has never had much interest in dealing with flyover country. sure they build reactors in some of the backwaters, but not all of them. and no reactor meant no need for shinra to spend the money on protecting hick villages from increased monster presence. the planet is dying and the monsters are restless in the same way wildlife gets in the real world. the people in those tiny towns do their best to defend their homes and livelihood and that means purchasing weaponry, mostly old stock from competitors that shinra has long since crushed or acquired. shinra lets this happen because it is not a threat to them.

so, for a few years, elena is a pretty face with a bang and it is almost scarlettian. she never comes close to the sex appeal of the actual weapons development director of shinra, but it is enough to help move merchandise. most of the buyers are just people trying to survive in the middle of nowhere, but not always. sometimes they are rougher than that, but the money is good enough that she doesn't care about that, or the fact the man who employed her hates her guts and doesn't care much whether she lives or dies. it is a thrilling rush and it is outside of shinra and more than ever does she want to put as much distance as possible between shinra and herself. because her sister is dead according to a notification that tseng of the turks had been cordial enough to send to her father, news that he passed on in a voicemail to elena with a hollow tone. maybe he was trying to reconnect with her because she was now all he had left in the way of family. maybe he just had the same sense of duty as always. she never calls back to ask.

midgar calls her back though. one day her employer informs her with a vindictive grin that he has sold the business part and parcel and that includes her as an employee. acquired by shinra. the reason, ironically, is scarlet, whom she has been doing a two-bit impersonation of. scarlet is a forward thinker but that doesn't mean she can't be swayed by a stockpile of vintage firearms, and with the viciousness required of her position she can throw weight around and get her hands on anything. the weapons are what she wanted and elena knows this and rejects the notion that she will become apart of the shinra payroll because of this little merger. this is proven wrong in short order as her assets are frozen systematically because the turks are hard up for people. they know her. they knew her sister and they know her, even if they haven't kept tabs on her. as soon as the papers cross his desk tseng seizes the opportunity.

the interview with hr to place elena is a mere formality. there is no other place for her there but in the turks. elena, for all her audacity, accepts this and plasters on a professional veneer. the game begins and the world ends.

[boricuareads]

My Year in the Middle: a review/critical analysis

[image description: banner with pastel blue in the background, the cover of My Year in the Middle in the center with a bright orange light behind the cover, and the text saying “boricuareads Reviews: My year in the Middle by Lila Quintero Weaver”]

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Description:

In a racially polarized classroom in 1970 Alabama, Lu's talent for running track makes her a new best friend — and tests her mettle as she navigates the school's social cliques.

Miss Garrett's classroom is like every other at our school. White kids sit on one side and black kids on the other. I'm one of the few middle-rowers who split the difference.

Sixth-grader Lu Olivera just wants to keep her head down and get along with everyone in her class. Trouble is, Lu's old friends have been changing lately — acting boy crazy and making snide remarks about Lu's newfound talent for running track. Lu's secret hope for a new friend is fellow runner Belinda Gresham, but in 1970 Red Grove, Alabama, blacks and whites don't mix. As segregationist ex-governor George Wallace ramps up his campaign against the current governor, Albert Brewer, growing tensions in the state — and in the classroom — mean that Lu can't stay neutral about the racial divide at school. Will she find the gumption to stand up for what's right and to choose friends who do the same?

Review:

This review turned into a critical analysis of the book, but I promise it’s worth it. But, heed my SPOILER ALERT. You’ve been warned!

In reading Lila Quintero Weaver’s first foray into children’s fiction, I couldn’t help but think that this would pair well as a close analysis, keeping in mind Gloria Anzaldúa’s border theory. To keep it simple, Anzaldúa believed that immigrants, especially Latinx, and more specifically those of Mexican descent, not just live with the trauma of immigrating across the literal border. The theory also refers to the borders that have been socially constructed, such as racial categorization and sexuality just to mention a few. I’ll apply her border theory to this text because I believe most of the book is a study of said theory.

My Year in the Middle follows the last six weeks of Lu Olivera’s sixth grade in 1970 Red Grove, Alabama. Lu is the child of two Argentinian immigrants, which reflects the author’s own personal experience (this is explained at the end of the book with the Author’s Note). Lu considers herself to be a wallflower and does everything in her power to stay that way. But when the P.E. teacher decides that the girls will start running for the last six weeks of class, Lu becomes the surprise underdog. She outruns the entire class, which had been desegregated only the year before. In classrooms, however, an unspoken rule still divides Lu’s peers between black and white. Seeing as she identifies as neither, she occupies a seat in the middle row. In that way, she straddles a literal border.

“A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Anzaldúa 3).

The way Lu sits in that racial border that has been constructed without her say in the matter, is much in the way she struggles with her identity as a Latina.  She fears her Spanish is not too good and that her translation skills are too basic. However, above all else, she seeks acceptance among the white girls in her class. She fears being Othered, but also fears complete assimilation into whiteness. Anzaldúa said: “The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants [of the borderlands] are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger” (4). Though death may not be something that’s talked about in the book, ambivalence is something the narrative strides to be against. Lu feels the tension between her black and white classmates, which at times escalates to physical violence. At some point, even Lu’s the victim of physical and verbal violence from an older white student who takes the bus with her. Lu thwarts this by stomping his feet and correcting that she’s Argentinian, but she has to constantly remind herself of something her mother says: “We’re foreigners. We’re not supposed to get involved.”

Thus, Lu becomes an agent of whiteness by not daring to mix with the black kids, even though she identifies more with them and wishes to befriend them. There is a border that she dares not cross, even though it’s not something her parents have taught her. Her parents have taught her to be implicit in white supremacy even though they don’t believe in it. When Lu finally decides to befriend Belinda, a black girl in her class who is also a fantastic runner, she worries about what her white peers might think of such relationship. She doesn’t hide it in public, and she defends Belinda in the face of a racist shopkeeper, but when she’s faced with the questions of her white peers she shies away from the courage she shows. It’s a slow process as she realizes the systems at play in her classroom, and though she has some help from white peers like her friend Sam, her “best friend” Abigail does the opposite and encourages Lu to assimilate.

In fact, most of the characters who wish that Lu assimilate are women. If it’s not Abigail telling Lu to read women’s fashion tips in magazines, it’s Lu’s mom telling her that sports aren’t for girls when Lu expresses her love of running. This is a sentiment that even Anzaldúa expresses: “Culture is made by those in power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them” (16). By communicating that assimilation into a white heterosexual capitalist patriarchy or assimilation by ignoring your Otherness and that of your peers, Abigail and Lu’s mom transmit the messages of those in power, which Lu then internalizes.

The book mostly consists of Lu unlearning these internalized feelings and the text does so deftly and with the innocence of a sixth grader who’s only starting to realize the depth of US’s injustices. A good evolution is the image of Lu’s sister, Marina, who’s a college student as well as a volunteer for the Brewer campaign. This campaign is another subplot that’s almost always occurring in the background of Lu’s life. At moments she believes she wouldn’t be affected by the campaign, which is against rampant white supremacist ex-governor George Wallace and  desegregationist Albert Brewer. But the book takes you on a sort-of ride-along as she goes to a Wallace rally because Abigail just wants to participate in a cake walk. As Lu feels horrible when the speeches start and the Confederate flags start flying, she bargains with herself and others that she only went to appease Abigail be a part of something with her white peers.

Lu doesn’t tell her black friends or her own family that she attended the rally, knowing it would be met with scorn, which means that she knew it was wrong. When her social studies teacher asks her to write an essay about her experience at the rally for bonus points, she does so, and gets full points while feeling guilty. That guilt is useless, however, seeing as it resembles the white guilt of her peers who want to rebel against the white supremacy in place at their school, but won’t do anything productive with it. It’s when Lu uses her guilt to defend her black friends that it becomes more productive.

At a white student’s birthday party, Lu becomes the target of harassment from her peers for being friends with the black students, especially Belinda. White fear comes bubbling up, and it’s only perforated when Lu finally owns up to her own prejudices and by calling out her peers’ racism in the process.

When Brewer loses the race, the sentiments explored in the book felt all too familiar. As the Brewer supporters start mourning the loss, the white Wallace supporters become even more assertive of their desire for white supremacy. The feelings paralleled the days after the election of Tr*mp. Keep in mind, the book is set less than 50 years ago, and the sentiments of white supremacy and segregationist laws are still present in the US. It is at that point that Lu’s reality comes crashing down on her.

At school, she finally decides to sit with the black students, eschewing the created border of the middle row, the false neutrality she thought she could keep. Lu finally overcomes “the tradition of silence” that Anzaldúa wished to do in regards of the censuring of her identity as a Chicana (59). And though, again, Lu isn’t a Chicana, it’s the best turning point for her as she accepts her Otherness and doesn’t give into white supremacy. In fact, she goes to a white man in power (the principal) to defend one of her black peers, who’s attacked by a white student in class.

Lu is constantly subverting the expectations set for her as the book moves along. She shows growth in the most hopeful and honest way. She’s constantly deconstructing the set default, though not always by herself, like in the scene in which Belinda is at her house and they’re going through the magazines that used to be Abigail’s. Belinda points out that there’s one black model for the overwhelmingly white publication, but she doesn’t worry because at her house they receive beauty magazines for black women. Lu can’t help but wonder that there’s no such thing for girls like her, girls from Latin America, and that she doubted she would ever find a black-haired model with brown skin. This scene is a short one, yet it puts into focus what has been set as the standard for beauty: Eurocentric features. It also helps as a way for Lu to deconstruct such standards, and to question why those are the default.

“It is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. [...] At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once [...] Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go a different route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react” (Anzaldúa 78-79).

And indeed, Lu acts. Most of the book is her reacting to injustice, and by the end she’s acting and choosing her own path. She chooses herself, she chooses her real friends, and her family. She also chooses running, with her entire family supporting her and her dad and sister helping her train before the big competition (a Field Day). It becomes a celebration of Lu’s identity as her parents shout encouragement in Spanish as she goes. Those screams allow her to win, seeing as her competition, an older white girl, gets distracted and falls on a pothole. This final scene settles the border paradox within Lu. She’s able to celebrate both her passion for running and her identity as a Latina, all while celebrating the friends she has. There’s no indication she wants to seek reunification with the white peers who turned their backs on her, or that she wants to seek some sort of revenge.

At the end, Lu is happy with forging her own path. She’s finally unafraid to embrace her actions, and leave behind the created borders. There are new borders, but she doesn’t wish to acknowledge them at the moment the book is finished. She’s proud of her growth, and so was I.

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Quintero Weaver, Lila. My Year in the Middle. Candlewick Press, 2018.

An eARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! (this is why I couldn’t directly cite from the source book, since ARCs undergo a lot of changes before publishing)

You can find this book online at all available retailers. (amazon, barnes and noble, indiebound)

Review available on Goodreads.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @boricuareads, and make sure you check out my other reviews, as well as my book lists, edits, and more! If you enjoyed this, know that I put a lot of work into my reviews, so a monetary donation helps keep this blog going.

[googly-eyed-android]

I just saw the phrase "arsonist Amity Blight" and I immediately thought "ASOUE crossover" and after giving it approximately ten seconds of thought I can already think of a bajillion ideas for how it could work

Looks like we have another AU boys. Oh no

(lmao my keyboard suggested the word AU I didn't even have to type it, shows you how many times I've typed that sentence, fuck)

Oh! Even more fascinating idea! What if it's crossed over specifically with my Beware the Watchers ASOUE AU? That would echo the vibes that the whole situation with Emporer Belos and the titan gives off... Could even have him in the crossover claiming to be able to communicate with VFD... Hmm, I'll have to think about that

Well, that last paragraph aside, my initial thoughts are as follows: Amity is an arsonist, obviously, and Luz was recruited late by Eda, who is a wildcard, neither firefighter nor arsonist. Maybe Luz is the daughter of firefighters? That wouldn't only echo the Baudelaires, which I'm not sure if I want to do or not, but it would also be a further reason for her and Amity to start out as rivals. In any case, both sides were racing to recruit her but Eda got to her first 😛 which neither side is happy about. I'm not sure what's up with the firefighter vs arsonist thing in this crossover, I can't think of anyone in The Owl House who seems like they would be a firefighter, except for Gus and Willow but they're kids, where are the adults? I guess it could be their parents (who in this crossover would really be their chaperones) but we barely know their parents and they're not big figures in the world, who are the big firefighters? Hm, I'll have to figure something out

Anyway, back to Luz: the Beware the Watchers AU would parallel the Owl House canon better because it has more overt fantasy elements than the ASOUE canon, but either universe would work; in either case she's pulled headfirst into a world that can seem wondrous when looked at through rose colored glasses, and we all know Luz wears about five pairs of rose colored glasses at all times. I'm not sure what to do with King, Hooty, and Owlbert; in Beware the Watchers they can easily be shoehorned in, but it'll be a lot harder to do that in default ASOUE. There are a lot of pros and cons to either choice, I'm not sure which one to pick, I just hope I'll be able to pick one because I have way too many unfinished ideas to go with both 😭. I wonder how we can get Luz away from her mother without either of them getting worried about the other though 🤔 what sort of plot device aside for a portal to another realm could separate them? Then again, the portal isn't the only factor even in the Owl House canon, there's also the letters. I hope we find out who's writing them soon so I can fit them into this crossover. Hm, and then there are also the theories that her mother is connected to the demon realm in some way, how would that factor into things? Ugh I don't like coming up with AUs for unfinished stories, there are too many unanswered questions, and I can't just come up with my own answers for them because they may be contradicted later 😭 but this is the curse of the hyperfixation, it always leads to me creating AUs 😔 and this time the hyperfixation is on a story that's unfinished. Such is life. How about I focus on the things we do know, hm?

So Eda takes Luz on as her apprentice, and is also determined to protect her from both sides of VFD and teach her her own wild ways, a lot like some fan characterizations of adult Ellington I've seen. Reminds me specifically of Connie's ASOUE/Stranger Things crossover Fanning the Flames's version of Ellington, although there are also plenty of differences between the two, it's a pretty vague resemblance. Anyway, Luz still ends up coming into contact with VFD kids, firefighter apprentices Willow and Gus and arsonist apprentice Amity. Or we could position Willow and Gus as being on the run from VFD, but that would both mess up our only firefighter connection and leave Eda with no reason not to recruit them like she recruited Luz, so I guess they'll be firefighter apprentices unless I can figure out some other way of making things work. Also in the Owl House canon they both follow Emporer Belos so having them be firefighter apprentices would parallel that better, but something about them being on the run from VFD speaks to me, I don't know what. Oh well, I guess as the story progresses the Owl House canon will probably have them start getting skeptical about Belos so they might eventually end up on the run from VFD in this crossover.

Hmm, speaking of how the story will progress, while the idea of having a crossover with Beware the Watchers is cool, Beware the Watchers is also very intense and leans heavy on the cosmic horror, which doesn't fit the tone of The Owl House at all, and I especially wouldn't want to see bright and sunny Luz end up as miserable as the Baudelaires end up in Beware the Watchers, that would be way too painful, but the only to avoid that would be to make VFD less powerful, which would cheapen the entire premise of the AU. Sadly, it doesn't seem like Beware the Watchers would work 😔 that's too bad. I'm not going to discard the idea entirely, but unless I can think of a solution to this I just don't see how I can make it work. Oh well

Anyway, back to figuring out the crossover: we can try to make Prufrock Prep stand in for Hexside, but that may be difficult because Hexside is an actual half-decent school (at least as far as magical schools go) while Prufrock is a dumpster fire that has been eaten by a trash slug and is somehow still on fire despite being inside the trash slug. If anyone got this far into this post without being familiar with Prufrock Preparatory School, no, that's not an exaggeration. So, we can either modify Prufrock to parallel Hexside better or we can figure out some other way to get the kids together. I'm leaning toward the second option, I don't want to touch Prufrock with a ten foot pole.

Anyway, Amity is secretly miserable with the arsonists and is slowly brought out of her shell by Luz which helps her distance herself emotionally from the arsonists. Willow and Gus though are steeped in the firefighter brainwashing and are still firm in their loyalty to VFD, and their brainwashing, which they spout constantly, is also having an influence on Luz and Amity. But then everything gets turned upside down when Eda is captured by the arsonists, and the kids realize that the firefighters seem to care more about telling the arsonists that killing Eda is wrong than they care about actually stopping them from killing Eda (since, of course, they hate her too and want her out of the way, and the firefighters and arsonists are simply two sides of the same rotten coin). This starts them on their own independent (from Eda) realization that VFD sucks no matter which side you're on.

And then of course there's Lilith. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a replacement for the curse, though I'm not sure how her motivations would transfer over. She's obviously an arsonist because she's with Belos and Belos has to be an arsonist because only the arsonists would make a spectacle of killing someone who hasn't really done anything wrong, but I like the idea of her and Eda starting out as firefighters but then Eda leaving VFD and Lilith switching sides. If we keep the generations the same as in the Snicketverse books then Eda and Lilith are from the generation where the schism really cemented itself and tore VFD in two, leaving us with those who light fires and those who put them out, and I'm really excited to come up with something that could tear the sisters apart and/or push Lilith to the other side à la the night at the opera, and of course we would need to figure out the other players in this, I already mentioned Gus and Willow's parents/chaperones but there's also the Blight parents and Belos and Kikimora and various other people that we don't know much about, plus what I mentioned earlier about needing to figure out who the big firefighters are. I imagine the Blight parents would be able to pull some strings to avoid being separated from their children, especially since the arsonists tend to be more lax about the rules, but I imagine that Lilith would serve as Amity's chaperone in some capacity. Not sure about Em and Ed though. Then Lilith ditches VFD to join Eda, which upsets things within VFD, right in time for Willow and Gus to start questioning things. I imagine that their chaperones will try to keep them from interacting with Lilith and the one who got her to leave VFD aka Eda, and by proxy Luz, which would push them to choose between the firefighters and Eda's little crew. And the Blight parents would probably crack down on Amity after Lilith's defection. As for what will happen next, I think I'll wait for season 2 to figure that out

Okay, this has been fun, but this is getting long and complicated and I've been working on this for hours, so I'm just gonna post this now

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

How well you're doing a few months later saying This is supposed to be the next Paris or London, but it doesn't seem the right answer to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. The venture capital business is pretty incestuous, and there were presumably people in a position, if not months. Three options remain: you can use any language, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain. He meant it more literally—that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be to shirk it, but at the same time, of course. Day wanted to raise around $400k. Nerds are already a lot cooler than they were prepared for.

You need investors. If other companies didn't want to use, like English. The principle extends even into programming. So if such a company has two possible strategies, a conservative one that's slightly more likely to close, so of deals that close, more will have multiple investors. This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2009 Startup School. I'm excessively attached to conciseness. That language didn't even support recursion. Now that you know has no outlet. The problem is, it wouldn't be fun for most people. They're not allowed to include the numbers, and they're expected to spackle over the gaps with gratuitous transitions Furthermore. After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and that what we've seen so far is nothing compared to what's coming. Perhaps it's a technicality to point out that a predisposition to intelligence is not the destination.

But that's still a problem for the startups; by definition a high valuation means enough investors were willing to accept it. Recognizing an important trend turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. Eminence is like a pricing anomaly; once people realize it's there, it will disappear. I haven't prepared. So they want the fund to be huge—hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work for a big company or a VC fund after a full partner meeting where the firm as a whole says yes or no answer to that is, to grow about ten percent a year. The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at various points on the curve, and the answer is obvious: from a job. What were the results of this experiment? Because we're relaxed, it's so much easier to have fun doing what we do. If you're still losing money, then eventually you'll either have to fire good people, get some or all of the employees to take less salary for a while before acting, so don't be bummed if he seems ambivalent. The real test is the final outcome for the founder, and getting too high a valuation may just make a good outcome, not the confident media stars they are today. After an angel round is not an atomic operation.

I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market. At first it was just for Harvard students. If you're small, you'll probably still be aggressive when you're big. That's a constant of the startup world, startup founders get no respect. Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more than anyone expected. It's legally a company, but you feel like you're lying when you call it one. You have to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out the right thing to do is give the right sort of founder a one line intro to a VC, and he'll chase down the implications of what's said to you can sometimes get away with refusing to debate. And as any politician could tell you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life: it's either forced on you or it tricks you. Whereas if you only have a handful of people, it may be slightly faster. But that is not going to change the world, and they're begging not to be cut out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic.

The first step is to have the junior people do the work for him. Nor do they want to market themselves to the investors who are their customers—the endowments and pension funds and rich families whose money they invest—and also to founders who might come to them for funding. What most don't realize is how late. It is possible to slow time somewhat. But that doesn't mean such a thing exists. They have an interesting business. Their investors would have been furious of course. Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs?

And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. Most large organizations and many small ones are steeped in it. The resulting software did things our competitors' software couldn't do. This is how most venture investors operate. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base where we had to buy air by the liter. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. They're not. Six months later they're all saying the same thing. So the best strategy is to try lots of different things. Startup School, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people too.

It will start with small ones. 6 months. The defining quality of startups is that they grow fast, and you have no idea how much they damage the companies they invest in by taking so long to close is mainly that investors can't make up their minds, and why their due diligence feels like a body cavity search. Investors have much higher standards for companies that will get bought. It was not just our price to earnings ratios by saying that technology was going to increase productivity dramatically. The financial risk? And finally, there are more questions about the commitment and relationship of the founders than their ability. When you let customers tell you what they're after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they want, or they'll get the wrong candidates. I think about why I voted for Clinton over the first George Bush managed to win in 1988, though he would later be vanquished by one of the most common type, so being good at solving that kind of problem. Few would dispute, at least, that high level languages are often all treated as equivalent. If that makes you profitable, or will enable you to make it to the solid ground on the other hand, the money is there, waiting to be invested. In principle you could avoid it, just as it had to learn to value common stocks in the early 1970s, are now, just barely, on the other.

Thanks to David Sloo, Pete Koomen, Robert Morris, Patrick Collison, and Harj Taggar for the lulz.

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

A Review of the Fujifilm EF-X500 Flash

In 2016, I joined team Fuji after being extremely impressed with the X-T2 body. I had been watching mirrorless technology for a while, but this was the first time a system had everything I wanted in a camera body.

While I finally had a satisfying mirrorless experience, with great autofocus, low-light capabilities, and image quality, I quickly realized the system was lacking in the flash department. Not only did Fuji lack a dedicated speedlight, the low market share has kept 3rd party companies from building dedicated lighting products for Fuji systems.

After plenty of delays, the flagship Fuji EF-X500 speedlight has finally hit shelves globally. While it fills a monstrous gap in the system, it comes with a steep price of $449.99, which may be a tough pill to swallow for photographers who have become accustomed to affordable feature-rich solutions such as the Godox X series lighting.

I have been holding out myself, but thankfully Fuji fiend Jeffrey Lewis Bennett let me borrow his 3 EF-X500 flashess to see if they were right for me. Here’s what I found in my testing.

Typical Speedlight Features

Fujifilm’s flash has all the standards of speedlights. It rotates 135° left and 180° right, and has tilt from -10° to 90°. It has a bounce card and diffusion panel, and uses 4 AA batteries.

Build Quality and Size

The EF-X500 is well-balanced for their top-tier APS-C mirrorless cameras, which are quite smaller than DSLRs. It’s a great fit for cameras such as the X-T2 and X-Pro 2, but may still seem a little oversized for their smaller models. Like their camera bodies and lenses, it feels exceptionally well crafted, and built to last. It’s actually quite heavy despite it’s size. The grip portions are a familiar and perfect match to the camera bodies. It is shorter and more narrow than flagship speedlights for DSLRs such as the 600 EX-RT and SB-910.

Power Output

Since it’s a bit smaller, my first question was how much light does it put out. I tested it against a Flashpoint Zoom R2 TTL Li-Ion (aka Godox V860ii). I positioned them the same distance from a Sekonic light meter, with the Fuji @ 24mm zoom and the Flashpoint @ 35mm, to ensure they were putting out an equal spread of light (Fuji with no head priority). The Flashpoint put out a half stop more light than the Fuji. This was consistent in other zoom comparisons as well.

Recycle Speed

I’ve grown quite accustomed to the 2 second recycle speed at full power of my lithium-ion pack Zoom R2’s, so I wasn’t expecting much when I loaded up the Powerex AA’s into the Fuji EF-X500. From the jump, it recycled full power in about 4.5 seconds. After continued recycling, it eventually dipped to 5 and 6 seconds. It took over 3 full minutes of instantaneously firing before the heat protection came on. The speedlight would fire whatever power it had stored even if it was not ready to fire full power again. After a few seconds, the test button light would begin to blink, meaning it had some juice to fire, but not until it stopped blinking was it prepared to fire at 1/1. It also still functioned after the heat protection came on, just not as fast/powerful as it is by default.

Functionality

The EF-X500 has TTL, HSS, stroboscopic (multi), and “full wireless control”. The TTL was very accurate, and worked as expected over various metering modes and using compensation. The HSS was a bit of a disappointment, as it lost about 2.5-3 stops of light by switching to a pulsating source. With HSS being most useful in bright situations, and the EF-X500 being less powerful than DSLR flagship flashes, I can’t see it being very useful outdoors. This would be even more difficult if you are using it with larger modifiers. Lastly, let’s talk about Fuji’s “full wireless control”. Systems from Canon, Godox, Phottix, and Yongnuo have implemented radio technology within speedlights, allowing photographers to reliably adjust power and modes from the top of their hot-shoe mount, without excess radio receivers or line-of-sight requirements. Unfortunately Fuji did not implement this, and line of sight is still necessary to maintain control between the flashes. There is also no radio controller or receiver system from Fuji to combat this, meaning you have to use a speedlight on camera as the master. Line-of-sight systems are known to be problematic due to distance, bright conditions, and modifiers / environmental blockages. 2.4 Ghz Radio technology has since solved all these issues with no downside. Not implementing this technology into a brand new flash with no alternatives is a big failure by Fuji.

Compatibility

The only Fuji camera I have used is the X-T2, and I’ve been asked a lot about the support for the EF-X500 from photographers using other camera bodies. The flash features are only 100% compatible with 3 of their bodies, the X-T2, X-Pro 2, and X-T1, the latter 2 requiring firmware updates. All other bodies are listed on Fujifilm’s website as “the camera is compatible with some of the function”. I’m waiting to hear directly from Fuji on what functions do not work from their 17 other cameras, whether it be TTL, HSS, or remote control of off-camera flashes.

Flash Menu and Camera Control

One place where the flash shines is the ease and depth of control from both the flash menu and in camera menu. It is quick and intuitive to dance around the menus, even for more complicated functions such as controlling the remote speedlights. Pair that with the EVF and you have an entirely new experience of controlling your off-camera lights without ever having your eye leave the viewfinder. Fuji manages to pack a ton of options for controlling the flash into a tight space, while still making it easy to view and understand every aspect of your flash.

LED and Autofocus Assist

Auto-focus assist grids are a very popular feature of modern speedlights, allowing users to quickly attain focus in even the darkest of environments. Unfortunately, a typical red grid doesn’t work well with the Fujifilm sensors. They opted to combat this by including an LED lamp on the front of the camera which can serve multiple functions.

You can power it on to use for general illumination, and control it’s power from 1/1 – 1/128. You can use it as an AF-assist lamp to temporarily illuminate an area when your camera is struggling to focus. Lastly, there is a catchlight mode where it stays powered while the shutter captures an image, to create a catchlight in a subject’s eyes.

Personally, as a wedding photographer I find the LED lamp to be a pitfall of this strobe. I find it to be highly distracting to use in a dark environment, where it would draw attention to the user. It also doesn’t have the reach that a red grid has on a DSLR. While I think it’s the best solution for their cameras, it still leaves me reaching for my Nikon system in dark scenarios.

Additional Intricacies

There are a few other details about the Fuji EF-X500 that I thought were worth mentioning. One thing people worry about with line-of-sight / optical triggering systems is the idea of other flashes triggering your off-camera lights. If you are in an environment such as a reception with many other cameras, the additional flashes can cause the flash to dump right before you take a shot, leaving you with wasted power and a dark frame. Fortunately this is not a concern with the EF-X500 as when it triggers other flashes it does so with a specific pattern of light that acts as a “code” between flashes. This ensures only you can trigger your off camera flash.

Within the custom functions is the option to choose the output level that your TTL is metered at. For those unfamiliar, TTL works by firing a “pre-flash”, and using that information to select what flash output to use to properly illuminate a subject. With the EF-X500 you can choose 1/1, 1/32, or 1/128. This is a clever option from Fuji, as most TTL systems illuminate to the power required, and then dump that power again instantly. Imagine your flash decides it needs 1/2 power to illuminate the scene, you are constantly recycling and using battery on those 1/2 power pre-flashes. Fuji solves this by keeping a constant pre-flash setting. I recommend 1/32, as it provides the largest range and will not significantly affect your recycle speeds or power consumption.

The EF-X500 has a lowest minimum power of 1/512. This is 2 stops less than other speedlights, and gives it a 10-stop power range. Finally, the flash has 3 zoom head modes that can modify how the head operates. Normal mode, which stays rigid with the zoom head’s focal length.. Power priority will sacrifice spread and increase the zoom head to achieve more output (great when you are bouncing and the spread is not critical to your focal length. Spread priority will widen the zoom to ensure maximum coverage. All 3 option are available whether you are in an automatic mode or manually choose the zoom of the flash head to fine tune to your liking.

Final Thoughts

Fuji needed a dedicated and full-featured speedlight for their system, especially as many photographers jump to the X-T2. They created a well-built and highly functional flash that provides reliability and opens new doors for Fuji strobists. However, the EF-X500 still has quite a few flaws.

The LED as an AF-assist lamp is a step backwards for DSLR photographers. The inclusion of HSS may have been desired, but the light’s output and efficiency loss prevent it from being very useful. The use of line-of-sight for flash to flash communication with no alternative makes for very restricted off-camera use.

Unfortunately, I feel the price is asking a lot for what it offers. I’m hoping Fuji can get on Sony’s update schedule to give us a model with radio technology that is more consistent with modern releases.

About the author: Robert Hall is a wedding, portrait, and commercial photographer based in Michigan. You can find more of his work on his website, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

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