#the leading theory seems to be that their final over all verdict is based on which verdict they had more

[randomidiocyncrazies]

apparently some people seem to take pride in not watching the voice dramas (which gives context clues to the characters' mindset and background) before voting in milgram? i must confess i don't get it

i mean, vote however you want, and these aren't real people so it's not like we're actually harming anyone, but it's so fascinating to see the different levels of investment in the... duty? responsibility? of passing judgement on a bunch of fictional anime-esque characters: you get people who judge purely by the MVs (with some of them seeming to consider anything outside of the MVs as unnecessary/impure influences); people who watch the MVs and voice dramas (maybe even keep up with the interrogation Q&As) for context before voting; people who watch all the previous info AND the cover songs; people who aren't involved in the franchise at all and only vote because they've been bribed; people who set up the voter fraud in the first place and bribed unrelated parties into voting certain ways; people who choose not to vote...

oh, and we don't actually know how the overall results are tallied up—is the character's over all verdict based on which verdict they got more? are they fucked as soon as they get a single unforgiven verdict (Kotoko's concept of "once a beast tastes flesh, there's no going back for them" in her T2 interrogation) and the 3 trial system is just to see how fucked they are? does only the final T3 verdict count, and it doesn't matter what verdicts they've received previously? NOR do we know what actually happens to the characters who get an overall unforgiven/guilty verdict (where death penalty and/or torture are plausible options). We're explicitly told not to worry our pretty little heads about it by our only source of authority, who enjoys controlling the information we have access to.

(also as a general comment on the voting: i am uneasy about voting bc i have hangups about how little we actually know about what we're ultimately subjecting these characters to, BUT not voting is wasting your vote—you cannot stop others from voting in a court of opinion. even if YOU don't participate, others will happily do so, even those without any love or attachment to the franchise. so, will you abstain from voting bc of your ethics and values? or will you vote to try to lessen the damage?

how fortunate that this particular scenario is fictional, involving fictional characters.)

[makeste]

so let’s talk about the new bak-u-go stuff

hey guys, so long story short, I took all of the bak-u-go stuff out of my weekly liveblog/recap post, and put it into its own separate post so that it didn’t take over the recap completely. so this is my big “all of my thoughts about the second OFA user’s vestige in chapter 304” post, basically.

my opinion going into the chapter

okay so without mincing words, my very controversial stance on this theory going in was more or less, “yes, I do think that maybe that Bakugou-shaped shadow who looks exactly like Bakugou could, in fact, be Bakugou.” not only that, but it strikes me as much more feasible than the alternatives, “Bakugou’s ancestor who looks exactly like him was the second user of OFA for some reason, and Horikoshi keeps hiding his face because... we don’t really know”, or “this is just some random guy with spiky hair, and again his face is being hidden just because.”

like, there is some reason we’re not allowed to know what he looks like, especially at this point. and writing-wise, there are really only three possible explanations for this. (1) it’s a red herring meant to trick us for some reason, (2) his character design hasn’t been completed yet, or (3) something about this character’s appearance is a spoiler, and the reveal is supposed to be a surprise.

regarding (1), I actually think this is the case with the Third. clearly he is not Kirishima as some had speculated. he doesn’t appear to be familiar at all. so if that’s the case, why is his face also being hidden? my theory is that it’s simply to lampshade the fact that the Second is being hidden as well. if Second was the only vestige whose face we couldn’t see, it would be beyond obvious at that point that he was someone familiar to us. having another vestige doing the same weird stuff makes him stand out slightly less.

anyways though, as far as Second himself being a red herring, I guess he could be. but a red herring for what? not to say it isn’t possible, but I don’t really see what the purpose would be.

regarding (2), this is a remote possibility, but imo it would be pretty uncharacteristic of Horikoshi. plus by this point he’s had more than enough time to flesh the design out. all of the other vestige character designs are completed, and we’ve seen all of Second and Third except their fronts and faces by this point. so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this isn’t the reason.

which leaves (3): this character’s identity is important in some way, and is being purposely kept secret. this to me implies that it must be someone we know (because otherwise it wouldn’t be a spoiler). which basically means that no matter what, the possibilities are about to get weird.

my thoughts on the new “evidence” in the chapter

first off, my biggest impression is that there really isn’t much new evidence at all either way lol. but okay, let’s review what we got.

I’m ignoring Third at this point because I honestly have no idea who he is. he may very well be someone we haven’t met yet, so I don’t think there’s much point in speculating. so let’s focus on Second instead.

the hair

first off, his hair isn’t quite right to be Bakugou’s. it’s darker than Bakugou’s hair usually is, at least in the close-up, and also the hair on the nape of his neck doesn’t quite look right; it’s got more of an undercut vibe than Bakugou’s usually does. Bakugou’s hair is usually more out-of-control dandelion puff from the back.

so yeah, I’m not sold by this image. though on the other hand, I will say that as far as the argument that his hair is too dark, that’s undermined by the wide angle panel right before the close-up in which his hair isn’t colored in at all.

so yeah, it could just be something about the lighting in the close-up. also, the RHA scan seems to have upped the contrast a bit more than the original image.

here it doesn’t seem to be quite as dark compared to the wall he’s standing against. I could be wrong, though; we’ll get a better idea when the official version is released in a couple days.

but overall the style of the hair seems more off to me than the color. on the whole, I’m not really convinced either way here, so I’ll move on.

the rest of him

okay so first off, obviously this is not Bakugou’s current hero costume in any way, shape or form. honestly my first thought was “what is Shippuuden-era Naruto doing here in the OFA Mystical Space Land” lol. so yeah, no idea what that’s all about.

however he does have gauntlets! so this is definitely someone with some sort of arm or hands-related quirk. and Kacchan does have a new gauntlet design that we’ll see in movie 3, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that these could be another new design along those lines. that said, these are clearly not his current big ugly grenade-style gauntlets.

last but not least, this person seems older than Bakugou, which for me makes me considerably less enthused about the possibilities here, since I’m a weirdo who likes the idea of a timeskip even less than most people seem to like the idea of time travel, lol. then again there really isn’t much here to support that “he seems older” statement; that’s just the general vibe I get from him, idk.

I will say though that he has Kacchan’s same triangle-shaped torso with the same broad shoulders and upper back tapering down into a more slender build. that stuck out to me right away when I looked at this image. but he really does give off Naruto vibes as well lol, like I can’t unsee it sob.

anyway, and last but not least,

the hidden faces

because so far most of the attention seems to be on their appearances. but those aside, this chapter introduces a very interesting question that this mystery will have to address one way or the other. namely, why are these two vestiges turned around and not interacting with the others?

“so that we can’t see their faces, duh” -- no, I get that, lol. but let’s talk in-story explanation now. why are they huddled in the time-out corner not moving or speaking? what could possibly be the reason for that. we can see them clearly enough, so we know that they’re “unlocked” and fully formed in that sense. All Might’s vestige is the only one that’s not yet visible, and supposedly that’s because he was quirkless?? and so he didn’t have a quirk factor that could be passed down through OFA initially. though I didn’t quite understand all of that part tbh.

but so then what’s the deal with these two losers? are they just antisocial or what? OFA First says that the vestige souls which were chilling out inside of OFA gradually gained the ability to take a physical form as OFA grew more powerful. and these two clearly have taken a physical form. so then why don’t they talk? there are only a few explanations for this that I can see.

(1) it could be that these guys are still alive, just like All Might (who doesn’t seem to be able to speak either, although the other vestiges can communicate with him in other ways).

(2) or, these guys are purposely hiding from Deku for some reason. (or at least, hiding as best as they can in this weird little rock slab floating in space.)

that’s it. if anyone else can think of more possibilities let me know because I’ve been sitting here racking my brain lol. this is all I can come up with. and honestly, either of these explanations would be suspicious as hell, theory-wise. if these two vestiges are still alive, that almost guarantees time travel right there. and if it’s simply that they’re hiding themselves from Deku, then that begs the question of why. which, again, leads us back to “they’re familiar, and Deku would recognize them.” (though that last bit goes against what I was saying earlier about the Third, doesn’t it. honestly I’m just spitballing here now, I haven’t really thought this all out too thoroughly.)

soooo... yeah. that’s pretty much where I’m at. nothing about this seems to make any more sense than it did a chapter ago tbh. though I will end this post by addressing one more thing, just cuz.

“this theory is dumb and makes no sense”

the correct statement to make here isn’t “this makes no sense”; it’s “we don’t know what’s going on yet.” if and when we finally get an explanation, then we can start making judgments about how much sense it does or doesn’t make. but until then we have nothing to base that verdict on.

same thing with “it’s dumb” -- look, “I hate time travel plots because they rarely work” is a valid opinion. but “rarely” isn’t the same thing as “never.” there are good time travel plots out there. idk why everyone keeps rolling with the assumption that this is going to be some cliche plot hole-filled science fiction bs narrative with a tragic ending. we have literally nothing to base that on. we have no answers and a whole lot of questions, is what we have.

maybe it will be disproven! or maybe it won’t, and it will be exactly as awful as everyone thinks and it will ruin the manga entirely. or maybe it will actually be really cool. we don’t know yet. that’s my one and only conclusion here -- that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. but then again I guess it wouldn’t be BnHA fandom if we didn’t. anyway so thus concludes my post.

[infinites-chaser]

attachment theory | tears of themis | mo yi

deals with a few more serious themes but nothing too far off from the cases in game! also. suggestive ending pls avert ur eyes

vague, alluded to spoilers for mo yi's story and ch.2 of the main story :>

"not sleeping yet?"

for all its gentleness, mo yi's voice takes you by surprise-- you straighten abruptly from where you'd been hunched over a case file and there's a crunch in your neck-- you instantly regret it until the sudden pain's replaced with a gentle touch, and you're pulled back into his embrace, one hand resting warm around your waist, the other massaging circles around the tension in your neck.

"it's this case," you say, gesturing to the abandoned sheaf of papers. "it's bothering me."

his answering laugh's a tender vibration against your back.

"when do your cases not?"

"no," you reply, "this one's not hard, it just--"

"is bothering you," he finishes. you nod.

his hand slips from the back of your neck to rub gentle across your shoulder, then he leans forward to pick up the file, bringing the pages up to a level comfortable enough for the two of you to read together.

a silence passes. then,

"how nostalgic," he remarks. "a pick up artist and a jealous paramour."

you nod. it'd been a straightforward case: the client had gone through a bad breakup with their long-time partner, only to be preyed upon in her vulnerable state by a pick-up artist. when the ex-partner found out, he'd schemed against her, only for him and his plans to be foiled when she'd found out. it would've been simple for him to be charged, but his family had stepped in, had tried to argue it was all her, her and her abusive family, that she was just the same as them, that she'd been blackmailing and extorting him and they'd been relieved when she was finally gone.

you'd won the trial easily: it had hardly been a trial at all, more of a formality than anything else, but when you'd looked over at your client after the verdict, she hadn't looked happy. she hadn't looked proud.

she'd only looked miserable, sitting on the hard wooden bench, all alone.

you'd gone to her when the courtroom cleared, and she'd broken down, asked if this was all she would ever have in a relationship, if this was her fault, if all she ever did was seek out relationships with people who'd hurt her, just like her mother and father.

"is this all there is?" she'd asked. "to hope and hope for better and only be hurt more every time? I might as well not try at all anymore."

"that's not true at all," you'd replied. "i-- maybe I'm privileged to be able to say this, but I think we always have to keep trying, no matter how hard it gets. because what we want, the love we deserve-- it's worth it. it's something we'll never know if we give up now."

she'd fallen silent, after. you'd pulled her into a hug, and her fingers had dug deep into your shoulder blades, and for a long, shuddering moment, she hadn't let go.

"I wonder," you say now. "how much of us is from our parents? what do we inherit? what do we still have the power to change?"

though mo yi doesn't turn his head, you can feel his attention shift from the case files back to you.

"that woman," you continue, "she had a hard childhood. she had to raise herself. but her ex-boyfriend had caring parents. they'd do anything for him."

"you know," you say, "his mother even approached me before the trial."

"and what did she want?" he asks, voice soft.

you scoff.

"she told me she'd give me any sum of money if it meant her son's record would stay clean."

"oftentimes, parents will do anything for their children."

"she and her husband-- they love him a lot," you say. "they're good people. but--"

"but then why did he grow up like that? why did your client?"

you nod. he sits back, places the file aside, lets his fingers drum thoughtful across your back.

"humans are not so simple," he says at last. then, when you open your mouth,

"but you already know that."

you close your mouth as he laughs softly, then continues.

"psychologists used to think criminality was a gene. it's almost like some religions, if you think about it. you inherit the sins of your past life. if they did not live cleanly, then neither shall you. if your parents became criminals, then, inevitably, so would you."

"we know they're wrong now," he continues, "but isn't there some truth to that? who our parents are come to define who we are. or who we aren't. I believe in your client's and her ex's case, the latter is true."

"what do you mean?"

"your relationship with their parent when you're young shapes you. it's what each of us first learns attachment from. love, caring, connection-- it all stems from there. perhaps we look at your client's ex and his parents, and we see the love they have for him. the care. but for him, all he feels is that it's stifling. that he needs someone of his own to control."

his voice grows lower.

"perhaps, for your client, one might look at her, and how she raised herself, and find her independence admirable. but as you saw, rather than be happy with herself, rather than be proud, of surviving, of living well, despite all odds, all she finds in herself is her own loneliness."

he laughs softly. it isn't a happy sound.

"we humans," he says. "we often are trapped by circumstance, for reasons we can't control. but we often trap ourselves, too."

"we aren't like just that, though," you say. "humans can't always be defined just one way. we grow. we change. sometimes all we need is a direction, but it's never fixed-- there's always a choice. a chance for change. for becoming more."

a long silence passes.

"perhaps you're right," he says at last, voice almost wistful.

"but," he continues, "isn't that enough psychology for tonight? there's only so much information our brains can maintain without proper rest."

"rest?" you ask with a laugh, "what's that?"

"rest," he repeats, firmer. "it's nearly two in the morning. even if you feel awake right now, your body will regret it later."

you'd press him further about the sudden subject change, but something about the way his arms have gone tense around yours holds your tongue.

instead, you acknowledge his point with a nod and a sigh, and let him lead you back to lie down on the bed beside him.

you've had your eyes closed for all of a minute before he's pulled you into his arms, his head tucked warm under yours.

"to rest," he muses, "or to... relax."

"after all that talk about unhealthy attachment, what does this say about you, hm, Dr. Mo?" you chide gently. he chuckles, but doesn't let go, his breath warm at the base of your neck. you shiver. he pulls you closer.

"who can say," he murmurs as reply. "it's interesting, really. normally, I'd never think of myself as someone who gets attached. but around you--"

"around me what?" you echo.

"around you, I can't seem to help myself."

his voice is low. on another man, you'd call it almost needy, but with him, paradox, walking contradiction he is, it's a confessional. a prayer. a promise. a prediction.

"can't help yourself?" you repeat again, hoping the words don't betray the heat creeping over your cheeks. and there's a million questions you want to ask, about his parents, his past, the way he always pulls back from a conversation before you can catch a true glimpse of the inner him,

but he breathes in, breathes out. slow, langourous, savoring the moment, savoring you, and the questions quiet,

"I never can," he muses. "it's strange."

his head dips lower, the silver of his hair brushing low across your cheek.

"why you," he murmurs against the hollow of your throat. you don't dare breathe, dare move, dare think. then his lips find the curve of tender skin where neck meets collarbone and you inhale, sharp and fast, and you don't think at all.

you drown in him, his mouth on your skin, his teeth a gentle rough, his tongue teasing tender, quicksilver, lightning, lava, everything molten, leaving you breathless burning,

he surfaces between your legs, your fingers laced through his hair, turned silvered with sweat, golden gaze on yours, his hands tracing the course of your veins, your pulse racing hard and heavy under his touch.

"you," he breathes against your inner thigh, fingers ghosting gentle, ghosting higher, "you, you, a thousand times over. always you."

he presses his mouth to your skin, lets his lips skim upward, a hundred kisses in one, slow and teasing.

more than anything else, you think, we are what we choose to be. maybe there are parts of him you'll never quite know the way you want to, maybe there are certain things he can't give up, and the same goes for you. but despite his past, despite his secrets, you've always ever known one truth of mo yi, the truth of him when it comes to you.

(he chooses you, despite, despite, despite. and so do you. you choose, in the hopes of growth. of change. of something that'll last, something meaningful.)

"it's always you for me, too," you whisper, then let his lips claim yours.

[sepublic]

Hey I love you reading your theories and analysis, they've contributed a lot to my own headcanons and views on the characters so I wanted to get your thoughts on a in universe reason why Amity might be the only outlier for the name of her family. You have Edric: prosperous ruler, Emira most commonly meaning princess or leader, Odalia: wealth and fortune, Aladar: noble, eminent, glorious, and then you have Amity for friendship.

           It really means a lot to me to hear about this! Honestly, I’m just another fan, speculating on things, maybe projecting a few ideas and opinions of what I’d like to see onto the show… But it’s very touching to hear this, thank you so much! As for the subject of your ask…

           Well, there WAS that one brief idea I aired a while back… Basically, I considered the possibility that Amity was literally conceived for a sole purpose, and/or was chosen by Odalia and Alador to be a glorified ‘offering’ to Emperor Belos…

           The thing about members of the Emperor’s Coven is, we don’t know much, if anything, about their social lives outside of their jobs! And that’s assuming they even HAVE one… The most we see is Lilith’s bedroom, which based on the architecture is possibly within Belos’ castle, but we can’t really say for sure! Not to mention this was from a background that was never included in the episode, and as Head of the Emperor’s Coven, Lilith would understandably have a more intimate relationship with its headquarters given the tasks she oversees.

           And amidst the speculation of EC witches going a physical transformation upon receiving the Emperor’s Brand, in order to further conform them to Belos’ standard… And again, it makes me wonder if Amity is even going to remain in contact with her family. If ANY of the Emperor’s Coven witches do… Again, there’s Lilith, but she doesn’t exactly have much family to go back to, to begin with it seems! And even if she DID, it’s worth noting that she’s Head of the Emperor’s Coven, and like Wrath and Kikimora… It seems that having a high position even amongst Belos’ enforcers garners you a little special individuality, just to hammer it in just how much MORE you are compared to the rest!

           So again; All speculation. But it makes me wonder if standard members of the Emperor’s Coven basically sacrifice their previous life and cut off all ties with it to become an enforcer of Belos. This potentially means no relationships, no adopting kids because even if it’s not expressly forbidden, you just don’t have the time and resources for that… etc.

           And given how big a deal Odalia and Alador place on the concept of the ‘Blight’ family name, it makes sense that they’d want to have grandchildren and continue the lineage, right? And… that’s possibly where Emira and Edric come into play…!

           What I’m suggesting is that Emira and Edric are allowed to get away with things, because Odalia was always okay with that sort of thing… But with Amity, she’s subject to extra scrutiny because she’s basically being given to Belos as an offering; Like, here, we raised one of our kids for the sole purpose of serving your will, doesn’t this show how loyal we are? Considering how young Belos’ reign is, he’s likely looking for witches he can trust, and considering the kind of person Odalia likely is (I can’t say much for Alador especially since he was ‘interesting’ for Dana to write and was an outsider to the family), it’s possible she saw this as her chance to schmoozy up to the Emperor, gain his favor, etc.!

           But the thing is… Belos’ standards are HIGH, and Odalia knows it. Maybe she never joined the Emperor’s Coven herself because she wasn’t skilled enough, because her talents lied elsewhere and the system recognized this, and/or she didn’t want to sacrifice her individuality… So why not prove just how loyal she is, just how useful the Blights are, by presenting a perfect child to the Titan’s Messenger! A shining example of the Blight family!

           And if I AM correct in that members of the Emperor’s Coven basically dedicate their entire existence to Belos, then… This means that Amity won’t be able to continue the Blight lineage. But Emira and Edric will… And because THEY’re not the ones who will have Belos breathing down their necks, they can get away with making more mistakes because they’re not trying to impress the emperor, and likewise they’re not trying to get into his prestigious coven! So Amity is subject to a special double-standard because she’s the one who will be ‘sacrificed’ to Belos to make a good image of the family, while Ed and Em are given a lot more leniency!

           This DOES raise the question, if I am correct… Did Odalia and Alador give Amity a different theme-naming, because they knew this? Because they KNEW from the beginning that this third child wouldn’t actually grow up to be a part of the family, that they’d say goodbye once she turned eighteen –maybe even younger- and sacrifice her Blight identity to become an enforcer of Belos? Did they give Amity a more ‘mundane’ name, because even if she was technically chosen to represent the family, by the end of the day she’d be revoking her connection to them anyway, so why bother building one up?

           Is THAT one of many reasons why Odalia and Alador are so cold- Because they know there’s no point getting attached to Amity, if she’s going to leave them in the end and prioritize Belos over them!? And BECAUSE they’re purposefully colder and more detached towards Amity, that just causes Odalia and Alador to act crueler towards her, and so on and so forth in a self-feeding cycle.

           Again; The fact that this was Amity’s name, which was likely decided before she was born or right when she was… Indicates that, if there WAS an in-universe reason (and the differentiation isn’t simply meta), she was intended to be separate from the rest. Whether this was a sign of rejection from Odalia because Amity had her brown hair prominent from birth… I can’t say for sure, because she seemed willing to accept Alador!

          But we don’t know exactly what his deal is… And regardless, Odalia seemed intent on making Amity more like a ‘traditional’ Blight by having her hair dyed green, and forcing Amity to uphold the family standards. So why undermine this effort by giving her a different type of name, unless she changed her mind afterwards, and by then the name had stuck?

           Plus, if Odalia DID make a point of having Amity be ‘more like a Blight’, then how does this fit into the idea of her and Alador having a purposeful disconnect from her compared to them and the Twins, if they knew Amity’s identity as an Emperor’s Coven witch would be prioritized in the end? Unless of course, it was to better signify to Belos that Amity is representative of the Blights as the most talented, obedient enforcer… So Green Hair is a must! But then, why give Amity a different kind of name, unless there was a specific balance to be had between ‘Setting Amity aside as different because she’s going to be gone anyway’ and ‘Making her representative of the Blight family to Belos’.

           This is just a crazy theory though, with not too much evidence. It comes solely from the assumption that Emperor’s Coven witches don’t maintain lives outside of their roles, which while I wouldn’t be shocked if that were the case… There’s nothing outright in favor of this assumption, either. It’s just that- An assumption, which I then used as the basis for a fairly outlandish idea that while not unreasonable given what we’ve seen of Odalia and Alador, doesn’t have much evidence pointing in that direction otherwise.

           Because, like you said; If there IS an in-universe reasoning for this naming, then it suggests that Odalia and Alador had intentions for Amity to be set apart from the rest of the family, even before she could’ve shown any prowess or skill as a witch! And while the Oracle Coven’s exist DOES allude to visions of the future being a thing… Amity’s name suggests her ‘separation’ from the family was always planned and not in reaction to any particular ‘deviancy’ from the Blight identity.

          Which again, leads back to the speculation of why Amity was chosen to join the Emperor’s Coven, but not Emira and Edric… If they simply proved too defiant to mold by that point, or if their talents in Illusions had already been noted by the system, thereby guaranteeing a place within the Illusionist Coven and NOT the EC as would’ve been desired…. Etc. Because as I said before, unless Odalia and Alador looked into the future (which again isn’t too out of the question thanks to Oracle magic), they would’ve only had brown hair to differentiate Amity by that point, and it doesn’t make sense for Odalia to more or less condemn Amity to a completely different fate and identity for something her own husband has.

           And THAT leads me to my final verdict, of… Either there IS a reason we’ll learn more of later in the future, or there is no reason in-universe, and it’s a purely meta decision! Just as there is no in-universe reason why Amity parallels Luz, but from a thematic standpoint, this connection IS very much real and one of the more meaningful and developed concepts this show has to offer! Personally my assumption is that, when it comes to the name at least, the difference doesn’t exist in-universe and it’s a purely meta thing… But as always, you can never say for sure! Especially since we still have Season 2 and so much more to see from Odalia and Alador, no less!

           (This makes me wonder how Alador reacted to the hair-color change… Is he an ‘outsider’ who was fully indoctrinated into the idea of upholding the Blight identity? Is HIS hair dyed green, too? Did he willingly subject himself to this, as a dark parallel to Luz and her relationship with Amity… With Alador being unconditionally selfless to a self-destructive degree, willingly forgoing his identity to meet Odalia’s standards, potentially because he really wanted to be with her and/or didn’t want to stir up trouble with her parents by not meeting their standards?)

[mazurah]

Altmeris Vocabulary from Summerset

Regarding Altmeris: The Altmer would probably say that their language is named Aldmeris, considering their obsession with all things Aldmeri, but we need some way of differentiating it from the language spoken by actual ancient Aldmer, so I’m using Altmeris for now. 

Profanity and Pejoratives:

(I.E. swears and insults. I know why you’re here.)

Slek - Profanity. Both an interjection and a pejorative, likely high intensity. Probably equivalent to "shit" or possibly "fuck." Examples: "Slek, my head hasn't hurt this bad since..." "May that slek thank her ancestors that she won't have to face me in battle."

Glan'nt - Profanity. Pejorative, likely moderate to high intensity. Probably equivalent to “bastard” or “asshole” or “motherfucker.” Examples: "I promise to duel that filthy glan'nt at the determined place and time." "These glan'nts think they can double cross me?"

De'nt - Profanity. Pejorative, likely mild to moderate intensity. Probably equivalent to “jerk” or “asshole.” Examples: "I know some of us here in Summerset have been true de'nts about this open border situation." "Are you going to look or are you going to buy? I have no time for de'nts in my shop." "Those Maormer de'nts have certainly done their part."

Ephem - Someone who isn’t Altmer. Probably pejorative, likely mild intensity. Possibly short for “ephemeral”, as a reference to someone with a short lifespan. Examples: “Get away, ephem. Away from me. Away from our island!” "These ephems have taken all the rooms." "If our crafts are left to the work of ephems, our reputation will grow tarnished." "If the ephems didn't want entrance processing to take so long, they could fill out the forms in advance."

Nebarra - Pejorative, likely moderate intensity. Literal translation: “unwelcome.” Impolite word for outlander. (The Altmer equivalent of the Dunmer "n'wah".) Examples: “You know what that word means? The one the High Elves call us? 'Nebarra.' It means 'unwelcome.'” “And now a damn nebarra is standing close enough for me to smell it! Well, nebarra? Speak up!” “Nebarra? Well, I suppose that's our word for the newcomers. I guess you could say it's impolite, but old habits can be hard to break.” “With all the nebarra in Alinor, it's no wonder the hunting has gotten worse.”

Forms of Address:

Barra - A greeting. Literal translation: "welcome."

Cerum - Gender neutral honorific probably equivalent to “sir” or “ma'am.”

Ceruval - Gender neutral honorific probably equivalent to “sir” or “ma'am.” I suspect it is more respectful than cerum, but that’s just inference based on usage.

Altmeri Cultural and Philosophical Concepts:

Alaxon - State of perfection. Example: "An Altmer concept practiced widely here in Summerset. Alaxon is the state of perfection that every High Elf strives for. The Path to Alaxon represents the approach we take to achieve that state."

Oegnithir - "The bad change." Example: "Membership in the Psijic Order will bring you both prestige and power. But such honors often lead to oegnithir—the bad change. What you do in the Order's name, you do for others. Never yourself."

Aprax (Singular, "an aprax elf"; plural, "apraxics") - Someone who has been outcast from society and banished for crimes. Members of society are forbidden from talking to apraxics. Similar, but not the same as ousters. Examples: “I'm what the clods in the kinhouses call an apraxic—an Elf criminal. There are other High Elf misfits called ousters, but the fortunes of an apraxic are a little more severe.” “He's not an aprax or an ouster, but he tries to act the part.” “If those surfacers know you're talking to an aprax, they might toss you out too.” “Apraxic Mer are people who, for whatever reason, were expelled from the greater Elven community. Most aprax labor for years to reenter society. Others choose to remain in exile.” “Rumor has it that a famous aprax called the Mother of Rats lives in the city, but I've never met her. Even if I did, we're forbidden from speaking with her.”

Apraxis - The state of being outcast from society and banished for crimes; exile. See The Price of Praxis for more info. Example: “Finally, she whispered the damning phrase, ‘Apraxis’ and let the sphere slip through her fingers.”

Calian, or praxic talisman - A symbol of a person's membership in Altmeri society. Possibly used as proof of ancestry. Physical descriptions of a praxic talisman from The Price of Praxis:

“At that time, the sphere was pristine—fashioned from milky aethequartz and sun-blown glass.”

“All the pride of my noble race found voice in its creamy luster.”

It is shattered if its owner becomes an aprax, and must be restored to allow return to Altmeri society.

“For thirty years, I labored over the shattered remains of my blessed calian. I spent the last of my gold gathering stone-cutting tools, pearl-powder fixatives, and sacred oils. I ate little and slept not at all. My beard grew long and my muscles withered. With each success came three new failures. And all the while, my fellow Altmer spurned and cursed me. Finally, one bright morning in Second Seed, I set the last delicate shard of glass in its place—returning the calian to its pristine origins.” — The Price of Praxis.

Calan - Possibly means the living members of a person’s clan, but that’s just conjecture based on context. Example: “My entire calan—mother, father, grandseers, and rumes—shuffled in their pews.” (Don’t ask me what “rumes” means, that’s the only time we ever see it used.)

Aednavorith - Genealogy. Example: "The monks of the Serene Harmony Monastery stand as the most renowned "Aednavorith" scholars in all of Summerset. The study of genealogy and ancestry remains a subject of endless interest to all High Elves."

Hulkynd - Literal translation: "Broken child." Altmer who were cast out of society as children because of some perceived imperfection or deformity. Examples:

Tableau: “High Elves strive for perfection in all things, and their bloodline most of all. Hulkynds are children abandoned by their families for some perceived imperfection, generally a physical deformity. They’re more than just orphans. They’re outcasts.” Player: “Outcasts? In what way?” Tableau: “In Summerset, family stands above all. They guide your life, almost immeasurably. To be without family is to be unseen, unrecognized as a member of our society. There’s not much of a life a hulkynd can make for themselves because of that.”

Manacar: “I have no family to shame, no name which to soil. I may as well be a shadow, for all the worth I am given. Society would rather ignore me than admit I exist. Of course, this anonymity allows me unprecedented freedom. A blessing within my curse.” Player: “Your curse? The fact that you’re a hulkynd?” Manacar: “Yes. I was rejected when I was but a babe. One look upon my face should tell you why.”

Valtarion: “Hulkynds have no sense of honor. It comes with being raised without a family, you know. That’s why no one trusts them.” Player: “What does having a family have to do with who you can trust?” Valtarion: “A family sets expectations. Here in Summerset, all we do is for our family’s honor. There’s no hope for someone who doesn’t have even that to guide them.”

Lilawen: “A mer without family cannot truly be considered a mer, after all. Why, he’s more than an outsider within Summerset. He’s truly nothing. A broken child can never hope to become anything more.”

Other Vocabulary:

Kynd - Child. Example: "Anyone is capable of anything. A snot-nosed kynd would murder his most beloved dog with a shovel if you gave him a good enough reason." 

Canvaroth - Scout. Example: "I often serve as the Ritemaster's canvaroth... a scout, as it were."

Halsoriel - sewer. Example: “It seems he escaped into the vaulted halsoriel.”

Graxifalas - Extremely disgraceful. Example: “It is graxifalas—disgraceful on a scale you outsiders can't even imagine.”

Kamlehal - "Shrieking terror." Example:

Erudil: “I borrowed it from the Librarium Kamlehal to impress Glardir.” Player: “Librarium Kamlehal? What’s that?” Erudil: “The… uhm… Library of Shrieking Terror.”

Eluvein - Another name for the hilas owl, used to describe people who are cold-hearted or aloof. Example: “Eluveins lay their eggs, then abandon them.”

Adma'na - Poor listener. Example: "I'm what they call an adma'na—poor listener."

Criminological Technical Jargon:

Admanen - Literal translation: "the listening eye." One of three members of an examiner's quorum whose role it is to inspect and advise, collect evidence, interview suspects, balance competing theories, and in general provide a fresh perspective to an investigation. Example: “You would take on the duties of the admanen, the listening eye.”

Revelator-naganwe - Literal translation: "death seer." One of three members of an examiner's quorum whose role it is to use magic to solve crimes. Example: “I am a revelator-naganwe—a death seer. I use magic to solve murders.”

Thalmilan - One of three members of an examiner's quorum whose role it is to parse clues and render a verdict. Example: “Jurisreeves always travel in groups of three. A quorum comprises three distinct roles—a revelator-naganwe for magical inquiry, an admanen to inspect and advise, and a thalmilan to parse the clues and render a verdict.”

Riasen - A critical witness to a crime. Example: "The Sapiarchs classified him as a riasen—a critical witness.

Etymological Roots of Place Names:

Russafeld - "Russafeld means 'scarlet shrine' in some dialects of Aldmeris, which may explain where the Red Temple gets its curious name. But the most commonly held opinion states that it's a shortening or corruption of 'Dread Temple.'" — Loading screen for Russafeld

Tor-Hame-Khard - "In Aldmeric, the name means Warlord's Mountain Lair, as these vast halls were originally built in the early First Era for the legendary Prime Battlereeve Fiirfarya. One morning the estate's entire populace was found slaughtered, and thereafter the site was abandoned." — Loading screen for Tor-Hame-Khard

Ald Mora - Literal translation: “Old Forest.”

I came across more Altmeris words that were not defined, but these are all the words that I could find for which translation was provided, or there was enough context to infer a translation. All examples given above are taken directly from the game.

[teganovak]

Bobby pins (Scholar x Tyler)

(because i’m not over that illustration)

The day of the competition is easily the most hectic one Arthur's spent at Arlington yet, though he supposes that's to be expected. Everyone seems to be buzzing with energy as they gather around, waiting for the opening ceremony to start, and he finds himself soaking it all in. It culminates in a weird mixture of apprehension and anticipation inside of him, and he feels vaguely annoyed at the sensation; he was never this emotional before Arlington.

At least, he thinks with a sort of dry amusement, it's not as though he doesn't have a reason to be nervous. If his idea for the fashion show doesn't work out, the entire department would probably come after him, pitchforks and sewing kits in hand, with Karolina leading the mob. Or, he muses, she'll just stand aside and enjoy the show; one or the other, for sure.

"Psst," he hears from his left and shifts, eyes narrowing. Any frown that might've been making its way on his face, however, immediately softens as he spots Tyler's grin -- for whatever reason, Arthur finds it hard to be moody around him. "Shouldn't you be with your department?" he raises an eyebrow instead and, as he feels the bead ring on it being pulled, he wonders, distinctly, if he should've perhaps taken it out; he's ‘Arlington's sweetheart’, after all, and piercings don't exactly scream nice and approachable. Ah, well, he decides. Screw people if they judge him based on that. At his question though, Tyler waves a hand dismissively. "There's still some time left, it's fine. Besides," he grins and Arthur must be imagining this because he can swear he sees Tyler's cheeks darken. "I wanted to see how you were doing." Oh.

It's a sweet gesture, really; one Arthur would probably be rolling his eyes at if it was anybody else. But no, it's him, and it's Tyler, and that seems to be enough to leave him speechless, mind blank. "Er," he says finally and winces, annoyed at his own fumbling; he's never had problems with eloquence before. "I'm fine. I know we have a good idea, it's only a matter of executing it well." It's a very him thing to say, he's aware, and Tyler nods, unsurprised. "Yeah, I figured," he says and something in his grin seems to soften as he reaches out to give Arthur a light pat on the arm. "Even if you were nervous, though. Well. You'd still be a badass." Arthur has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling -- he doesn't think he does a very good job but the effort has to count for something. "...Thanks." Tyler laughs, hand sliding off of Arthur's arm, says, "Anytime, man," and suddenly Arthur has no idea what's next. Is he supposed to say something? His mind once again goes annoyingly blank. He thinks he's about to say something really stupid when, thankfully, Tadashi calls out to the student body. "We're on in two minutes, everybody join their department!" Arthur lets out a small sigh -- whether one of relief or disappointment, he's not really sure -- and throws Tyler a half-smile. "Well. Guess that's your cue." (He's surprised by how much he wants Tyler to just stay and chat, and the feeling is so bizarre he nearly frowns. ) "Yeah," Tyler says and returns the smile. "Before I go though, here." He pulls something out of the pocket of his uniform and holds out a fist, gesturing for Arthur to extend his hand. "Are you going to put something nasty in it?" Arthur asks, snorting in amusement even as he's already extending his right hand towards Tyler, who then laughs as well, and it registers somewhere in the back of Arthur's mind that he has a nice laugh. (It’s a weird thought.)

"Nah, not this time."

Arthur's officially curious and as Tyler finally drops the supposedly-not-nasty object in his hand, he has to squint. "Are those... bobby pins?" "Damn right they are," Tyler says, proud, but there's a maybe imaginary flush on his face once again. "And they're grey so they fit your whole 'prince of darkness' aesthetic." Arthur blinks at him as he slowly processes everything that’s just happened. "That's... Okay, first of all, never call me prince of darkness again. It makes me sound like a twelve-year-old that shops exclusively in Cold Topic," he says and makes a face because damn it, he really used to be that kid and it’s a memory he definitely doesn’t want to go back to.

"Anyway, uh... thanks. I guess." It's not that he's not grateful as much as he doesn't really understand why Tyler's given him this, and belatedly Arthur realises he could've probably worded that better. Fortunately, Tyler doesn't seem offended as he lets out another laugh. "It's for your hair, tall-dark-and-handsome," he says and Arthur is torn between rolling his eyes at the new moniker (which also makes him sound like the aforementioned twelve-year-old) and teasing Tyler for pointing out the obvious. In the end, he says nothing as Tyler continues. "It's covering your face. And while I do think you absolutely rock the whole messy look, you're more likely to get votes if people can see your entire face." Arthur stares at him for a long moment until Tyler eventually shifts in his spot. "It's kinda a silly idea, I know, and you don't have to actually use them, obviously, but I thought I'd suggest it anyway. Since, you know, you mentioned you had to get into the Silver Tier and all -- which I'm sure you'll do even without the bobby pins. Like I said, just an idea." When Arthur's brain finally catches up to what Tyler’s saying, his hand closes around the bobby pins almost involuntarily. "No, uh," his voice comes out weird and he clears his throat. "No. It's... it's a good idea. Thank you. Really." Tyler lets out an exaggerated sigh and makes a show of wiping the metaphorical sweat off his brow. "Oh, good! You're welcome!” After a beat, he adds, “You're gonna look so good the cameras won't be able to look away! And it’ll all be thanks to yours truly."

Arthur rolls his eyes as he lets out a snort; he's not sure he'll even get to be on camera, with how many people there are, but he doesn’t exactly mind; he works best in the background anyway. "Right, I'm sure," he plays along regardless. ”I’ll be sure to remember you when I skyrocket to fame.” Then he unclenches his hand and he looks down at the pins. "Er, do you mind...?" Tyler needs no further prompting as he immediately jumps in action. "Absolutely! Let me just..." And he moves closer, eyes narrowing in concentration as one of his hands goes to push Arthur's hair to the side. "Pin please." Arthur obediently hands him one and then, a few seconds later, he hands him the other as well. When Tyler steps back to examine his work, he raises an eyebrow. "Well, doc? What's the verdict?" It takes Tyler a moment to respond. "Uh, yeah,” he nods, and there’s something Arthur can’t quite place in his eye. “Looking good.” And then just as quickly as that something appeared, it vanishes, replaced by a cheeky grin. “Just like I said you would." Arthur's eyes linger on him a moment longer, though, and there's a thought half-forming in his head. Before he can accurately place the feeling in his chest, however, Tadashi interrupts once again. "Tyler," he calls, walking briskly in their direction. "We're starting any moment now; for the love of god, go to your department," he says and Arthur has to stifle a snort. It shouldn't be funny, he knows that, in theory; Tadashi’s probably had only a few hours of sleep and he's been running around the school like mad for the past few days. However the pure annoyance mixed with a healthy dose of resignation on his face makes for one hell of an expression and, well, Arthur’s only human. (Then he happens to meet Tyler's eye for the briefest second and containing his amusement gets even harder.) "I'm already gone," Tyler turns to Tadashi, raising his hands in surrender. "Now you see me..." and he throws Arthur one last look before dashing off. Arthur sighs, still amused, but what can he do, let Tyler down? As if. So he shakes his head and dutifully finishes, "Now you don't." The glint in Tadashi's eye at that promises murder but aw, hell, Arthur's tired too; he shrugs. "Don't look at me, I'm just an innocent bystander." (Tadashi stares at him for a bit before letting out the deepest, most desperate sigh Arthur’s ever heard and walking away, muttering something about dumb teenagers. Which, fair, but hi, kettle, it's pot.) When he finally turns to glance at where Lady Arlington is standing, ready to begin her speech, Arthur finally lets out the smile he's been fighting off. He feels... better. Not necessarily calm but that's alright; he always gets a buzz under his skin whenever he gets to work on something he's passionate about and if anything, it only helps him focus. But getting to talk to Tyler, even if just for a little bit, was... nice. His hand, almost subconsciously, goes up to touch the bobby pins, and as he does, he notices a random student staring at him. His hand drops immediately and his eyes narrow; he’s unabashedly pleased as the guy quickly averts his gaze -- Arthur does have a reputation of a prince of darkness to uphold, after all.

[i-am-the-entertainer]

RevieWBY: Volume 6, Chapter 1 “Argus Limited”

Spoilers for Volume 6, Chapter 1

This is the first of what I hope are gonna be regular RWBY review posts. It’s hard, nay almost difficult to review individual episodes of RWBY considering each part is only a single piece of an overall product, but I think there’s value in giving special attention to what the show gets right in its individual episodes.

I want to emphasize a bulk of this was written in response to the premiere screenings, which is a significantly different experience from watching it on RoosterTeeth.com, considering everything is in your face and you’re watching it with fellow fans, which makes it a more visceral experience I think. I have edited this here and there after watching it again on the website, but since my first experience with the episode will always be from a giant screen, take what I say with a grain of salt.

As I suspected, it looks like the trailer is made up of footage from the first few episodes. About 50% of what we saw in the trailer came from this episode, mostly the stuff involving the action sequences. Two possible explanations for this:

The pipeline for production hasn’t changed: they’re still producing the episodes as they come out.

The pipeline has in fact changed but they don’t want to spoil stuff.

If it’s 1, I’m worried because I and several other people felt a rushed production timeline was why Volumes 4 and 5 had major storytelling issues. The thing is, it’s clear from the BTS stuff they showed that the general production pipeline has changed: the studio has gotten bigger, and I think production on gen:LOCK has forced them to fix the problems they already had: meaning, they’re spending more time on the finished product. And it makes sense not to spoil the latter half of the season in the trailer: considering it’s serialized storytelling, it’s a big no-no to give that kind of thing away before the show even comes out.

And this episode? They clearly had a lot of time to work on it. This is the best animation-wise the show has looked: there’s a lot of attention paid to minute details in the show. Character movements are more fluid, the choice to turn to more anime-like gags is making the show feel more like RWBY that we’re used to (which to be fair the first episodes of the last two volumes also did and did nothing with so take that with a grain of salt), and during our first big battle sequence minute things like firing effects and visuals are so much better than they’ve been: the show looks more like a cartoon/anime now more than ever before, which is coming down to the movements just as much as the visuals. But it even comes down to the little details, like how Weiss’s mouth is at a certain angle when she’s complaining about having to go back to Atlas, and how it seems like characters’ faces use more than just the mouth and eyebrows to convey emotions.

Characterization was, as usual, excellent––let’s be honest, the characters have always been at least the second best part of the show, next to the fights. The dynamic between team RWBY, despite their long separation, is the same as ever. And appropriate for what’s happened, there’s definite tension between Yang and Blake over what happened back in Vale in Volume 3. Considering this fandom’s seeming inability to accurately predict story direction (which I myself am guilty of), I don’t want to make too many calls about where I see the story go, but I think it’s safe to say they’re not going to gloss over a firm reconciliation between Yang and Blake: we get a strong hint of that in the opening.

The humor in this episode was a lot better as well: jokes didn’t seem forced, and at my screening the laughs really came from entertaining character interaction. They’re definitely trying to lean back into the anime vibe from the earlier seasons, but the jury’s out on whether that’s gonna be consistent for the rest of the season.

I don’t have much to say about how Ilia and Sun were removed from the plot other than, “Yeah, that’s a good call.” Let’s be honest, having too many characters doing too many things was a problem even during the so-called “golden age” of the show, so removing them from the equation would have had to happen or we all would have been moaning for the Volume to end sooner. And I think they got proper send-offs: Ilia’s been redeemed and gone off to her own adventures, and SSSN is back together (Neptune had everyone at my screening doubled over in laughter).

The choice to start the episode with the fight, then cut to earlier, then show a small portion of the fight before continuing the story was an interesting one, one I enjoyed. For one thing, it gives us a chance to see the whole Team RWBY in action right off the bat, and definitely sates everyone’s desire to see an action scene: we don’t need any context as to why they’re fighting, we just know for sure that they are once again a team. Honestly? After two seasons of waiting, the fan in me is relieved they didn’t waste any more time for that. Plus it would have saved the fight sequence from going on longer than it needed to with a weird pause to have Oscar tell Dudley to turn off the turrets.

So, uh, speaking of the fight...

Regarding the big battle sequence: it’s an improvement, there is absolutely no denying it. But on first viewing I didn’t think it was particularly memorable.

There was a lot going on, sure, and after watching it a few times I think we can all agree they’ve definitely improved the fight animation: characters are once again on the move constantly, they’re using their weapons in the way they were designed to, no more awkward pauses, etc. But it felt like a battle that was inserted specifically to give the show a reason to set team RWBY on its own path. Which, granted, it was, but the problem was bigger than just it didn’t have very high stakes (and I applaud them for trying by having Dee get killed off almost immediately, but killing off a character we weren’t given much time to appreciate or even given the chance to like isn’t very high stakes––same reason why Sienna Khan’s abrupt death felt more annoying than shocking). The problem was the fight scene had too much going on.

Let me explain. If you’ve seen Lindsay Ellis’s Transformers film theory series, you might have seen her video essay about why it’s so hard to remember what happens in Michael Bay’s Transformers series. Basically, the Transformers films have a whole lot going on in terms of visual: explosions! Guns! Robots that transform into cars! Cars that transform into robots! Yeah yeah, lot of spectacle, but because the action is non-stop, you don’t have the mental power to retain it all.

One could argue that madcap fight sequences have always been part of RWBY’s charm. But the thing about previous fight sequences, especially Monty’s (look, I know it’s been some years now, but it’s an inevitable comparison, he set the bar), is that nonstop visual spectacle was never really all they were: in terms of pacing, shots of action were followed by moments that gave characters time to breathe: the separation of actions would then lead to a new way of shooting the fight. For reference, look at the gunchuck fight from Volume 1: camera angles and movements changed based on what portion of the fight is happening, with appropriate breathers in between. This contrast gives the fight maximum impact: it’s why the gunchucks’ introduction was so cool. For one of the best examples from Volumes 4 and 5, look at the Qrow v. Tyrian fight for a similar rhythm.

And while the shots in Volume 6′s premiere certainly showed off the movements well, the pacing was fast, the characters’ actions made sense, I wasn’t snoozing during the fight––basically covering a lot of the problems I’ve had with the post-Monty era of fight animation––because there wasn’t a whole lot of room to breathe in the fight, I didn’t get a very big impression from it. And it’s a pity, because there are some genuinely creative things going on that I couldn’t recall after the premiere and had to actually be reminded: I especially love the split screen of Qrow and Ruby using their scythes to to attack the Grimm, and I’m guessing based on the splitscreen’s presence in the opening that we’ll be seeing it used more (once again adding a more anime-feel to the show). Last volume’s Cinder vs. Raven fight actually got the right contrast down in terms of giving the battle time to breathe, but again it was still mostly non-stop visual explosion. I’m hoping we’ll see some improvement on this front. Plus, I can understand why they may have felt obligated to do this, as they wanted to make sure the season premiere was telling you “You want action? Here’s some action!” And this was a shitton better than the Volume 4 premiere fight and basically every fight that wasn’t Qrow v. Tyrian, Yang v. Bandits, and Cinder v. Raven (...damn. They haven’t had very good fights for a while, huh?). We’ll just have to see how the other fights hold up.

So overall verdict? Genuinely optimistic. They definitely seem to be taking viewer feedback into account with the little stuff I picked up in this episode (it helps that some of the relentlessly positive RWBY reviewers that I’m sure Rooster Teeth follows got so annoyed with the last volume I think they finally realized “Huh. Maybe we aren’t doing so great after all”). I can’t make a call on whether that logic applies to the whole Volume. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Nitpicks/Observations

The relic is inexplicably smaller. Why is the relic inexplicably smaller? Look, I get it, maybe you made it too big in Volume 5, and ultimately I can’t bring myself to care that much about it, but don’t just retcon it. Either just keep it that size and try to work the story around it, or show some sort of explanation as early as possible.

An accusation was made in the rwde tag shortly after the film screenings that claimed the shot of Ilia’s feet as she walks over to hug Blake was queerbaiting because the shot is framed as though she is going to kiss her. Look, that wasn’t the impression I got at all on first viewing, I’m still doubtful about it after rewatching the scene a few times, but the fact is queerbaiting is not an accusation that is leveled lightly. Representation is important, and I would hope the team understands that and that someone in the CRWBY would call out any moment of concern. That said, I also don’t think queerbaiting is an accusation that should just be made without some thought put into it (lest we forget the whole Lapidot thing on a show known for representation), and the thing is we haven’t gotten any signs from the show that Ilia and Blake are in any way meant to become a couple and the fact that both she and Sun (one of the characters most shipped with Blake) are leaving the show for now was enough for me to not interpret that show as romantic. But I think it’s important that the queerbaiting accusation not be just tossed aside. Have thoughts? Comment.

Look, as dramatic as “don’t let anyone else die” may have seemed, I really didn’t care that Dee died, and probably could not have been made to care.

Yet I should add––they weren’t gonna kill off a major character in the premiere. At this point I think they’ve learned deaths and major character injuries should only be done for emotional impact, if they’re done in the way where it’s just shock value (like Weiss getting impaled), it’s going to be very hard to get people to care (like everyone being like “Oh, that’s just stupid” when Weiss got impaled and there was a cliffhanger).

Like, I dunno, maybe just have the Grimm cause a significant amount of damage? That still gives them a reason to separate the relic from the rest of the car, and still gives RNJ something to do in the name of removing them from the plot.

The shot of the train crash was a little awkward. I think there was an issue with the framerate, or maybe the physics of it didn’t seem to work. I remember seeing it in theaters and thinking “Oh. That doesn’t look that great...”

Good intro to the mystery lady, who we now know is named Maria Calavera. So...when do we learn more?

Predictions

All the posts seem to be saying “Oh that hooded figure is Neo because of Torchwick’s hat floating nearby and she’s the only one without a parasol” or “Oh, that hooded figure is Cinder because of the Grimm arm and Cinder’s sword.” And the thing is: they’re two separate shots, and the latter is really darkened to hide their identity, moreso than the other. I am almost positive they’re two different people...

A note: Cinder’s return to the series is basically guaranteed. Unlike Torchwick, in public statements the writers have avoided outright confirming she’s dead. It would make sense for her survival to be revealed a couple episodes in, with her shot in the opening then brightened.

As for Neo, it’s been 3 years. If they don’t bring her back now, what exactly is the point of the character continuing to exist?

Whoever our mystery person is...they are probably the one whom Kerry claimed in the BTS bit would be the one we’d sympathize with. I don’t think he’s referring to Adam: it doesn’t feel as though Adam is being set up for a redemption arc, especially given his characterization in the character short.

The moon is whole...and then it shatters. Symbolism? Could this be another Volume 3?

Judging by the trailer and the intro, we might finally get some “Ozpin is not what he seems” explanation...

Death flags for Qrow: he already had the major injury in Volume 4. If a major character is going to die this Volume, it’s him.

[quranreadalong]

SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: MOSES’ EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, PART 4

So we’ve established that there’s no doubt that the exodus of Hebrew slaves from Egypt to Canaan did not take place, and that Moses was only tied to books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy for political reasons somewhere between the 7th and 4th centuries BC. The conclusion to the Exodus story, the conquest of Canaan, is also mythical and probably a later addition to the tale. Moses is a mythical figure, albeit one who has been around for quite a while. But that leads us to back to our first question: is this a mythologized version of some real event or is it a completely mythical origin story, like Romulus and Remus? How far back can we date the story of Moses?

Throughout the past three centuries of Biblical scholarship, some scholars have tried (usually in vain) to find some explanation for the events described in Exodus. Even though they know it didn’t happen as described, even though it’s clear that the Hebrews have always lived in “Canaan” without any sudden mass immigration to the area, they theorized that maybe Exodus was a metaphor for some other, more minor event that involved some people of Israel or Judah or both.

The Bible dates the Exodus to around 500 years before the reign of King Solomon, and Solomon’s supposed time is around 1000 BC. So we’re looking at a hypothetical time of 1500 BC. This era of Egypt’s history was pretty well-documented, and nothing even remotely similar to the Exodus--even assuming the Biblical account has inflated numbers and mythological elements--is found in those records. So the story is clearly more complicated than “the Jews based the story on a real but smaller journey from Egypt”.

Biblical scholars have noted that regardless of whether there was a “real” event that Exodus was based upon or not, the authors of Exodus itself almost certainly didn’t know exactly when it happened, beyond being “a long time ago”. There are no dates in the book, no specific details that would allow one to identify the era; the villain of the story is just called “the pharaoh”, no name given. Compare this to the Book of Kings or Chronicles, books written about ancient but (mostly) real Jewish leaders, where the details may largely be mythological but the figures in the stories are based on named, identifiable individuals in clear eras. So whenever Exodus was first written, or orally transmitted, it was long after those involved in the supposed events were gone. 

With all that in mind, let’s look at a handful of the theories about the ultimate source of the story.

THE EXODUS IS...

…THE MYTHOLOGIZED VERSION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE LEVITES

This theory is based more on Biblical texts outside the Exodus story than within it. One of the twelve tribes of Israel was the tribe of Levi. The Levites were the kingdom’s priestly class, and at least in post-exilic times the priests claimed descent from Aaron (and he, Moses, and their family were supposed to be descendants of Levi). Unlike the other eleven tribes, they didn’t get a particular piece of land–they just lived throughout Israel in major cities. Because they have a different status than the other 11 tribes, some have suggested that they came to Israel from somewhere else and dispersed throughout the territory. That, combined with some of the Levites in the Exodus story having names (including Moses and Aaron himself) that sound plausibly Egyptian, has led a handful of scholars to believe that while the majority of Jews always lived in Canaan, maybe the Levites were some group who left Egypt and then joined the other tribes, who were later added to the Exodus story to make it more universal. The story itself may be mythical, but they contend it was at least based on a movement of a (future) Jewish group from Egypt to Israel.

There is no archaeological, genetic, historical, or any other sort of evidence for this. It seems to be mainly a theory for those who want to believe that there was some movement of Jews from Egypt to Israel while acknowledging that the entire group did not make this trek. The connection between the Levite priests and Aaron (and the story of Aaron itself) seems to be a rather late invention, as mentioned last section, so his name being possibly Egyptian is hardly evidence of anything. For the record, most scholars think that priesthood in Israel was open to every tribe, but gradually the families of the priests intermarried and consolidated spiritual power, and this--not a migration--is how the Levites came to be in ancient times.

Verdict: There’s no evidence that the Levites came to Israel from Egypt, let alone in an Exodus-like event, nor is there evidence that “Levites” were a distinct, interrelated group anywhere close to the supposed time of Exodus. Considered unlikely.

...SOME MYTHOLOGICAL VERSION OF SOME OTHER SMALL GROUP OF ESCAPED SLAVES

There’s nothing to back this one up aside from the fact that the writer(s) of the Exodus story seems to have had a fairly good understanding of the geography of the desert between Egypt and Israel. There were slaves at the time and some did escape, so some scholars say that hey, maybe a small group of slaves did make their way to Israel from Egypt, and this huge story gradually grew out of that real event. Maybe that group wasn’t comprised of Levites or anyone particularly important, but it still made for a good story, so the memory of the journey survived. These scholars acknowledge that the hypothetical original story had basically zero resemblance to the Exodus we know, they just speculate that some small group did make the journey.

Verdict: No evidence one way or the other.

...A REFERENCE TO THE ENSLAVED “APIRU” PEOPLE

Some Akkadian records mention a group called the Apiru or “Habiru” located throughout the Middle East, some of whom were slaves. Since “Habiru” obviously sounds quite a bit like “Hebrew”, early scholars thought that there might be some connection. Perhaps, they reasoned, the real exodus involved the “Habiru” breaking away from their masters--not in Egypt, but in Canaan itself. The Egyptians were worked into the story due to Egyptian domination of the region.

But further investigation has shown that “Habiru” was essentially a derogatory term, like “brigands” or something of that nature--it did not refer to people in one area or even one ethnic/linguistic group. While some were slaves, many of the people called “Apiru” were outlaws, murderers, and mercenaries. In many cases the word “Apiru” is used to refer to bands of mercenaries who are hired by some would-be ruler. There is nothing in particular to link them to the future people of Israel/Judah, let alone anything connecting them to any sort of exodus event. While the words do sound vaguely similar, that’s the only thing even sort of linking them to the Hebrews.

Verdict: No real evidence to support it; since the term doesn’t seem to refer to a specific ethnic group and has no clear link to Israel, it’s not considered probable.

...A REFERENCE TO THE COLLAPSE OF HYKSOS RULE OF EGYPT

The “Hyksos” were some group of vaguely Levantine people who took over the government of Egypt and ruled it for a while, usually through vassals, around the 1500s BC. It’s unclear exactly when their influence started and how it began in the first place; most believe it wasn’t a simple invasion but rather involved large numbers of migrants arriving in Egypt for trade and such. Regardless, by the 1400s BC they had largely been routed. Because it fits the timeline given in the Book of Kings and Israel is in the Levant, many throughout history have hypothesized that there is some connection between them and the Exodus story. Maybe the Hyksos getting kicked out of Egypt and back to the Levant, where they came from, was the basis of Exodus; the Hyksos were re-cast as slaves to make them more sympathetic. Some go further and suggest that the cataclysmic Minoan eruption, which occurred around this time, was the basis of the Biblical plagues, seen in hindsight as god’s punishment falling upon the Egyptians (not that they were the only ones affected by it).

The first-century Roman Jewish historian Josephus claimed that the “Hyksos” mentioned in Egyptian records were a lordly class of shepherds, which he suggests is the root etymology for their name. Thousands of these shepherds left Egypt for Jerusalem at the end of Hyksos rule. The only problem with this is that there are no records saying it actually happened, and the source Josephus claimed he got this from (which no longer exists) dates to the 300s BC, which would be over a thousand years later. Also, Josephus got the etymology of “Hyksos” wrong (it just means “foreign leaders” basically). Moreover, the “Hyksos” as a people in the region stop being mentioned centuries before the time that “Israelites” became a distinct group.

Verdict: The “Hyksos” probably did originate in the Levant (around modern-day southwestern Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine) and did have some connection to Egypt in the 1500s BC, but absolutely nothing about their history bears any resemblance to the Exodus or Moses. It’s possible that some vague, region-wide (not specific to the people of Israel and Judah) memory of the Hyksos influenced the story in some way, but that’s as far as it goes.

...REALLY ABOUT A REVOLT OF LEPERS

Josephus mentions that the same lost 4th century BC Egyptian source (or rather a document based on that source) claims that a priest named Osarseph led a revolt of lepers and other undesirables against the pharaoh of Egypt. They helped the Hyksos conquer Egypt and religiously oppressed the population before they were finally defeated. Oh and then Osarseph changed his name to Moses!

Yet again, this event isn’t recorded in any actual Egyptian texts. The fact that the only source we know of for this story post-dates Exodus has led many to view it as later anti-Jewish propaganda, as the rebellious group is obviously evil here. The original myth about the lepers’ revolt was probably a metaphor for the religious policies of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who forced an unpopular policy of worshiping only one god, the sun god Aten, on Egypt before the country reverted to its earlier practices after his death. The details connecting it with the Exodus story were almost certainly later additions.

Verdict: Pretty clearly doesn’t have anything to do with it.

...AN EGYPTIAN MYTH BROUGHT TO ISRAEL BY MEMBERS OF THE “SHASU”

I mentioned in an earlier section that Egyptian records in the 15th-13th centuries BC name some group called the “Shasu”, who appear to have been a nomadic people spread out over a large area, with most in the Jordan region. One group of Shasu is called “Shasu of Y-h-w-”, which some scholars connect to the word “Yahweh”. Some speculate that they brought some stories from Egypt with them, including perhaps the one above, and over time it just changed until it reached the form we now know. Others believe that Exodus is based on the enslavement of some Shasu people themselves, though there is zero historical evidence suggesting that they were enslaved in large numbers or left Egypt in a slave revolt. This is all purely hypothetical--there’s no evidence for it at all.

Verdict: The connection between the Shasu and Yahweh may have some truth to it but there’s nothing to suggest they were the originators of the Exodus story.

...BASED ON THE COLLAPSE OF EGYPTIAN RULE OF THE LEVANT

The beginnings of the Israelites as a distinct group, rather than just one of many Canaanite peoples, seem to have their roots in the societal collapse around the whole eastern Mediterranean region of the 1200s BC. During this time, groups of “sea peoples”, evidently mostly Greeks and Philistines (Greek colonists in the Levant), went on an absolute tear of destroying shit along the eastern Mediterranean. It’s unclear if this caused the collapse, or if these people had been affected by the collapse and sought to conquer other territories as a result, but there’s no doubt that it was not a fun time to live in this region. It’s easy to see why small splinter groups would arise and fight with one another to protect what little they had in such an environment, and at first, the people of Israel (and later Judah) were probably just one of many such groups.

The first probable reference to a people called Israel dates to around the year 1200 BC in the Merneptah Stele, which states that the armies of Egypt destroyed them in addition to various other peoples of the Canaan region. Egypt, you see, had been attacked by the “sea peoples” too, but they’d fought them off and their society had survived. And so they did what the Egyptians did best, namely keep their many territories in line by occasionally attacking the rebellious people living there. This event in the life of the young nation was no doubt quite traumatizing and probably did not endear the Egyptians to them. But they’d get the last laugh--Egypt may have thought that it survived the collapse, but the kingdom would eventually fall into political and economic disarray, beginning only 100 or so years after the aforementioned “destruction” of Israel. The resulting decline of Egyptian influence in the region allowed Israel to prosper, and by 1000 BC it had become a true, functional kingdom.

Some scholars speculate that the oldest part of the Exodus story is the “Song of the Sea”, which is written in a noticeably archaic style compared to the rest of the book (though others point out that this might have been intentional, i.e. someone was writing in Old-Timey Hebrew the way someone might write in Old-Timey English in a fictional work). This “song” doesn’t actually mention Moses himself, nor the whole slave thing, but does say that the Lord destroyed the pharaoh’s armies and cast them into the sea, then boasts of how he will help the Hebrews conquer various regional rivals. These scholars believe that this may have been the actual basis of Exodus, transmitted orally, with Moses and the narrative of slavery etc all being added later to build a story around this text. But they believe that the original text itself was just implying that the god of the Hebrews had destroyed the Egyptians as punishment for Egypt attacking them.

Verdict: There are important scholars who believe it’s a credible theory, though obviously it has nothing much in common with the final version of Exodus beyond the role of Egyptians as villains.

...A VARIANT OF THE LEVIATHAN STORY TAKEN FROM ANOTHER CULTURE

This one is sometimes presented as a precursor to the theory above and sometimes presented as its own thing. In the Bible, there is a story of God defeating some evil sea creature named Leviathan or Rahab. This story is from the Baal Cycle of Middle Eastern mythology, which seems to have started or was at least heavily developed by the Ugarites. In this story, the evil sea creature Lotan is defeated by Baal, who you may remember as one of the Canaanite gods who was also worshiped by the Jews before such things were outlawed. No one really disputes that this is where the story of Leviathan came from, but that’s not really the point.

The point is that there are some features that the Exodus story seems to share with, if not pulled from, the Leviathan story. Take this from the Book of Isaiah, written around the 6th century BC:

Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,    who pierced the dragon? Was it not you who dried up the sea,    the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way    for the redeemed to pass over?

YHWH destroys the evil creature and “dried up the sea” so that “the redeemed” could cross over it. In other parts of the Bible written around the same time, like the Book of Ezekiel, the pharaoh himself is called “the great monster lurking in the streams of the Nile”.

Obviously, these later writers connected the Leviathan story to Exodus' account of Yahweh killing the Egyptian army in the sea. But might there have been a historical reason for this connection? Maybe a very early version of the Exodus story was just an upgraded version of the Leviathan tale, with YHWH smiting the monstrous pharaoh in the water. And maybe that story got combined with some of the other stories above, like the escaped-slave narrative.

Verdict: Maybe...?

...MANY DIFFERENT MYTHICAL STORIES GLUED TOGETHER OVER CENTURIES, WITH EACH ADDITION COMING AT AN IMPORTANT TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS BUT NOT HAVING ANY HISTORICAL BASIS

This one is intentionally vague but it’s repeated by a lot of scholars. Rather than just one or two of the above being correct, the Exodus story was likely built up over time, and did not reach its basic form--the persecution and enslavement of Hebrews, Moses as the central figure, who as a baby was taken into the royal household and as an adult was a prophet, the plagues and the destruction of the pharaoh, the trek to Canaan, the conquest of its people--until not long before (or even after) the exile, after which the various laws were added to it along with a few other changes. Maybe it really did start as the Leviathan myth, and then it was changed into being about the pharaoh’s army being drowned after the Bronze Age Collapse. Maybe then the Israelites wanted to be different from the other Canaanites and later said that all of this happened in Egypt itself and the Hebrews left and conquered their current homeland rather than just always living there. Maybe the slavery part was from a myth taken from the Egyptians themselves or from some group that really did make its way to Israel from Egypt. Maybe Moses was only included from this point onwards and not before it. Maybe much of it is true, in small measures.

For example, nearly all scholars believe that Moses’ childhood is based on a mythical account of the king Sargon of Akkad, who is described in a 7th century BC at latest (it is probably earlier than that) text as:

My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me.

...which itself is based, in all likelihood, on an even older tale about the Queen of Kanesh. So Moses’ personal story probably wasn’t finalized until not long before the exile itself; many of the details of the story indicate an 8th century BC origin at earliest, though most believe it is more likely the 7th century, with other additions centuries after that. (Some of the same scholars think that details of Moses’s later life were based on Hadad of Edom--the relationship between the two is obvious but which came first is extremely unclear.)

There are scholars who believe that other details about the behavior of the Hebrews during the journey through the desert may have their origins in some sort of conflict between Judah and Israel, as the Exodus story has many similarities to the (mostly legendary) story of the Israelite king Jeroboam in the Book of Kings and Book of Chronicles. For example, Jeroboam receives word that he has a great destiny, flees to Egypt and then returns to Israel. When he gets back, he demands the king Rehoboam stop treating the people of Israel so harshly, and leads a successful revolt against him when he refuses. This is given as the origin of the Kingdom of Israel, after it separated from the united monarchy (which, just to reiterate, we have no historical evidence for). But then Jeroboam and his people fall into sinfulness, as they build a golden calf idol, falling back out of god’s favor.

Obviously the details are too similar to be a coincidence. Some scholars believe Jeroboam’s actions were intended to hearken back to the Exodus story... but others believe that it was the other way around. The Bible, which was written almost entirely by Judeans, presents their vanquished northern neighbors as overly influenced by foreigners, prone to idolatry, and generally incapable of ruling themselves without falling into sin. As we saw in the first section, this was likely tied to the Judean kings’ determination to “restore” their “rightful” rule over Israel.

And so other scholars believe that Jeroboam or a similar early king of Israel did indeed build calf idols, and the people writing this story in Josiah’s time sought to present this as a grave sin in the eyes of YHWH and one of the reasons for Israel’s later collapse. So the calf story was inserted into Exodus, where it is shown to be a heinous act that YHWH brutally punishes. Probably not coincidentally, the Book of Kings has a prophet saying that Josiah himself will personally destroy the site where Jeroboam built the calf idols. And that is what Josiah did, when he took over Bethel and demolished the cult center there (to eliminate a rival religious center for Jerusalem, in all likelihood).

It’s not a crazy theory, because as we’ve seen, most of the hypothetical additions to the (also hypothetical) base text served some political or religious purpose--the document was not thrown together randomly. In the 600s BC, it served to unite a nation under an ambitious leader and provide a justification for his policies; in the 500s and 400s BC, it served to re-form the history and spiritual life of a destroyed and restored people. Moses as a figure proved useful to writers in both eras. He hated what they hated, and loved what they loved, because they wrote him that way.

The Exodus was a perpetually changing document, and we just know the end result of it all. It likely wasn’t originally about an adopted Egyptian prince sending plagues upon the Egyptians and leading his people to Canaan after various desert shenanigans, but that’s the tale that solidified at some point after the Babylonian exile, becoming a central component of the history of the Jewish people. Given everything we’ve talked about, you can tell why the story had such enormous appeal to Jews in the exilic and post-exilic era, regardless of its origins--in the end, it was about their triumph as a people, and a return to their homeland. Jews and Christians in Mohammed’s era fully believed in the Exodus, with no doubts about its historicity, and so it’s the tale Mohammed had to work with--with even more additions from apocryphal texts. So let’s leave the “original” Moses, whoever he was, behind, and actually get back to the Quran now.

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[mysticsparklewings]

Crayola Artist Colored Pencils Test

Disclaimer: I would not have purchased these pencils even out of curiosity had they not been on clearance for around $9 at my local Michaels. Even before I bought them I was convinced they were not worth the $20-$30 retail price tag, based on other reviews I had already seen. I've had this set of the Crayola Signature Blend & Shade/Artist colored pencils for a couple of weeks now, and I put off addressing them in favor of some other art supplies I'd been salivating to get my hands on. But now that I've taken care of those, I finally sat down and decided to see what these were like for myself. I went in with very low expectations. First, let's talk about the name and a little background on the pencils themselves. For starters, there are at least two if not three kinds of "premium" colored pencils currently listed on Crayola's website, the Blend & Shade pencils (24 count, retail $20), the Artist pencils (24 count, retail $20), and the Color Escapes (72 count, retail $25). Based on the name on the packaging, I have the "Blend & Shade" pencils, but a quick look at the details of the packaging and on the website, you cannot convince me that the Blend & Shade and the Artist pencils aren't the bloody exact same pencils, just with a different name and in different tins. The Color Escapes might not be the same as them, if only because their barrels appear to be hexagonal (hexagon shaped/six-sided), and the other two are circular/round. But based on the specifications, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they're otherwise identical. The other thing I want to point out are two very specific claims for these pencils; Crayola claims that they have soft, gel-based cores. The soft claim isn't very special, as most any colored pencil trying to lay stake in the same market as Prismacolor will say that, whether it's actually true or not. (For the record, I didn't find them that soft, but we'll get to that later.) The gel-based cores, on the other hand, are what initially caught my attention the first time I encountered these pencils. If you Google "gel core pencils" or some variation, you'll find listings for these pencils, and articles comparing colored pencils and gel pens, and not much else. Usually, colored pencils are either wax (Prismacolor, classic Crayola, etc.) or oil (Faber Castell Polychromos, Schpirerr Farben, etc.) based, so these are an interesting case, and I think this is a lot more important than most people that have taken a look at these realize. The first 1-2 layers, which for me was a white base to neutralize the tan paper, and the base for the lighter areas of color, went down feeling okay, but they looked pretty scratchy. Once I got to about the third layer though, things started to smooth out. After that, they layered and blended much better than I expected. Not perfectly, but well enough I would dare to call both good. The pigmentation was...interesting. The colors are bright, but they just don't get very dark or rich, including the black, which looks more like a very very dark gray and not a true black. So they took a bit of extra force to get the payoff I wanted, but they were by no means a total nightmare to get color out of. The thing is, I think the wonky pigmentation lends itself to blending and layering with these. Although I will say I was impressed with how easily the other colors "read" when layered over black. Usually, once you put a heavy layer of black down, you can't do much else with it. But here, you could sort of see the color "bleeding" over it, and that was actually pretty useful to me. The only truly bothersome issue I had was that I had the black pencil tip break three times back to back while trying to sharpen it (and eventually had to resort to using the fat side of an eyeliner sharpener to get it to actually sharpen and stay that way), and the purple/violet broke once. I think the pencils sharpen much quicker and much more sensitively than the average pencil user would be used to since when you're coloring with them the cores seem pretty sturdy and didn't give me any breaking issues there. If anything, the cores seem much harder than one would expect a "soft, gel" core to be. (And I am 100% sure it wasn't my normal sharpener that was the problem because it sharpens all my other pencils [including my softcore Prismacolors] just fine and has a high quality, sharp blade.) I have a theory on how a lot of what I observed might relate to the gel cores, but I'll be putting it in small text so that if you're really not interested you can just skip down to my final verdict. And just one other disclaimer here that I'm not an art-scientist of any kind so this is all nothing more than speculation based on prior knowledge: So, I don't know about you guys, but the idea of "gel" cores draws me almost immediately to gel pens. You'll notice if you look at the barrel of a gel pen that you can usually see the ink and a clear liquid pocket seeming to sit on top of it, but if you tilt the pen that stuff doesn't usually visibly move at all, leading me to believe if probably adjusted it could be used as a solid not unlikely these pencils. Now, the reason that wax and oil based pencils still have similar behaviors is that by virtue of being pencils they both still have a lot of similar fillers and additives that make up a pencil-core formula. (Hence why oil-based pencils do not feel oily to the touch, etc.) My theory is that the gel in the cores behaves/is treated largely the same way. And this makes sense considering that in my experience with oil-based pencils, even the expensive Faber-Castell Polychromos, their pigmentation just can't seem to go quite as dark as something like the wax-based Prismacolors (specifically when looking at the black, though other colors can portray this too), and as I've already mentioned the gel cores didn't impress me with their pigmentation, either. But they did layer fairly well after giving them a base to work on, dare I say feeling somewhat like oil-based pencils would after that. Also, my theory for the sharpening issues is where things really get iffy on how accurate my ideas might be. If the gel cores contain that same unknown clear substance as part of their chemical make up, I'm left to wonder if it might be in the same family as liquid silicone or glycerin (since glycerin is often used by colorists to get more mileage out of gel pens in various ways) and thus can form "cells" in the gel, which could cause it to have natural cleavage like certain gemstones. (Cleavage in this case being points where it naturally breaks very easily). If all that is correct, and the cleavage points are in the right place, the sharpener blade could be naturally hitting them as it or the pencil is turned and causing the breaking issues. And if I am completely wrong, then I haven't the foggiest idea what's going on. Anyway. Ultimately, I do think these are at least a slight step up from the classic Crayola colored pencils, but for 24 pencils at $17.99 on Crayola's website...I'm sorry, but I can't in good conscience recommend these when the 24 set of Prismacolor pencils is currently $16.42 on Amazon, and the quality of those overall is much better. (At least if you ask me). At the very least, I'd say get the Crayola off of Amazon, as they're only $12.39 under the "Blend & Shade" name there. But even so...the June Gold mechanical pencils that I've tested before are also currently $9.97 for a set of 36... Look, Crayola, I'm sorry, and I really wanted to like these as much as I liked the Blending Markers, but from where I'm standing it looks like the gel cores were an experiment, and it shows pretty badly. It was an interesting concept, but I think some perfecting needs to be done before I can really get behind these pencils. That said, based on what I'd seen other people saying, I was expecting garbage. They aren't garbage, but I would make at least two other recommendations before I came to these when it comes to pencils. Although I am curious about what other colors you get in the 50 set...but I really sincerely don't need any more colored pencils  (For now...) As for the piece itself, I got the funky shape from using a stencil to draw several overlapping squares and then erasing the inner lines, and then accented with gel pens as usual (and it didn't really look that special before I took the pens to it). Oh, and a side note: these are the pencils my white Gelly Roll had the least issues trying to go over, likely because of the gel cores, but I'm not certain. Hopefully, my next supply test/review will be more positive. (It really should be; I've got two kinds of watercolor supplies and some water-based markers and all these things have left pretty positive impressions on others already). ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[ciathyzareposts]

Darklands

Darklands may well have been the most original single CRPG of the 1990s, but its box art was planted firmly in the tacky CRPG tradition. I’m not sure that anyone in Medieval Germany really looked much like these two…

Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the genres of the adventure game and the CRPG tended to blend together, in magazine columns as well as in the minds of ordinary gamers. I thus considered it an early point of order for this history project to attempt to identify the precise differences between the genres. Rather than addressing typical surface attributes — a CRPG, many a gamer has said over the years, is an adventure game where you also have to kill monsters — I tried to peek under the hood and identify what really makes the two genres tick. At bottom, I decided, the difference was one of design philosophy. The adventure game focuses on set-piece, handcrafted puzzles and other unique interactions, simulating the world that houses them only to the degree that is absolutely necessary. (This latter is especially true of the point-and-click graphic adventures that came to dominate the field after the 1980s; indeed, throughout gaming history, the trend in adventure games has been to become less rather than more ambitious in terms of simulation.) The CRPG, meanwhile, goes in much more for simulation, to a large degree replacing set-piece behaviors with systems of rules which give scope for truly emergent experiences that were never hard-coded into the design.

Another clear difference between the two genres, however, is in the scope of their fictions’ ambitions. Since the earliest days of Crowther and Woods and Scott Adams, adventure games have roamed widely across the spectrum of storytelling; Infocom alone during the 1980s hit on most of the viable modern literary genres, from the obvious (fantasy, science fiction) to the slightly less obvious (mysteries, thrillers) to the downright surprising (romance novels, social satires). CRPGs, on the other hand, have been plowing more or less the same small plot of fictional territory for decades. How many times now have groups of stalwart men and ladies set forth to conquer the evil wizard? While we do get the occasional foray into science fiction — usually awkwardly hammered into a frame of gameplay conventions more naturally suited to heroic fantasy — it’s for the most part been J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, over and over and over again.

This seeming lack of adventurousness (excuse the pun!) among CRPG designers raises some interesting questions. Can the simulation-oriented approach only be made to work within a strictly circumscribed subset of possible virtual worlds? Or is the lack of variety in CRPGs down to a simple lack of trying? An affirmative case for the latter question might be made by Origin Systems’s two rather wonderful Worlds of Ultima games of the early 1990s, which retained the game engine from the more traditional fantasy CRPG Ultima VI but moved it into settings inspired by the classic adventure tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. Sadly, though, Origin’s customers seemed not to know what to make of Ultima games not taking place in a Renaissance Faire world, and both were dismal commercial failures — thus providing CRPG makers with a strong external motivation to stick with high fantasy, whatever the abstract limits of the applicability of the CRPG formula to fiction might be.

Our subject for today — Darklands, the only CRPG ever released by MicroProse Software — might be described as the rebuttal to the case made by the Worlds of Ultima games, in that its failings point to some of the intrinsic limits of the simulation-oriented approach. Then again, maybe not; today, perhaps even more so than when it was new, this is a game with a hardcore fan base who love it with a passion, even as other players, like the one who happens to be writing this article, see it as rather collapsing under the weight of its ambition and complexity. Whatever your final verdict on it, it’s undeniable that Darklands is overflowing with original ideas for a genre which, even by the game’s release year of 1992, had long since settled into a set of established expectations. By upending so many of them, it became one of the most intriguing CRPGs ever made.

Darklands was the brainchild of Arnold Hendrick, a veteran board-game, wargame, tabletop-RPG, and console-videogame designer who joined MicroProse in 1985, when it was still known strictly as a maker of military simulations. As the first MicroProse employee hired only for a design role — he had no programming or other technical experience whatsoever — he began to place his stamp on the company’s products immediately. It was Hendrick who first had the germ of an idea that Sid Meier, MicroProse’s star programmer/designer, turned into Pirates!, the first MicroProse game to depart notably from the company’s established formula. In addition to Pirates!, for which he continued to serve as a scenario designer and historical consultant even after turning the lead-designer reins over to Meier, Hendrick worked on other games whose feet were more firmly planted in MicroProse’s wheelhouse: titles like Gunship, Project Stealth Fighter, Red Storm Rising, M1 Tank Platoon, and Silent Service II.

“Wild” Bill Stealey, the flamboyant head of MicroProse, had no interest whatsoever in any game that wasn’t a military flight simulator. Still, he liked making money even more than he liked flying virtual aircraft, and by 1990 he wasn’t sure how much more he could grow his company if it continued to make almost nothing but military simulations and the occasional strategic wargame. Meanwhile he had Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, the latter being Sid Meier’s latest departure from military games, to look at as examples of how successful non-traditional MicroProse games could be. Not knowing enough about other game genres to know what else might be a good bet for his company, he threw the question up to his creative and technical staff: “Okay, programmers, give me what you want to do, and tell me how much money you want to spend. We’ll find a way to sell it.”

And so Hendrick came forward with a proposal to make a CRPG called Darklands, to be set in the Germany of the 15th century, a time and place of dark forests and musty monasteries, Walpurgis Night and witch covens. It could become, Hendrick said, the first of a whole new series of historical CRPGs that, even as they provided MicroProse with an entrée into one of the most popular genres out there, would also leverage their reputation for making games with roots in the real world.

The typical CRPG, then as now, took place in a version of Medieval times that had only ever existed in the imagination of a modern person raised on Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. It ignored how appallingly miserable and dull life was for the vast majority of people who lived through the historical reality of the Middle Ages, with its plagues, wars, filth, hard labor, and nearly universal illiteracy. Although he was a dedicated student of history, with a university degree in the field, Hendrick too was smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much of a game to be had by hewing overly close to this mundane historical reality. But what if, instead of portraying a Medieval world as his own contemporaries liked to imagine it to have been, he conjured up the world of the Middle Ages as the people who had lived in it had imagined it to be? God and his many saints would take an active role in everyday affairs, monsters and devils would roam the forests, alchemy would really work, and those suspicious-looking folks who lived in the next village really would be enacting unspeakable rituals in the name of Satan every night. “This is an era before logic or science,” Hendrick wrote, “a time when anything is possible. In short, if Medieval Germans believed something to be true, in Darklands it might actually be true.”

He wanted to incorporate an interwoven tapestry of Medieval imagination and reality into Darklands: a magic system based on Medieval theories about alchemy; a pantheon of real saints to pray to, each able to grant her own special favors; a complete, lovingly detailed map of 15th-century Germany and lands adjacent, over which you could wander at will; hundreds of little textual vignettes oozing with the flavor of the Middle Ages. To make it all go, he devised a set of systems the likes of which had never been seen in a CRPG, beginning with a real-time combat engine that let you pause it at any time to issue orders; its degree of simulation would be so deep that it would include penetration values for various weapons against various materials (thus ensuring that a vagabond with rusty knife could never, ever kill a full-fledged knight in shining armor). The character-creation system would be so detailed as to practically become a little game in itself, asking you not so much to roll up each character as live out the life story that brought her to this point: bloodline, occupations, education (such as it was for most in the Middles Ages), etc.

Character creation in Darklands is really, really complicated. And throughout the game, the spidery font superimposed on brown-sauce backgrounds will make your eyes bleed.

All told, it was one heck of a proposition for a company that had never made a CRPG before. Had Stealey been interested enough in CRPGs to realize just how unique the idea was, he might have realized as well how doubtful its commercial prospects were in a market that seemed to have little appetite for any CRPG that didn’t hew more or less slavishly to the Dungeons & Dragons archetype. But Stealey didn’t realize, and so Darklands got the green light in mid-1990. What followed was a tortuous odyssey; it became the most protracted and expensive development project MicroProse had ever funded.

We’ve seen in some of my other recent articles how companies like Sierra and Origin, taking stocking of escalating complexity in gameplay and audiovisuals and their inevitable companion of escalating budgets, began to systematize the process of game development around this time. And we’ve at least glimpsed as well how such systematization could be a double-edged sword, leading to creatively unsatisfied team members and final products with something of a cookie-cutter feel.

MicroProse, suffice to say, didn’t go that route. Stealey took a hands-off approach to all projects apart from his beloved flight simulators, allowing his people to freelance their way through them. For all the drawbacks of rigid hierarchies and strict methodologies, the Darklands project could have used an injection of exactly those things. It was plagued by poor communication and outright confusion from beginning to end, as Arnold Hendrick and his colleagues improvised like mad in the process of making a game that was like nothing any of them had ever tried to make before.

Hendrick today forthrightly acknowledges that his own performance as project leader was “terrible.” Too often, the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. An example cited by Hendrik involves Jim Synoski, the team’s first and most important programmer. For some months at the beginning of the project, he believed he was making essentially a real-time fighting game; while that was in fact some of what Darklands was about, it was far from the sum total of the experience. Once made aware at last that his combat code would need to interact with many other modules, he managed to hack the whole mess together, but it certainly wasn’t pretty. It seems there wasn’t so much as a design document for the team to work from — just a bunch of ideas in Hendrick’s head, imperfectly conveyed to everyone else.

The first advertisement for Darklands appeared in the March 1991 issue of Computer Gaming World. The actual product wouldn’t materialize until eighteen months later.

It’s small wonder, then, that Darklands went so awesomely over time and over budget; the fact that MicroProse never cancelled it likely owes as much to the sunk-cost fallacy as anything else. Hendrick claims that the game cost as much as $3 million to make in the end — a flabbergasting number that, if correct, would easily give it the crown of most expensive computer game ever made at the time of its release. Indeed, even a $2 million price tag, the figure typically cited by Stealey, would also qualify it for that honor. (By way of perspective, consider that Origin Systems’s epic CRPG Ultima VII shipped the same year as Darklands with an estimated price tag of $1 million.)

All of this was happening at the worst possible time for MicroProse. Another of Stealey’s efforts to expand the company’s market share had been an ill-advised standup-arcade version of F-15 Strike Eagle, MicroProse’s first big hit. The result, full of expensive state-of-the-art graphics hardware, was far too complex for the quarter-eater market; it flopped dismally, costing MicroProse a bundle. Even as that investment was going up in smoke, Stealey, acting again purely on the basis of his creative staff’s fondest wishes, agreed to challenge the likes of Sierra by making a line of point-and-click graphic adventures. Those products too would go dramatically over time and over budget.

Stealey tried to finance these latest products by floating an initial public offering in October of 1991. By June of 1992, on the heels of an announcement that not just Darklands but three other major releases as well would not be released that quarter — more fruit of Stealey’s laissez-faire philosophy of game development — the stock tumbled to almost 25 percent below its initial price. A stench of doom was beginning to surround the company, despite such recent successes as Civilization.

Games, like most creative productions, generally mirror the circumstances of their creation. This fact doesn’t bode well for Darklands, a project which started in chaos and ended, two years later, in a panicked save-the-company scramble.

Pirates!

Darklands

If you squint hard enough at Darklands, you can see its roots in Pirates!, the first classic Arnold Hendrick helped to create at MicroProse. As in that game, Darklands juxtaposes menu-driven in-town activities, written in an embodied narrative style, with more free-form wanderings over the territories that lie between the towns. But, in place of the straightforward menu of six choices in Pirates!, your time in the towns of Darklands becomes a veritable maze of twisty little passages; you start the game in an inn, but from there can visit a side street or a main street, which in turn can lead you to the wharves or the market, dark alleys or a park, all with yet more things to see and do. Because all of these options are constantly looping back upon one another — it’s seldom clear if the side street from this menu is the same side street you just visited from that other menu — just trying to buy some gear for your party can be a baffling undertaking for the beginner.

Thus, in spite of the superficial interface similarities, we see two radically opposing approaches to game design in Pirates! and Darklands. The older game emphasizes simplicity and accessibility, being only as complex as it needs to be to support the fictional experience it wants to deliver. But Darklands, for its part, piles on layer after layer of baroque detail with gleeful abandon. One might say that here the complexity is the challenge; learning to play the entirety of Darklands at all requires at least as much time and effort as getting really, truly good at a game like Pirates!.

The design dialog we see taking place here has been with us for a long time. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the co-creators of the first incarnation of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, parted ways not long afterward thanks largely to a philosophical disagreement about how their creation should evolve. Arneson saw the game as a fairly minimalist framework to enable a shared storytelling session, while Gygax saw it as something more akin to the complex wargames on which he’d cut his teeth. Gygax, who would go on to write hundreds of pages of fiddly rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, his magnum opus, was happily cataloging and quantifying every variant of pole arm used in Medieval times when an exasperated Arneson finally lost his cool: “It’s a pointy thing on the end of a stick!” Your appreciation for Darklands must hinge on whether you are a Gary Gygax or a Dave Arneson in spirit. I know to which camp I belong; while there is a subset of gamers who truly enjoy Darkland‘s type of complexity — and more power to them for it — I must confess that I’m not among them.

In an interview conducted many years after the release of Darklands, Arnold Hendrick himself put his finger on what I consider to be its core problem: “Back then, game systems were often overly complicated, and attention to gameplay was often woefully lacking. These days, there’s a much better balance between gameplay and the human psychology of game players and the game systems underlying that gameplay.” Simply put, there are an awful lot of ideas in Darklands which foster complexity, but don’t foster what ought to be the ultimate arbitrator in game design: Fun. Modern designers often talk about an elusive sense of “flow” — a sense by the player that all of a game’s parts merge into a harmonious whole which makes playing for hours on end all too tempting. For this player at least, Darklands is the polar opposite of this ideal. Not only is it about as off-putting a game as I’ve ever seen at initial startup, but it continues always, even after a certain understanding has become to dawn, to be a game of disparate parts: a character-generation game, a combat game, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style narrative, a game of alchemical crafting. There are enough original ideas here for ten games, but it never becomes clear why they absolutely, positively all need to be in this one. Darklands, in other words, is kind of a muddle.

Your motivation for adventuring in Medieval Germany in the first place is one of Darklands‘s original ideas in CRPG design. Drawing once again comparisons to Pirates!, Darklands dispenses with any sort of overarching plot as a motivating force. Instead, like your intrepid corsair of the earlier game, your party of four has decided simply “to bring everlasting honor and glory to your names.” If you play for long enough, something of a larger plot will eventually begin to emerge, involving a Satan-worshiping cult and a citadel dedicated to the demon Baphomet, but even after rooting out the cult and destroying the citadel the game doesn’t end.

In place of an overarching plot, Darklands relies on incidents and anecdotes, from a wandering knight challenging you to a dual to a sinkhole that swallows up half your party. While these are the products of a human writer (presumably Arnold Hendrick for the most part), their placements in the world are randomized. To improve your party’s reputation and earn money, you undertake a variety of quests of the “take item A to person B” or “go kill monster C” variety. All of this too is procedurally generated. Indeed, you begin a new game of Darklands by choosing the menu option “Create a New World.” Although the geography of Medieval Germany won’t change from game to game, most of what you’ll find in and around the towns is unique to your particular created world. It all adds up to a game that could literally, as MicroProse’s marketers didn’t hesitate to declare, go on forever.

But, as all too commonly happens with these things, it’s a little less compelling in practice than it sounds in theory. I’ve gone on record a number of times now with my practical objections to generative narratives. Darklands too often falls prey to the problems that are so typical of the approach. The quests you pick up, lacking as they do any larger relationship to a plot or to the world, are the very definition of FedEx quests, bereft of any interest beyond the reputation and money they earn for you. And, while it can sometimes surprise you with an unexpectedly appropriate and evocative textual vignette, the game more commonly hews to the predictable here as well. Worse, it has a dismaying tendency to show you the same multiple-choice vignettes again and again, pulling you right out of the fiction.

And yet the vignettes are actually the most narratively interesting parts of the game; it will be some time before you begin to see them at all. As in so many other vintage CRPGs, the bulk of your time at the beginning of Darklands is spent doing boring things in the name of earning the right to eventually do less boring things. In this case, you’ll likely have to spend several hours roaming the vacant back streets of whatever town you happen to begin in, seeking out and killing anonymous bands of robbers, just to build up your party enough to leave the starting town.

The open-ended structure works for Pirates! because that game dispenses with this puritanical philosophy of design. It manages to be great fun from the first instant by keeping the pace fast and the details minimal, even as it puts a definite time limit on your career, thus tempting you to play again and again in order to improve on your best final score. Darklands, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily end even when your party is too old to adventure anymore (aging becomes a factor after about age thirty); you can just make new characters and continue where the old ones left off, in the same world with the same equipment, quests, and reputation. Darklands, then, ends only when you get tired of it. Just when that exact point arrives will doubtless differ markedly from player to player, but it’s guaranteed to be anticlimactic.

The ostensible point of Darklands‘s enormously complex systems of character creation, alchemy, religion, and combat is to evoke its chosen time and place as richly as possible. One might even say the same about its lack of an overarching epic plot; such a thing doesn’t exist in the books of history and legend to which the game is so determined to be so faithful. Yet I can’t help but feel that this approach — that of trying to convey the sense of a time and place through sheer detail — is fundamentally misguided. Michael Bate, a designer of several games for Accolade during the 1980s, coined the term “aesthetic simulations” for historical games that try to capture the spirit of their subject matter rather than every piddling detail. Pirates! is, yet again, a fine example of this approach, as is the graceful, period-infused but not period-heavy-handed writing of the 1992 adventure game The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

The writing in Darklands falls somewhat below that standard. It isn’t terrible, but it is a bit graceless, trying to make up for in concrete detail what it isn’t quite able to conjure in atmosphere. So, we get money that is laboriously explicated in terms of individual pfenniges, groschen, and florins, times of day described in terms that a Medieval monk would understand (Matins, Latins, Prime, etc.), and lots of off-putting-to-native-English-speakers German names, but little real sense of being in Medieval Germany.

Graphically as well, the game is… challenged. Having devoted most of their development efforts to 3D vehicular simulators during the 1980s, MicroProse’s art department plainly struggled to adapt to the demands of other genres. Even an unimpeachable classic like Sid Meier’s Civilization achieves its classic status despite rather than because of its art; visually, it’s a little garish compared to what other studios were putting out by this time. But Darklands is much more of a visual disaster, a conflicting mishmash of styles that sometimes manage to look okay in isolation, such as in the watercolor-style backgrounds to many of the textual vignettes. Just as often, though, it verges on the hideous; the opening movie is so absurdly amateurish that, according to industry legend, some people actually returned the game after seeing it, thinking they must have gotten a defective disk or had an incompatible video card.

One of Darklands‘s more evocative vignettes, with one of its better illustrations as a backdrop. Unfortunately, you’re likely to see this same vignette and illustration several times, with a decided sense of diminishing returns.

But undoubtedly the game’s biggest single problem, at the time of its release and to some extent still today, was all of the bugs. Even by the standards of an industry at large which was clearly struggling to come to terms with the process of making far more elaborate games than had been seen in the previous decade, Darklands stood out upon its belated release in August of 1992 for its woefully under-baked state. Whether this was despite or because of its extended development cycle remains a question for debate. What isn’t debatable, however, is that it was literally impossible to complete Darklands in its initial released state, and that, even more damningly, a financially pressured MicroProse knew this and released it anyway. To their credit, the Darklands team kept trying to fix the game after its release, with patch after patch to its rickety code base. The patches eventually numbered at least nine in all, a huge quantity for long-suffering gamers to acquire at a time when they could only be distributed on physical floppy disks or via pricey commercial online services like CompuServe. After about a year, the team managed to get the game into a state where it only occasionally did flaky things, although even today it remains far from completely bug-free.

By the time the game reached this reasonably stable state, however, the damage had been done. It sold fairly well in its first month or two, but then came a slew of negative reviews and an avalanche of returns that actually exceeded new sales for some time; Darklands thus managed the neat trick of continuing to be a drain on MicroProse’s precarious day-to-day finances even after it had finally been released. Hendrick had once imagined a whole line of similar historical CRPGs; needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Combined with the only slightly less disastrous failure of the new point-and-click graphic-adventure line, Darklands was directly responsible for the end of MicroProse as an independent entity. In December of 1993, with the company’s stock now at well under half of its IPO price and the creditors clamoring, a venture-capital firm arranged a deal whereby MicroProse was acquired by Spectrum Holobyte, known virtually exclusively for a truly odd pairing of products: the home-computer version of the casual game Tetris and the ultra-hardcore flight simulator Falcon. The topsy-turvy world of corporate finance being what it was, this happened despite the fact that MicroProse’s total annual sales were still several times that of Spectrum Holobyte.

Stealey, finding life unpleasant in a merged company where he was no longer top dog, quit six months later. His evaluation of the reasons for MicroProse’s collapse was incisive enough in its fashion:

You have to be known for something. We were known for two things [military simulators and grand-strategy games], but we tried to do more. I think that was a big mistake. I should have been smarter than that. I should have stuck with what we were good at.

I’ve been pretty hard on Darklands in this article, a stance for which I don’t quite feel a need to apologize; I consider it a part of my duty as your humble scribe to call ’em like I see ’em. Yet there is far more to Darklands‘s legacy than a disappointing game which bankrupted a company. Given how rare its spirit of innovation has been in CRPG design, plenty of players in the years since its commercial vanishing performance have been willing to cut it a lot of slack, to work hard to enjoy it on its own terms. For reasons I’ve described at some length now, I can’t manage to join this group, but neither can I begrudge them their passion.

But then, Darklands has been polarizing its players from the very beginning. Shortly after the game’s release, Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s famously opinionated adventure-game columnist, wrote a notably harsh review of it, concluding that it “might have been one of the great ones” but instead “turns out to be a game more to be avoided than anything else.” Johnny L. Wilson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, was so bothered by her verdict that he took the unusual step of publishing a sidebar response of his own. It became something of a template for future Darklands apologies by acknowledging the game’s obvious flaws yet insisting that its sheer uniqueness nevertheless made it worthwhile. (“The game is as repetitive as Scorpia and some of the game’s online critics have noted. One comes across some of the same encounters over and over. Yet only occasionally did I find this disconcerting.”) He noted as well that he personally hadn’t seen many of the bugs and random crashes which Scorpia had described in her review. Perhaps, he mused, his computer was just an “immaculate contraption” — or perhaps Scorpia’s was the opposite. In response to the sidebar, Wilson was castigated by his magazine’s readership, who apparently agreed with Scorpia much more than with him and considered him to have undermined his own acknowledged reviewer.

The reader response wasn’t the only interesting postscript to this episode. Wilson:

Later, after 72 hours of playing around with minor quests and avoiding the main plot line of Darklands, I decided it was time to finish the game. I had seven complete system crashes in less than an hour and a half once I decided to jump in and finish the game. I didn’t really have an immaculate contraption, I just hadn’t encountered the worst crashes because I hadn’t filled my upper memory with the system-critical details of the endgame. Scorpia hadn’t overreacted to the crashes. I just hadn’t seen how bad it was because I was fooling around with the game instead of trying to win. Since most players would be trying to win, Scorpia’s review was more valid than my sidebar. Ah, well, that probably isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done when I thought I was being fair.

This anecdote reveals what may be a deciding factor — in addition to a tolerance for complexity for its own sake — as to whether one can enjoy Darklands or not. Wilson had been willing to simply inhabit its world, while the more goal-oriented Scorpia approached it as she would any other CRPG — i.e., as a game that she wanted to win. As a rather plot-focused, goal-oriented player myself, I naturally sympathize more with her point of view.

In the end, then, the question of where the point of failure lies in Darklands is one for the individual player to answer. Is Darklands as a whole a very specific sort of failure, a good idea that just wasn’t executed as well as it might have been? Or does the failure lie with the CRPG format itself, which this game stretched beyond the breaking point? Or does the real failure lie with the game’s first players, who weren’t willing to look past the bugs and other occasional infelicities to appreciate what could have been a whole new type of CRPG? I know where I stand, but my word is hardly the final one.

Given the game’s connection to the real world and its real cultures, so unusual to the CRPG genre, perhaps the most interesting question of all raised by Darklands is that of the appropriate limits of gamefication. A decade before Darklands‘s release, the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG was embroiled in a controversy engendered by God-fearing parents who feared it to be an instrument of Satanic indoctrination. In actuality, the creators of the game had been wise enough to steer well clear of any living Western belief system. (The Deities & Demigods source book did include living native-American, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese religions, which raises some troublesome questions of its own about cultural appropriation and respect, but wasn’t quite the same thing as what the angry Christian contingent was complaining about.)

It’s ironic to note that much of the content which Evangelical Christians believed to be present in Dungeons & Dragons actually is present in Darklands, including the Christian God and Satan and worshipers of both. Had Darklands become successful enough to attract the attention of the same groups who objected so strongly to Dungeons & Dragons, there would have been hell to pay. Arnold Hendrick had lived through the earlier controversy from an uncomfortably close vantage point, having been a working member of the tabletop-game industry at the time it all went down. In his designer’s notes in Darklands‘s manual, he thus went to great pains to praise the modern “vigorous, healthy, and far more spiritual [Catholic] Church whose quiet role around the globe is more altruistic and beneficial than many imagine.” Likewise, he attempted to separate modern conceptions of Satanism and witchcraft from those of Medieval times. Still, the attempt to build a wall between the Christianity of the 15th century and that of today cannot be entirely successful; at the end of the day, we are dealing with the same religion, albeit in two very different historical contexts.

Opinions vary as to whether the universe in which we live is entirely mechanistic, reduceable to the interactions of concrete, understandable, computable physical laws. But it is clear that a computer simulation of a world must be exactly such a thing. In short, a simulation leaves no room for the ineffable. And yet Darklands chooses to grapple, to an extent unrivaled by almost any other game I’m aware of, with those parts of human culture that depend upon a belief in the ineffable. By bringing Christianity into its world, it goes to a place virtually no other game has dared approach. Its vending-machine saints reduce a religion — a real, living human faith — to a game mechanic. Is this okay? Or are there areas of the human experience which ought not to be turned into banal computer code? The answer must be in the eye — and perhaps the faith — of the beholder.

Darklands‘s real-time-with-pause combat system. The interface here is something of a disaster, and the visuals too leave much to be desired, but the core idea is sound.

After my lights, Darklands is more of a collection of bold ideas than a coherent game, more of an experiment in the limits of CRPG design than a classic example of same. Still, in a genre which is so often in thrall to the tried and true, its willingness to experiment can only be applauded.

For sometimes experiments yield rich rewards, as the most obvious historical legacy of this poor-selling, obscure, bug-ridden game testifies. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the joint CEOs of Bioware at the time that studio made the Baldur’s Gate series of CRPGs, have acknowledged lifting the real-time-with-pause combat systems in those huge-selling and much-loved games directly out of Darklands. Since the Baldur’s Gate series’s heyday around the turn of the millennium, dozens if not hundreds of other CRPGs have borrowed the same system second-hand from Bioware. Such is the way that innovation diffuses itself through the culture of game design. So, the next time you fire up a Steam-hosted extravaganza like Pillars of Eternity, know that part of the game you’re playing owes its existence to Darklands. Lumpy and imperfect though it is in so many ways, we could use more of its spirit of bold innovation today — in CRPG design and, indeed, across the entire landscape of interactive entertainment.

(Sources: the book Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay; Computer Gaming World of March 1991, February 1992, May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, January 1993, and June 1994; Commodore Magazine of September 1987; Questbusters of November 1992; Compute! of October 1993; PC Zone of September 2001; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of January 17 1992; New York Times of June 13 1993. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interview with Arnold Hendrick, Just Adventure‘s interview with Johnny L. Wilson, and Arnold Hendrick’s discussion of Darklands in the Steam forum.

Darklands is available for purchase on GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/darklands/

[minhthangcoi9993-blog]

Review Game Vampyr

With a fresh and genuine take on the familiar supernatural mythology, Vampyr’s bold RPG ambition is to tempt you into eating your own quest givers. Beguiling the citizens of London and suffering the consequences of quenching your terrible thirst sets up some big choices that generally pay off, though its combat doesn’t quite have the bite needed to force you out of your comfort zone and into the darker, morally gray areas it so clearly wants you to live in.

Where Vampyr sets itself apart is in its excellent recreation of London during the first World War and in the throes of the Spanish Flu epidemic. It’s a gloomy, somber city, explorable through snaking alleyways, cobblestone courtyards, dingy sewers, and expansive buildings that combine with the moody string-heavy soundtrack to create a dense, sad atmosphere of a city on the edge.

The great sense of contrast throughout Vampyr is a focused theme. You’ll see the posh and proper etiquette of early 1900s English aristocracy juxtaposed with the ugly, seedy underbelly of the city. Even our protagonist, physician and newly turned vampire Dr. Jonathan Reid himself, reflects this conflict, as his modern-man-of-science persona clashes with the mysticism of his newfound supernatural world. It all complicates the experience in ways I found refreshing.

That setting is reinforced through the many, many authentic characters. And there are dozens of them spread throughout the distinct districts of London, each with so much to say that if you’re looking to investigate each person and solve all their problems and side quests, you’ll be wandering through forests of branching dialog trees with hours of voiced conversation.

And if, like me, you find it easy to soak in this melting pot of society, science, and the supernatural, you’ll be glad to know that each of these characters are generally well-written and performed and that they only occasionally cross the line into hokey. Which is both a surprise and a relief, considering Vampyr leans hard into its heady vampire lore that without appropriate delivery it could’ve come off as downright goofy. It doesn’t stop at the accepted tropes of the subject like wooden stakes and garlic but instead aims for the moon, pulling inspiration from landmark moments of history, mythology, famous figures, and much more to weave a vampire conspiracy theory with its tendrils burrowed throughout history.

Vampyr’s story is generally engaging thanks to its grounded approach, setting the stage with modest, understandable stakes before going off the deep end. It starts small as our reluctant hero, Dr. Reid, grapples with his new vampiric condition. As a man of science, he’s a walking mockery of his own beliefs, and he only gradually begins to accept the gravity of his situation. Much of the early game mirrors that journey, with quests built around using your vampire senses to locate characters and resolving pedestrian issues like infidelity, a lost heirloom, or a gang war, and peppering it with the ugly racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia of the time period. The only blemish on these citizens is the obvious discrepancy in animation qualities between the lead characters and the minor ones, with poor mouth syncing being the most obvious sign.

Feast and Famine

The citizen system that binds all these characters together is a highlight of Vampyr. Because you can choose to mesmerize and feed on just about everyone you meet, characters are more than just side quest givers and information pinatas. As you talk with them you’ll uncover their secrets and, in the process, improve the quality of their blood, giving you more experience when you finally decide to sink your teeth in. If you choose to at all, that is. The choice to abstain from fresh blood is there, and I found myself avoiding it because Dr. Reid seems so opposed to giving in to the temptation that I felt I owed it to his character.

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But in a deliciously morbid way, talking with people and solving their problems is kind of like preparing your meals. The idea is that when you’re not strong enough and need a quick boost, you consume someone to quickly gain a healthy chunk of experience at the cost of permanently losing any information or quests they’ve yet to give you – and taking on more of a monstrous appearance yourself. That decision is given even more weight by the fact that Vampyr’s save system doesn’t allow you to reload to a previous save to undo a choice – something the load screen tips make clear is a conscious decision by the developers.

In a deliciously morbid way, talking with people is like preparing your meals.

The problem with this in practice is that I never found combat difficult enough to make me want to suffer the consequences of feeding on a citizen. Despite the fact that there are some top-shelf garbage-people all over London that the world would probably be better off without, feeding on a citizen damages the stability rating of their district. If that stability drops too low, other citizens living there will start suffering and go missing, and feral monsters will start roaming the streets where they didn’t before. It’s a selfish dilemma: eat for personal power, or abstain for the good of the city. This is Vampyr’s version of a difficulty setting, and you can see how it’s supposed to force you into making a hard decision. But developer Dontnot didn’t balance it aggressively enough, and so I was able to complete my approximately 30-hour playthrough without taking a life, and only died a handful of times.

Low Stakes

The loop of Vampyr’s combat boils down to locking on, dodging around an enemy, and smacking it over and over with a club or sword that you’ve upgraded through a very simple crafting system. Such crude methods are strange for a vampire power fantasy, but in a way, it actually plays back into that theme of duality all over Vampyr.

What’s more interesting is the health, stamina, and blood resources that you’ll want to manage during combat. You expend blood to power your vampiric abilities and stamina to dodge, attack, and stun enemies, so it becomes this interesting dance of dodging, striking, and using blood-based abilities, then stunning and enemy so you can bite it and refill some of your blood, which then recharges your supernatural abilities like healing, turning invisible, or conjuring pools of shadow. There’s a good level of micromanaging these resources during combat, and it works because enemies aren’t just your obstacles, but also your health packs.

Progression in Vampyr is all about being a vampire. As you cobble together the paltry amounts of experience you get for killing enemies and the more respectable amount you get for uncovering dialog hints and solving side missions and quests, you can choose to sleep and evolve your vampire abilities. There’s enough here to branch out into the kind of vampire you want to be, casting bloody spears and freezing an enemies’ blood in place, lunging over great distances and pouncing with devastating claw attacks, or any combination of the dozen-or-so skills you can learn. But experience is scarce if you’re not regularly feeding on citizens, so I found the best investment for my hard-earned experience was to bump up my passive health, stamina, and blood reserves rather than dumping it into those expensive, flashier abilities.

Unfortunately, even with all those unique vampire-afforded abilities – including some devastating ultimate powers that pack a horrific punch – the simple combat loop does start to feel stale sooner than I’d hoped. Fairly early on I found a two-handed club and enough materials to upgrade it through the barebones crafting system, to the point where clubbing things to death was overwhelmingly the most efficient and reliable strategy. I did experiment with all manner of weapons, firearms, and abilities, and while there are some cool combos you can employ, dodging and counter-striking with a heavy weapon remained the best option.

This means most fights boil down to the same experience, and that goes double for the dozen-or-so boss-arena fights throughout the campaign. While they add some interesting mechanics like environmental dangers and otherworldly abilities and certainly ratchet up the pageantry, they lack enough variety to require anything more than just quickly learning their attack patterns before the dodge/counter-striking resumes.

There’s a welcome variety in the enemies of Vampyr, at least. The militaristic vampire hunters, called the Guard of Priwen, send shock troopers and sharpshooters after you, while the feral subsets of vampires, werewolf-like monsters, and full-fledged children of the night begin to appear regularly as the city succumbs to the epidemic.

But the most frustrating obstacles are the frame rate dips, the spontaneous loading screens, and the occasional bugs. Vampyr runs acceptably on the PS4, but dips below the 30-frames-per-second mark regularly when you turn a corner or enter a new area too quickly. While I didn’t find anything game breaking, a few issues with quest markers not updating made progression more difficult than it needed to be, costing me an hour or two of scouring the city for something that should have been made much clearer. These hiccups seem to get worse in the later stages, but they never become more than minor annoyances.

The Verdict

Vampyr is a slow burn of an RPG, taking its time to ramp up its intriguing blend of science and the supernatural in an elaborately gloomy version of London. When it gets going you can see the potential of the way it offers you more power if you consume its interesting citizens. But Vampyr never commits to this idea to the point where I felt I needed to make that sacrifice to succeed in its relatively simple combat, which leaves it feeling toothless and vulnerable to having a lot of its fun sucked away by technical issues, despite its genuinely engaging story.

[dietpillswatchdog]

LCR Health Active Stem

LCR Health Active Stem is a supplement that claims to improve cognitive ability, improve muscle and joint strength and increase longevity. The supplement is based on stem cell research that suggests that adult stem cells have a wide range of beneficial effects. LCR Health Active Stem seems to have replaced an earlier supplement called Active PK, which is no longer available.

LCR Health is a California-based company with a focus on scientific research. It appears to sell only Active Stem and although the previous supplement Active PK was generating customer interest, it appears to have been dropped by the company in favour of Active Stem. LCR Health is led by Dr. R.S. McClain and is dedicated to extending lifespan and health.

LCR Health Active Stem Pros

Unlikely to cause side effects

LCR Health Active Stem Cons

Lacks any real evidence that it will work as described

Expensive

Directions for use are not provided

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What You Need To Know About LCR Health Active Stem

LCR Health Active Stem is a supplement in powder form and appears to be a replacement for an earlier LCR Health product called Active PK which is no longer on the market.

Active Stem is supposed to increase cognitive ability and other physical benefits and it seems to reflect current stem cell research. However, there is no proof that LCR Health Active Stem will increase adult stem cell count as promised. In fact, we can’t see any real link between this product and actual stem cell research. In addition, it is expensive and the lack of directions is of concern as is the validity of the guarantee and the lack of customer feedback.

What Are The Side Effects Of LCR Health Active Stem?

LCR Health Active Stem looks safe and side effects shouldn’t be an issue for most people. However, it may contain caffeine, which could lead to mild caffeine side effects. In addition, L carnosine may lower blood pressure levels. Check with your doctor first if you are taking medication in case of drug interactions.

How Much Does LCR Health Active Stem Cost?

LCR Health Active Stem is expensive. 1 tub or 30 days supply costs $46.99. 3 tubs ( 90 days supply) costs $117.00. 6 tubs (180 days supply) costs $214.27.

US shipping is only free on orders over $50.00.

Our Verdict On LCR Health Active Stem

We are not impressed with LCR Health Active Stem. There is zero evidence that this powder will work in the way as advertised and increase adult stem cells as promised. This theory has never been tested on humans and, in addition, there is very little information about the so-called lab testing carried out by the company leader Dr Rand McLain.

We have real concerns about any company that advertises a product and then fails to tell customers how to use it. Yet this is what has happened here. Added to this, there is no real customer feedback and the little available includes a customer complaint about the difficulty of obtaining the advertised money-back refund.

We like that LCR Active Stem looks safe but in our opinion this supplement is unlikely to do anything more than countless other health drinks on the market. It is farsical that this product claims any relation to what stem cells and research into this area of biology can do.We would not recommend LCR Health Active Stem to our readers.

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Key Features

Ingredients

Side Effects

Testimonials

Guarantee

Where to Buy

LCR Health Active Stem Review

LCR Health Active Stem is a general purpose health supplement in powder form that may have a nootropic effect in that it may boost cognitive ability and mental performance. In addition, it may help improve muscle and joint strength and increase longevity. Obviously nobody will know whether this last claim is really true until it is too late, but if this supplement really works as described, you should experience noticeable benefits.

LCR Health Active Stem Facts

Supplement in powder form

Contains five ingredients

No real evidence it will work in the way as described

According to the product information, LCR Active Stem is based on stem cell research. This is not as alarming as it sounds because it has not been carried out on embryos, but instead on tissue samples from adult volunteers. Adult stem cells are cells in the body that multiply by cell division and replenish dying cells. They also regenerate damaged tissue. Adult stem cells are undifferentiated cells which means they can change from one type of cell to another wherever needed by the body so play a vital role in maintaining health and theoretically could prevent and cure diseases.

It is important to point out here that the studies in the adult stem cells are in their infancy and according to scientists we are a long way from finding any sort of real medical cure from adult stem cells yet. However, according to the product information, laboratory testing shows that LCR Active Stem increases the proliferation of adult stem cells. We can’t help but feel that if this were the case then Dr. McClain (if he exists) would be much more involved in cutting-edge medical research than he appears to be.

How to Take LCR Health Active Stem

Directions are not provided.

LCR Active Stem contains five ingredients. There is a proprietary blend comprised of L Leucine, an essential amino acid which the body needs but cannot produce, plus blueberry fruit and green leaf tea extract, both of which are high in antioxidants. It contains L Carnosine, a combination of two amino acids Alanine and Histidine. Studies have shown that L Carnosine supplements may improve neurological function and age related conditions such as cataracts.

The final ingredient is vitamin D as Cholecalciferol. Vitamin D is synthesised from sunlight and is extremely important for bone health as well as numerous functions in the body.

LCR Health Active Stem Concerns:

Only available from the official website. Is this company concerned about the risk of adverse feedback?

The guarantee looks good, but will LCR Health really honour the agreement. According to one customer’s experience it seems unlikely

Why does LCR Health only ever sell one product at a time? Why is Active PK no longer available?

LCR Health is based in California. According to the “about us” information, the company is headed by Dr Rand McClain, a sports medicine doctor who still operates as such in Los Angeles. He is described as a pioneer in “Rejuvenative, Regenerative (“Anti-Aging”), Cosmetic and Family Medicine.”

LCR Health only appears to market this one supplement and despite the authoritative look of the website with its description of stem cell research, like every other supplement on the market, it is unapproved by the FDA and not intended to treat or cure any medical condition.

What Does LCR Health Active Stem Claim To Do?

According the product information there are three benefits to taking this supplement:

Improved Cognitive Function

Enhanced Joint and Muscle Strength

Increased Longevity

In addition it states that,

each serving contains 1400 mg of five potent ingredients that have never been combined before.

We find this statement hard to believe because we have seen numerous supplements with a very similar ingredients profile.

The advertising briefly mentions the clinical studies into this supplement,

…which, in clinical studies, have been shown to increase adult stem cell proliferation in vitro.

This simply means that the cells have been tested under lab conditions. There is no evidence anywhere that proves that this supplement will have the same effects in the human body.

Strangely, the product information does not explain how to mix this supplement or when to take it, which is a serious omission.

Does LCR Health Active Stem Work?

Let’s look at the facts. According to the product information, this powdered supplement harnesses the power of stem cell research and by drinking this potion you will prevent cell damage and live longer and healthier. If this were really proven to be effective it would be the stem cell breakthrough of the century!

There is no evidence anywhere that proves that this supplement will work as described. There are no links to any independent research that proves that the ingredients contained in LCR Active Stem will encourage the proliferation of adult stem cells.

That said, it looks like a healthy drink without side effects.

What Are The Ingredients of LCR Health Active Stem?

LCR Active Stem is a powdered supplement that you add to liquid in order to make a health drink. Each serving is equal to one 3.9 g scoop of powder so there are obviously a lot of filler ingredients given that the proprietary blend adds up to just 1.4 g.

We would have liked to have provided the results of the clinical testing carried out by Dr Rand McClain but he does not provide this information. Instead we will look at the individual ingredients.

Vitamin D ( as Cholecalciferol) ( 2.000 IU): Important for bone health and the prevention of old fashioned diseases such as rickets, vitamin D is also important for the immune system. In large doses it can cause side effects but here in a reasonably safe serving size. Many scientists believe that we should all be taking more vitamin D because of its numerous health benefits. http://ift.tt/2f08uG8

Proprietary blend (1,400mg):

L Leucine: This amino acid is necessary for health and can only be obtained by diet; it is present in dairy, meat and fish. It is sometimes taken for weight loss and building muscle but it lacks any real evidence because this has been mainly tested on animals.

Blueberry fruit: Rich in antioxidants – molecules that have a protective effect upon cells because they inhibit oxidisation, blueberries are good for health especially when consumed as natural fruit.

Green tea extract: We all love green tea. When added to part of your regular diet it may have real health benefits. However there is no real evidence it will help you live longer or do anything much when taken in supplement form. Although green tea contains antioxidants called polyphenols, which are proven to prevent damage caused by free radicals, this does not seem to make much difference to life span or health in supplement form.

L Carnosine: This combination of two amino acids Alanine and Histidine is manufactured in the body and is a substance that has an antioxidant effect which prevents free radical cell damage. This substance is been investigated as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and other mental disorders such as autism but as yet results are not conclusive.

Does LCR Health Active Stem Have Any Side Effects?

Side effects are unlikely. However, green tea contains caffeine so may cause mild caffeine-related side effects such as jitteriness and insomnia. L carnosine may cause blood pressure to drop. In addition, some of the ingredients may cause interactions with medication.

The product information does not provide any safety information.

Caution: Not suitable for individuals under 18. Avoid if you are pregnant or breast feeding. Speak to your doctor first if you are taking prescription medication as this supplement may cause interactions.

Are There Any Customer Reviews For LCR Health Active Stem?

LCR Active Stem only seems to be on sale via the official LCR Health website so there is no platform for customer comments. However, we found some people discussing LCR Active Stem on the Hiya website.

There is one positive review but fellow reviewers have lambasted this as a fake!

It reads,

I am an Anthropologist and take my health seriously because no one else will. We, as individuals, are responsible for our health and well-being. I researched many supplements, and Active Stem is one of the few that have an iron-clad, 90-day money back guarantee. It can’t get any better than that. The product works, hence the confidence of their products!

We are inclined to agree with the reviewer who commented,

That’s obviously a fake review!

Others joined in the discussion. This customer asked the reviewer,

What results have you experienced? How long have you taken it? What health problems do you have, or did you have? This review tells me little, except that you were able to return it and get your money back. Great! But that speaks to nothing of the product itself, or you. Provide more information, please.

Another customer asked,

What did the stem cell product do for you? Your comments seemed to focus more on the money back guarantee, rather than the actual effectiveness of this product. Examples of what it did would be most helpful…

The reviewer did not reply to these questions.

One of the customer comments reports to trying the supplement. However he was not as satisfied as the (fake) reviewer and had serious doubts about the supplement and the advertised guarantee.

I tried a couple of their products for a month, with no results or being reenergized in any way. I suffer from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and their products did not help me. Also, I am currently having problems returning the products for a full refund. They want to only refund me for the unused portion, which is totally not the way it was presented to me when I purchased them. I will be contacting the Better Business Bureau, and cancelling payments on my credit card.

Does LCR Health Active Stem Offer a Money-Back Guarantee?

LCR Active Stem does come with an advertised 90-day guarantee. Here’s what the company says about it;

LCR Health is proud to offer a 90-Day, Ironclad Guarantee on every single order of Active Stem. If for any reason this revolutionary formula does not meet your expectations, simply send it back for a full refund of the purchase price. You can even use the entire supply and simply send back the empty bottles — that’s how confident we are that you’ll love this incredible health breakthrough.

This sounds great, but according to one customer LCR Health did not keep to this agreement.

Where Can I Buy LCR Health Active Stem?

LCR Active Stem is only available direct from the official LCR Health website.

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