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incoherentbabblings · 4 years

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can i get a long post about why tim/steph worked out when tim/ari, tim/zo and tim/cassie didn't?

To be honest, I really struggled with this one because...well, so here’s the thing. Tim and Steph didn’t work out. That is, if you are saying 2011 is the end of that timeline with those specific iterations of those characters, Tim and Stephanie as a couple failed. Fairly spectacularly really. Like, you can make an argument that people died because of it even. Twice if you count the very end of Robin with all the crap with Ulysses.

There are things which they got right that the others didn’t, sure. And you can say Convergence was the genuine last time we saw those iterations of those characters, in which case, yes, they got there in the end. And though I would like to think that the two would have reunited in the end, their respective solo runs do not end with them as a couple. Tim doesn’t even really get a mention in Steph’s final issue, and vice versa. Like, they focus on the main thematic points of their series - Tim and his relationship with his fathers, Stephanie and justifying her existence as a vigilante. Don’t get me wrong they matter deeply to each other and they probably do still love each other...they just have more important things on their mind when the other is not in the room.

But even so, between 2004 and 2015 (or 2016 if you count Rebirth instead of Convergence), Tim and Stephanie were not a couple. And one of the reason they failed was the same as for Arianna, Zoanne, Tam etc., didn’t work out. (Cassie is kind of it’s own ballpark). Tim could not keep his girlfriends in the loop. Either as Robin or as Tim Drake. There are other things that made them flatline, and I think at the end of the day what made Tim’s relationship with Steph fail was a little different, but that’s the jist. For the long and short of it:

Ari/Zo: Largely Tim’s fault. Too secretive about Robin.

Tam: Entirely Tim’s fault. Too secretive about both Tim and Red Robin.

Steph: Equally at fault. She trusted Bruce over Tim. Tim didn’t trust her enough period.

Cassie: Equally at fault. Grief is not a good reason for a rebound.

Lynx: Boy was just horny.

So, for Ariana, it was genuinely just because they were too young. They were fourteen when they split up. Ariana said it was because they were getting too serious at too young an age; Tim because he was tired of lying to her about Robin and also the will they/won’t they of Tim and Steph had been rolling on for fifty plus issues and Steph was just a more interesting character than Ari and was the preferred option by the readers so hey. There you go. End of. Tim cheated on her with Steph repeatedly, emotionally and smooching. Ari cheated because she felt ignored and left behind by Tim. He fell asleep in the car as she was telling him. Also Ari was insecure, because she was fourteen and every fourteen year old is insecure, so she did things like dye her hair (because Tim was staring at Steph at funeral not because he was gobsmacked by her beauty or anything it was less of a ‘holy shit she’s so pretty and blond’ and more of a ‘holy shit if she sees me my secret identity is blown’) or try to keep Tim’s attention on her by sleeping together. Which, again, they were fourteen. So in many ways, she was right in her reasoning. There was a lot going on there for people barely starting adolescence, but Tim’s general emotional and physical absence made their problems seem huge and overwhelming, when really, it was just because they were fourteen. Everything is such a big deal when you’re fourteen.

It’s kind of a similar thing with Zo. Now, I don’t know if it was intentional, but it’s sometimes said that your next partner after a big breakup is often the complete opposite of your previous. Zo comes from a nice middle class background with parents who are still together and are very loving. She is very school orientated and in fact tutored Tim. She is also (bless her) very boring. Which is arguably what Tim wanted. He’s still trying to convince himself that there’s a Tim Drake life worth living. However, same issues as Ari arise. Emotional and physical absence. Only this time it’s both the pressure or Robin plus the lovely trauma of dead family and friends. He can’t keep up with Tim Drake anymore. He falls asleep on a rollercoaster and can’t tell Zo why. He cheats on her with Steph (again emotionally and smooching). He breaks up with her over the phone. He kinda gets a bit grabby and manhandle-ly at points, physically lifting and carting her around when they are having an argument and she does not want to listen. Tim is... not good to Zo. At all.

Ari and Zo fail as relationships because they only know Tim Drake, except who Tim Drake is... is Robin. So they aren’t really in a relationship with Tim as a whole, so inevitably they both crumble.

The reason Cassie didn’t work out was just because they were out of their minds with grief. The cult arc and the cloning was bad. Like it was just a bad storyline. Rebounds like that (which timeline wise was occurring at the same time Tim was taking an interest in Zo) were bound to fail. Cassie deserves better!!!!!!!!!! Stupid goddamn writers.

Tam is tricky. Because she, like Steph, actually gets the privilege of knowing about Tim and Red Robin. She does it ‘backwards’, so her issue is having the realisation that yeah Red Robin is really cool but Tim Drake is a mess. And he still lies to her. There’s a few times where she has moments of realisation of how messed up Tim Drake is by the time she meets him. Her leaving is explicitly because that cool person who saved her from the LoA is also the kind of person to lie and throw people under the bus if it serves the greater good (what Tim thinks is the greater good). And she wants no part in that. It’s emotionally taxing to say the least. Also Tim cheats on her with Lynx. Constantly. And Steph, less constantly. He deserved that slap to be honest.

So we’re left with Steph. Steph also does things backwards, meeting Robin first. However, she gets moments with Tim (kind of) before she knows who Tim actually is. So she gets to go to the cinema with him. She gets her birthing classes with him. She gets the evenings sat at her kitchen table chatting about school. She gets him before the absolute shit show that was 2004/5 for Tim Drake. She is more patient than the other girls, either owing to a general lack of self esteem (hence being more willing to put up with long unexplained absences' than the others) or just by nature. At the same time she’s also more likely to tell Tim to belt up when he’s being mopey or secretive or whatever. Tim to be fair makes it pretty clear the ground rules of the relationship - she can’t be in all aspects of his life. Managing expectations and all that.

This fails. Obviously. Bruce is Bruce and uses Stephanie repeatedly to manipulate Tim. And she trusts Bruce. Repeatedly. For reasons. Bad writing. Low self esteem. Desire for approval making her throw out common sense.

But, here’s why maybe Tim and Steph would one day work again. It’s a minor thing I know, but Tim falls asleep on his girlfriends a lot, as I have shown above. What is Steph’s reaction when he does so?

Sweet dreams then, honey...

She knows him. So she is able to put the pieces together. Zo and Ari were not given that opportunity, so it could be said they couldn’t ever love Tim because they didn’t know him. Tam didn’t even like who Tim was when they broke up. Cassie never really stopped loving Conner. Steph pretty much consistently remained in love with Tim, and vice versa, even after their relationship imploded. It’s a lot easier to forgive your significant other for things like falling asleep over the phone when you know there’s a high chance they were probably out all last night working a case you know?

Stephanie had the sheer determination (stupidity) to stay around Tim until brick by brick (hoho) she was allowed behind those walls into all aspects of his life (unlike Zo and Ari), and she loved all aspects of Tim, regardless of how... disagreeable those aspects or actions were (Tam).

Flipping over to Tim’s feelings towards the girls... Steph won over Ari because he enjoyed sharing his night life with someone who understood. She was wittier, sharper, and less insecure than Ari. Steph won over Zo because of the omg you’re not dead factor and by this point she was a presence in both Tim and Robin’s lives so was just around him more often. And again, bless her, Zo was kinda dull, especially in comparison to Steph.

Steph didn’t win over Cassie or Tam as such but Tim did make a move on her whilst dating Tam. The problems that had ruined their relationship at the end of the Robin run had been proven moot after she’d shown how much she’d matured. So it’s possible in Tim’s mind, just for that split second on the roof, he thought things could go back to the way they were. Only for Steph to remind him that one of the reasons she had grown so much was because of his absence. And then he had the lovely reminder that Tam existed via engagement announcement.

Finally Lynx... well. He just wanted to bonk there to be honest. Which is fine. If he wasn’t seeing Tam at the same time.

#TimDrakeStopCheatingOnYourCivilianGirlfriendsChallenge

#dc #tim drake #stephanie brown #timsteph #ask and i'll babble #timsteph meta

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ifbrd · 6 years

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Dark Animaniacs Theory

because this is my idea of fun XD

Disclaimer before I begin:

A few days ago, I made a post asking if Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs take place in the same universe and if we could apply the logic of one show to the other. Most of the notes of this post were likes, which given my post was in the form of a question, doesn’t really tell me people’s thoughts on the subject. (I assumed anyone who liked it either agreed with me or was liking it because they wanted to know the answer too and that was their way of saving the post to check other people’s responses later (I’ve done that)) I did get one reply from @viridianvenus that said:

i always thought the canon was that everyone was actors who were well aware that they were on a tv show. Therefore you can never really tell what's 'real' and what was just part of their show

Which is a good point and even with my two interpretations of this show, (see here) they both incorporate this idea in some way shape or form.

So, with that being said, I would like to clarify beforehand which interpretation/logic I am applying to is the first one I talk about in the post above. And if you don’t want to read it, I’ll sum it up real quick: the logic is that it’s in the same universe as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the idea that toons come to life and are actors for their cartoons applies to both, and because of this, the idea that the Warner Siblings were locked up in the water tower for 60ish years is canon. It’s also important to note that like I suggested above, this theory involves the idea that Tiny Toons takes place in this universe as well, and the logic of that show also applies to Animaniacs.

So, keep this in mind as you read this theory. If you agree with the logic this theory stands on, I hope I blow your mind! If you don’t agree with this logic, then this entire theory is a moot point, but hey, maybe you’ll still enjoy it!

Anyway…

I’ve been going through the episodes of Animaniacs that give us insights into the Warner siblings’ past, (wanting to create a timeline for them, but that’s a whole other thing) and of course I can’t do that without watching their 65th-anniversary special. While watching that episode, I came across a line that I previously didn’t bat an eye about, but all the sudden seems a little suspicious.

The line in question came up while various characters were giving testimonies about the Warners, specifically talking about when the kids got locked up in the water tower. The line came from Plotz: “They’d spend the rest of their lives in that tower…alone!” Perhaps I’m simply reading too much into this, but the wording of “the rest of their lives” seems to imply the studio assumed the Warners’ lives would eventually end. And given everything we know about toons in this universe (regardless of whether or not you think it is connected to WFRR and TTA) the concept of them dying seems to be something next to impossible, especially since many toons we see haven’t aged since they first came to life. Then I remembered the logic of Tiny Toons, that toons will age if people stop watching and laughing at their cartoons.

And then suddenly I remembered a little line from the News Reel opening. “The Warners’ films, which made absolutely no sense, were locked away in the studio vault, never to be released”

This happened at the same time the Warners themselves were locked up, so there would have been no way for them to get anyone to laugh at them.

Combine this with the suspiciously morbid line of “They’d spend the rest of their lives in that tower…” and I have come to the unsettling conclusion/theory that the studio basically tried to kill the Warners by forcing them to age.

Now I do have some ideas on what the opposing arguments will be to this and rebuttals to some of them, so let’s cover those:

Opposing Argument: Slappy has stated many times that no one dies in cartoons (and let’s be honest, she’s the cartoon expert, she would know), so while toons may age from people not watching their cartoons, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will ever die from aging.

My thoughts: An excellent point. It’s certainly hard to suggest the idea that Slappy doesn’t know the cold hard facts about cartoons and the logic in them, but I do have a rebuttal to this,

My rebuttal: There is one episode in which Slappy attends a funeral for Walter Wolf, and yes, I am aware Walter was faking to get revenge on Slappy, but the important take away from that episode was the number of people who attended his funeral. There was a large group of people who did genuinely seem to believe that Walter did die. This doesn’t necessarily prove that toons can die from old age, I admit, but it could suggest that. However, it could also suggest that they just didn’t know if toons could die from aging yet. Perhaps it was unheard of until Walter “died”, and they all just went, “oh, I guess toons can die from old age” which to me says that they at least understand it’s a possibility, even if it hadn’t happened yet. If it was a known fact that toons couldn’t die from aging, no one would have attended his funeral, they all would have known he was faking. I would even dare to argue that in this episode, even Slappy believed that Walter was dead until she saw him up and moving (she just didn’t really care that he was dead because ya know, it’s Slappy), but the rest of you might disagree with me there. Either way, no matter how you look at it, it seems that the general population at least acknowledges that toons dying from old age is a possibility.

Opposing argument to my rebuttal: But, as viridianvenus stated, it’s a show within a show, so there’s no real way to tell what’s real and what’s part of the show, this is especially true when dealing with other cast members’ cartoons.

My thoughts: Good point, no rebuttal to that one.

Opposing Argument: Even if it’s true that toons can age from not having people watch their cartoons, that doesn’t mean the studio actually knew that. If toons started becoming a species as animation was invented, then at the time the Warners and their cartoons were locked away, there wouldn’t be any toons that would have aged enough, if at all, to have proven that this is how aging works for toons. Even if this was a known fact at this point, that doesn’t mean it was a well-known fact. It may have been known by some, but not necessarily known by the studio.

My thoughts: These are all very good points, and I have no rebuttal for this one.

Opposing argument: Even if it was a well-known fact that toons aged by having their cartoons not be watched, and even if toons can die from aging, that does not mean that the studio’s intent was to kill the Warners. Because even if the aging could have been proven by the mid-1930s, there wouldn’t have been enough time to prove that toons could die from aging and perhaps this is something they didn’t learn until later.

My thoughts: A very good point indeed, I have no rebuttal, but I do have a thought I would like to add to this idea: this could potentially explain why they let the Warners out to do cartoons every once in a while, like with their wartime cartoon and their being lent out to competing studios. Perhaps the studio discovered that toons could die from not having their cartoons watched, and the studio realized what they could have been unintentionally doing to the Warners and decided to give them just enough cartoons to keep them alive.

And the thing about these arguments I’ve thought of, while they do offer a potentially likely alternative, they dont seem to actually debunk the theory...

Another thing: Even if the studio wasn’t trying to actually kill the Warner kids through aging, that doesn’t negate the fact that this certainly was something that could have happened to them.

There’re probably more arguments against this theory, but I couldn’t think of them, so it’s up to you guys to let me know what you find or remember that debunks it!

Now if it is true, I have two questions:

1. How is it that despite these efforts, the Warners seemed to have not aged a day? Yes, there are the cartoons the studio let them do while they were out of the tower, but would those have been enough to keep them young for several decades until the next batch of cartoons? Or were there other cartoons the studio let them do that we never got to see? Or was it just them having to be let out every few years so the tower could be fumigated enough to get enough laughs for them to stay young. Or did they perhaps actually age, while in the tower, and then when they got released and got more people laughing at them, reverted back to their child states, and maybe that’s why they are able to make so many adult jokes, because there were periods of time when they were adults.

2. Do you think they ever caught onto this? Do you think they ever connected these dots and went “holy crap this studio is trying to kill us!”?

Yes, I know I’m probably just over analyzing and over thinking a silly cartoon that’s meant for nothing but to make its audience smile, but ya know what? Dark conspiracy theories make me smile so it’s still doing its job!

#animaniacs #animaniacs theory #yakko wakko and dot #yakko warner #wakko warner #dot warner #thadeus plotz #i like how i said i have rebuttals to some of them but then i only had one rebuttal #honestly this theory kinda scared me a little #im trying to make a timeline for a fanfic i'm planning #and instead i find this #and part of me feels compelled to bring this up in the fanfic #but idk how that would work so i may just ingore it #but that will be hard because the fanfic follows the exact logic and interpretation that this theory does so idk #hope you enjoyed me ruining this show for you!#i've read this over so many times and i still feel like im forgetting something or have a grammar error in there :/

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dahniwitchoflight · 6 years

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minor AU Completion of the Beta Kid’s Animal Symbolism

so something I’ve always thought about and wondered about, I wanna talk about for a bit, now that homestuck’s over and I’m rereading it going through the story

all of the beta kids throughout the story have unique animal related symbolism, that eventually ties into delving into greater parts of their characters, exploring even what you might consider the “darker side” to their characters, sometimes to the point of representing their inverted states/jungian shadow selves nicely tied into the idea of “lower bestial natures” being at odds with their true human natures

and these culminate and get fully cashed in by tragic/failed alternate versions of each beta kid that gets somehow mixed with their respective animal (usually through sprite shenanigans) and ends up in some way dealing with their inner issues a bit

Jade’s Dreamself (who was always very silly and prone be overemtional) dies under prospit’s moon, gets stuffed, and later resurrected as a JadeBecsprite who represents Jade’s inner tragic emotional states

Dave gets trapped in an alternate timeline with Rose, but then goes back in time after learning the ins and outs of the game, only to sec prototype as Davesprite and earn wings, and then forevers deals with the depression and aftermath of never being “Alpha” Dave ever again

Rose eventually dies in a pre retcon timeline fighting the condesce, and her corpse is thrown into Roxy’s sprite post retcon, which then merges with Jaspersprite to make Jasprosesprite^2 and which post retcon Rose is herself embarrassed by the inner revelations revealed by this character, who has itself lost all inhibitions due to the animal prototyping

but John never really gets anything of the sort, but in reality, there was a GREAT opportunity for him to have something like this happen to him, early on in the story, that doesn’t actually change much of the story at all

so this is kind of a “what if this had happened instead?” minor AU where some minor details were a little different

because the animal candidate I’m thinking of that could have had something to do with John personally in the above way, already has a great setup for this: none of its own character/personality/dialogue as it was just a programmed toy robot, minimal invasion into the plot (and most only in regards to John’s Dad related things), viewed John as it’s sole master and had a nice clean death via Green Sun explosion in Cascade

and that is the Uber Bunny Robot known as Liv Tyler

and the alternate version John candidate I’m thinking of is the John that got tricked by Terezi into facing Typheus too early and getting killed by him, causing the doomed timeline where Davesprite is from

this John also has a great setup for this, because at first we get exactly 5 or so pages describing what went down in the Doomed timeline, and all of it from Dave and Rose’s perspective, we know nothing of what really happened in that John Typheus encounter, other than “John died and thus was unavailable to help Jade enter the game”, we also get a little bit more later, when we see the Ghost of this John have a chat with a dead version of Vriska much much later in the story. John says there was more to his death than he let on, he died, but not in a fight with his denizen, because he spoke with Typheus, and knew that his death was necessary for his friends to live on, he made his Choice to die, for the sake of the timeline

and because this alternate John and Liv Tyler have a huge chunk of symbolism in common, all of which ties directly back to John, and more specifically, John’s opposite aspect Blood

the first is, the same Liv Tyler Bunny plush was given to John by all three of his friend’s on his same birthday through time shenanigans

Dave gives him the original plush rabbit, which is the actual original rabbit from the one nic cage movie john really loves, when John ecto’s all the babies, he dramatically re-enacts the con air nic cage scene from that movie (reunite with your loving wife and daughter) and gives the rabbit to Rose

Rose in this reality grows up with the rabbit as her own sentimental youthful object, its old and torn growing up with her, so she knits it back together using the needles that John gifted to her and gives it to John on his birthday

John then gives this rabbit to Baby Jade in the same reunite with loving wife and daughter scene

and finally, Jade with her then alt universe penpal Jake, send it back and forth, making robotic upgrades and enhancements and equipping it with all kinds of awesome gear: the Warhammer Of Zillyhoo, the Quills of Echidna, the Royal Deringer, and Ahab's Crosshairs, which match the Strife Specibi of the beta kids. She does this because she foresaw John would be in danger and wanted to send something to help him fight

this rabbit is the literal embodiment of Johns strongest friendship bonds 3 times over, the literal physical manifestation of his Blood

and then Typheus!John is only able to get to Typheus because Terezi through Sollux helped him removed the 3 random objects stuck in his rocket, 3 random objects, that just so happen to be object that appear in Dave’s, Rose’s and Jade’s houses: a cinderblock, a violin and a potted plant

so again, a connection to John’s connection to all 3 of his friends

now here’s where the AU kicks in:

John is still tricked into meeting his denizen early, preserving the timeline with Davesprite and whatnot, however his choice to die to preserve the reality where his friends continue to exist has another part to it

Not only does Typheus allow him to choose to become a ghost to preserve the alpha timeline, but also gives John a sort of challenge, with a potential boon at the end

If John as a ghost can break out of his extra hard dream bubble coma, break out of his memories, remember the choice he made to help save his friends/the timeline, he may be allowed to manifest in a different physical form instead, in order to continue helping his friends/his new alpha self survive the game

all the panels where dead Vriska meets him and helps him to jog his usually hard to jog memory compared to the other ghosts still happen, but the ending is different, because of the extra challenge/boon Typheus gave him. When John remembers fully, he remembers the boon Typheus left him/how to use it, probably something like, a one use portal window thing that transports his ghost back into the physical realm, so he’s kinda in the same state Aradia was as a ghost in Alternia

so he finds somewhere where the uber bun exists, some point before it actually gets to his dreamself on prospit (doesn’t actually matter where)

and then it’s revealed after the fact, that everything Liv Tyler did upon activation at Prospit was actually the choices made by this alternate universe dead spirit version of John

it’s viable because as a robot made by Jade and Jake, it has the ability to potentially house a soul/life, just like Jade’s dreambot for her dreamself (or again, earth version of the tech that Equius made for Aradia, lot of weird Aradia parallels here, but that really only helps this AU) and something that helps is that the bun likely wasn’t built with any way to naturally communicate, no pesterchum in it like lil hal, nor a voicebox, again making a connection to this being a John which has to internally deal with/overcome that he is no longer the “important” John, but this time he’s simultaneously back with all of his friends, and cut off from them at the same time, similar to Davesprite, but also in a having no mouth and must scream kind of way (relating to symbolism of Breath = Speech/communication/mail) being the opposite of his natural element, in an unhealthy place, similar in situation to how Lil Hal was an A.I. copy of Dirk, a heartless version of a heart player/out of their natural element and having to deal with that negative environmental influence

and it helps explain the few things that Liv Tyler seem to do with no direction, like help get Dad’s wallet containing the tumor (which a John would have recognized as his dad’s and picked up anyway) and getting to Dave Rose and helping them (when it’s stated Liv Tyler was supposed to view John and only John as his master, specifically built that way by Jade for that purpose, to protect John)

the package hes in goes through it’s shenanigans like usual, one minor change could be instead of Jack Noir wielding the bunny against the black queen to get her ring in rebellion, he could simply use one of the many regiswords/assassination requests he apparently gives out like candy, like the one he gave to PM, and the bun merely stays in the box until it’s delivered to PM and then John himself and Bun!John recognizes John and becomes his protector

but then you could just make the point in time that Alt!John merges with the bun the point where Liv Tyler’s allegiances switch to helping John from Jack Noir, so the above is just moot anyway

he stays with John for awhile, then fulfills his major mission in helping get the tumor to Rose and Dave and help them to survive/god tier in the correct time and place/again preserve the timeline, fulfilling the idea of him wanting to come back for the purpose of wanting to keep his friends safe/putting his bonds above his own internal state and self to the point of self sacrifice during the green’ sun’s explosion (again, another point for his blood overpowering his breath)

so yeah, you can see, despite all my text it doesn’t actually change much in the plot! the biggest thing could be Jack Noir not using it for the Black Queen (cuz lets be honest he didn’t really need to, his betrayal would have caught her off guard enough to grab the ring) but really just depends on where you choose to do it

AND instead of this flash: https://www.homestuck.com/story/5027 which was more comedic, we could potentially get a string of panels showing what John was thinking and feeling as the Bun Robot, so close and yet so far away from all his friends, completely alone in his own thoughts and with his only motivation being to make sure his friends survive the game, maybe in thought bubbles or code like Serenity the firefly, showcasing the sort of mental descent and depression that John is really prone to, showing how he could end up in a state where he willingly dies for his friends for their sake

I think it’s a great missed opportunity to be honest and at the very least it’s a very neat little AU Idea

and the way it’s set up would be like an awesome shock reveal too

but then also, John is already compared to nic cage so much it’s not even funny

and John himself makes the symbolic connection between nic cage being just like the rabbit “dirty, worn, old, but it’s what on the inside that counts” simultaneously making that connection to himself when he’s inside the rabbit, because it’s bot his outward appearance that matters, what matters is that He’s still John on the inside, still your best friend guys, I’m right here...

and homestuck has a pattern of turning old jokes into new serious content, so it’s not like it doesn’t fit

and if a few panels are thrown in of a ghostly spirit wandering a bit before settling on the bun inside jade’s gift, it can help establish that Alpha John later would become truly intangible and floating through not just earth, but all of homestuck itself

anyway, those are my thoughts for this idea, I think there’s a lot to go on here

the only thing thats not involved are sprite shenanigans, but If I could find a way to involve those then I would :P

maybe instead of dying at the green sun with Dave and Rose he somehow gets thrown into an sprite somewhere and becomes actual RoboBunJohnsprite (even though everything’s taken already and can’t be altered) maybe it can happen instead of Tavris or GCATavris who knows is BunJohn even survives somehow

shenanigans! shenanigans i say

#Homestuck #John Egbert #Liv Tyler

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chalabrun · 7 years

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the case for nyx & noctis (theory)

Alrighty, so as I’ve peddled through the material, I have a theory: that Nyx and Noctis are much closer than what was insinuated in-game. Granted, while we never really see mention of Nyx beyond a few easter eggs, there’s little proofs I’ve picked up on I think allude to them being closer than what we initially believe.

Regardless of whether you like the idea of Nyx and Noctis being bros in arms, Nyx being a big brother figure, or you were among the bewildered shippers who fell into Nyxnoct hell like I did big time shhh but have no real substance for them knowing each other beyond the mutually superficial belief it’s their status as XV’s protagonists that unites them, here’s something I hope might open your eyes and make you see otherwise.

As usual, due to length I’m going to split this up into parts as it’s going to get wordy:

Parting Ways: The only canon Nyx & Noctis interaction we have (and why it’s substantial)

The prologue: "Drautos, he’s in your hands!”

Did they train together?

Nyx is never mentioned in-game (but why it doesn’t invalidate him)

FFXV: Comrades (the PC, Libertus and Noctis)

Lastly...

Parting Ways: The only canon Nyx & Noctis interaction we have (and why it’s substantial)

If you’re wondering what Parting Ways is, it’s a background script detailing the Chocobros and their interactions with others as they’re getting ready to leave Insomnia and embark on their road trip across Lucis before they finally leave for Altissia where he gets engaged and weds Luna, and the rest is history. However, you’re probably wondering: what was their interaction? Parting Ways is, admittedly, not common fandom knowledge. I, personally, didn’t know about it until very recently.

In the notable section I’m speaking about, Nyx picks Noctis up in the Star of Lucis and ferries him from the Citadel to his apartment so he can begin packing with the others. At first glance, this doesn’t look like anything much. Libertus even bemoans how it’s like they’re expected be to baby-sitters now. Except, this has much more leverage than it appears.

In what world would a mere Kingsglaive be allowed this level of clearance? Regardless of this being a fantasy game or not, even games such as these acknowledge a hierarchy of some sort, especially where royalty is concerned. Even if Noctis would rather have people treat him otherwise, he’s still the Crown Prince. As crown prince, no ordinary person can be entrusted with the task of being chauffeur to royalty. Why might this be?

I think, knowing the nature of Regis’ character and the charge he gave Nyx in a life or death situation, that the king trusts Nyx on a deeply personal level. Despite his many flaws, considering how this was before the turmoil of the invasion, it was under rather peaceful circumstances. Knowing Regis, it’s extremely likely that Noctis and Nyx have known each other. Considering Nyx himself said Regis took him in like one of his own twelve years ago, and sees him as a father figure, this could allude to IC closeness between the two. To an extent that Regis would entrust the task of driving his son on such short notice to Nyx, which would’ve made sense for a Crownsguard to do, but a Glaive? Unthinkable.

Remember: the Crownsguard is the personal guardsmen of the royal family. The Kingsglaive are not. They’re something like a mercenary/soldier unit, but not fit to do something of the likes the should’ve been designated to someone like Ignis or Gladio.

Well, unless Nyx actually knew Noctis beyond this one occurrence. That there was a bond of trust that existed beyond king and glaive. That Noctis himself trusted Nyx enough to be around him, let alone driving his car (Drautos makes a note of this in Kingsglaive).

Remember, Nyx joined the Kingsglaive at the time it was founded twelve years ago; at around the time Tenebrae fell and Noctis was disabled by a Maralith attack. For Regis to think Nyx could get along with his heavily traumatized son doesn’t sound too inane, I think. For them to have fostered a friendship, even.

However, their relationship could stem beyond even that. Though, more on that, later.

The prologue: "Drautos, he’s in your hands!”

Alright, this probably seems extremely insubstantial. It’s just Noctis casually waving his father off one final time, passing the responsibility of his father on to one of his generals. There’s really nothing more to it, right?

Well, kind of. In Kingsglaive, prior to his flagrant betrayal, Drautos is seen with Nyx in Noctis’ car. This suggests another degree of connectivity between Noctis and the Kingsglaive, and by extension, the idea that Noctis likely bore some degree of familiarity with the Kingsglaive beyond them copping use of one of his cars when it was convenient. Granted, it might not look to be much more than that, but remember the above: using the prince’s personal possession, likely a car that was recognizable (that was a “gift” from Audi in the real world for Noct’s 20th birthday), means it would’ve just been more than Regis’ leniency, but likely Noctis’ own familiarity with the Kingsglaive and being alright with them using his personal possessions before.

Again, it might be reading into this too deeply, but remember: the Kingsglaive is the equivalent of Lucis’ standing army, while the Crownsguard is the personal guard. The KG being temporarily reassigned to guard Insomnia during the peace treaty signing isn’t enough to evoke this level of trust. It had to have come from somewhere, that thing likely being Noctis having known not only Drautos, but Nyx as well.

Specifically Nyx, though that comes next.

Omen: Noctis & Nyx’s kukris

What’s like the strongest piece of evidence to my theory is in the Omen trailer. From what we know, it is confirmed that the kukris Noctis is seen using are, in fact, Nyx’s. So, that begs the questions: how did he attain them? Omen, at its root, is simply what would’ve happened if Noctis had left the Crown City on his own. Where the novella of parting ways would’ve been altered. Likely, it might’ve been stripped of the Chocobros’ involvement outside of good-byes, but it’s significant because it makes me wonder where Noctis got Nyx’s kukris at all.

Which leaves me with two theories: Nyx either entrusted his beloved weapons to Noctis--which would make sense since he’d be embarking on his own--or, which would be supported by the fact that Kingsglaive’s production began around 2013...when the transition trailer for Versus to be converted into XV was released that same year. Again, why is this significant? This trailer shows gameplay of Noctis in Insomnia, presumably when the invasion is taking place. Earlier Versus trailers continue to support this as Noctis, in his earliest scenes with Stella, show him in Insomnia as well some footage of he and team-members in the same treaty room where it was to be ratified.

This gives credence to the idea that Nyx and Noctis could’ve met during the invasion, fought together, and saw Nyx give his kukris to Noctis.

Again, the old script changing is a moot point. Where Nyx is concerned, there have been leaks released of a Stella model in Kingsglaive, as well as some concept art and fully-rendered scene.

It takes years for pure CGI to be rendered, even for something as short as the Omen trailer likely took awhile. That a studio outside of Square’s own production was in charge of this likely meant Omen’s production and release fell within the timeline of an older version of the script; an older version where Nyx and Noctis fought side-by-side.

Again, consider this render:

Sure, it might just be for the sake of promotion between both of XV’s protagonists, but this is clearly staged after the invasion of Insomnia. Noctis is wielding one of Nyx’s kukris. Considering it’s confirmed officially the ones in Omen are Nyx’s, again--the likelihood of Omen Noctis having encountered Nyx before or after the invasion and being the inheritor of his iconic kukris seems extremely likely to me.

And what would’ve been required beforehand? Why, for them to have known each other, of course.

Did they train together?

I honestly believe so. Why? Remember: none of the other Chocobros can warp. This ability is unique to line of Lucis and the Kingsglaive, and they’re the only ones we see doing it. The only time we see them do so is a special Chain Link when they embattle the Adamantoise, but otherwise, only Ignis is seen doing so when he puts on the Ring of the Lucii that grants him access to the king’s magic (he even says so when donning it Verse 2 with Ardyn; how he might not be of royal blood, but if a Glaive (Nyx) can--why can’t he? Which alludes to the idea that Ignis can’t warp and like otherwise).

Also, consider these gifs:

This...

...compared to this:

Or even this tactic--

...compared to this:

It’s evident in XV how the Chocobros all have fairly good synergy when fighting one another, what with them having those link strikes and moves that all meld pretty well with each other.

However, I think Noctis having know-how on how to use Nyx’s kukris and emulate his fighting style is inherent, even outside of Omen. Why? When you find Nyx’s kukris in Chapter 14, Noctis already knows how to use them. This isn’t simply a case of his diverse familiarity with a wide range of weapons, but possibly because he’s familiar with them. He trained with all those weapons, so--what if he trained with Nyx’s, too? With the glaive himself? Remember, Omen was merely canon divergent from the time of his departure on. For him to have trained with Nyx before makes perfect sense.

Let’s recap with this:

None of the Chocobros but Noctis can warp outside of unique and limited circumstances.

Therefore, he had to receive his warping training from someone, and given his familiarity with Drautos (who isn’t shown being able to warp in KG) and Nyx, this likely fell to Nyx (also considering Drautos’ duties as both Captain and General Glauca, he likely was too busy to).

Nyx demonstrates many times in KG where Regis places implicit trust not only with the fate of Insomnia, Luna, but even his own son in something as mundane as being driven back to his apartment to pack up. It’s mundane, but given how close Regis was with Nyx, entrusting his son’s training to him makes sense, also.

In short, I think Noctis having received training from Nyx makes the most sense from what I’ve gathered so far.

Nyx is never mentioned in-game (but why it doesn’t invalidate him)

This is much shorter, but you have to wonder: how can this be if Nyx is never mentioned in-game? Thing is, this doesn’t really mean much. Because someone else tremendously important in-game doesn’t mention Nyx, either.

Think of the only person in KG who lived on after Nyx’s sacrifice, who was by his side the entire time, who also was a major character in-game.

Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.

As shown here, even though she never once mentions Nyx even by name, she still wore the hair clip he gave her by proxy of Crowe. Meaning? He still had a monumental place in her heart, that she wore it right until she died, and even in the afterlife beyond. So, for Nyx to have had a similarly lasting impression on him isn’t unthinkable.

More proof?

Remember this? From left to right, the corpses are Iedolas, Regis, Luna....and Nyx.

Thing is, why Nyx? Ardyn specifically conjured this with the intention of rattling Noctis. In the wiki, on Nyx’s page it says Nyx’s hanging cadaver was meant to discourage Noctis. Why discourage?

Now, I could understand if Ardyn had a personal fascination with Nyx. However, unlike Luna or Regis, Ardyn never met Nyx in person. He witnessed the destruction of Insomnia, likely heard tale or even saw some of Nyx’s heroism after he donned the ring. So, a personal fascination could make sense in that context.

However, these corpses weren’t chosen for Ardyn’s gratification. They were specifically selected to taunt Noctis. This was an illusion sustained on Ardyn’s magic, after all. Why would he keep them manifested for ten years except on the night of the fateful battle to encourage despair?

Remember: Iedolas was the figurehead of Niflheim, likely a target of Noctis’ hatred. Ardyn hanging him likely could be symbolic of the futility of facing himself, as an all-powerful enemy brought down by Ardyn’s whim would rattle even the most lionhearted hero.

Regis and Luna are no-brainers. Regardless of how you feel about Regis’ actions or Noctluna in general, Noctis loved them implicitly. Regis was his father, and Luna was his fiance. He says he loves them in a monologue and flashbacks before he deals that final blow and the Lucii spear him through.

However...Nyx. The wiki says he was strung up there, too, to discourage Noctis. Again, Iedolas, Regis, and Luna make sense. But for Nyx to be up there, too, can mean only one thing:

That Noctis was close to Nyx in some way, shape, or form. Close in a way the game never reveals, but close nonetheless.

FFXV: Comrades (Libertus and Noctis)

Let’s consider Comrades here, too. Love it or hate it, Comrades is still a part of canon. Now, I believe it’s AU, yes, but like Verse 2 of Episode Ignis it’s still a canon divergence.

Now, the scene I want to draw the most attention to is actually the epilogue.

The interaction I think is the most substantial to this post, in particular, is that of Libertus and Noctis’ interaction. While it may have been brief, what with Noctis exchanging only a few words, it was monumental for Libertus to have been there--to go so far as someone branded a traitor and fight alongside the PC to redeem themselves.

How so? Remember, Libertus was among those glaives who betrayed Regis. I think it’s credible to think, that while Lib’s redemption didn’t happen within KG proper, it was there that it begun--the second he rammed Glauca with that SUV. When he helped Nyx and Luna in fighting him, in getting Luna to safety while Nyx fought in that final battle.

So, for Libertus’ loyalty to have carried that far, feels like direct parallelism between Noctis and Nyx: how their actions changed hearts and mind, and how their sacrifices enabled the world to be saved. As without Nyx, without Noctis, many more people would’ve died. I think Libertus was aware of this, knowing the parallels between Nyx and Noctis and where their actions led them for the sake of the greater good.

It’s even apparent in that secret scene at Hammerhead where Noct and the bros reflect on the glaives’ sacrifice--redeemed traitors or no--and how this likely extended to Nyx’s, as well. For Libertus’ sacrifice, his being there to an awakening Noctis, likely would’ve never happened if not for Nyx.

Lastly...

Do you see the chair Nyx is seated on here? Feel like you’ve seen it before? Look again:

It’s almost identical to the one Noctis sits in here, which brings me to my last, final parallel between them.

That’s because they’re both sitting on a nearly identical throne.

Nyx and Noctis were both kings for a night.

Like how Ignis was able to repeat what Regis had told him as a boy about standing tall, so too did Noctis share the same sentiment of not wanting to have people sacrifice their lives for his sake (in Nyx saying to Regis, “Is this the way of our king? Sacrificing Lucian sons to save his own?” Noctis said something to the same effect in the Lucii’s tomb to Cor).

Wielding the power of the Ring, summoning the Old Wall, Nyx did what no non-Lucian king has done before--maybe not originally since its first designation. For Nyx to have summoned the old wall alongside the magic and powers he wielded--compared to Glauca’s magitek-enhanced own--is spellbinding. In doing this, Nyx became a king for a night. He achieved the highest respect from Regis, who saw him as a worthy inheritor of the Lucii’s power second only to Noctis, the True King. Compared those previously, even Ignis wasn’t able to summon this much power, even if he was able to stop Ardyn in his tracks and facilitate Noctis surviving (if you go by Verse 2), Nyx gave himself selflessly. He perished by the dawn’s first light.

In exactly the same way Noctis does.

Both men wore the ring for selfless reasons, and gave their lives so the people of Eos could live to see the dawn breaking. Between them, the weight of their sacrifices is unquantifiable. What they did for Lucis cannot hope to be replicated after, that much I am certain as even canon shows.

And it is for this reason that I believe Noctis and Nyx knew each other, and why their connection cannot be overlooked by anyone.

#nyx ulric #noctis lucis caelum #nyxnoct #nyx x noctis #my headcanon

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loyallogic · 4 years

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How to crack Judiciary in the first attempt

This article is written by Priyanka Cholera, a student of MKES College of Law, Mumbai University.

Guest Speaker:

Anubha Jindal did her BCom (LLB) from Panjab University, Chandigarh (2nd topper, Batch 2013-18). Moreover, she is pursuing LLM from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She appeared not only for one but four judicial services examination and achieved Rank 8, in Punjab Judiciary, Rank 11, in Haryana Judiciary Rank 25, Rajasthan Judiciary and cleared Delhi Mains of which (Interview pending), she has also won National Moot Court Competition.

Host:

Anu Bhatnagar, Webinar Executive, LawSikho

How did you choose law? And what motivated you for Judiciary?

Ms. Anubha says that she began studying Law to be a Judicial Officer. From the first day of college, she knew her goal very well and I Planned my 5 years accordingly.

Her parents always wanted her to be a Judicial Officer and that dream Materialized after joining law.

When to start with judicial preparation?

She believes that there are ideally two categories of Students who opt for Judiciary, First ones like herself, who know early on from their college that they want to opt for law and others, who are still weighing their options.

If you are in college and you have decided to opt for Judiciary, it is recommended join coaching classes from your 4th Year (if you’re in the Five Year Course) because then you will have plenty of time to make notes and your 5th year will keep you very busy, so best to start early and if you decide later, there’s no need to be worried.

Just start preparing as soon as you decide, everyone’s timelines are different.

What strategy did you apply for preparation and time management?

As she mentioned earlier, she joined coaching from the Fourth year itself, and by the time she graduated, all her notes were ready. And after college, she began with self Study.

According to Anubha’s personal experience, Self-Study is the key for cracking any Judicial Exams, Coaching will spoon-feed and handhold you about the concepts and techniques, but the real work needs to be done by the student.

She started preparing with major Subjects like IPC, CrPC and CPC, Evidence and Family Law (because her main aim was clearing the Punjab Judiciary and Family Law is an Important Chunk of Syllabus), she completed the major subjects before proceeding to the Niche ones.

She gave 8 hours of her time every day to cover all subjects.

What was your strategy for preparing notes for Self Study?

Start with your textbooks, Anubha used Textbooks to prepare for all the main subjects like IPC, CPC, CrPC. One can also use the textbooks that he/she had used for College. The note-making process is as old school as our usual note-making process, Highlight points that are important for you. In her note-making process, whenever she studied any topic, she left space for extra notes that might be added from law news sources, for Judgments, etc.

She made sure that her notes are very specific and short notes for the main exams so that when the occasion comes, she can just look through all the notes.

During preparing for her Delhi Judiciary, ‘LiveLaw’ was very helpful as in that Judicial Exams, many questions are based on recent Judgements.

The same strategy helped her to take the Haryana and Rajasthan Judicial Exams too.

And there is no thumb rule that one has to go for coaching; going for coaching just smoothens the road a bit.

Many students clear the Judiciary without any help from coaching.

How did you prepare for the preliminary examination?

Once you receive the notification regarding the prelims, you should start preparing for Prelims; Revising Bare Acts (only) is Sufficient for Prelim’s Preparation. Anyway, Judicial Exams need wholesome Preparation, which includes Bare Acts plus notes. But for Prelims, As soon as you are notified about it, start being well versed with the Bare Acts e.g. Knowing all the Sections and explanations, etc is very important. and General Knowledge, that includes knowing about Latest Case Laws. If you’re confident about the preliminary, that will boost your confidence about the Main Exam, as well.

Anubha shared her experience that she appeared for the Judicial Examination, same year she Graduated, hence she had 2-3 months to prepare. Although there are books available for MCQ’s for Preliminary, she relied on past papers only to help her prepare.

Even if the questions don’t repeat (as one might hope it will), students will be aware of the Paper Patterns, because different states have different types of Questions; Rajasthan had Hindi Language related questions, Delhi had contextual questions, for Delhi exams, one has known concepts beyond bare acts.

From her experience70% of her question paper was based on past papers. Hence previous year papers are very important.

What was your approach for learning and remembering Sections of the Act or Code for Prelims?

Instead of trying to remember the Section number, try to understand the Concept. Because mugging up the numbers won’t lead you anywhere. Revise and Repeat. Keep visiting the sections repeatedly until you get the hang of it.

If you have friends or Colleagues preparing for Judiciary as well, Discussing Concept with Peers, helps a lot too.

How to Prepare for Language, General Knowledge and Case Laws related Questions, in Prelims?

Generally, in all state Prelim exams cover the Language and GK part, Delhi has the GK portion in main exams too. The best way to prepare for GK is to maintain consistency in making notes from newspapers regularly, to be honest, all newspapers collectively give 2-3 major points that are relevant for your Judicial examination, so it isn’t as difficult as it appears to be.

There youtube channels like StudyIQ that help in keeping you updated about Current Affairs, referring Magazines are also recommended.

Anubha says, she wasn’t confident about the Hindi Language, that was in portion for the Rajasthan Judicial Exams, So for concepts like those, referring past papers and taking help from YouTube Channels, sailed her boat.

Case Laws are important from the Main Examination point of view too. Not only recent ones but LandMark Judgements are also important to remember. E.g. for the topic of Arrest, to be aware of the DK Basu case Judgement is important. One can refer to various Subject Material available online and past papers too.

For studying recent Case Laws, it is important to do Smart Work. Because remembering all the Recent Case Laws for a decent number of Subjects is very difficult. Hence just be aware of what is important from the exam point of view and prepare accordingly.

How did you prepare for the MAIN examination?

The most important step is Making an Ideal Time Table and keeping Targets. Anubha shares that she used to start her day early in the morning to study and try to maintain Targets for each month. She had slots for study time divided between breakfast and Lunch. Also, she had added leisure time to her timetable. Studying GK was kept at the end of the day when the Brain is exhausted to intake any Study Material.

As she mentioned earlier, she made concept specific notes and made sure she had at least one Case Law per Topic. Her tip for writing exams is to write answers that very specific in nature, don’t beat around the bush. Even for 20 marks question 2 pages are enough. Make your answers crisp and precise.

If you co-relate your answers to Laws outside the ambit of the question, e.g. if the question is from IPC you can relate laws from CrPC or Constitution too, that adds an edge to your answers and shows your aptitude, it advisable to write at least one case law per question.

Completing the paper is also very crucial, we usually prioritize writing what we know best first, but instead of that try to manage the paper with a timeline, there are chance you’ll run short of time to complete it but if time isn’t a luxury at that moment, shorten the answers, BUT ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS.

How did you prepare for Delhi Judiciary Mains?

Anubha shares her experience, in Delhi Judicial Exam, questions to a great extent are based on Practical Aspects or Latest Judgements, hence one must be aware of the issues upon which the question is based, in 2-3 lines, Then add provision related to the question and if you can add case laws related to it, then it’ll truly be an ideal Answer.

If you’re clear with concepts, aware of the Judgements, and reason your answers logically and correctly, Delhi Judicial Examination will be achievable for you.

Did you prepare templates for lengthy answers?

No one can predict what type of questions will be asked, hence opting to make templates is not reasonable. But certain provisions are extremely important from the exam point of view, so it is important to make notes in such a pattern that, if a question is proposed on it, you can derive the answer from your notes. If during an exam, the student feels that answer will not suffice as content, one can always write essentials of the provisions to increase the length and quality of the answer.

E.g. – In Haryana Judiciary Exam, there was a question on Discharge of Contracts, so instead of writing everything in detail, Anubha says she opted for Flow Chart, to explain the steps of Discharge of Contract and she concluded concepts and Case Laws in 2-3 lines because it isn’t feasible to the writer in-depth about every provision when you have other questions to attend too.

How did you answer General Knowledge questions?

In Delhi Judicial Exams only students faced questions on GK in the English Language Exam Paper itself, according to Anubha’s experience.

There were questions on AI, Chandrayan, etc. and for those, she referred IAS (or Civil Services) notes, there are questions based on Religion, Education, Women Empowerment for Essays, so it can be Summed up In 2-3 pages, it is important to write about the latest news or information regarding the essay you have chosen to write.

How did you prepare for Judgement Writing Exercise?

Ms. Anubha came across the question of Judgement writing only in Rajasthan Judiciary Exams. She referred to the book for previous exam questions and practiced it a couple of times. For judgment writing there is format and chronology that one has to follow, writing the brief Facts of the case, the contentions from Petitioners and Respondents as well as if there is any evidence provided, then to correlate it to the case and giving an opinion on it, finally passing the Judgement.

How to prepare for the Interview Round?

Your knowledge has already been tested, through your examinations, hence the interview round is to judge your personality. So it is important to know the basics of the law and the current affairs. As Anubha was a fresher, she was interviewed regarding the Current Affairs, Case Laws, recent news, family background, etc.

As one has already studied enough material on case laws and Laws in general, so just revision will work, and keeping up General Knowledge and Current affairs is very important.

She also shares that, in her interview, the Interviewers were cordial and made sure she was comfortable.

It is advisable to be calm and not run in circles, if you don’t know the answer to any question, just be humble and admit it.

Can you share your personal experience?

Ms. Anubha shares her experience of Rajasthan Judicial Interview, she was questioned about a few particular sections of CrPC and IPC, regarding their context and implementations. Similar Experience during Punjab and Haryana Interview.

She had a very pleasant experience in regards to the Interview Round.

Questions by Audience

How to cover CPC for Judiciary exams?

For CPC being thorough with Bare Acts and knowing important topics from past papers and Judiciary points of view is ideal for preparation. e.g. concepts like Orders, Res Judicata, Representative Suits, etc. Write, section no. provision and Order no and Judgements.

How to prepare for CrPC and CPC landmark Judgements?

Anubha says she prepared maximum of her syllabus through self-study, hence often while reading when she came across a Judgement too many times she marked it as important, and often the book you’re referring will mention and important judgments, but it is always wise to go through several references like Coaching Notes, Past Paper, Graduation Notes, etc.

How did you prepare for Local Laws?

Mainly Rent Law differs in every state, and even in that, the framework is similar for all states. So for local laws of different states, she prepared through Bare Acts only and Past Papers. In her experience questions on Local Laws do not hold many marks on their account.

How did I prepare for 4 different States?

Primarily while making notes, Aubhav says she covered everything, she possibly could, and she was very well versed with major concepts like IPC, CrPC, and CPC. And 60-70% portion is common for all state exams, that helped too. The Rajasthan Judicial Services Hindi Language paper was a bit Technical, but it was doable with the Study Material in a couple of weeks. She advises students to focus on a maximum of 3 states, not more than that, because any more than that, increases chances of burn out are high.

Can you refer to some reliable references?

IPC by PSA Pillai, CPC by C.K Takwani, CrPC by R.V Kelkar, Evidence Act by Batuklal, Muslim Family Law by Aqil Ahmed, Hindu Family Law by Punamkar Dhan, For Minor laws, she referred AK Jain and Contract by Avatar Singh.

What to refer to MCQ’s?

For Prelims, Universal’s is preferred and Past Paper, and for Mains in Punjab and Haryana, Shailender Malik, and Chawla’s.

LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:

https://t.me/joinchat/J_0YrBa4IBSHdpuTfQO_sA

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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Considering the fact that I adore your ds posts, and seeing you now are playing ff7r (oh my, my 3 fave things in one! Haha), I'd definitely like to hear your take on the game overall vs OG (if you played), the love triangle debate, Real!C vs SOLDIER!C. I guess I'd like some fresh insight? I like hearing multiple opinions, even if I do have my own.

Well a few notes: - I actually finished the remake already, I just didn't leave commentary on it, and my verbal commentary the whole way through was mostly fallen on the ears of my wife and adoptive mama (depending on if you go to twitter, you may recognize them respectively as the Honeybadger and Doris Helmick)

...actually this is gonna be long and touch on spoilers so I'ma put it behind a cut.

- Yes, I played the original. In fact it has an anchor point in my life, I think, as to how I consume media, as it was the first game I ever played on my own console. My mom was one of those “video games rot ur brain” moms and my experiences until then were being loaned a game boy by a friend and a few of their games and playing under the blankets when I was little, smashing things with Link or playing pokemon or whatever here or there.

- It’s also one of the best memories of my late mother, who eventually slid into major opiod addiction due to mismanaged health issues. She was a disabled single mother and I was the illegally-working-way-too-young-to-stay-alive kid. She eventually cracked and, around when the PS2 was being freshly released and everybody was selling off their PSX, she went to a pawn shop.

- It’s fresh in my mind to this day. First she had me open the box and I lost my mind, and then, huddled up in her pained position she had, she held out a plastic bag to me that christmas, apologizing because she didn’t know anything about video games but the nice man at the store said they were all very popular. Inside were a spyro game, a Star Wars game, and FF7-9. My jaw dropped. I told her she did better than she could ever understand. Hearing the most about FF7, I grabbed it and ran to the playstation to put it in, and started crying at the initial cinematic sequence.

- I 100% approve of this reboot. It's designed in a way where it maintains the full spirit of the original, and hit on speculation points my wife and I had through the course of the game. (Eg, I hadn't spoilered myself but started addressing the whispers of fate, and the chance to change the course of history, maybe even saving Aerith. She countered with the fact that Advent Children would then be moot. At which point I said, yeah, but isn't that the very point of showing us the fates and making an alternate timeline? And then the ending dickslaps you repeatedly at the Crossroads of Destiny). They made it true to the *full body of work* while still making sure that just because you played the original you don't know what's coming.

- To avoid public spoilers being too specific despite the cut, there is literally a "death” around the Jenova fight I yelled THAT ISNT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, WHAT THE FUCK, NO, WHY, WHAT THE FUCK and poor Doris was like "????????? what what what???? I mean that's sad but WHAT" because she never saw the original and couldn't figure out why I was flipping out.

- Despite knowing better with the way they were arranging the fates, they arranged it so dramatically that in the moment I completely forgot about that and started panicking and losing my nut. I was yelling it the entire fight too, like, BUT WHY, WHY HIM, THAT ISNT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN while doing dramatic dodge flips avoiding tentacles shitting all over me. Timing and execution is A+.

- While augmenting parts of the narrative, it really just emboldened the original rather than writing over it. I can’t emphasize enough how this game, from 1997, is so politically on point for today, right down to the blackmask avalanche cell, the propaganda, corporatism, controlled government, and the goddamn antifa flag painted in one of the fucking sewers lmao wtf

- when it comes to the love triangle debate, I’m actually not the kind to say, pick one side or the other. As I mentioned in my previous post, I see both sides of the discussion (eg Tifa, Aerith) as valid. Because the weird competitive ship warring in fandom is as hilarious to me in any other place as it is in SPN fandom tbqh.

- I do see them ~possibly~ setting up a potential of even changing or revising Zack’s fate and letting him reunite with Aerith which, long term, would probably slide Cloud -- awakened to his truth and self -- towards Tifa’s court. Original I’d say both are equally valid, despite nobody doing any kissing, love confessions, etc. Because again, when I talk about not holding my queer pairings to unequal bars, this is exactly what I’m talking about -- and I think part of what I said about sculpting how I receive media at a young age. Not only was I buried in mountains of classic literature my entire life, but my engagement with modern media still showed that you don’t HAVE to have some giant make out session or perfectly poised I LUFF YEW to be valid in romance, the same as old books. Hell, this even applies to the few animes I watched, like X. They were always orbiting around complex interpersonal relationships, nonphysicalized romance be it het or queer, whatever else. I don’t know what kind of media diet people grew up with to act like every straight pairing ever gets a humpa-dumpa-horny-scene or perfectly poised confession or whatever the fuck, tbqh.

- In the end though, I do consider it unfair to say, OG!Cloud rather than Soldier!Cloud to also infer any and all attachments he had to Aerith were manufactured. Cloud gained patched over memories for Zack, sure, but he wasn’t really witness to Aerith and Zack to just take that on. Aerith definitely saw the ghost of Zack in Cloud, too. But you’re really not gonna get me to say “Cloud/Aerith > Cloud/Tifa” or the other way around, even if personally, Cloud/Aerith hits on a far more emotionally impacting level to the point I started crying again any time I heard her theme play in the remake, or her being cute, or whatever, or even saw the fates swirling around her because I knew what inevitability they were driving home.

- There’s also other reasons that hits very truly home for me that I can’t even get into in a public post tbh

- I think I answered everything for this but IDK?

- I will type Aerith to appease the nerd crowd but I refuse to say it out loud and I’m sorry. After decades of saying Aeris, I feel like I have a lithp if I thtart thaying aerith. Like no offense to people who have lisps and no judgment but it theriously metheth with my head.

0 notes

hadjii-blogs-undertale · 7 years

Text

[23 days later]

In reference to https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/163800444030/

@lynns-art-blog

...

And honestly, @everyone-needs-a-hoopoe because there's things in here that go for you too. Please read it through to the end. Or just skip to the very end at first and then go back and read through if you need.

I really, really, really didn’t actually want to get off my butt and do this, for multiple reasons. And not just cuz I’m a lazy jackhole with depression who doesn’t want to do anything in general. But recent events have brought things to a head, and I cannot remain silent any longer.

First, I should like to clarify just where I stand as regarding the Undertale fandom.

The Undertale fandom is a beautiful thing. It is extremely imperfect but I love the fandom and will continue to do so for as long as I am able.

Second, I should like to clarify where I stand as regarding Undertale itself.

It will be difficult however, because I love Undertale more than I am capable of putting into any transferable medium that I know of.

Am I a bit emotionally over-invested in Undertale?

Heck. Yes.

I also don't care that I am.

Undertale has brought more joy and happiness and meaning to my life than literally anything else save my family who raised me and loves me, my religion, and a shortlist of friends, some of whom I only have so dear to my heart because of Undertale, so the point is moot.

I can't say that Undertale cured my depression, because it didn't.

What it did do is it showed me at a critical point in my life that there's something outside the grey murky mire.

I'd considered myself an emotionally open person before Undertale. This was only vaguely true. Current me cannot comfortably say that old me was emotionally intelligent without severe disclaimers.

Old me was an emotionally awkward dirtbag who had some idea of how to be a person but on the whole was completely clueless.

I had forgotten how to feel. Like, really feel. And not just from the depression.

I could occasionally get hits from certain songs and I absolutely lived for those moments but the songs would rapidly hit their saturation levels and I'd be cold again.

Then Undertale came along. I loved the game long before I played it, discovering things about it slowly through an endless flood of my tumblr feed.

It looked like a rather good, cute, compelling little game. Eventually I decided to write a bit of fanfiction about it because it looked really good and I wanted to churn out what would happen if GLaD had an interaction with a murdery timeline.

So I went and researched. I dug and I dug and I dug. This wasn't all of my research, but on one particular tumblr alone I went through 700-odd undertale posts.

Between that and pouring out my heart and soul into the writing as I discovered just how much I could care about these things, or care in general really, I found that I'd left the door open, and something came back. A whole lot of something.

Undertale is a Happy™ game about Happy™ things.

I had learned that maybe sad things weren't all bad back from the days of Background Pony. The difference being, Background Pony had a disappointing, absurd ending. They'd won the right even by my sappy heart to have a sad ending, then they completely botched it. I'd associated one of the most significant songs I know of with it, and they failed terribly.

But Undertale had a good ending. As aggravating as it is to not be able to keep Asriel, much less Chara, in the bounds of the game itself, that's part of the point of the ending. So there was no knee-jerk shock. While it is true that in a practical Undertale implementation, unbounded by the Game Maker engine, fuelled by the raw power of Determination, human spirit, and imagination, surely something more could have been achieved. But that does not take away from the coherent ending of Undertale.

There is a lot of pain in Undertale. So much pain.

It is overwhelming and vivid and searing and scorching and so very, very tangible and understandable and real. Not that the events of the game are real, well, as far as I can tell. The emotions are deep and real, I mean.

This was to me as the gas leak was to Vinny Santorini in Atlantis.

Due to the combined pressure of the mental overhaul Undertale was giving me, and the softness and vulnerability it re-introduced, throwing in re-learning certain cold facts about how much the powers-that-be at my previous job didn't care about doing good work, only making money, more severely than I had previously believed from last year, I lost my ability to continue driving there and showing up every day. Now, due to the way the contract works, and my having left the job gracefully, I am free to go back whenever I want. I was not fired. There are many employees who just go there, work as long as they can, then leave and wait for next season to come back. Their efforts are appreciated, especially when all heck breaks loose at the beginning of the on-season because all the bugs in the software that weren't found yet are harsly exposed. What happened with me is not ideal, nor is it rare or even unusual at this place. In about 3 months I could walk in the door and they'd welcome me with a smile and I'd get back to politely telling people that they're wrong and clueless and fixing their crap for them and half the time doing their job for them. (as if that's terribly different than my current job... just in person now instead of over a phone)

Anyways, so, Undertale hurts. Loving Undertale so deeply hurts a lot.

But it's also happy. It has so much happiness. It's so bright and wonderful. It's a warm, soft, fuzzy hug from goatmom and a slice of butterscotch pie. It's making spaghetti with Papyrus, only using an actual recipe this time and making it turn out well. It's watching anime until 4 am with Alphys and Undyne and suppressing giggles at seeing the two precious gay babies asleep and cuddling. It's hugging Sans and telling him it'll be okay. It's having a lovely tea party with Asgore and Muffet.

It's kissing a sad sapient golden flower on the forehead, buying a bar of chocolate and raising it in the air as a toast before eating it.

Bittersweet happiness sometimes but so very, very good and I love it and I really cannot get enough.

I'm addicted. Addicted to feeling again.

As the band Ghost says, "From the pinnacle to the pit, it is a long way down."

I haven't been to the absolute bottom, in that I haven't been institutionalized/hospitalized/just straight up killed by my depression, But I have been in the shower for 4 hours before from 2 am to 6 am at college, for one thing, so uhhh, nobody can say that I'm utterly clueless about such things without looking like a lunatic.

https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/164567314340

Posts like the above still rip my heart out every time I see them. I've long since re-associated the song mentioned earlier with this particular point of note of Chara.

It's not entirely pleasant, no, but it makes me feel so alive and real and like I'm an actual human being and not an emotionless, soulless automaton covered in flesh.

And the happy posts are just that much brighter because of the contrast.

https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/164689197750 https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/164498003145 https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/164161681835 https://hadjii-blogs-undertale.tumblr.com/post/164061257705

Some people can get by on just fluff alone. There's nothing wrong with that. This is just the way I personally operate. As for me, I've had too much saccharine positivity and "oh dont be sad everything is completely fine and theres nothing to be sad about youre not depressed just get up and go to work son!"

sorry got sidetracked and a little oddly specific there anyways

So the point is from the above wall of text that I have a lot of investment in Undertale and it means a lot to me.

Now, it's time for me to pull receipts.

One receipt, to be exact.

On a semifamous Undertale blog, that I still have not responded to, and quite possibly never will, unless you count this post as a response.

http://charadreemurr.tumblr.com/post/157052680490

I literally couldn't even read their last response for a solid two months because my eyes would skim off the words because they were full of so much utter crap. When I did, I was sorry for it, because it was still so much crap. And no, this isn't like the average tumblr receipt pull, because a lot of the time, a given person has changed for the better, and the receipts you're pulling are for a dramatically different person. This person has not changed and as best as I can tell will never change, or at least not for the next decade or so, unless something dramatic happens. They were the OP of the twitter bustercluck. If you don't know, don't ask, because I don't feel like getting into that right now. I may do so later though in a different post.

All I was trying to do was share a little positivity, and I was met with discourse, hostility, and self-righteousness.

"And second “biological gender” is a statement rife with discontent-"

Pardon my french but wtf m8?

Since then I have learned more thoroughly that in more modern usage, that sex and gender don't have ambiguity and don't need "biological" and "identity" modifiers for clarification, so to a limited extent, they were correct.

However, this does not excuse their behavior. There are many people, myself included back then, that because of their upbringing are uncomfortable saying the word "sex" in any context. I am not now, but I was then, which is why I used "gender" with modifiers for clarification. I gave them multiple chances in earlier reblogs to realize that I was just trying to share a bit of happiness. I clearly conveyed the belief that what's in one's pants doesn't necessarily align with what's in one's head and that it's not a problem. I also clearly stated that when referring to Frisk and Chara, one should use they/them.

And yet, they chose to perceive a threat where there was none. They prefaced their statement with "Yikes" then "Im gonna assume the best here though because i wanna assume people are good"

And completely did not follow through on that.

Statement rife with discontent, indeed.

I was rather hurt by this. Especially, especially because of the uniqueness of their url. They are the one and only charadreemurr. That's a very particular title, and they ought to live up to it.

And here, they did not. Unless Chara Dreemurr really is supposed to be a pretentious self-serving self-righteous paranoid uptight jackhole of a binch. In which case, congratulations, they succeeded.

I showed the post to a different trans friend of mine, and they were shocked by the post as well, looked through their tumblr, and declared the person "basically their least favorite type of person".

To this day, I feel uneasy just seeing the word "yikes" sometimes.

I have mentioned it a few times to some people but this really sent me for a loop. I almost left the fandom on the spot, like far too many good people have done when they were burned by the toxic side of the fandom.

And honestly, if I'd lost Undertale at such a key point in my life, with my job already falling apart, and the other crap I was going through at the time, especially with the election, I cannot safely say that I'd still be here. With the friends that I wouldn't have made solid yet, I probably would have attempted suicide.

And believe me, I'm an engineer. I would not have survived. Knives, pills, guns, rope, water, heights, motor vehicles, police, fire, bleach, all are too unreliable for me. I know exactly how I would do it, if I were to ever do it.

Yeah, I know, it's not anyone's job to make sure I don't commit suicide beyond my own. People who threaten others with their own suicide are horribly manipulative. I am not threatening anyone with my suicide here. I'm not saying "ermagersh dont break up with me or ill literally kill myself" What I am saying is "X happened to me in the past and it's made me want to kill myself" Suicide baiting someone is a terrible thing to do. Accidental baiting someone is not someone's fault, as it's accidental, but generally one should try to avoid it. Very similar to triggering somebody. Don't trigger people. If you do, apologize, and do better in the future, and be more consistent about tags and crap.

Just for the record, due to that and other things that have happened to me, I know that I am not now and not ever going to die by my own hand.

Because, I stood up. I turned around. And like Captain America, I said "No. You move."

Well, in my head. I didn't actually say anything to them.

And I stayed.

And that has made all the difference.

I have a great job now that pays moderately well. I have a wonderful aspec girlfriend now. My life still sucks in so many ways but I actually oftentimes see a light at the end of the tunnel. The world is crap and it's going to get crappier but not everything will be bad forever.

Now, we get to the center of the issue, having explained some needed context.

Nonbinary Frisk and Chara.

I love nb Frisk and Chara.

I have not and will never make a Frisk or Chara that is anything but nb.

At one point, a certain Frisk was going to maybe use She/They (or He/They, hadn't decided yet) instead of just They when they became a parent, but I scrapped that idea long before any of this.

It is completely correct to use they/them pronouns when talking about Frisk and Chara in general. These are all that are used in the game itself.

The pertinent question though is does this mean that Frisk and Chara are canonically nonbinary, and what of people who make variants/instances that aren't nonbinary?

Thus far, most of the argument I've seen in favor of nonbinary being a forcible requirement is only slightly more solid than claiming that the Boss in the Saints Row series must be nonbinary, as an example.

Yes, it is true that in SR2 and later, one chooses the boss's sex.

However, they also choose a voice, and the voice doesn't necessarily have to match the physical sex. Trans and NB Bosses are completely plausible within the game's canon. All dialogue just refers to the Boss as They/Them, regardless of player choice, to the best of my knowledge. Or just refers to them as "The Boss". In SR:GOOH, Satan (yes, the literal Prince of Darkness, ruler of literal actual Hell) refers to The Boss as "They" so yeah. Anyways.

Honestly the strongest argument I've seen in favor of NB Frisk and Chara being canon is "Because NB people could use the representation!" Which boils down to "Because I said so!" Which boils down to "Because f*** you, that's why"

Now, I personally love this reasoning and I'm already on board, but with three quirks.

1. I can see why other people may not be so satisfied with this. 2. I cannot see this as an absolute requirement preventing any other possible interpretation of Frisk and Chara being okay. 3. I do not find this a remotely strong enough reasoning to condone attacking other people over it.

I personally headcanon NB Frisks and Charas being by far the dominant kind across the entire Undertale trunk. And I look across the internet at the many, many wonderful creative people who have instanced Frisk and Chara, and I see that this is so. And this is how it should be.

Frisk and Chara are excellent NB representation.

I quite firmly believe Tobyfox intended this to be so, and created them as such.

On a side note, I just found out the "my last wish for undertale is that when discussion of it fades it dies peacefully instead of morphing into a garbage cesspool" tweet was faked. Probably should've figured that out a long time ago, that's not quite how toby tweets.

...

Anyways,

https://twitter.com/UnderTale/status/644614840925978624

Tobyfox, the one who made Frisk and Chara so readily NB, who put so much NB representation into the game in general, did not ask for this. He did not create them to be sticks to beat others with. They were a gift of kindness. To say "Hey. Hey you. You matter and are important and are valid. Have two complex characters who have no indicated and strongly ambiguous gender, not even barriers blocking a particular interpretation."

Thats the kicker. No barriers blocking a particular interpretation. The road goes both ways.

Frisk and Chara were meant to be characters one identified with. "It's me, Chara." "It's you!"

Frisk and Chara ought to be NB, yes. Unless otherwise specified, they're NB.

Thing is, not everyone who plays Undertale is nb.

real shocker there yeah

Point is, hurting someone who's not nb for identifying with Chara or Frisk is on the same level of behavior as yelling at someone for being kin with the same character as someone else, or yelling at someone for selfshipping with the same character as someone else.

It's immature, unkind, greedy, and completely unnecessary. Even illogical.

Even if Frisk and Chara were real in their own timelines and not just pixels on a screen, there are an infinite number of instances and infinite number of variations of them.

Even if infinities don't appease one, and they demand to examine the situation proportion/representation-wise, NB Frisk and Chara dominate the multiverse.

And if that does not satisfy, then what will?

Even if the entire infinite expanse was filled solely with nb Charas and Frisks, and there was only one Frisk across the trunk who was not nb, because they were created by one author in memory of a cis person who played and loved Undertale and fought through the entire game reset after reset, in a fruitless effort to save Asriel, will you rip that from their hands, in the name of "equal representation"?

Will you be like David in the bible, who had more than anyone could ask for, and lost it all because he wanted one last thing? One more person to be theirs as well?

There is a song by Tool which is very relevant here.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tool/rightintwo.html

"Don't these talking monkeys know that Eden has enough to go around? Plenty in this holy garden, silly monkeys, Where there's one you're bound to divide it. Right in two."

I'm sorry, but I cannot condone vitriol over this. I cannot condone such hateful attitude and behaviors.

Just like the antifa who was punched by another antifa at a protest because they judged them by mere appearance to be a fascist, hatred doesn't accomplish anything.

There are times and places when due to the actions of other people, there is no valid choice remaining but violence.

This is seen in Undertale. Even when attempting to run a True Pacifist route, one has to beat down Asgore, and/or Flowey. This was seen back in WWII. We could not allow the Axis powers to enslave the world and murder whomever they wished.

This is not the case here.

Yes, there are those who purposely seek to misgender Frisks and Charas all around. Such folks correctly are rebuffed and banished to the shadows. And people who argue that Frisk or Chara canonically have to be a boy or girl really need to find a new hobby.

Those, if anyone, are the enemy. The lost, clueless, angry, bitter enemy, who need to be talked to and brought into the fold of those who know better, in true Undertale MERCY fashion. Or, if they will not listen, to be sent away, and blocked if harassment continues.

Random creatives on the internet who create a Frisk or Chara, maybe modelled after themselves, maybe after someone else, doens't matter, anyways, who happen to create one that isn't NB are not the enemy. Some young unlearned cis 12 year old who wants to be like Frisk and thinks Frisk is just like them, or that they are Frisk, and has little involvement with NB matters, or perhaps just hasn't yet heard of or seen how well NB and Chara and Frisk go together, is not the enemy.

NB folk have a lot of very, very real enemies. We have a long way to go as a species. Please, do not make up enemies where there are none.

I ask anyone who attacks others solely for having a different idea of Chara and Frisk's gender to please reconsider.

Please, spread NB Frisks and Charas all around the net. Let them enter the hearts of everyone who can appreciate this beautiful game. Not through anger and aggression, but through love and kindness and patience.

If you cannot abide my having such a stance on this, Mel, then I suppose this is farewell if you must break off all contact. And if you must leave, you may keep that commission money, whether or not you ever finish the art.

Thank you to anyone who reads the entirety of my words.

#language warning #suicide warning #meta #discourse #general trigger warning #things get deep here and i'm sorry but i had to share how i feel

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years

Link

The iPhone XS proves one thing definitively: that the iPhone X was probably one of the most ambitious product bets of all time.

When Apple told me in 2017 that they put aside plans for the iterative upgrade that they were going to ship and went all in on the iPhone X because they thought they could jump ahead a year, they were not blustering. That the iPhone XS feels, at least on the surface, like one of Apple’s most “S” models ever is a testament to how aggressive the iPhone X timeline was.

I think there will be plenty of people who will see this as a weakness of the iPhone XS, and I can understand their point of view. There are about a half-dozen definitive improvements in the XS over the iPhone X, but none of them has quite the buzzword-worthy effectiveness of a marquee upgrade like 64-bit, 3D Touch or wireless charging — all benefits delivered in previous “S” years.

That weakness, however, is only really present if you view it through the eyes of the year-over-year upgrader. As an upgrade over an iPhone X, I’d say you’re going to have to love what they’ve done with the camera to want to make the jump. As a move from any other device, it’s a huge win and you’re going head-first into sculpted OLED screens, face recognition and super durable gesture-first interfaces and a bunch of other genre-defining moves that Apple made in 2017, thinking about 2030, while you were sitting back there in 2016.

Since I do not have an iPhone XR, I can’t really make a call for you on that comparison, but from what I saw at the event and from what I know about the tech in the iPhone XS and XS Max from using them over the past week, I have some basic theories about how it will stack up.

For those with interest in the edge of the envelope, however, there is a lot to absorb in these two new phones, separated only by size. Once you begin to unpack the technological advancements behind each of the upgrades in the XS, you begin to understand the real competitive edge and competence of Apple’s silicon team, and how well they listen to what the software side needs now and in the future.

Whether that makes any difference for you day to day is another question, one that, as I mentioned above, really lands on how much you like the camera.

But first, let’s walk through some other interesting new stuff.

Notes on durability

As is always true with my testing methodology, I treat this as anyone would who got a new iPhone and loaded an iCloud backup onto it. Plenty of other sites will do clean room testing if you like comparison porn, but I really don’t think that does most folks much good. By and large most people aren’t making choices between ecosystems based on one spec or another. Instead, I try to take them along on prototypical daily carries, whether to work for TechCrunch, on vacation or doing family stuff. A foot injury precluded any theme parks this year (plus, I don’t like to be predictable) so I did some office work, road travel in the center of California and some family outings to the park and zoo. A mix of uses cases that involves CarPlay, navigation, photos and general use in a suburban environment.

In terms of testing locale, Fresno may not be the most metropolitan city, but it’s got some interesting conditions that set it apart from the cities where most of the iPhones are going to end up being tested. Network conditions are pretty adverse in a lot of places, for one. There’s a lot of farmland and undeveloped acreage and not all of it is covered well by wireless carriers. Then there’s the heat. Most of the year it’s above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a good chunk of that is spent above 100. That means that batteries take an absolute beating here and often perform worse than other, more temperate, places like San Francisco. I think that’s true of a lot of places where iPhones get used, but not so much the places where they get reviewed.

That said, battery life has been hard to judge. In my rundown tests, the iPhone XS Max clearly went beast mode, outlasting my iPhone X and iPhone XS. Between those two, though, it was tougher to tell. I try to wait until the end of the period I have to test the phones to do battery stuff so that background indexing doesn’t affect the numbers. In my ‘real world’ testing in the 90+ degree heat around here, iPhone XS did best my iPhone X by a few percentage points, which is what Apple does claim, but my X is also a year old. The battery didn’t fail during even intense days of testing with the XS.

In terms of storage I’m tapping at the door of 256GB, so the addition of 512GB option is really nice. As always, the easiest way to determine what size you should buy is to check your existing free space. If you’re using around 50% of what your phone currently has, buy the same size. If you’re using more, consider upgrading because these phones are only getting faster at taking better pictures and video and that will eat up more space.

The review units I was given both had the new gold finish. As I mentioned on the day, this is a much deeper, brassier gold than the Apple Watch Edition. It’s less ‘pawn shop gold’ and more ‘this is very expensive’ gold. I like it a lot, though it is hard to photograph accurately — if you’re skeptical, try to see it in person. It has a touch of pink added in, especially as you look at the back glass along with the metal bands around the edges. The back glass has a pearlescent look now as well, and we were told that this is a new formulation that Apple created specifically with Corning. Apple says that this is the most durable glass ever in a smartphone.

My current iPhone has held up to multiple falls over 3 feet over the past year, one of which resulted in a broken screen and replacement under warranty. Doubtless multiple YouTubers will be hitting this thing with hammers and dropping it from buildings in beautiful Phantom Flex slo-mo soon enough. I didn’t test it. One thing I am interested in seeing develop, however, is how the glass holds up to fine abrasions and scratches over time.

My iPhone X is riddled with scratches both front and back, something having to do with the glass formulation being harder, but more brittle. Less likely to break on impact but more prone to abrasion. I’m a dedicated no-caser, which is why my phone looks like it does, but there’s no way for me to tell how the iPhone XS and XS Max will hold up without giving them more time on the clock. So I’ll return to this in a few weeks.

Both the gold and space grey iPhones XS have been subjected to a coating process called physical vapor deposition or PVD. Basically metal particles get vaporized and bonded to the surface to coat and color the band. PVD is a process, not a material, so I’m not sure what they’re actually coating these with, but one suggestion has been Titanium Nitride. I don’t mind the weathering that has happened on my iPhone X band, but I think it would look a lot worse on the gold, so I’m hoping that this process (which is known to be incredibly durable and used in machine tooling) will improve the durability of the band. That said, I know most people are not no-casers like me so it’s likely a moot point.

Now let’s get to the nut of it: the camera.

Bokeh let’s do it

I’m (still) not going to be comparing the iPhone XS to an interchangeable lens camera because portrait mode is not a replacement for those, it’s about pulling them out less. That said, this is closest its ever been.

One of the major hurdles that smartphone cameras have had to overcome in their comparisons to cameras with beautiful glass attached is their inherent depth of focus. Without getting too into the weeds (feel free to read this for more), because they’re so small, smartphone cameras produce an incredibly compressed image that makes everything sharp. This doesn’t feel like a portrait or well composed shot from a larger camera because it doesn’t produce background blur. That blur was added a couple of years ago with Apple’s portrait mode and has been duplicated since by every manufacturer that matters — to varying levels of success or failure.

By and large, most manufacturers do it in software. They figure out what the subject probably is, use image recognition to see the eyes/nose/mouth triangle is, build a quick matte and blur everything else. Apple does more by adding the parallax of two lenses OR the IR projector of the TrueDepth array that enables Face ID to gather a 9-layer depth map.

As a note, the iPhone XR works differently, and with less tools, to enable portrait mode. Because it only has one lens it uses focus pixels and segmentation masking to ‘fake’ the parallax of two lenses.

With the iPhone XS, Apple is continuing to push ahead with the complexity of its modeling for the portrait mode. The relatively straightforward disc blur of the past is being replaced by a true bokeh effect.

Background blur in an image is related directly to lens compression, subject-to-camera distance and aperture. Bokeh is the character of that blur. It’s more than just ‘how blurry’, it’s the shapes produced from light sources, the way they change throughout the frame from center to edges, how they diffuse color and how they interact with the sharp portions of the image.

Bokeh is to blur what seasoning is to a good meal. Unless you’re the chef, you probably don’t care what they did you just care that it tastes great.

Well, Apple chef-ed it the hell up with this. Unwilling to settle for a templatized bokeh that felt good and leave it that, the camera team went the extra mile and created an algorithmic model that contains virtual ‘characteristics’ of the iPhone XS’s lens. Just as a photographer might pick one lens or another for a particular effect, the camera team built out the bokeh model after testing a multitude of lenses from all of the classic camera systems.

I keep saying model because it’s important to emphasize that this is a living construct. The blur you get will look different from image to image, at different distances and in different lighting conditions, but it will stay true to the nature of the virtual lens. Apple’s bokeh has a medium-sized penumbra, spreading out light sources but not blowing them out. It maintains color nicely, making sure that the quality of light isn’t obscured like it is with so many other portrait applications in other phones that just pick a spot and create a circle of standard gaussian or disc blur.

Check out these two images, for instance. Note that when the light is circular, it retains its shape, as does the rectangular light. It is softened and blurred, as it would when diffusing through the widened aperture of a regular lens. The same goes with other shapes in reflected light scenarios.

Now here’s the same shot from an iPhone X, note the indiscriminate blur of the light. This modeling effort is why I’m glad that the adjustment slider proudly carries f-stop or aperture measurements. This is what this image would look like at a given aperture, rather than a 0-100 scale. It’s very well done and, because it’s modeled, it can be improved over time. My hope is that eventually, developers will be able to plug in their own numbers to “add lenses” to a user’s kit.

And an adjustable depth of focus isn’t just good for blurring, it’s also good for un-blurring. This portrait mode selfie placed my son in the blurry zone because it focused on my face. Sure, I could turn the portrait mode off on an iPhone X and get everything sharp, but now I can choose to “add” him to the in-focus area while still leaving the background blurry. Super cool feature I think is going to get a lot of use.

It’s also great for removing unwanted people or things from the background by cranking up the blur.

And yes, it works on non humans.

If you end up with an iPhone XS, I’d play with the feature a bunch to get used to what a super wide aperture lens feels like. When its open all the way to f1.4 (not the actual widest aperture of the lens btw, this is the virtual model we’re controlling) pretty much only the eyes should be in focus. Ears, shoulders, maybe even nose could be out of the focus area. It takes some getting used to but can produce dramatic results.

A 150% crop of a larger photo to show detail preservation.

Developers do have access to one new feature though, the segmentation mask. This is a more precise mask that aids in edge detailing, improving hair and fine line detail around the edges of a portrait subject. In my testing it has led to better handling of these transition areas and less clumsiness. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better. And third-party apps like Halide are already utilizing it. Halide’s co-creator, Sebastiaan de With, says they’re already seeing improvements in Halide with the segmentation map.

“Segmentation is the ability to classify sets of pixels into different categories,” says de With. “This is different than a “Hot dog, not a hot dog” problem, which just tells you whether a hot dog exists anywhere in the image. With segmentation, the goal is drawing an outline over just the hot dog. It’s an important topic with self driving cars, because it isn’t enough to tell you there’s a person somewhere in the image. It needs to know that person is directly in front of you. On devices that support it, we use PEM as the authority for what should stay in focus. We still use the classic method on old devices (anything earlier than iPhone 8), but the quality difference is huge.

The above is an example shot in Halide that shows the image, the depth map and the segmentation map.

In the example below, the middle black-and-white image is what was possible before iOS 12. Using a handful of rules like, “Where did the user tap in the image?” We constructed this matte to apply our blur effect. It’s no bad by any means, but compare it to the image on the right. For starters, it’s much higher resolution, which means the edges look natural.

My testing of portrait mode on the iPhone XS says that it is massively improved, but that there are still some very evident quirks that will lead to weirdness in some shots like wrong things made blurry and halos of light appearing around subjects. It’s also not quite aggressive enough on foreground objects — those should blur too but only sometimes do. But the quirks are overshadowed by the super cool addition of the adjustable background blur. If conditions are right it blows you away. But every once in a while you still get this sense like the Neural Engine just threw up its hands and shrugged.

Live preview of the depth control in the camera view is not in iOS 12 at the launch of the iPhone XS, but it will be coming in a future version of iOS 12 this fall.

I also shoot a huge amount of photos with the telephoto lens. It’s closer to what you’d consider to be a standard lens on a camera. The normal lens is really wide and once you acclimate to the telephoto you’re left wondering why you have a bunch of pictures of people in the middle of a ton of foreground and sky. If you haven’t already, I’d say try defaulting to 2x for a couple of weeks and see how you like your photos. For those tight conditions or really broad landscapes you can always drop it back to the wide. Because of this, any iPhone that doesn’t have a telephoto is a basic non-starter for me, which is going to be one of the limiters on people moving to iPhone XR from iPhone X, I believe. Even iPhone 8 Plus users who rely on the telephoto I believe will miss it if they don’t go to the XS.

But, man, Smart HDR is where it’s at

I’m going to say something now that is surely going to cause some Apple followers to snort, but it’s true. Here it is:

For a company as prone to hyperbole and Maximum Force Enthusiasm about its products, I think that they have dramatically undersold how much improved photos are from the iPhone X to the iPhone XS. It’s extreme, and it has to do with a technique Apple calls Smart HDR.

Smart HDR on the iPhone XR encompasses a bundle of techniques and technology including highlight recovery, rapid-firing the sensor, an OLED screen with much improved dynamic range and the Neural Engine/image signal processor combo. It’s now running faster sensors and offloading some of the work to the CPU, which enables firing off nearly two images for every one it used to in order to make sure that motion does not create ghosting in HDR images, it’s picking the sharpest image and merging the other frames into it in a smarter way and applying tone mapping that produces more even exposure and color in the roughest of lighting conditions.

iPhone XS shot, better range of tones, skintone and black point

iPhone X Shot, not a bad image at all, but blocking up of shadow detail, flatter skin tone and blue shift

Nearly every image you shoot on an iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max will have HDR applied to it. It does it so much that Apple has stopped labeling most images with HDR at all. There’s still a toggle to turn Smart HDR off if you wish, but by default it will trigger any time it feels it’s needed.

And that includes more types of shots that could not benefit from HDR before. Panoramic shots, for instance, as well as burst shots, low light photos and every frame of Live Photos is now processed.

The results for me have been massively improved quick snaps with no thought given to exposure or adjustments due to poor lighting. Your camera roll as a whole will just suddenly start looking like you’re a better picture taker, with no intervention from you. All of this is capped off by the fact that the OLED screens in the iPhone XS and XS Max have a significantly improved ability to display a range of color and brightness. So images will just plain look better on the wider gamut screen, which can display more of the P3 color space.

Under the hood

As far as Face ID goes, there has been no perceivable difference for me in speed or number of positives, but my facial model has been training on my iPhone X for a year. It’s starting fresh on iPhone XS. And I’ve always been lucky that Face ID has just worked for me most of the time. The gist of the improvements here are jumps in acquisition times and confirmation of the map to pattern match. There is also supposed to be improvements in off-angle recognition of your face, say when lying down or when your phone is flat on a desk. I tried a lot of different positions here and could never really definitively say that iPhone XS was better in this regard, though as I said above, it very likely takes training time to get it near the confidence levels that my iPhone X has stored away.

In terms of CPU performance the world’s first at-scale 7nm architecture has paid dividends. You can see from the iPhone XS benchmarks that it compares favorably to fast laptops and easily exceeds iPhone X performance.

The Neural Engine and better A12 chip has meant for better frame rates in intense games and AR, image searches, some small improvement in app launches. One easy way to demonstrate this is the video from the iScape app, captured on an iPhone X and an iPhone XS. You can see how jerky and FPS challenged the iPhone X is in a similar AR scenario. There is so much more overhead for AR experiences I know developers are going to be salivating for what they can do here.

The stereo sound is impressive, surpassingly decent separation for a phone and definitely louder. The tradeoff is that you get asymmetrical speaker grills so if that kind of thing annoys you you’re welcome.

Upgrade or no

Every other year for the iPhone I see and hear the same things — that the middle years are unimpressive and not worthy of upgrading. And I get it, money matters, phones are our primary computer and we want the best bang for our buck. This year, as I mentioned at the outset, the iPhone X has created its own little pocket of uncertainty by still feeling a bit ahead of its time.

I don’t kid myself into thinking that we’re going to have an honest discussion about whether you want to upgrade from the iPhone X to iPhone XS or not. You’re either going to do it because you want to or you’re not going to do it because you don’t feel it’s a big enough improvement.

And I think Apple is completely fine with that because iPhone XS really isn’t targeted at iPhone X users at all, it’s targeted at the millions of people who are not on a gesture-first device that has Face ID. I’ve never been one to recommend someone upgrade every year anyway. Every two years is more than fine for most folks — unless you want the best camera, then do it.

And, given that Apple’s fairly bold talk about making sure that iPhones last as long as they can, I think that it is well into the era where it is planning on having a massive installed user base that rents iPhones from it on a monthly or yearly or biennial period. And it doesn’t care whether those phones are on their first, second or third owner, because that user base will need for-pay services that Apple can provide. And it seems to be moving in that direction already, with phones as old as the five-year-old iPhone 5s still getting iOS updates.

With the iPhone XS, we might just be seeing the true beginning of the iPhone-as-a-service era.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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fmservers · 6 years

Text

Review: iPhone XS and the power of long-term thinking

The iPhone XS proves one thing definitively: that the iPhone X was probably one of the most ambitious product bets of all time.

Whether that makes any difference for you day to day is another question, one that, as I mentioned above, really lands on how much you like the camera.

But first, let’s walk through some other interesting new stuff.

Notes on durability

As is always true with my testing methodology, I treat this as anyone would who got a new iPhone and loaded an iCloud backup onto it. Plenty of other sites will do clean room testing if you like metrics porn, but I really don’t think that does most folks much good. Instead, I try to take them along on prototypical daily carries, whether to work for TechCrunch, on vacation or doing family stuff. A foot injury precluded any theme parks this year (plus, I don’t like to be predictable) so I did some office work, road travel in the center of California and some family outings to the park and zoo. A mix of uses cases that involves CarPlay, navigation, photos and general use in a suburban environment.

That said, battery life has been hard to judge. In my rundown tests, the iPhone XS Max clearly went beast mode, outlasting my iPhone X and iPhone XS. Between those two, though, it was tougher to tell. I try to wait until the end of the period I have to test the phones to do battery stuff so that background indexing doesn’t affect the numbers. In my ‘real world’ testing in the 90+ degree heat around here, iPhone XS did best my iPhone X by a few percentage points, which is what Apple does claim, but my X is also a year old. I didn’t fail to get through a pretty intense day of testing with the XS once though.

Now let’s get to the nut of it: the camera.

Bokeh let’s do it

Bokeh is to blur what seasoning is to a good meal. Unless you’re the chef, you probably don’t care what they did you just care that it tastes great.

I keep saying model because it’s important to emphasize that this is a living construct. The blur you get will look different from image to image, at different distances and in different lighting conditions, but it will stay true to the nature of the virtual lens. Apple’s bokeh has a medium-sized penumbra, spreading light out from light sources but not blowing them out. It maintains color nicely, making sure that the quality of light isn’t obscured like it is with so many other portrait applications in other phones that just pick a spot and create a circle of standard gaussian or disc blur.

It’s also great for removing unwanted people or things from the background by cranking up the blur.

And yes, it works on non humans.

The above is an example shot in Halide that shows the image, the depth map and the segmentation map.

My testing of portrait mode on the iPhone XS says that it is massively improved, still some quirks that will lead to weirdness and it’s not quite aggressive enough on foreground objects — those should blur too but only sometimes do. But the quirks are overshadowed by the super cool addition of the adjustable background blur.

Live preview of the depth control is not in iOS 12 at the launch of the iPhone XS, but it will be coming in a future version of iOS 12 this fall.

But, man, Smart HDR is where it’s at

I’m going to say something now that is surely going to cause some Apple followers to snort, but it’s true. Here it is:

iPhone XS shot, better range of tones, skintone and black point

iPhone X Shot, not a bad image at all, but blocking up of shadow detail, flatter skin tone and blue shift

And that includes more types of shots that could not benefit from HDR before. Panoramic shots, for instance, as well as burst shots, low light photos and every frame of Live Photos is now processed.

Under the hood

In terms of CPU performance the world’s first 7nm architecture has paid dividends. You can see from the iPhone XS benchmarks that it compares favorably to fast laptops and easily exceeds iPhone X performance.

youtube

Upgrade or no

With the iPhone XS, we might just be seeing the true beginning of the iPhone-as-a-service era.

Via Matthew Panzarino https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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torreygazette · 7 years

Text

Romans, Israel, and Infant Baptism

I've been sitting on thoughts about sacramentology and baptism since covering them in early September during our weekly bible study. More specifically, in what way Romans 2-4 educate us (or don't) on the continuity of God's administration of His covenants. This is mostly a concern for exegesis but it addresses poor exegesis that makes these chapters about baptism.

The story oft told is that Paul in Romans 2 through 4 demolishes the idea that circumcision corresponds to baptism (particularly of the infant sort). Or more specifically that neither circumcision or baptism has any covenantal role in the New Covenant like circumcision had in the Old Testament. This line of thinking is normally developed as a polemic against the practice of Infant Baptism retained during the Reformation. Though it should be sufficient to say that the grounds of infant baptism are not solely—perhaps even primarily—tied to continuity with circumcision, there are reasons to stop and take a critical look at these important chapters of Paul's epistle.

Romans 2 & 3

In the second chapter of the epistle, Paul is expanding (in some sense) the verdict of judgment against sin that he has described in the opening chapter (Rom. 1:18-32). Paul has explained how God's righteousness was revealed in the gospel (Rom. 1:17) before articulating how God's wrath is revealed against the ungodly (Rom. 1:18). Further, those who judge the ungodly positively (Rom. 1:32) and those who judge the ungodly negatively (Rom. 2:1-11)—in different manners revealing hypocrisy—will be found guilty of transgressing the law. So, Paul concludes his discourse on God's wrath by declaring the future judgment of Christ as part of his "gospel" (Rom. 2:16).

To be additionally clear, Paul articulates that this judgment pertains to the Jews and their faith in circumcision (Rom. 2:17-29). Paul critically states that circumcision—as a ritual of law—only benefits those who keep the law (Rom. 2:25) and thus does not preserve them from this judgment. Paul understands that this statement would spark questions and so the opening verses of the next chapter address those questions (Rom. 3:1-4). In the face of this disregard for external circumcision, Paul still confesses that physical circumcision—as a ritual of God's faithfulness (Rom. 3:3)—has benefits! Namely, Paul says that "the spoken words of God" (Rom. 3:2; HCSB) were given to the Jews in circumcision! Though circumcision of the heart alone justifies, outward circumcision is not rendered useless or meaningless. Instead, physical circumcision is rendered moot when viewed as a human response to God to merit His favor. From this section of Paul, we witness the Reformation emphasis that the sacraments are articulations of divine action (e.g. promises from God to man) and not human action (e.g man's demonstrated "commitment" to God through ritual).

Today as in Paul's day, this naturally leads to some confusion. Paul has just finished saying that God has spoken words of benefit to a people who have not escaped God's judgment. If these promises of God were spoken and if recipients of these promises don't believe, wouldn't that make God a liar? Paul answers in the negative—God's faithfulness is not tied to our faith whether in our practice or rejection of faith (Rom. 3:3-5; 2 Tim. 2:13). In fact, Paul argues our unfaithfulness to God's promises reveals God's righteousness. Who are we to conclude God is unjust?

In contrast to law-oriented (or legalistic) circumcision, Paul concludes that God's redeeming righteousness has been revealed in Jesus Christ to all men (Rom. 3:21-26). Boasting in the law or some ritualistic commitment to God is a wasted effort. God will save the circumcised and uncircumcised in the same manner, faith (Rom. 3:27-31).

Romans 4

All of this backdrop leads to Paul's primer on "justification by faith." Contra any Jewish boasting, works were of no use in justification even to Abraham and David (Rom. 4:1-8). These great recipients of God's covenants were justified on the basis of faith and not of works. At this point, the Jews of Paul's audience are meant to be convinced and assured that God has not forgotten His promise. But the question remains, who else is this blessed "justification by faith" for exactly? Is it only for the circumcised (Rom. 4:9)? Didn't Paul just finish saying that God was the God of Jew and Gentile (Rom. 3:29)?

Paul's answer is that the blessing belongs to both (Rom. 4:12, 16). However, this question is why Paul introduces the timeline of Abraham's justification. Abraham received the sign of righteousness by faith (circumcision) when he was without circumcision (Rom. 4:11). He received the promise of the covenant before receiving the sign of the promise. To Paul, this alone is proof that Abraham is the father of both the circumcised and uncircumcised (Rom. 4:12). This was written for our sake (Rom. 4:23-24) in order to demonstrate that God is, in fact, the God of the Gentiles (Rom. 1:16; 3:29-30; 4:16)!

So what does this particular section say sacramentally about circumcision and/or infant baptism? Well, relatively little actually. Paul's point in the passage is to show how Abraham was "the father of many nations" (Rom. 4:17) to descendants of the law and his faith (Rom. 4:16). This passage isn't denigrating to circumcision in regards to sacramental theology or covenantal continuity. Paul has already affirmed that circumcision is a benefit to the Jews, but it is not so exclusively a benefit as to exclude the Gentiles who are uncircumcised. One might persist that there is an important value in that Abraham received the sign after faith as a seal of what he already had by faith. Only to the extent that we allow the value to be what Paul says it is—to show Abraham is the father of the Gentiles.

In context, Paul doesn't provide any reason to assume circumcision meant less than a sign and "seal of righteousness" to Isaac. Abraham believed (the promise of) God and was justified (Gen. 15:6). But the promise (by faith) was guaranteed to all Abraham's descendants (Rom. 4:16). This logic of inclusion into the promises of circumcision is also reflected in Ephesians 2:11-19. Far from being texts that disprove continuity, these texts expand the continuity of the Old Testament covenants to the Gentiles.

Romans 9

Despite Paul's clarity about the expansion of this covenant, the opposition of many Jews remained a subject of controversy to the church. In fact, one can argue from the Scriptural witness that it is precisely Paul's expansion of the covenant aspects to the Gentiles that upset the Jews. Why are so many Jews rejecting the fulfilled promises of God that they claim to be waiting for? This is the question Paul answers in the ninth chapter of Romans by explaining God's historical behavior to the Jews and how it carries forward to their current time (and beyond).

This background is also why the chapter starts with a valuable, comprehensive look at God's work towards the Jews. Paul opens with a lament that his people are separate from the God who has given them so much. All of these things were promised to them simply because of God's favor to the Patriarchs. For they are—not were as some supersessionist would argue—the recipients of:

the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises (Rom. 9:4)

All of these promises and benefits belong to Israel. And so their opposition to the gospel leads Paul to speak dramatically of his own rejection for their elections. This truth is what prompts Paul to articulate God's electing power in the history of the Jews. This will help explain why the Jews oppose the gospel and what will come when they accept God's promises as found in Christ (Rom. 11:15). But contrary to any doctrine of predestination devoid of covenant influence, Paul does not articulate that God's election negates the promises and benefits offered to the Jews. Instead, Paul speaks of them as "natural" to the olive branch (Rom. 11:24) and with regards to election (!) "loved" by God according to the Patriarchs (Rom. 11:28). Even as the Jews opposed the gospel in favor of the Law, they could not invalidate the covenant of promises made with Abraham (Gal. 3:17-18).

It is clear from Paul's doctrine that God's spoken word (Rom. 3:1-2) and promises (Rom. 9:4) remain with the circumcised of Israel so that God may "justify the circumcised by faith" (Rom. 3:30). Even amidst the inclusion of the Gentiles, God's blessing and promises are extended to generations.

#Romans #Israel #Justification #Baptism #Circumcision

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isaacscrawford · 7 years

Text

Doctors Do Know Best. Exhibit A: The Charlie Gard Case.

By SAURABH JHA, MD

For American conservatives, Britain’s NHS is an antiquated Orwellian dystopia. For Brits, even those who don’t love the NHS, American conservatives are better suited to spaghetti westerns, such as Fistful of Dollars, than reality.

The twain is unlikely to meet after the recent press surrounding Charlie Gard the infant, now deceased, with a rare, fatal mitochondrial disorder in which mitochondrial DNA is depleted – mitochondrial depletion disorder (MDD). In this condition, the cells lose their power supply and tissues, notably in the brain, die progressively and rapidly.

The courts forbade Charlie’s parents from taking him for a last dash of hope to the United States. This confirmed for many conservatives the perils of a government-run healthcare system, where the state decides who lives and who dies through Death Panels.

Ted and Mike, whose healthcare reform might affect many curable little Charlies, were moved by the plight of an incurable Charlie. No European will understand the science behind their sentiment – if you care so much about a sick incurable baby, why don’t you care about sick, cure.

Brits will never get the importance conservatives place on individual choice, even if that choice is forlorn, and of the lure of medical heroism. Conservatives seldom acknowledge that modern medicine reaches its limitations too quickly for Death Panels to be effective. Charlie was given a grim prognosis by doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), arguably the finest hospital for sick children in the world.able babies, they’d ask.

GOSH might not have the endowments of its American counterparts. It is an orthodox British hospital with creaking staircases, the sort where I trained, where doctors have incredible clinical acumen, paranormal common sense, and dabble freely in paternalism. Doctors know best and are not ashamed to say so. When doctors at GOSH say death is imminent, Death Panelists are rendered unemployed, unless there’s a miracle to slay. For Charlie, that miracle was a New York neurologist offering an untested therapy.

The reaction to Charlie’s plight is as instructive as the reaction to the reaction to his plight. It’s as if everyone took the Rorschach test simultaneously.

Charlie’s plight was felt by the Pope. The Pontiff is a busy chap and can’t possibly Tweet in support of every dying child in GOSH. But once the media portrayed his suffering, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The Pope was joined by Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Theresa May, Nigel Farage and even the notoriously unsentimental Jeremy Corbyn. This is the power of the identifiable victim.

Some have wondered whether our preoccupation with stories such as Charlie’s diverts our moral and financial resources from tackling deaths from malaria in Africa – i.e. we don’t care about deaths from malaria because we care too much about one dying infant. In this classic utilitarian fallacy, the utilitarian treats moral sentiments as a zero-sum game with opportunity costs. The truth, as Adam Smith pointed out in Theory of Moral Sentiments, is that we’ll always be more perturbed by events proximate to us, the identifiable victim, than random people who don’t appear on our Twitter timeline. If Charlie hadn’t surfaced in our news channels, we still wouldn’t be fretting about deaths from malaria in far off countries we’ve never heard about.

Charlie’s case showed the limitations of not just modern medicine but modern medical ethics.

When all hopes seemed lost, Charlie’s parents did what many do today – they consulted Dr. Google, who didn’t disappoint. Their search revealed a New York neurologist – Dr. Michio Hirano, a researcher and an expert in mitochondrial disorders.

When hope resurfaced so did the controversy. The first point of controversy was that the nucleoside therapy Dr. Hirano was offering was not scientific – i.e. there was no proven benefit of the nucleoside in the specific variant (RRM2B) of Charlie’s MDD – it hadn’t even been tested on animals with that variant. GOSH, the High Court and the terribly unoriginal European Court, used the absence of proven efficacy in their justification for stopping the parents from taking the child to the US.

“Not scientific”, a compelling statement as no one can argue with science, needs parsing. It is possible for a treatment for a rare disease to have promising results in a small trial in the US, but still not be available in the NHS either because the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) hasn’t gotten around to approving it or is waiting for more evidence. This wasn’t the case with Charlie’s disorder, but my point is what may be unscientific today may truly be unscientific or may simply be waiting for NICE to schedule a conference call.

Charlie would have been the first patient with the RRM2B variant to have received the nucleoside therapy. Though we don’t know for certain, it is highly unlikely Charlie would have responded favorably. Had he responded favorably, the treatment’s efficacy would be certain. This is because Charlie’s condition had a 100 % fatality and anything that’d have saved him, gotten him off the ventilator and breathing spontaneously, and restored his motor function, would either be a parachute or a prophet – you don’t need a double blind, placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of a drug for a condition which is imminently and uniformly fatal.

The neurologist was accused of having financially conflict of interest in nucleoside therapy, which he has strongly denied.

This familiar moral dilemma, which brings science closer to morality than necessary, begs legitimate questions. Was the doctor genuinely motivated by a desire to help or by making more money? Was there truly therapeutic equipoise or was he selling snake oil?

Science being morally neutral means that the neurologist’s motivation for helping was moot. The therapy either worked or didn’t. And if it worked no one would care if the doctor is Satan. If it didn’t work it scant mattered if he were the Pontiff. His financial conflict of interest is relevant only because it indicates whether equipoise – i.e. that the therapy may work – is justified.

To emphasize, we must believe that science, i.e. proven treatment benefits, is morally neutral – because it would be silly not to – I mean it’d be like saying a treatment would work better if the prescribing doctor were more pious.

But, seemingly, equipoise is not morally neutral. What we’re saying is that the uncertainty, and I repeat the uncertainty, that a treatment may work depends, to some extent, on the motivations of who is calling the experiment. This is understandable because medicine is replete with stories of sellers of snake oil. But there’s a large coastline of plausibility far removed from snake oil.

Dr. Hirano wasn’t selling snake oil. He was selling a plausible but untested treatment to desperate parents. The nucleoside therapy had modest efficacy in a variant of Charlie’s disorder (TK 2). But had never been tested in the RR2MB mutation, which Charlie had. It was unscientific because it was unproven – it wasn’t implausible – it certainly wasn’t snake oil.

Ironically, precision medicine exposed the unscientific nature of the nucleoside therapy. Imagine if you couldn’t sequence. You wouldn’t know that MDD had variants – that is you wouldn’t know whether Charlie’s MDD was the TK2 or the RR2MB variant, it’d all be the same. Would the nucleoside therapy, which had worked in a handful of patients with the TK2 variant, still have been unscientific? This is not a dig against precision medicine. I’m merely asking for less dogmatism in what we call unscientific, given that the line is so thin between groups in which therapies work and don’t work.

This takes me to the desperation of Charlie’s parents. I can’t even begin to imagine what they were going through. I recall how I reacted at the very slight possibility that my older son, when he was three weeks old, had pyloric stenosis. My frontal lobe stopped working. Were I Charlie’s parents, I’d have fought tooth and nail and eked every possibility. I’d have done exactly what they did.

Parents of children who have terminal illnesses have nothing to lose, so they pursue any hope, no matter how hopeless the hope is. Some ethicists find this sentiment repugnant. You can see why the ethicist’s ire is drawn. Picture this – desperate parents willing to do anything, offered false hope by a doctor who knows that their condition is hopeless, who knows the treatment is unproven, and who is merely taking advantage of their predicament, like a parasite. Won’t you be disgusted by that doctor?

Let’s reframe this. A doctor offers hope to desperate parents who have nothing to lose except hope itself. The doctor believes that denying hope, no matter how hopeless, will be crueler than giving hope. Incidentally, Lord Krishna, one of the many Gods of Hindus, said that a lie which makes someone feel better is better than a thousand truths which make a person feel worse.

Are you still disgusted with the doctor prescribing hope? I’d say “repugnance” is a rather strong sentiment in this ethical gray zone, where the answer depends on how the situation is framed. To believe medical ethics is as absolute as Newton’s Third Law of Motion betrays an alarming level of judgment.

Charlie would have been the first to receive the nucleoside therapy for his condition. In any trial of medical treatment, there is always an index patient – the first to receive the unproven therapy. This is an inviolable fact, whether the unproven therapy later proves itself or not.

Would we be offended if Charlie was the first to receive the unproven treatment as part of a research trial with a hypothesis where the researcher purposefully set out to collect data and specified the outcomes in advance?

It was unethical to experiment unproven therapy with Charlie. Paradoxically, it was also unethical to give Charlie unproven treatment because it wasn’t an experiment.

What then in modern era is the difference between a neurologist responding to desperate parents by giving unproven therapy and a neurologist responding to desperate parents by giving unproven therapy as part of a trial? It’s easy seeing that both scenarios are experimental. But there is a difference. The latter comes with regulatory oversight, the former doesn’t. So, a major gripe here is the absence of regulatory oversight.

This wouldn’t have been the first-time unproven therapy has been offered to sick children with fatal conditions short circuiting a trial. Take the case of surgery for complex congenital heart diseases such as Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. The first time a surgeon operated on a neonate with this condition, the treatment was unproven and, therefore, unscientific. The treatment was offered to desperate parents who believed they had nothing to lose. Indeed, the operative morbidity and mortality for early cardiac surgery for congenital heart disease was so high that whatever short life span these babies had was curtailed by the surgery – i.e. surgery made matters worse. Then the heart surgeons learnt from their errors, improved their technique and patients lived longer. Today, patients with complex congenital heart disease are old enough to worry about cancer and dementia.

Again, the ethics of offering an unproven treatment to a sick child of desperate parents is trickier than first appears. While it may make us balk, the first few recipients of unproven therapy can be made worse, even if the therapy later does net good. I’m not terribly fond of utilitarian reasoning – greatest good to the greatest number – but utilitarianism makes its way through multiple avenues. One argument, which I’m partial to, is that if you relax the access to therapies which haven’t been adequately scientifically vetted for rare diseases with no cures, drug developers will have little incentive to produce genuine cures. This is a compelling and highly plausible conjecture, but it is utilitarian at its core – i.e. we believe that easy access for a few could lead to net harms for many.

Some have defended the action of GOSH by saying it is not about costs, only effectiveness. This is understandable – no one wants to muddy the issue by talking about costs – but disingenuous. Of course, costs are important when the taxpayer is footing the bill. Charlie was ventilated. He’d have to be shifted by air ambulance and accompanied by trained personnel. Medical resources aren’t free even in the NHS. And given that the effectiveness of the nucleoside therapy is nearly zero, the cost-effectiveness would be nearly infinite.

Charlie’s parents had raised funds to help with the costs. This evokes a familiar sentiment in the NHS – should they be allowed to pursue treatment simply because they can afford it? The NHS prides itself, rightly so, on equity – no one is denied proven treatment because of inability to pay. But it’s hard seeing how equity is disrupted if someone decides to pay for futile treatment. Furthermore, Britain has a parallel private system in which proven treatment is accelerated for those who can pay. The Brits, when they want, seem perfectly capable of tolerating inequity.

The crux of the matter was the tension between the welfare of the child and the wishes of the parents. When I was a junior doctor working in an emergency department in London, we were counselled not to bow to the demands of parents and prescribe antibiotics for febrile children. Doctors, even junior doctors, knew best.

The trickier situation is when parents refuse treatment for their sick child. Doctors have the law on their side here and you can understand why. If parents of a child with meningococcal septicemia are conscientious objectors of synthetic therapy and decide that antibiotics for meningitis aren’t indicated, their wishes can’t supersede medical necessity. That is if parents clash with doctors, the doctors will prevail, and the child will receive life-saving antibiotics against the wishes of the parents, and rightly so. Let me state this in no uncertain terms – the courts agree that doctors know best.

Neither medical paternalism, nor the fight against it, is absolute. Doctors do know best, but “best” is a spectrum. For example, the courts can’t force a child to be vaccinated against the wishes of the parents. Few would dispute that vaccinations are beneficial to both the individual and society. But the courts distinguish between a proximate harm and a probabilistic harm to the child.

Would subjecting Charlie to unproven therapy worsen his welfare? Arguably, yes – there’s a fate worse than death, and being on a ventilator prolonging death senselessly is a form of suffering, no less because it can’t be articulated. Does this come under the antibiotics – meningitis domain (proximate harm) or the vaccination domain (probabilistic harm)? I’d be inclined to put it towards the former, unless I was Charlie’s parents. But you can see that this, too, is in the ethical gray zone.

There’s no doubt that the doctors in GOSH made a good clinical call. But every now and then the medical profession encounters an outlier and responding to an outlier needs more than clinical acumen.

The matter reached the European Court – an institution which excels itself at irrelevance by saying nothing new. It’s hard not concluding that a drama was made of a crisis in a tricky realm where each actor wanted to stamp their absolutism. Would it really have been the world’s greatest travesty if Charlie had been taken to the US to receive an unproven therapy? Could GOSH have handled the matter more prudently? Was a legal injunction really necessary? Could the NHS have avoided been morally scolded by Ted Cruz?

Of note, when Dr. Hirano examined Charlie at GOSH he concluded that the brain damage could not be reversed. Perhaps if the doctors at GOSH had incorporated Dr. Hirano as part of their multidisciplinary team at the outset, thus respecting the parent’s preferences, the legal drama could have been avoided. NHS hospitals have something to learn from their American counterparts.

For conservatives, the Charlie Gard story affirms that the NHS is a tyrannical apparatus which conspires to rob people of their fundamental human rights and that Brits submit meekly to medical paternalism. In this tragic story, no one has been more naively absolutist than the conservatives. Calling the NHS “tyrannical” when it saves many poor kids without bankrupting their parents is absurd. This noble institution could, however, do with better PR, because it has come across as inflexible and dogmatic instead of compassionate and scientific. For both the National Health Service and the Great Ormond Street Hospital, this is a huge travesty.

Saurabh Jha is a contributing editor to THCB.

Article source:The Health Care Blog

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goldbergjonblog · 7 years

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Lobster Boy

"We got lobster boy! I think it's a two parter,” and then there was a bit of a celebration in the office. This was the high point of my first Hollywood gig, writing recreation scenes (like recreating a scene from real life, not recreation like volleyball or ping pong) for a 1994 tv show called Behind Bars. The show could be described as a low grade, reality based look at crime from all perspectives - cop, victim and criminal. The low grade aspect comes from the insane production timeline and the lack of...of...caring on anyone's part. A story would get a green light on a Thursday. Interviews of criminals, victims and law enforcement were held on Friday. We wrote the script on Sunday and Monday. Casted it Monday afternoon. Shot it on Tuesday. Edited it on Wednesday and Thursday. Aired it on Friday. Not much room for…thought or creativity. What gave it a bit of notoriety was that it was hosted by Darryl Gates. This was Gates' post riot, post retirement move, to host a show that sympathizes with criminals and victims, probably his two weakest demographics. The producers stuck with this head-scratcher for twenty five episodes. The final twenty five were handled by the more grounded and more respected Paul Sorvino. I was there for the transition and we didn't skip a beat, because we had no time for the beat to skip.

The process started with the news, not the front page, but more like the local crime blotter. We called this the research department. A producer would dig up "interesting" crime stories. Victims also played a huge role, as most of the time the stories would come from their transcripts, if they were still alive, as well as the transcripts of the criminals, who were ultimately the "stars". It was truly stomach turning stuff to work on, and these stories were generally ones that were passed up by the tv movie crowds, the Inside Edition crew and the 20/20's of the time, which I think was 20/20. But, hey, I got paid to write on a TV show.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 I was committed. I went for it. I would write as much as I could - spec scripts, screenplays, anything, and while I was waiting for that big break I took any job I could find. My first one was as a pre-production assistant on the film "Amos & Andrew" starring Nicolas Cage and Samuel L. Jackson. Remember it? Exactly. Not my fault. It was being produced by Castle Rock and, at the time, there was no hotter place to be. Seinfeld was just taking off, they were making great movies and the top people in the industry were milling about. I would make copies, get coffee for auditioning actors, make sure they signed the sheet when they arrived, you know, a part of the industry. I drove my grey Jeep from Brentwood to Beverly Hills and parked it in a lot, with a pass, no validation needed. I was validated every day. The only things missing were money, fame and anyone seeing me as a writer. On one of those perfect days I was late, my guess is horrific traffic not just on Santa Monica but on Little Santa Monica too, and I rushed to get to the office, parked my car and started going about my very insignificant business. About an hour later a guy comes into our small office and just yells out "who the fuck parked in Rob's spot? A grey Jeep?". I think I blurted out an "oh shit" and just weaseled down to the parking lot where I saw as clear as day that my car was parked in a spot that said "reserved for Rob Reiner." Now most Hollywood stories like that end with the PA shlub getting his big break. But not this shlub. Still waiting.

I was writing spec script after spec script, almost getting the break and almost getting an agent. Because the biggest Catch-22 in Hollywood was that in order to get someone to read your scripts, you needed an agent but an agent wouldn't read any unsolicited scripts, basically a weeding out phase. But they did read the cover letter, so instead of writing a generic cover letter I made the letter my material, because I realized that was my only shot at them reading anything of mine. The cover letter exposed the Catch-22 successfully as I asked the agents not to read the enclosed material because I understood that they couldn’t read unsolicited stuff, but I asked them if they had a sister or a daughter that I could meet in order to get in good with them, take advantage of the pervasive nepotism and therefore make the work solicited or at least make the point moot. It actually worked as agents enjoyed the cover letter, gave me a pass and started reading my work, which got me an agent. It did little to move the needle but I made it through phase one. Naturally in Los Angeles you run into people going through the same struggle and frustrations. One night I had plans to meet up with my brother, who was in town for work in sports production doing a baseball game. The announcer of that game was from Boston and he had an actor friend that he wanted to see. We all met at a bar in Santa Monica and I started talking to Matt, the actor friend who, to double his punishment, was also a screenwriter. We shared our Hollywood horror stories and talked about the things we were working on. He mentioned that he and his buddy were in the middle of a feature script about two friends from Boston. We wished each other good luck and he must have gotten all of it because two years later I saw Matt Damon again, accepting an Oscar for that script. Me, I was slumming it, writing on TV.

I had been somewhat exposed to tabloid journalism as my roommate was a producer in that world. She had worked on Hard Copy and was in LA to make a made for tv movie about a killer in Texas called the Texas Twister Killer. It had something to do with a guy that killed his wife during a tornado, or after a tornado, or maybe he threw her into a tornado. She looked at news and stories completely differently than I did. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 she didn't see tragedy, she saw opportunity, making calls to friends who were there to get the scoop on perpetrators and victims. She was looking for angles. One day the phone rang. I picked it up.

"Hello"

(heavy southern drawl on the other end) "Is Betsy there?"

"No she's not. Can I take a message?"

"Yeah, I'm calling about the Texas umm...murder thing."

"Oh right, right she mentioned you'd be calling. Sheriff...."

"Well no. This is...well I'm the...I'm calling cuz we had arranged a specific time to call. I'm only available like once a day and this was our scheduled time. I'll have to call back tomorrow."

Click

Later to Betsy.

"I think you're killer called."

"Shit! He's calling back tomorrow right?"

"It sounded like he could fit it into his schedule."

So there was an ick all around me. An old work friend of my Mom's who I reconnected with was a producer/director for Behind Bars and he mentioned that they needed writers that could take the crime and the sound bites and turn them into a story. I told him I was in. It had the title writer in it. All I had to do was transcribe the interviews, pick the key moments and write those scenes out. They had no money so they scraped together whatever they could production wise, costume wise and acting wise. Each episode consisted of some unbelievable mistakes in logic, appearance and just plain "why would they ever put that on film" moments. False mustaches would be falling off, clothes wouldn't fit or match from scene to scene, and actors would be seen reading cue cards like a Saturday Night Live skit. I had to transcribe lines like this doozy from a crack addict - "the rock was the monster". But I wanted to get a feel for the whole operation so I asked to go on a shoot. I picked the perfect one.

The story was simple, and remember we weren't doing The Great Train Robbery or Heat. This was lowlife scum who would be willing to talk to a camera out of some hope that it would free them from jail when dramatically depicted. The crime involved a man who was on line at a grocery store when he noticed the overweight man in front of him flashing a hundred dollar bill to pay for his food. So our hero (criminal) decides to follow the plump guy to his car, hit him in the head with a baseball bat, stuff him in his own car and drive off with his money, his car and his knocked out body in the trunk. Not exactly Ocean's Eleven. Easy enough for a re-creation scene. The rest of the scenes were interviews and recaps by our host, the esteemed Captain Gates in what would be his series swan song. The interior shoot of the store went great, the bad guy looked bad, like every Timothy Olyphant part in his first six movies, and the victim looked like he didn't see it coming, a nervous Josh Gadd type.

As the shoot moved outside and the crew began to block the scene something became very apparent. Clearly the nonexistent props department didn't cross reference with the nonexistent casting department because our victim was too big to fit in the trunk of the prop car, which was the director's gorgeous BMW convertible. They kept trying to shut the trunk on our portly thespian, and as the trunk kept bouncing back up there was an audible "ouch" from our victim, who was stuffed in there like silly putty in a container, parts just spilling out. They wanted to prove he could fit, with no care of how it would look on film, and we had to get him into the trunk because the real crime wasn't the theft of a hundred dollars or even knocking him out. The real crime was driving away with him in the trunk. Kidnapping was the reason the guy was in jail and the purpose of the entire episode. So we couldn't just knock him out and leave him in the parking lot.

Eventually these geniuses accepted the fact that they needed a different car for the stuffing of our victim. The other option we had was, I shit you not, a Gremlin. This was meant for our criminal. It was perfect for him. But it was deemed more perfect for our victim as he could fit, positioned fetally, in the hatchback trunk. All they had to do was switch the cars and no harm done right? Sure. This is how the scene was scripted:

- Criminal drives his Gremlin to the grocery store parking lot just as our victim gets out of his brand new BMW convertible, an obvious target.

- Criminal follows his mark into the store.

- As they are in the check out line the criminal gets confirmation that he's chosen well as the target flashes a hundred dollar bill.

- Criminal follows the victim to the BMW, waits as the victim pops the trunk to put his grocery bag inside. As the trunk opens the criminal sees a baseball bat in the trunk. He grabs the victim's bat and quickly hits him on the head with it, knocking him out.

- Criminal stuffs the victim’s body in the trunk, shuts the trunk and drives off in the BMW, leaving his shitty Gremlin in the lot to be picked up later.

This made sense from a story standpoint.

Here is what was shot and AIRED because of our portly victim:

- CRIMINAL drives his brand new BMW convertible into the grocery store parking lot just as our VICTIM gets out of his GREMLIN, a not so obvious target for our criminal.

- Criminal follows his target into the store

- As they are in the check out line the criminal is surprised that he's chosen well as the target flashes a hundred dollar bill.

- Criminal follows the victim to the Gremlin, waits as the victim pops the trunk to put his grocery bag inside. As the trunk opens the criminal sees a baseball bat in the trunk. He grabs the victim's bat and quickly bops him on the head with it, knocking him out.

- Criminal easily stuffs the victim in the trunk of the Gremlin, shuts the trunk and drives off in the shitty Gremlin, leaving his brand new BMW convertible in the lot to be picked up later.

This made absolutely no sense from a story standpoint. There was a lot of shrugging and acceptance. There was no time to contemplate the stupidity of the decision. So they went with it. And it aired, like that. Darryl Gates should’ve gone to jail for this.

With this as the bar it makes a little sense that there was a celebration in obtaining the "Lobster Boy" story. It was their biggest "get" yet as many family members, law enforcement and victims agreed to do it and it was actually a fairly infamous story, almost legit. It was worthy of a two parter.

Grady Stiles was born with an affliction called ectrodactyly, where his fingers and toes were fused together to form claw-like hands and feet. Stiles' stage name was "Lobster Boy". This was genetic and he was the sixth in a line that began with the birth of his great, great, great grandfather in 1805. Grady Stiles' father was a sideshow attraction in a traveling carnival when his son was born and added him to the act at a young age. As Grady grew up in the circus it became his life, really only being exposed to this world and not much else. Grady married twice and had four children, two of whom also had the affliction and joined Grady on the carnival tour as The Lobster Family. When not traveling with the carnival the family lived in Gibsonton, Florida where many other carnival performers lived during the winter season. Due to his condition, he was unable to walk and while he often used a wheelchair, he mostly used his hands and arms to move around, which lead to incredible upper body strength that, when combined with his temper and alcohol consumption, made him dangerous to his family and others. He was a scary guy and often followed through on his threats. In 1978, Stiles shot and killed his oldest daughter's fiancé on the eve of their wedding, but he wasn’t sent to prison as no state institution was equipped to care for someone with his condition. So he got fifteen years probation and during this time he stopped drinking for a bit and remarried his first wife, Maria. However, he soon began drinking again and his family claimed that he became even more abusive, one time Army crawling from the kitchen into the bedroom with a knife in his mouth until he got to a sleeping Maria, putting the knife to her throat and threatening her. In 1992 Maria and her son from a previous marriage hired a sideshow performer to kill Stiles for $1500. He shot him three times in the back of the head, killing Grady instantly. All three were brought to trial and convicted. In her defense, Maria told the judge, "My husband was going to kill my family. I believe that from the bottom of my heart. I’m sorry this happened, but my family is safe now."

Can you say goldmine? We had the script down and the story was quite compelling, with amazing characters and dramatic moments that we could heighten. But what was really going to make this episode sing were the prosthetics. We went the distance on this one and decided to build the claws. The day before the shoot the prosthetics arrived in the office and everyone was excited to see what the art department came up with. We gathered around to look at the artistry and sitting on the table was...an oven mitt...painted a flesh-like color. The team agreed that this was acceptable (let's remember where the bar is set for this collection of artists). Our actor could wear it and we wouldn't shoot it too close up. If Spielberg could shoot around a flawed robotic shark, we could shoot around six dollar Bed, Bath and Beyond oven mitts.

The script was snappy and rich but we didn't have a title for the show. The writing was on the wall that Behind Bars was not getting a season 2. Shocking. Was it the actors we found on the streets? Was it the poor communication between props and casting? Were we running out of stories? Why would this show not make it? Maybe because it was the campiest, sleaziest, most uncomfortable show I've ever seen. And this is coming from someone who in 4th grade was told by his parents to lie to his teacher about how many hours of TV they watch in a week. "Cut it in half", my mom implored, "I don't think the real number will be believable". So I lied and still beat everyone easily. But there was no saving Behind Bars as it only aired in 5 markets at around 3 am. My parents actually thought about flying to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see the show as that was the easternmost market. So The Lobster Boy episode was to be our Emmy entry and to win an Emmy it needed a title. Other episode titles included things like "My Husband, My Killer", "The Texas Terror” (not to be confused with “The Texas Twister Killer”) and "The Monster and the Rock". So there had to be some punch to it. I looked for my inner NY Post headline and it just came to me. So if you ever come across Behind Bars on YouTube or in some other digital, cloud-like thing that holds all the crap ever filmed and you see this episode, just know that for a week or two I was on a writing high because I surpassed the challenge presented to me, reaching the pinnacle of my art form, and The Grady Bunch was my opus.

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