#they like the 90s more than they do the 60s but there was common ground

[tiredeyes1975]

i just “r u guys talking about the beach boys”ed my way into a conversation with those two cool ppl ive been wanting to talk to for so longgg

[kendrixtermina]

Another thing where Chibnall fucked up is that unlike previous showrunners, he never really tried to sell us on the companions as important deuteragonists who have cool stories in their own right.

I mean the classics sometimes had the problem that they would come up with cool character concepts but then under-utilize them / not think of anything better to with them than having the villains kidnap them again, but still it was attempted to have them be interesting & contrasting, for example they would follow up a sour snarky character with a cheerful one.

And in the pre-chibnall new series in particular, they've always had distinctive dynamics planned-out arcs. You couldn't swap one new series companion for another & still get the same episode. They were damn near the main characters.

With most of the companions we've had so far you could say what they'll do if you throw them at a given situation:

Donna would stay grounded & look for the common sense solution, Rose would usually comfort someone who's upset & discover crucial info that way, Martha would keep a cool head, start trying to puzzle things out and try to help, Clara would take charge & try to get the situation under control, Amy would just charge into it based on intuition, Rory would remain unfazed, tag along but also point out the danger, Bill would be curious and voice some unusual question or observation...

What do Yaz, Graham, Ryan or Dan do? Mostly just make corny jokes & follow the Doctor around, defaulting to whatever she does... You could swap 90% of their lines with none the wiser cause it exists mostly to prompt exposition while failing to imbue it with meaning & stakes..

They rarely ever act of their own accord, make important, plot-changing decisions or even react much to what happens to them. Nor do they really get one on one scenes with the Doctor or bond emotionally (except Ryan and Graham, sometimes, in the stiffest, corniest way possible), and no just having the characters TELL us they like each other is no substitute.

And if the characters don't seem to care, well, the viewers won't care either.

Even the Yaz having a lesbian crush thing which you'd think would be a really big aspect of her character, was apparently a suggestion by Mandip & Whittaker themselves, which means that Chibs had absolutely no plan for his characters expect just being... there, until it was time for them to go. So little plan he could just throw in a major thing like that. I mean I'm glad he did cause else it would have been ever blander, but still.

You'd think that with a big group of characters you could flesh them out by having them disagree about what to do, play different roles and react in contrasting ways, but that idea never occurred to Chibnall.

Let's compare the introduction of the "fam" to... not even the new series, but the very first serial from the 60s. Some aspects of it seem dated in hindsight, I could've done without the screaming & the Red Indian line, but still all four main characters are distinctly established & make meaningful decisions. The story would not turn out the same without any of them present:

Barbara is introduced as being worried about a student & shown to be responsible & intuitive. She decides that they should check on Susan, and later that they should save the caveman rather than just escape, more or less setting the story in motion.

Ian is introduced as brave, unflappable and inquisitive. He's the one who proposes taking bold action, moving the plot forward, but he is also more calm about it the whole time & continues to do so in a scary unfamiliar situation.

The First Doctor is introduced giving nonsense answers and trying to bullshit his way out of a situation. We see that he is quite cocky & guarded, but also tends to think his way out of situation. While he tends to respond to fear & pressure by bluffing, we see that he is still frightened underneath. (it is when he admits this that we get the first bonding moment between him & Barbara) His contributions to the plot are to take off with the teachers on board (half to avoid being discovered & half cause he's offended they don't believe he had a spaceship), and then later he solves the caveman murder.

Susan is shown to be quite smart, but also very timid, and she describes her time hiding out on earth as the happiest in her life, showing that she would maybe prefer a quieter, more stable life than the one she leads. She's probably the most passive character, seeing as she's the youngest, but since she likes and trusts both the teachers and the Doctor, she's essential to keep the group together until everyone else starts trusting each other.

Note that at no point does anyone say "Ian is brave & unflappable" or "Barbara is responsible & intuitive", rather we are shown, not told.

Now, what are we told about the fam, and just as important, how are we told?

Yaz wants more challenges than her job offers. We are told this because she just states it out loud.

Ryan & Graham don't get along, but Graham would like them to. We know this because Graham explicitly tells us.

Ryan is frustrated because despite ppl's encouragement, his disability presents real limits. We know because he tells us so.

..okay? Kinda unsubtle delivery, but it's a start. All of this could have potential if it's developed more, especially the last thing. You could make interesting characters with these basic points.

But what happens then?

The plot is advanced not by character decisions, but by a bunch of random coincidences: The Doctor just crashes into them, Ryan just happens upon the onion, Yaz just happens to be on duty when he calls etc.

The main characters learn that they've been implanted with bombs... and barely react. Ryan reacts more when his phone is erased for the sake of a "phone obssessed millenial" joke than to learning he's about to die.

Imagine if they had Ryan complain about how he'll die & that is yet another unfair thing in his life, or: Graham chooses at this moment to act protective on Ryan. Or: Yaz tries to keep a cool head & control the situation, maybe having some friction with the Doctor's attempts to do the same but also impressing her. Just gimme any character/emotion, Chris!

Notice how they show Ryan having a youtube channel... and it's the blandest, most generic thing ever. This was THE opportunity to characterize him: What videos does he watch, what videos does he make, does he have a distinct username? No, it's just his name with some numbers. They just wanted the video framing device, so he has a youtube, but they don't think about what it says about him.

Remember for example, how Clara picked 'Oswin' as an username (short for Oswald for the Win), & how this shows that she is confident and a bit vain.

Now imagine if they had Ryan pick something with a relatable downtrodden millenial vibe, or had him reference internet culture. Just anything that characterizes him in any way.

When we get character scenes at all they feel sort of tacked on & removed from the plot, like the plot stops 5 minutes for Ryan & Graham to have a scene, and while the plot is happening everyone becomes a plank of wood walking from location to location.

That's the worst thing to do, especially in sci fi when you have wild fantastic things happening! The plot and the characters should always be connected: The plot is made to challenge the characters, and the characters reactions give the plot weight.

Any time a Dalek showed up in RTD's run, everyone panicked, even the normally level-headed characters - and that's how they sold that these pepperpots are a big deal. Donna being needed to save the universe is designed as a counterpoint to her self-esteem issues. Martha has a problem with prioritizing herself, so the plot throws her in taxing situations untill she realizes that she can't keep doing this.

We care about River meeting the Doctor out of order because she emotes about it. We would care much less about the puddle person if she wasn't Bill's girlfriend trying to keep her promise. We wouldn't care as much about the timecrack if it hadn't eaten Amy's fiancé. As phantastical as the impossible girl thing is, on the character level it has a pretty simple meaning: The Doctor owes clara a debt & wants to thank her but is also suspiciou cause he's jaded from past losses, and we then explore how his character responds to this situation.

In Chibnall's writing, this connection is absent, and so neither the plot nor the characters manage to really land emotionally. So much ppl stopped watching cause it was just bland flavorless & not exciting anymore.

[lilyginnyblackv2]

T&B Buddy Compatibility Based on Zodiac Years

Now that we have specific zodiac years associated with the heroes in Tiger & Bunny, I decided to check out each Buddy Pairs' compatibility, lol. So, here is a little thread going from most to least compatible, with the chart I used as a reference in the last post. Let's start!

1st - Most Compatible - Lara & Pao-lin (Rat & Dragon) - 100% - Perfect. 

This makes sense to me, since Lara & Pao-lin's issues as buddies came from an external source (Lara's mother), rather than with any compatibility issues.

2nd - Greatly Compatible - Karina & Ryan (Goat/Sheep & Pig) - 90% - Awesome. 

 This makes sense to me too. They have some issues, of course, but once they get each other - they get each other 100% and they have a lot of actual romantic chemistry in-series.

3rd - Decently Compatible - Nathan & Keith (Horse & Rooster) - 60% - Workable.  

This buddy pair was really unexpected for like every Tiger & Bunny fan, and we saw that they were really struggling to understand each other for a while. But then, when they got it, they were good.

The rest are going under a Read More because of length.

4th - Decently Compatible - Thomas & Subaru (Snake & Dog) - 60% - Workable.  

These two have a rough partnership. When they do get it right though, then they work quite well together. An outside influence (like Ruby) also makes their partnership work better.

5th - Somewhat Compatible - Kotetsu & Barnaby (Tiger & Rabbit) - 50% - Average.  

I really like that Kotetsu and Barnaby's zodiac years aren't 100% compatible. I think it reflects how they had to, and still have to, work hard to reach the level of companionship that they have.

6th - Least Compatible - Antonio & Ivan (Ox & Monkey) - 30% - Tricky.  

I don't think this comes as a surprise to anyone, lol. Their Buddy Pair had the most work (even more than HIT & Black). They are completely different personality types. But do finally find some common ground.

Obviously, these aren't the actual zodiac years of all the T&B characters (since we still don't know the exact DOB for many of the characters). But these are the years they are representing, and the compatibility levels match up well, imo. Here is the image I used as a source:

[the-healing-witch-named-clover]

The Owl House Guys ranked as Dads (Raine Included!)

(Note: I will be using both Wittebane brothers, so this will be pre-show Philip, and not current Emperor"Can go get sucked into a tornado and die" Belos. Also; Hunter, Gus, and Edric will be aged up for common sense purposes.)

Also, this is just my own opinion guys. If y'all have your own opinions...good for you.

(Canon Dads)

Manny Noceda: Alright. Even though we do not fully know much about The OG himself, from what we can see from how Camila and Luz talk about him and from the many family photos, is that he was honestly the best Dad in the human realm, hands down. He was the source of Luz' fascination for fantasy, and imagination, and spontaneous creativity, and had shared the same love of Cosmic Frontier as Camila.

Dad Rating: 100/100

Alador Blight: Mr. Blight is honestly the best example of a IRL Dad who has gotten roped into a bit of an unhealthy relationship with his wife that probably started out well, but after getting involved with having to build those abomination soldiers for the Emperor's Coven, had caused him to accidentally neglect his own children because of Odelia forcing him to work his head off for literal to Titan years! Though that doesn't mean that he was a bad father. He really does love his children, even if his way of showing it is a little weird sometimes, but he's slowly working to become a better father than he was before now that he's no longer under Odelia's influence.

Dad Rating: 60/100

Harvey and Gilbert Park: They are two dads just trying to do what they think is best for dear Willow, and I love it. Now, while I can understand how Harvey would be more upset over the unjust expulsion, wanting to ground Willow for 3 years is a tad much...so points deducted. Gilbert on the other hand seems to be the voice of reason in the relationship, kinda being the one to balance his husband out as it were. I also love that he honestly secretly promised their daughter that he wouldn't tell Harvey that she was sneaking out to save Luz when Odalia was...so to speak...trying to kill her.

Dad Ratings: 85/100

Dell Clawthorne: This man honestly reminded me of a teacher I had once, who was the sweetest, caring man I've ever met. Next to Manny, Dell is very proud of his daughters and loves them no matter what, which was proven when he and Eda finally talked after so many years and he showed that his love for her had never faltered even after she had unintentionally attacked him in her Owl Beast mode.

Dad Rating: 100/100

(Unconfirmed-Canon Dad)

Caleb Wittebane: Okay, yes. I know he's a brother, but he is in this list because he had to take on the Father role for his little brother. Caleb had to sacrifice almost everything in order to care for his brother when they were still wandering around the literal wilderness, until reaching Gravesfield. He had to be his guide, his provider and protector until he finally reached his late teens. Caleb without a doubt knew that he and his brother had no choice but to fit in with the residents of Old Gravesfield and that included becoming witch hunters. He probably didn't want to become one, but feared that he and Philip would get accused of being one themselves. And even after Caleb had gone to the demon realm with Evelyn, it was clear through Philip's memory that Caleb looked happy to see him and had introduced him to Evelyn, thinking that maybe his brother would see that witches aren't really bad at all. Caleb loved his brother and only wanted him to change his views like how he did....if only that was the path that was followed.

Dad Rating: 90/100

Perry Porter: I'm going on another whim and just assume that Mr. Porter is a widower. He is a single father just trying to raise Gus as best as he's able to, even though work constantly gets in the way of that. I believe that he's trying to understand his son's fascination and love for The Human Realm even if the whole thing is a little weird to him. Like Willow's dads, Perry only wants what's best for his son and even though he can be a little too strict sometimes, still loves and supports him anyway he can.

Dad Rating: 90/100

(Fanon Dads)

Raine Whispers: Raine would honestly make a wonderful parent. They are definitely on that tier that others can only dream of being on. They are kind as they are strict, but just like Harvey and Gilbert, only wants what is best for their child. But may the Titan help the poor fool who thinks that they can harm Raine's children. Because A Bard is not to be taken lightly once they find out.

Dad Rating: 100/100

Darius Deamonne: This man. Let me tell you. Any child he has better get used to standing around just waiting for Darius to pick out an outfit for them if Darius' partner gives him the chance of picking out the kid's outfits. Darius is a man of style and taste, so he's not going to allow for his own kin to walk out looking like they grew up in a barn or something! He is also very protective and isn't afraid to get mean when the time calls for it. (Just don't expect him to get his clothes dirty.)

Dad Rating: 60/100

Hunter Noceda (formally Wittebane): Hunter as a first time dad is already a recipe for disaster. He wouldn't know what to do at first and has asked Camila for help on a lot of occasions. However, the more he continues to learn the basics, the easier it is for him to be a Dad. Plus, he's had a pretty great parenting teacher to help him.

Dad Rating: 90/100

Gus Porter: Gus is definitely the one to fit into the "Fun Dad" category, though his jokes are incredibly cheesey and horrible that even Hunter and Amity just can't deal with it. Imagine Dad-Jokes but make them more cringe. And he has probably gotten them from his own dad. He also uses his illusions as a way of entertaining his children and to also be able to multi-task.

Dad Rating: A solid 90/100

Philip Wittebane: He tries. He really does. But it is safe to say that Caleb made taking care of him look a lot easier than this with his own child. He has to deal with getting his hair pulled, hands and arms bitten, and even his child screaming directly into his ear when they're having a tantrum and he's already getting grey hair from the stress. What's worse is that his child is clearly showing that they favor his brother, Evelyn, and his own partner over him which just adds salt into the wound. However, he does have his golden moments. He knows how to comfort them when they have nightmares or are being picked on by other kids. Because he's been there before. Though the parents of those kids better do something. Otherwise he will not hesitate to make their lives miserable in the way he knows how.

Dad Rating: 50/100 (for effort. Hang in there, Philip.)

Edric Blight: Upon becoming a parent, Edic had to...mellow out as it were in terms of pulling pranks with Emira, otherwise he could accidentally rub off on his kid and it would not end well. However, what he didn't expect was for his kid to be a natural prankster just like he is. So, instead he's now being both a responsible parent while also pulling pranks with his child as much as possible while also trying not to get caught by Amity and Alador otherwise they will definitely not let him hear the end of it. (Emira will also be helping him, but she's subtle about it.)

Dad Rating: 84/100

Edit: Forgot Edric's rating, and had to look back to see that Willow was almost grounded for 3 years instead of months like I had thought. Whoops.

[slavghoul]

Tobias Forge on Satanism, religion, etc.

Recently one of the most common questions I get here concerns the topic of Satanism – “Is Tobias actually a Satanist?”, “Are Ghost really devil worshippers or is this just a funny shtick?” and so on, and so forth. I have therefore compiled a few quotes from the man himself speaking about his personal views on Satanism and religion, as well as how the satanic themes translate into the world of Ghost. Perhaps it will help you form your own judgement on the matter.

On his personal relationship with Satanism

Sacramento News & Review, 2018

Are you a Satanist?

TF: From a strictly Christian point of view, if that means believing in a physical, half man, half-ram living in the underground, no, I don’t believe there is such a thing. I’m not the opposite either. And you know, I’m sure in the eyes of the beholder, if I was put in front of true god-fearing bible thumpers, I would probably be regarded as a Satanist just because I’m not a god-fearing bible thumper. But the concept of Satanism has many, many forms. In the last 50 years now, ever since [Anton] LaVey and pop-cultural Satanism, when that rose in the latter of the part of ’60s with the Church of Satan, and Black Sabbath and Black Widow and Coven and that sort of hippie Satanism, which at the end of the day, heavy metal, black metal, all that is based upon that cultural Satanism. I grew up with that. So from that point of view, I would definitely say that culturally, I am definitely, for lack of better way of putting it, I’m a devil-liking kind of guy. But I wouldn’t sacrifice a baby to a half-ram that I believe to be living in the underground. And I would never ever encourage anyone to do that.

Aftonbladet, 2016

I became interested in Satanism when I was 10-11, so I find it very difficult to have a clear intellectual approach to it. In the end, I became interested in it because I thought it was cool. Aesthetically, I think it's amazing. An incredibly fun and, for me, a very homey world. As I tell our children, the devil is our friend. The monsters are our friends. But I was much more convinced back then, than I am now. As a grown man, it's hard to buy the idea that if we take a shovel and dig into the ground, eventually we'll come across a half-buck in a burning inferno. Although it would have been an incredibly festive thought. What I know is that I haven't got a fucking clue. That's the only thing I'm absolutely convinced of.

Banger TV, 2019

Even though I am very, very, very fascinated with religion in many ways, I'm sort of staying in the pop cultural world when it comes to referencing the devil, and especially when I'm talking about my relationship to him. He appeared in my life through rock music, through films. I've been dressing myself with pentagrams and upside down crosses ever since I was 11 years old and was watching horror films and listening to music about Satan way before that. That's the difference I think between a musician born in the 40s that added the devil as a "hip" thing in 1969 to their musical movement, it was more an addition that they could do as grown-ups, whereas for me and a lot of my friends who grew up with black metal, death metal bands - it's part of our blood basically.

Psychology Today, 2018

I think in 99.9 percent of every so-called Satanist in the last 50 years, you would find that the vast majority of them have been introduced to the Devil via music. And it usually happens at a certain age as well. It was also the early '90s—so that was the rise of the death metal and black metal movement in Europe and in the world I guess. Especially in Sweden and Norway, it was a big thing. It was just right up my alley and it became such a powerful way of expressing myself, and how to not only deviate and differentiate myself from the norm and normal people but just like hand in glove with my way of seeing the world.

On the pop-cultural devil vs the biblical devil

Areena, 2019

What does Satan mean to you?

TF: For me personally, he or it, she... She has been such a faithful companion for the majority of my life - as a guide, as a mentor, as a symbol. The idea of the devil representing ‘evil’ as opposed to 'good’ does not… it clashes with my idea of the devil. Because the devil for me represents rock and roll, film, freedom, humor - essentially, my life and my background because it’s so coloured with so many “blasphemous” expressions. I think that’s one of the most common misconceptions that makes it so hard for people to fathom - that there’s obviously the biblical devil, and then you have the pop-cultural devil. The pop-cultural devil being very much a representative of freedom, intellectualism and liberation from the chains of handicapping worship of the three Abrahamic religions - because that’s what [these religions] are about, they’re about control. Satan represents, in the pop cultural sense, the opposite of that. In the Bible it represents evil, but I know very, very few things in the history of the world that have been perpetrated in the name of the devil that have been to the non-benefit of mankind, whereas… I mean, just look at the amount of abuse and human despair that has been caused in the name of 'good.’

Billboard, 2019

On the Satanic leanings: For me, it is very personal and important, but I struggle to define the differences between the pop-cultural Satan and the actual one – if you want to say it that way – because that’s even harder to define. [Since the 1960s, Satanism] has become a fun little thing for 20-somethings to play with. It has very much been embraced as a symbol of liberation, rather than a symbol of actual tyranny and evil. The pop-cultural Satan has an amazing importance for me, and that’s because I’m a born rebel and a natural ‘opposer,’ in that I oppose shit.

On whether there would be Satan without God: The Satan that we are most commonly referring to in the Western world is obviously a product of Christianity. Within the confines and context of Christianity, no. They cannot exist without the other. That’s the problem with the entire concept of Satanism because, depending on who you’re talking to – if you’re talking to a Bible thumper, Satan exists within the bras of women, and Satan exists within the confines of rock ‘n’ roll music and drugs and everything that would be considered quote ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ and ‘harmful.’ And I think that in rock ‘n’ roll and in pop culture, that is the thing that most people cling to. Satan as a symbol or symbolic role model represents liberation and free thought and fun. Intellectualism as opposed to regression and stupidity. But if you’re talking about Satan as the main peddler and the prime motor for evil – if I look at the world and I see evil, I think of ISIS and I think that’s pure evil, and that has nothing to do with a pop-cultural horned-goat half-man called Satan. So you really, really, really have to understand that the ‘Satan’ that has been embraced by artists in film, music, poetry, and art going back centuries was made to scare people.

On not being against religion but rather organized religion, and on not being an atheist

Rolling Stone Deutschland, 2019

I’m not against religion. I’m not against being religious. But I am against organized religion, the scriptures, because we know perfectly well that they are basically manifests put together by other people in order to control the rest. That’s not even a secret.

New York Post, 2018

The problem with religious doctrine, as with politics, because of its ability to give people authority, it has a tendency to attract people that want authority for all the wrong reasons, and that is what it has done across all time. But, then again, in all fairness, I am not saying that there shouldn’t be faith. It’s completely different things. The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.

Loudwire, 2015

I'm definitely not an atheist. Intellectually, obviously my intellect tells me one thing, but I want there to be something so I choose not to completely follow my intellect when it comes to the idea of there being a bigger being or beings that I cannot explain.

Psychology Today, 2018

I am not against the idea of believing. I am not an atheist. The whole institution of Christianity being based on that book, being based on the premise that he was conceived out of nowhere—it’s kind of hard to believe. But on the other hand, I do believe in the idea of a historic person named Jesus that was a kind of chill dude who was just telling people to chill and be nice to each other. And he got penalized for that. So I’m not dismissing the whole thing as bullsh*t. But I definitely believe that tormenting other people because of the Bible and for that to be—for lack of a better word, Gospel. I think that is not very nice.

Amusio, 2013

Are you afraid of death?

TF: I am not very afraid of death, only of the question of how I will die. I don't know what will happen to us when it's all over, but I'm not an atheist and I certainly believe in a higher, inexplicable existence out there with which we humans are more or less in contact. That's why I don't think that death is the end of our existence.

Rolling Stone Deutschland, 2019

How religious was your upbringing?

TF: Not very. I'd say that in my main home, which was with my mother and my brother, there was always spiritualism I would say. We were definitely not atheists, but it was more infused by the idea of there being greater things than what we know. But that takes the tools that we use to trigger these feelings and that comes from pop cultural powers, rather than scripture - if that makes sense. The power of rock’n’roll. The power of film. The power of a good book. And that combined sort of gives us hint that there might be something that we cannot explain.

US Time Today, 2022

I’ve always had an intense relationship with organized, linear religion, let’s put it that way. I’m very fascinated by the art and its history, but maybe not so much by the rules and the guilt.

On Satanism in Ghost

Pitchfork, 2013

The theme of Satanism, tongue-in-cheek or not, has a long tradition in heavy metal. How important is it to what you guys are doing?

TF: Well thematically, obviously, it’s alpha to omega, that’s what we’re doing. The sort of Satanism, or devil-worship, that we want to portray in the confines of Ghost, a very biblical version of goat worship, the sort of things that you see in a Satanic Panic movie. And obviously in the theatre that is Ghost, everything is supposed to feel like it’s orthodox devil-worshipping. As an audience member, you can choose to believe whatever you want to. And you can choose to partake, or you can choose not to.

Hard Force, 2015

We are not necessarily singing about God or Satan, we're singing about what we think and how we treat each other because of what we believe is God and Satan. All of a sudden, that's a way bigger scope than most other cult-oriented rock bands do, because normally it's just odes to this, that and the other.

Telegraph, 2022

When we’re talking about darkness, death, despair, it’s to express our discontent at the world. It’s our way to explain how shit things are.

Loudwire, 2018

We’re trying to make people happy about life. We’re actually quite humanistic. If you take all of these things that we’re saying and what we’re doing completely literally, and you believe that this is equal to damnation, then there’s no way that we can meet intellectually. As a human, I grieve for tendencies like that because I think it reflects on something somber, limited and regressive. 

[hapalopus]

So are you going to address the fact that the current otherkin community lifts elements from the DID community for their own use, i.e kin "shifting", or the fact most sources seem to agree it spawned from 90's internet subcultures and has no real grounds as an actual occult practice? You can't harp on normal-horoscopes if you're gonna ignore the fact otherkin has had it's own issues with racism and ableism.

You picked the wrong person to send this ask to jshkdjk One of my special interests is literally otherkind history.

To start off, 'shifting,' the way it's used in the otherkind community today, actually doesn't stem from the "otherkin community" (and nor is it lifted from the plural community) – instead it has roots in the therian community.

Let me explain: There have always been folks out there who felt nonhuman or other-than-human, there have just never been that many of us. It's been hard for us to create a community because we're just so few and far between. The earliest nonhuman community we have records of is the Elf Queen's Daughters, a group of Tolkienesque elves who found each other in the 60s and officially created mailing lists (with snail mail! can you believe?? :D) in the 70s. The EQD and their offshoots never discussed shifting as far as I'm aware. Some of them probably experienced fluctuations in their species identity and the intensity of it, but they didn't discuss it as a shapeshifting phenomenon. Shapeshifting just wasn't part of the elven culture.

The only other nonhuman community I'm aware of from those early days is the starseed community which has... issues... but it's nonetheless a real community with real beliefs and it's nowhere near as horrible as people on tumblr have made it out to be in the past few years.

But then the internet was invented and it became unfathomably easy for nonhumans to find each other. Several communities sprung up independently of each other and with little to no overlap: Alfandra for the dragons, Always Believe for the unicorns, The Elfinkind Digest for various kinds of nonhumans, and Alt.Horror.Werewolves for the animals. It was on AHWw that the idea of shapeshifting first took off, probably because people visiting the newsgroup already had werewolves on their mind.

Where the elven communities had had a more spiritual approach to nonhumanity, the therian community (as it became known; 'therian' being a shortened form of 'therianthrope') on AHWw had a more analytic approach. Which is not to say that spirituality and analysis can't go hand in hand, they usually do, but what I'm getting at is just that the two communities had very different mindsets and ideas right from the get-go. The therians quickly realized that there were different kinds of shapeshifting that they could experience. Mental shifting is one of the most common forms, and probably the one you're thinking of, though it's origins can be found in werewolf media, and not plurality, like you assumed. You know in werewolf movies when the full moon approaches and the werewolf starts acting more like a wolf before they've even started transforming physically? That's what mental shifting is like. Taking on the mindset of your theriotype (or kintype, when the different communities later started melding together). Other types of shift include (but are not limited to) phantom shift, sensory shift, shadow shift, dream shift, bilocation shift, astral shift, berserker shift, envisage shift, and aura shift. Check out this glossary for more info :D

Also, I'm curious what you think counts as a "real" practice. Like, I'm Asatru, and proudly so. But Norse Paganism, as it's known today, is no older than the otherkind community. The only sources we have on the original Norse beliefs (which no doubt included many 'denominations' and disparate factions) were written down by Christians way after the Norse beliefs had begun dying out. Norse Paganism is an experiment at best. Would you claim, then, that seiðr "has no real grounds as an actual occult practice"? Of course not, that's ridiculous! No religious scholar would claim that. Age does not affect validity.

Try reading The Otherkin Timeline, A Field Guide to Otherkin, or perhaps even Werewolf Magick beforehand the next time you wanna tout misinformation about my community :)

[tanadrin]

I want to explore at length someday the way that Star Trek setting up a particular opposition between “rationality/logic” and “emotion,” in addition to other tropes like the “natural development of a species” and an “evolutionary ladder,” all spring from a common source in Victorian attitudes toward progress, where in parts of the cultural discourse sentimentality was excluded from the domain of “science” or “rationalism” as a way to keep political power structures from being responsible for moral transgressions, a way to reinforce conservative ideologies rebranded with pseudoscientific language like social darwinism, without exposing them to criticism on traditional moral grounds, and the way that the long half-life of these ideas is still being wrestled with in Star Trek in the 60s, 80, 90s, and even the 21st century.

More of Star Trek as a case study in these things than a particularly egregious example--in fact, I think Star Trek, especially in its humanistic dimension, is struggling against these ideas sometimes, though it’s not very good at articulating why they’re wrong. A core example is “Patterns of Force,” which falls for Nazi mythmaking even as it’s attempting to repudiate fascism. And Star Trek’s hostility to genetic engineering is a reflection of a genuinely humanistic belief in equality, though it’s framed in ways that grant Victorian assumptions about the natural development of species up a hierarchy of being.

The Vulcans are another good example: emotion/intuition and logic are seen as countervailing forces, even though any truly “logical” Vulcan would have to grant that apparently irrational decisionmaking processes like intuition are often based on logical processes that simply aren’t exposed to the conscious mind, and can be valuable; and that many other apparently “irrational” features of humans are perfectly natural developments given the context of evolution as highly social animals negotiating complex interactions and hierarchies. A passionate alien species that has learned to control its extremes of emotion through careful cultivation of discipline, and has attained a great deal of wisdom as a result, is a cool idea for a humanoid alien species, and a great way to hold up an SF mirror to human society--but in the hands of lesser writers who fall back on recapitulating a commonplace of folk wisdom, that these two domains are somehow entirely distinct (a commonplace that, if not created, was reinforced by discourse in the 19th century that tried to contrast “rational” and “scientific” empire and exploitation against “emotional” appeals for restraint), we instead get supposedly highly intelligent Vulcans like Spock being befuddled by things any first-year anthropology student could explain.

And I think that would be worth exploring in particular because we still often implicitly grant the 19th century apologists for empire and exploitation the premises of their arguments--that they really were rationally and scientifically minded people who simply were clouded by their biases, rather than political ideologues searching for any set of ideas they could use to support conclusions they had already come to. I’m not shitting on empiricism or rationality here. Quite the opposite. There were plenty of people doing good science in the 19th century who didn’t fall into the same traps, and plenty of people who didn’t see rationality and empiricism as opposed to morality and sentiment. But those who did were especially useful to enterprises like the British Empire, and so their legacy is outsized.

[thecreaturecodex]

Nightmare Beast

Image by Wayne Reynolds, © Wizards of the Coast. Accessed at the Monster Manual II Art Gallery here

[The nightmare beast is one of seven monsters in the Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium that is said to be the most fearsome on Athas barring the Dragon of Tyr. Like, they can’t all be the most fearsome, my dudes. More 90s edginess, I guess. The nightmare beast has been sufficiently popular to turn up in both 3e and 4e, which means there were plenty of versions for me to compare and draw from. The 2e and 4e art both have short, bulldog like jaws, a motif that turns up in a number of Dark Sun creatures. The longer jaws that Reynolds gave it are more distinctive to me (although of course, the 3e version is the first one I saw, so it might just be a nostalgia bias).

The 2e and 4e versions of the nightmare beast are explicitly defilers, the type of magic in Dark Sun that draws the life from other creatures. Defliling is what destroyed most of Athas’ ecosystems, leaving it a dying desert world. It’s a metaphor. So I gave my nightmare beast the ability to deal negative levels, which it had in 2e but lost in all other editions, and gave it the healing thief ability, because it seemed thematically appropriate.]

Nightmare Beast CR 17 CE Magical Beast This scaly creature resembles no true animal, but an amalgamation of the worst qualities of many of them. It stands on four legs tipped with saber-like claws, and has a maw of sword-sized teeth. Two curving tusks grow from its lower jaw, and its enormous eyes are red globes.

A nightmare beast is a true terror, a magical mutant that spreads destruction in its wake. All nightmare beasts hate other living things, and they rampage for days on end, destroying buildings, tearing down forests and slaying all in their path. These rampages are interrupted by long sleep, up to a year at a time, but all creatures near a resting nightmare beast dream of its rampages and are worn down psychically. The land around a nightmare beast lair is shattered, scarred, and bereft of most life.

If it sights potential victims a way off, a nightmare beast will often torment them at range with spells or summoned monsters before teleporting into the middle of the group. A nightmare beast prefers to be up close in combat, crushing foes under its feet and goring them with its swiveling tusks. This way it can drain the life from enemies with its teeth and steal their healing spells through magic. Every time it does so, its own spells grow stronger. Nightmare beasts will flee from a fight if they feel threatened, but few creatures are strong enough to concern it.

Nightmare beasts eat what they kill, and have been known to consume pieces of buildings, armor and weapons as well. They do not intentionally collect treasure, but their guts collect small valuables, and those foolish enough to rifle through their droppings may find a few surviving items. The ground tusks and teeth of a nightmare beast are coveted for use as components in making items of the necromancy or evocation schools, but forgeries are much more common than the real deal in markets.

A nightmare beast speaks Abyssal, but rarely has little to say except threats and curses. They can live for centuries.

Nightmare Beast     CR 17 XP 102,400 CE Huge magical beast Init +6; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +23, scent Aura healing theft (30 ft., Will DC 28), nightmares (1 mile, Will DC 28) Defense AC 30, touch 10, flat-footed 28 (-2 size, +2 Dex, +20 natural) hp 287 (23d10+161) Fort +20, Ref +15, Will +12; +8 vs. mind-influencing effects DR 15/magic; Immune ability damage or drain, bleed, curses, divination, energy drain; Resist fire 20; SR 28 Offense Speed 30 ft. Melee 2 gores +30 (2d10+9/19-20), bite +30 (2d8+9 plus energy drain), 2 claws +30 (2d6+9) Space 15 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks defiled casting, energy drain (2 negative levels, Fort DC 28), trample (4d6+13, DC 30) Spell-like Abilities CL 17th, concentration +24 Constant—mind blank At will—fireball (DC 20), shout (DC 21), wall of fire 3/day—empowered chain lightning (DC 23), quickened dimension door, disintegrate (DC 23) 1/day—incendiary cloud (DC 25), mass inflict serious wounds (DC 25), summon monster VIII Statistics Str 28, Dex 15, Con 25, Int 10, Wis 20, Cha 25 Base Atk +23; CMB +34 (+40 sunder); CMD 46 (48 vs. sunder, 50 vs. trip) Feats Blind-fight, Critical Focus, Dimensional Agility, Empower SLA (chain lightning), Greater Sunder, Improved Critical (gore), Improved Initiative, Improved Sunder, Power Attack, Quicken SLA (dimension door), Staggering Critical, Stunning Critical Skills Acrobatics +21, Climb +27, Perception +23 Languages Abyssal SQ double damage against objects Ecology Environment any land or underground Organization solitary Treasure incidental Special Abilities Aura of Nightmares (Su) All creatures within 1 mile of a nightmare beast must succeed a DC 28 Will save every time they fall asleep or be affected by a nightmare spell. Casting dispel evil on a victim of these nightmares does not stun the nightmare beast, but does automatically dispel the nightmare effect. A nightmare beast’s aura of nightmares does not affect creatures under protection from evil or a similar effect. Defiled Casting (Su) Any spell-like abilities used by a nightmare beast for 1 round after it deals negative levels with its bite or is healed with its healing theft aura gains a +2 to its save DC. Double Damage against Objects (Ex) When a nightmare beast makes a full attack against an object or structure, it deals double normal damage. Healing Theft Aura (Su) Any time a creature casts a spell that heals hit points or channels positive energy to heal within 30 feet of a nightmare beast, it must succeed a DC 28 Will save or half of the healing is redirected to heal the nightmare beast instead of its selected target. The save DC is Charisma based.

[askkrenko]

Krenko’s Guide to Pokemon: Aerodactyl

Do you think original Aerodactyl was a rock type, or is that part of the revival process?

DESIGN:

Aerodactyl is a Pterodactyl with… uhh… a longer tail? While at first Aerodactyl just seems like a Pterodactyl with minimum alterations, its stone typing and coloration, spaded tail, head horns, and back spikes remind me of gargoyles. I’m not sure if this was intentional or just the result of making it look ‘cooler,’ but I can absolutely see an Aerodactyl perched on an old stone building, blending in, and then diving down to attack its prey just as easily as I can see it flying down on prehistoric creatures.

Also, real Pterodactyls didn’t actually look like that. The image comes from fossil recreations back when people thought Pterosaurs were flying lizards, but the real creature was more like a bird.

Mega Aerodactyl looks like crap. It just has a bunch of stone spikes added on haphazardly, seemingly without thought as to what might be useful or even cool. It no longer has hands, and the dark stone against its face looks like facial hair, making it look less ferocious and more like it desperately needs to shave.

What’s interesting to me about Mega Aerodactyl, though, is how at odds its Pokedex entries are. Its Sun, Ultra Moon, and Let’s Go Pokedex entries suggest that Mega Aerodactyl is the ‘correct’ Aerodactyl, and that the fossil revived Aerodactyl is a weakened shadow of what it’s supposed to be. On the other hand, its Moon and Ultra Sun entries suggest that Mega Evolution is a painful burden on its body that’s driving it mad. Considering a lot of Mega Evolution entries are like this, I’m going to assume that Mega Aerodactyl is an abomination, and not how Aerodactyl ‘should’ be. Especially because Mega Aerodactyl doesn’t have hands, and hands are super useful. I’m actually using my hands right now.

TYPING: 

Aerodactyl is a Flying Rock which is frankly pretty impressive just in concept. Defensively, it winds up pretty well, with equal weaknesses and resistances, plus an immunity to Ground, though it does have the disadvantage of some of its weaknesses being more common. 

Offensively, this gives Aerodactyl super effective STAB options against six types, with the usual culprit of Steel being the only type to resist both Flying and Rock. 

Art by LindseyWArt

STATS: 

130 Speed, 105 Attack.

That’s enough. And Aerodactyl’s not even total glass canon territory. Its physical defense is a bit low at 65, but HP and Special Defense are comfortably average.  Its Special Attack is low, which is to be expected, and while normally I’d say the secondary attack stat doesn’t matter, Aerodactyl’s flying type attacks are pretty lacking, and its inability to make full use of Hurricane is an issue only because it can’t learn Brave Bird.

Mega Aerodactyl just takes these stats to the peak. 150 speed is only outsped by a handful of Pokemon, and 135 Attack is generally speaking plenty. Its defenses still aren’t anything special, but both jump 20 points on Mega Evolution which is certainly helpful.

Art by BonnyJohn

ABILITIES:

 Aerodactyl gets Rock Head, making it immune to recoil damage… but doesn’t get Brave Bird. Or Head Smash. Sure, it gets Double Edge, but 120 Normal power is the same as 80 Rock or Flying, so who cares?

Pressure is basically a dead ability in most games. It can be a pain in dungeons, but actual battles generally start with all moves at full PP, and in competitive matches both players have gotten their PP Maxes. Unless a Pokemon is absurdly tanky, Pressure is a waste of space.

So Aerodactyl uses its Hidden Ability, Unnerve. Unnerver prevents opponents from eating berries. I’m not going to say this never matters, because of course it can, but it’s hardly what I’d call impressive.

Mega Aerodactyl trades whatever ability it had for Tough Claws, which is just outright absurdly powerful. Tough Claws increases the damage of Contact moves by 30% which is most physical attacks. And Mega Aerodactyl is a Physical Attacker. … But you know what doesn’t make contact? Stone Edge. So here we have Mega Aerodactyl with a 100 Power STAB attack, and an ability that, while good, doesn’t work on it. In fact, Tough Claws doesn’t work on ANY of Aerodactyl’s Rock attacks. It is helpful for some of its flying attacks, and of course some of its other attacks, but the fact is that Mega Aerodactyl’s primary attack form is Stone Edge, and Tough Claws doesn’t help there.

Art by nganlamsong

MOVES:

Stone Edge is 100 Power STAB, and even though it doesn’t benefit from Tough Claws, nothing else Aerodactyl has can beat that without taking two turns.I simply cannot comprehend the thought process of an Aerodactyl build without Stone Edge.

For Flying, Aerodactyl has a few options. Dual Wingbeat, available as of Sword and Shield, is easily the strongest option for Aerodactyl in its base form… But it doesn’t benefit from Tough Claws, so as Mega Aerodactyl, Aerial Ace winds up being almost as powerful with the benefit of perfect accuracy. But even then, Aerial Ace is 60 base x 1.5 STAB, for a total of 90 power before Tough Claws… meaning a Mega Aerodactyl build is likely to eschew Flying attacks entirely in favor of an off-type attack with comparable base damage that DOES benefit from Tough Claws.

And then there’s Earthquake. It’s not getting Tough Claws either, but base 100 power with 100 accuracy just makes it one of the strongest attacks. It also has the benefit of being super effective against Steel types.

Aerodactyl has a wide variety of type coverage depending on what you want to fight. Crunch, Pursuit, Fire Fang, Ice Fang, Thunder Fang, Iron Head, Psychic Fang, and Dragon Claw all provide additional coverage options to help round out your team, and all of them make contact to benefit from Tough Claws. 

With Aerodactyl’s high speed, it’s entirely reasonable to just pick four attacks and hope to be able to go first and hit the opponent with something super-effective.

But Aerodactyl DOES have some decent non-attacking moves. Stealth Rock is a classic, for plenty of good reasons,  Roost allows Aerodactyl to heal, Tailwind helps the rest of your party, and sometimes you just want something with high speed and Defog.  These moves, combined with abilities like Taunt and Wide Guard, give it reasonable options in 2v2 battles or when used as a support Pokemon.

Art by Hemmerson

OVERALL:

Aerodactyl is great. I like the way it looks (until it goes Mega,) it has solid stats, its moveset is really wide, and it’s strong enough to be competitive. It does have a serious ability issue, though, and I’d love to see that remedied. Honestly, I think Unnerve needs a buff overall, or Berries need a buff. They’re just not competitive with other held items most of the time, and NPCs never use them. I don’t need Aerodactyl to get some super powerful ability- it’s mostly fine as is-  but it can’t make full use of Rock Head, Unnerve and Pressure are useless, and Tough Claws doesn’t work with its best attacks. 

Two of those abilities could be fixed by giving it Head Smash, but honestly that might be too much of a buff. Of course, Mega Aerodactyl probably couldn’t survive delivering more than one Tough Claws Head Smashes anyway… So it’d probably be fine.

Art by Methusalah-Alchemist

[raleighliving]

Budget Living Raleigh

Living in any city you’re gonna look at higher costs of living.  Rent, utilities, and insurance all add up before you even factor in groceries.  But just because you’re living in the city doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have nice things.

If you find all your money is being eaten by rent, and your bed is supported by the ground itself, then this article is for you; cause we’re going to talk today about bargain hunting in Raleigh and what to look for when you want a good deal on good furniture.  Maybe I’ll do this again for groceries or other such things but for now we’re just focused on general niceties.

Best part of this is it’s gonna be fairly general too.  Anything I mention here you could probably find or do in any American city or small town since the institutions are fairly ubiquitous.  

If you find yourself lacking furniture, decorations, or just general quality of life enhancers my answer boils down to two main points:  Thrifting and Resale stores.  At times they can seem similar enough but there are fine differences that separate the two using fairly recognizable criteria.

“RL,” I hear you say between fistfuls of knockoff Cheetos and self-loathing, “Of course if you want bargains  you go thrifting! Did you JUST hear about Goodwill recently?”  

Yes, in terms of hot takes this is especially dull but what I can lend to the conversation isn’t about how prices at thrift organizations are cheaper than retailers, how you should support your local thrift organizations, or even the general good they provide to low-income communities; what I’m looking at is knowing what you have and what you can expect to find when visiting.  

Take Goodwill, for instance, since everyone has seen at least one in their life. Outside of their larger outlets where you’ll find more furniture, walk into any Raleigh Goodwill and you’ll have seen all of them.  90% of the floorspace is dedicated to cheap clothes with a backwall full of knickknacks and a small bookshelf.  If you’re lucky, there may even be a sofa or two and some paintings along the wall but most of what you’ll find is cheap clothes.

Now, if that’s what you’re looking for that’s great! However, I’ve grown to have a deep distaste for the homogeneity of local GCF stores.  Customers can donate their clothes, toys, and other items to GCF at any store locations; but those items are shipped to processing and then distributed to other GCFs across the country based on inventory need and sales patterns.  What you see in one donation center/store you’ll likely see in every other with maybe the odd rare find if you’re lucky. 

GCF aside your options for Raleigh include org thrifts, mom and pop stores, and discount thrifts to provide some much needed variety in your day-to-day shopping. Each with their pros and cons, yet all sharing the glorious benefit of providing furniture and clothing for a fraction of the price of bigger brand stores.

Org thrifts (short for organization thrift stores, creative I know) are exactly what they sound like.  Thrifts run by an organization or charity, similar to Goodwill's, with a stated goal of helping others and supporting the organization financially over seeking a profit margin. 

Cause 4 Paws, Raleigh/Durham Rescue mission, and Dorcas thrift stores all provide a wide variety of products while using the store proceeds to help the less fortunate; but with phenomenal prices.  It’s not uncommon for a thrift store run by one of these organizations to have fifty cent books, clothing sold by the pound, and furniture/power tools under the $40 price tag if you’re lucky.  Plus, not to sound like a broken record but, your proceeds go towards good causes like animal adoption and feeding the homeless.  

Most thrifts of this nature are run by religious organizations, so if you’re at odds with supporting that sort of thing you might be more interested in the other two options; but otherwise this type of thrift store typically comes with very few downsides. 

|Image Credit:  Dorcas Thrift on Nextdoor

Of course, one of those other options is the standard mom and pop operation.  Not linked to any specific organization or franchise, these tend to be small businesses run by local families serving a smaller radius.  

Prices as a result tend to be a little higher than your average thrift store since it’s, y’know, a business; and the selection can be a little below average, usually consisting largely of estate sale leftovers, but this also works to their favor.

There’s no central distribution center for these businesses, so what people sell/donate to these stores comes from nearby communities typically.  So if you find one near an upper class area like Honeycutt Rd or Ebeneezer Church Rd, they’ll typically have nice furniture, art, and electronics for thrift store prices. 

There’s not too many of these, but my personal favorite is Fabulous Affordable Treasures in Southwest Raleigh.  A decent assortment of clothes and decorative pieces (and a very relaxing general environment) makes it a positive visit even when I’m just browsing. 

|Image credit:  Affordable Treasures Facebook

Finally there’s Discount thrifts.  They’re not too common, and are usually supported by an organization additionally although not all are, but if you find one check back with them regularly because it’s almost guaranteed to be worth it.

These thrift stores operate by having a degrading price scale; setting prices when the object comes into inventory, and then lowering them based on how long its been with them or the condition it was received in.  

Stores like Habitat for Humanity ReStore and Petersons Consigning Design use this, and typically offer discounts upwards of 60% if you wait long enough.  On top of having equally large selections of product from org thrifts, they offer plenty for the savvy shopper. 

The downside is, the best possible price you can receive for any given product is a gamble.  That sweet leather armchair you have your eye on might be dropped from 40% to 50% in the next two days, but if someone finds the price acceptable where it is then that products gone forever (or at least until something similar winds up in inventory).

|Image Credit:  Petersons Consigning Design website

Regardless of which thrift store you choose though, you’re bound to find a bargain in one eventually if you check back every once in awhile.  I’ve only mentioned a fraction of the stores available in Raleigh, if you find a few favorites of your own and check back regularly, you’re bound to find something you’ll love at a price you couldn’t find anywhere else.

Of course, if you’re looking for more niche deals you could always use programs like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for people just looking to get rid of their junk.  They’re easy to use and both are incredibly active for the Raleigh area; but if you’re looking for something a little more...interesting then I’d recommend checking out liquidation stores.

There’s not many of them in Raleigh, but recently this past week a store by the name of Treasure Hunt Liquidation opened up with an interesting premise.  They buy tons of returned and opened merchandise from places like Amazon and sell them to other people on a degrading price scale similar to the thrift stores we mentioned above. 

Fridays the price-per-item is $10, and then day by day it drops till it hits $1 per item on the following Wednesdays (and they close Thursdays for inventory).  large bins full of boxed or repackaged goods line the floor with everything from car parts to 3D printing filaments depending on when you can get there. 

Additionally, you can purchase pallets of goods as well; with some of the more high ticket items ranging from $300 up to $1500; but generally containing some of the more desirable items like bikes and kitchen equipment.  

Overall, the whole experience is like a giant rotating lootbox; you’re never quite sure what you’re gonna get when you go but you’re likely to find something that at least catches your eye, even if it doesn’t come home with you.

|Image Credit:  Treasure Hunt Liquidation facebook group

You can’t find everything you’ll ever need at stores like these, but you’ll definitely be able to find affordable furniture and clothes even on a college student’s budget. Even a few dollars saved can make a huge difference though, so if you get the chance or see a store on the side of the road that catches your eye, be sure to at least stop in and see what they have for sale. 

Or, if you’ve read this and have some books/clothes/toys to donate please consider donating or selling them to your local thrift location.  These secondhand finds can make all the difference in the world to a kid who wouldn’t be able to get them otherwise.   Regardless, hopefully at the very least this article kept you entertained, and I hope everyone reading has a great day!

[vonbaghager]

more DBD killers

all the ones from the last batch

these ones are The Gremlin, a tiny saboteur that can rig the various props in the game with destructive traps, and The Boogeyman, a shadowy horror that easily tracks isolated survivors.

The Gremlin

A nasty little piece of work believed to be born from human superstitions, the Gremlin is actually one of the surviving Fair Folk nearly driven to extinction by the march of human progress. It burned with hatred for humanity and sought their ends, using their own inventions against them, ripping apart what they had created and crafting devices of exquisite cruelty that it used to torture, maim, and kill. Even its kin soon began to view it with fear as its thirst for revenge turned into sadistic malice, its devices becoming less machines of elegant execution and more engines of unnecessary suffering. They believed it to be no better than the humans with its methods, which drove it to hate its kin as well.

Rather than spurning iron, the Gremlin learned to work with it, driving spikes and hooks of the substance into its flesh to terrify and bully others of its kind into submission, exposing them to the same machines it used to torment humanity. Unable to bear what their once-brother had become, the Folk cast the Gremlin from their home and into the smog and oil of mankind’s march. Rather than wither and die, the Gremlin grew strong in the misery that surrounded it, seeking to amplify it as much as possible.

The Entity pulled the creature from between the teeth of two massive gears it had attempted to sabotage, its attempt at collapsing an entire factory ended by a single mistake. Now, however, the minuscule horror can malice hapless humans to its hearts content, no longer bound by the weaknesses it once had.

Base stats: 120% speed. 32 meter terror radius. Small size (stands at roughly stomach height for the average survivor).

Passive: Tiny Threat. The Gremlin is smaller than every other killer in the game. It vaults windows 30% faster than any other killer, and kicks pallets/generators 20% faster to compensate. The Gremlin does not carry survivors over its shoulder, but drags them on the ground behind it. It takes 2 extra seconds to hook a survivor, due to it needing to physically lower the hook first.

Active Power: Bladed Bomb. Has 3 charges, which refresh at a rate of 1 every 30 seconds. Places a trap on the ground in front of the Gremlin, which arms itself after 2 seconds. A survivor that draws within 1 meter of the trap will trigger it, causing it to screech for 2 seconds before detonating, injuring all survivors within 2 meters and placing injured survivors in that radius into the dying state. The Gremlin can face a bomb (in a manner akin to Demogorgon’s teleport interface) and press the special action button to instantly trigger it.

If the Gremlin is facing a hook, a chest (opened or unopened), a generator, or a pallet, it can place a Hidden Bomb within the prop to sabotage it in a specific manner. A survivor that sabotages a trapped hook causes a loud noise notification, suffers a deep wound, and is hindered for 10 seconds. A chest that is sabotaged unleashes a spray of glass particles once opened which creates a noise notification, then blinds and exhausts the survivor for 30 seconds. A sabotaged pallet unleashes a deafening whooshing noise, rendering survivors within 1 meter of it oblivious for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, the bomb explodes, destroying the pallet. A sabotaged generator detonates immediately if the survivor misses a skill check, and releases a hissing noise if the survivor performs a Good skill check (a Great skill check does not activate it), alerting them to its presence and giving them 3 seconds to run more than 1 meter away before the generator explodes. The detonation removes 4% of progress from the generator and causes deep wounds in all survivors in range. Like the Bladed Bomb, the Gremlin can face one of its Hidden Bombs and use its special action to detonate it instantly.

The Gremlin, without addons, can only maintain six bombs at a time. If a seventh is placed, the oldest bomb defuses and breaks.

Unique Perks:

Tortured Steel: The cruelty of your attacks on technology can briefly make the Entity believe its own machines are capable of suffering. After kicking a generator, that generator becomes blocked by the Entity for 14/18/22 seconds. Only one generator can be blocked by Tortured Steel at a time. Tortured Steel has a cooldown of 60/40/30 seconds.

Hex: Blood and Oil: The power of this Hex makes steel and iron thirst in a way only the living normally can, drinking from the injured who foolishly place themselves too close. Injured survivors repairing generators have a 20% greater chance of triggering Skill Checks. If an injured survivor fails a Skill Check, the generator crushes their hands, preventing them from making further repairs until they’re healed or until 10/14/18 seconds pass.

Hex: Bane of Progress: Where one may succeed, all others will fail. When a generator is repaired past 90%/70%/50% while the Hex Totem still stands, all other generators with any amount of progress on them immediately burst, losing 5%/6%/7% progress and beginning to regress. Bane of Progress has an 80 second cooldown.

----------

The Boogeyman

A creature from mankind’s fears given flesh, the Boogeyman hunted the small and the easy. The scared child, the lonely wanderer, the lost vagrant, all were easy prey, but as humanity continued to grow, so too did their bravery. Lights became more common, and not just the light of a candle or a lantern’s glow; harsh, white, burning light, as though harvested from the sun itself began to invade the darkness. There were less places to hide, less places where it could find someone alone and scared, less places it could hunt without being hunted in turn. And so, desperate and starving, it fled into the wilderness in hopes of finding settlements untouched by civilization, where the demon that was electricity could not find it.

What it found instead was the Fog, inviting it into a realm in which the sun would never rise, where intoxicating fear runs rampant, and where humans can never truly fight back.

Base stats: 115%. 36 meter terror radius. Medium height (Clown height).

Passive power: Scent of Fear. Survivors further than 10 meters from one another begin building up Panic at a rate of 1 point every 5 seconds, to a maximum of 10 points. At 10 points of Panic, if the survivor is within the Boogeyman’s terror radius, the survivor is highlighted by Killer Instinct until a generator is repaired, until they are within 20 meters of another survivor, or until their health state changes (in any direction).

Panic is reduced by 1 point every 10 seconds they are within 10 meters of another Survivor, by 3 points when their health state decreases, by 5 points if their health state increases or if the Boogeyman is blinded or stunned through any means, and is completely removed when a generator is fully repaired. Survivors on hooks do not gain Panic. 

Active power: Alone In The Dark. The Boogeyman charges for 3 seconds, then blasts a wave of shadows 20 meters in every direction, which travels through walls and into lockers. Survivors struck by this wave scream in terror and gain 3 points of Panic (survivors inside lockers instead gain 5). Then, any survivor with more than 5 points of Panic become Blinded until their Panic is reduced to 4 or less. A survivor at 10 points of Panic becomes Terrified, a status similar to the Doctor’s Madness III, in that a Terrified survivor will scream every few seconds and can take no actions but Calm Down, which reduces their Panic by 5 but takes 13 seconds to perform.

Alone in the Dark has a 35-second cooldown. The Boogeyman can be stopped by Lightburn while charging it.

Unique Perks

Claustrophobia: What once offered safety now only harbors fear. Survivors inside lockers and your terror radius at the same time for 5/4/3 seconds are highlighted by Killer Instinct while inside, and for 6 seconds after leaving.

Hex: Zoophobia: The power of this Hex causes the crows of the trial to become supernaturally terrifying, briefly overwhelming the survivor’s minds. Survivors alerting the crows while the Hex Totem stands scream in terror. Survivors are so startled by the crows taking off that they are Incapacitated for 2/3/4 seconds.

Monophobia: You spark weakness in the heart of one survivor, so that they cannot stand being alone. You become Obsessed with one survivor. Your Obsession suffers a 20%/30%/40% penalty to repairing and healing actions if they are further than 22/18/14 meters from another survivor.

[ladymazzy]

One year on: the BLM event that divided a Gloucestershire town

I'm beyond furious and exasperated with the perpetuation of the lie that racism is a thing of the past. This woman is only 25, and her recounting her experiences of going to school as a Black girl in the West Country only around a decade ago speaks volumes

Some highlights from the article. (CW for racism and White Fragility™️):

Growing up, Khady Gueye was one of just a handful of black pupils at her school in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. By the time she was a teenager, she was desperate to fit in and conform. And so when her nickname became “Nigs” – short for the N-word – Gueye didn’t challenge it.

Here, in the rural west of England, where she had been fed racist stereotypes of black people her whole life, she didn’t want to be labelled “the angry black girl” or the self-pitying minority who “couldn’t take a joke” or what was considered a “bit of light banter”.

And so it was, that on the last day of school where it is tradition for year 11s to scrawl goodbye messages on one another’s school shirts, Gueye took home a shirt covered with the N-word in giant block capital letters across the front. “Gonna Miss You Nigs” was written on the back next to jokes about golliwogs and messages of good luck.

Gueye was supposed to consider it an affectionate send-off; it was written by her own friends. It was 2012, the year Britain proudly celebrated its optimistic and diverse Olympic Games opening ceremony, or as Conservative MP Aidan Burley would call it, “multicultural crap”.

“I became complicit in allowing it to continue, by being ‘Ha ha! Good joke guys,’” says Gueye, flatly. “But when you grow up in an area that is so predominantly white and are already made to feel different, you just do your best to fit in. The ideal is don’t call out racism. Let it slide. You become so accustomed to it, it becomes your norm.”

Now 25 and on the verge of finishing her English degree at Manchester University, Gueye has become a local community organiser and is more visible than ever in the town where she was born and grew up.

“I don’t want my daughter to grow up with the same experience I did,” she says emphatically, over lunch at her local pub. “This is my home and it’s a lovely area to bring up a family in. I want my daughter to have a life where she is celebrated for who she is, not feel attacked or unwelcome because of her skin colour.”

But Gueye’s attempts to hold a small “celebration of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) culture” sparked a furious backlash that, one year on, still reverberates throughout the small Gloucestershire town of Lydney.

...an online petition was set up to stop the event going ahead on the grounds that it was unsafe and high risk in the middle of a pandemic. Organiser Natasha Saunders wrote: “A mass gathering is a slap in the face to people who have been tirelessly shielding themselves, the elderly and loved ones from this virus.”

Anger, tension and outright abuse boiled over online as a counter-petition to support the event was organised. It got twice the number of signatures, leading Saunders to say that hers was more valid by claiming “90% of [signatories] are from Lydney, can you say yours was?” Later, she would make Eldridge-Tull gasp by posting: “He couldn’t breathe, now we can’t speak”, in a reference to Floyd’s murder by a police officer.

“We’re a happy community, we don’t really have an issue with racism,” said one middle-aged man, who didn’t want his name published, as he nursed a pint outside a local pub. “Outsiders bring their problems, but there’s not a lot of them here,” he said, echoing in politer terms a point that was made repeatedly to the Observer last week.

Last year, Gueye and Eldridge-Tull spent hours patiently replying to comments online in an attempt to explain the event and reassure people about it, but still received threats. Hundreds of screenshots of the abuse have been shared with the Observer. A typical missive read: “Fuck off. Not everyone agrees with black lives. I can’t say what I want on here coz I’ll be reported for racism. But I would bring back black slavery.” Gueye was repeatedly told to go back to where she came from if she didn’t like it and that she would be responsible for bringing harm to Lydney residents.

The pair’s standard response to those with genuine concerns about mass gatherings in a health pandemic, during a lockdown, was to keep explaining that social distancing was being strictly adhered to – two-metre grids were hand-chalked by Gueye and Eldridge-Tull on the site – and that PPE was being provided to anyone who didn’t have any.

“I think it speaks volumes that BAME people are still willing to protest for their human rights even though they are disproportionately affected by the pandemic,” wrote Gueye. “Maybe this should highlight the severity of the inequality in our society”.

....

When asked if she [deputy mayor, Tess Tremlett] accepted there were a lot of racist aspects to the abuse the organisers had endured, Tremlett replied: “I think some of the comments coming from supporters of the event were actually racist in themselves. They were called ‘white trash’, they were called Nazis and all sorts.”

But as anti-racist activists have spent the last year explaining, racism isn’t simply prejudice based on how one looks, but a system...[based] around a specific set of ideas – in this case, racist ones.

It is useful to explain why it is possible for white people to experience individual prejudice and unpleasant behaviour simply based on the colour of their skin but why it is inaccurate to call that “racism”. Being white does not mean one is more likely to be criminalised by the police, or that one is more likely to work in lower-paid frontline work or that one is more likely to be exposed to and die of Covid as a result.

In Gloucestershire, for instance, police statistics show that being black means you are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than you would if you were white.

The numbers are blankly disproportionate; there are just over 5,000 black people resident in the county compared with 570,000 white people. Last year, Gloucestershire council published evidence that jobseekers from minority ethnic groups had to send an average of 60% more applications to receive the same level of interest as white candidates. It’s not a conversation that Lydney, like much of the country, appears to have much interest in yet.

Tremlett, who has two decades of experience working in community engagement, explained that her sole reason for opposing the event was to be lawful. “Racism is the biggest insult anyone can say to me and I was called a racist by Khady’s team, whoever they are.” Was being called a racist worse than the actual racism that Gueye was continually facing in her everyday life? At this, Tremlett began to cry.

”You don’t understand,” she said, explaining that her daughter had been to three Indian weddings, that her builder was black, and that she had run an equalities panel for years as a councillor. Her experience – being called a racist, being abused online – when she felt she was doing the right thing, understandably made her defensive and upset. But it’s a difficult position for Gueye and Eldridge-Tull to deal with. Especially as she described Gueye as “aggressive and confrontational”.

Last year, Tremlett took the matter of the Forest of Dean’s BLM movement to local Conservative MP Mark Harper, who raised the matter in the House of Commons.

On 17 June, Harper, who may be best known as the immigration minister responsible for sending vans encouraging illegal immigrants to “go home” around parts of London, appeared to encourage an online pile-on against Eldridge-Tull, who had a tenth of his 30,000 followers, and demanded she apologise to the local community for tweeting: “The reaction to the BLM protest in Lydney has brought to light so much support, but so much hate. I love where I live, but I’m ashamed of my neighbours, and ashamed to be part of a community that has so widely endorsed and exacerbated racial hatred.”

....

When Gueye posted a picture of her school-leaver’s shirt on Instagram last year, one of her schoolfriends wrote that it was outrageous, and that she was impressed with everything Gueye was doing. “I was really happy she felt that but it was awkward,” says Gueye. “I messaged her back to say that she was one of the people who wrote those messages.” An embarrassed silence followed, but Gueye is hopeful and optimistic. “It’s still a positive sign.”

[maximelebled]

How I encode videos for YouTube and archival

Hello everyone! This post is going to describe the way in which I export and encode my video work to send it over the Internet and archive it. I’ll be talking about everything I’ve discovered over the past 10 years of research on the topic, and I’ll be mentioning some of the pitfalls to avoid falling into.

There’s a tremendous amount of misguided information out there, and while I’m not going to claim I know everything there is to know on this subject, I would like to think that I’ve spent long enough researching various issues to speak about my own little setup that I’ve got going on... it’s kind of elaborate and complex, but it works great for me.

(UPDATE 2020/12/09: added, corrected, & elaborated on a few things.)

First rule, the most golden of them all!

There should only ever be one compression step: the one YouTube does. In practice, there will be at least two, because you can’t send a mathematically-lossless file to YouTube... but you can send one that’s extremely close, and perceptually pristine. 

The gist of it: none of your working files should be compressed if you can help it, and if they need to be, they should be as little as possible. (Because let’s face it, it’s pretty tricky to keep hours of game footage around in lossless form, let alone recording them as such in the first place.)

This means that any AVC files should be full (0-255) range, 4:4:4 YUV, if possible. If you use footage that’s recorded with, like, OBS, it’s theoretically possible to punch in a lossless mode for x264, and even a RGB mode, but last I checked, neither were compatible with Vegas Pro. You may have better luck with other video editors.

Make sure that the brightness levels and that the colors match what you should be seeing. This is something you should be doing at every single step of the way throughout your entire process. Always keep this in mind. Lagom.nl’s LCD calibration section has quite a few useful things you can use to make sure.

If you’re able to, set a GOP length / max keyframe range of 1 second in the encoder of your footage. Modern video codecs suck in video editors because they use all sorts of compression tricks which are great for video playback, but not so efficient with the ways video editors access and request video frames. (These formats are meant to be played forwards, and requesting frames in any other order, as NLEs do, has far-reaching implications that hurt performance.) 

Setting the max keyframe range to 1 second will mildly hurt compressability of that working footage but it will greatly limit the performance impact you’ll be putting your video editor’s decoder through.

A working file is a lossless file!

I’ve been using utvideo as my lossless codec of choice. (Remember, codec means encoder/decoder.) It compresses much like FLAC or ZIP files do: losslessly. And not just perceptual losslessness, but a mathematical one: what comes in will be exactly what comes out, bit for bit.

Download it here: https://github.com/umezawatakeshi/utvideo/releases

It’s an AVI VFW codec. In this instance, VFW means Video for Windows, and it’s just the... sort of universal API that any Windows program can call for. And AVI is the container, just like how MP4 and MKV are containers. MP4 as a file is not a video format, it’s a container. MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264) is the video format specification you’re thinking of when you say “MP4″.

Here’s a typical AVI VFW window, you might have seen one in the wild already.

In apps that expose this setting, you can hit “configure” and set the prediction mode of utvideo to “median” to get some more efficient compression at the cost of slower decoding, but in practice this isn’t a problem.

Things to watch out for:

Any and all apps involved must support OpenDML AVIs. The original AVI spec is 2GB max only. This fixes that limitation. That’s normal, but make sure your apps support that. The OpenDML spec is from the mid-90s, so usually it’s not a problem. But for example, the SFM doesn’t support it.

The files WILL be very large. But they won’t be as large as they’d be if you had a truly uncompressed AVI.

SSDs are recommended within the bounds of reasonability, especially NVMe ones. 1080p30 should be within reach of traditional HDDs though.

utvideo will naturally perform better on CGI content rather than real-life footage and I would not recommend it at all for real-life footage, especially since you’re gonna get that in already-compressed form anyway. Do not convert your camera’s AVC/HEVC files to utvideo, it’s pointless. (Unless you were to do it as a proxy but still, kinda weird)

If you’re feeling adventurous, try out the YUV modes! They work great for matte passes, since those are often just luma-masks, so you don’t care about chroma subsampling.

If you don’t care about utvideo or don’t want to do AVIs for whatever reason, you could go the way of image sequences, but you’ll then be getting the OS-level overhead that comes with having dozens of thousands of files being accessed, etc.

They’re a valid option though. (Just not an efficient one in most cases.)

Some of my working files aren’t lossless...

Unfortunately we don’t all have 10 TB of storage in our computers. If you’re using compressed files as a source, make sure they get decoded properly by your video editing software. Make sure the colors, contrast, etc. match what you see in your “ground truth” player of choice. Make sure your “ground truth” player of choice really does represent the ground truth. Check with other devices if you can. You want to cross-reference to make sure.

One common thing that a lot of software screws up is BT.601 & BT.709 mixups. (It’s reds becoming a bit more orange.)

Ultimately you want your compressed footage to appear cohesive with your RGB footage. It should not have different ranges, different colors, etc. 

For reasons that I don’t fully understand myself, 99% of AVC/H.264 video is “limited range”. That means that internally it’s actually squeezed into 16-235 as opposed to the original starting 0-255 (which is full range). And a limited range video gets decoded back to 0-255 anyway.

Sony/Magix Vegas Pro will decode limited range video properly but it will NOT expand it back to full 0-255 range, so it will appear with grayish blacks and dimmer whites. You can go into the “Levels” Effects tab to apply a preset that fixes this.

Exporting your video.

A lot of video editors out there are going to “render” your video (that is to say, calculate and render what the frames of your video look like) and encode it at the same time with whatever’s bundled in the software.

Do not ever do this with Vegas Pro. Do not ever rely on the integrated AVC encoders of Vegas Pro. They expect full range input, and encode AVC video as if it were full range (yeah), so if you want normal looking video, you have to apply a Levels preset to squeeze it into 16-235 levels, but it’s... god, honestly, just save yourself the headache and don’t use them.

Instead, export a LOSSLESS AVI out of Vegas. (using utvideo!)

But you may be able to skip this step altogether if you use Adobe Media Encoder, or software that can interface directly with it.

Okay, what do I do with this lossless AVI?

Option 1: Adobe Media Encoder.

Premiere and AE integrate directly with Adobe Media Encoder. It’s good; it doesn’t mix up BT.601/709, for example. In this case, you won’t have to export an AVI, you should be able to export “straight from the software”.

However, the integrated AVC/HEVC encoders that Adobe has licensed (from MainConcept, I believe) aren’t at the top of their game. Even cranking up the bitrate super high won’t reach the level of pristine that you’d expect (it keeps on not really allocating bits to flatter parts of the image to make them fully clean), and they don’t expose a CRF mode (more on that later), so, technically, you could still go with something better.

But what I’m getting at is, it’s not wrong to go with AME. Just crank up the bitrate though. (Try to reach 0.3 bits per pixel.) Here’s my quick rough quick guideline of Adobe Media Encoder settings:

H.264/AVC (faster encode but far from the most efficient compression one can have)

Switch from Hardware to Software encoding (unless you’re really in a hurry... but if you’re gonna be using Hardware encoding you might as well switch to H.265/HEVC, see below.)

Set the profile to High (you may not be able to do this without the above)

Bitrate to... VBR 1-pass, 30mbps for 1080p, 90mbps for 4K. Set the maximum to x2. +50% to both target and max if fps = 60.

“Maximum Render Quality” doesn’t need to be ticked, this only affects scaling. Only tick it if you are changing the final resolution of the video during this encoder step (e.g. 1080p source to be encoded as 720p)

If using H.265/HEVC (smaller file size, better for using same file as archive)

Probably stick with hardware encoding due to how slow software encoding is.

Stick to Main profile & Main tier.

If hardware: quality: Highest (slowest)

If software: quality: Higher.

4K: set Level to 5.2, 60mbps

1440p: set Level to 5.1, 40mbps

1080p: keep Level to 5.0, 25mbps

If 60fps instead of 24/30: +50% to bitrate. In which case you might have to go up to Level 6.2, but this might cause local playback issues; more on "Levels” way further down the post.

Keep in mind however that hardware encoders are far less efficient in terms of compression, but boy howdy are they super fast. This is why they become kind of worth it when it comes to H.265/HEVC. Still won’t produce the kind of super pristine result I’d want, but acceptable for the vast majority of YouTube cases.

Option 2: other encoding GUIs...

Find software of your choice that integrates the x264 encoder, which is state-of-the-art. (Again, x264 is one encoder for the H.264/AVC codec specification. Just making sure there’s no confusion here.)

Handbrake is one common choice, but honestly, I haven’t used it enough to vouch for it. I don’t know if the settings it exposes are giving you proper control over the whole BT601/709 mess. It has some UI/UX choices which I find really questionable too.

If you’re feeling like a command-line masochist, you could try using ffmpeg, but be ready to pour over the documentation. (I haven’t managed to find out how to do the BT.709 conversion well in there yet.)

Personally, I use MeGUI, because it runs through Avisynth (a frameserver), which allows me to do some cool preprocessing and override some of the default behaviour that other encoder interfaces would do. It empowers you to get into the nitty gritty of things, with lots of plugins and scripts you can install, like this one:

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Dither_tools (grab it)

Once you’re in MeGUI, and it has finished updating its modules, you gotta hit CTRL+R to open the automated script creator. Select your input, hit “File Indexer” (not “One Click Encoder”), then just hit “Queue” so that Avisynth’s internal thingamajigs start indexing your AVI file. Once that’s done, you’ll be greeted with a video player and a template script.

In the script, all you need to add is this at the bottom:

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

This will perform the proper colorspace conversion, AND it does so with dithering! It’s the only software I know of which can do it with dithering!! I kid you not! Mode 7 means it’s doing it using a noise distribution that scales better and doesn’t create weird patterns when resizing the video (I would know, I’ve tried them all).

Your script should look like this, just 3 lines

LoadPlugin("D:\(path to megui, etc)\LSMASHSource.dll")

LWLibavVideoSource("F:\yourvideo.avi")

dither_convert_rgb_to_yuv(matrix="709",output="YV12",mode=7)

The colors WILL look messed up in the preview window but that’s normal. It’s one more example of how you should always be wary when you see an issue. Sometimes you don’t know what is misbehaving, and at which stage. Always try to troubleshoot at every step along the way, otherwise you will be chasing red herrings. Anyway...

Now, back in the main MeGUI window, we’ve got our first line complete (AviSynth script), the “Video Output” path should be autofilled, now we’re gonna touch the third line: “Encoder settings”. Make sure x264 is selected and hit “config” on the right.

Tick “show advanced settings.”

Set the encoding mode to “Const. Quality” (that’s CRF, constant rate factor). Instead of being encoded with a fixed bitrate, and then achieving variable quality with that amount of bits available, CRF instead encodes for a fixed quality, with a variable bitrate (whatever needs to be done to achieve that quality).

CRF 20 is the default, and it’s alright, but you probably want to go up to 15 if you really want to be pristine. I’m going up to 10 because I am unreasonable. (Lower is better, higher numbers means quality is worse.)

Because we’re operating under a Constant Quality metric, CRF 15 at encoder presets “fast” vs. “slow” will produce the same perceptual quality, but at different file sizes. Slow being smaller, of course. 

You probably want to be at “slow” at least, there isn’t that much point in going to “slower” or “veryslow”, but you can always do it if you have the CPU horsepower to spare.

Make sure AVC Profile is set to High. The default would be Main, but High unlocks a few more features of the spec that increase compressability, especially at higher resolutions. (8x8 transforms & intra prediction, quantization scaling matrices, cb/cr controls, etc.)

Make sure to also select a Level. This doesn’t mean ANYTHING by itself, but thankfully the x264 config window here is smart enough to actually apply settings which are meaningful with regards to the level.

A short explanation is that different devices have different decoding capabilities. A decade ago, a mobile phone might have only supported level 3 in hardware, meaning that it could only do main profile at 30mbps max, and if you went over that, it would either not decode the video or do it using the CPU instead of its hardware acceleration, resulting in massive battery usage. The GPU in your computer also supports a maximum level. 5.0 is a safe bet though.

If you don’t restrict the level accordingly to what your video card supports, you might see funny things happen during playback:

It’s nothing that would actually affect YouTube (AFAIK), but still, it’s best to constrain.

Finally, head over to the “misc” tab of the x264 config panel and tick these.

If the command line preview looks like mine does (see the screenshot from a few paragraphs ago) then everything should be fine.

x264 is configured, now let’s take care of the audio.

Likewise, “Audio Input” and “Audio Output” should be prefilled if MeGUI detected an audio track in your AVI file. Just switch the audio encoder over to FLAC, hit config, crank the slider to “smallest file, slow encode” and you’re good to go. FLAC = mathematically lossless audio. Again, we want to not compress anything, or as little as possible until YouTube does its own compression job, so you might as well go with FLAC, which will equal roughly 700 to 1000kbps of audio, instead of going with 320kbps of MP3/AAC, which might be perceptually lossless, but is still compressed (bad). The added size is nothing next to the high-quality video track you’re about to pump out. 

FLAC is not an audio format supported by the MP4 container, so MeGUI should have automagically changed the output to be using the MKV (Matroska) container. If it hasn’t, do it yourself.

Now, hit the “Autoencode” button in the lower right of the main window. And STOP, do not be hasty: in the new window, make sure “no target size” is selected before you do anything else. If you were to keep “file size” selected, then you would be effectively switched over to 2-pass encoding, which is another form of (bit)rate control. We don’t want that. We want CRF. 

Hit queue and once it’s done processing, you should have a brand new pristine MKV file that constains lossless audio and extra clean video! Make sure to double-check that everything matches—take screenshots of the same frames in the AVI and MKV files and compare them.

Now all you’ve got to do is send it to YouTube!

For archival... well, you could just go and crank up the preset to Placebo and reduce CRF a little bit—OR you could use the 2-pass “File Size” mode which will ensure that your video stream will be the exact size (give or take a couple %) you want it to be. You could also use x265 for your archival file buuuut I haven’t used it enough (on account of how slow it is) to make sure that it has no problems anywhere with the whole BT.601/708 thing. It doesn’t expose those metadata settings so who knows how other software’s going to treat those files in the future... (god forbid they get read as BT.2020)

You can use Mediainfo (or any player that integrates it, like my favorite, MPC-HC) to check the metadata of the file.

Good luck out there!

And remember to always double-check the behaviour of decoders at every step of the way with your setup. 99% of the time I see people talk about YouTube messing with the contrast of their video, it’s because they weren’t aware of how quirky Vegas can be with H.264/AVC input & its integrated encoder.

Hope this helps!

[dragonmaiden79]

Enlightenment (part 1)

Introducing, my latest OC Xenisha (Zen-E-Shuh)! She’s a genius from Earthrealm who moved to Outworld by her own choice and though she would much prefer to keep excessive attention off herself, that becomes less and less plausible when the Kahn and Queen start hearing about her inventions and technical ability. New job with new demands is something she doesn’t care for, but when Shang Tsung gets involved, she decides maybe it’s not so bad.

Part 1, Enlightenment; First Encounter

(Shang Tsung x BlackFemaleOC, No warnings)

The sun scorched landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. The main parts of Outworld were composed almost entirely of the hardened cracked sand that Xenisha’s hover-pack kept her in flight over. A summons had been brought to her door, requesting presence before Empress Sindel and Emperor Shao Kahn. Immediately. Two days, was all she had to get herself together and head for the rust colored mountains, where one of their many lavish palaces was located.

From the moment she discovered the notice pinned to the door of her home, Xenisha had to ensure preparedness and punctuality to the meeting. Heat was a given, the sun was always so relentless, especially when heading into the private properties of the mountains, so she had to dress light and still remain presentable– Though she had no intentions of going overboard to put up any appearances. Never that. A neon green t-shirt with navy blue denim overalls would serve just fine. They were both made from the genetically altered cotton that was grown on her plot of land; As a result the clothes could nearly breath and were resilient to external temperatures. In other words, by her own creation, there existed a fabric that remained roughly an even 60 degrees to the touch at all times. Long gloves that went past her elbows with fingers tipped in soft metal to operate any of her custom interfaces and made of a hardier version of the same cotton accompanied it, as she was determined not to let the sun sear her skin the same way it had the terrain.

As for her hair, she began washing it immediately after her outfit was chosen. This was one part of her appearance that couldn’t be compromised. It was long, impractically so– Although it didn’t appear to be, favoring instead a thick, mass of tight, puffy, dark colored coils that grew from her scalp in all directions and came to rest on her shoulders, with some continuing midway down her back. For the impromptu journey it needed to be fully hydrated, double twisted and then pinned into a bun, to finally be covered with a decorative silk headwrap to keep it from sustaining heat damage from Outworld’s unforgiving climate. It was treated as her crown– One of the few non-science related indulgences that she simply adored participating in.

Lastly, since she had no intentions of showing up empty handed, some of her tech was chosen for the occasion. Hover-pack, teleporter, and sub-space sash with a pair of flexible, comfortable shoes, and she was ready to go.

The whole way there, she tried to think not annoyed thoughts. Not only was the day a complete loss, meaning no time to dig around for parts or work on any of her near finished projects, but this situation was one that she’d found herself in constantly and she hated it. Xenisha didn’t mind inventing and creating things for commoners and poor folk, but when it came to powerful authority figures she’d learned to avoid displaying her talents. She preferred not being a pawn to be bargained with, bought or sold.

The ‘locals’ were near destitute, left to scratch around and work as slave laborers once their home realms were fused into Outworld. Out by the Rust Wall, i.e. the cluster of shantytowns that survivors gathered in to preserve what they could of their culture, is where she amassed hidden influence. It wasn’t on purpose, but after building a permanent home and using gene tampering to grow fruit and vegetables year round, she began to garner much attention. Soon enough, she was handing out free food to beggars and giving away bundles of the specialized seeds to farm and be planted in high traffic spaces. The sudden abundance of plant life earned new nicknames for the area, and soon the Rust Wall became the Green Wall (or any other variation of that name).

People repaid their gratitude by giving her things like books, materials, currency, and whatever else they could get their hands on. She didn’t ask for much, if anything at all, just to be able to hear how this invention and that new plant was working out. If anything needed improvement. Doing things that way helped her research extensively, which was satisfaction enough. It always had been.

But as the Green Wall grew and word of it spread, the Emperor and Empress became interested. Hiring her for small tasks and offering higher and higher payouts whenever she tried to say no, until they started sending Kollector to retrieve her, in lieu of making requests. Now she was abundantly wealthy with a position she never wanted or needed.

She shook her head. This was her own fault. Had she not been so eager to toss her creations at everyone she saw this wouldn’t be happening right now.

But they were all just so dang poor! How the hell was she supposed to ignore them?

She sighed as she touched down. It didn’t make much of a difference at this point.

Now standing before the spear-like rod iron gate that allowed entry on to the grounds, she was greeted by the hulking Shokan guards meant to escort her to the throne room. They would’ve let her walk there on her own, but the place was vast (ugly too), and she’d failed to navigate it more than once (gotten lost).

While it was wise to build around the largest oasis in the area, the 'sharp’ design of everything from the torch holders on the wall to the impractical black spiral staircase that led to (lo and behold) another long hallway and another flight of stairs (this time not spiral) was just ridiculous. Black, green, dark red, with skulls, warped faces, and spikes was the entire motif, and it was… Unbearable; A melodramatic over statement of 'I am Villain, I am King, I will be obeyed’, if Xenisha ever saw one.

Finally, after more stairs than anyone would ever care to walk, they arrived in the throne room. It was large enough to have a troop of soldiers gather and receive orders all at once. Crossing the polished sandstone floor, flanked by two guards on each side, Xenisha stopped just before the (godforsaken) stairs that lead up to a platform that held a set of matching thrones. Two powerful entities sat atop them with one advisor standing next to each seat neither of whom she’d met. They were just high enough, make a person feel beneath them and know who had the power.

“Your Majesty.” Xenisha bowed to each of them, “Your Majesty.”

The proud beautiful Empress Sindel spoke first. “Hmph. The girl continues to offend me,” she scoffed to Shao Kahn before turning to her. “Must your lack of effort always be so apparent?”

The simmering annoyance that she’d had been feeling became a blaze of anger, and she had to bite her tongue to push it down, avoid getting her head taken off. The Empress enjoyed antagonizing those who were 'lower class’ than her, especially appearance wise. She hated Xenisha’s work clothes and made sure to say so every time she saw her in them.

Do not start with me…. Xenisha thought, rolling her eyes.

Bringing a hand up to her ear and twisting the stud earring there, she exhaled slowly before answering. “With all due respect Madame,” she urged herself to say, “The letter didn’t say this was a social call.” She replied, with the tiniest edge of condescension.

Obviously satisfied with herself, Sindel waved a dismissive hand smirking. “I care not for your excuses.”

“Right…” Xenisha grumbled, letting go of her ear to slip her hands in her pockets. “How can I help you guys today?” She sighed.

Shao Kahn spoke. “Some of our 'allies’ require a small amount of monitoring. I gather you are capable of creating such devices.”

“Sure.” She replied.

“Excellent.” He nodded, “The intel will prove to be a valuable asset.”

“Mmmhm. Wonderful.” She said flatly.

“How much time will this take?” Sindel asked.

“3 months– 90 Earth days.”

“Your 'enthusiasm’ is contagious.” Shao Kahn remarked sarcastically. “Very well. Part of your payment will arrive at your home tomorrow.”

“Great.” Xenisha nodded, quickly. “Will that be all?”

This was always how these conversations went; The Queen or the Kahn stated a 'request’, she said 'Yes I can!’, performed said task, and received a massive sum of money. She had more Shao Koins and Sin-Dollars than she knew what to do with, but admittedly it was nice being able to buy more rare and expensive metals. Even if only because it took away some of the time and effort of having to scavenge.

“No.” Sindel said, sitting back and crossing her leg, gesturing to the right. “That will not be all, Xenisha. Shang Tsung will be overseeing this undertaking to ensure quality, as well as personally screening any intel that you may find.”

Xenisha glanced at him, who raised his eyebrows and smirked.

“Actually he can stay here, I don’t need any supervision. But thanks.” She said, uneasily shifting.

“On the contrary,” Shao Kahn interjected, “Since you will be the one collecting the information–”

“I never said I w-”

“–Reporting to him directly will bypass the tedium of having to await your arrival.”

“…..Ya know what? I… Guess that’ll work.” The idea of periodically having to meet up with them was enough to have her agree.

Hopefully this situation wouldn’t carry on for too long, but from Shang Tsung’s expression, he was likely to make this as difficult as possible.

***##***

Hope you all enjoyed my new shit, and thank you for reading❤❤

[jamescharles00]

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Massive therapy has been growing and converting in the latest years. Increasingly humans are figuring out that full body massage,Tukwila, could have an enormous range of benefits. Relying on what you need, a full body massage, Tukwila can help relieve pain, relax your muscular tissues, enhance your posture, or reduce your strain. Take a second to don't forget a number of the pinnacle reasons that human beings pick to get a full body massage, Tukwila.

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A full body massage, Tukwila, is typically given from the top to the toe. It commonly starts evolved with the head, neck, and shoulders, then actions to the hands and front legs. You're then asked to show over; the therapist then massages your legs and, finally, your lower back for about 25 minutes.

Full body massage, Tukwila no longer handiest relaxes your muscular body tissues, however, additionally the thoughts and spirit as nicely. The warm, soothing ambiance performs a critical role, as it gives an air of secrecy of a quiet and peaceful atmosphere.

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1) It releases strain and tension from the mind: A 60-minute or a 90-minute full-body massage, Tukwila relaxes the body totally due to which many humans float off to sleep, imparting a very effective calming effect.

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7)Reduces anxiety. 

8) Relieves headaches and migraines.

9) Improves posture: Some connective tissues can grow to be chronically inflexible and tight, leading to a bad body posture. Full bodymassage, Tukwila can help soften the connective tissues of the body.

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[insidethegiftbasket]

Rays (5-7) at Yankees (5-7)

Game One – Friday at 7pm on YES and MLBN: Wacha vs Nelson

Game Two – Saturday at 1pm on YES and MLBN: TBD (probably Glasnow) vs Jordan Montgomery

Game Three – Sunday  at 1pm on YES: TBD (probably Yarbrough) vs Gerrit Cole

Rays Injuries

Kevin Kiermaier (CF) on the 10 Day IL with a quad injury- eligible to come off on April 16th, but no time table to return

Ji-Man Choi (1b) on the 10 Day IL after knee surgery, expected to be out until the middle of May

Pete Fairbanks (RHP) on the 10 Day IL with a rotator cuff injury, no time table to return

Chris Archer (RHP) on the 10 Day IL with a forearm injury, no time table to return

Oliver Drake (RHP) on the 60 Day IL with a strained flexor, likely out until the second half of the season

Nick Anderson (RHP) on the 60 Day IL with an elbow injury, likely out until the second half of the season

Chaz Roe (RHP) on the 60 Day IL with a shoulder injury, likely out for the season

Rays Pitching

Tampa’s pitching staff, despite giving away Blake Snell and being hammered by injuries this year, has once again been sneakily really good — while they as a staff have a 85 ERA+ (tied for 26th in baseball), they have the fifth best FIP in the league at 3.37. The Rays aren’t giving up homers — only allowing .8 HR a game (second in baseball) and their 3.17 strikeout to walk ratio is seventh in baseball. The big issue for the Rays is that they are tied for 27th in hits allowed per nine innings at 9.3 — and surprisingly enough for a Tampa team, they are currently last in defensive efficiency with .647 of balls in play being turned into outs. That said, facing a Yankees team that is doing a great job of hitting the ball right to the defenders and relying on the homer to score makes this the battle of the moveable object and the stoppable force.

That said, they do have one pitcher who’s maybe been the best pitcher in baseball so far this season, Tyler Glasnow:

Those bold/italic numbers in there means he leads the league in ERA+, FIP, and hasn’t allowed a homer yet. He’s struck out 29 batters and walked only three, and given up only seven hits in nearly 20 innings. He’s only given up two extra base hits (both doubles) and just one run allowed on the season.

Glasnow is currently throwing his fastball about 55% of the time, and then sprinkling in a few sliders and curveballs here and there, and so far teams aren’t touching either the fastball or the curveball. His slider has been his “worst” pitch and that still has a .200 BA and a .267 SLG against it.

Glasnow also benefits from being super tall—he has the highest release point in the majors, which helps lead to a ton of spin and a ton of downward force coming at you:

That’s a lot of fastballs starting high and dropping fast, with a bunch of breaking balls moving off the fastball as well. He’s allowing only 2.8% of pitches thrown to be barrels, and 50% of the balls that do get put in play against him are grounders. Glasnow in the past has struggled over the course of the full season, and he’s pitched more than 65 innings in a season once in his career (111.2 IP in 2018) so I’m not sure if he can hold up over the course of the season, but right now he’s put himself firmly on the DeGrom/Cole tier.

Rays Hitting

The Rays offense has been really mixed so far this season- they have 96 OPS+ as a team, which is two points worse than the Yankees have been, but it’s really been a stars and scrubs approach for the Rays. Tampa has five players with at least a 120 OPS+ (Diaz, Wendle, Meadows, Margot, and Arozarena), and then the next two highest players have an OPS+ at 90 (Lowe and Brousseau). They have two players that are getting a lot of playing time in Tsutsugo and Phillips that are putting up Jay Bruce levels of numbers.

Austin Meadows, yet another player the Pirates stupidly gave up for Chris Archer, has been playing really, really well to start the season:

Last year was definitely a major disappointment for Meadows, as he dealt with injuries throughout the short season, but he’s right back on track to be an All Star this year.

Meadows is someone who hits the ball hard when he makes contact and does an excellent job of drawing walks, and he cut his K% in half this season. He’s also been a Yankee killer in his career—105 tOPS+ (.876 OPS) with seven homers and six doubles in 108 at bats vs New York. The biggest weakness in his career is against the breaking ball, so hopefully the Yankee pitchers can take advantage of that and slow him down.

Yankee Breakdown: DJ LeMahieu

I think the common thought around Yankees fans right now is “why is DJ struggling?”

DJ currently has a 144 OPS+, second best on the Yankees (Judge is first) if you don’t include Higgy’s 10 at bats.

His percentile ranks are a little bit worse than they were the last two seasons (other than his BB% increasing) but they’re still really good. Really, the only big difference between DJ of last year and this year is his GB% and his Pull%:

He’s hitting the ball on the ground too much and getting less line drives, and he’s hitting the ball the opposite way less than ever. This is mostly because of his fastball hitting, which has dropped from a .385 BA in 2020 (.335 xBA) to a .238 BA in 2021 (.320 xBA).

That’s DJ’s spray heatmap for fastballs in 2021, compared to 2020:

Lots more area spread out there in RF for base hits, and a lot more red in there to find the gaps. DJ’s fine, he’ll start finding holes again soon and everything will be good to go for him.