#things just take a different amount of time visually vs written

[reynardmuldrake]

Anytime anyone used to say how the lord of the rings movies were too violent and battle-centric I always thought like yeah okay there are some pretty nasty parts for sure and I hadn’t read the books myself then so I couldn’t really argue but now that I’m actually reading the books I’m honestly surprised to see that a lot of the violence and horror that I had just assumed were added in to the movies for shock value and drama are things that are straight from the text. Like the Uruk hai head on a spike in two towers or the catapults shooting the men’s heads who had fallen at osgiliath over the walls of minas tirith…….that shit is fucked

[desultory-novice]

hi dess! probably the wrong person to ask but it's just to immensely confuddling... is there a solid lore explanation for how sectonia turned into a bee? i wanted to write a body horror thing for her but i wanted it to be lore accurate and it's just all so convoluted !

Wrong person or not, it is impeccable timing! Both because of Triple Deluxe's 10th Anniversary (in Japan time) and the fact that I've been intensely studying those scenes for my own anniversary piece! Which is, err, running late.

Here is what we can garner about Sectonia's transformation abilities based on the available information + insights the game gives us.

[Pause Screen Lore]

VS Sectonia Vine

"Sectonia's family(1) have parasitized, taken possession of, and controlled countless lifeforms."

1) This word is often translated as "clan" as in a large gathering of members who are not necessarily family but belong to a specific unified group. IE, this could mean anything from "she and her direct family members have this ability" to "all spiders within a certain classification have this ability" to "all spiders have this ability".

I sometimes HC that possession is something all female spiders possess, because I like to imagine her people being a Queendom and that'd be a good reason for it, and also because of The Dark Crystal's "Wings? I don't have wings." "Of course not. You're a boy." (Which just feels so Taranza + Sectonia coded to me)

(I say "sometimes" because I'm also very fond of trans-girl Sectonia HC.)

VS Queen Sectonia (2)

"Sectonia, beautiful and menacing in form. She has [placed herself] inside the world tree..."

VS Sectonia Soul (2)

"I have parasitized and changed bodies so many times, I can no longer recall...which of them was my original self..."

(This pause screen lore is written from Sectonia's POV.)

So, yes, Joronia/Sectonia is a parasite.

She attaches to something and makes it part of her body/swaps bodies with it. If we look at the difference between her queen-form and her flowered-form, we understand a few things about this process: she takes her current body, as well as the body of another living organism and fuse them together. IE: 1 + 1 = 1

She retains some visual aspects of her previous body after a "switch" (she still has the bee head, collar, and wings, for example) and gains the greater (?) amount of traits from the new body.

This would mean that after her first swap, she probably still looked a little like "Joronia." (Something like a messed up version of those matching toys where you have to align the head, torso, and legs.)

What this also means is that in order to look like "Queen Sectonia" who is so completely different from what Taranza and Joronia look like, she would have had to swap bodies a lot. (Not to mention, she is BIG. It is possible her last body-swap wasn't even to a bee/wasp but something large she absorbed to gain the qualities of its size! Or maybe she stole something large for the size and then stole something with a super thin waist to get that hourglass figure XD)

Planet Robobot's Clone Sectonia lore tells us that "countless species" were found in the Dream Stalk's DNA "stretching over 1,000 years" so this does indeed seem to confirm she did this a frightening amount of times over a long period of time.

It's safe to say you will probably find no one creature in the Kirby-verse that looks similar to Queen Sectonia, as her body was custom crafted with parts from countless critters.

We also get a few visual insights into how parasitization looks...

...Upon her initial defeat, she begins giving off a massive amount of glitter/sparkles/insect scales. 

This visual is interesting as, if she was already reaching for a new body after her defeat, it is possible this is the first part of the process. Shedding her initial body. If not, this could either be a sign of her current body failing/dying or her parasitic control over it weakening.

She raises up, does some hand movements, lets out a wave of magic and begins to glow brightly. When we check back in on her, she has expelled her wings (she has them back in flower form but they DO appear slightly different. More petal-like and droopy. See above.) and wriggling tentacles appear from behind her...

You can debate that these are the Dream Stalk's vines wrapping around her, but they don't seem to behave the same way. (They don't have leaves either, which the vines do.) Thus, I think these are "appendages" that specifically appear as part of Sectonia/Joronia's transformation process. If you think about the way insects emerge from their cocoons, I can imagine these as tendrils as coming out from a "split/crack" that slowly forms in her back...

There's a LOT of light and time and struggle involved in the process but this could be just because the Dream Stalk was such a large and powerful target, being rooted into Popstar itself. If she's done this hundreds or thousands of times before, it is possible there is a shorter version of this for things she already overpowers.

...Though, the grimdark part of my brain imagines things like Taranza using his magic to hold one of her struggling targets down while she enwraps it with her horrible parasite tendrils. If Dess hasn't said this before, I'm less interested in soft, sad boy Taranza and much more interested in "1/2 of a gleeful villain couple" Taranza, who is so captivated by his beloved, he happily joins her in all sorts of horrendous things - leading military invasions in her name, assassinations, putting down rebellions, capturing new victims for her, all things he IS implied to do in game through Dedede -  only turning a blind eye to it because he believes in and is infatuated with her and thus, this must be the right thing to do. Right...?

-

In summary, what we can glean is all pretty bad. Sectonia doesn't even "swap" bodies because the bodies she absorb all get used up and can be said to be "dead" from the moment she inhabits them. Though you can even argue this, as, once she is defeated, the Dream Stalk seems to regain its individuality after her absorption. If you're re~ally into horror, you could take this to mean that some aspect of her victims consciousness is carried on from body to body...!!!!

Also, swapping from body to body appears to be more of a melding process anyway, which could also be pretty darn horrible, depending upon how much control you think she has over which traits she inherits from her victims. If it's entirely her choice, it's simply a matter of how many bodies until she's found the traits she believes "perfects" her ultimate vision of herself - plus how many times she changes her mind. If it's NOT then she's probably gone through an insane amount of swaps/victims, discontented at the results and insisting on trying again and again until it turns out "right."

And there you have it! Joronia's transformation into Sectonia is both deeply pitiful and deeply, deeply frightening!

[a-fox-studies]

Hi! I struggle with how to study efficiently. Any study tips you can give? Thank you! you're an inspiration <3

Hihi! Thankyou for the compliment :)

I'm disabled, so my study techniques have changed a lot over the years, so I'll give you both — when I was able-bodied and what I do rn.

(able bodied)

Reviewing lecture notes

📝 So the first thing I do is, review the day's lectures after coming home before doing any other leisurely activities. I come home, eat something, then look through the topics that have been done for the day, and make sure I understand everything. I don't STUDY it, but only read through.

Posing deadlines for myself:

⏳ I do this for a few days until a significant amount of portion is done, and THEN I start studying. I finish one chapter per day, or if it is a huge one, split it for two or three days. I usually pose a deadline for myself — if i have 5 hours to complete this part, and it has 25 pages, so i need to complete 5 pages in one hour, which is 1 page every 12 minutes. I know this is very specific but giving specific deadlines for myself help me complete things faster. And breaking up big chapters like this also make em less intimidating.

Pomodoro:

🕑 I used a 60-10 pomodoro, give and take a few minutes — and it worked because when I was able bodied, I could focus for longer periods of time without any difficulty.

Making notes: Is it required?

✒️ One important thing to think of while taking notes is— do you really need to take seperate notes in order to study, or is reading from the textbook enough for you? Personally, my textbooks have information that's spread through pages and I like my study material to be concise and to the point. I zone out really quickly while reading from the textbook because the information is EVERYWHERE. Abd also the lack of color makes it boring lol. This is why i make seperate notes. If you have no problem with reading from the textbook or any other printed material, I think making notes would be a waste of time.

Physical vs Digital notes:

⌨️ I extensively take physical notes. I love writing down information, color coding them, and highlighting key points. The colors help me visualize the page during the exam, and sometimes I remember an answer only because it was written in a different color than the rest of the page.

I know people who take digital notes, but that doesn't work for me because again, I zone out while reading things from a screen XD. But there are a lot of advantages like easy portability, better organization etc.

(disabled)

Start early

📝 I start studying from the first day. Since my health fluctuates a lot, I don't know when I will go down with a flare and not be able to study. So I start early and try to be ahead of the lecturers so even if I take a few days off, I'm not lagging behind.

Pomodoro:

🕑 Sitting for a long time messes up my hips, so I use a 20-5 pomodoro. I study for 20 minutes and then walk around for 5, stretching a little etc.

Posing deadlines:

⏳I make a schedule but not a very harsh one. Because I need to make it flexible as my health fluctuates a lot. So I usually assign study days for two days, then take a day off, so that I don't get burntout easily. I usually start with assignments the day it is assigned, so that I can do a little everyday and complete it before the due date without tiring myself out.

Making notes:

✒️ Even if I am disabled, I take notes (this does not apply to everyone, I'm just giving my experience). I've tried taking digital notes, and although the stylus and/or typing is much easier on my hand, I allow myself the pleasure of taking physical notes whenever I have the energy to. Because I genuinely cannot study from digital notes lol. I color code my physical notes so I can remember and recall information easily, and it also makes any topic less boring :D

These are all the tips that I use(d), I hope they help you anon!

[not-poignant]

I remember reading some asks that when you were in Guardians fandom, people were always correcting some stuff too, that they though is wrong or smth. And I feel like especially after so long writing your own universes, those very "smart" anons are really annoying. I just hope that they won't suck any wind from benith your wings and you don't spend much energy on answers to their asks and that you know always know - your writing is your own and we are fucking blessed for reading it <3

Maybe I just have forgotten so that I can mostly remember the good things (haha) but aside from people always having a bone to pick with me calling Pitch's daughter Seraphina, Rise of the Guardians was generally pretty chill!

I think back then there were a lot more 'why are you depicting Bunnymund this way?' or 'Why are you making this choice?' which as open-ended questions I really don't mind answering!! Even when it's obvious that the person who's asking the question doesn't agree with my depiction, then I can explain myself, vs. someone just anonymously coming in to go 'hi you are wrong' when... I'm not O.o

Different fandoms have different feels to them, kind of like visiting different countries! DnD / FR as a fandom seems to have a pocket of vocal people who want to prove they know more than me about DnD / FR to which I'll just say - you all know more than me, you win, here's your trophy, now let me write my fic the way I want thanks and learn how to read tags/author's notes :D That being said, the folks who don't care about that shit and just want to enjoy Astarion being railed / living his best-worst life have been the BEST and I really enjoy how thoughtful they are and how cool their comments are. There's some super engaged folks in this fandom who have really great takes on things, and I enjoy that side of it a lot.

Rise of the Guardians was incredibly creative. Like, to this day, I know one fanartist who went to work at Dreamworks, one who does official art for Hearthstone and works for Blizzard (her dream - and I still have her fanart of Gwyn in my house!), plenty more who went on to become professional artists, comic writers, writers, animators etc. I think the visual art and style of that show attracted so many people who love art, which was fun. We also had antis, but whatever, I feel like every fandom has those if you're active in the fandom.

Stardew Valley is mostly very mild, because it's intermittently very quiet and there's so many different pairings, and I've always written rarepairs. Generally people who enjoy that game are pretty low-key, and they're some of the nicest folks I've met in like anon asks and in comments! Love SDV peeps and it's been a pleasure to come back to the fandom.

Dragon Age: Inquisition was... lol. Lol. Well, look, I made some amazing friends through that fandom who I still know today. It attracted actually a surprising amount of older fandom folks who brought a lot of knowledge about how to write fic, so the fandom is drenched in really good fic, really good art. There was a ton of fucking drama, and some of the most acephobic rhetoric I've ever seen came out of this fandom, including asexual block-lists where people hunted each other down on Tumblr with things like 'have you blocked this person yet they're asexual' in anon. So like... DAI was a RIDE. The people I met in that fandom as friends I'll treasure. The actual fandom itself was a trash-fire depending on where you were. There were definitely a couple of BNFs in this fandom who made it their job to just hate other people, especially if they were ace and liked writing an ace Dorian Pavus. That was the first time I learned that blocking is good for the soul.

The Beast that Chose Its Own Bridle is a tiny fandom made of people who all love Felix and Mildmay very much :D

Detroit Become Human was a weird experience and it felt like a weird fandom. It was I think Korean or Japanese fanart that actually inspired Eversion, since that's where the first reverse!AU fanart (at least that I saw) began. But the comments could be weird, the anons were sometimes weird (not always, but sometimes! Especially in the beginning - and I just think first impressions really count lol), and I remember joining a Connor/Hank Discord where the most active folks were very quick to tell me how I should write my story, which was like - I like that they liked the story, but I've never had people try to show how much they like something by trying to change it into something they like more in quite that way before? I didn't really feel like staying in the fandom, tbh, it's extremely cliquey, especially all the folks that have like 400 names for the different versions of Connor, and it feels like it has a steep learning curve if you want to join the 'club.'

It was also the story where I had to do the most heavy lifting on BDSM education. Like, this fandom felt very BDSM naive *overall* - there's obviously exceptions, but I had to literally change how I was writing the story to explain more things than I normally would have done in a fic like that, because I was just getting so many 'why would Connor want to be humiliated during sex' anons and comments which was like okay, okay, let's actually do some 101 brochure stuff with this (the chapter where Connor calls Luuk and they talk about Connor liking being humiliated was not meant to be a whole chapter dslkfjas).

In fandoms like Thorki I could assume that the majority of readers would sort of get that even if it was a kink they didn't like - it was still just a kink that people can like and/or help others out with explanations. So it's possible D:BH skewed young and/or just not BDSM experienced! Which is fine! It's just I've noticed it here the most of all the fandoms I've been in. There were folks who knew kink really well who didn't need any explanations there at all, because I tend to over-explain a character's reasoning at the best of times, but yeah.

These are all like... deeply personal experiences influenced by the pairings I'm writing and how deeply I'm going into each fandom! I was tag-tracking in RotG / D:BH / DA:I, so I saw a lot more stuff, I think.

There's other fandoms I've been a part of but not really written for much or at all, like Thorki (love it there) and Sebaciel re: Black Butler (love it there too, but we lose a lot of writers because of antis), and also Murderbot (really weirdly cliquey in a 'oh... I see' kind of way, which might explain why a small pocket of people are writing most of the fics - because they're the only ones allowed in their Discord lol). Murderbot fandom is why I didn't end up writing Murderbot fanfiction sdalkfjdsa

Anyway, fandoms are weird, personal spaces that should be heavily curated! But I can't stop anons coming into my inbox with certain 'flavours' of question per fandom unless I turn off anon and honestly where would be the fun of that :D :D :D

[voiceless-story-nights]

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Fear of the Unknown  WIP Progress Blog #3  January 29th, 2024 

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Okay, okay... I think I got it down. I think. I’m hoping. 

So, it’s been a long, long while since I last updated. I’ve gone through SO MANY PROBLEMS and resolved them during that time, so I’m about to spam all the crap I’ve done in the past four months since I last updated. 

Get ready to change your pants cuz this is gonna be a lot of shit coming... 

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Gacha Series vs Comic vs Book 

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Yeah... Once again, I was debating what to do with the medium of my story. Why? Because GL2 had just freshly came out, and I was too lazy to redesign my characters. Literally, that was it. Not because there was some incredibly terrible people, not because the community was being overly toxic again, I just didn’t wanna redesign my characters in GL2. 

Wow~ 

But, unlike my past self that would mull this decision over and over again, I just put it in the back burner and left it. In the end, I went with a Gacha series because... well... I may be getting back into drawing again, but I ain’t that confident to start a comic. 

As for the book thing, I decided I’d write the book version first before the Gacha series version, although I’m not sure how well that’d hold up cuz I haven’t written in a novel format in so long. I just thought of it like this: if there’s a dedicated viewer who is really interested with where the story is gonna go, and they can’t wait, like, a couple months for the next episode, they can go buy the book. 

Free marketing, you know? Plus, it'll make the kids read///SHOT 

And if I feel confident enough, or if I have a team of great artists, I can make the comic later. It’s not like I have to make only one medium. I just need to know which would come out first, and the book would be that since it’d be faster to create. Kinda. 

The reason I’m not sure if I’d be able to write the book first is just because I’m reliant on visuals, so I might end up making the series and the book at the same time. I don’t know for sure. 

(Makes a light novel instead---) 

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Simplifying the World 

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The world FotU is taking place in, Similia, has been a WIP for a long while. The concept was a universe full of three galaxies before I realized how complicated that’d be, especially if I had plans of migration and space travel. Because they’re GALAXIES, it’d be hard to go from one galaxy to a different one in a small amount of time. And speaking about time, I didn’t know how to measure the time in all different galaxies/planets/solar systems cuz it’d be VASTLY different than each other. And if each planet is different, that means there’s gonna be seasonal differences and weather normality and other stuff I have to consider........... 

So I simplified it to one world with many nations and species. This would make the whole thing better, and the history would be easier to follow as that’s the main storyline of the world. 

I’m still working on the world building part, though. I’ve gotten my species, their abilities, and the concepts of their races, but I haven’t gotten through anything else. If I can make up like a history for how they came about and have more depth to their cultures, I’d be just about finished. 

I don’t wanna worry about the weather just yet... 

There’s one concept I’m hoping to keep, though: Similia is a godless world where even the tiniest insects believe only in their facts and history. Things as mystical as a higher being, a creator of the world, or a divine garden for the good and a hellish place for the bad are things that the people don’t believe in simply because it can’t be proven. If there’s no proof of something, it means it doesn’t exist. 

Of course, the concept would change over the years, but this is like the main belief in Similia. However, the only reason why it changes is simply because of the expansion of creativity and fiction. No one is still willing to believe in the divine, even with all the ideas of it being pushed around. 

And, I mean, when it comes to the creatures themselves, it’d make sense. 

There are people with animal-like instincts, so they’re more focused on survival than the ideology of a god. There are people with the gifts of the elements, and they’ve always been the keepers of a natural order, so the thought of gods has never passed their minds. And there are people who uses magic in a scientific way, which is self-explanatory why they wouldn’t believe in gods. 

There’s only one kingdom (well, two, but the second one isn’t as well known and well established) that believes in gods, but that’s only because a god had truly transcended on them and helped them flourish their nation. 

That’s the concept, though. I haven’t really put much thought into it, so I don’t know how well it’d hold up as I continue building onto the world. It’s pretty solid, especially with how the people have reasons NOT to believe, but I still gotta work on it. 

... 

And now that I wrote it out, I see how this world of mine will have some problems in the future... Meh, whatever. What’s a story if it doesn’t touch on some sensitive topics? 

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Magical Ability Adjustment 

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The people on Similia were overpowered af when I wrote the concept... 

To give an idea of what it was, there are three types/races/species of people on Similia that I mentioned before: animal-instincts, natural order, and scientists. Depending on which type you’re born into, you’re given that type of power. It’s a power dependent on your bloodline, your hereditary trait. And, of course, there will be mixed blood as well. 

So, that’s the first concept of magical abilities. Pretty good. I think this would be understandable for the magical ability concept. It’s solid, it’s got some limitations, it’s believable to a point— 

There’s another magical ability concept. 

Lemme repeat, THERE’S ANOTHER MAGICAL ABILITY CONCEPT. 

This second concept, that had blown this out of proportions, was a power everyone could receive at a specific age. And this power in particular... HAD NO LIMITATIONS!!! 

Literally, someone with animal instincts can gain something like reading the future, so not only would they be super strong and fast and deadly, they’re gonna be able to know what to look out for in the future!! 

And it’s not just ONE power these guys can gain when they come of age. Oh, no. I wanted to be fancy. I wanted to be different. I wanted Pokemon in my world. 

These guys would be able to develop FOUR types of the same power. 

So a clairvoyant cheetah person can develop not just the ability to read the future, but they can also develop maybe time travel, mind reading, uhhh BRINGING THE FUTURE CLOSER. I don’t know. Something like that. Something that’s similar to their first developed ability. 

There was no limitation. There was NO limitation on the second power concept. 

Actually, why was there even a second power concept? I don’t know. I just wanted to be different. I just wanted these guys to have something else that’s cooler than their hereditary powers! 

But by doing that, the people became so overpowered that even I didn’t know how to handle them... 

I didn’t even know how to handle them when they just had their hereditary powers! How the hell was I gonna know what to do when these guys bust out the time travel and shit?! 

... 

I’m dying. 

So I decided to completely omit the second power play. Everyone’s gonna have their hereditary powers and that’s it. That’s all. 

Unless they meet a certain condition. 

I won’t go into details of what those conditions are, since that’s a bit of a spoiler for all the stories in Similia I’d be doing, but just know that these people would lose their hereditary powers and gain the secondary power. And how these secondary powers are given to these people is based on how they grew up! 

I’m not giving them four different types... 

Once that’s done and done, they would either be picked up by the “forgotten god” of Similia and taken to some place or the “forgotten god” would kill them so they wouldn’t wreak havoc and abuse their newfound “godlike” powers. 

So... yeah... 

Now that I adjusted this, writing my series has gotten SO MUCH EASIER... Put a limit cap on magical abilities... It’ll save ya trouble... Go figure... 

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FotU had been worked on for over five years... without a genre... 

(throws knives at self) 

I can’t believe I FORGOT about the damn GENRE of a story! That’s, like, a foundation, a start, a way to keep the story in line so that it doesn’t GO ALL OVER THE PLACE. 

Which it did for so long. 

I really had no idea what kind of genre FotU would be considered as. At first, it was gonna be about three delinquent kids discovering more about themselves through the magic of acting, so it would’ve been a “self-search” genre because of that. But I couldn’t make any of those three kids likeable, so I omitted that rough draft. 

Second, I was gonna go with a kind of mystery genre where everyone had to figure out Lenard’s real reason to be an actor! But that’s, like, the weakest mystery ever... Be more like a detective for this! 

Then I just gave up and stopped looking for a genre. 

Until now. 

Because I simplified the story and the world so much, I finally figured out the genre it would be. Kind of. It’s still weak, though... 

It’ll mainly be a self-search genre since Annie’s just escaped from some serious, untrue accusations about how she killed her own sister on set due to jealousy, so she’s battling some terrible mental health problems. However, those problems aren’t gonna be seen as often since once she meets Lenard, she would overwork herself to forget them. It won’t be until closer to the second arc that it’ll be seen. 

And the secondary genre will be a mystery genre. It’s kind of the main focus but not really? There are some mysteries surrounding Annie’s sister’s death, especially since the police hasn’t discovered her body (it was a fire that killed her). Not only that, Lenard’s father was also killed by someone in the entertainment industry, and Lenard’s trying to find them. 

So those would be the main two genres. Well, main focus. 

I’m not completely sure what to expect since the self-search genre isn’t as strong, and the mystery genre gets sidetracked. If anything at all, it’s like a romance, slice-of-life, school story...? The mysteries and self-search genre really doesn’t come into play until the second arc... 

Meh, whatever. I’m slipping with this story since I didn’t have a genre at the beginning, so I’m not complaining. 

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Changing Up the Beginning (again...) 

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I’ve simplified everything. I know what general genre I’m looking at for the story. I’m sorting out the important stuff and the nonimportant stuff. 

I’m finally ready to begin the story. 

I’ve been rewriting it over and over again for the past five years, and I’ve never gotten anywhere past just the first five pages or so. But now that I’ve gotten a good understanding of my story, I’ve got a good start to the story that I know, for sure, will be the finished copy. 

So instead of hiding a lot of things from both the readers and the other characters, I decided to reveal almost everything—Lenard's motivation of becoming and actor as well as Annie’s identity to the drama department. That way, I don’t have to worry about too many of the problems that occurred or would occur in the future. 

Plus, when I hid Lenard’s motivation, Annie’s reason to help him diminished as well. While I could’ve just had her sympathize with Lenard’s situation (where he couldn’t get into the drama department cuz he sucked at acting), she didn’t have enough reason to help him. After all, Annie grew up in a place where there was no merit in helping another person be a better actor than you. And she didn’t want to be involved in acting anymore anyway so no point. 

But when he revealed his motivation, his skill in acting became apparent, and that motivated Annie to help him because he resembled a lot like her sister. This prompted Annie to get back into wanting to make him the best actor of Similia, much like she did so for her sister. 

That’s why the beginning this time would iterate that. 

Best part? I’m not dragging on with the beginning, nor would I be info bombing all over the place about this and that. I’m getting straight to the point, which is what I wanted to do, with very little info bombs. 

Finally... 

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That’s It... 

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Those were the major and confirmed updates to the story. There are some “in the works” stuff, but I haven’t really gotten to them to the point where I’m like “yeah, this’ll change the whole thing”. 

I was thinking about working on some other stories while working on FotU, but I realized I’m not capable of that... My mind is on FotU 24/7, so working on something else puts me off and makes me anxious. 

I mean, I can still work on another story, but it has to be a story that’s already well-established or it goes hand-in-hand with FotU’s world. If not, I wouldn’t be able to put my thoughts into it, and it’d come out shallow... 

God, why am I like this? I’ve got three stories lined up, and they’re not meant to be turned into a series like FotU!!! 

I’ll figure something out sooner or later... 

Anyways, I’m done with this update now. Been meaning to do it a bit earlier, but I didn’t know what to write and just carried on with writing FotU. Speaking about that, I might as well go write it now. 

[flowergirlmiwa]

i had a poll asking if yal wanted me to post my wrestling video game reviews here so heres the first one its a review of the game WCW vs nWo World Tour for the N64. TL;DR this game especially for its time pretty much fucks i mean it's just a great game even if it doesn't have a season mode. AKI made awesome wrestling games

this was written in like 2019 as a potential youtube script so if it reads like a youtube script i was writing it to be a youtube script ok ty also i just put in some pictures so it's a little less drab ok ty again

Graphically, for 1997, World Tour looks pretty good… for the most part. The crowd is a strange flat texture that doesn’t necessarily even resemble a crowd, but it does its job, and reacts accordingly with the crowd noise. The wrestlers themselves generally look good, although body proportions can be totally off at times. Everyone appears to have the same height, meaning Rey Mysterio Jr. and The Giant stand practically shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s quite strange, but besides this, each wrestler has a decent approximation of their real-life look and attire for the era. That is, with the exception of the faces. Sometimes, the faces look good enough, and sometimes they just look totally off. For example, Rick Steiner looks okay, but Scott Hall just looks strange.

There are some strange quirks like the 'back spike' which can be seen every so often, as well as things like parts of a body disappearing from view in certain camera angles. All-in-all, the models themselves are rather detailed, and the faces kind of fall into the back of your mind while you’re playing anyway. Each wrestler in the game has four attires, clearly accounting for the possibility that 4 players would all want to play as the same character. While half of the time, this amounts to alternate colors, this feature is deeper than one may expect. For example, both Hogan and Sting feature their ‘classic’ look in alternate attires. The feature clearly wasn’t just an afterthought by the development team. (2024 edit: also the alternate colors are probably relatively accurate to real world gear they've worn for all i know)

Each wrestler has a drawn picture as their menu sprite, which sometimes looks great and sometimes just looks odd. It’s quite like the in-game faces in this way.

While the action plays out, the camera angle will often change to give a better or more exciting view of the moves being performed. At first, this may seem distracting, but as the camera angle typically reverts back to the same view by the time you’re back in control of moving your character, it just serves to make the match seem that much more dynamic.

Each wrestler has a variety of moves at their disposal, which I’ll get into later, but in general, these moves look GREAT. There is a lot of very fluid animation and the sheer variety of available moves goes to show that the developers were passionate about professional wrestling. Especially for the time, the animations in general are top notch. In addition, as wrestlers take damage, they will get visibly weaker, with arms clutching at pains in the chest and head, for example. This level of detail is above and beyond what one would expect from a product of this time. There are also a variety of fighting stances, taunts, etcetera for each wrestler, and the fictional wrestlers even get plenty of totally unique animations. Each character truly feels distinct, from their movesets down to their unique animations, even though they all control the same way.

There is one arena for each promotion in the game. These are generally unremarkable, and don’t really reflect any actual arenas, but the visual variety is nice. Each arena has differences such as turnbuckle colors and the size of the crowd. The Independent Union even has a very unique Japanese-style ring. Some may be disappointed that arenas such as the one for Monday Nitro were not included, but I’m just surprised the different promotions have this many differences in their arenas, and find them to be a worthy inclusion.

In terms of entrances, there… kind of aren’t any. I say ‘kind of’ as there are match introductions which play out as a name card and a brief taunt by your wrestler. It’s bare-bones, but it’s passable. (2024 edit: this is basically a truncated version of how Japanese wrestling promotions do wrestler introductions)

Let’s talk about sound. Like the arenas, the music in the game is pretty unremarkable. Unless you play the game a lot, a definite possibility in 1997, you probably won’t remember any of the songs after turning the console off. Most of the tracks have a rock ambiance to them, but they strike me more as Japanese video game music than, say, an edgy late 90s kind of rock you may expect based on the license. There are also no wrestler themes, or WCW-related themes included in the game. Each wrestler seems to have a single sound effect associated with them which they will use pretty much every time they do anything. Most of these are simple grunts, and they’re not, say, voiced by the original wrestler, so they’ll probably fall to the back of your mind as play continues. The aforementioned crowd noise provides a good backdrop to the action. The crowd will ‘ooh’ at moves during their setup, and cheer when the move lands. If a wrestler happens to take an attack to their dick area, the crowd will react with shock. It’s easy to overlook, but the crowd noise does a good job all the same.

Let’s talk roster. This is one MAMMOTH of a roster for the time. Forty-two total wrestlers, each with their own distinct look and move set, in 1997 no less, is nothing short of impressive. There is a caveat here, however. Many WCW fans were and will be disappointed to hear that only about half of the included characters are from WCW, and for that matter, the other half are entirely fictional. This is where the “World Tour” aspect comes into play. Ostensibly, this other half of the roster is foreign wrestlers with all sorts of strange personalities. Unfortunately, this means that for many people, there won’t be much appeal in half of the roster, as they are, for the most part, inherently uninteresting compared to the WCW wrestlers. However, there is a hidden secret behind these characters. Each one is actually a stand-in for a wrestler, mostly Japanese, which wouldn’t have made it into the game otherwise as they didn’t have the license to use those likenesses outside of Japan. So, if names like TAKA Michinoku, Genichiro Tenryu, The Great Sasuke and Abdullah the Butcher interest you, they made the game in the form of these fictional characters. The full moveset for these characters are based on these wrestlers. It’s a smart way to include these move sets, although it may still disappoint fans, as the character who receive these move sets usually bear little resemblance to the wrestler they represent. It is good to have these extra characters, though, as they make the roster fuller than it would otherwise be.

Back to the WCW guys, there’s 23 of them, and most of them are worthy inclusions. You have guys like Hogan, Hall, Nash, Syxx, Macho Man, DDP, Regal, Sting, Dean Malenko, Ric Flair… if you were a WCW fan at the time, you were pretty much guaranteed to have one of your favorites make the cut. I know most people would have preferred if the entire roster were WCW guys, but by all accounts, this is still a big, impressive roster.

In terms of general presentation, I think WCW vs. nWo World Tour does its job quite well. The biggest issue here for me is a tenuous link to the WCW license. There is, for example, no Monday Nitro arena. There aren’t any WCW belts seen in the game. There’s no commentary of any kind, there’s no music from WCW, there isn’t really anything that relates the game to the WCW license other than the included talent and the logo being seen in the WCW ring. And, of course, half the roster isn’t WCW guys. It’s not a huge deal, but it does give a bit of an air of having the WCW license put on in the final stages of development, which I’m not sure was actually the case.

A big roster doesn’t mean much if the gameplay doesn’t hold up, and fortunately, World Tour delivers. It has a gameplay system I’d describe as easy to pick up but complex to master. The A button provides access to grapples, and the B button handles strikes. The C buttons handle things like running, pinning and exiting the ring, while R and L provide ways to evade or block attacks. Unusually for a Nintendo 64 game, movement is controlled by the D-pad, with taunts and special attacks mapped to the analog stick. You can do a strong version of a strike or grapple by holding down the respective button. For grapples, there are 12 total moves that can be done from a front standing position alone, by using any combination of A or B, up and down, after getting your opponent into a hold with the A button. Moves are context sensitive, you can grapple your opponent at a turnbuckle, from behind, and there’s even different moves on a grounded opponent depending on what side they’re laying on and whether you go for the head or the legs. The opponent can also be irish whipped and attacked while you’re running. There’s a lot of different ways to deal damage to your opponent, and most importantly, all of this has a great flow to it. Reversals can be done by tapping R at the right time, there’s backing away to evade grapples with L, you can use a strike to interrupt the opponent or go for a surprise strong grapple when you catch them guarding too much. In addition, when both you and your opponent go for a grapple at the same time, a test of strength occurs. I’m not sure how this feature works, but it may just be that the winner is whoever can button mash the fastest. Speaking of button mashing, both pin falls and submissions work this way as well. Submissions will occur whenever a wrestler happens to have a submission move in their moveset, so it pays to explore each wrestler’s moveset thoroughly to find out where his best submissions are. The gameplay is a bit slow paced, but it does a fantastic job of emulating an actual wrestling match. As I’ve intimated, the game features simple controls with a lot of depth built in, for those who are interested in getting skilled at the game. There’s even unique maneuvers and moves that I haven’t mentioned, as there are just so many of them for seemingly every situation. Overall, I have no hesitations in saying that based on what I’ve covered already, WCW vs. nWo World Tour was the greatest wrestling game that had been released to America at the time of its release.

We can’t talk about gameplay without bringing up the Spirit meter. This shows how well your wrestler is doing, and is another way that the game emulates wrestling fantastically. When your wrestler is doing well, his Spirit meter will rise, and when it reaches its peak, you are allowed to do special moves. There are two ways to do special moves in this game, done by strong grappling an opponent from the front or back and using the analog stick. If your wrestler is getting beat down, his spirit meter will become smaller. However, much like a real wrestling match, a comeback can be initiated by turning the tide of the match into your favor, and this will inspire the Spirit meter to rise rapidly. The Spirit meter has a surprising amount of depth to it, much like the rest of the gameplay, it isn’t a simple bar you fill up to gain super attacks. Keeping a close eye on your Spirit meter is key to success.

You can go outside the ring and attempt to find weapons given to you by the crowd, but I haven’t found a way to bring these weapons into the ring. Unlike most aspects to the game, the weapons seem to be a bit of an afterthought. You can’t get disqualified, and I haven’t observed weapon attacks to do that much more damage than, say, a regular heavy strike. Additionally, you can cause your opponent to bleed if you have ‘realism’ set to ON. How this passed on a rated K to A game is beyond me, but it’s fun to see happen. As for how this happens, I’m not quite sure. It seems to just happen at random in my experience.

Believe me when I say this, this is a finely crafted game from a gameplay perspective, and it’s still quite fun to play to this day. That especially goes for multiplayer, which was a particular highlight for many people at the time. The Nintendo 64 was equipped with 4 controller ports out of the box, and as such, four players can battle in an all-out war in the battle royal mode. This works in an elimination style, although eliminated wrestlers still stick around and can mess with other players by grappling their feet.

In terms of match types, it’s pretty basic. There’s the standard one on one, tag team matches, a two on one handicap match, and the aforementioned battle royal. That’s all there is in terms of exhibition, but even having a battle royal match in the game made for a great plus to the total package in a time when players probably weren’t expecting things like cage and table matches. Speaking on the tag team matches, they are actually quite fun in this due to your partner’s ability to interrupt the action and help out, whether it be hitting or grabbing an opponent from the ropes, opening an opportunity for their partner to make an attack, breaking up pin attempts, or just jumping into the ring to kick ass. With two players against computers, this can be quite engaging, and I’d imagine it would be even more fun against a second team of players.

There are three other exhibition modes seen on the main menu, these being the eponymous WCW vs. nWo, League, and Tournament. The tournament mode is pretty self explanatory, although there is support for a tag team tournament as well. The league plays out a Round Robin style tournament, commonly seen in Japan. I’d imagine this would take quite some time to complete if you go with the maximum of eight wrestlers and have them all controlled by people. I wonder what was the last time someone actually did that. Hmm. In these modes, matches that include only computer players can be skipped and simulated. WCW vs. nWo mode pits teams of up to 5 against one another in a gauntlet format. One wrestler stays in until they are defeated. It goes on like this until one side has won. Your reward for all of these three modes is the same basic congratulations screen. These modes don’t add a lot to the game, but they certainly don’t take away anything either.

The main single player mode and your path to unlocking this game’s 6 hidden characters is League Challenge. Each promotion in the game has a series of battles to face en route to a championship opportunity. In each promotion, finishing the Heavyweight title run will reward you with a WCW character, most notably DDP and Randy Savage. There are also Tag Team and cruiserwight paths to try out. Upon completing all of the other challenges of a type, a new challenge in a new promotion will open up, allowing you to unlock the strangest characters in the game, Joe Bruiser and BlackWidow. BlackWidow is the only female character, but she works exactly like everyone else and there aren’t any kind of restrictions against fighting or even bloodying her. She does look a bit odd, though. Joe Bruiser, on the other hand, is a boxer who has no grapples to speak of, just a lot of different punches. It’s worth unlocking Bruiser just for how unique and strange he is as an inclusion. Sadly, the hidden promotion doesn’t also unlock a new hidden arena, as the promotion just uses the WCW arena. Once you have these two, you can consider this game finished.

League Challenge is a pretty straightforward series of matches with no flavor or cutscenes. In the end, you are rewarded with a simple trophy screen and another check mark on the list. Besides the unlockable wrestlers, there isn’t much if any reward, so the tag title paths are essentially pointless. It shouldn’t take very long for most players to unlock all of the hidden characters. The game allows you to pick the difficulty of your computer controlled opponents, from Easy to Medium to Hard, which may add a little spice to this. My biggest issue with this mode is how damn long some of them can take. Some of these championships will require what feels like an endless amount of battles to win, especially the WWW challenges. It gets a bit stale simply doing matches one after the other, so it may be better to chip away at these over time rather than try to get them all done as soon as possible. And as a small note, as Wrath and Glacier are unlocked by doing the fictional promotion Heavyweight paths, they are put onto the selection screen in those promotions. I would have expected them to be put with the WCW characters, but instead they stick out put next to all these fictional wrestlers. Just a bit odd.

Although I have been pretty positive with World Tour so far, there’s a couple of gripes I have with it. For one thing, having only front and back specials means some wrestlers like Hollywood Hogan are out in the cold. His leg drop is just a regular move which requires no preamble and doesn’t do much damage. You can still finish a match by using it, but as it’s not contextualized as a special, it feels a bit odd. As well, Hogan’s actual front special is… a chokehold? Some wrestlers don’t have entirely accurate specials, either, with Nash famously doing a not-Outsider’s Edge, for example. As the moves are generally on point, seeing some guys lacking in terms of accurate specials is a bit disappointing. This also contributes to the ‘not-quite-WCW-enough’ feel that the game has. Another thing that may be an issue to some is that it is impossible to save your progress without a Memory Pak. All it does is save your settings and the League Challenges you’ve defeated, but this means if you don’t own a Memory Pak, you will have to unlock all the characters you want to use every time you turn on the game. Saving via the Memory Pak wasn’t a totally uncommon thing back in 1997, and most N64 fans will most likely have one or two laying around, but it’s worth noting nonetheless.

WCW vs. nWo World Tour is a very solid game. While it may feel rather bare bones by today’s standards, it was revolutionary for the time and basically wrote the book on how 3D wrestling games should work in the future. It’s a hell of a lot better than contemporary games such as WWF War Zone, and is still a fun time today. With no creation aspects and a simple arcade mode for single player content, wrestling fans may find themselves uninterested after a while. The gameplay is the main star here, however, and with a big roster, good graphics for the time, a selection of unique arenas and the famous battle royal mode, World Tour stands up to this day as a good wrestling game, and a great starting point for the AKI/THQ wrestling game series.

+Revolutionary, skill-oriented gameplay +Large roster including not just WCW but foreign wrestlers as well under aliases, each with their own unique moveset +Stellar animation work along with solid graphics for its time +4-player Battle Royal and a variety of side modes such as tournaments give the game multiplayer replay value -Single-player League Challenge mode is no-frills arcade style, with little in the way of personality, which gets repetitive -More WCW names could have been included -Saves need to be done with a Memory Pak -Not a lot of content outside of the standard Exhibition matches -Some wrestlers don’t have their accurate finishing moves, either because of a wrong move choice, or because their finishing move doesn’t fit one of the 2 Special move types included

Fake Sting here is playing the Japanese equivalent to this game, Virtual Pro Wrestling 64

[shihalyfie]

Kizuna itself vs. the two versions of the novel

Written on request from a friend who wanted to remain anonymous. This is more of an editorial than a meta, and while I usually have a policy of “this is an analysis blog, not a review blog” it goes into more of my personal impressions and opinions than usual, but it’s something I write hoping to be helpful.

There are basically three “official” full versions of Kizuna: one being, of course, the movie itself, one being the Dash X Bunko version of the novel, and one being the Shueisha Mirai Bunko version of it. While it’s certainly not to say that any of the three is an “incomplete” version of the narrative, if you really want as full of a picture of the story as possible, somehow, each of all three versions of the story happens to have really important information that the other two do not. If I had to pick only one of these three versions to recommend to people, I would of course pick the movie itself; it’s obviously the base story everything else is based off of and was the one the production centered around as a priority, but the novelizations have a surprising amount of info that provide a lot of insight into the movie’s story and themes.

I get the impression that the creation of Kizuna involved making a lot more story and background details than could fit in a 95-minute movie, so these novelizations, which were based directly off the original movie script, ended up being an outlet for a lot of these details (and as much as I could be harsh on the movie itself for being a bit “reliant” on extra material, I have to admit that Adventure and 02 were both like this too -- a lot of our current understanding of the series comes from the Adventure novels and drama CDs -- so frankly I’m thankful we at least got this with a 95-minute movie instead of a yearlong series). On the flip side, while I'm not going to say that the novels are completely and utterly inaccurate representations of the movie, in a perhaps too-close approximation of Adventure and 02's writing style, this is a movie where even the nuances in a single line or split-second moment carry heavy implications, which become much blurrier or harder to identify when they’re presented differently (or not even presented at all) in the novel’s context, especially when they emphasize very different things from what the movie itself was emphasizing.

The short version of this is that I believe the Dash X version contains the greater amount of “plot and story” information but significantly misses out on the emotional themes and presentation, whereas the Shueisha Mirai version abridges and cuts chunks of content but is much better at conveying the intended message. More on this below the cut. (Note that the following post spoils Kizuna’s plot events.)

The movie itself

Since the following parts are more “in comparison to the movie”, I’m not going to go too much into this in this section, but one thing I will say is that the official English subtitle translation for the movie is really not great. Even if you take out nitpickiness about the fact it misses several significant nuances (the difference between “unchangeable fate” and “changeable destiny”, or the fact that Gennai refers to partnership dissolution as a “case” and not like it’s something that happens overall) at really plot-important moments, some lines (thankfully, usually not plot-important ones) are just straight-up incorrect. And worse, there’s evidence the official English dub was based on that translation! (I’m not faulting the people in charge of the dub for this, but whoever handed them that translation to work with.)

The dialogue in the Dash X Bunko version is transcribed effectively word-for-word from the dialogue in the movie (or perhaps vice versa, given that the novel is based on the original script), so I highly recommend checking that version as a reference for dialogue or if you want to do any intimate analysis on it. I don't want to go as far as to suggest not supporting the official version of the movie because of this, but at least please be aware that the translation used there is not entirely reliable.

Dash X Bunko

If you talk about “the Kizuna novel”, this is the one that people usually tend to be referring to, for two reasons. Firstly, it was translated shortly after the movie’s release, and due to the unfortunate circumstances of Kizuna being delayed in accessibility outside Japan for several months, this basically served as the only comprehensive source of info about the movie outside Japan for a very long time. Secondly, in Japan, this one was marketed as “the one for adults” in contrast to the Shueisha Mirai one being “for kids”, which meant that a lot of people assumed that the latter one was just an incredibly stripped down version that was otherwise disposable or replaceable. (This is very, very much not the case, and is extremely ironic when it comes to a movie that partially centers around the dangers of looking down too much on things associated with childhood.)

When it comes to “plot and story info”, this is the one that probably serves as the best reference (especially for fanfic writers or those who need a refresher on certain plot events or to look up something quickly), and probably has the most “comprehensive” listing of plot events surrounding the movie. The dialogue in it is a word-for-word recreation of the movie’s script, and actually includes more scenes than the movie itself does, including two that I suspect to be deleted scenes (a detailing of the specifics behind the initial plan to pursue Eosmon, and a conversation between Koushirou and Tentomon) and adaptations of the first and second memorial shorts within their context in the movie. It also contains some interesting background details and extra context for some things in the movie that you might think would normally be animation flair or something, but take a very interesting implication of story importance if they’re going out of their way to write this in the script. (There’s a scene where Agumon and Gabumon appear in front of their partners when they’d been behind them a minute before, and it’s easy to think this might be an animation error, but not only does the surrounding context make this unlikely, the novel itself actually directly states that their positions had changed.) Given that, I think it was very fortunate that this novel was available to us for those outside Japan waiting for the actual movie to come out, because this level of detail was very important to have on hand rather than fragmented spoilers on social media.

However, the part where I think the novel is significantly deficient in compared to the actual movie (and also to the other version of the novel) is that it describes the plot events in too blunt of a manner and doesn’t bring out its themes very well. (It’s kind of like having a long and very detailed Wikipedia article plot summary; it definitely got all the hard facts down, but the emotion is gone, which is still a pretty significant issue when media’s all about the feelings and message in the end.) While “considering the movie to be more cynical than it’s probably meant to be” happens regardless of which version someone’s working from, I’ve talked to perhaps an unnervingly high number of people who started with the novel and were absolutely convinced that the movie’s message was about adulthood sucking and needing to just accept it, until they saw how the actual movie pulled it off and the surrounding atmosphere and realized it definitely was not. (I think one really big factor here is that a lot of the visual imagery makes it extremely, extremely hard to miss that Menoa’s mentality is completely screwed up and her way of seeing things was dubious to begin with; prose descriptions really just don’t capture the way they slam this in your face with visual and musical cues during the climax of the movie.)

You can figure this out from the novel itself, but you have to really be looking closely at the way they word things, and on top of that it’s hard to figure out which parts you should be focusing on and which parts aren’t actually that important -- in other words, the “choice of priorities” gets a bit lost in there. Even the little things lose a lot of value; it’s theoretically possible to use the novel to put together that Daisuke is wearing his sunglasses indoors during his first scene, but you have to put together the context clues from completely different paragraphs to figure this out, none of which compares to the actual hilarity of visually seeing him wearing the thing in a very obviously dimly lit restaurant because he’s our beloved idiot. (For more details, please see my post with more elaboration on this and more examples of this kind of thing.)

I wouldn’t say that the movie itself isn’t guilty of (perhaps accidentally) having some degree of mixed messaging, but I would say this problem is rather exacerbated by the novel’s way of presenting it due to its dedication to dropping every single plot detail and event without much in the way of choosing what to contextualize and what to put emphasis on (as it turns out, treating practically everything in the movie as if it has equal weight might not be a great idea). So, again, for that reason I think the novel serves as a good reference in terms of remembering what happened in it and knowing the movie’s contents, but I also feel that it’s really not the greatest deliverer of the movie’s message or themes at all.

Shueisha Mirai Bunko

The second version of the novel was not translated until several months after the movie first released, and shortly before the Blu-ray and streaming versions of the movie itself came out anyway, so my impression is that on this end a lot of people don’t even know it was a thing. On top of that, even those who know about it often dismiss it as the “kid version” -- and to be fair, it did baffle quite a few people as to why this version even exists (Kizuna is technically not unacceptable for kid viewing and its plot is still understandable regardless of age, but since the movie is so heavily about the millennial existential crisis, it’s not something kids would really relate to). So a lot of people tended to just skip over it...which is really a shame, because it contains some interesting things that actually aren’t in the other two versions at all. For instance, did you know that, as of this writing, this is the only thing that plainly states the specific explanation for why Yamato decided to become an astronaut, for the first time in 20 real-life years?

While there are still some things that weren’t in the movie proper (mainly the Eosmon initial plan and the adaptation of the second memorial short), for the most part, the actual events are somewhat abridged compared to the movie and the Dash X version, and other than a few stray lines, there’s not a lot of extra information that would be as helpful for referencing the events of the plot. The version of the novel here is rather broadly interpretive of the scenes in the movie, so several things are condensed or taken out (and, amusingly, because it’s assuming that the kids reading this don’t actually know the original Adventure or 02, it has to describe what each character is like in a quick one-liner).

However, interestingly enough, it’s because it’s so heavily interpretive that it illuminates a lot of things that weren’t really easy to glean out of the Dash X version. For instance:

Some scenes are described with “other perspectives” that give you info on someone else’s point of view. (For instance, we see more of Yamato’s perspective and thoughts when he has his first phone call with Daisuke, or a bit more detail in the process of how Eosmon kidnappings work.)

We get a lot more information on what’s going through everyone’s heads during each scene, and what emotions they’re feeling at a given time. (This is something that you could at least get to some degree in the movie itself from facial expressions and framing, but would often be a lot blurrier in the Dash X version; here, it’s spelled out in words.)

When things are abridged, you get a clearer idea of what the intended point and theme of the scene was because it’s stripped down to include only that part. In one really interesting case, the scene with Agumon finding Taichi’s AVs has a “censored” equivalent where Taichi’s pushed to a corner because he can’t find anything non-alcoholic in his fridge -- so when you look at the two versions of the scene and what they have in common, you can figure out that the point isn’t that it was a lewd joke for the sake of it, but rather that Taichi’s forcing himself into boxes of “adulthood” that are actually meaningless and impractical.

Some of the descriptions of the characters, scenes, and background information make it a lot more obvious as to their purpose in the narrative (it outright confirms that Miyako being in Spain means that her personality is getting overly enabled there).

The scene where the circumstances behind Morphomon’s disappearance are revealed makes it significantly less subtle what the point is. In the actual movie, a lot of this involved visual framing with Menoa seeming to become more and more distant, but in this version of the novel they basically whack you over the head with the final confirmation that Menoa is guilty of neglecting her own partner, which contradicts her own assertions that “they were always together” (maybe not emotionally, it seems!) and helps clarify the commonality between her, Taichi, Yamato, and Sora in what exactly led to their partners disappearing.

Bonus: this version of the novel really wants you to know that the ending of the movie is about Taichi and Yamato fully having the determination to turn things around and lead up to the 02 epilogue. (The movie’s version of this involves the extended version of Taichi’s thesis and the credits photo with Yamato obviously next to a rocket, while this novel’s version involves more detailed fleshing out of how Taichi and Yamato decided to use their experiences to move onto their eventual career paths and what kind of hope they still have at the end. The Dash X version...didn’t really have a very strong equivalent here.)

In other words, while this version of the novel isn’t the greatest reference for plot or worldbuilding, it does a much more effective job being straightforward about the intended themes and message of the movie, and even if the scenes in it are much more loosely adapted, it’s much better at adapting the emotional nuances of the things that would normally be conveyed via visuals, expressions, and voice acting. (Although I would still say that the movie itself is the best reference for that kind of thing, of course.) If you just want lore or plot ideas, I don’t think it’ll help you very much, but since this series is so much about characters that had their ways of thinking fleshed out in such incredible detail, and about strong theme messaging, this is all still very valuable information in its own way.

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my ���thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[fakeikemen]

The "Cave of Two Lovers" foreshadows the Zutara interactions in "Crossroads of Destiny"

[And maybe after that too; (yeah this part will be purely based on speculation)]

(See also: A meta that everybody has already written but I haven't because I was living under a rock and watched Avatar very recently)

Like seriously, it is so obvious? I see people try to interpret "The Legend Of Oma and Shu" in so many other ways; like yeah, you're free to interpret it however you want but— most people try to make sense of it while thinking that the tale is just a random occurrence? But it's not.

And here's why:

(I'm so sorry, I tried to add the "keep reading" link here because this gets kinda long but it just won't work) (Also click on the pictures if you want better resolution).

The tale of Oma and Shu is about two lovers who belonged to villages that were at war against each other. To continue meeting each other, they learnt earthbending to create caves in the mountain that divides the two villages. But one day Shu didn't come to the caves. He'd died in the war. So Oma unleashed a terrifying display of her power. And then when people were willing to listen to her, she called off the war and strived for peace between both the villages. As a result the city of Omashu was created— as a monument in remembrance of their love.

So in comparison:

1. Two people belonging to the opposite sides of the war

(Other than the 100 year old war that has been going on, Zuko and Katara are involved in a very fundamental conflict: Capture the Avatar Vs. Protect the Avatar.)

2. With the same colour scheme:

3. Share intimate moments in a cave lit by green crystals:

A popular argument for this comparison is that; Oma and Shu had a positive impressions of each other when they first met. Unlike Zuko and Katara where Katara's first impression of Zuko was pretty negative because he invaded her village.

Zuko and Katara's first proper conversation happens in "Crossroads of Destiny" i.e.; the scene I'm talking about here. After this interaction that they have, I think it's safe to say that they did have positive impressions of each other. (Until Zuko made the wrong choice.)

Other than that, about the colour scheme being a coincidence: Here and here are posts by @marsreds about how the colours are definitely not a coincidence.

But seriously guys? Oma and Shu were the FIRST EARTHBENDERS and yet, instead of greens and yellows they were designed with RED and BLUE?!? (I'll take about Oma's green dress below.)

And on that note, why were Zuko and Katara the only ones who were thrown into the catacombs when everybody else was being held at the dungeons? The dungeons wouldn't have been easy to escape, neither for Zuko nor for Katara.

It's because Zuko and Katara were meant to share an intimate moment in a cave that was supposed to jog our visual memory to remind us of the caves built by Oma and Shu.

(Seriously though, I wasn't really paying attention during CoTL and thought that the Omashu legend was just put in to consume screen time, so I missed the red/blue thing. But then I watched CoD and saw the catacombs and I was like: "Isn't this like that cave made by the lovers?" And then I proceeded to have an oh shit moment because, I knew that Zutara was not canon so I never even considered the possibility of the narrative hinting at anything between them but then this happened. I mean, it's pretty darn obvious).

The colour of the crystals being the same in both caves is no coincidence either— if they just wanted two random caves with crystals, then they could've used a different colour because crystals of different colours exist:

Moving on,

The Visual Cues:

According to the colour coding Zuko = Oma (red) and Katara = Shu (blue).

So,

EXHIBIT A:

I feel like this one speaks for itself.

(I personally think that in this parallel Oma is in red because Katara at this point still sees Zuko as the face of the Fire Nation.)

EXHIBIT B:

This sequence of frames show Oma (dressed in green, like Zuko was in the catacombs) and Shu (dressed in his usual blue), standing on neutral territory and reaching out to each other and then being torn apart by the war.

Pretty much like:

The first time they are in each other's presence without the cause of their conflict (i.e. the Avatar), Zuko and Katara reach out to each other empathetically and attain bone deep understanding of each other within a matter of minutes. This whole encounter is in Ba Sing Se, which counts for the neutral territory because it hadn't been completely taken over by Fire Nation at that point.

And honestly? The raw vulnerability and intimacy of this scene and the high emotional energy of their powerful dynamic is just— wow. (I put off my binging spree for a whole day because I didn't have the heart to see Zutara not become canon after all of this.)

And soon after, Zuko and Katara face each other in battle, their tentative friendship torn apart, as they fight from their respective sides of the war.

EXHIBIT C:

Whenever Oma and Shu appear in the same frame during the visualization of the legend, Oma is always on the left half of the frame and Shu is on the right.

Similarly, throughout all their interactions in the Catacombs, whenever the frame exclusively includes Zuko and Katara, Zuko (like Oma) is on the left half of the frame and Katara (like Shu) is on the right.

The parallels (or foils rather):

#1

In CoTL, we see Song who is a healer (cures Iroh of his poisoning). She mentions that she hasn't seen her father since a Fire Nation raid took place in her village. Zuko empathises with her and says that he too hasn't seen his father in a long while. But then he refuses to say anything else about it.

Later Song tries to reach out to Zuko and tries to touch his scar— which Zuko prevents her from. She shows Zuko her own scars to show that she understood him.

And yet, Zuko doesn't open up to her.

After a while of life-changing and eye-opening experiences, in CoD, when Katara has her meltdown and cries while saying that her mother was snatched away from her by the Fire Nation; Zuko sees an opening to offer an olive branch and he takes it, he empathises with her and tells her that how his mother was snatched away by the Fire Nation as well.

Then Zuko opens up to Katara in a show of complete vulnerability. He openly talks about his scar and what he feels about it. In response, Katara offers to heal his scar and then Zuko lets her touch his scar.

It was nothing but a deliberate choice to make Song slightly parallel Katara (a healer, lost a parent because of the war) and then making Zuko not open up to her and not let her touch the scar, only for Katara to be the one he opened up to and allowed to touch the scar.

#2

After being trapped with Aang in the cave in CoTL and sharing an intimate moment with him, as soon as they find their way out, Katara runs straight ahead without looking back.

But after her time with Zuko, trapped in the Catacombs in CoD, while leaving she turns back to look at Zuko.

Judging by the amount of time the animation puts into showing us Aang's disappointment at Katara running off and into making it clear that Katara did look back at Zuko and that Zuko looked right back at her, to me, it feels like the choice to show this was pretty deliberate.

(Turning back to look at a person while leaving is a romantic trope that has been overused to death? Or is it just bollywood?)

Also I wouldn't have paid this much attention to this small detail if not for the fact that just a hint of the Omashu legend theme is played here?

No, I swear I'm not making it up.

The Omashu legend theme is used in CoD:

The Omashu legend theme is largely dominated by the music of a stringed instrument (forgive me, I don't know what it's called) alongwith a steady melody playing in the background.

In CoD, when Katara and Zuko start conversing for real, (i.e.; when Katara says: "I'm sorry I yelled at you.") what sounds like a variation of the background melody in the Omashu legend theme, starts its subtle ascent as the background score, but sans the music of the stringed instrument.

It is when Katara says: "Maybe you could be free of it." [About Zuko's scar], when then first hint of the stringed instrument is heard. It is only a single note of the strings but it's there. And this "single note" sound keeps on repeating at regular intervals with the melody building up until Aang and Iroh burst into the catacombs.

But then, when Katara is leaving with Aang and she turns back to look at Zuko, this time the music that plays for a few seconds at best, is dominated by the stringed instrument again and this time it's unmistakable.

Also I don't think this music is used anywhere else in the course of the whole show? So it can't really be a coincidence? But I don't really know. I'm saying this on the basis of as far as my memory can reach.

And this is as far as canon stands testimony to what I am trying to say here.

But what about the second half of the story yk, the dying thing, you say?

Well this is where the speculations come in.

Speculation Time:

#1

As a thumb rule, a romance foreshadowed by a tragic tale is meant to have a happy ending.

So this time when Katara's (Shu) life is in danger (Azula's lightning bolt), Zuko (Oma) steps in at the nick of time to save her life (by jumping infront of Katara to intercept the lightning).

(Since I have crossed the limit of images in a post, here is a post by @araeph which illustrates this point.)

Yes, I am completely aware that Zuko taking the lightning bolt for Katara is not his declaration of love for her. What I mean to say is that the whole scene was so very painfully obviously romantically framed (the immediate change in music when Zuko realises where the lightning bolt was headed, both of their expressions, Zuko's agonized "Nooooo", the slow-mo throughout the shot).

I am also aware that Zuko would've taken the lightning bolt for anyone. But it is the narrative that demands that Zuko take the lightning bolt for Katara and Katara only. Because this has atleast 10 different payoffs (a direct callback to the Book 2 finale where Azula had shot Aang with the lightning; the grief of which was for Katara to bear but this time Zuko himself stands between the lightning and Katara instead of being the silent spectator, the culmination of both Zuko and Katara's personal character arcs, Zuko's scar would parallel Aang's: Aang got it because he chose Katara over the world and Zuko got it because he was willing to give up the world to save Katara, etc, etc).

Tl;dr: The lightning scene wouldn't hold all that much weight if it wasn't Zuko taking the hit for Katara because the narrative literally demands it.

#2

This is where we start wading into really murky waters.

From mucking around on Tumblr due to Zutara feels™, I came across this post where some of the ideas for Book 4 were written:

• The Southern Water Tribe experienced the longest series of attacks from the Fire Nation. Zuko and Katara become political partners and work together to help end the animosity and repair relations between their two nations.

• Just like how Zuko learned to appreciate the Earth Kingdom, he would learn to appreciate the Water Tribes. Katara also learns to respect the complexity of Fire Nation culture. There is no such thing as an “evil” nation.

And that basically means that Zuko and Katara would've been working together to de-escalate the hostility between their respective nations and improve the relations between the two nations, while learning about each other's cultures simultaneously as the world would be in the process of being rebuilt after the war and they would be major role-players in shaping the new world.

Which is quite similar to how Oma strived for peace between the two villages and then as a result of the improved relations between the villages, the city of Omashu was built as a monument to the love story of Oma and Shu; which might just be symbolic of building a new world where both the villages could live in peace due to the initiative taken by Oma on behalf of herself and Shu.

The story would've come a full circle; that's all I'm saying.

If you've stuck around for this long, thank you for taking the time to read this long ass post with points that you may already have read ♥️

[warriorsredux]

Have you got any worldbuilding tips for anyone else writing fiction in the 'Wild Animals Living in a Society™' genre?

I had an answer for this and it got deleted somehow. Hopefully this one will be better written. 

I would say that the most important thing is to study the animal you’re working with, and not just for biology or genetics. The thing is that animals are not humans. They don’t think, or eat, or communicate, or die like we do. They have an entirely different concept of life that we sometimes can’t even comprehend, much less relate to!  

This means they’re going to value entirely different things than us, which leads to how their culture would develop. Take a bat, for example. What would daylight vs. dark mean to them? What events and ideas would they ascribe gods to? They don’t see very well at all, so would those gods be visualized or “heard”? Would everything be “heard”? How far can they count? What does “community” signify? What do they consider important, beyond food and drink and breeding?

Once you know enough about a bat, you can answer those questions, and the most likely thing is that the answers will be wildly different from what they’d be for us. That is what opens up creativity. Bats aren’t going to care about color, and they may vilify brightness because of the dangers it brings and the confusion and pain they’d associate with it. Then you could assign a mythical figure to these concepts, and perhaps they’d be evil or terrifying predators that disorient wandering stragglers before sending monsters (such as cats or big birds) to devour them. There’s a ton you can do just by thinking a little abstractly with any random animal, bats included!

However, there is one crucial element to all this, and that is empathy from your audience. I remember reading a book about ants, and the author certainly did his research, but he didn’t bother making the ants feel personable enough to catch my attention. They weren’t really characters, just animals doing animal things in a way that I couldn’t find any relatability with. That’s something to avoid. You don’t have to make them people in fur coats, but introducing a certain amount of intelligence, or giving them personalities that make them feel a little like someone you could enjoy a conversation with, or even altering their usual behavior a little, just enough to make them not devour a baby - any or all of that will give a reader/viewer/listener something to hold on to and agree with. 

All of this to say that you should research for multiple reasons, and not just to appease someone who’s itching to push up their glasses and correct you on the mating habits of the tse-tse fly or some shit. It’ll give you material to work with beyond “this is how this animal lives in a group”. Often times, it may give you a better story idea! 

Hopefully this helped you! Thank you for asking. 

[mikami]

Can you do an analysis of Light in part II

It took me a bit, but yes, absolutely! First, I’ll take this spot to promote casuistor’s early canon Light and Yotsuba Arc Light analyses. I absolutely concur with what is said in them and for a full picture of Light, they’re recommended reading. I can’t claim to know if Casuistor would fully agree with what I have to say about Arc 2 Light now, but I can at least hope that this patches together to a coherent characterization, haha.

Eclipse - An Analysis of 23 year old Light Yagami.

Light in after the timeskip is a little tricky because we don’t get to see a lot of him at his ‘status quo’. Very early on Sayu gets kidnapped and from then on we largely see Light in stress situations which is only minorly conductive to figuring out how he changed at baseline between ages 18 and 23. I will still attempt to do this and establish where life brought him in those five years first of all.

First off, he finished his undergraduate college education. This is a 4 year program, so from spring 2005 to spring 2009, this is part of what keeps Light busy. The other is his two jobs as Kira and as L, each of which must have eaten up a good amount of his time. And yet, Light did at least a minimum of socializing as well:

In the first arc, Light and Takada date for exactly two days and knew each other for maybe a month. There isn’t any space for them to be having these in-depth conversations here - it makes much more sense that Light smoothed things over between them after returning from confinement. It’s not like him to leave a blemish like him cheating on and then ghosting Takada stand uncorrected. It appears they became friends afterwards and only fully lost contact when Takada graduated, around a year before Light did (since she didn’t miss a year due to being a Kira suspect)…. This just goes to establish that during the majority of the time-skip, Light absolutely does keep up his charming good boy public image.

He also keeps Misa reasonably happy - though he does not show her any overt affections, he doesn’t neglect her to a degree she’s uncomfortable with and it’s canon that they are sexually active together. (Elaborations: here and here).

I’m bringing all this up immediately because there is often an assumption that the Light we see the most in the second arc is fully reflective of his attitude during the timeskip, which I think is demonstrably untrue.

Nevertheless, it would also be wrong to say Light didn’t change at all.

For one, obviously, he gets a job. Contrary to popular opinion, Light’s work is NOT just being on the Kira Task Force. When the second arc starts up properly, he’s already been working on the information bureau for 6 months. And this is canonically not just a cover as Light mentions work from it that he was involved with:

So this brings Light up to 3 labor-intense jobs - NPA, L, Kira. Even with task delegating, that’s a lot of work. If there’s just one word to describe young adult Light it’s simply ‘busy’. He’s just so busy.

The other thing that notably changed is his relationship to Soichiro. This change took root during the Yotsuba Arc and spans further and further now. Though Light still looks up to his father, he is no longer hesitant to talk back to Soichiro - likewise, Soichiro often defers to him through this arc. The two of them have become adults of equal standing by now. Soichiro is no longer the unquestioned patriarch of the Yagami family. 

Now, there isn’t a lot of space to examine Light’s adult daily life demeanor in, but the image he gives off in the few scenes we get is that he’s become a more serious and stoic person over his years of being busy and living a double life. The double life aspect is especially highlighted in the brief Yagami family scene.

Though we see Light laugh along with his family, his eyes are obscured in both instances. With Light, this is classically a visual cue towards emotional conflict rather than plain lying. The issue here isn’t that he’s faking it, the issue is that his double life existence is taking some amount of mental toll on him.

At the start of the second arc we are introduced to the setting information that Kira has been gaining more and more wide-spread acceptance across the globe. Yet the Yagami family stands firmly against Kira, not exactly to Light’s delight. In the end, his family members are the prototypical ‘good people’ that he’s making his new world for in the first place. I’ve discussed ad nausea that Light desires his father approval, but his sister’s and mother’s opinion matter to him as well. Above all other people, Light loves his family. Five years of playing charades and listening to them vehemently disagree with his actions have created a sense of emotional disconnect though, which I think is visible in his vacant expressions during this scene.  

Since Light isn’t currently facing any thrilling challenge, I get the feeling that his mentality during this timeframe is a sense of ‘just a bit further until….’. He’s not living in the moment so much as dismissing the moment as temporary inconvenience on his quest towards the ideal he is striving for. (Which isn’t to say I see him as totally emotionally absent. This is just the underlying current.)

And that’s where we have Light at the end of Volume 7. And with Volume 8, he is immediately tossed into great emotional peril with Sayu’s kidnapping. This would be the first big segment you’d need to cover for second arc Light, but it’s already been written out brilliant by casuistor in the second half of this post. The bottom line is: Light changes all his plans to his disadvantage because he loves his sister and wants her safe, hurray! This is relevant to every arc Light really, loving his family is a big constant with him.

How much this all stresses him out is evident in him getting loud and abrasive, which isn’t much his usual behavior. (Again, I’d argue Misa seems surprised by this outburst more than anything - I don’t believe this has been a pattern between them at any point during the timeskip.)

Especially since he goes back to being smarmy as is default with her once the threat to his sister is dealt with.

The other big thing that happens in Volume 8 is obviously him meeting Mello and Near, who are the ones reintroducing struggle into Light’s stagnant life.

The meeting with Near immediately evokes the tension of a battle with L for Light - for Mello, the association doesn’t come until Sayu is out of immediate danger. Either way, for the time being the presence of these two kind of anchors Light. Having something to fight and schemes to do to keep his brain actively engaged tends to be something that makes him thrive.

It’s cool that he himself points out how thematically Mello and Near are challenging him on two different facets of his existence. The fact that it’s a challenge is also what sets this apart from Light vs L in the first arc. Though Light hadn’t initially known it, back then L was the established force and Light was the newcomer and challenger. Now Light is established in both areas and Mello and Near are the ones attacking his existent positions - that’s why he views them as roadblocks to outplay rather than as nemeses. He views himself, from the get-go, as the person with the upper hand - this brand of confidence is only possible because the timeskip existed and made Light get used to this as status quo.

And this about sums-up Light in the first half of the second arc. It’s important to note that as far as Light characterization is concerned the second arc really does segment mid volume 9. His father’s death is an event that changes Light significantly on every count.

I wrote it out before, so in the name of not getting super repetitive, here’s the key elements of Soichiro’s death as far as Light is concerned. 

It was not what Light planned. He wanted to kill Matsuda, he never even considered his father would volunteer.

Soichiro dies while expressing happiness that Light is not Kira - thus cementing once and for all that Light will never and can never attain his father’s approval that he yearns for.

Soichiro’s statement also implies that he still had doubts about Light’s innocence, even after mock-shooting him in the face and working alongside him for years. Light also learns his father never trusted him fully.

Basically everything Light wants from his father is negated and denied and then Soichiro is dead, leaving Light with no way to rectify things.

We’d established in the early paragraphs of this that a lot of Light acting as Kira was a matter of waiting until his family approves. Soichiro’s passing now makes this ‘until’ an impossibility. And that hurts badly.

Light deals with this by rationalizing everything to the n-th degree. He focuses himself on killing Mello during his father’s death to push the emotions as far away as possible and after that tries to cut himself off from his father emotionally as much as possible. This includes being avoidant to the rest of his family who remind him of the cocktail of unresolved emotions he has simmering below:

And then changes in his rhetoric and candidness about his thoughts are also immediately apparent. I feel like I cap this scene in every second post I write but it’s simply too relevant to ever be left out:

Again, we’re dealing with the hidden eyes visual cue that usually indicates that Light is saying the truth or is very emotionally conflicted about what he’s saying.

So here we have Light fully verbally acknowledging Kira’s evil-ness, to the world, to himself. Soichiro always thought of Kira as evil and how badly that wounded Light is one of the key segments early in the first arc. Now, Soichiro’s stance is eternal, because Soichiro is gone. Light has to acknowledge it as unchangable fact - so he focuses his rhetoric on the idea of sacrifice once more.

This little speech isn’t for the sake of the task force members, it’s Light’s answer to his dead father; Light re-convincing himself of his whole scheme.

None of these are brand-new thoughts for Light, but the timing and intensity with which they surface here is noteworthy.

(Side Note: from this point on, the usage of the hidden eye cue for Light changes a little - up until here it’d been used pretty much exclusively for Light being emotional. Now it is also often used when we see the scene from Aizawa’s perspective, symbolizing his distrust of Light - how he feels he and Light literally cannot talk eye to to eye because Light is lying. The inconsistency in the visual language is kind of annoying, but ah well.)

Further, Light loses his qualms about going against Soichiro’s morals in front of the task force. Now that there is no father there to judge him anymore, he doesn’t put too much care into keeping up appearances. Where in the Yotsuba Arc Light had made plenty clear that he’s his father’s good son who would never use people, he just… totally gives up on this now. Though in front of his father Light always acted out that he and Misa are an actual couple, he now cheats on her without so much as a feigned hesitance.

His excuse regarding Takada is half-hearted at best as well. Of course, this in part just relates to Ohba not putting any care into writing women or people’s feelings about women. But on a solely in-universe level, this is a notable shift in how manipulative Light lets people see him as.

The rest of the task force simply does not matter to him as more than mere pawns - their opinion of him is only important when it comes to threat level assessment. Light’s actual morality chain is gone now.

Light’s characterization during this time-frame is a little tough to talk about because there isn’t a lot of added value, if that makes sense? He’s the Light we know but less. His character change isn’t defined by new traits emerging so much as old traits falling away: Light doesn’t joke around anymore, Light doesn’t bother to hide duplicitous nature as much anymore. And notably, Light doesn’t really get emotional key moments anymore either.

He’s mostly just… this. He’s laser-focused on his plan and his victory while pushing aside any personal elements. 

Only with Takada, he amps up the charm again and acts more like his first arc self, but that’s not a positive statement to their relationship.

To Light, this is solely functional rather than relaxing. He was going to kill Takada along with everyone else who knows of the notebook right after the 28th, rather than keep her around for use. The only one who would have survived this rampage would have been Mikami, solely because he has the eyes and that is still useful.

And with all of this as our baseline, we move into the finale.

Going into the warehouse, Light is, above all, overconfident. In his mind, he’s won before he even sets foot into the Yellow Box. 

When he unfavorably compares Near to L, he’s in truth saying more about himself and his own mindset than he is saying about Near. He took L more seriously, not because L was better, but because he himself was more alert and aware of the possibility of failure. Earlier in the arc, Light even refers to Near as ‘worse’ than L on the threat-scale... He’s lost all of this now. The level of detached scheming he has reached after his father’s death is to the detriment of his maneuvering ability. 

Light now relies on the fact that he’s the established power and views himself as inherently victorious - though Light has always been arrogant, he used to not fully underestimate people this way. He has become complacent in his arrogance - I do think that is related to how dead inside he is generally, too.

So when it turns out that he has in fact been outplayed, he takes it harsher than he ever took any set-backs before. Instead of taking reparation measures immediately, he reacts with disbelief and badly thought out excuses.

Light is fully caught off-guard by his own failure.

He is laid bare in front of everybody. Light has spent the last five years consistently lying to everybody around him, but now he is proverbially naked. This panel uses the same visual language as when Light regained his memories at the end of the Yotsuba-arc. Here and there, a split-up Light becomes more himself. There, the literally memorywiped Light got reunited with his full plans. Here, Light’s masks fall away and he’s only himself in the eyes of himself and the world. 

Sometimes all you can do is laugh (tm).

Now Light finally gets to lay all the justifications he’s always told himself about his actions as Kira out in the open. And this time, maybe for the first time ever, literally every part of him believes in it. Now that everything has fallen away, this self-justification is literally all that Light has left and he’ll cling to it like a drowning man clings to a log of wood.

I think this is really the moment where Light ‘comes together’ so to speak. Masks and excuses conflate with the person, become one on every level.

For a large amount of the second arc Light has been driving on scheme-y autopilot but now his heart is fully in it once more. There is no more ‘until’. He’s justice now, he erased the last fraction of doubt now.... and it doesn’t help him.

Light is fully unified as himself for the first time.

And he’s also completely alone for the first time.

His entire life, Light had people look up to him. He’s always been adored. There has never ever been a situation in which there was truly nobody on Light’s side - not in all of his 23 years, not until now. 

And that’s the one thing Light can truly not believe. The one certainty in his life has always been that people look up to him. Now he’s on the floor, crawling in his own blood, and nobody is his ally. He can’t and won’t believe it.

And that’s why he asks Ryuk for help. And that’s why Ryuk kills him.

At the very end of his life, Light is a scared child. He comes full circle from the time he found the Death Note and thought he’d die for accidentally using it - he’s back to this fear of death, only this time it’s worse. Then, he had hope to change the world in his days before death. Now, he has changed it, and he realizes that’s not enough. Leaving a legacy is not simply not enough.

Light wants to live.

All these years of feeding himself the narrative of self-sacrifice for the greater good... and at the bottom line below all that, what he really wants is to live.

Too late for that.

[realtimereports]

Creating An Automated Report In Word - Principal Toolbox 9.5

How I Automated My Daily Progress Report As A Software ...

Table of ContentsAutomated Reports - Jotform'Automated Writing': Implications For Digital Communicators ...Automated Journalism – Ai Applications At New York Times ...Quill - Narrative ScienceCan You Tell The Difference Between A Robot And A Stock ...

As online marketers in 2020, there's one significant thing that we share: We're driven by information. Despite whether we're copywriters, social media supervisors, videographers, or web designers, data is key to helping us determine which jobs are successful, which methods may need more of a spending plan, and which methods we need to leave behind.

Even if you have an analytics software application that tracks a campaign's traffic, engagements, ROI, and other KPIs, you'll likely still require to take some time to arrange these numbers, evaluate them, and create a reasonable method to report on your projects to your group or customers. In the past, marketing companies and companies charged full-timers with reporting-related responsibilities. real time reports.

Top use cases in automated report writingphrazor.ai

This is an issue that my Cleveland-based marketing company, PR 20/20, encountered a couple of years back. As part of our procedure, we produce monthly efficiency reports for each of our customers. When we produce them, we pull the information from HubSpot and Google Analytics. Then, we compose a report to describe the information to our colleagues, clients, and task stakeholders.

However, although they were assisting our customers, creating them was holding our team back. While our clients found the reports important, the procedure of pulling the data, examining it, and preparing the reports easily took five hours per customer, per month. This took our marketers far from tasks that might have been productive in the long run, such as conceptualizing new concepts and techniques that could visibly assist their customers.

Automated Reporting With R Markdown

Whenever you're trying to explore or implement a brand-new technique, you'll wish to look into the subject completely. For example, you'll want to recognize your budget and after that look into software application that suits it. You'll likewise wish to determine the advantages and disadvantages of any software you think about. This will help you better acquaint yourself with the world of AI and which tools can actually help you.

Prior to choosing that we desired to improve our reporting method, we 'd been researching AI through resources at our Marketing AI Institute. The Institute is a media company that aims to make AI more friendly for online marketers. time reports. Because we launched the business, we have actually published more than 400 short articles on AI in marketing.

2 billion. After learning about how AI had already streamlined lots of marketing-related procedures, we chose to explore how automation and expert system could help us with our clients at PR 20/20. We ended up being consumed with how smarter technology could increase earnings and lower costs. While doing so, we discovered natural language generation (NLG) innovation that wrote plain English automatically.

You've encountered NLG anytime you have actually used Gmail's Smart Compose function. Or, when you hear Amazon's Alexa react to your voice inquiries. As soon as we discovered a possibly practical NLG software, we decided to run an experiment to see if the AI technology might partly or fully automate our efficiency report writing procedure.

Dream Report For Hmi Panels - Automated Data Collection ...

Now, the next action is to browse for software that works for your company. Here are a couple of things you'll need to consider: You'll want to consider the expense of any of the software application's memberships or costs, as well as the cost to implement it. For example, you might require to contract or employ an engineer to prepare your information and take any actions to ensure the software works smoothly.

Make certain to comprehend what you'll require to do if something isn't working effectively so you do not sustain any emergency costs. As a marketer, you will not want to rely on a full-time engineer to utilize AI software application to run your reports. You'll wish to purchase software that your less tech-savvy staff member can ultimately get trained on and discover. time reports.

As you select software, you'll likewise want to locate case research studies, reviews, or user testimonials that explain how a company used the software to run reports or complete a similar activity. This will provide you an idea of if the item you're considering has a good track record or credibility in the AI software application industry.

Here are two highly-regarded examples: Domo is a data visualization and reporting tool that integrates with significant data and analytics platforms including Google Analytics. When you link these platforms, you can use a control panel to set up and generate data visualizations or reports for your customers. These visualizations include pie charts, other graphs, and word clouds.

Manual Reports Vs. Report Automation & Scheduling Tools

The platform offers guides on how to produce datasets or spreadsheets that its algorithms will recognize as well as a drag and drop guide which asks you to submit specific info such as "Monthly Budget plan." Here's a quick demo that shows Domo in action: This reporting software application permits you to generate reports or reporting control panels that your group and clients can edit and cross-collaborate on.

Sales Reporting 101: Here's Everything ...propellercrm.com

Aside from data visualizations, you can likewise include boxes to your control panels that reveal you scorecards that note whether you're hitting your goals or not, in addition to filters that assist you drill down on particular aspects of your task. Here's a demo explaining how small companies such as nonprofits can take advantage of the software application's dashboard reporting features: Despite which product you pick, you'll likely require to prepare your data in a manner that your software application's robotic or algorithm could quickly acknowledge and analyze - automatic report.

Plecto ApS

Address: Viby Ringvej 11, 1 tv

Phone: +45 71 99 71 60

Email: support@plecto.com

Real-time insights

The software application needed structured information in columns and rows to generate text. So, first, we had to pull HubSpot and Google Analytics information into spreadsheets. Because doing this manually would take excessive time and limit the potential time conserved with automation, we utilized APIs and constructed our own algorithm using Google Apps Scripts to pull information into a Google Sheet.

We understood NLG software application would be unlikely to deal with entirely custom-made reports well. So, we developed a design template for these reports that didn't alter every month. To produce a format for each report, we determined a set of 12 common questions we were trying to address for clients monthly: Just how much traffic concerned your site, and how does that compare to the previous month? In 2015? How engaged was last month's site traffic? What were the top traffic-driving channels? Was there fluctuation in general traffic, and if so, what caused it? How did the blog site carry out last month? How engaged was blog site traffic? What were the top-performing article? Were there any modifications in blog traffic last month, and if so, what triggered them? The number of objectives or new contacts were generated last month? What were the top transforming pages? Where did objectives or brand-new contacts originate? Was there any modification in overall goals or lead volume, and if so, what was responsible? A great AI software will either permit you to develop files or even dashboards, as your reports.

04 Instant Asbestos Survey Report In Your Format - Start Software

When we 'd structured our data and developed a basic report format, we had to translate our basic report format into an NLG template. The design template was basically a completed version of an efficiency report. When the NLG software runs, this report gets copied into the NLG software application. Then rules are applied to the copy to programmatically update what's written based upon the structured data offered.

------------[ 1 ]------------

Search Funded Research Grants And Contracts - Details

Table of ContentsAutomated Sports Journalism. The Anafut Case Study, The Bot ...Writetolearn - A Web-based Ai-automated Writing Scoring ...Dawn Of The Intelligently Automated Agency - Pr 20/20Automated Writing Evaluation - Excelsior College OwlGuide To Automated Journalism - Academic Commons

The last output might be a CSV, Word, or Google Doc file. Even if you're working with a trustworthy AI software, you'll still want to check it and fix any problems that emerge. This avoids any AI-related occurrences from happening when the tool is actively being utilized by workers or on tight deadlines.

Plecto ApS

Address: Viby Ringvej 11, 1 tv

Phone: +45 71 99 71 60

Email: support@plecto.com

Real-time insights

And we ultimately perfected the process to regularly produce clear, precise automated efficiency reports. If a software application company that you work with deals a trial or discount rate for testing out their product, leverage it. This will permit you to witness first-hand if the expense of the item outweighs its advantages, or give you time to determine if there is a preferable item that you need to be utilizing - time reports.

When you do this, here are a couple of things that you'll wish to examine: The amount of time that the software is saving workers, or if there were any bugs, just how much time the software application cost. The amount of other efficient or revenue-generating tasks your group was able to get done with the extra time you had.

Sales Reporting 101: Here's Everything ...propellercrm.com

As we tracked our brand-new automated efficiency reports, we discovered that our tools took a portion of the time to produce the very same report that we took hours to create. Furthermore, the level of information in our client reports is now constant throughout all accounts. Prior to we carried out AI tools, the reports were only as strong as the account team's convenience level of analyzing marketing efficiency reports.

Study Report Writer - Synchrogenix

The only handbook part of the process now involves spot-checking the data for precision, applying some styling, and after that sending out. real-time progress reporting. What when took us five hours per report now takes 10 minutes. While the original process needed to be managed by multiple teammates, only one employee is needed for spot-checking.

Although our team has the ability to gain access to AI companies and specialists for our in-office experiments, other little service online marketers can likewise benefit from this strategy rather economically. Nevertheless, bear in mind that AI execution can take some time. For us, we required to put time into developing structured datasets, along with our Report design template so that our AI software application could read our analytics and draft reports correctly.

Complete info, faster conclusions, and much better decision-making digital-era success hinges on them (automatic reporting). However an organization with a single version of the reality, spreadsheets filled with accurate information, is still a couple of rungs brief of success. One reason: management needs easy-to-digest reports that translate the numbers. That tends to lead to cleaner interpretations and crisper decision-making.

These items drill-down into ab organization's database and auto-produce easy-to-understand, written reports from the very same information that Microsoft Excel utilizes to create graphics. Some of these relatively brand-new AI tools also known as natural language generation, or NLG, software application are variations of the exact same technology that helps major media companies produce computer-written news products.

Top Use Cases In Automated Report Writing - Phrazor

Anna Schena, a senior item manager at Story Science, another AI-generated composing toolmaker, states that "data storytelling" indicates users do not have to discover how to evaluate spreadsheets or glean insights from long rows of control panel dials. "Easy-to-understand language and one-click cooperation features ensure that everybody in a business really comprehends the data, all the time," Schena says.

States Sharon Daniels, CEO of Arria: "NLG-driven, multi-dimensional stories are the advancement that [data-generated] visuals were years back. The big data issue was partially addressed with the development of organization intelligence dashboards," she discusses. "However while visuals paint a picture, they're not the complete image." Adds Daniels: "The ability to gain access to key details in near real-time communicated as if written

[adhdadulting]

Breaking tasks down vs getting overwhelmed by too many tasks

tl;dr:. If you have tasks to do and can't start break them down into more specific tasks and if you struggle with too many small tasks overwhelming you have a masterlist of tasks where each task leads to a different list of more specific subtasks (and each of those can lead to another list if you need).

This is a problem I struggle with quite often. If I have a big task, such as “clean flat” or “study” I can’t find a way to start, the task is too big or too scary or the thought of doing it wrong paralyzes me and I just. Sit there. Doing other things and feeling bad about it, or just staring at nothing because “I can’t do this other thing before I have done this thing”. The solution to that? Breaking tasks down to smaller tasks, make it less big and scary!

Now the issue with “break it down into smaller task” is that often that means that “study” becomes “study for half an hour” or “study for biochemistry exam” and while that’s slightly better, it doesn’t really help that much. Because the issue isn’t the task taking up less time, the issue is that the task isn’t specific enough.

“study for biochemistry exam” is better than just “study”. But it still doesn’t tell me where to start, because what does that mean? I mean I know how to study, I should do a practice test right? And read through the book again! And take more notes! And sort through my notes! Maybe draw some visualizing stuff? Talk to friends about it? When is the exam again?

So then let’s break it down: Figure out all the things that “study biochemistry” means and write them down, sort them by priority and now I can get started right? Well no. Because “sort through notes” is still not specific enough, so I break it down more into really tiny things. “sort through notes” becomes “find notes” “read first few pages” “mark important things” “write down questions as you have them” and hell this isn’t even a very good breakdown - I lied, I don’t actually know how to study, but somehow I still got a bachelor’s degree, don’t ask me how.

But hey I have lots of tiny managable tasks now, so now I can study? Right? Wrong.

Because here’s the second part of the problem, the part that makes it really REALLY frustrating. Once I have written all these tasks down, even though they’re now all small and managable and I’ve probably even sorted them by priority and I know which of them I should start with, my todo list now looks like this:

1) Find notes

2) Mark important things in notes

3) Write down questions you have on another piece of paper while looking at notes

4) Find your books

5) Find relevant chapters

6) Try to find answers to questions in books

7) Write cuecards from the things that you marked as important

8) study cuecards

9) do a practice test

10) see how you did on the test

11) add testquestions to cuecards

12) add any testquestions you were confused about to questions

13) meet with friends and discuss questions you have problems with

And so on and so forth, I look at this list and I despair because I haven’t even done the first one. And these are so many. And the exam is in two days, oh god why didn’t I start studying earlier??

Also that’s just an incomplete list for what was ONE task. Never mind the other things I should study for. Never mind the flat I should be cleaning or that I should get the groceries. There’s a reason I never eat very healthy when I’m studying for exams.

The issue now is that I’m not getting overwhelmed by one unspecific big scary task, instead I’m getting overwhelmed by the sheer NUMBER of tasks. And of course in this example, that’s even somewhat rational. That’s a lot to do in not a lot of time, but this happens even when all the tasks are in fact perfectly doable in the amount of time I have. I’m just staring at them and get overwhelmed.

The solution that somewhat works for me for this is this:

Don’t EVER put all your small broken down tasks in one place. Don’t. No. Bad.

Instead what I do is this:

On one page of my notebook/planner/word document: General todo list in the form of 1)study 2) clean flat and so on, each referring to another page, that then breaks it down more into 1.1) study biochemistry, 1.2) study algebra and so on and 2.1)clean kitchen 2.2) clean bedroom ...

You can do that for a lot longer or you can now immediatly jump to that long list up there. It certainly helps keep your mind on just the general task for right now and keeps you from being overwhelmed by all the other stuff you need to do... somewhat.

This is still not perfect, because I still know in the back of my head that there is so much to do and it’s hard to know what to do next! And even if you’re really great at prioritising things, sometimes there are outside factors that keep you from doing the next most important thing. “make a doctors appointment” may not be possible on a weekend. “discuss your questions with friends” is only possible if your friends have time. And some tasks have shifting priorities. “get groceries” isn’t pressing when you’ve still got a lot of food in the fridge, but it sure is when you don’t.

So another things that I do is DAILY TASKS: I personally use habitica for this, but you could also write these on a pin board or put them in your planner or whatever.

I have a daily on habitica, that simply says “look in notebook, make plan for today/tomorrow”. What that means is that either in the evening or the morning I look in my notebook and I decide what to do on the day. Are the groceries low? Cool let‘s write that in there. I should study, so I pick a few specific things to study and leave the rest alone. I never go for more than 7 specific tasks - if I get done with them early I can always go back for more. But usually I’m happy if I manage to do most of them. Because doing things is hard.

[violetsystems]

personal

I’ve been able to sleep until six the last few days.  I’ve been on this miserable eight to four sleep schedule.  I ordered a silent vortex coffee grinder specifically to be less annoying in this regard.   Even if I could literally just grind the coffee the night before.  I also bought a rug cleaner for the first time in my life.  It’s amazing the things you don’t realize you need for a home let alone an office.  Last night I received an email from LinkedIn asking me to weigh in on a conversation about higher education.  The only public facing social networking site I really use actively I pay for.  They bought a service called Linda.com years ago.  It was probably the most important site to me for instructional videos.  These days it is included on the platform so I spend a fair amount of time keeping my job skills plausible.  I learned pretty hard the last six months that my professional network had all but evaporated.  A hard thing to face when you worked with your friends for over twenty years.  But people have to move on.  I sometimes make decisions that seem smarter in retrospect.  You could even mistake it for premonition but I just call it good judgement.  I made the decision to start the process of becoming a LLC.  It was pretty easy to do once you paid the four hundred dollars.  There’s services out there online that will do the legal part for you.  I chose VS consulting as the name which becomes real around mid December if the Secretary of State accepts it.  They asked me to cut the ribbon virtually.  I congratulated myself in silence but this is pretty much the first place I’ve shared the news with.  My mom didn’t quite understand what I had done and my dad is an accountant.  I haven’t told him yet either.  I got the idea seeing some of the people who still work at my old job starting their own side businesses.  Crazy to see people still employed having extra jobs in this economy.  But for the most part I don’t really compare my experience to anyone’s anymore.  So I just look forward.  There are a lot of ways I generate income.  Some of them aren’t very lucrative.  I released another ep Monday.  Three of my friends from across the world I never really talk to bought it immediately.  It makes sense because my music is how they know me.  So that’s how they keep up with me.  From there, Bandcamp revenue share Friday passed with little or no fanfare.  It still doesn’t change the fact I owe taxes on the income above a certain amount if I report it.  We all know how the rich hate paying those taxes.  And the whole world now knows that I work for a LLC on the premier professional social networking site.  It’s a win win for me because I can still look for a job but I appear employed.  It’s also a nice buffer in these times for your resume.  In retrospect, every article I read says the end of December is a perfect time to start your own business.  Mostly because January 1st allows you to start with a fresh balance sheet and good accounting.  So if anything my New Year’s resolution is to be cleaner and more concise about everything.  Even if the rest of society’s ethics and accountability gets muddier as COVID-19 and the election process drags on.  The only things I really have to worry about this next year are documenting my spending, opening up a business checking account, and deducting business expenses.  Sounds like a job to me.

There are tools you need for a job.  I bought a year long subscription to Creative Cloud.  I had it for free for years.  I worked in a visual communications department for ten years.  I saw the most amazing work every morning hung up outside my office.  It inspired me to learn about print making and screen printing.  I even owned Adobe stock at one point because I realized Microsoft Office wasn’t doing my resume much justice.  I shudder to think how many jokes were cracked by the Workday staff over my Chanel submission.  Truth is nobody called back for interviews at any of the places I applied.  And this doesn’t really stop me from keeping my eyes out for a position anywhere.  But if we are talking about generating income, I can do that all by myself.  I can also hire people and deduct more business expenses if I felt that was an option.  Which starts to get into the meat of why the job market and economy is so fucked up in America.  A lot of people didn’t fall in line on a balance sheet when COVID-19 came crashing down last February.  And when the fiscal year came time to start fresh, they thinned their liabilities.  Companies are now thinking in quarters rather than years at this point.  And small businesses like myself also have to think the same because I now owe the IRS money every three months.  The accounting side of it doesn’t really bore me.  I’ve done every IT role in the business pretty much over twenty years.  I guess that’s why LinkedIn calls on me to offer an opinion.  I’ve never had to be this hardcore about the finances.  Another great reason why I spend so much time in spreadsheets aside from writing on the internet.  It’s much easier to approach a professional consultant with twenty years of experience with an invoice than it is to tether them to your payroll with benefits.  I’m always having to think six months ahead myself.  This has an advantage to it insofar that I don’t often look back.  You pay your taxes and you move on.  There are many things I could do to generate income.  I could make a zine and sell it quarterly on bandcamp along with shirts.  I could post flyers around the neighborhood offering after christmas tech support.  I could scour the net for opportunities to audit galvanized IT departments.  I could do all this with more confidence if I could say I am employed.  I could also hire someone to help me.  But I could do none of this and deduct expenses without applying for a sole proprietorship.  And truth be told I already have to claim this for the New York Stock Exchange.  So if you had to put a label on what I do now it isn’t really that much different from any other business.  The state’s richest men started as LLCs.  They’re also the biggest pricks who pay the least taxes.  Trickle down economics is a funny concept.  Businesses offer jobs they deduct from their income therefore paying less to the pool.  This would be fine for small income generating businesses.  But Ken Griffin would say otherwise as he and other rich people benefit from this structure.  They say the American Dream is owning your own business.  So welcome to my personal nightmare.  I hope you don’t mind me taking the itemized deductions after how I’ve been treated.

I don’t actually know how it’s going to work out.  I just know I don’t want to appear unemployed while corporate America expects me to wink and make them more money.  There are investments that have worked out for me as volatile as they might be.  One Chinese company I invested in has made the CEO twelve times richer.  I own four hundred and twenty shares of that company in a brokerage.  My intent is to hold on to them for the long term possibly making someone richer at my own risk.  I could short the entire next year to my heart’s content.  My credit scores have gone through the roof.  Nobody has had any answers for me on what to do.  Nobody has coached me.  I read.  I think.  I come up with solutions to my problems.  And I put money in the right places.  That doesn’t mean anything is a sure thing.  Especially when my government finds it more advantageous to punish other countries while forgetting about it’s own people.  I am absolutely in the dark about everything.  Everything except running my own business in America.  I already have income I have to report over the next three years due the CARES act.  So that is income I will deduct.  This is how it works here in America.  You seize the means of production and you go to work.  If it seems backward for me, you wouldn’t know the half.  My life is so fucked up in terms of how hazy and confusing other people have made it.  People invaded my life on pretenses that I can’t even begin to explain.  And part of being a strong, responsible adult is engineering your way out of these problems.  And for the most part, I’ve engineered myself into a fort that overlooks the CTA train.  And a small portion of that fort can be written off as an office.  Which in some ways if you do the math makes rent and utilities cheaper in the long run.  I don’t make the rules.  This is how America works.  A LLC gets a tax id number.  It allows you better options for retirement savings with a SEP IRA.  You can apply for business accounts and waive taxes on business purchases.  Even the family dollar around the corner has a sign in the window reminding me I can apply for tax free status.  Maybe they’re mostly to blame for planting the idea in my head.  I’m the one who made the call to apply.  Nobody held my hand.  You could also get audited by the IRS.  And I’m sure the IRS would have to figure out how I got into this situation in the first place.  Maybe they’d offer me a job. There’s other fantasies in my life I could imagine happening more than that waking nightmare.  Like actually having money to retire.  I could be travelling around the world cleaning up the mess mark to market accounting has left on big business.  The scars on economies the rich have pock marked on the middle class.  Or I could just keep generating income and be my own boss here in my kitchen.  The one thing I do know is that is sexier to be confident enough to move ahead with your own plan slowly than to short a bunch of stocks disruptively and brag about it on the internet.  You could call it my three year plan.  Don’t ask me how bonds factor in that equation.  I’m not a spy.  What I am is a guy that is trying to be the solution and not the victim.  And that guy doesn’t ever want to be a burden on the people I love.  So that guy is going to keep doing what he does.  And I’m not going to lie that you inspire me to do so.  As sexy and confident as I’m born to be.  <3 Tim

[heatherwitch]

So, you want to be a witch? #5

Part one talks about spells, wards, sigils, cleansing, divination and more!

Part two talks about grimoires, crystals, wands, altars and more!

Part three talks about this vs. that for a lot of the common terms you hear!

Part four talks about types of witches, deities and more!

It can be easy to feel super overwhelmed when you’re first starting off. This post is for very new witches who have limited knowledge and would like a broad overview! These are my opinions, feel free to disagree but be polite about it. *And please note that you do not have to do every thing I listed, this is just an overview of basic terms/things some witches do.*

This post is a little different than the other ones, it’s all about casting spells!

Grounding and cleansing yourself:

It often is harder to focus on a spell if you are stuck in your own thoughts or have the energies from the day on you. I’ll often start with cleansing myself, by burning a sage or cedar herb bundle, and then sit and take some focused breaths and becoming present in my body.

Casting a circle:

Many witches cast circles as a way to protect themselves from outside energies or unwanted spirits while they’re performing magic. You can use the elements, a salt circle, invoking a deity, etc. Click the links to learn more!  [X] [X] It is recommend you stay in the circle until you finish the spell and close the circle.

Drawing energy from something:

(So you don’t draw all the energy from yourself, which can be draining). Energy can be drawn from the elements, from crystals, deities, and many other things. This can be done by visualization and energy work or by asking. 

Casting the spell:

This is when you use your ingredients and the guidelines of the spell. It is best to be completely focused so try to avoid having distractions (like your phone) and have everything you need ready to go. 

Closing any loopholes:

Often, this is not included in the written spell so this is up to you. I usually write a list of loopholes I want to close before starting this process, so it’s handy when I’m finished with the spell! If it’s a spell you want to come to light in a certain way or by a certain time, this is when you clarify that. This post has more info [X]

Completing the spell and dispelling any energies:

Once you have finished with the loopholes, finishing the spell can be as simple as “this spell is now complete”. I recommend dispelling any energies you called on and returning them to where they belong. If you didn’t cast a circle, now is the time to rid of anything you may have attracted by performing your spell.

Closing the circle:

Closing a circle is fairly simple! All you have to do is the reverse of how you cast it. (If it was with smoke for example, you would then undo the circle by burning the bundle in the opposite direction).

Cleansing and grounding:

Cleansing here is optional, depends on the spell, how you’re feeling, and if you want to do it. Grounding is highly recommended. This can come in many forms. I often use water, putting drops on the key points of my face (forehead, eyelids, cheeks, nose, lips and chin) and sit while taking focused breaths.

Other considerations:

Consent: If you are casting a spell on a specific person and they do not know or they have not given you permission, you do not have their consent. Spells cast to bring a general thing (to attract love instead of to make a specific person fall in love with you), with permission, or on yourself don’t need consent/already have it!

Ingredients: Ingredients are often an important part of the spell and are included for a reason. They either represent a part of the spell, what the spell is trying to accomplish or are something you can draw energy from.

Alternative ingredients: If you can’t get your hands on a certain ingredient, you can almost always use a substitute ingredient. Just use correspondences and trust your gut while searching for the perfect substitute. Many people believe: Clear quartz = any crystal, Rosemary = any herb, Rose = any flower. But really, look at what that ingredient is meant to bring to the spell, then find an alternative that still brings that!

Discarding used ingredients: (Click me)

Belief: If you don’t believe the spell is going to work - it probably won’t. To combat this, take the time to find a spell you really believe will work and write a list of ways you might expect it to present in your life.

Intention: Similar to belief. I’ve performed magic only using a pen, paper, and my powerful intentions. The more powerfully you want something and bring it into your life, the more likely it is to appear. Intent is the end goal, why you’re casting the spell. 

Deities: I do not use deities in my spellwork (or witchcraft at all). There is a huge amount of respect and connection-building that is required before asking a deity to help with your spell. I tend to avoid spells where a listed ingredient is a deity. (If you do have a connection with a deity, by all means ask them to help you out if that feels right to you!)

Energy: It is common to feel drained after casting a spell. Grounding yourself, casting a circle and drawing energy from other things all help with this, but allow yourself some time to recover. [X]

When your spell fails: (click me)

Nullifying your spell: (click me)

Writing your own spells: [X] [X] [X] [X]

Related posts: [X] [X] [X] [X] [X]

(Click here for the other parts in this series!)

[gelo-p]

What trying for T10 ~kinda~ looks like

My friend said that the last thing I wrote was all over the place so I decided to rewrite all of it. >_>

So what’s this about?

This is just my own experience (and in a way, method) about tiering in Bandori; most of these, you’ve probably already read somewhere else. To be frank, tiering in Bandori can be summarized as “get the best team you can, prepare lots of flames, pick meta songs, and go like hell”. However, I think it’s important to visualize and plan out what “going like hell” really means.

Most of these will be written as if you’re trying to get into T10 as a solo player.

First things first - Bestdori is your friend.

Bestdori is a website that lets you determine exactly how strong your team really is. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so; it’s invaluable in making estimates. Set up an account (you don’t have to, but it’s convenient later on), enter your cards and area items, and then use Bestdori’s team builder feature to determine what the best team to use is for a specific event. This post assumes you won’t need help in using Bestdori; I might write a separate post for that later.

(huge thanks to u/NonSpicyBurrito over at reddit and the rest of the Bestdori team for making an excellent tool ^^)

Table of Contents

“Estimate how much EP you’ll need”: A Fallacy

There are no guarantees, so prepare to lose efficiently

Automating the Guesswork: The T10 Calc

Input: Active Hours Per Day

Input: Multi-Live Score (includes VS Live)

Input: Multi-Live Duration

Input: Challenge Live Score

Input: Challenge Live Duration

Input: Final Hours Sprint

Planning your daily Multi-Live Progress

Planning your daily Challenge Live Progress

Hold on - what’s a “set” ???

Tracking your Flames (and CL’s) per day

Miscellaneous Tips

Final words

I. “Estimate how much EP you’ll need”: A Fallacy

Getting into your desired tier (T1, T2, T3, T10, T100, T1000...) is all about getting enough event points (EP) before the event ends, and nothing else. If only 99 people have higher EP than you, then congrats, you make it to the top 100! And if your EP is so high that only 9 people have it higher, then you make it to the Top 10.

However, there is no good way to estimate how much EP you’ll need to ensure getting into the desired tier. The moment you think you’ve figured it out, the other players start upping the ante and all of a sudden you’re left in the dust.

For example: when I first started estimating the EP I’ll need for Cycling Seasons, I figured 16M would be enough for T10, based on some foolish assumption using data from the last Challenge Live (which was My Ideal). Having read other posts by the other T10′s (post-event), they wondered if 18M would be enough. Surprise, the cutoff turned out to be 18.5M - and I personally did 19.2M.

Where did 18.5M come from? Nowhere. Nobody decided before the event to just “stop” at 18.5M and call it a day. And that’s why you can never actually estimate how much EP you’ll need. As long as there’s someone crazier than you out there, that cutoff is going to be pushed higher and higher.

II. There are no guarantees, so prepare to lose efficiently

Read that header again and again until it sinks in. There are no guarantees. I can tell from personal experience: during the Cycling Seasons event, the player who finished at T11 had a better team than I did (I know from periodically tracking their score), but I was able to put in more effort.

All you can do is put in as much effort as you can, using the best team you can get your hands on; however, should this not work out, you should also learn how to lose efficiently.

There will come a point where the amount of effort you’ve done will almost always** guarantee you a spot in T100. You have to decide at that point - usually after 2 days of playing at T10 pace - if keeping up with T10 is worth it or not. If you decide not to, then congratulations on an early T100.

** In the absolutely rare-as-hell event (never happened before AFAIK because seriously this is crazy AF) that 100 people fight for T10, then you’re going to have to put more effort to stay in T100. Otherwise, just play defensively, and keep yourself above T50. It’ll be easy at that point.

III. Automating the Guesswork: The T10 Calc

If you’re still willing to take the risk, then let’s start talking numbers. This was the first step in planning for me: making sure I know the numbers behind what I’m about to do.

First, grab a copy of the T10 Calc spreadsheet, since this pretty much streamlines the entire estimation process.

T10 Calc over at Google Sheets

Note: I know it’s ironic how it’s called the T10 Calc when I said there are no guarantees, but that’s what I call it, so... ^^;

Go to the EP Estimator Sheet and fill up the inputs.

Num Full Days - An event is always N Days + 6 hours long, so enter the number of full days here. It’s officially announced a day before the actual event, but sometimes Bestdori already has that info as early as a week before. Some events are just 6 days long (lucky~) while others can reach up to 12 (fuck me ugh). Typically it’s 8 or 9.

Num Hours Last Day - An even is always N Days + 6 hours long, so usually keep this at 6. There is a special case where you might want to change this though, discussed later.

Active Hours per Day - The number of hours per day you’ll be playing. This doesn’t include breaks, i.e. Active Hours + Sleep + Breaks = 24

ML Score - Compute using Bestdori. This is your score when playing in Multi-Live / VS Live using 3 flames.

ML Duration  - The average duration of a Multi-Live. This is different from the average duration of a song.

CP required per CL: This pretty much stays at 800, since this is the most efficient, time-wise. (There are 200/400-CP CL’s, we won’t use those)

CL score - Compute using Bestdori. This is your score when playing a Challenge Live. If the event isn’t a Challenge Live, please set this to 0 or leave blank.

CL duration - The average duration of a Challenge Live. This is different from the average duration of the challenge song.

Final hours sprint - Specific to Challenge Live events, it’s possible to hold back your CP’s, and instead use them during the final 6 hours of the event.

IV. Input: Active Hours Per Day

The average person can do 14 active hours per day. Which means 14 hours of staring at your phone, and 10 hours left for eating / having a life / sleeping. I found this the hard way; you’re free to make your own estimate. You can bump this up to something higher (I did 14.3), but make sure you don’t lose too much sleep / time for other activities. The higher you can push this, the better.

Have you ever wondered how T1 / T2 / T3′s always get crazy-high scores? Well, they can set this to 24 by sharing their account with teammates using the Data Transfer feature. By having teammates who can take over your account while you rest, your account can do 24 hours a day of gaming. I personally don’t do it (I’m a soloist all the way~), but it doesn’t seem to be a banned practice, so get your own team if you want those titles.

Thankfully, there are only 1-to-3 of these accounts per event, leaving some space for solo players to actually get to T10. WARNING THOUGH! If after a couple of days, you can’t get into T10 because they all have crazy high scores, give up and settle for T100. You can’t fight a 24/7 account.

V. Input: Multi-Live Score (includes VS Lives)

Note: For VS Live Events, you’re obviously expected to play VS Lives instead of Multi-Lives, but for the purpose of naming variables I stuck to the “ML” naming scheme.

No matter the event type, you’re going to have to compute an ML score using Bestdori.

Always use 3 flames for your computation, and because Bestdori gives you the maximum points achievable, dial it down for safety. In my case, I used 4275 instead of 4380. Initially it was 4200; however, after 2 days, I realized that it’s too safe (my actual score was waaaay above my calc sheet’s estimate) so I bumped it up to 4275.

Please note that different event types will give you different scores for the same team; Multi-Lives during Challenge Live events give you a lower EP compared to, say, a VS Live event, because during a Challenge Live, you’re expected to get some of your scores from the Challenge Lives. VS Lives give just a bit more EP than Challenge Lives; however, there won’t actually be any Challenge Lives, so the final EP is smaller. Normal events (where you’re expected to farm using ML’s alone) give the highest EP per ML.

ML Score is directly tied to the room score, and there are four ways to bump it up:

Increase your band’s power. Max out all your area items, and follow Bestdori’s recommended band. If you can afford it, buy your way into better members. Prioritize maxing out items that match the Characters / Attribute of the event.

Choose a Leader with a 90/100/110/115% score boost, and max out their level. Bestdori would have already done this for you. For VS Live, increase everyone’s skill levels.

Join private rooms (where the members are high-level). Joining the Grand Room is okay (that’s what I did), but if you have high-level friends who can help you out with their high-level bands, then it’s better. Conversely, during VS Lives, you want to join a private room where everyone is weaker than you are.

Pick meta songs. Meta songs score higher in general compared to non-meta songs, so try to pick them as much as you can. These include Jumpin’, Unite from A to Z, Home Street, KIZUNA MUSIC, etc... You probably recognize this list.

VI. Input: Multi-Live Duration (includes VS Lives)

This is the amount it takes to complete an entire Multi-Live / VS Live, from the moment you press the “Live” button to the next time you’re able to press it again.

There are two ways to dial down ML duration:

Join private rooms. On average, ML duration is 3.5 minutes in the Grand Room; if someone disconnects, or takes a reeeeally long time to pick, it can take up to 4, even 5 minutes. A good game in a public room is 2 mins and 45 secs long, but those are far and few in between. By joining a private room and agreeing beforehand which songs and difficulties to pick, you can keep the average ML duration down.

Pick meta songs, again. Meta songs are shorter in general compared to non-meta songs, that’s why they’re really good for farming event points. You will keep running into these songs once you start tiering.

SPECIAL NOTE FOR VS LIVES: During VS Lives, there’s an Event Song room, which might prove to be faster than the Free Song room, since there’s no need to select the song. This is especially the case if the event song is a meta song; case in point, the Roselia vs Afterglow event, where the event song was Passionate Anthem. I suggest checking out the Event Room (and song) during the first day, and see if the ML Score and ML Duration will give you a better final EP compared to taking your chances over at the Free Song room.

VII. Input: Challenge Live Score

Note: If you’re not playing a Challenge Live event, set this to 0!

Specific to Challenge Live Events, you also have to compute your CL score. A Challenge Live event will have a list of featured songs (you can look this up in advance using Bestdori). Take for example the Cycling Seasons event:

Songs higher up in the list are better for your score, but I find that the first Hard song in the list is less tiring to play, giving me more consistent scores (in this case, Brand New Days level 18).

If you can genuinely manage playing the EX / SP songs multiple times consistently, then please do so.

Once you’ve settled into a song, calculate your CL score. Always use 800 CP.

Again, better to have a safety net, so instead of using 26,380 I used 25000. You’ll get a good feel for this value once you’ve actually started playing the CL songs. Just update the estimate later on.

You can bump this up by getting all members of your team as strong as you can. Area items, max skill levels.

VIII. Input: Challenge Live Duration

Like ML Duration, this is the amount it takes to complete an entire Challenge Live, from the moment you press the “Live” button to the next time you’re able to press it again. There’s no way to bring this down, since you’ll be playing the same song over and over again (to get a consistent CL score, see above).

Use an external timer to get the exact time this takes. Add a few seconds for safety, because the phone slows down after some time. For example, Brand New Days takes 2 mins 12 seconds long, but it can slow down up to 2 mins 22 secs long (according to my timing) once you’ve played enough.

IX. Input: Final Hours Sprint

This is unique to Challenge Lives, because it’s possible to stock up on CP’s and use them all up during the last hours of the event.

When this is set to > 0 (but capped at 6, for the number of hours in the last day), the estimator will calculate how much CP you should save up to perform the sprint during the last day.

A sprint is simply a period where you start using your CP’s. If you save up your CP’s until the very last hours, it’s possible to catch a few people off guard who thought you’ve ran out of CP already. Sprints let you earn a really high amount of EP in a short time, letting you overtake other people. There are still daily sprints, but not as much as the final day sprint. (You will still play Challenge Lives every day, you’re just not going to use them all up)

This will not affect your final score; this is just so your opponents could be tricked into not giving too much effort, thinking you use up your CP everyday. Please note however that most T10′s will also hold back their daily CP usage, but from what I gathered, most of them will sprint during the last full day, and not during the final 6 hours.

This won’t have any advantage if everyone else decides to hold back their sprints until the final 6 hours.

X. Planning your daily Multi-Live Progress

Now that you know how much effort you’ll be putting into tiering, you can now determine your Final EP and the number of Flames you’ll need to get there.

If you’re lacking in Flames, better start buying stars early. The premium boxes are the most economic; however, you have to buy them months in advance, because it takes 25 days to reap the full benefits.

If you’re not satisfied with your estimated Final EP, then you have to start finding ways to bring up your live scores, bring down your live durations, or increase how much time you can play for in a day.

Use Bestdori to simulate past events and see how you’ll fare. ^_^

Now, assuming you’re already satisfied with your target EP (again, no guarantees...), the next step is to ensure you’re on track getting there. This is where Flames used per full day comes in. If you want to evenly distribute the load over the duration of the entire event, then you must use at least this much flames per day. It’s easy to think you’ll just catch up, but might prove difficult (remember, you barely have enough time for sleep and other activities). On the other hand, if after reaching your quota you have enough strength to keep going, then please do so.

Of course, the final 6 hours isn’t a full day, so for that, please refer to Flames used during final hours.

XI. Planning your daily Challenge Live Progress

Note: The Challenge Live section should become empty if CL score is set to 0; conversely, the Normal / VS / Live Goals / Mission section should be empty if CL score is set to > 0. Also, a lot of these are just stats used in computing more important stats.

For Challenge Lives, the idea is the same: you have a quota of Flames to use per day, but now you also have a quota of Challenge Lives played per day. Both of these already take your Final Hours Sprint into account. The longer you plan to sprint, the more flames you have to consume per day, and the less CL’s you have to play per day (because you’re concentrating a lot of the CL’s in the final 6 hours). You’re still going to play the exact number of ML’s and CL’s, you’re just rearranging them.

If you don’t plan on sprinting (Final Hours Sprint = 0), then the final hours is just like any other day: the same amount of Flames and CL’s per hour, except for just 6 hours.

Should you decide to split the final 6 hours (Final Hours Sprint > 0, < 6), then you’ll have a few hours where you’re playing normally (mixed ML’s and CL’s), and then the final hours will be for CL’s only.

If you plan on using the full 6 hours for a final sprint (Final Hours Sprint = 6), then that’s all you need to do: play CL’s one after another for 6 hours straight. Please start at least half an hour earlier to account for possible interruptions. You need to consume all your Challenge Points before the event ends.

If you want to dedicate the final 6 hours to a sprint, but only want to do it for 4 hours (as an example), then please do the following:

Note your current total active hours.

Set num hours last day to 4.

Set final hours sprint to 4.

At this point, your total active hours should drop.

Slowly increase your active hours per day until you’re back to your original total active hours.

Since you’re “forfeiting” 2 hours of the final 6 hours, you have to make up for this by playing a bit more per day.

XII. Hold on - what’s a “set” ???

You need 800 CP to perform a Challenge Live, and in order to get 800 CP you need to play (in my example) 3.74 games on average. A “set” is the set of these 3.74 ML games + the CL it activates. That’s how you get set duration: 3.74 ML x 3.5 mins / ML + 2.37 mins of the CL = ~15.45 mins (it’s 15.46 when computed manually; Excel just rounded off 3.74 differently).

I just refer to it as a “set” for the purposes of calculation. Since you won’t actually be playing ML’s and CL’s one after the other (it’s more time-efficient to play a bunch of ML’s and then a bunch of ML’s, especially if you need to switch teams), you can just ignore the idea that you have to play in terms of “sets”.

XIII. Tracking your Flames (and CL’s) per day

Now that you know your daily quotas, it’s time to visualize them. Using the Excel file, head over to the Tracker Meta sheet:

Enter the current full day of the event, and it will automatically compute how many Flames and CL’s you should have used by the end of the current day.

Please keep playing until both “Remaining” fields are 0. ^_^ (they will of course increase once you move to the next day)

There is an Estimated Current Score based on the number of games you’ve played. If your actual score is below this estimated score after a day, then you overestimated your scores, and should immediately bring them down. Conversely, if your actual score is above the estimated score, then you made too safe estimates. You can probably increase your average ML score / CL score when that happens (I personally did this, from 4200 ML score to 4275).

To actually enter how many flames and CL’s you’ve consumed, head to the Tracker sheet.

Every time you finish a song (while the fireworks are exploding, to make better use of that time), enter a “3″ under the Flames column, or a “1″ under the Challenge column (if playing a CL). The timestamp should automatically be filled up (instructions inside the Excel file); if it doesn’t work, just delete the timestamp column, it’s not important anyway.

Note: The timestamp column has since been deleted, after migrating the document to Google Sheets. It’s not relevant anymore, but other functions should still work as intended.

Based on your current iteration (which day you’re in) and the number of games you’ve already played, you’ll know conveniently what time your misery would actually end for the day ^o^

(If you rest for one hour, you’ll find that the hours left won’t change, and that the estimated end time would also be pushed back one hour.)

It’s also possible to enter 0.25 / 0.5 under the Challenge column, if you somehow decide to play 200 / 400-CP CL’s. I don’t recommend it, but at least when starting out and just trying out the songs, you can still plot accurately.

One thing I personally do is enter a “2″ under the Flames section when I finish an ML with a score that’s significantly lower than my estimate. This lets me ensure that my estimated score won’t be higher than my actual score. However, I have to use one extra flame to catch up - and that means in the end, I’ll end up using more flames than what was actually planned.

Note: The tracker is only meant to be used until the last full day. I don’t think tracking the final 6 hours is necessarily useful; better to focus on just playing at that point, and give your best! ^o^

XIV. Miscellaneous Tips

During the first day, obviously, you’ll be playing CL’s after the ML’s (since you don’t have CP’s yet).

Starting the 3rd day, however, I found it easier to play all the CL’s before the all ML’s. This also lets me avoid a long-ass sprint (imagine finishing the last full day with a sprint... only to follow it up with a 5-hour sprint). This is only applicable if you plan to do a final sprint, since you’ll have reserved CP’s by this time. Your mileage may vary, just something you might want to consider.

Now, I didn’t discover this by accident - I actually woke up one morning and found there was no internet. Yes, that did happen. Thankfully, because I had enough CP to spare, I was able to stay productive and “passed” the time burning through my CP’s instead (mobile data proved to be stable enough for CL’s). That’s one advantage of not immediately consuming all your CP’s - it lets you stay productive (assuming you have mobile data) when the internet fails.

If you do lose internet and the only way to earn event points is via playing ML’s, then you’re fucked. Go to sleep, and make up for it once the internet is back. You have to hit your quotas, and if you aren’t playing, then you should be resting. Same thing when there’s an emergency maintenance.

When playing in a public room, if another player is taking too long to load, you might want to disconnect - especially when their progress bar resets. This is admittedly a dick move, but in my experience, 50% of the time, that player is going to lose connection in the middle of the game, and your room score is going to suffer. It’s still up to you. That said, don’t disconnect while loading a VS Live.

When you’re already tired, and you think there’s a chance you’ll fail the chosen song in Expert, just pick Hard. The billion times Jumpin’ was chosen, I played it in Hard. No shame in that.

You might want to start tracking the scores of other T10 contenders at some point. For non-Challenge Lives, this lets you know how many hours a day they’re actually playing (since EP gain is proportional to time played); for Challenge Lives, this can give you some idea if they’ve already sprinted or not (if they gained waaay more points than usual, you know they’ve expended some, maybe all, of their CP). Now, this info might not matter, since you already have a planned amount of effort anyway, but if you see that you’re severely lagging behind, start considering stepping up, or backing down.

If you do make it into the T10 at some point, make sure to set stupid profile comments. It’s your time under the spotlight, have fun with it XD (don’t put offensive comments please) ... just don’t take 30 minutes to decide.

Prime examples. 😎

XV. Final words

Whew! I don’t know how much of these is new information to any of you, but I hope at the very least that the Spreadsheet helps. >///< If you have questions please don’t hesitate to ask me!

Most people who try for T10 will have friends to help them. I cannot, in good faith, recommend doing this alone like I did, especially during a major event.

However, that being said, I can understand the feeling of wanting to do it anyway.

SO! Good luck, have fun, 7000+ go like hell, and hey-hey-hoh~! ^o^