#were people all equally invested? no! were some people memeing? yes! but by and large nov 5th became a juggernaut bc of destiel

[segernatural]

sure it was a perfect storm of a pressure cooker but i promise destiel was about destiel

[lazyliars]

/rp

Before I get into it, I want to state that is EXPLICITLY an analysis of the Characters, and is not intended to touch on how the cc’s played them in a meta sense unless specifically stated otherwise.

Also, this is technically a part two to my other post, which took a more in depth look at Techno and Phil’s reactions to Tommy’s death. It’s not necessary when reading this post, but I don’t address their reactions here.

So. The question must be asked.

Are we [the Syndicate] the baddies?

Yes.

The End.

 Why are the Syndicate the baddies?

They got damn logo is a wither skull.

The End.

That's not how this works.

Yeah, yeah. You’re right.

The Syndicate's goals as an organization are not inherently bad. They seem to have good intentions behind them, and the focus on the freedom of it's individual group members is important to remember when talking about it; It is not a government. There is no hierarchical power system. No one is forced to do anything against their will, or surrender any of their rights or power to remain a member. It is not a government.

I also want to address Techno and Phil backing Ranboo into a corner – I see them getting a lot of flack for this, but I personally do not think it is relevant to the greater discussion, or necessarily representative of any contradictions within the organization. It was clearly played for laughs, and after they back off they clarify to Ranboo that they won't force him. Then later when Phil and Ranboo are alone, Ranboo feels safe enough to express that he felt like he was pressured into it, and Phil assures him he is allowed to leave whenever he wants; He is not being forced to do anything, and he is not being coerced or blackmailed.

None of the Syndicate members have done any wrongs against each other in the context of the Syndicate, OR gone against any of the Syndicate's core principles.

That, said, holy shit are they the baddies.

Listen, there's trying to telegraph a meaning or message to the audience and then there's having your logo be wither skulls on blackstone. That is straight out of the skit I keep referencing, seriously.

Okay, but, they laughed at it! It was played as a joke, just like the Ranboo thing!

The Ranboo thing was improv, the Syndicate's headquarters were planned – the artistic choices that they made reflect on what role they want the build and the organization inhabiting it to play in the future storylines.

Wither Skulls kind of have some CONNOTATIONS. Techno is an English major, I don't think he chose the most threatening imagery possible on accident, and then joked about the way people would interpret it just to stir the pot. This reads as hugely intentional.

And beyond that, the jokes they make during this part aren't “haha yeah, we look bad but we're actually good!” they're “you can tell by looking at these that we're the good guys wink wink, this is good guy stuff right here :)” It is a joke about how they are definitely not the good guys. This isn't even a case of unreliable narrators, this is one step down from flat out saying the meta intent.

But okay, I hear you, I'm talking about things that haven't happened yet. The Syndicate hasn't used any Withers, they could be an aesthetic choice.  Lets look at what they do in practice.

So, they barge into private property, assess Snowchester's right to continue existing based entirely on their own ideals of what Freedom is, and then only once Tubbo assures them that they have no standing leader do they grant the place their approval to, and I gotta stress this part, continue existing.

 In my Quackity meta, I already talked about how Government in the context of a M1necraft RP cannot be compared to IRL Governments on a one-to-one scale. They don't serve the same purposes or have the same type of power. What I didn't talk about was Agency in the context of m1necraft governments.

In an irl government, if you are born into one, you can't really leave without committing a massive overhaul on your life, which can be expensive and difficult, if not impossible for many people. Even in a “benevolent” government, the simple physicality of where you were born can prevent you from leaving it easily.

The same hurdles do not exist in the Dream SMP. People who join M1necraft governments choose to. They want to, either at the beginning when they form one, or later on when they join up. So far, no Government has just Sprung Up and forced the current residents of an area to become dependent on them, except maybe the Eggpire, who's status as a government is... shakey.

And even when people want to leave or separate from the government, they have been historically able to do so without any trouble or any effort from said governments to stop them. Jack Manifold emancipated from Manberg. Fundy and Quackity both left to start new nations. In all cases they were allowed to do so without any attempts on the part of the governments to stop them, either through force, or institutions preventing them from doing so.

The most anyone has lost when leaving a government is their house, which is still usually their property anyway, and is something that is easily rebuilt elsewhere and is inconvenient to move anyway.

The only exceptions to this might be Schlatt exiling Wilbur and Tommy - but even then, they weren’t trying to leave, they were trying to get back in, and of course the original L’manberg revolution, where Dream attempted to force L’manberg back into the Dream SMP, which wasn’t even a government at that point in time.

I don’t consider Phil’s house arrest an example of a government forcing someone to stay a citizen - that was treated less as a matter of a citizen wanting to leave the country and more as a threat to national security. Still pretty fucked up, but it’s a different issue.

What I'm saying is, If Tubbo wants to create a government out in the middle of nowhere, threatening no one, forcing no one to join either through force or desperation, and allowing people to join willingly because they want to, then he should be allowed to do that.

The Irony of the Syndicate, a group of people consisting of some of the richest, strongest people on the server, going around and enforcing 'Freedom' that entails no one person having more power than any other, is absurd. 

It shows an extreme lack of self-awareness and/or self-righteousness, as they seem to think that they deserve to be the ones who decide what constitutes a government.

Snowchester is a small independent nation - they shouldn’t have to live in fear of being obliterated if they don’t walk on eggshells to meet an arbitrary standard decided by people who’s only authority on the matter COMES FROM THEIR PERSONAL POWER. No one elected them! No one chose them! They were not “approved” by the server at large to enact this kind of law.

The Syndicate are not a government, but they are an unsupervised power structure exerting their ideals on a land that did not ask for them. Like, These people have invented an actual Authoritarian-Anarchist faction. How the hell did they manage this?????

Back on topic.

Tubbo shows them the crater left by his nukes. The reaction is oddly positive – the nukes are fine by the morals of the Syndicate, apparently. I'd argue that they come across as more impressed than anything else; they seem to respect Tubbo for having gotten ahold of “real” power.

(There's a few good memes out there about “We can excuse nuclear weaponry, but we draw the line at Government!”)

So. By the Syndicate's standards: A single person or group of acceptably equal persons with weapons of mass-destruction are only worth “keeping an eye on” because they might provoke other people.

Like, I consider Project Dreamcatcher to be one of, if not the most morally ambiguous thing Tubbo has ever done, largely because it was all on his own initiative. He holds some culpability for The Butcher Army and Phil's house arrest, but they weren't his ideas and he was mostly following Quackity at that point.

And Phil tells Tubbo, IMMEDIATELY AFTER SEEING THE NUCLEAR CRATER:

“Looks like you've reformed a little bit Tubbo, I'm proud.”

And it's fine. Crimes against nature? Fine. A sign of healing in fact!! Tubbo is having a sweeeelll time and he definitely didn't make these nukes specifically in fear of being attacked by these exact people! Tubbo is doing great. Tubbo is doing fine. Tubbo. is. FINE.

Anyway.

I don't think this presentation of the Syndicate was an accident. Looking at the greater lore of SMP right now, after the Egg is done, their list of enemies is slim, and considering that they seem solely invested in taking down governments, that leaves maybe Snowchester, Kinoko Kingdom, and Eret and the greater Dream SMP.

Snowchester has not been shown to be corrupt, evil, or have any intent to go down that route. The most ambiguous thing they've done is, again, is the nukes. Other than that, it's pretty much your average cottagecore snow village.

Kinoko is presented in an even more morally 'good' light, Karl having founded it specifically for his Time-travel library purposes, which are currently being treated by the narrative as a selfless act, if not downright heroic.

Eret is also a fairly 'good' aligned character atm. He's been on that redemption grind since the og betrayal, and doesn't seem keen on backtracking. He's actively tried to leverage his position as king to make things better, and hasn't been quiet about that. He was also 'validated' by Tommy*, a character who has been described both by his allies and enemies as “the hero,” so take that as you will.

What I'm getting at is, all of the current potential enemies for the Syndicate aside from the Egg, are currently being cast as 'good,' and if they were to be attacked, they would undoubtedly have the moral high-ground, unless something drastically changed.

The only potential shakeups I can think of is are a Dream escape and/or a Wilbur revival, both of which could draw the Syndicate's attention and ire, depending on how things go. That said, it's just as likely that either or both of them would join the Syndicate – Dream still has that favor, and Phil and Techno both seemed to think Wilbur would've agreed with their blowing up L'manberg.

Both of those characters are currently **villains – the fact that they're both prime candidates for the Syndicate is a huge indication of the direction it's going to go as the plot moves forward.

((*I know some people are gonna come at me for painting Tommy as the “deciding factor” of what is morally good, so lemme just stop you there. I'm not talking about Tommy somehow having the 'right' to decide who is and isn't good, and definitely not the right to decide who should and shouldn't be king. I'm saying that Tommy, a character who the narrative treats as, if not a good person, then a person who is trying to be good, was in support of Eret, a character who has also been trying to be good.

Eret doesn't gain the moral highground because Tommy said so, he gets it because a character who the narrative treats as trying to do better, acknowledged Eret's earnest attempts at doing the same.

**I'm referring to Wilbur here as a villain because Tommy seemed convinced he would be if he were to be brought back. There is always the possibility that he's wrong.))

So, to summarize this: I read the Syndicate as being intentionally positioned as future antagonists, if not outright villains of a future arc. They are NOT a Government but their goals are contradictory with their means, and it is important to keep in mind that they plan to enforce their own brand of freedom on people who did not grant them either the authority or permission to do so.

So, uh. Can you tell I loved these streams? They were seriously so good. I kept switching between Ranboo and Techno's POV's trying to keep up with everything. I still have to watch Niki's!

All in all, I'm super, super excited for whats coming next, egg stuff, Syndicate stuff, Tommy stuff, all of it.

[dornish-queen]

Pedro Pascal on Fame and ‘The Mandalorian’: ‘Can We Cut the S— and Talk About the Child?’

By Adam B. Vary

Photographs by Beau Grealy

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.

At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

[leepace71]

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

x

[armsdealing]

❤ matt and neil & nathaniel and matthew. thank you

ULTIMATE SHIP MEME / inbox cleaning + not accepting. / @undones​

ah yes, our two ships with exact same names -- 

putting both under the cut as to avoid length.

matt and neil.

who’s more dominant: i generally don’t think in those terms for either of them? it’s a balanced relationship. they communicate and reach compromises or decide between each other the best course of action. sometimes, matt takes more of the initiative for certain things, but that’s simply because neil is inexperienced regarding relationships -- and he still gets to decide whether he’s comfortable or not at any given point. and i believe that once neil is more comfortable, he’ll probably take the initiative just as much. 

who’s the cuddler: matt loves a good ol snuggle

who’s the big spoon/little spoon: matt is definitely the big spoon to neil’s little spoon.

what’s their favorite non-sexual activity: listen these people met through sports, and yeah i’m sure matt enjoys a good scrimmage session (especially considering neil is a striker and matt a backliner so each gets to practice against their opposing roles) but there’s also other things in their lives i’m sure like.... matt tries to get neil interested in videogames, probably simple ones like mario kart (would be funny if neil found himself crazy competitive about it all of a sudden) and such and, eventually, if he likes them, some other ones. matt likes to do things with neil, anything at all. neil’s had such a crazy life, he figures domestic, idyllic things are actually new experiences. 

who uses all the hot water: matt does not like to shower with hot water for too long anyway and he usually switches to warm/cold. 

most trivial thing they fight over: neil the jorts need to go. stop dressing like you’re 46.

who does most of the cleaning: they both take turns and pull their weight but since matt does most of the cooking neil usually gets the clean up afterwards.

what has a season pass on their dvr/who controls the netflix queue: usually matt is the one picking things unless neil has interest in something in particular.

who calls up the super/landlord when the heat’s not working:  matt?

who leaves their stuff around: matt!

who remembers to buy the milk: neither. 

who remembers anniversaries: i feel like they’re meaningful to the two of them and both remember, but they don’t necessarily celebrate them in a grand way.

who cooks normally: i said it.... it’s matt.

how often do they fight: basically never. i mean, some arguments are bound to be had, but it’s usually over minor things, or big things and not generally out of anger but concern. they’re never fights since they never let it escalate to that point.

what do they do when they’re away from each other: they begin to spend a lot of time away from each other since matt graduates college and neil stays studying at palmetto, and then later when neil gets into his own professional team and what not, so they’re used to the long distance. they text and facetime often.

nicknames for each other: neil sometimes gets called babe what’s His thoughts on this.

who is more likely to pay for dinner: both are likely cuz both got money. 

who steals the covers at night: neil!

what would they get each other for gifts: matt would get neil clothes or exy related gear and neil can always give him hiking gear. can’t go wrong with any of those things.

who kissed who first: matt kissed neil first :’)

who made the first move: matt. see above!

who remembers things: i feel like neil all around has a better memory than matt for things.

who started the relationship: it was a mutual decision.

who cusses more: this one genuinely makes me think? i feel like neither is big on swearing, they just do it when it feels right. 

what would they do if the other one was hurt: skulls would get Busted!

who is the dirty talker: hmmm... it’s matt. but like, he’s not that much of a dirty talker in the first place.

a head canon: we’ve said it before but imma say it again: they once kissed in celebration of neil scoring and everyone went apeshit. 

matthew and nathaniel. 

who’s more dominant: matthew is generally kind of a dominant personality, not overbearing with it but he is just in certain aspects (mostly the professional). out of the bedroom they’re pretty equal. in the bedroom, matthew is more the one setting the scene, nathaniel is more just relaxing and being taken care of. not submissive, just willing to be guided.

who’s the cuddler: nathaniel is more of a cuddler and generally more physically affectionate, but matthew enjoys it just the same. 

who’s the big spoon/little spoon: they actually take turns with that, it depends on the mood!

what’s their favorite non-sexual activity: pillow talk is a frequent thing, even the nights they don’t have sex they spend at least a few minutes in bed every night talking about the day and the kids and one another before they go to sleep. they also like to go on walks together with cinnamon (their dog), playing with their pet, reading together quietly in the living room or watching tv -- they’re the sort of couple that will sit and watch dumb reality shows just to criticize how silly things are getting. the hilarious part is when they get actually a little invested. 

who uses all the hot water: it’s not usually a problem that presents itself at their home. 

most trivial thing they fight over: listen, they’ve been married for decades now. they don’t fight, but they bicker in a good-hearted fashion quite a bit, usually about events in the aforementioned tv shows (whether that guy really deserved to get the rose or not, etc), or about whether they dislike or not this new brand of quinoa over the old one, or about whether the new curtains make the living room feel inviting or they simply make the room feel hot. matthew is nitpicky and deadpan; nathaniel is playfully argumentative and a wisecrack. do they both know these topics are trivial and don’t really affect the larger picture? yes. does it stop them from discussing them? not at all. it’s how they communicate. they’re at that stage were they can be 100% honest with each other and it doesn’t lend itself to a bigger deal than it actually is. and sometimes they make each other laugh. 

who does most of the cleaning: they’re both pretty tidy, but in different angles. matthew wants things to look clean, and nathaniel wants things to look good. matthew enjoys minimalism; nathaniel likes clutter. they take care of it together, with the help of all their children.

what has a season pass on their dvr/who controls the netflix queue: nathaniel usually picks the movies and shows.

who calls up the super/landlord when the heat’s not working: they’re house owners, it’s largely a problem they have to work out together. nathaniel is the seasoned handyman of the two, though -- he usually gets that fixed. 

who leaves their stuff around: their kids. out of the two, nathaniel is just a little more forgetful. 

who remembers to buy the milk: there’s a corkboard chore chart in the kitchen (yes they’re that kind of parent -- at least mostly matthew -- but it’s actually pretty cute. outside his own office, that’s where he likes to put the kids’ drawings) and whoever has to buy the groceries (be it them or one of their older kids) is the one who has to remember. but it’s both matthew and nathaniel who sit down together and figure out what needs to be bought in order to write the grocery list. 

who remembers anniversaries: matthew has the better memory. he usually reminds nathaniel a week in advance to figure out if they’re gonna plan something or just chill out. 

who cooks normally: they’re both very good cooks and usually, they cook together. but nathaniel has more natural talent and intuition, matthew is just better at following recipes. 

how often do they fight: like i said above, these two have been together for a long time. they’ve had their fair share of small, medium-sized, and big fights/arguments, but nowadays they’re more likely to have a calm discussion. since they’re so honest and used to conversing with each other, fights born out of misunderstanding or lies are virtually non-existant. it has to be something to do with the children, maybe some problem they may be facing, so it’s as often as such circumstances may present themselves. 

what do they do when they’re away from each other: at the beginning of their relationship there periods of distance between them due to the nature of their jobs. nowadays separation is rare, but if it’s to visit family or some kind of work-related errand then they just text, call each other every day to have their nightly conversations and do what needs to be done. 

nicknames for each other: it’s actually a deal for them that there’s a pointed lack of nicknames for their given names. matthew is never matt, and nathaniel is never nate. it’s always their full names. matthew, overly formal dummy that he is, does not like nicknames used on him, or to use nicknames for others (unless that person expresses desire to be called by them, in which case he will respect their wishes). since nathaniel actually enjoys this (like you mentioned to me the other time), then that is usually what they call each other. of course, there will be also be the usuals (baby, honey, sweetheart) peppered in.  

who is more likely to pay for dinner: they’re married. but back when they were just dating, just starting to date, matthew liked to pay. 

who steals the covers at night: nathaniel. 

what would they get each other for gifts: clothes, framed photographs of them as a couple or the family, gardening or baking tools (for nathaniel), boat stuff (for matthew); nathaniel loves keepsakes, to matthew has prepared albums of pictures of them when they were younger, or their kids when they were younger, or even drawings the children have made, as well as digitized copies of all of them including home videos. matthew likes chess, whittling and wooden figurines, so nathaniel once commissioned a handcrafted chess set for him. 

who kissed who first: matthew kissed him first. 

who made the first move: matthew.

who remembers things: matthew has the better memory, but both remember the important things.

who started the relationship: both of them.

who cusses more: nathaniel. never around the kids, of course. 

what would they do if the other one was hurt: drop everything and go to where the other is. 

who is the dirty talker: matthew, surprisingly.

a head canon: it was matthew who taught daniel (their youngest, a toddler now) how to talk, but it was nathaniel who taught him how to walk. matthew argues this was a mistake. 

[riskeith]

you just responded and i nyoomed to answer. yes my days consist of waiting for you. yes i’m not ashamed to admit it. <3

that makes so much sense actually? like A Lot of sense. i don’t think you should feel bad about that at all i mean if you are comfortable with how you perceive them then by all means! haha! what’s fun about fanfics is that people can take one character and shape them in so many different ways. canon doesn’t anyways give us depth to characters yet writers do which 🙏🏽 godsent. but then again, it can feel weird if someone makes them behave like ~someone~ else haha. i remember it used to be a hot topic in voltron actually, where people would portray lance as a weak and emotional guy only even if he’s arguably the bravest and most bamf... people didn’t like that very much. do you know what i’m talking about?

I’M SO EXCITED TO READ ALL OF THESE. thank you so much you just set my late night weekend plans 😏. and oh god esselle is the ao3 writer. i love their bnha fics so much. can’t wait to read their haikyuu stuff as well. kagehina too... 🥺 dude, i saw some oikage things last night and i have my eyes open.. 👁 i know you like them a lot so hm... i’ll definitely read that as well i love the summary already.

he’s puppy-like so would he like to play in the water? i want to say so, just bc i think it would be cute for him to splash around 🥺

just one?? wow now i get what you meant in your earlier messages, shskdhsk. all my current friends i’ve known since we were children, i don’t even know how to make new friends irl tbh.... AND SAME!!!! CHILDHOOD FRIENDS TO LOVERS GO BRR. and god the best thing is how things change but at the same time they don’t? like they start to notice little things and realize they’ve always liked them? or the ‘i thought best friends felt like this towards each other’.... aaaaaaaah. 🥺 but then again enemies to lovers.. the tension and the yearning? the moment everything just snaps? god i couldn’t pick my favorite i don’t think. i just love those two so much equally hahah.

if it’s cyberpunk vibes i will combust. i love those aesthetics so much.. (waiting for ps5 to restock so i can run around in night city in cyberpunk 2077 forever.) but yeah it makes sense for it to be themed like that but it’s so funny to think about transporting from the whispering woods to like... large billboards and grungy streets. AR 35?? oh that’s must earlier than i expected. so i take it the main story isn’t done yet?

how sexy, even though this blog is just our messenger app at this point snskdhkddhj.. once again, i’m sorry riskeith stans.. 🙏🏽

i wish i could get you all the cotton candy in the world. and wow kenma HAIR!! sounds so cute but wait oh my god,,, do you have short hair,....... 😳💗💓💕👁💘💝💓😭💗👀💖💓💘💝💞 do you? 😳💢 how was it shaving everything? must’ve been such a big decision!! 😳

ikr? like most of the fics i’ve read portrays them as a angst ship which i do love a lot but you’re right it’s funny bc in canon they’re just.. supportive idiots. i think it’s the oikawa fangirls thing and iwa being annoyed by it that people get hooked on. at least i think since it’s almost always there in the fics... :+ DO YOU LIKE IT? i’m so obsessed with it i saw a edit on ig with klance and that song earlier and it fits them so well too... 🥺 anyway back to iwaoi, i think i like writing from iwa’s pov actually? i haven’t tried writing much from oikawa’s yet but idk.,, iwa’s personality just speaks to me. also i like that oikawa’s personality is so complex to understand, it’s easier to spice up the angst that way. (I DON’T 🥺 it’s such a sad topic for me bc it’s my ultimate dream to drive but it costs soo much money to get it here and i’ve been too busy to invest... 😭 wbu?????) I KNOW MEMO AND OH MY GODNESS? i’m sure the fic is sooo good oh god.... the vibes. 😭 please tell me what it’s about. please. 🙇🏽‍♀️

OH it means that i’m just gonna reread your fics until you post something new... here i thought i was being clever and cute shshskdhdks

STOP YOU KEEP MAKING ME SO EXCITED aaaa ma’am please... think about my heart. 🥺

here’s a new topic to discuss; are you a coffee or tea person? (or neither.. please don’t say so)

kiss, m.a. 💘

i keep forgetting to check whether you’ve responded or not before shutting down my laptop and i’m left to answer on my phone 😭😭 and i too spend my days awaiting your responses <333 but i always forget to check after a period of time HFJSKFKSKCKNC i swear i’m checking like once every 5 min but the moment i forget you respond NCKSNDN

bro (do you mind being called stuff like that lol) writers give us everything canon is too cowardly to give.… truly blessed 🙏🙏 yeah i do!! there are a lot of complaints about mischaracterisation in hq fandom too actually… which i think is fair enough but at the end of the day just let these people have their fun you know.. it’s not harming anyone and if you don’t like it just don’t read! lol

i haven’t read much of esselle’s bnha actually (aside from tdbk) but i just know they’re absolutely amazing!!!!!! absolute legend i hope (i know you will tho hehe) you enjoy her kagehina toooo. and yes oikage!!!!!! omg pls 😭😭😭 i wish they were more popular aaaa

🥺🥺🥺 razor in one of those baby pools.. RAZOR WITH POOL FLOATIES!!! my goodness 😭😭😭😭

fjksnxksndm yeah but i think i might be an outlier in that… LOL oops. and you’re so right like they just grew up together and like grew in love it’s so natural and just comes to them like they were always supposed to be together and they are <333 bc soulmates <33333 BUT YEAHHH THE MOMENT EVERYTHING SNAPS YOU KNOW IT!!!!! god when person A SAVES person B even tho they’ve “hated” them the entire time...… but when they were faced with a tough circumstance they realised they couldn’t bear the thought of being without them 😩😩👌👌👌👌👌👌

omg ps5.… ngl i considered buying a ps console so i could play the last of us 2 chxjjskskxjxjs. have you seen all the cyberpunk memes tho? lolol. nah main story isn’t done!! i think the main story is supposed to develop all 7 worlds until we find our sibling so like.… it ain’t gonna be over for a LONGGGG time (lol omg could you imagine if mih*y* pulled a me and like 4 worlds in was just ‘ok soz i’m uninterested now you can imagine how the game would’ve gone’ HFJSJFKSKFKDJ)

HAHAHAHHA it legitimately is. riskeith who??? more like marriage anon stan account. fjdkfnnd anyways to my other followers hope y’all are enjoying the show 🤪

i do have short hair rn!!! lowkey a bowl cut but i’m also trynna grow out a mullet djksndksnd. and having a shaved head was so nice.. i literally just couldn’t stop touching it after cjskckksnfks. and it wasn’t that big of a decision to me tbh i’m not that fussed about my hair like i know some other people are djskkd the biggest obstacle was getting my parents to agree 💀💀💀 (much like i am trying now..…) i used to have my hair long for ballet, but once i quit i just kept getting it cut shorter and shorter and then voila! shave. GJDJKSKDND

true.. jealous iwa.. i have that in one of my wips i believe FJSJJCKSKDK (it might even be in the memo fic?) AND UHHHH i didn’t love the song ;–; it’s just… slow HFKALDLAKDK and not the mood i was in when i heard it cjdkslxllskcjskcnkscnkzmxmcm omg no not klance 😭😭 they have a lot of angst too.. (i say, as if there isn’t a single klance fic of mine that doesn’t have angst JFJDJSKDJ) OMG YOU LIKE WRITING IWA POV TOO???? you 🤝 me iwa kin. i joke that it’s because i, much like him, am very much in love with oikawa. (aw no i’m so sorry for bringing it up 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 but i’m on my learner’s rn!) IVE POSTED THE OUTLINE ONCE (not a good sign… LMAO) https://kaheyama.tumblr.com/post/190015338287/yall-want-some-iwaoi-angst THERE!! also wait i just realised it has manga spoilers.… maybe don’t look fjdknfjd (you could stop after “pining iwaizumi hajime” but i don’t want to accidentally spoil you 😭😭)

JFKSKSLAKFKSKCJLSKD IM so sorry it WAS clever and cute my brain was just not big enough at the moment to understand 😭😭😭😭😭 but thank u as always i appreciate 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗 so honoured you would even think about going back to them lord knows i don’t KFKSJSKA

HEHEHE NO MERCY!!! but ok ok i shall lay low until the day comes 😋😋😋

tea!! simply bc i can’t sleep if i drink coffee fjskfjsj. but that’s been happening with tea too so i haven’t even had tea recently 😭😭😭😭😭 flavour wise i think i like coffee more but also you get so much more variety with tea? hm. HAHA. hbu??

hugssss, c.r. 💝

[pauldeckerus]

Social Media is Ruining Photography

In the U.S. and most industrialized nations, we have a collective infatuation with technology but a poor understanding of its effects – both intended and unintended. We love asking Siri to play our favorite song, but don’t fully consider the privacy implications of allowing the device to persistently listen to us.

We love the convenience of smartphones, so much so that we’re willing to engage in destructive behavior like texting while driving. And we love the connectedness of social media but are virtually powerless to the dopamine-dependent culture of likes and comments.

At this year’s Photo Plus Expo, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion along with Adriana Teresa Letorney (CEO and Founder of Visura), photographer Dusty Wooddell, photographer Rhynna Santos, and moderator Greg Scoblete of PDN to discuss the role and value of social media in photography, and it sparked a lot of competing thoughts.

Is social media ruining photography? A simple yes or no answer is unhelpfully reductive because the answer depends on the context. As the year comes to a close, I thought it would be beneficial to give the topic a more nuanced look on a complex topic that permeates both photography and life in general.

Remember, we’re the product

Sociologist Katherine Cross explained the confounding reality of social media on The Verge’s Why’d You Push that Button podcast:

You are the product being sold by Facebook, Twitter. It shapes not only how we use social media, but what we do to each other on social media. It creates an environment where people are incentivized to turn other people into content b/c the currency of social media is attention. It’s getting likes, followers, raising one’s profile.

How do you raise your social media profile? You have to create content. And the nature of social media is such that it creates these perverse incentives for people to farm each other for content regardless of consent. Regardless of the ethics of doing so b/c that’s what is salable in that attention economy.

In other words, connecting people is the byproduct of a system that collects user-generated content and provides an incentive (likes and comments) for us to literally become addicted. This addiction leads us to behave in ways that often flies in the face of standard kindergarten-fare morals and ethics. This reality is the starting and end point for any discussion over the value of social media. Now let’s add some nuance.

Exposure

Social media creates a direct line of communication with an opt-in audience – rendering traditional gatekeepers less important and less potent. In the print days, the gatekeepers were comprised of a narrow band of publications – with historically white photographers, editors, and publishers – that led to a homogenous gaze.

Digital publishing effectively drives the cost of publishing to zero. Unfortunately, distribution isn’t as egalitarian. Anyone with a Facebook page is aware of the “pay-to-play” dynamic and algorithms that opaquely decide what content gets seen.

Nevertheless, voices that would otherwise be marginalized, ignored and never be seen can be accessed in fractions of a second through the Internet. And social media enables potential virality. Projects like the various incarnations of “@everyday[insert place name]” have become important to dispel stereotypes of exoticism and otherness.

View this post on Instagram

Every time I am in Nairobi I get lost, it changes so fast. photo by @guillaumebonn #nairobi #kenya #dispatchesfromatraveler #architecture #modern #guillaumebonn #buildings

A post shared by Everyday Africa (@everydayafrica) on Sep 12, 2018 at 11:57pm PDT

The ability to directly amass an audience has led to the rise of the influencer class. As pundits debate the rise and fall of influencer marketing, it is clear that photographers like Chris Burkhard, Brandon Woefel, and Murad Osmann wouldn’t otherwise have built such massive followings, which allows them to make a living through photography in non-traditional ways.

View this post on Instagram

Followmeto the night temples of Chongqing with @natalyosmann..love shooting them with a central perspective, so that these temples look like endless stairway to heaven…places like that fill me up with creative energy and gives me ideas. What are your secret places that broaden your creative mind? #Chongqing #CQIFS Следуйзамной в ночные храмы Чунцина. Люблю снимать с центральной перспективой – они всегда кажутся как бесконечные лестницы в небо. Такие места наполняют креативной энергией и идеями, а какие у вас любимые секретные места?

A post shared by MURAD OSMANN (@muradosmann) on Oct 10, 2018 at 9:15am PDT

The exposure potential provided by social media means that we can instantaneously notify our followers about new work or a new exhibit. We can collect RSVP and admission online. We can use social proof (e.g.” Your friend Amir is going to this event”) as a way to hook other people’s interest. These tools are both powerful and damn convenient. We don’t need to argue the counterfactual because we know what the pre-social media world was like: a postcard, a fax, a flyer and a prayer in hopes that people showed up.

Gatekeepers

The art world provides a perfect example of a twisted world of gatekeepers where a handful of galleries have largely determined what is valuable (see art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary on The Price of Everything).

The phenomenon is paradoxical. On the one hand, we rely on curators to help us filter all the noise, and a handful of platforms to amplify (e.g. TIME’s 51 Instagram photographers to follow in the US). We need what are hopefully well-informed domain experts to help curate the world. But many Buzzfeed-esque sites use the same information to generate their own lists leading to a frustrating sameness. Surf photographers can’t possibly the only genre of photographer in Hawai’i.

On the other hand, the cost of digital publishing is virtually zero. So for better or worse, we can all have a voice. Washington Examiner commentary writer Becket Adams told Vox, “Social media has given us the power to spread nonsense further and faster than ever before.”

With everything accessible at our fingertips, we still need a way to access information. On the web, SEO is the basis for discovery. Social media platforms from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram tend to be much less sophisticated. Algorithms help with discovery (as do geotags, hashtags, etc). What you “like” influences what you see leading to bubbles of reality.

Community

Social media has fulfilled a potential to connect disparate people around the world around shared interest. This ability to build community is true for Neo-Nazis as it is for photographers of different ilk.

From a marketing perspective, the question photographers should ask themselves around social media participation is “Who is your audience you have, and who is the audience you want?” If building a social media audience around your intended audience won’t lead to more paid work, then spending hours trying to build a following is a dubious proposition. But for photographers selling prints, books, workshops, etc, having a big social media following allows for very inexpensive marketing opportunities.

Community extends beyond marketing because a community can support a photographer in non-financial ways. A community is resilient. A community is there for the long haul. You participate, ideally, as an equal member of a community vs a client/service provider relationship. Online photographer communities regularly assist its members with pricing questions, copyright infringements, and other business concerns. I’ve seen more than a handful of photographers ask for financial support through social media for things not connected to their photography (e.g. health issues, natural disasters, personal causes, etc). Social media makes these types of interactions possible.

The weaponization of photography

I’ve written about the weaponization of photography in the past. Suffice it to say, the climate has only gotten worse with the public’s increasing distrust of the media and the misappropriation of photography on wedge issues by both political parties and trolls alike.

For every warm and fuzzy dog photo, there’s a meme-ified migrant photo used out of context and designed to provoke outrage and fear. Social media amplifies messages of good and hate alike and the gatekeepers (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc) have barely acknowledged their responsibility, let alone figured out how to solve the problem of weaponized misinformation.

A glut of photography

Social media isn’t responsible for the glut of photography. As with all creative fields, the emergence of digital technology has driven the cost to produce content to fractions of the analog counterparts.

Social media does contribute to visual sameness and environmental degradation.

But it also allows niches of photography to build passionate communities. Astrophotography, for example, has grown increasingly popular over the past few years, undoubtedly fueled by Milky Way photos on Instagram. Participating in astrophotography necessarily makes the photographer aware of a range of environmental and natural phenomena like dark skies and moon phases. It generates the sale of specialized gear from fast wide-angle primes to tripods.

The ability to find inspiration and cultivate creative agency through social media is enormous.

I’m pro social media

Social media can often cause me unnecessary anxiety. I was a very inactive participant on Twitter until recently, and have found that the increased knowledge on certain issues has largely been outweighed by the noise and anxiety it has induced. We can’t be outraged at everything. We can’t live our lives in search of a snarky response that reaffirms our worldview. We can’t be invested in what some cute person that we have a parasocial relationship with ate for lunch.

But despite this, I’m inspired by the ability to give a voice to the minority, and I’m not just talking about racial or socioeconomic minorities. I mean every photographer who wants to go off into their corner and shoot bugs, bird feathers, cosplay, the Bronx, or food.

The community you deserve is the one you help build. Our participation in social media should be reflective of the real-life world we’d like to live in. Finding creative inspiration and constructively critical voices that help evolve both the business and artistry of photography make social media a powerful, but imperfect tool.

About the author: Allen Murabayashi is the Chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter, which regularly publishes resources for photographers. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Allen is a graduate of Yale University, and flosses daily. This article was also published here.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/11/09/social-media-is-ruining-photography/

[archiveofprolbems]

Real Economies and The Illusions of Abstraction by Hazel Henderson

The yawning gap between the real world and the discipline and profession of economics has never been wider. The ever-increasing abstractions in finance and its models based on "efficient markets" and "rational actors": capital asset pricing, Value-at-Risk, Black-Scholes Options Pricing have been awarded most of the Bank of Sweden prizes since they were founded in the 1960s and foisted onto the Nobel Prize Committee. Most of these abstract models, based on misuse of mathematics, contributed to the financial crises of 2007-2008. Now, the family of Alfred Nobel, led by lawyer Peter Nobel, has disassociated itself from the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics In Memory of Alfred Nobel.1,* They point out that Nobel never would have approved of a prize in economics since it is not a science - and would have disapproved even more that most of the prizes were given to Western, neoclassical economists using mathematized, abstract models - far from Nobel's wider concerns.

Nowhere is this abstraction more devastating than in the mathematical compounding of interest rates on borrowed money, now sinking individuals, companies and nations in unrepayable debt as explored in lawyer Ellen Brown's Web of Debt (2007).

In The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1988), I warned that compound interest violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

"Much confusion arises because economics inappropriately analogizes from some of these models from the physical, social, and biological realms. For example, the best example of a "runaway" can be found in the hypothetical model that economists have imposed on the real world: compounded interest. Here, they have set up an a priori, positive feedback system (based on the value system of private property and its accumulation), in which the interest earned on a fixed quantity of money (capital) will be compounded and the next calculation of interest added on cumulatively. But this "runaway" accumulation process bears no relationship to the real world - only to the value system. However, it has profound real-world effects if enough people believe it is legitimate and employ lawyers, courts, etc., to enforce it!" (p. 228)

I also pointed out that Frederick Soddy, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, decided that economists' dangerous drift into pseudo-scientific abstraction must be halted before they destroyed industrial societies, because their uninformed ideas contravened the first and second laws of thermodynamics. (p. 225)

The mathematical fantasy that money is wealth and can reproduce itself is revealed again in the US housing and foreclosure crisis. Money is a useful information system for tracking our use of nature's resources and scoring the games we humans play, but it gradually became mistakenly equated with the real wealth of nations. Similarly, too often economists and politicians describe money flows in economies as analogous to the human body's circulatory system. Yet human blood's hemoglobin cells do not charge money or interest for the life-giving oxygen they deliver to every other cell in our bodies.

Charging interest for lending money was frowned on by our ancestors and considered a sin in Christian, Judaic as well as Islamic and other religious traditions. This view survives today in Sharia finance where lending at interest is shunned in favor of requiring the investor or creditor to share risks of any enterprise with the entrepreneur.

Generations of scholars since Aristotle's treatises on "just prices" have examined the myths and human experiments in creating money and systems of exchange, from mutual fund manager Stephen Zarlenga's "The Lost Science of Money" (2002) and Prof. Margrit Kennedy's "Interest and Inflation Free Money" (1995) to lawyer Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" (2007). In my "Creating Alternative Futures", I posed the question: Is there any such thing as profit without some equal, unrecorded debt entry in some social or environmental ledger or passed on to future generations? My answer was "yes," provided all costs of production were internalized and thermodynamic, not economic, measures of efficiency were calculated.

The mismatch is between the real-world economies, where real people grow food, make shoes, clothes, shelter and tools in real factories, versus the human mind's tendencies toward abstraction. Understanding the real world in which we live requires us to recognize patterns and to abstract reality into mental models. The map is not the territory, as we have been reminded by many epistemologists. The danger is that we routinize our perception through these models, forgetting the need for constant updating and course-correcting as conditions change around us. Thus our mental models are memes that crystallize into habits, dogmas and outdated theories such as those in conventional economics and finance. These led to collective illusions: about "efficient markets," "humans as rational actors" and the lure of "compound interest" that still guide the decisions of too many asset managers. New models of triple bottom line accounting for Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) have been adopted by responsible investors and institutional investors, including those engaged with the UN Principles of Responsible Investment, managing $22 trillion in assets. The current US mortgage and foreclosure mess provides a new teachable moment where we can re-examine the obsolete beliefs still at the core of economics and now refuted by physicists, endocrinologists, brain and behavioral scientists.2

The computerized efficiency of digitizing mortgages for rapid securitization in the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) is at the root of the foreclosure and toxic assets dilemma. We must examine how computers, when introduced into Wall Street, financial and housing markets drove economic theories further into mathematization, led by the Arrow-Debreu modeling of national economies in the 1960s, beyond earlier attempts by Leon Walras. Bank of Sweden Prizes in Memory of Alfred Nobel were given to Arrow and Debreu and others for mathematical models inappropriately applied to economics and finance.3 Similar mathematical models on which economists still rely, accept Arrow-Debreu's assumption of a process of "market completion" where markets could be extended to enclose ever more of the global commons: air, carbon emissions, water, forests, biodiversity, ecological assets and their productivity which supports all life. The newest commons are global communications infrastructure, the internet, the electromagnetic spectrum and space, all of which require massive public investments and underpin global finance and its extensive bailouts. The report of the Global Commission to Fund the UN, "The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives", proposed taxing all commercial uses of the global commons and fines for misuse, including a tax on currency speculation. 4

For any market to efficiently allocate resources, buyers and sellers must have equal information and power, while their transactions should not harm any innocent bystanders. These conditions identified by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776 are now violated everywhere due to the scale and technological reach of global corporations and finance. Examples include the earliest forms of industrial pollution and exploitation of workers to today's toxic sludge dam failure in Hungary; BP's Gulf oil contamination and the growing costs in lives and ecological destruction of coal mining; the Wall Street volatility due to program trading; the financial meltdown of 2007-2008; the May 6, 2010 "flash crash," and the new revelations of US mortgage and foreclosure frauds. An ingenious enterprise, the Open Models Company (OMC) founded by Prof. Chuck Bralver at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, based on Linux principles, provides an open-source platform for global experts and critics in finance to examine the assumptions underlying derivatives and risk models - a huge help for underfunded regulators.5Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England, called for restructuring beyond Dodd-Frank, Basel III and other recent reforms of today's unsustainable "financial alchemy."6 King reflects most of the issues identified by experts in our Transforming Finance statement of September 13, 2010.

The scale of industrial and financial operations becomes global and ever more computerized and digitized, accelerating the abstraction of management, global supply chains, risk assessment, calculations of accountants for profits and losses, strategies of national governments and central bankers using defunct models such as NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) to set interest rates, along with subsidies, tax policies, and quantitative easing to "manage" their economies. All are based on levels of aggregation in statistical indicators akin to assessing national economies while over-flying a country's territory at 50,000 feet. The digitization of Wall Street and security analysis is cancelling out strategies for diversification of portfolios. In the post-Bretton Woods, turbulent global casino, the $3 trillion plus daily electronic trading of currencies and sovereign bonds are driven largely by speculation, credit default swaps, and high-frequency trader's algorithms. The proliferation of electronic trading platforms, credit cards and digital payment and credit systems bypass regulatory models of governments and central banks.

Today's ad hoc global financialization cannot be described as a system since it is still driven by the long-outdated assumptions and models in economics and the sloppy generalizations and categories that underlie economics and its theories: "capital" (not clearly defined); "growth" (GDP is the output of goods and services measured in money without subtracting social and environmental costs or adding the unpaid services in families and communities which support official paid production); "innovation" (does not distinguish between new brands of dog food, potato chips, credit default swaps vs. computer chips, gene sequencing or renewable energy); "productivity" (if measured as output per worker, this leads to further automation and technological unemployment); "free trade" (which led to the hollowing out of the US economy, outsourcing of jobs in manufacturing and services, trade deficits); "inflation" and "deflation." Statistical illusions: CPI, "core CPI" (which excludes energy and food), drives Fed policies, Social Security, taxes as well as employment and macroeconomic policies. **

Perhaps the most obvious policy errors were the models used by Alan Greenspan to describe the global economy in the dot com boom and by Ben Bernanke during the period from 2003-2006 as "The Great Moderation" (economic cycles had been tamed) and then, as the global imbalances grew, labeling them "the Global Glut of Savings" (China, Japan and other countries supposedly saved too much). Instead, I and others labeled this a growing global bubble of fiat currencies, led by the US dollar, acting as a global reserve currency. The crisis was one of macro-economic management - sinking under mounting deficits, debt and compound interest, while facing growing systemic risks due to deregulation in the global casino.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out all these conceptual errors in "Fooled by Randomness" (2005) and "The Black Swan" (2007), digging even deeper into the fallacies of the human mind, including confirmation bias, herd behavior and excessive optimism verified by behavioral psychologists. Mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot warned of the limits of statistical models of probability and risk informed by Gaussian normal distribution "bell curves." Fat tails, black swans and perfect storms entered the language, but instead of examining these human perceptual errors, they became excuses for Robert Rubin and his protégés, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, as well as central bankers, Wall Street CEOs and asset managers - all claiming that "no one could have predicted the financial crises." As Richard Bookstaber described in "A Demon of Our Own Design", Wall Street's financial models were bound to fail.

The truth is that thousands of critics, scholars and market players, including the author accurately predicted and warned of the coming debacle - but were ignored by the leading elites in business, government and academia. 7,8 Mainstream media accepted conventional wisdom, funded by advertising from incumbent industries and their financial allies while their lobbyists took control of Congress. After the half-hearted reforms of Dodd-Frank, the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS and the G-20, how can a paradigm shift allow new voices, new models and more accurate modeling and control of systemic risk to emerge in the global financial system?

First, we must recognize the crises we face are not black swans, fat tails or perfect storms, but symptoms of our limited perception, fragmentary reductionist mindsets, models, research methods and academic curricula , particularly in economics and business schools. Second, we must move beyond economics to capture all their "externalities" in multi-disciplinary frameworks, systems models, multiple metrics and pluralistic research, such as that pioneered by the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on whose founding Technology Assessment Advisory Council I was honored to serve from 1974 until 1980. This useful messenger, with its ground-breaking research, now copied in many countries, was decapitated by Congress in 1996 by Speaker Newt Gingrich and his Republican colleagues. Luckily, OTA's studies are still highly relevant and archived at Princeton University and the University of Maryland. Signs of awakening include new memes, including describing fragmented approaches as "silos" and narrow research as "stovepipe information" with frequent calls to "connect the dots."

Equally urgent are the phasing out of all the hundreds of billions of dollars of perverse subsidies propping up obsolete, incumbent companies and industries still blocking the emergence of cleaner, greener information-rich technologies and new companies. Governments' conceptual confusion over climate issues is evident in still subsidizing carbon-based industries while at the same time trying to cap and price carbon emissions. This Green Transition to the Solar Age is underway as we gradually exit the earlier, fossil-fueled Industrial Era. Ethical Markets Media measures private investments since 2007 in solar, wind, energy efficiency, renewables and smart infrastructure worldwide in our Green Transition Scoreboard®.++

Meanwhile, a below 1% financial transaction tax on all transactions can curb high frequency trading and currency speculators, limit positions by hedge funds and other institutional investors - while sparing legitimate hedging by commercial firms. Such long-debated taxes proposed by James Tobin in the 1970s and Larry Summers in his 1989 paper are now supported by the EU and are on the G-20's agenda. 9,10

To finally correct our money-creation ceded to private banks by Congress in 1913 through the Federal Reserve system, Congress could enact the Monetary Reform Act long proposed and vetted by seasoned market veterans of the American Monetary Institute. This would entail a rolling readjustment in money issuance - now obviously dysfunctional under the Fed and private banks, and return it to a public function as in the US Constitution. Meantime, many states could adopt state banking as in North Dakota, the only state with a surplus and full employment - unharmed by the depredations of Wall Street extractions from Main Street.$$

I agree with others from E.F. Schumacher, author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973), Simon Johnson, author of "13 Bankers" (2009), Laurence Kotlikoff, author of "Jimmy Stewart is Dead" (2009) to Nassim Nicholas Taleb: if systems are too large and interconnected to manage and banks are "too big to fail," then they need to be carefully dismantled and decentralized to restore diversity and resilience following nature's design principles. Monetary monocultures now on a global scale have demonstrably failed. Healthy, homegrown, local economies need protection from global bankers and their casino. Complementary local currencies and peer-to-peer finance are flourishing. && Bloated financial sectors can be downsized and returned to their role of serving real economies. In the USA, small non-profit community development finance institutions (CDFIs) are growing to fill the needs of micro-businesses.11

Trickle down economics has failed utterly, even as the politicians and central bankers still believe that pouring taxpayers funds and printed money into big banks and bloated financial sectors will somehow trickle down to Main Street and local businesses. Instead of creating US jobs, the rest of us see the Wall Street traders and big asset managers investing these funds in China, India, Brazil and other emerging markets where US multinationals have shifted their plants, jobs and research. Worse still, big banks take the Fed's funds and rather than lending to Main Street, use it for gambling on currencies, oil, interest rates and other derivatives. All this money-creation is fueling currency wars. Hopefully, all this together with ballooning debts, deficits and un-repayable compound interest, the foreclosure and mortgage securitization scandals and auditing Fannie, Freddie and the Fed, will provide enough evidence to Washington and voters in many countries of the needed paradigm shift and new policies.

Calls in the USA for facing up to these painful truths are coming from all sides, from Republicans including Congressman Ron Paul to Democrats including Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Independents including Senators Bernie Sanders and Byron Dorgan. Indeed, Republicans and Democrats are now both minority parties as most voters are now independents.

Exposing all the statistic illusions, inoperative models, dysfunctional economic dogmas - including their unsustainable offspring: debt-based money and compound interest - can begin the Green Transition to the emerging economies of the 21st century. The new coalition is now visible: responsible and green investors and companies, environmentalists, Millennials, progressive labor unions and their pension funds, students, independent media and voters, systems thinkers, futurists and academics pioneering new courses in sustainability, as well as dispossessed homeowners, jobless workers, professionals and veterans eager to put their skills to work - all are ready to help grow the green economies of the future.

Notes

Peter Söderbaum, "Nobel Prize in Economics Diminishes the Value of Other Nobel Prizes" Dagens Nyheter, October 10, 2004.

Hazel Henderson, "The Cuckoo's Egg in the Nobel Prize Nest, " Inter Press Service, October 2006.

Hazel Henderson, "Abolish the 'Nobel' in Economics? Many Scientists Agree, " Inter Press Service, 2004.

Harlan Cleveland, Hazel Henderson and Inge Kaul, eds., The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives (London: Elsevier Science Press, 1995).

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Macrowikinomics (London: Penguin, 2010).

"King plays God" The Economist, October 26, 2010.

Hazel Henderson, Building a Win-Win World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996).

Hazel Henderson, "New Markets and New Commons," Futures 27, no.2 (1995):113-124.

Larry Summers and Victoria Summers, "When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A cautious case for a securities transactions tax" Journal of Financial Services Research 3, no. 2-3 (1989): 261-286.

Hazel Henderson, "Financial Transaction Taxes: The Common Sense Approach" Responsible Investor, October 19, 2010.

Mark Pinsky, "Help for Small Businesses: Loans are just a start" Businessweek, Oct. 25, 2010.

Source: http://www.cadmusjournal.org/node/93

PDF: http://www.cadmusjournal.org/files/pdfreprints/vol1issue3/Reprint_Hazel_Henderson_Real_Economies.pdf

[flicksnfilms]

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

As the Avengers and their allies have continued to protect the world from threats too large for any one hero to handle, a new danger has emerged from the cosmic shadows: Thanos. A despot of intergalactic infamy, his goal is to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of unimaginable power, and use them to inflict his twisted will on all of reality. Everything the Avengers have fought for has led up to this moment - the fate of Earth and existence itself has never been more uncertain.

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo Writer: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (screenplay), Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (Marvel comics), Jim Starlin, George Pérez, Ron Lim (comic book story) Cast: fucking everybody IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Official Site

Watched: on 25 April, at the IMAX cinema, and 28 April, and 01 May

Reaction: ± Thanos demands my silence. I will say that i wasn’t half as prepared as i though i was. I'll edit this in like a week with my actual reaction since i assume by then it'll be far enough down any follower's (who hasn't watched - IN A WHOLE WEEK AFTER RELEASE!) dashboard to not be seen unless you're looking specifically at this blog.

Memorable aspect of the movie: + So many things. (Soon.)

Would I recommend it? > Fuck. Yes.

[EDIT:] So, reaction. After more than a month because i haven’t been on in a while, and under the cut because it’s hella long (like, super fucking long) and rambling in my geeky joy. :D It’s in 3 parts, from the three times i watched it.

[Take 1] ± It was an EXCELLENT, WELL BALANCED FILM. They have the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula down pat of comedy and drama, action and reaction. It’s so perfect and fun to watch. They were able to give the gigantic cast fairly equal screen time as well as balancing the personalities on screen. [See bonus content at the very end.]. That they split up the teams and threw them with other franchises was a great choice for both balance and dynamic. The visuals -- cinematography, CGI, costume, make up, set design --, as always, are a feast, with the coloration of the film striking a balance between all the different tones from each individual franchise. 

[Take 2] Memorable [aspect] moments of the movie: + D:  “I am Loki, Prince of Asgard... Odinson.” + XD “I’ll get you a metaphysical ham on rye.” + Doctor Strange and Tony’s interactions. It was interesting repartee and good chemistry. + Stark-raving Hazelnut and Hunka-Hulk-a Burning Love. I need to try these flavours, and also i need to know the flavours for every other Avenger. + <3 Tony brings the stupid flip phone around with him! AND there’s a message!! + XD “Squidward” + XD “Dude, you’re embarrassing me in front of the wizards.” + XD Bruce trying to beat Hulk out.  + “Wong, you’re invited to my wedding.” + XD The singing. Mean faces. “Language. ... Ever since you got a little sap.” OMG. You GOT a little sap. Oh, puberty. “ XD “He is not a dude. You are a dude. He is a man. A handsome, muscular man.” “It’s like a pirate made a baby with an angel.” “God man.” + XD Mantis’s attack form. + XD Quill’s jealousy and mimicking. + “All words are made up words.” Well, that’s actually a good point. + “Is there a 4 digit code? A birthday perhaps” Thor’s really gotten into Midgard culture eh? (Which is a good carry over from Thor: Ragnarok.) + XD Rabbit. Tree. Morons. Ah, Thor’s nicknames. It’s fun, cause he doesn’t mean them maliciously and he says them with such regal diction that they feel kind of acceptable as nicknames. + The intro sequences for the rogue Avengers. STEVE!!! <3 And Sam! And Nat!! The whole fight sequence too! + D:  “Where to, Cap?” “Home.” !!! (ESPECIALLY IF YOU REWATCH AGE OF ULTRON AND SEE HOW STEVE REACTS TO SAM SAYING “Home is home,” AT THE PARTY. TT_TT )  + “The kid watches more movies.” Well, that’s a good enough strategy. + “WHAT ARE THOSE??” The two teenagers use the same (meme) phrasing. + “Doctor. Do you concur?” + <3 “I’m not looking for forgiveness. And I’m way past asking permission. Earth just lost its best defender, so we’re here to fight. If you want to stand in our way, we’ll fight you too.” ICONIC. STEVEN FUCKING ROGERS, EVERYONE. + <3 The reunion greetings with Rhodey.” + XD “This is awkward.” + XD “It was an elective.” I NEED TO KNOW WHAT OTHER ELECTIVES THEY OFFERED ON ASGARD, PLEASE. + “I am Groot?” Evidently translates to: Are we there yet? The question of all kids in travelling vehicles everywhere. + D:  “What more do I have to lose?”  + Giant Peter Dinklage. So weird. + D:  Quill and Gamora. + Quill actually got Thanos’s approval. So like, thanks, dad? Hahaha. + “We don’t trade lives.”  + Nebula. What a badass. + XD “Blanket of death” + XD “Where is Gamora?” “Who is Gamora?” “Why is Gamora?” + “You’re from Earth?” “I’m from Missouri.” “Missouri is on Earth, dumbass.” + XD “Kick names. Take ass.” + Tony’s face. He’s so done with everyone. + Rhodey & Bruce. Ahh, what are friends for. XD + Steve & Bucky. Both of you are “hundred year old, semi-stable soldier”s. + Shuri! Wakanda! Man, i love this place. It’s great. + D:  Gamora!! + “Get out of the way, Sammy.” SAMMY! + Thor jumping onto and then sitting on the pod. What a cutie. + “It’ll kill you.” “Not if I don’t die.” “Yes, that’s what killing you means.” + XD “Magic! More magic! Magic with a kick!” + Bucky & Rocket + “New haircut?” “I see you’ve copied my beard.” This is SO MUCH better knowing they ad-libbed it.  + “This is my friend, Tree.” “I am Groot.” “I am Steve Rogers.” Of fucking course. Such a polite cutie pie, this guy. + XD Okoye’s reactions, and the “Why was she up there all this time?” + “She’s not alone.” FUCK YEAH. LET’S GO LADIES!! + “Oh, screw you, you big green asshole. I’ll do it myself.” Banner is super funny, situationally in this film. + “Tony Stark.” “You know me?” Hell yeah, you deserve to be acknowledged all over the universe, Tony. + The power of Doctor Strange and the mystic arts. SO COOL.  + Tony ran out of nanoparticles! O_o + D:  Wanda & Vision + “Steve?” TT___TT D: Bucky! Sam! My King! “Steady, Quill.” “I don’t wanna go!” TT__TT FEELS.

[Take 3] ± The familial hits get me more than the romantic ones. My reactions per viewing gave me three different experiences; It was personal, then intellectual, them empathic, in that order, for me. There are some moments i paid particular attention to, for a few characters:

Loki gets to come full circle with the “We have a Hulk,” line along with his redemption arc continuing on in from Thor: Ragnarok. Thor is an odd amalgamation of Shakespearean proper and slangy modern. “A little bit.” “So cool.” “I bid thee farewell and good luck, morons.” “Bye.”

The interplay between Tony and Strange. Excellent. It’s a real battle of egos at the beginning which turns to a mutual respect. Tony is a true leader. He intuits other people’s emotional reactions and attempts to keep them in line long enough to complete the goal.

A lot of shots in the Avengers compound are just Steve’s reactions. What bearing will this have? How does he feel about the cost?? Are they showing how tired he is from paying for his decisions?

The kid’s all heart. The first thing Peter does, once their plan goes awry, is try to save everyone even if he can’t remember their names. Okoye is a warrior to the core. She refuses to attach even these fuckers from behind. Bruce is such a goof and it shows now that he can’t disappear mid-scene. “Oh, you guys are so screwed!” And all the talking-to he gives Hulk.

Thanos’s voice really goes soft for Gamora, as a child, and the “I’m sorry, daughter.” “Tony Stark. ... You have my respect. I will wipe out half of humanity. I hope they remember you.” That’s amazing. The cost, the deterioration, is up to his arm and his neck. That’s an interesting detail which kind of implies that the Infinity Gauntlet (in the MCU at least) can only be used for something of this scale a few, if not only one, times.

I love that Marvel is really invested in antagonists that aren’t villains purely for the sake of being evil, but are fleshed out beings with emotions and purpose and passion, even if their goals are morally misguided. They have complex backstories and three dimensional personalities. Their goals are logical and intelligent, if a little beyond what’s reasonable. Their thought processes within the realm of imagination but a step too far for civilians and heroes.

The ending of this film is superb. I’ve seen many a peer say they think it’s too short or unresolved but i think they fail to appreciate the story. That sometimes the “good guys” don’t or can’t win (for now). That there are outcomes we’d rather not fathom and costs we’d rather not pay. But they happen. And the MCU gets this. That things happen and there’s a balance to it. There’s collateral and there’s gains and losses. And not just for the protagonist. (But for every character.)

Thanos achieved his goal, but at great personal cost. He won but lost all at once. Likewise, Killmonger achieved some of his goals but failed at others, died but did it with dignity in his eyes; Hela brought was released from her bonds and gained power but didn’t wind up ruling Asgard as it was swallowed by Ragnarok; Zemo sowed discord and ripped the Avengers apart from the inside, but was prevented from shooting himself and joining his family. 

[BONUS:] In some of my movie reviews i talk about the characters and their stories in relation to Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Monomyth. And, i dunno, i suppose it my complete emotional roller coaster watching this film along with all the geek out moments, i completely missed its inclusion in this, given that the beginning of the monomyth takes place before the beginning of this film. I was delighted to find it pointed out to me in this post by The Screen Junkies - The Dailies Facebook. It’s a really good breakdown of the way the writers (maybe intentionally) incorporated the Heroic Monomyth in Infinity War despite it featuring like 7000 characters and all of Hollywood. :)