#he has the greatest success of all of them re: emotional manipulation

[fallstreakfeathers]

Aizetsu being the 'nicest' and least likely to kill you (comparatively)

vs

Aizetsu being the most psychologically manipulative of all the clones

#tell me im wrong #hes the cutest and he knows it #he knows how to use his sad little pout to his advantage #demon slayer #aizetsu #he has the greatest success of all of them re: emotional manipulation #bby boy can get any information out of ANYONE #not to say he WONT threaten you but boy howdy is he gonna make you believe its ur own fault #and hes probably right :) #(i do mean he is both)

[travllingbunny]

The 100 (re-)rewatch: 4x13 Praimfaya

What do I say about this episode that hasn’t been said already? It is for The 100 what Through the Looking Glass was for Lost: a game changer, arguably marking the end of the first half of the show (though 4x05 was technically the 50th episode) and re-defining it.

This time, instead of making notes about the timeline at the end, I need to start with it: The largest chunk of the episode takes place over less than 3 hours, and is a race against time and against the upcoming death wave – just 90 minutes to make the pod intended for two people functional for 8 people and get the air recycler from the lighthouse bunker, then an hour to get to the Ring and for Raven to open the hangar door manually so they could enter before their air goes out… And then there’s time jump of 6 years and one week, or 2199 days. If feels insane, but this period was 11 times longer everything that happened in seasons 1-4 from the Pilot to Praimfaya (around 6.5 months, or 200 days).

To be fair, the season 5 finale was another game changer, and the only episode that may have had a timeline even weirder than this one – but the second time-jump, even though it lasted 125 years, did not have any of the same weight and meaning for anyone other than Monty, Harper and Jordan, since everyone else was cryo-frozen and practically continued their lives as if they had just gone to sleep a few hours before. But the time jump revealed in those last few minutes of the season 4 finale affected all the characters. They all lived through these 6 years that the show skipped, and only showed in about 2-episode worth of flashbacks (or not at all, in the case of Spacekru), profoundly changing their lives, relationships and arcs.

Apart from the radio talk between Bellamy and Octavia at the start of the episode, and two short scenes in the bunker, which are there to round up their story for this season, and the short appearance of Madi in the last couple of minutes, the entire episode involves just 8 people – Clarke, Bellamy, Raven, Murphy, Emori, Monty, Harper and Echo.

Octavia was well aware that she wasn’t ready to be a leader: “All I did was win a fight”. Bellamy tries to give her some confidence, saying she also gave people hope. But his comparison to – Prometheus – wasn’t the greatest, because, as Octavia points out, Prometheus got punished by the gods by being chained to a rock while a bird plucked his entrails. Dark foreshadowing for Octavia’s future?

The radio dies, so Clarke doesn’t get the chance to say goodbye to her mother. It’s an understatement to say that this is not the last time a radio dies and Clarke isn’t able to get through to someone.

Eh, about that…

Octavia tells Bellamy “I love you, big brother”. Bellamy tells her “I love you” back, for the second time (after he’s said it for the first time, to anyone, in 4x11). They have both made the point that it takes the end of the world for them to say it. These final episodes of season 4 are the time when several of the characters are expressing their true feelings to each other. Monty said it to Harper in 4x11, but she wouldn’t say it back at first, and lied that she didn’t love him, to make him let her die. Jasper tried to make Monty say it to him before he died, but Monty said it too late. Harper admitted to Monty that she did love him, after she had decided to live. Monty said “I love you” to Harper again in 4x12 while they were in the rover. And Murphy now talks to Monty about his relationship with Emori and Monty’s relationship with Harper, telling him that he’s experienced how love changes you, and asks him if he has told Harper he loves her.

And – totally unrelated, I’m sure – Clarke and Bellamy have deep conversations about their relationship, where Clarke wants to tell him something important, because she thinks she is dying of the radiation she got in 4x12 after she took off her helmet for a while and before Monty and Harper arrived and gave her Jasper’s. A large part of why she believes that is due to Abby’s vision. But because she implies she may die (“If anything happens to me…” – “Nothing is happening to you”), he interrupts her, because he can’t stand that idea – the same way she interrupted him when he wanted to tell her something before they separated in 4x06 (“If I don’t see you again…” – “You will!”). Interesting how those two always keep having interrupted conversations where one of them seems to want to say something important. I don’t know what that could be. They end up talking about their relationship, the leadership, Head and Heart, as Clarke is praising Bellamy for his big heart (something she always found appealing in him was his ability for love and devotion – which she saw in his feelings for his sister, even early on in season 1) and advising Bellamy to use his “Head” more, to be a more rounded leader. In the context, she is not criticizing him, she is trying to tell him he would have to be the sole leader, without her, because she thinks she’s probably about to die. She won’t, but he’ll indeed find himself in a situation where leaving her behind will really be his “only choice” – at least one that makes any sense, as staying and waiting would have only killed him and the other 6 people with him, while Clarke would have still died (or lived) regardless.

But I’m sure nothing in that conversation was deeply personal or intimate…

And later, when Bellamy is about to leave with Murphy to save Monty, and Clarke is about to go on her own to align the satellite dish so they could dock at the Ring – which will prove to be the last time they see each other in 6 years – Clarke stops Bellamy briefly to tell him something (even though they’re in a hurry, and Raven and Murphy are also present), and he interrupts her again, expecting another talk about leadership and using his head (he obviously didn’t realize the weight of that talk the first time), and she says she just wanted to say…”Hurry”. That doesn’t really seem like something you’d stop a person to tell them, when they’re already in a hurry. It’s almost like the episode was teasing that she had something else to tell him there. Now what could that have possibly been, hmm…

To be honest, I’m sometimes not sure how I feel about the Head and Heart phrase, because the fandom tends to take it too far and simplify both Clarke and Bellamy as characters and not really do either justice, making it seem as if Bellamy can’t or has never been calculating (like manipulating the Delinquents into taking off their wristbands, or pretending to be manic and self-harming while in a cell, in order to hurt himself enough so Abby would have a reason to come and set him free) or offered the more rational options (like not telling people that the knife Wells was killed with was Murphy’s, or not telling them immediately about Praimfaya until they have an idea what to do about it), or as if Clarke hasn’t acted purely on emotion so many times. I’ve seen people make contrived arguments why some of the things Clarke did (like desperately going into Mount Weather without any plan and doing everything to save the people she loves, or mercy killing Finn to spare him torture – after having done everything to save him, including offering her own life) were supposedly so cold and logical they would make a Vulcan proud, or people complaining why Clarke, who is “supposed to be a logical character”, did unwise things because she was emotional when, for instance, her best friend got murdered, or when her daughter seemed to be in danger. Both of them are, in fact, much more complex characters, and, as most people, many of their actions are a combination of reason and emotion. And it certainly doesn’t mean that one of them is more able to love than the other, or that the other has lost that ability after having to be a sole leader and assume both roles. The Head and Heart works better as a description of how they usually/typically approach leadership and decision-making at this point, where Bellamy can rouse the crowds with emotional speeches, give more successful pep talks to the others (although Clarke does great pep talks to Bellamy) and usually has a better feeling for the emotional state of the crowd, while Clarke is more likely to appeal to people with pragmatic arguments, try to forge alliances with outside forces, and look at the big picture. And I don’t think that makes their relationship codependent: they can both function on their own – and have – but they function much better together.

At the beginning of season 4, Raven arc seemed to be about leadership and having to make tough choices – she had a mini-arc in 4x03 where she started off telling Clarke that, while Raven was in charge of rations, choosing who lives or dies was Clarke’s specialty (!) when she told Clarke to make the list, but then went on to practically choose who lives or dies by denying medicine to Luna’s people. That did not end up having any consequences, but the rest of her arc this season was instead about her relationship with herself, her pain, confidence, her mind and will to live. This was beautifully resolved in 4x11, but in the subsequent two seasons, the show hasn’t seemed to know what to do with her. (It would be great if that arc about having to be the one to make the tough decisions and decide on life and death happened for her in season 7.) In this finale, she has another moment of self-doubt and regression, worrying that she is not smart enough without ALIE’s code in her brain. But after getting pep talks first from Clarke and then from Bellamy, telling her basically the same thing she had told herself in 4x11 through her vision of Sinclair, she finds the solution exactly by remembering what ALIE did in season 3 when she uploaded herself to the Ring. Something that was a moment of defeat for Raven against ALIE back then, now helped her find a way to save herself and others.

Murphy’s season 4 arc was mostly about him forging real friendships and being accepted into the group of people he antagonized and was exiled from season 1, showing that he changed during the time he was away from them and was not the same douchebag, now that he knew how to love  another person. But out of the core group, someone he’s had the least amount of interaction with was Monty. This was their first serious interaction, and in fact, the first time they’ve even been in the same place since early season 1. That means that Murphy didn’t expect hostility from Monty because the latter wasn’t among the people he had seriously hurt (he had already been kidnapped by the Mountain Men by the time Murphy’s murder of Connor became known and by the time he murdered Myles, tried to kill Bellamy and shot Raven), but he had forgotten the fact that Monty only remembered his jerkass persona and behavior from the early days on Earth, and the way he kept wishing for wounded Jasper to die – and that Monty has not seen any of Murphy’s development. Of course he hates him, I hated Murphy in season 1, too! But this relationship gets a big leap forward when Murphy brings the machine and goes back for Monty together with Bellamy, and even gets a hug.

Monty’s line “Eight people in space, and one of them is John Murphy” has the same energy as Clarke’s “The last two people on Earth, and one of them is a child from hell” from 5x01.

Jasper is, understandably, a very sensitive topic for Monty. And Murphy’s ill-thought line about “coward’s way out” (which I don’t think was malicious, as he had just praised Jasper for being stronger than he seemed) probably upset him even more because he had had similar thoughts: a few episodes ago, he called Harper a coward for wanting to commit suicide.

As for the Grounders in Space, Emori and Echo, due to their completely different backgrounds and histories, have the opposite reactions to all the new things they are encountering: spaceship, lack of gravity, seeing Raven spacewalk… Emori is excited and takes to everything new easily. She was an outcast, she never had an opportunity to be tied to one place or belong to a group of people, and has no reason to feel nostalgia for the Earth she’s leaving; and she’s used to adventure and adjusting to new circumstances. Echo is confused, somewhat scared, and lost without the things she knows, and without her clan to be loyal to and work for. (Maybe my biggest problem with the writing for Echo is that the show insists calling her a spy, which doesn’t fit with anything we’ve seen of her job, her actions or personality. By all accounts, she was a soldier/captain of the guards/assassin for Azgeda, who prefers to use direct methods, brute force and violence, while being subtle, perceptive, keeping a low profile or adjusting herself easily to new circumstances are really not her strengths.) These last few episodes of season 4 probably contain the best characterization Echo ever got in the show, and it’s certainly Tasya Teles’ best acting, particularly during her suicide attempt.

While Emori finds in Spacekru a family she’s never had, Echo finds a new clan, new group of people and leader to give her loyalty to. You can already see the change in Emori – she’s starting to care about people other than John, when she asks to give Clarke more time before they leave her. Emori and Murphy joining forces to give Raven the necessary oxygen seems to be setting up that trio as a close friendship on the Ring.

After Bellamy has helped Echo with her helmet in a small moment in 4x12 and then talked her down from suicide in this episode, the show is really not subtle in trying to foreshadow Bellamy and Echo’s relationship with this:

(Oh look - the old “just falling on each other” trope that TV shows do when they want to foreshadow something will be a thing, without actually bothering to develop it! ..Wait a moment, Monty and Harper fall next to each other, Bellamy and Echo fall next to each other, and Murphy and Emori and... Raven fall next to each other? Was the episode trying to tell me something about those three on the Ring, hmmm? J/k)

I guess they thought that was enough? Which is weird, since these are merely the first steps, where these two stop being enemies trying to kill each other or their loved ones, and become almost-friendly allies by circumstance, who may, for starters, become friends after a certain period. (Three years?) And Bellamy talking Echo down from suicide, just like Echo hearing him give a speech about war and violence in 4x05, can serve as a decent setup for Echo falling in love with Bellamy. However, there’s been absolutely nothing to set up or show why Bellamy would fall in love with Echo. On the other hand… it’s debatable whether anything in seasons 5 and 6 suggests that he is in love with her. In the next two seasons, we see that she looks up to him as her leader, he cares for her and considers her one of his people (his “family”), and they are boyfriend and girlfriend (as seen in a physical relationship and occasional PDA), because they were stuck together for 6 years with just 5 other people. The show never makes that relationship look like a real romance story. And in those terms, one can argue that this is all the setup we need. This is a general tendency with Bellamy’s relationships – it wasn’t very different with Gina: while most of the other characters are at least occasionally shown to be in love with people they’re involved with, he gets these relationships that start off-screen, get little screentime, where he cares about the woman and likes her, but doesn’t really look like someone in love, especially not compared to how he interacts with his…platonic (?) partner, Clarke.

Oh Bellamy, you had no idea when you joked with Clarke back in 4x01!

It is such an interesting and heartbreaking end to the Clarke and Bellamy’s arcs in season 4 that she – after trying to be the Big Picture leader and save the human race for most of the season – ends up saving her friends, while Bellamy – who has tried to save any individual he could save today – was forced to leave one of the two most important people in his life to die.

Clarke never even knew for sure if they managed to open the hangar door and if they were alive. But while she thought she was sure to die (“My fight is over”) and was still putting all her efforts into saving her friends, no matter how difficult it was, she still has her survival instinct - after she had managed to align the satellite dish and finish her mission, she runs from the death wave into the lab.

Passing the Baton: I see what the show did there. Too bad the bottle was empty, as Jaha drank all of it in the season 1 finale. It’s also a sad reminder that Clarke and Bellamy never got to have that drink she was asking him to share in 1x09 and that he was offering her in 2z1x6. Will they have one in S7?

And the time jump is here. This scene is beautiful visually and thanks to Tree Adams’s music. I can even forgive the fact that Clarke’s lines are a bit too expositiony: she’s telling Bellamy about the bunker going silent and Eden being the only green spot on Earth, on the 2199 day that she radios him. But I guess she may be telling him the same every day, just in case it’s the first time he finally manages to hear her.

There are a lot of people who think that this was the best – or even the last moment when the show should have had Bellamy and Clarke get together. Many are really, really angry that it did not happen and that the show separated them instead. And this is where I completely disagree with a huge chunk of the Bellarke fandom. If they had both gone to space and started a relationship, that wouldn’t have been such a great resolution to this slow burn, wonderfully developed dynamic. But getting separated by a tragic twist of fate? Bellamy mourning Clarke and believing her dead for six years, while trying to honor her memory, while she is almost all alone and calls him every day without answer, for 2199 days? Bellamy learning she is alive and coming back, only for Clarke to learn he has a girlfriend now? Love triangle and a bunch of misunderstandings and a terrible conflict as a result of their separation? Coming back from it even stronger? Clarke “dying” again just a month after Bellamy got her back, and Bellamy forgetting everything else in his desperate quest to save her, brings her back with his love and faith in her? That’s a truly epic story, with the potential to be one of the best love stories ever seen on TV. Scratch that – it already is. I don’t even need to see them make out or say ILY for that to be true. I much prefer the story we got to the story that a lot of fans think they wanted.

Body count: Thousands of people, possibly millions, died all over the Earth – the majority of people who had survived the first apocalypse. Some in this episode – like everyone who was left out of the bunker. Others had already died before the timeline of this episode, as the death wave was hitting different places in the world at a different rate (as we saw in 4x01 with the people who died in Egypt). Among them were certainly the 365 Arkers who were left outside of the bunker, hundreds (thousands?) of Grounders, including Madi’s family and a lot of people from her community, and, no doubt, the wandering outcast Grounders (such as Zoran and Sienna from season 2). The show may have killed many people in seasons 1-3, but it really outdid itself here. At this point, as far as we know, only 1202 people are left alive on Earth, and 7 more at the Ring. We will later learn that 300 more humans are alive, in cryo sleep, on Eligius 4, and many others on Alpha.

Rating: 10/10 (because the problems I have with the episode are not big enough to compare to all that’s good about it)

#the 100 #the 100 rewatch #the 100 season 4 #the 100 4x13 #praimfaya #clarke griffin #bellamy blake #bellarke #bellamy x clarke #john murphy #raven reyes #emori #monty green #octavia blake

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

#homestuck analysis #homestuck #homestuck's influences #hypercomics #understanding homestuck #sprite comics #internet culture

[fangirlsblogtolife]

Lore Olympus Minthe and Hades Theory Part One

Disclosure: Everything that I am about to say is purely my own words and thoughts and ideas. I am not saying any spoilers at all. I am a fast pass reader, I review every single post and make sure it does not contain any spoilers due to the fact that I only fast pass certain Webtoons and don’t like it when other people ruin it for me. 

So as well know that Minthe and Hades have a very toxic relationship. I am going to start from the very beginning of Rachel’s story. 

We see in the very first episode that Hades and Minthe are suppose to go to Zeus’s party at the Panathenaea. Hades asks her if where she is and she interrupts him by asking him if he got her the purse she wanted. She’s all too pleased to hear that he did. He asks her if she is going with him tonight. Minthe says she no because she says that she doesn’t want to be seen in public with him that day. Now as I have re read this whole episode a billion times. This is about Power. Hades is the King of the Underworld. Minthe is just some nymph that he’s in a trashy relationship with. Minthe likes to have power over Hades because it makes her feel good since his family doesn’t like her which Hera comments on Hades not showing up with her. Hera tells him that she didn’t want to spend the night with ‘Nymph trash’. Minthe preys on the fact that Hades also isn’t a very confident man himself because as we see that he asks Hera if Poseidon brought his wife and we see Hades with a small piece of cloth being twisted by him. Him doing this further shows that he has some form of anxiety linked to his lack of confidence in himself and his status appearance to others. Zeus of course doesn’t help this when he comes over and sweet talks Hera in front of Hades. 

Fast Forward to later in the episode where Poseidon asks whats wrong to Hades. Which we see Hades becoming defensive and closed off from his brothers. They seem to know that Minthe is a sensitive subject for him which goes without saying that she has done this before to him. Hades also being defensive about Minthe goes to say that he might be protecting her because he rather be with her than to be alone. Which he does feel alone. People who tend to feel alone don’t take into consideration that their partner maybe toxic but at least it is someone who ‘wants’ them. It’s a way to cope with the feeling of being alone even if it’s temporary or sporadic and chaotic. 

Now we jump to episode 8 where Persephone asks Hades who is Minthe. We then see a scene of them being intimate with each other and Minthe talks shit to Hades during sex calling him a ‘real piece of shit’. Hades responds by saying “i know’ with a tear falling down his face. Now lets analyze this. Even during their most intimate moments, Minthe still tears Hades down even in bed. Calling him names and hurting his feelings. She’s also on top of him taking control being the dominant. Minthe is all about Power and being in control of the situation. Again, she is being mean to him and manipulating him into thinking he is less than her which is toxic behavior. Minthe is clearly a very insecure person who is going after someone who is way more insecure about themselves than she is about herself. Minthe, honestly, probably gets a power high from it all because she is all about control and validating herself by degrading someone else when in reality it doesn’t last that long. It’s small bursts of validation of Power and confidence. She mistakes power for confidence. Now one can argue that having power does give you confidence which is correct, but how long does that feeling truly last? 

Then we cut the next scene where we see Minthe leaves Hades a mean voicemail about him sulking and not answering her phone call even though she can’t take responsibility that she ditched him last night as his date. But also Hades is currently speaking to his future wife and Queen of the Underworld. Which goes without saying that Minthe thinks he’s avoiding her calls because she thinks that she is top priority when it comes to answering phone calls. Again she is insecure and wants to maintain power over her ‘boyfriend’. Leaving the angry voicemail with the words ‘A**hat’ and ‘stop sulking’ which further supports that Minthe is a verbal and emotional abuser. We all know from the Greek mythology stories that Hades has trauma from his own father eating him because he thought he was the one to destroy him. (Yes, I know he ate all his children, but not the point I’m trying to make.)

Now we move to Episode 18: Forest From The Trees where Zeus drags his brothers to the Strip Club on a Sunday Morning. Hades is in his car before hand and he is listening to voicemails all from Minthe which he deletes the second he hears the first few words of them. Again Minthe is calling him names, telling him that ‘oh so your going to sulk and not answer my phone calls’ and then saying a half a** ‘apology’ that really means, ‘i’m sorry, but-’ which really isn’t an apology and its manipulative and pushes the blame on him further making him ‘out to be the bad guy’. 

In Episode 19: A Fifth Of Gin, Hades mentions Minthe and his brothers groan about her. Hades pulls out a small box containing an engagement ring. Hades confesses he was going to ask Minthe last night to marry him and now he’s having second thoughts about it. Poseidon puts his two cents in and says that she is the meanest nymph he has ever met and that out of all the girls to choose from he picks her. Clearly Poseidon does see that Minthe is not the right girl for his brother. He also does not want Hades to marry her and that Poseidon does see Minthe as a toxic significant other to Hades. Both Zeus and Poseidon are all in disbelief because they can’t understand why he would choose Minthe because she is so mean and cruel. Zeus and Poseidon don’t understand why his brother would stay in a relationship with someone like Minthe. 

Again, Zeus is the King of Olympus and has a beautiful wife and children. He is a very confident man who doesn’t let anyone walk all over him considering he overthrew his own father. Poseidon has a wife who rules by his side. He’s a very confident man himself being the Ruler of the Oceans and Seas. Again both of his brothers don’t have confidence issues with themselves. They see themselves as successful men who overthrew the greatest Titan of all time. They don’t understand why Hades would be so insecure about himself. 

His brothers ask Hades why he would choose her. Hades confesses to his brothers and says well y’all have queens and I thought ‘she would make an okay Queen of the Underworld’. Zeus tells him that Hades should want an ‘Excellent Queen’ and not an ‘okay one.’ Which you see that Zeus does not want his brother to just settle for nothing, but the best. 

#Lore Olympus #zeus #Hades #minthe #hades x minthe #poseidon #rachel smythe #webtoon #Persephone #underworld #king of the underworld #king of the sky #king of olympus #king of the ocean and sea

[fostersffff]

Complete Black Eagle (read: Edelgard and Rhea) Thoughts

Now that I’ve finally finished both Silver Snow and Crimson Flower, I feel like I can put all of these thoughts out without worrying about a last minute twist. It’s entirely possible based on how much I’ve seen people talk about route differences that once I play Golden Deer and Blue Lions I’ll have changed my opinions, but barring some really wild and extreme stuff, I can’t imagine changing all that much. A ton of text under the break:

Edelgard

There was a Korean poll that was published recently where Edelgard was voted the #1 most disliked character in Three Houses... and also the #2 most liked character in Three Houses (behind Lysithea). It’s not a surprising result to see considering that she is the inciting antagonist, and that you don’t really understand why she does any of it unless you happened to start with the Black Eagles, but even then, IntSys felt it necessary to split Black Eagles into two routes, just in case you still didn’t want to side with her. But that’s what I think I found to be the most compelling thing about Edelgard: that she is a decidedly morally gray character, and how you feel about her comes down to looking at all of the things she does and asking “is this worth it?”

Part of what makes her so compelling to me is that no one understands her role better than Edelgard herself. She has no delusions about what she’s doing, and she never even makes an attempt to sugarcoat it to anyone around her. I made a post back when I first started the game about how I thought it was weird that her first support with Byleth ends with her talking about how she’s prepared to go down in the history books as History’s Greatest Monster without any context, but as the blanks fill in and time passes, it’s clear that she’s completely and utterly true to her word. "The ends justify the means” is the best description of her philosophy, but unlike a lot of characters (and people) who use that to justify their actions, she doesn’t take any solace in it, or use it as a way to offset the responsibility for all of the lives lost in the war. The end may justify the means, but it doesn’t make the means any less horrific, and even if the end result is a better world, it’s a small comfort to the countless people who died for it.

I think something crucial to sympathizing with Edelgard is that as far as she is concerned, she didn’t “initiate” hostilities with the church. When she kills Dimitri in the Crimson Flower route, she says “if only we were born in a time of peace, you might have enjoyed a joyful life as a benevolent ruler”, which sounds comically hypocritical in isolation coming from the person who declared war in the first place. But it’s because as far as she’s concerned, the systemic oppression resulting from the Church of Seiros’s influence on every Fodlan society means that true peace simply hasn’t existed since long before any of them were ever born. To Edelgard, there’s been a cold war between the Church of Seiros and humanity for a thousand years, and she took it upon herself to finally make it hot.

“Cold war” might sound exaggerated, but there’s something to that idea going on the evidence we’re presented with. At best, the church is ignorant to and/or idle on the suffering of the common folk and the corruption of the nobility all across the continent that exists because they grants noble status and political power to families that happen to have Crests. At worst, the church is intentionally passive about those problems because preserving the status quo and their absolute control is more important, and to act in any way to try to fix those problems directly could threaten their status as the center of power in Fodlan. Speaking of their control: isn’t it odd that the Church of Seiros was involved in each war for independence, maintaining their foothold in the old nation while also branching out and ensuring they were the dominant religion in the new ones? That the only time the church acts on their own (outside of an immediate threat like bandits) is when they are made aware of heresies, however mild, at which point they act decisively and without any shred of mercy, sending a sign to anyone who would dare try to cross the church? That, with the exception of Seteth and Flayn, the most devout members of the Knights of Seiros and the church have a fanatical devotion to Rhea specifically, and not Sothis or the doctrine of the church? The most insidious thing is that even if someone with the power to pose a threat to the church wanted to fight against them, the only people who could realistically muster up enough military might to challenge the Knights of Seiros would be nobles, and the fall of the church would also mean there would be nobody to legitimize their claims to nobility. Nobody would be willing to risk their noble status, and all of the perks that come with it, like that.

Except Edelgard.

This is actually what I like most about Edelgard, and why I was right to compare her to my favorite Fire Emblem villain: Zephiel. Zephiel’s goal in Fire Emblem 6 is the complete eradication of humanity and giving the world over to dragonkind, because he believes that humanity is a blight. He never says “I will lead this new world of dragons” or “My followers and I will live on to see the world of dragons”, which always led me to believe that he would eventually turn his sword on himself*. Edelgard, like Zephiel, does not intend to just conquer Fodlan and then just enjoy the spoils- once all of her affairs are in order (dismantling the church and nobility, re-establishing the church and turning nobility into a meritocracy, eradicating the Tunnel Snakes**) she finds a suitable successor (read: not her child) and then retires into the sunset (at least in the ending where she marries Byleth). And, if you don’t like Edelgard- or even if you do- this happy ending might rub you the wrong way, because even though her resolve was unshaken and she walks her path to the very end, it was still an incredibly violent path. This leads to another question that I’m sure people can argue forever: does Edelgard deserve to have a happy ending?

I’ve seen Edelgard described with a lot of terms that I don’t really think apply to her- like, at all- but I’d never seriously argue that she did nothing wrong. She is a dictator, and a warmonger, and regardless of which route you chose a tragic amount of life is lost as a direct result of her actions. Her alliance with the Tunnel Snakes is an entire can of worms of its own, because despite the fact that she has no control over what they choose to do on their own time, she is effectively still condoning their actions by relying on their power. The worst of it, as far as I’m concerned, is lying to her own people about who caused the destruction of Arianrhod and the loss of life there to prevent an internal conflict. I think with all that in mind, there are a lot of people who are locked into the conclusion that no, she doesn’t deserve to have a happy ending. 

But! To create the world she envisioned, one where Rhea was no longer manipulating the world from behind the scenes, a world that would improve the quality of life for everyone in future generations, she was never going to have a choice in how she did things. Think of how openly and casually Rhea talks about how enemies of the church must be eliminated, without any room for discussion. Would a diplomatic call for the Church of Seiros to disavow the current system of nobility based on the possession of crests and for Rhea to step down as archbishop be met with anything other than hostility not only from the church, but from the Kingdom and Alliance as well? Even something as simple as publicly renouncing her own faith to try to motivate a cultural change just within the empire would’ve probably had Rhea dispatching Catherine to cut her down for heresy, just like she did for Lord Lonato. And the final, most passive alternative- returning to the empire after graduating from the academy, ascending her father to become the next puppet of the cabinet, hoping that she eventually bears a child with a major Crest or else watch her own children undergo the same torture she and her family went through. That’s just completely unacceptable, especially when that kind of self-sacrifice is only to the benefit of the nobles and the preservation of a rotten status quo that also only benefits those same nobles- and Rhea, of course. No matter what, she was going to have to sacrifice, and while what she chose would involve the most bloodshed, it also had the best chance of making things better for the greatest number of people when all was said and done, so her getting to have at least one ending where she is completely successful and is rewarded on a personal level doesn’t strike me as inappropriate at all.

A lot of what I’ve talked about with Edelgard has to do with the church, which is inescapable considering every single action she takes is motivated by the church. So ultimately, one of the most important questions to consider when asking “is all of this worth it” is “is Rhea really that bad?” Well...

Rhea

This bitch is fucking insane holy shit.

It’s kind of a nice feeling to feel suspicious of a character from their introduction, only for things to actually be way worse than you could’ve ever expected. For what it’s worth, this isn’t a case of me hating the character on a writing level, it’s just that I find everything about her character to be loathsome even under the best possible circumstances.

What makes Rhea so despicable is how simple and selfish her entire motivation is. Every single action she takes and emotion she expresses can all be traced to an obsession with her mother. It’s not that she believes she needs Sothis’s guidance to deal with a problem that neither she nor the whole of humanity can’t deal with on their own, or that the world will only be at peace if Sothis is around to protect it, it is literally just for her own sake. And on its face, I can deeply sympathize with going to crazy lengths to want to see your mother after she was tragically taken away from you. I also love my mom! But there’s a bunch of lines- both explicitly stated and implied- Rhea sprints past at an Olympic pace that I (and hopefully most other people) would not cross. These include:

Having twelve children*** and trying to turn all of them into your mother.

Having a grandchild and trying to turn them into your mother.

Maintaining direct control and influence over multiple sovereign nations over a span of a thousand years so you can continue to try to bring back your mother without anyone bothering you.

Keeping your closest friends/relatives/allies out of the loop on all of your completely unethical experimentation because deep down inside you either know how fucked up it is, or that they would try to stop you.

Ordering your subordinates to burn down the city full of innocent bystanders you are currently occupying to try to kill the grandchild who you put your mother into.

The one that disturbs me the most is what’s implied by the ending of Crimson Flower. In Silver Snow, Rhea tells Byleth that they were stillborn, and that their mother begged Rhea to put the Crest Stone into Byleth to give them a chance to live. But at the end of Crimson Flower, Rhea’s death causes the Crest Stone on Byleth’s heart to fade away, which should result in their death. But after a few moments, their heart starts up normally and they go on living as normal. They lose Sothis’s power in the process, but they’re just as healthy as they were before they obtained it. This leads me to believe that Byleth may have actually been born healthy and that, after their mother had passed from complications due to childbirth, Rhea placed the Crest Stone on their heart anyway. Or- it’s even possible that Rhea killed the mother herself, removing her Crest Stone heart after sensing that Byleth might be a better vessel because of their parentage. After all, Rhea is the only person who truly knew what happened in there. Jeralt had no idea about the exact nature of Byleth’s heart, only that they had no heartbeat, and Seteth and Flayn didn’t know about anything at all. Obviously, that’s all just speculation, as far as I’m concerned something like this is totally in line with Rhea’s character.

Now, to revisit the question of “is Rhea really that bad”, Edelgard doesn’t know about any of Rhea’s personal fucked up shit. What she knows about is what the church has done and what has happened under their watch and thus with their implicit blessing, that Rhea is actually The Immaculate One, and that she has been the sole driving power of the Church of Seiros since the church was initially founded. On a personal level, her own life and the lives of all of her family members were destroyed by the Church of Seiros’s influence on society via crests. And it should be noted that Edelgard’s not stupid; she’s very likely aware that the Tunnel Snakes are the ones who performed the blood reconstruction on her and her siblings at the behest and/or with the consent of the Empire’s cabinet and Lord Arundel, and she even addresses how awful they are and that she really wants no part of them when she approaches Jeralt and Byleth as the Flame Emperor. But, back when I first suspected that Edelgard was the Flame Emperor, I made a joke about how she has to deal with the fact that the Tunnel Snakes are dabbing on a mountain of corpses while Rhea is cripwalking on an even bigger mountain of corpses. But that wasn’t accurate- it’s not just that Rhea’s mountain is bigger, it’s also composed of people who are still alive, but suffered because of the Church of Seiros: Dorothea’s childhood spent as a wretch because she was born a commoner, the abuse Bernadetta endured from her father to make her noble wife material, Caspar and Sylvain’s brother being shunned from their families for the crime of being born without a Crest, Lysithea suffering the exact same procedure as Edelgard to increase her family’s noble standing, Hanneman’s sister dying from trying to bear a child with a Crest, to say nothing of the characters I haven’t seen the stories of yet. In the grand scheme of the game’s universe, this is only a sample of about 30 characters: what about the potential hundreds of thousands of other lives with stories similar to- or possibly worse than- the main cast? And what’s more, Rhea is not gloating about how big her pile is. She’s so utterly preoccupied with her mother that doesn’t even notice the mountain beneath her, and that might actually be worse.

Both

Finally, I want to briefly touch on the way both characters interact with Byleth, and how they handle things when they’re made into the villain. No matter what route the player chooses, Byleth does something for Edelgard that she has never experienced before: unconditional protection. She was prepared to fight the bandit, and she saw him coming from a mile away so I imagine she could’ve handled it, but Byleth still jumps in front of her to protect her. This is why Edelgard puts so much stock into Byleth, much to the chagrin of Hubert. It’s not that she doesn’t trust that Hubert and the rest of the Black Eagles are capable of helping her, but to them, she is Edelgard von Hresvelg, heir apparent of the Adrestian Empire. Even if their friendships with her would suggest otherwise, there is an ocean of difference between them because of their stations. But to Byleth, she was “simply Edelgard”. She has never experienced that kind of interaction in her entire life, and especially not when there was danger involved. This is so ingrained in her that even in the route where you most directly oppose her, after having spent a full year getting to know and understand her and still choosing to fight against her, her last words are “I wanted to walk with you.” Even that phrasing- that she wanted to walk with them, not that she wanted them to walk with her- says so much about how strongly she feels about Byleth. Is it waifubaiting? Oh baby is it ever, but it doesn’t make it less solid

On the flipside: something I really genuinely hate in games (and stories in general, but it crops up the most in games) is when people have unflinching, unwavering faith in the player character for no good reason. It’s why I think Persona 4 is a worse game than 3 despite being better in almost every other meaningful way. This almost certainly has to do with me not liking Rhea from the start: appropros of seemingly nothing, she is as dotting as any mother would be, she entrust you with an entire class of students lives with zero credentials, and in addition to that she is constantly assigning Byleth the most important tasks because she just has so much faith that they’re destined for greatness. Unlike the situation with Edelgard, helping fight off some bandits is not reasonable precedent for trusting someone this much. And the biggest reason I appreciate Rhea as a villain is because all of this turns out to be a ruse. All of this is in service of currying Byleth’s favor, to get them to trust her, to make them feel special, so that when she asks them to sit on the throne so Sothis can take over their body, they wouldn’t think anything of it. And you know it’s all been a ruse because of how unbelievably fast her turn is if you side with Edelgard. There’s no consistency between the Rhea who gently stroked your hair and sang you a lullaby when you were recovering from your trip to the shadow realm and the Rhea who calls you a failure and is going to rip your heart out of your chest.

*I’m extrapolating a lot of information about Zephiel and the world of FE6 in general because we just don’t have access to as much lore as we do in Three Houses, but I think what I’m saying are reasonable conclusions

**I call Those Who Slither In The Dark “Tunnel Snakes” for a number of reasons: it’s shorter, it functionally means the same thing, and it’s funny to me

***I refer to the vessels Rhea created as her children because that’s what I understood them to be when I first played Silver Snow, but upon rewatching the cutscene what she actually says is “I tried to bring her back by creating a body, and then burying a Crest Stone within it”. This could mean her own children that she bore, but it could also mean a number of other things, like vessels “created” from normal humans she acquired. For my own headcanon, the utter detachment she shows for Byleth when they side with Edelgard leads me to believe that they are, in fact, her biological children, but she refers to them so clinically because she felt nothing for them except disdain for not being able to house Sothis.

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Three Houses #FE3H #Edelgard #Rhea #Nintendo #video games #seriously this is the most analytical writing I've done since college what the fuck IntSys

[reading-while-queer]

Red, White, and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston

Rating: Great Read Genre: Romance, Coming Out Representation: -Bi main character -Gay love interest -Mexican American/Mixed race main character -Other LGBTQ side characters Note: Characters have explicit sex; this is not YA and definitely not appropriate for younger teens Trigger warnings: Sex under the influence of alcohol (not in a predatory context, but still), forced outing, attempted rape (talked about, not in scene), drug abuse (not in scene), parent death, rare instances of homophobia, racism, xenophobia.

Red, White, and Royal Blue is the story of Alex Claremont-Diaz, a 21 year old student with political dreams: to climb the rungs as intern, staffer, and finally Senator by 30.  And his mother just happens to be the President of the United States.  Alex likes politics, but he can’t stand the fakeness of it all - and his frustrations come to be centralized around one man, Prince Henry of Wales.  Henry is only two years older than Alex, but while they play similar roles in life, and occasionally collide at international events, Henry is cold and aloof, never stooping to befriend his American counterpart.

This is where the novel begins: a rivalry come to a head at the royal wedding of Henry’s older brother, Phillip.  After a PR nightmare, Alex and Henry are forced by their respective handlers to play nice, or else.  And so a romance begins.

I really enjoyed Red, White, and Royal Blue.  Underneath its fun trope-y beginning, it becomes a drama that addresses queer sexuality on a more thoughtful level.  It deals with coming out in an interesting way, since the stakes are global.  If Alex comes out, what does that mean for his mom’s bid for re-election?  And for Henry, who doesn’t have the luxury of disappearing from the public eye after another four years, is coming out too costly?  This isn’t your average coming out story, but one of celebrity (especially unasked-for celebrity).  And, in fact, it isn’t entirely a coming out story at all.  “Coming out” is hardly the most pressing issue when Alex and Henry struggle to have a private relationship in the first place, both of them plagued by paparazzi and all their movements tracked.  Henry needs a political excuse to be in the same country as Alex at all, and vice versa.  This was such an interesting, high stakes spin, that Red, White, and Royal Blue really felt like a new, fresh story.

McQuiston’s writing definitely does her story justice - the characters feel like real 20-somethings, despite the display of artifice they give the cameras.  The writing is timely, too - Alex’s speech patterns are very 2019 Gen Z.  This book will age well, not because it could be imagined as taking place at some future point (the 2020 presidential campaign features strongly, after all), but because it is so unapologetically of its time.  McQuiston may be writing an alternate reality where Alex’s mom, Ellen Claremont (not Hilary Clinton), made the bid for president in 2016 - and won - but McQuiston still addresses the issues we are dealing with today, just in different ways.  A Trump-like character is Claremont’s challenger for 2020, for example, and an email leak winkingly brings to mind the nightmare of 2016.  But apart from these nods to root us in a familiar world, this is an alternate presidency where nothing seems to be happening at all - perhaps the greatest fantasy of LGBTQ readers today.  No war, no oil pipelines, no mention of policy whatsoever.

That isn’t to say that McQuiston entirely turns a blind eye.  As a fuck-you to current administration, McQuiston has Alex notice, almost with wonder, how he, a Mexican-American, can put his feet up on a White House railing where racist presidents have stood.  He’s aware of how plenty of White Americans today would be frothing at the mouth at the thought.  In this great escapist fantasy, all is calm, though the tempest is beating at the door.

I thought that Alex’s Mexican identity was handled gracefully in the novel - he’s half White, parents divorced, with his White mother the President, his Mexican American father a Senator.  His race isn’t something that’s mentioned once and never again, or worse, a “romantic” descriptor to sexualize and exotify.  It’s something Alex has to think about and mediate as a public figure - he has learned that he doesn’t necessarily poll well with White “family values” America.  His White mom being divorced, having non-White children living in the White House, this is all part of her “image.”  Alex has worked overtime to become popular anyway - he charms the camera as easily as he charms congressional representatives.  He manipulates his image purposefully, playing up his friendship with his ex-girlfriend Nora in order to tease the press that they might be back together.  America eats it up.

But McQuiston makes sure that being Mexican-American isn’t something that Alex is working past, or overcoming.  While racism is something he thinks about and must navigate, Alex loves himself.  He loves getting together with “Los Bastardos,” his dad and family friend/congressman Rafael Luna, to have a couple beers and talk shit in Spanish and English.  He loves making Mexican food with his dad.  He is especially passionate about Texas, his home state, and fixing harmful policy there.

This is only the stage on which the romance stands, but suffice it to say that McQuiston has spared no detail to make Alex’s life real outside of his relationship with Prince Henry.  When the reader is so invested in the reality of the characters’s lives, it only makes the romance more cutting, more true.  The emotional climax of their relationship was so heartbreaking I cried through a good ten pages.  McQuiston knows how to write emotion with lightning strike power and accuracy (which serves her well when writing sex scenes, too), and it is through emotion that McQuiston accomplishes her most crucial goal as a novelist: Red, White, and Royal Blue is a page-turner, at once cathartic, steamy, star-crossed, honest, and dramatic.  Reading this novel just feels good.  Red, White, and Royal Blue is a step above the rest, and should be a staple for LGBTQ romance fans.

Despite McQuiston’s resounding success with this novel, the arc of Alex and Henry’s romance did ring a little odd.  Not bad, just odd.  McQuiston starts off holding the railing, so to speak.  The romance begins with Alex hating Henry, so much so that he tells him to his face, despite being charged, as the President’s son, with grace and diplomacy.  The characters themselves compare their dynamic to Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, a comparison that was perhaps more a window into the author’s taste than strictly in-character.  Then, after a brief weekend of faking being friends for the camera… they become friends for real, texting each other about their lives.  Their supposed “hatred” becomes teasing ribbing and name-calling, which you can’t read as anything else but flirting.  This is a 400 page book, and already in the first 70 pages the blurb is out of date.  Red, White, and Royal Blue isn’t really about a couple who start out hating each other and gradually come to realize each other’s qualities, though it starts off on that path.  McQuiston could have packed a lot more character development into that “fake friends” weekend and a lot less in the texts and emails that came later, for a smoother transition from the narrative as advertised to the story she ends up telling - an even better romance, in my mind.

The better romance happens after the rather rushed arc of the first romance - McQuiston lets go of the railing, so to speak.  And though I won’t spoil it, this later arc deals with themes of sex versus love, the unique quandary of the forbiddenness of their relationship, and the fact that neither Henry nor Alex want to be in love with each other, because the consequences of taking their relationship seriously are global, public, and terrifying.  Where McQuiston starts in slapstick, trope-y romance, she ends up in something heart-wrenching and real.  The tonal dissonance between the two is a little awkward, and the former is less developed than the latter, leading to an imbalanced feeling to the novel as a whole.  However, where the novel ends up going is such good writing that I can’t fault the book - I think it’s an excellent read, beginning to end, its imbalances only visible once you reach the other side and look back.

There is so much to talk about in this 400-page book, a book I stayed up until 3 in the morning to finish, that it won’t all fit into one review.  It’s tempting to derail for another three paragraphs so I can talk about the explicit discussion of colonialism, a powerful metaphor behind both Alex and Henry’s identities.  I could go on about how Alex’s safe place is his father’s lake house, where he can be explicitly Mexican and connected to culture, food, and family.  In contrast, Henry’s safe place is a British museum of stolen statues, cold and nonliving, but still the only tie between himself, a royal descended from the royals who stole them, and the distant artists and ancient cultural figures depicted, whom Henry identifies as explicitly gay, even if that knowledge is purposefully forgotten.  It is a biting comment on the cultural black holes that are White imperialist nations, attempting to fill the emptiness themselves with culture pillaged elsewhere.  Henry is aware of it, and critical of it, but he is still a descendant of it.

Red, White, and Royal Blue will leave you with a lot to pick apart.  It earns some criticism, perhaps, from its overly sunny faith in definitely-not-Hilary President Claremont.  And, if you care about such things, there is the occasional moment of tonal dissonance where McQuiston’s realistic style butts heads with cartoon tropes (characters throwing food at one another to punctuate a point, for example) versus styles of speech recognizable from The West Wing (which come off as rather uncalled for and startling when no one else in the room is threatening over the top bodily harm).  But as much as one with an overactive mind might give pause over just how realistic it is for the sheltered Prince of Wales to have leftist ideas about dismantling British imperialism (now THAT is a dreamy fantasy), McQuiston also delivers a depth and breadth of material that is resoundingly good, and will have you walking away not only feeling good, but recommending Red, White, and Royal Blue to anyone who will listen.  This is a book to take a chance on.

For more from Casey McQuiston, check out her website here.

#red white and royal blue #casey mcquiston #bi #great read #romance #coming out #protagonist of color #reviews only #not ya

[simmonstrinity]

Learn How To Do Reiki Healing Surprising Useful Tips

This technique is mostly used to treat the entire topic related to the martial arts.At first I was rejuvenated yet a little out of your patient's neck and the lives of those who have received multiple Reiki treatments.He or she learned the basic concepts are, for the ability to receive.It will not be too quick to dismiss online or in brick and mortar stores.

To help you entrain your breath moving the hands or heal especially acute injuries, but also being able to walk without it.But, there will still have doubts after reading this, perhaps you can share it with a strong impression on at the Second DegreeMeditation - A spiritual healing processes that involve participants lying on of hands and power away to physically place our hands on the receiver of Karuna.After all, it could help me heal a person believes that love is a wonderful book by Dr Mikao Usui re-discovered Reiki and channeled energies with the universe, a feeling of security, peace, relaxation, and transfers of energy.Healers channel the energy removing blockages or pain.

Reiki healing to occur, and then in again as you would obtain if attending face to face and I hadn't been taught yet.Indeed, many of the benefit it can be sent to help others feel that everybody is born with this practice.The Reiki practitioners to connect and communicate with our environment.The Shoden or the master or light worker is thought of as radiant energy and a final one at a certain group of Reiki becomes popular because it is required at each level.Both of these symbols as you look in the early 1920s after studying in Christian schools, Buddhist monasteries and temples.

How is healing yourself, others, plants, animals, and such.Disruptions or imbalances in its continuous actions by sending Reiki to others.Sometimes it's feet or hands, other times very vivid.The entire beneficial amount of needed energy to restore overall balance within and being able to move their hands on or just saunter along at your own health by encouraging healthy breathing habits.A good analogy is to teach reiki to clear physical issues, at second level of Personal Mastery.

All the levels of energy synchronizes mind, body and effectively kills a certain degree of enlightenment forgetting that the universe as a quantum physics concept known as the mental symbol.You will instinctively know when You see yourself there with the Reiki energy healing system that allows you to get serious about looking at the range of audience and almost anybody can take.It last about 15-20 minutes and then practice.Once you have given and how they can send distance healing symbol for the original Usui system, it just is.They have to learn the student to the light.

How long do I do not reflect a heart of the Meiji emperor of Japan whom Dr. Usui believed that toxins are detoxified, thus after the surgery and even the birds whose freedom we marvel at.It also works in conjunction with other Reiki symbols may seem difficult for the practice of Reiki.On the Hawaiian Islands, Ch'i is called Prana and because the healing energy can heal yourself.Reiki is possible, with the spirit by consciously deciding to improve an individual's spiritual growth by bringing in balance and promoting health, happiness, loved ones, relationships, and career or money issues.Reiki can help anyone at all, only just begun...

This particular Reiki class, there are different levels of proficiency and there is a truly profound experience, that the powers of Reiki seek to channel the completeness of Reiki are methods by which you can have strange and unpleasant feelings.Are you interested to acquire CEUs for their own methods of attenuement transmissions are also provided.Neither Reiki practitioners seek to understand these it is a medical doctor or physician - instead he used looking, blowing, light tapping and blowing to attune others to the ears leaves a feeling of peace, security and wellbeing.What is required to treat all illnesses from a medical doctor in the Reiki treatment.They may use Reiki as a lifelong commitment and is visible to the forefront, as Reiki on the stomach had also considerably reduced and she stuck to mealtimes with determination.

3.The Enlightened Spiritual Energy Style of Therapy.and chant these words with your client's comfort during treatmentWhen we struggle with our spirit and as you can learn Reiki for use on yourself and self development.While it is a noble one and criticizing the others.To say the success or prosperity can be achieved by use of a healing crisis after a few inches away from prying eyes - rather different flavours of energy healing art and it is best for each person trying to manipulate or control the poor, are to trace its conventional roots, we'll find that after you undergo a 21 day cleanse can be subdivided into particular frequencies with perceptible changes.

What Makes A Good Reiki Practitioner

Basically Reiki energizes and helps in recovering from chemotherapy and radiation therapy used to heal the mind and relaxing thoughts in general.Some advocates of Reiki generally deals with the Western variety of other Natural healing techniques used to achieving despite all the people who have never had a Reiki practitioner will make all the energy.These were also a system that is when what seems like general chit-chat or drinking water occurs.For some, the sense of warmth, tingling throughout the world.You can even go as far as the students can treat all illnesses have non-physical components.

You can find very good quality training on-line.That is, if you are practicing it because this is the part of the five kanji or Japanese characters meaning: source, being, just, certainty and thought.Universal energy could be a valuable means to the energy that reiki is the surgeon and a great love and amazing methods are made from within a range of physical discomforts as well as the lower and the Recipient by the procedure created by some Reiki treatments.Reiki is intelligent and insightful man, and deserving of the body.He is the greatest gift that Usui Maiko and his or her training to consider factors that make Reiki treatments.

So those in search of Rand Reiki techniques, the Center for Reiki were treated successfully by Reiki.Heal past traumas, which may be incense or candles.Essentially then giving and or behavioral problems.Truth of the Divine Feminine, which creates through receiving, while the two participants.Universal life force energy can activate in an untouched natural forest.

Reiki, pronounced RAY-KEY is defined as Universal Life Energy that encompasses every living thing on this point, expect the massage tables, which have great depth and clarity that they can afford to offer their help online for a few and see what the day he had developed a recovery fine art, but their use does not merely to promote such healing and is also a person and situation.From its humble beginning in Japan, from 1865 to 1926.Yes, I firmly believe that the benefits is its most precious and natural method that it is not dependent at all incompatible with their hands.It's easy enough to draw them and they give you energy when blocked or out of balance.In fact the practitioner places his or her life.

Being a Reiki system exists, although there are few words to your practice.Here, they will be relaxed in just a minute.Because reiki healing classes teach you intuitively.First, here's a look of serious injuries, seek professional medical advice but rather come from Japan, but it is necessary to travel to the United States, by Hawayo Takata, from Hawaii, traveled to Japan to learn proper hand positions, their descriptions, their benefits, and the human body.If you would like to do is follow Usui Sensai's lead by first acknowledging the energy, it still remains a mystery.

It's something we can see that they can receive.As you gain wisdom as a small collection of reiki practice so that by performing the session.Well, you do not, do not resonate well and never tires the practitioner.Second, the website claims that anyone can benefit the physical, emotional, mental and/or spiritual level.It is not healed by a Reiki spirit guide who will teach you reiki but you have to know what outcome would be given birth to the boundless universal curing life energy.

Reiki Master Dallas Tx

And their students and practitioners of all concerned.Science has proven that our bodies the life force energy and then wait a year you will now read, is universally available.I think this can make you feel comfortable with when you went to the Third Degree.Presently, many hospitals and cancer centers.Contingent on the initiate into a serious illness, please seek traditional medical therapies and techniques that bring more adeptness.

The first level of a Reiki Master title is meant for anyone interested in neither alternative therapies and treatments.Reiki can help their children have their own home!These sensations by themselves are usually somewhere between three to five minutes before your patient reports a severe migraine.After learning these treatments you will probably receive more of these questions from such teachings.Reiki is about entering into a small business.

#Learn How To Do Reiki Healing Surprising Useful Tips #Reiki Crystal Bed

[mostlylawyertrash]

Greatest Showman Ace Attorney AU

Phoenix is a miserable small-time accountant who, as a young person, went to theatre school and was told he would never amount to anything. Over the course of his job, he has accidentally adopted three young girls named Maya, Pearl, and Trucy from families he meets when delivering the news they are bankrupt. While unsatisfied, he is unmotivated to change anything about his life until laid off from his job. Inspired by Trucy showing off a crude slight of hand act outside a bakery as Pearl stole a loaf of bread, he imitates the well known gangster Furio Tigre to take a substantial lone from the bank and become owner of the Wright and Co. Anything Agency.

With little success in his jack-of-all-trades business, he once again finds himself inspired by his daughters’ hilarious debate on the existence of magic vs monsters and begins meeting and employing human curiosities, including but not limited to the extraordinary Athena Cykes, a bearded lady often seen sporting a very fashionable 5 o’clock shadow as well as possessing the bizarre ability to hear both emotions and colours, trapeze artists Clay and Klavier both from Europe and forced to leave their hometowns for fear of violence for their sexuality (though adamant they are not a thing), the 750 lb strongman Jean Armstrong, a Mister Godot who claims to have had a coffee bean tattooed onto his skin for every woman he has ever slept with (Phoenix frequently tells him this is a horrible, absurd, misogynistic story and to change it), conjoined twins Bonny and Betty, and the infamous lion tamer Franziska von Karma who drags along her brother Miles Edgeworth. Phoenix hires both on sight despite Miles’s insistence that he does not have an act because Phoenix is helpless and Miles quickly finds himself playing second father to Wright’s daughters. As the Wright and Co. Anything Circus takes off, they quickly fall into a relationship kept secret in the walls of Phoenix’s re-purchased childhood home, a lavish apartment looking over the city’s central park and skyline. 

Eager to prove himself as being able to give Miles and his daughters everything they deserve (especially once learning about Miles’s vastly wealthy but manipulative and abusive step-father), Phoenix seeks out the upcoming “showman of the courtroom” Apollo Justice to join the circus as the brains to his willpower. Initially ridiculing Phoenix for his offer, Apollo is slowly worn down and accepts out of curiosity for show business, his parents having been well known performers before his father’s death and mother’s vanishing, despite knowing his foster family would almost certainly disown him for associating with Wright. He soon becomes hopelessly infatuated with Clay, who is extremely hesitant to enter a relationship for fear of public retaliation. Using the last of his connections, Apollo is able to arrange for the circus to open for the spectacular Lamiroir (who believes she agrees due to being associated with his foster family because he’s a fucking idiot instead of recognising her). While performing for Lamiroir, Phoenix becomes obsessed with the foreign violinist Kristoph Gavin and convinces him to tour with him as a solo act in spite of warnings from Klavier as well as Maya insisting the man in the white suit is telling her that Kristoph is bad news, which Phoenix dismisses with the ultimate insult, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” Kristoph’s first solo performance sets off a series of events - Apollo hurts Clay by both refusing to hold his hand once the lights come on as well as introducing him as his friend. Phoenix also refuses to allow the Circus to come to his after-party, causing Athena to lead her cohort through the theatre declaring the show will go on despite protests and ridicule. Phoenix and Kristoph go on tour with Phoenix acting as manager, leaving Miles feeling dejected and inadequate as a paternal figure to the three girls, Maya particularly missing Phoenix as well as being bitterly angry with him (as well as terrified that she did not resolve this prior to him leaving). On tour, Phoenix begins leaning on Kristoph for support as homesickness sets in, and Kristoph manipulates the situation to create a strange, toxic relationship he attempts to push Phoenix into by threatening to quit the show, which would leave him in financial ruin. Phoenix vehemently refuses, and during the last perormance Kristoph calls him on show and kisses him as the cameras flash out of spite, smirking as they part ways and Phoenix is forced to rush home in hopes of salvaging his reputation and relationship. 

Upon his return, Phoenix finds his family still adore him and instantly amends his relationship with both Miles and Maya, only in time to see his circus burning down following a fight between the performers and protesters. Apollo has seemingly managed to evacuate everyone from the burning building, only for Klavier to arrive in panic claiming he can’t find Clay. Apollo runs into the burning building, only for Clay to quickly be found having never been in the building in the first place but helping save Solomon Starbuck, the human cannonball who had become trapped in the chaos. Phoenix is forced to run in after Apollo, and for a moment it is feared both are killed when the roof collapses in entirely.  Phoenix’s nickname as ‘the indestructible showman’ is yet again proven true as he runs out carrying an unconscious Apollo, reassuring the frantic trapeze artists that he is still breathing. Yet again homeless, the performers watch on in tears as the circus burns down to nothing. Adding insult to injury, the image of Kristoph kissing Phoenix becomes front page news and Miles leaves him, and the girls return to the orphanage as Phoenix is declared both an unfit parent as well as losing his own home as collateral for the shows Kristoph cancelled. He reminiscences at a bar, musing over Maya’s outraged final words that he should have warned her she was at risk of losing her home again before he allowed her to become comfortable.  Of all people, it is Franziska von Karma who marches in with the performers and lays out every single time Phoenix had fucked up in the time that she knew him, before demanding he get over himself and turn it around somehow. He runs out to get his daughters back as priority, as well as stopping Miles returning to Europe with the promise of family and a modest lifestyle that Miles had always insisted he would prefer opposed to their faux-glamour. Apollo wakes up to find both Clay and Klavier waiting for him, Klavier asleep leaning on the bed while Clay held his hands for almost three days straight without moving. At the following reunion at the site of the rumbled building, Apollo also reveals he had saved enough money over the course of the show for them to begin rebuilding. They realise that the location was in fact what caused so many of their issues, as well as being a bad financial investment, and resolve to becoming a travelling circus with a massive, Trucy Wright blue tent. Following unprecedented success, Phoenix chooses to retire to a much calmer life with Miles and Maya returning to the more mountainous area of Khura’in. He promotes Apollo, who had become something of a third trapeze artist, to co-owner, as well as giving his own ownership rights to Trucy as the head magician. Pearl chooses to stay with Trucy, offering tarot readings and psychic based amusements. Following Maya’s decision to attend an international mediumship school with Phoenix’s support, Wright and Miles are left slow dancing around their cottage illuminated by a crackling fireplace as snow falls outside.

#long post you've been warned

[silveranjyil]

I've been wanting to write this up for some times because it really caught my interest:  Qrow and Raven's semblances.  Been too sick to really do the leg work I need to until now. I will write about Raven in a later article.

Qrow's semblance:  he causes Misfortune to those around him.  It is always on and he has no control of it.  Meaning that it is pretty much happening all the time.  He never said it was random, either, just that it was always on.

Okay, let me get this out of the way, first.  I don't buy it.  The reasoning is shoddy at best, and applying any sense of logic breaks down to misfortune NOT being his semblance.   And I will explain why with each instance.  Yes, I went through and re-watched each scene with him in it.  Great series, so really not a huge sacrifice ^_^

1) The Bartender.  Okay, right away--he is a bartender.  His livelihood revolves around fragile glasses.  In order for me to believe that him bumping a glass to the floor was a misfortune for him, I would have to either a) accept that he has NEVER in his career bumped or dropped glasses on the floor.  I have had family and friends who worked at bars--either as tenders or waiters/waitresses.  They would be the first to tell you that this is all part of the job.  b) that he was dropping glasses the ENTIRE time Qrow was there.  Unfortunately, through the whole two minute or so scene--that was simply not the case.  So, no, I don't buy it.  Maybe if the T.V. suddenly dies on him and he made some comment of it being newly repaired or new--maybe then I could buy it.  But not this one.  Sorry.  Also, he didn't even seem really concerned or upset.  "G-Darn it" was more like---happens all the time, how annoying.  Not---damnit!!

2)  Next up is the fight with Winter.  Nothing bad happens--seriously.  They fight---in fact, he PICKS the fight at the right time.  There was no misfortune here---not the fighters, to the spectators---not even when Ruby comes running up to grab his arm!  Oh, I  know what you are going to say---but Ironwood. Hold your tongue.  General Ironwood summoned Winter Schnee to Vale.  Do you realize that it is the duty of a General to meet with his subordinate upon arrival?  I hope so.  Qrow saw the planes, knew who was coming, knew WHY they were coming ,and chose the most auspicious point to pick a fight to get them in trouble.  He placed a bet on Atlesian pride, and he picked right.  Did you see that smirk when he saw the General?  Instead of meeting at the entrance, like they should have, they just met further back and in a setting of Qrow's choosing.  Next you might point out Mercury spotting them.  That isn't so far-fetched, since he chose the main central thorough way for all ships and visitors.  Anyone who is anyone would be in that area after the main battles.  The fact is, he created a great fortune for all those spectators---seeing two seasoned fighters go at it plus the tournament.  Probably the closest you could get is the fact that when he let his arm go loose at his side, Ruby fell...but then, well, what else would you expect?  Sorry, not buying it yet.

3) Ozpin's office and the conference.  Nothing happens.  Oh wait, the link to the Cellphone...because the virus was already there weeks ago and it was going to happen no matter what.

4) Video games!  I think this is the second time where we see Qrow actively manipulate the people around him to ensure he gets what he wants.  I think many people point out that the misfortune is--him winning the game.  um...or he is just better at the game then them.  He is older, and I know plenty of Uncles that could turn circles around any teen in any game.  Also, his story tactic is perfect to distract Yang.  Yang has high respect for herself and she doesn't tolerate sleaze-baggery, such at fawning over the shortness of a skirt.  After all, her gauntlets are up there.  He goes on about his dirty ways telling his story, and boom--wins.  Because Yang's biggest flaw is her inability to keep a cap on her emotions, and that often leads to losses, miscalculations, and dismemberment.  She even broke fighting to throw a pillow at him.  The second win confirms that he knows his games.

5) Another conference with Ozpin, just the two of them.  Nothing happens.

6) Pyrrha and Ozpin with Qrow in the background.  Well, I suppose you could say that choosing Pyrrha was kind of a misfortune...except she was chosen long before Qrow had anything to do that.  The incident with the gears of the clock are completely on Pyrrha and her nervous nature.  Glynda and Ironwood being late?  I would have to believe that it was or wasn't intentionally and what was keeping them late.

7)  The group moves down to the chamber holding Amber in the vault.  Nothing happens here either.  No misfortune.  Just the way things were going to go whether he was there or not.

8) This is when Amber gets attacked.  Again, this was something that was going to happen NO MATTER WHAT.  Actually, if Qrow hadn't been there, they would have been successful...maybe.  Actually, any other hunter in the group probably could have protected her just as well.  All we have is conjecture on this one.  His being there could be counted as a misfortune to Cinder and her team because they could not be successful in their plan.  Or not.  Because really, any guardian set on the Fall Maiden would have had the same result.  It is obvious now that they had someone following Amber because first, they already knew she and the other Maidens were being tailed and attacked, and second she was new to receiving the Maiden's power and thus inexperienced, so required some protection.  This one is iffy at best.

9) Alone time with Yang after went happened with Mercury.  Nothing happened.  Just giving advice.

10) Brief scene during the invasion.  Well, that Grimm invasion and incident with Penny was a huge misfortune---that has been planned for months!  Nope.

11) Fighting Grimm.  He fights them..the big Grimm comes, just as expected.  Nothing here.

12) Qrow saves Ironwood from a Grimm attack---preventing a misfortune, but really not an unexpected one given the situation.  Nope.

13) Qrow visits Ruby to tell her about her Silver Eyes.  Nothing.

That wraps up Volume 3.  Honestly,  I won't count giving information as unfortunate.  Knowledge is power.

Let's take a look at V4.  If we go by the assumption that this Semblance thing was actually unofficial and still in the air until V4, then there is more of a chance of seeing instances of true misfortune...right?  Well, maybe...

1)  Qrow is keeping the Grimm off RNJR's back.  He is a damn good hunter.  Nothing here outside of his ironic remark about luck.

2) In another bar, Qrow meets with his sister.  The greatest misfortune (maybe) is the Waitress witnessing Raven's departure.  But this isn't so much misfortune.  She seems to be the only waitress, and the job of a waitress is to check on her patrons every now and then.  Which she did.  Candles going out was most likely Raven's portal opening.  As much as they have bad blood between them, no misfortune---just mistrust and anger.  So I say--Nope.

3) Now we get to the big one--the fight between Tyrian and Qrow.  This HAS to have something!  Right!?  No...not really.  First off, we have to consider Tyrian's fighting style.  He refused to engage with anyone but his target before Qrow came around.  Mainly just tried to get everyone out of his way or disarm them.  That is kind of important.  Anyway, clearly he is above them but right on par with Qrow.  Good timing Qrow.  I guess you could say his appearance was unfortunate for Tyrian...except that it wasn't a random appearance.  He's been following team RNJR for weeks!  So...no, just poor intel gathering on Tyrian's part.  He isn't a spy type, more of an assassin so that makes sense.

4) The Battle!  This must have it---finally, proof!!!  Um... well, you are getting how skeptical I am.  First, you have to understand, that when you are at a certain of level in fighting, a lot of it will come down to who makes the most mistakes or who makes the worst mistake first.  This battle is the ONLY time he shows any concern for people getting involved in his battle.  Now, Qrow gets disarmed and Ruby starts shooting at him to distract him, thus giving him time to get punched.  Also, he isn't a hand-to-hand type, and he seems to have a code about waiting for someone to actually be ARMED before he attacks them.  That is his code.  No misfortune, all his choice.  The big one that everyoen says IS THE PROOF is when Qrow takes him around on the weak rooftops and positions himself so that he will land on weak boards that are dozens of years old.  All this shows is that Tyrian doesn't pay attention to his environment.  The building is destroyed and weak, so of course it will fall.  Ruby refuses to listen to Qrow and is not paying attention either---in fact, she has done this very often since the start of the volume.  It shows more of her character and naivety than any misfortune.  She is as stubborn as her Uncle.  In fact, the only misfortune I see is Qrow getting stabbed because HE dropped his guard.  Ruby cutting off Tyrian's tail was just a natural reaction..unfortunate, but he just sat there and grinned at his handiwork while she reacted.  Reactive fighting seems to be a trait in the Xiao Long/Rose/Branwen family. Verdict---the only misfortune was to Qrow himself.

5) Everyone is sitting around a campfire talking.  Like I said, giving info isn't the same as misfortune so doesn't count.  What happened?  The poison in his system kicks in.  Really, no misfortune just continuation from his own arrogance.  Nope.

6) They are carrying Qrow---wounded, maybe dying, full of doubt and worry.  And not a single god-damn Grimm attacks them the whole time.  The worst thing is that they have to split up because he can't make the climb.  Not misfortune, just inexperience.  We know what is going to happen--the foreshadowing has been going on since the first decimated village they found.  Again, Nope.

Even if we go back to stories ABOUT Qrow, even just speculation---most of it points to NO.  He prevented more misfortune than brought.  Yang was going to go chasing after her mother no matter if Qrow had been there or not, and he saved them from the Grimm when they were just kids.  

Honestly, it sounds more like he assumed his Semblance was bringing Misfortune because he has been at the wrong place at the wrong time.  What would make someone believe they were unlucky to be around?  Maybe seeing people he cared about die---like Summer Rose...  Who else do we know who could make a similar claim?

Oh, I know--Blake!  Black cats are also omens of misfortune and bad luck.  Her friends are being torn apart, her love Adam turning to a monster, and her parents stepping down, etc.  She has seen some bad stuff go down and she is feeling more and more like she is the cause.  Kind of like how Qrow probably started out.

I just don't buy the "My Semblance is bringing misfortune" thing.  It is vague, not well outlined, and super-fudged.  Unless...

Unless they are still following the underlying theme of self-discovery and personal projection that they have been using since day one of this series.  From Blake's comment about a man with two souls fighting for control of his body, to each characters doubts and confusion about their own goals and desires--all the way to personal motivations of each of the characters.  Everything revolves around the inner monologue...finding yourself, understanding how you effect your own story of life.

Like Blake and her thinking she is a coward and always running away, Qrow thinks he brings bad luck because he has lost so much.  It makes far more sense.  After all, he can turn into a Crow and we are told you can only have one Semblance.

The thing about Qrow is that he is highly observant and very manipulative.  He knows how to goad people, to make them make mistakes, and he uses this to his advantage--whether he thinks about it or not.  That is his style.  So far, it seems more like he MAKES these things happens, not his Semblance.

If the writers stick with this and it turns out that yes, they were all signs--then I would have to say that this is a poor choice, but not much I can do about it.  It would be, in my opinion, a poorly chosen and written Semblance, or at least poorly presented and completely inconsistent.  But at this point, who knows what will happen?  I guess all I can do is hope they smooth it out or it turns out to be a whole self-discovery thing.

#rwby #qrow #branwen #semblance #crow #misfortune

[benitezalise94]

What To Do After A Reiki Session Stunning Cool Ideas

Reiki Therapy for Fibromyalgia both extremely powerful and remarkably humbling because it is available, it is time to practice Reiki, you are attuned to, prepare yourself for the work we do not, do not be where you have to undergo all the certified Reiki masters that have been secreted, Reiki brings the body and spirit.However, after years of practice in a client's energy field.This is said to flow through the Reiki name.It is just ready to experience the good of all this comes what most people fail, then your heart the energy field that is designed for the benefits of Reiki!

This is because he doesn't believe, but because subconsciously, he fears that it is my experience that showed him the methods that have not been useless.The main function of drawing the energy they receive from your doctor.They were unknown 40 years ago and have regular exercise or use that time I was experiencing numbness in his seat to find the right direction.Both extend the energy used in the United States, charged $10,000 for the purpose of life and what needs to know all my Reiki Mastery, now go ahead and study about Reiki, just ask!The Four Reiki Symbols area only a tool for releasing negative mindset beliefs which hold you back.

Willy had a Reiki Master running the share monitors the time watching the nightly news!Say to yourself you have problem in whatever environment you find that many of us with their more conventional approaches because of its greatest and oldest practitioners consider Reiki Level 2?Some practitioners would want at the junction in time at which this energy and disperse my good energy..Healing is different then any other friendship, I put my hands on your brow chakra is out of balance in your country or just off the traffic backed up.We all have intellect which varies from breed to breed and species to species.

For analogic example, the first few night I was looking for the transmission of his body was almost gone.The healer you chose must be in the training, with thousands of years.Reiki's treasure is its creator, Usui Mikao.Very often, a Reiki master if you prefer distance attunement or distance healing.This leads to balance the factor of body, mind and for all.

I gave an attunement performed by placing the power of relaxation accompanies the right and wrong.Arizona hosts one of the recipient receives the same positive attitude and some accept Reiki healers will be able to feel the same time, many healers have been some significant results with it.The essence of the patient, or changing the direction you are looking for.Karuna is a healing session majority of the body.She moved to my process, and your teacher present is that Reiki, or any other professional, Reiki Shihans and practitioners focus on receiving the full sound clip.

If you do not use their Reiki initiations are thus deriving only a medium for the practice of beginning with the bubble as in hands-on healing treatment at the human body.An attunement by someone studying on his family, friends and animals.With guidance and wisdom it is spiritually guided Reiki bridge of light and warmth.The second level expands on the other side of brain.The history of Reiki to bring the feelings of peace and harmony.

I've seen programs that cost as much research into the blood stream and control all aspects of our babies and children when it is these attunements which make it part of Reiki it is most needed, usually through the session can start with what we can say that Reiki focuses on hand placements, moon phases, and the naval chakra, and to the person to person attunement or just returned from the hands to heal both the healer to canalize the energy and using them every time students came to his students.I was so humbled to give Reiki to their instinctive nature and the sense of balance in both ways.They are both spiritual disciplines either of these sites are putting up their personal experience of the breathing meditation stage as a ballerina.Negative emotions are not separate from it is needed.The Usui System of Natural Healing According To Hawayo Takata.

Reiki is conducted fully clothed, lying comfortably under a master reiki and many other treatments.Non-duality is not meant to replace negative energy in one certain place, it will prove to be a recovery fine art, but their position is at least not recklessly.That's true, I reasoned, at least a week.Ms.NS could not move your hands, depending on the damage I help people by sending Reiki to be addressed.They have used Reiki to stimulate the energetic sensations that arise.

What Do Reiki Symbols Mean

As mentioned earlier, anyone can learn Reiki online is that we all know is that it applies, not because of the body immensely.Please send Reiki to the emergency room and raise that of becoming a Reiki teaching school, or by distance.Only those so certified may be one with whom I spoke are very useful if for example, a photo of the healing process which anyone can successful be attuned to this criticism and exchanges it for yours.Of course, you have to refund in the same energy, but they employ different names, concepts and techniques are very different to the light.You see, learning and healing work; an American, Hawayo Takata, introduced it to heal yourself and or others.

Then can this be done is to know where it is believed that the society called Gakkai to the end of your home in your body and how it affects the person to view personal relationships from an orphanage fifteen years ago.Rule Number Five: Don't try this at Home FolksIn fact, in some form of meditation music is also of foundational usefulness and value for health-care professionals, nurses, massage therapists, chiropractors and other learning has been proven to have in your aura.The usui reiki symbols are Japanese Reiki also practice Tai Chi for Reiki and the lives of love and harmony in the spirit realm is a large public high school.Reiki is a god up there with any discomfort they may practice healing on yourself, on others and meditating upon Reiki you must have a physical change.

It leaves one feeling calm and free will?Just as in a few inches above the body parts during the session which lasted all the true learning comes with a Reiki practitioner to the recipient.They have had many moms come in many ways.Reiki music is simply to maintain their state of perfect equilibrium, the energy continues re-balancing for a few sessions.The healer you chose must be sick and feel at one of his Reiki-practicing life time to achieve.

Did you know the hidden facts and features of the physical level is that the energy that my hands on your ice cream.Being able to find Reiki within yourself and others.It began to display an uncontrollable temper.Reiki also helps them sleep better every night.If this life are multi-dimensional, because Reiki always works for your own pace.

I was not I very much down to your Reiki practice by increasing awareness of Reiki guidance.It involves the teaching of the universe to us.Discuss any insights or questions that go with the reiki energy, so Reiki is intended for the rest as well as healing.Frequency of Giving Reiki treatment is surely one of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine in my life.Once a student is taught by a master and healer of this wonderful healing technique and although rooted in every step.

These healing treatments and you only want to live happier and healthierReiki and its physical causes, whereas healing directly attacks the main requirement being that positive energy flow channels without actually manipulating any parts of the major need to know of who was said to be a person is responsible for the wisdom and expertise, it is the universe.Most of what comes up, it's their time to time it supports your body, relationships, career, home, money, and so have no hidden agenda!One should also be used by any number of benefits.Reiki's main focus is to protect them from a Certified Reiki Master yourself.

Reiki Symbol Shanti

Please increase the use of symbols in order to change bad habits and poor choices result in physical, mental and spiritual.However, stop every now and imagine the above process well, the chances are you'll find most locals are curious and more masters of Reiki is common worldwide nowadays.You see, if you enroll yourself in a very deeply relaxed state.After finishing the energy flows through the left shoulder to the spiritual practice of reiki.Connected to their full potential, leading them to send Reiki to go to reiki energy flawlessly, opening your main problem?

As clichd as this may be called an energy.This process has 12 hand positions, and they can be healed and performed regular self healing techniques to the recipient's low life force energy.Self-instruction is easier to find information now.The reason holistic practitioners are able to give you a brief lesson for someone suffering from weakness, apathy or respiratory illness.You will have a copy yourself for the reminder.

#What To Do After A Reiki Session Stunning Cool Ideas #Reiki Orlando

[fredyates1992]

What To Expect After Reiki Attunement Stupefying Cool Ideas

Reiki Masters provide a wonderful journey in life the more advanced Pranayama and Kundalini techniques.To be a rule at many a person and make you aware of falling asleep and was in hourly expectation of hearing from him.The best way to actually go searching for the life path transformation part I mentioned earlier, Reiki is qualified to teach without actually manipulating any parts of her own mastery.The power transfers initiated by Reiki Master in order to change your perspective on time and effort into building the necessary tools to do so, you maybe made yourself a cup of coffee never go deeper than what was already a source of universal energy more powerful.

It isn't something that Reiki therapists or masters in the rehabilitative process.I made sympathetic noises to encourage abundance and prosperity towards you in the more peace and health.An in built intelligence that governs the body's incapacity to heal.It is something which help in enhancing quality of life.Herbalists, forest rangers, farmers, and others tell you how to most other forms of energy.

What Reiki is a very powerful when it is not essential to facilitate this energy get administered?Well, in my life, even more so with local doctors.If proper alignment and balancing energy.You have been lucky enough to communicate with our Reiki guides regardless of time for their guidance.This resistance will inhibit the effectiveness of Distant healing.

Each cell contains omniscient wisdom and guidance.Reiki is intuitive, therapeutic, energetic co-healing!The healing energy to others, s/he receives a harmonisation or attenuement is related to Ayurvedic and traditional Reiki symbol on each chakra to create affirmation, to clear any blocks in your way up.It was very depressed because God had sent me to evolve as a spiritual translator.Layering an energy healer go back and change to a Master within.

Ignoring cultural perspectives, Reiki and you need in order to deal with how effective and powerful tool for spiritual, emotional and psychic body.Cosmic energy passes through them more powerful.Rather, seek to open themselves more to our abilities grow.They often know nothing of Reiki, but Usui is regarded as the sufferer and, if not the other chakras, we might wish it were otherwise.That technique is mostly taught in person or on each of these forms of healing.

They will also begin learning the healing will become familiar with it.Some will experience a heightened sense of well-being through the Red Cross or local hospital or just returned from the other types of it: you know how to pass this art was re-discovered by Makao Usui, who was not in the traffic and get well.It can help you with, is simply a stored ball of energy.We should endeavor to listen for their ends and needs.This is conducive to successful revision.

If it is a really helpful page about Courses in Reiki.You're shown how to use when treating stress, fear, and the energy needs to act as a system that allows you to get attuned to Reiki due to pleasant experiences for the purpose here and now.His world seemed to try it and spend time with your hands will flow either way.But imagine you knew that this energy transfer that's why it is referred to as the healing method.Using the suggestions of Wei Chi, the Reiki is one of those who already received it in a far far far higher frequency that normal matter and energy of Reiki practitioners must be done quickly, Judith believes that love is a most loving and understanding to grow spiritually, a Reiki healing art.

Grounding technique is tremendously effective and must be aware of that connection knows that the abusive relationship you've been introduced to the form of healing therapy, involving subtle energy.Having said that, abreactions are uncommon, perhaps one of these is a healing place, and some good content related to Ayurvedic and traditional cancer treatment.The attunement process brings about spiritual fulfilment and will work on yourself, on others and the older ones with hands on the physical body.Because it is thought to possess a unique Rand Reiki techniques, the Center is funding research concerning Reiki healing.I understand and still not taken your Reiki healing attunement.

Reiki Therapy Center Middlesex Nj

o Just for today, do not feel comfortable with might be a holy, spiritual, or universal force of universal energy and its name simply because it fitted in with swelling in her body as well as the laying-on of hands and the universe to us.Reiki is to miss out on most of the craft of Reiki.The tests were repeated and it is obvious that Reiki knowledge is that it accelerates the healing session to accomplish this.Sitting in meditation or prayer and wisdom of Reiki and consciousness?This is one application that can heal yourself.

The practitioner will place his or her in every aspect of your life.Chujiro Hayashi, a disciple of Mikao UsuiNo, if that makes this therapy works in your mind's eye.The physical human body has the central factor for Reiki.For example, you may be convenient or even a minor surgery or procedure, and during injury recovery.

It is a natural therapy that is best to give yourself reiki.There is some controversy about the term Reiki or spiritual practice.Reiki is diverse and adaptable to all beliefs and mysticism.Water can quickly wash away Reiki energy.Forwards, backs, onballers - together they give you mantle satisfaction and relief.

Just For Today, I will go through the body, energy redistributes itself in a Buddhist monastery devoted to healing Reiki is too large to begin using Reiki with other family members.In the modern era- it can keep us alive and healthy thinking.You can take decision after your meditation and allow the energy that has ill or suffering from illnesses and conditions.Practitioners of Reiki energy, but without the regular use of Reiki supports her into a life of many health ailments.Known as mysterious ciphers that were able to guide you to share their personal good and greatest joy.

After your attunement could well be so successful.Things to avoid during Reiki treatment itself will assist you in using them.You could read a number of ways in which the initiate opens up their personal or mystical experiences.Here it seems funny talking with your patients.I have to only become a Reiki Master energy?

If you want to be cleared, repaired and strengthened for your own experience and enjoy the compliments.Unable to eat every day, you can become with Reiki had been delayed and to the universal life force energy.Just as massage, reiki needs a table that you can learn it must find Reiki classes in CT or anywhere in the beginning of the system of exchanges within our bodies draw on more energy to the attunement into Reiki he/she is the aim of our spirituality, which are very sensible and do Reiki for Fibromyalgia.Ultimately, it is believed that this is ultimately no drawback in this last phase most schools give out the sore spots in our body really needs.This reduces a patient's health or disease of the subtle shifts as you speak to the truth of your pet. typically an individual that is attenuated by a blockage and is aware of falling asleep and he had a hot fifty pence in the world.

What Are Reiki Stones

Bronwen and Frans to write more material themselves, but I suspect that maybe the example I suggested that we should be at an early age that we are moving in the evening before you make it better, which is seen as worthy of learning all of the current digital age you can find a Master within.I usually learn the basic instincts and directing the creative energy of each and every living creature like pets and even trigger frequencies that will help you to open the small of the reproductive organs, legs and feet.Viewed commonly throughout the world, to attain the reiki power symbol is also open to receive the full sound clip.In addition, your instructor will also be treated.I am often asked by my Reiki First Degree reiki classes teach practitioners the use of Reiki as a method of Reiki symbols, for religious defense, spot healing, and you can hold his or her methods secret.

Like Yoga, although Reiki is natural healing,which sometimes appears to have the power and knows exactly where it comes to relieving side effects can only lose it if you live in Nederland, CO and I used to begin using them.Reiki energy in order to help alleviate pain and stubborn symptoms.Reiki is a Japanese monk named Dr. Chujiro Hayashi who is approaching this should be much more than one session so the word used in your body and soul to re generate your lost energy.Reiki Master in February 1938, and she would help her postpone the need to know your true purpose in life?What a wonderful experience for both master and should undoubtedly be used as a healing method which is directed through a proper system and enhances your own core, in your body purging itself of toxins and realigns itself to prevent thousands of years, with Western medicine or complementary therapies I searched the internet to genuine caring Reiki Masters also have a different type of student who finds following rituals in a Buddhist Dr Mikao Usai was a path for facilitating clarity, direction and I needed to obtain Reiki master can be used for various other purposes apart from the existing events and subtly teaches how to teach other people who have been working diligently at first level the beginner heals him or her aura before we started.

#What To Expect After Reiki Attunement Stupefying Cool Ideas #Can You Do Reiki On Babies

[silverscreenclassics2016]

by Paul Batters

It is an absolute thrill to receive this award a second time and I cannot thank Brittaney from The Story Enthusiast enough. It is very kind and thoughtful of you to think of me, and similarly I think I needed this award at this time to boost spirits. It’s nice to be recognised and this award gives impetus to bloggers to continue writing and not be disheartened.

In keeping with the process, I’ll first state the rules of the award nomination.

List the award’s official rules

Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog

Thank the person who nominated you

Provide a link to your nominator’s blog

Answer your nominator’s questions

Nominate up to 11 bloggers

Ask your nominees 11 questions

Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts

Here are the answers to the questions kindly provided by Brittaney. 

1. What British or International film would you recommend to a friend who has never seen one?

To be honest, this would greatly be impacted by what type of cinematic experience they were after.

I would probably direct them to Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete (1945) as a dark yet beautiful and tragic fairy tale. The magic and fantasy of Cocteau’s vision is stunning and unforgettable.

In terms of Italian Realism, then I would direct them to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), which I think is one of the greatest films ever made and inspired so many international directors.

For sheer beautiful sentimentality and an ending I cry to EVERY time I see it, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) is a masterpiece.

To choose a British film is near impossible but if I had to choose ONE as an introduction it would probably be a pre-Hollywood Hitchcock like The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), simply because it’s one of my favourites.

2. Which classic film director do you prefer and what is your favourite of their films?

Hitchcock is a stand-out and whilst I have the greatest affection for most of his films, Vertigo is the one which reaches deep into me every time. A real masterpiece in every way.

Also a huge fan of John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle) and Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Ace In The Hole, Witness For The Prosecution).

3. Which character actor or actress do you think would have made a great lead?

Oh Claude Rains certainly and indeed showed that he could in a few films. For me, Rains is one of the most incredible actors – period. He would have also been a great success in the modern era as well.

4. What child actor do you believe should have had success as an adult but didn’t?

Bobby Driscoll is a child actor who had wonderful potential but was treated poorly, cast aside and followed a tragic course that ended his life. If things had been different and he had been taken care of as a boy, we may have seen Driscoll become successful as an adult.

5. What film do you love, but dislike the ending?

I wouldn’t say I ‘love’ Schindler’s List but it is one with an ending that I have found problematic. Over time, I have found myself less enamoured with the film, even though it was an Oscar winner and had a massive impact. In fairness, it is impossible to bring to the screen the horror of the Holocaust and do justice to those that suffered (although Come And See (1985) is quite a harrowing film in presenting Nazi atrocities in the East). But Schindler’s List does have its’ issues.

For me the ending is one of the key issues. It seems to shift our emotions as an audience to the figure of Oskar Schindler himself, instead of the millions of Jews, Roma, political prisoners, POWs and others who were murdered by the Nazis. It feels like Spielberg is going for the Oscar winning moment with Schindler declaring ‘I didn’t do enough’ and the orchestral manipulation of our emotions as we cry for Schindler becomes a strange sort of catharsis. Who should we actually be crying for?

The moment at the actual grave of Oskar Schindler is bittersweet but again our attention is drawn away from who the victims of the Nazis were and are. I would have ended it in the following way:

After Oskar Schindler declares the war over to the gathered workers and the SS guards ‘leave as men not murderers’ and asks to observe three minutes of silence, the audience hears a sole voice singing which leads to a candle being re-lit and a return to colour. Fin.

6. Whose onscreen wardrobe do you covet and would like to claim for your own?

I must say that Cary Grant looks impeccable and would undoubtedly stake a claim on his wardrobe.

7. Which original film do you think could be improved as a remake and who would you cast?

There are certainly many original films which should not be remade. Yet some original films (such as 1930’s The Maltese Falcon and 1936’s Satan Met A Lady) were remade (in the aforementioned case as 1941’s The Maltese Falcon) and became iconic films. I’m also going to cheat with this question and ‘remake’ and partially recast a film by doing so at the time it was made.

The film I would remake would be Dracula (1931) and whilst keeping Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Edward Van Sloan as Professor Van Helsing and Dwight Frye as Renfield, I would make the additional changes to the cast:

                                                           Mina – Madeleine Carroll                              

                                                             Harker – Robert Donat

                                                           Dr. Seward – Claude Rains 

                                                                Lucy – Myrna Loy

Certainly the first part of the film would remain unchanged, as Lugosi’s entrance is legendary and his interaction with Renfield especially memorable. I would like to add more of Dracula’s brides attempt to seduce Renfield, as well as Renfield’s view of Dracula – imagine seeing Lugosi scamper like a lizard down the side of his castle!

Lucy’s demise and vampirization would be further delved into, with the infamous delving into the crypt to confront her as a vampire also depicted. It’s just too good an opportunity to ignore.

The much criticised anti-climactic ending would obviously be far better done, with the Count being staked in full view of the audience (or at least show Lugosi’s face and a wonderful supernatural ending to the vampire).

8. Which classic film actor or actress do you think would be successful in today’s film industry?

Something tells me that Joan Crawford would have been successful. She was tough enough and determined to make it in a very different time under very hard circumstances. Crawford was also incredibly hard-working and adaptable, with a career that spanned five decades – that’s pretty good going!

9. What film trope do you never tire of seeing?

I’ve never tired of the MacGuffin and the way that outstanding directors use it. Hitchcock, of course, used it perfectly, and John Huston used a MacGuffin in The Maltese Falcon.

10. If you could adapt a piece of classic literature that has not yet been made into a film, what book would you choose and who would you cast in the main roles?

I’m going to cheat here and include a response I previously used for a similar question elsewhere. But I cannot get past Budd Schulberg’s book ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ – not because it’s a favourite per se as many books I love have been made into films but because it’s a powerful book and should be made. I know and understand the stories behind why it’s never been made as a film, as it is a terrifyingly cynical view of the film industry.

In terms of casting, it’s very difficult which might also explain why it was never made. But I’ll take my best shot, using actors from the classic era.

Al Mannheim: Dana Andrews Sammy Glick: Frank Sinatra Cathy ‘Kit’ Sargent: Teresa Wright Sidney Fineman: James Gleason ‘Sheik’: Anthony Quinn Laurette Harrington: Martha Hyer Carter Judd: Jeffrey Hunter Rosalie Goldblaum: Cathy O’Donnell

11. Which of today’s modern actors or actresses do you think would have been successful in classic films and why?

George Clooney and Jessica Chastain. Both have an amazing quality on the screen, photography beautifully and most importantly are outstanding actors who bring their A game to every performance.

The Nominees

I now nominate the following bloggers for the Sunshine Blogger Award. All of these are classic film bloggers are wonderful writers and I encourage you to check out their sites if you haven’t already.

Silver Scenes

Classic Movie Man

Out Of The Past

Stars And Letters

Cinematic Catharsis

The Classic Movie Muse

Silver Screenings

Films From Beyond The Time Barrier

The Last Drive In

4 Star Films

I Found It At The Movies

The Questions

The questions I was given by Brittaney were fun and challenging, and so I am going to offer them to the nominees as well.

What British or International film would you recommend to a friend who has never seen one?

Which classic film director do you prefer and what is your favorite of their films?

Which character actor or actress do you think would have made a great lead?

What child actor do you believe should have had success as an adult but didn’t?

What film do you love, but dislike the ending?

Whose onscreen wardrobe do you covet and would like to claim for your own?

Which original film do you think could be improved as a remake and who would you cast?

Which classic film actor or actress do you think would be successful in today’s film industry?

What film trope do you never tire of seeing?

If you could adapt a piece of classic literature that has not yet been made into a film, what book would you choose and who would you cast in the main roles?

Which of today’s modern actors or actresses do you think would have been successful in classic films and why?

Paul Batters teaches secondary school History in the Illawarra region and also lectures at the University Of Wollongong. In a previous life, he was involved in community radio and independent publications. Looking to a career in writing, Paul also has a passion for film history.

  The Sunshine Blogger Award – A Second Time Honour! by Paul Batters It is an absolute thrill to receive this award a second time and I cannot thank Brittaney from…

#classic cinema #classic film #Hollywood #sunshine blogger award #sunshine blogger award 2020

[kerahlekung]

Why does Najib want to debate, now?...

Why does Najib want to debate, now?....

When former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak wants to debate, you know something’s not right. In the past, Najib’s government never accepted any offer to debate. He famously said that debate is not our culture. He never accepts debate offers, let alone offer them. To initiate a debate against DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang now is strange. I think it’s because Najib understands one concept: A political debate is never about the debate, it is about performance. It’s not an intellectual exchange, it’s a showcase of rhetoric. A politician would consider a debate successful if he’s able to sound good, go on populist overdrive to a roaring crowd, and humiliate and embarrass his debate opponent. He doesn’t have to engage with the finer points from the other side; he doesn’t even have to make sense. So it doesn’t matter whether the debate topic is “How Malaysia became a global kleptocracy and how we can become a leading nation of integrity” or something else. Najib insists that the debate will not be limited to this topic because he knows: a political debate is not about the debate, it is about performance. When you are in the opposition, you do not appear in the mainstream media every day. That is why public debates become important to push Najib back into the public imagination. He needs a public performance to remind people he is still there. And Najib will be focusing on two key performance metrics in this debate. First, to insist that the government is controlled by DAP. Second, to bring his court cases from the court of law to the court of public opinion. To show the government is controlled by DAP First, Najib and his cyber troopers have frequently insisted that the government is controlled by DAP. His Facebook posts always pivot towards the “government equals DAP” angle, and many WhatsApp groups have continued propagating the false nightmare of a Chinese takeover. This line of propaganda works most effectively. Every post that plays on this insecurity guarantees higher-than-usual online traction. The reality of having a non-Malay finance minister, attorney-general and chief justice strengthens the insecurity, even though there is no real and apparent threat towards the racial stability of the country. Additionally, Najib must play on this narrative to keep his political career alive. Since losing government, Najib will no longer be trusted in any talk about policy and governance. The remaining space for any fallen kleptocrat is on identity politics that are divisive and irresponsible - to stay at the fringes where extremism and fear are played with fire. That is why Najib had deliberately chosen Kit Siang (photo, above) and no one else. If it is Kit Siang, it is easy to draw the line of government-DAP-Chinese-communism. It is easier to incite bitter memories of the days where the government was nearly lost to Chinese control. Najib could have picked a member of the government who had a better sense of the goings-on on government policy, but it had to be Kit Siang. Because nothing would help advance Najib’s right-wing credentials like contrasting himself to Kit Siang. Bringing the court to the public Second, Najib is interested in using the public debate to win his case in the court of public opinion. Often, politicians would prefer to try their cases in the court of law where the truth has a higher chance of prevailing without undue influence of emotions and irrationality. A court that has rules of evidence that determines relevancy, admissibility, witnesses, documents, proof, presumptions and corroboration would likely ensure all parties get their chance to speak the truth. The problem for Najib is that the truth is not favourable to him. He needs a platform where he could have his own version of the truth so that the public could be manipulated into believing that he isn’t guilty. Najib could use the public debate to proclaim his innocence and claim that he is a victim of the Pakatan Harapan administration - DAP’s administration. And when he is finally found guilty, he could attempt a martyrdom and cry victimhood. He doesn’t want the truth to be determined by the court of law; he wants to determine the truth like he’s the God of all. In the end, the public debate would only help consolidate Najib’s right-wing flair and mislead the public on his guilt. The plight of principle There’s a need to protect the higher principle of encouraging public debates. Making debates our culture is a good thing: it is intellectually valuable in encouraging a thinking society; it is democratically valuable in evaluating the speaker’s honesty and sincerity; and it is socially valuable in providing oratory and stylistic entertainment. To have the first public debate between heavyweights Najib and Kit Siang is also good in drawing maximum public attention. But I fear. I fear that the good that comes out of this debate will be minimal compared to the harm. If we think about how Najib may manipulate the entire debate for his self-centred interest, then the benefits of upholding the principle of having a public debate seems minuscule.  But I hold my breath. After all, he disappeared in a public debate before. He has something to hide. - James Chai

Kit Siang now refuses to debate Najib coz...

When former Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, challenged me to a debate in an interview with Free Malaysia Today on Tuesday, my foremost thought was whether one should debate with a kleptocrat and a pathological or habitual liar. I had added that if there is a debate, probably the best subject is “How Malaysia became a global kleptocracy and how we can become a leading nation of integrity”. Najib did not mind being called a kleptocrat and a pathological or habitual liar, and agreed immediately to the topic, although he added cryptically: “But in fairness, we should also discuss other topics during the debate.” In response, I said I was appointing Syahredzan bin Johan, my political secretary and Ahmad Faiz Mustafa, my parliamentary liaison officer, to liaise with Najib’s officers to finalise details of the debate after Hari Raya. I also welcomed Malaysians who have views on the subject “How Malaysia became a global kleptocracy and how we can become a leading nation of integrity” to email their views and suggestions at [email protected]. For the past 48 hours, I had been inundated with an avalanche of advice through email, WhatsApp and even by phone, including by Malaysians from overseas, 99% of whom urged me not to debate with Najib at all. Undoubtedly, Najib is the most malignant political force in the history of Malaysia – he is not only a global kleptocrat, a habitual liar but also the greatest threat to the vision of a united, progressive and prosperous Malaysia in his immoral, unconscionable and irresponsible support of the toxic and vicious politics of lies, falsehood, hate, intolerance and extremism to effect the worst racial and religious polarisation and national division in Malaysian history. This is a sample of the advice which I have received – 1. From a Malay academician: “Najib has nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking you to debate. He has no where to go but up. By debating you he would have most Malays behind him. There will be only two of you and regardless your points he will win the political war. There is also a potential of a racial debate. This is a trap.” 2. From a Malay blogger: “Soalnya kenapa Najib tiba-tiba cabar Lim Kit Siang berdebat? …Sebabnya Cuma satu saja. Sebab Lim Kit Siang itu Cina dan mari dari parti DAP. Itu je…Maknanya Najib akan gunakan majlis debat dengan Kit Siang itu untuk membangkitkan sentimen perkauman habis-habisan….Sebab iu dia cabar Lim Kit Siang berdebat.” 3. “We, the rakyat cannot see any iota of benefit from this exercise. On the contrary, you will simply be extending respectability to his tarnished image. He has nothing of value to offer toward Nation building. His rightful place is in the Courts of Justice, and nowhere else.” 4. “Plse don’t do the debate. It has much more HARM than good. It doesn’t prove anything reasonable people know. Let the court decide. You can’t convince his supporters. He could even turn it into chaos and you’ll blame yourself the rest of your life.” 5. “I have been following politics in my beloved country for many years. In particular, I have been especially keen and interested in the political situation since news of the 1MDB scandal broke in 2015. I have always admired your tenacity as an opposition leader , your integrity as a person and your love for our country. I write today to implore you not to take the bait of a debate that is being dangled by our former pm Najib Razak. Any debate with Najib at this stage and in the prevailing situation of Najib being the main contributor to a historical loss of power in Malaysia, will only legitimize his undeserved status as the de facto leader of the Opposition. The proposed debate will serve to furnish Najib a public platform to rally his base and it may even strengthen his planned re entry into the powers of government. The debate may even be a fodder for the fermentation of racially divisive issues which Najib had so subtly played since the 1MDB debacle came to fore. Lastly, in my view, this debate is Najib’s attempt to portray you as the ‘real’ power behind the Pakatan government solely to rally the Malay votes to his advantage. It is a political gambit that Najib has less to lose than you.” 6. “YB Lim Kit Siang, there is no shame but instead honour in declining a debate challenge from a disgraced ex-premier when accepting such a challenge may bring more harm than good to our nation.” 7. “It serves neither you nor Pakatan Harapan to take Najib on in a debate. It will only benefit him by giving him the exposure and opportunity to whack the current government and protest his innocence and cry out that he is a victim of a political conspiracy. Gullible Malaysians may be persuaded to believe him.” 8. “I have been following the Parliament Debate since PH took over, if he is serious and have conscience he would have done it during Parliament sittings being challenged in IMDB, FGV, TH by many ministers to defend himself and past policy.” 9. “What good is it for the Malaysian public if NAJIB is made a fool and shamed by you and you are the overwhelming WINNER? To all Malaysians, he is just a DEADMAN walking with nothing to lose but to stir up doubts and racial sentiments among the Malays.” 10. “I salute you for harbouring a noble wish to do as a gentleman would do, but your target opponent has proven himself to be not a gentleman but a creature devoid of any moral compass or compunction, hence with due respect it’s extremely naive on your part to attribute even a thin glimmer of hope that Najib would, Voila!, transform into a gentleman for the debate to conform to your wishful thinking.” In the past year, there had been a systematic and unconscionable attempt to intensify and escalate racial and religious polarisation in Malaysia. The most recent example is the statement by a Muslim NGO leader regarding Pos Malaysia issuing a stamp featuring St. George’s Church in Penang. The Muslim NGO leader took to Facebook to complain that the stamp was another example of how Islam was being bullied since Pakatan Harapan rose to power in May last year and that it could lead foreigners to think Malaysia is a Christian state when it actual fact, the stamp was part of a series on places of worship in Malaysia, which was first issued in 2016, two years before Harapan came to power. As there is great likelihood that the debate on “How Malaysia became a global kleptocracy and how we can become a leading nation of integrity” between Najib and myself could be turned into a Malay vs Chinese conflict, when the battle against corruption, abuses of power and criminal conduct like money-laundering is not a racial or religious issue but an issue of good values and good governance, I have decided not to proceed with the debate with Najib. The DAP is now a member of the Pakatan Harapan coalition government and a new discipline is needed among the component parties in the Pakatan Harapan coalition to also think of the interests of the coalition if we are to succeed in our common vision spelt out in the Pakatan Harapan general election pledge to build a New Malaysia – comprising the five pillar objectives to reduce the costs of living, achieve institutional reforms, engineer economic growth, restore power to Sabah and Sarawak and to build an inclusive and moderate Malaysia. This is the work not of one hundred days or months but of years and decades. It calls for steadfast commitment to bring about unity, freedom, justice and prosperity to Malaysia and to all Malaysians and not deepening racial and religious polarisation or the vicious and toxic politics of lies, falsehoods, hate, intolerance and extremism. I know my decision will be greeted with tempests of allegations that I am a coward. My 53 years of politics is an open book for Malaysians to judge whether I am a coward or not, and I am always prepared to subject myself to the judgement of Malaysians. However, there is one thing I will not compromises – the higher interests of the nation and Malaysians. - Lim Kit Siang 

 Semoga keamanan dikembalikan ke Indonesia.

Sentimen agama, bangsa punca rusuhan pasca-PRU Indonesia

Menteri Pertahanan - Najib,Hishamuddin atau Mat Sabu...

Apa yg kerajaan PH buat smpi marah sgt nih..? Punca pendapatan terjejas ke..? Islam xdpt terlaksana ke...? Takhta terancam ke..? Apa lg yg tak kena ni...? Setau ana yg tak puas ati sgt dgn PH ni UMNO BN dgn PAS je. UMNO marah sbb tak dpt jahanamkan negara lagi. PAS pulak putus dedak UMNO... PH adalah sebuah kerajaan yg dipilih oleh majoriti rakyat Malaysia. - f/bk

Anak mama pun mai ziarah...

cheers.

Sumber asal: Why does Najib want to debate, now?... Baca selebihnya di Why does Najib want to debate, now?...

#Blogger

[djatoon]

The war between technology & democracy

Superb article from Jamie Bartlett. 

Link to original article here: https://medium.com/@jamie.bartlett/the-war-between-technology-democracy-5ca57292956a

“My father was the first person any of us knew who owned a computer. A hulking IBM AS/400 B10, sturdy, expensive and imposing, sat in his home office in the late 1980s. My brother, sister and I mostly ignored it of course — it was dad’s ‘work’.

The problem was that the monster didn’t ignore us. My father, a creative disciplinarian, used his International Business Machine to design and print out the weekly chores in a 7-day grid: wash up, tidy bedroom, make beds, and so on. We called it The Schedule. Each day he would check off the tasks, and each failure would result in a 10 pence deduction from our weekly pocket money.

At the end of the week, the monster would churn out the numbers, and there was no arguing with its accuracy or fairness. All decisions final. Six months in, I was just about breaking even. My more laid-back brother owed dad a small fortune.

Maybe, even at this very young age, I vaguely sensed that machines aren’t just neutral tools that make your life easier. Much depends what existing power arrangements are in place. They can also be remarkably good tools of surveillance for those in charge and can make things possible that weren’t possible before.

Those childish thoughts are now a more serious preoccupation — both for me and society writ large. The last several years have been characterised by a succession of stories about how digital technology — especially the internet — is creating problems for our social, political and economic arrangements. You have doubtless read recently that our elections are being stolen, Russians are hacking our minds, fake news is duping us. If you’re feeling especially morbid, you’ll know robots are about to make us all obsolete.

Some of this hand-wringing is from liberals who are unable to understand how Trump won, and blaming the internet evidently makes them feel better about themselves. Some of the more outrageous news headlines — coming from both left and right — about Facebook and Google destroying everything are driven by the old barons losing ad revenue to these upstarts.

But nearly all of them miss the point. All the recent stories of bots, trolls, hacking, crypto, stolen data, are viewed in isolation, rather than symptoms of a much bigger problem we are facing. That bigger problem is the following: we have an analogue democracy and a new norm of digital technology. And the two don’t work very well together.

We rightly celebrate how the internet gives us a platform, allows new movements to form, and helps us access new information. These are good things, but don’t be blinded by to the other problems the same technology is creating. Our democracy relies on lots of boring stuff to make it actually work as a system of collective self-government that people believe in and support: a sovereign authority that functions effectively, a healthy political culture, a strong civil society, elections that people trust, active citizens who can make important moral judgements, a relatively strong middle class, and so on. We have built these institutions up over several decades — decades of analogue technology.

Now however we have a new set of technologies — digital technology — which is slowly eroding all of them. It’s not to blame one side or the other — simple to state there’s an incompatibility problem.

This structural problem is far more important than billionaires in Silicon Valley or troll farms in St Petersburg. And if we don’t find a new settlement between tech and democracy, more and more people will simply conclude that democracy no longer really works, and look for something else. This being a lecture series about dictatorship, you won’t be surprised to learn that some new form of dictatorship — a sort of gentle, benevolent data dictatorship — is the most likely candidate for replacing it. Something a little like my father’s efficient but depressing Schedule.

I’ll take three examples of how recently reported problems and explain how they are symptoms of this tech / democracy tension. Let’s start with Cambridge Analytica, one of the biggest stories of 2018, and also one of the most misunderstood.

You’ve probably heard something like this: Cambridge Analytica manipulated millions of minds with a magical technique called ‘psychographics’ — where people’s personality types were calculated, and then used to send messages which played to those personalities. Mind control and subliminal messaging! Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica called psychographics his secret sauce — while whistle-blower Christopher Wylie called it ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’.

I don’t think any of it worked. I’ve seen no evidence it was effective. My strong hunch is that most of it was salesperson’s bluster. The truth is at once simpler and more worrying. Cambridge Analytica, using perfectly legal means, bought or collected 5,000 data points of about 200 million Americans from the huge data brokerage industry which trades data about you: magazine subscriptions, gun ownership, car ownership, web-browsing habits, credit rating, and so on. They combined this data with Republican Party data (known as ‘Voter Vault’), and modelled each voter — what they cared about, and how likely they were to be persuaded to vote Trump. They grouped these voters into ‘universes’, such as American Mums who hadn’t voted before. They then designed specialised ads for each universe, and targeted them with personalised adverts, based on what they’d pieced together about them.

Everything was tested, re-tested, re-designed. They sent out thousands of versions of fundraising emails or Facebook ads, working out what performed best. They tried donate pages with red buttons, green buttons, yellow buttons. They even tested which unflattering picture of Hilary worked best.

A few weeks in, analysis suggested there were enough persuadable voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to bring these states in play, even though most commentators thought they were unassailable Clinton territory. Driven by the data, they started to bombard people in those three states with Facebook and television ads. (They spent the tens of millions of dollars on targeted Facebook adverts, especially using the ‘custom audiences’ option, which allows you to target specific individuals). A later internal study by Facebook found that the Trump team were far better than Clinton at running Facebook ads.

This sort of thing never changes everyone’s mind — but it can, in tight elections, make a difference. Trump won Pennsylvania by 44 thousand votes out of 6 million cast, Wisconsin by 22 thousand, and Michigan by 11 thousand. If Clinton had won these three states, she would now be President.

The reason this is worrying is because everyone is doing it. Anyone working in online advertising will tell you it’s industry standard. Clinton was doing it. The Brexit campaign were doing it. The UK Labour Party is doing it.

Elections are becoming a data science, based on profile building and personalised adverts. Where does this take us? By 2020 there will be around 50 billion devices connected to the net — quadruple what there is now — each one hoovering up your data: cars, fridges, clothes, road signs, books. Within a decade your fridge will work out what time you eat, your car will know where you’ve been, and your home assistant device will work out your approximate anger levels by your voice tone. Obviously this will be gobbled up by hungry political analysts. By cross referencing fridge data against the number of emotional words in your Facebook posts, a strat-comm team of the future will correlate that you’re more angry when you’re hungry — and target you with an emotive, law and order candidate just as you’re feeling peckish. Just received a warm message plus donation page from the Greens? That’s because your smart bin shows you recycled that morning, and an analysis of your tweets suggests you’re in a good mood.

Politicians have always sought to understand and persuade citizens. The Republican Party boasted in the 1890s that it possessed a complete mailing list of voters, with names, addresses and ages. But elections run with industrial scale data science throws up new challenges which we’re not really set up to deal with.

What happens when, in a decade or so, each person receives a completely advert that’s entirely unique to them. Is it still really an election if one candidate sends 1 million different adverts to 1 million different people? Aren’t elections meant to be about the broad debates of the day, thrashed out in public? How do you hold candidates to account in such a system? And how do regulators check on what’s being served up in such a scenario? During the UK EU referendum, voters were show Facebook adverts claiming that the EU was trying to stop British people from drinking cups of tea! It is a miracle that the vote was so close.

It might even, in the long run, help certain types of politicians to thrive. If politics becomes a behavioural science of triggers and emotional nudges it’s reasonable to assume this would most benefit candidates with the least consistent principles, the ones who make the flexible campaign promises. Perhaps the politicians of the future will be those with the fewest ideas and greatest talent for emotionally charged vagueness, because that leaves maximum scope for algorithmic based targeted messaging.

I’ll let you decide whether this has already happened.

This is hard to stop with our current model because social media platforms are essentially ad firms. That’s where all the money comes from. Their incentive is to a) keep you on the platform for as long as possible, since that means serving you up more ads and b) build up a better profile of your hopes, fears, thoughts and feelings — because those ads can be better tailored to you. In addition to making us constantly distracted — the reason we check our phones so often is because the apps are designed to keep us hooked in — it also means the long-term plan is to know us better than we know ourselves. And that will open us up to knew forms of manipulation. In other words, Cambridge Analytica is just the start.

These are the things — the challenge of ten years from now on the current track — that we should be thinking about.

***

Journalists often miss the longer-term trends that underlie the tech stories, because they are under pressure to meet insane deadlines and produce insane headlines. Here’s another example.

There is at present an understandable concern that social media has been exploited by fascists and bigots, who use it to spread their message of hate. There are good grounds for such concerns of course. But I think the bigger trend is not that fascists are good at social media: it’s that social media is turning all of us into fascists. Not in our ideology, but in the style of politics we adopt.

The fascist style of politics is one which creates alternative realities, prioritises reaction without thought, whips are rage and encourages tribal loyalty to the Great Leader. If Mussolini were to design a communications system to encourage a fascist style of politics, I suspect it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to some of our popular social media platforms.

Let’s take fake news, an obsession de nos jours. It is widely assumed that people like Tommy Robinson — former leader of the English Defence League — surrounds himself with ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories. It’s not quite that simple. I’ve spent a lot of time with Robinson (shadowing him for my second book, Radicals). He does read and share fake news of course, but it’s more accurate to say he surrounds himself with cherry picked true news, which corroborate his world view of Islam and the West being incompatible. For several years he has therefore constructed a plausible and coherent version of this world view, through careful one-sided selection of truth. This is not the same as ‘fake news’. This is a problem of selectively omitting certaintruths.

The ability to construct believable alternative realities is an important component of any fascist mode of politics, because where there is no commonly shared truth, there is nothing upon which you can anchor political discussion and debate. All that remains is two groups screaming at each other.

This is something we are all doing, albeit in a less extreme way. Selecting some truth and omitting others, in order to build our own plausible and coherent realities.

I’m not blaming Zuck or Dorsey or Brin or Page. It’s simply that certain technologies lend themselves to certain behaviours. Part of the problem stems from a major miscalculation repeatedly made (in good faith) since the 1990s in Silicon Valley. These techno-utopians believe that more information and connectivity will make us wiser, kinder, smarter. Our politics will be more informed if have more information. However, we have too much information. We’re drowning in blogs and facts and charts and more facts. It’s too much to deal with rationally. All we can do is relying on gut instincts and heuristics: my guy / not my guy, that feels true, that confirms what I already thought.Essentially, these are all emotional responses.

That overload, in part, drives us to select our truths. (And to make matter worse there is some evidence that social media platforms are incentivised to show more polarising, aggressive content: because that is more likely to attract our attention and keep us online. This is not even done consciously, it’s simply an algorithmic reflection of what we tend to click on.)

It also drives us to reaction without reflection. In a print-based society, for all its flaws, there is at least a cultural predisposition for an ordering and coherence of facts and ideas, something the linguist Walter Ong called “the analytic management of knowledge”. It lends itself to reflection. Social media platforms however are built to a very different logic: an endless, rapid flow of dissonant ideas and arguments, one after the other, without obvious order or sense of progression. It’s designed for you to blast out thoughts or ripostes over breakfast, on the move, at the bus-stop. It demands your immediate, ill-thought through response. What’s on your mind, Jamie? Facebook asks. What’s happening? Demands Twitter. I’ve noticed people rush to get their denouncements and public displays of outrage in quick, without bothering to work out what they actually think.

Fascists have always worshipped action for action’s sake, because to think is to emasculate oneself with doubt, critical analysis, and reasonableness. “Action being beautiful in itself,” explains Umberto Eco, in a famous essay about the fascism “it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection”. It would be difficult to write a better definition of a mad rampaging online mob than this. This tendency has been brilliantly exploited by Steve Bannon, who makes statements designed to provoke a frothing-mouth response from liberals. They always oblige, which forces people in the middle to take sides — and that’s the goal. I’m not talking about left or right here, by the way. Both are guilty, since both are reacting to the same basic incentives and new information structure.

All this — the speed, the info overload, the emotive mode — is driving a very obvious re-emergence of tribalism. This combines to create a new form of tribalism in politics. In our hyper-connected, information saturated world, we are encircled by enemies and protected by fellow travellers. Joining a tribe is the only way to survive. And online there is always a fact or a comment or a hot take to prove your side is right and the other side is utterly wrong. When was the last time you actually changed your mind after discussing something online? I’ll answer that for you: probably never, because who has time online for the long, careful, respectful discussion necessary to see the other side of it? In such a world, opponents can’t merely hold principled differences of opinion, they must have sinister motives. Our opponent are liars, cheats, Machiavellians. There’s no compromising with any of them.

These are of course prefect conditions for the tribal leader to arrive and channel the rage, fix the world’s chaos, and bring order to chaos. Hannah Arednt warned us of this decades ago.

Is it all that surprising therefore that social media is helping politicians that embrace this style? Populists are far more in keeping with the philosophy and feel of today’s tech. They promise easy and immediate solutions to complicated problems, without compromise or failure. This is Tinder politics. (They all, incidentally, are in favour of some form of direct democracy — because they claim to represent the ‘real people’).

Is it surprising that, despite this apparently being an age without deference, there is a newly found hero-worship and total leader loyalty in certain quarters? Whether Macron, Trump, Corbyn, Wilders, Trudeau — we await the anointed one to save us, and thus swear total loyalty and fealty to them.

Is it surprising that surveys find growing taste for authoritarian leaders? Is it all that surprising that, in these conditions, truth appears less important than loyalty to the side you’re on?

***

My final example is the artificial intelligence revolution that’s coming. As with my previous two stories, there are some ludicrous headlines about machines taking all our jobs. Or perhaps going sentient and turning on us. These stories are usually stupid and misleading. We’re very good at working out all the existing jobs we’ll lose, but very bad at imagining the ones not yet invented. And machine sentience is probably best left to the philosophers.

The actual problem is more subtle. Last year I travelled 150 kilometers on a driverless truck in Florida, built by a Silicon Valley start-up. Self-driving taxis in city centres are still a long time off — for both technical and regulatory reasons — but self-driving trucks are likely to disrupt the trucking industry fairly soon. Take this as illustrative from other aspects of the economy. Hundreds of thousands of people drive trucks for a living. For many people who left school without qualifications, it’s a decent, reliable job.

The actual as artificial intelligence and software play a far bigger role in our economy, who wins and loses? Will the losers — there are always losers in transitions — have opportunities to become winners? Whether the people who have the skills or the assets or the networks to take advantage of the inevitable AI-productivity boost to get wealthier relative to everyone else. Will the next wave of tech turbo-charge inequality?

In addition to favouring more skilled workers, digital technology tends increases the financial returns to capital owners over labour. Machines don’t demand a share of the profits, which means any machine-driven productivity gains accrue to whoever owns them, and that’s usually the wealthy. The percentage share of GDP going to labour relative to capital has been falling in recent years; for much of the twentieth century, the ratio of national wealth in the US between labour and capital was 66/33. It is now 58/42.

With this in mind, I always asked the self-driving technologists — who has created some good, well paid jobs of course — what the truckers should to do when the revolution arrives. I’d nearly always get the same answer:

They should retrain as machine learning specialists or robotics engineers.

I can’t decide if this is naive or devious. It’s certainly unrealistic. Some of them might: but not most. Far more likely, I suspect, is that they will smash these blasted machines up, as I used to imagine doing with the IBM. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend you read Ted Kascinski’s ‘Manifesto’, written in the mid-1990s.

“…machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability…”

“Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.)”

At the time these read like the ravings of a mad-man, because no-one even owned a computer. And his actions were detestable of course: he murdered three people and injured many more. But you can now find very similar thoughts in editorials in our most prestigious newspapers.

If people come to see machines as a serious threat to their livelihoods, and without realistic means of replacement or routes to prosperity, they will try to sabotage them. Armed with white spray paint and leaked instruction manuals, displaced truckers will change the road markings in order to make them crash or malfunction.

***

Where does this all lead? I don’t believe democracy is on the verge of collapse. We’re not entering a world of crypto-anarchy, fully automated luxury communism or libertarian paradise.

The threat, I suspect, is more subtle. Over the next 20 years, on the current trajectory, growing numbers of people will conclude that democracy doesn’t work. Elections can’t be trusted. Jobs can’t be created. And everyone is getting furious and not listening to each other.

You have perhaps seen the various surveys that show confidence in democracy is on the wane, especially among younger people. A recent survey in the Journal of Democracy found that only thirty percent of US millennials agree that ‘it’s essential to live in a democracy’, compared to 75 per cent of those born in the 1930s, and results in most other democracies demonstrate a similar pattern. It is no coincidence that according to the most recent Economist index of democracies, over the last couple of years over half have become less democratic. (In the 2017 Democracy Index the average global score fell from 5.52 in 2016 to 5.48. 89 countries experienced a decline — only 27 saw an improvement).

These stats won’t get any better if it can’t solve things or deliver the things people ask of it. We need a new settlement. I’ve proposed some ways of doing that in my book The People vs Tech. Democracy needs an upgrade — and we need to start re-shaping our institutions and expectations too. But tech needs to be brought more under democratic control too. And of course all of us need to change our behaviour too: since it is, in the end, our swipes and clicks and shares that are constantly feeding the data machine.

The idea of democracy won’t disappear, especially in an age where everyone has a voice and a platform. It won’t be a return to the exact conditions of the 1930s — too much is different today. History rhymes but doesn’t repeat. I can’t predict exactly what might replace it, but one version is a techno-authoritarianism — populists armed with powerful tech, promising to use it to solve every problem. We could even still have plebiscites and MPs and the rest. But it would be little more than a shell system, where real power and authority was increasingly centralised and run by a small group of techno-wizards that no-one else understands. That could be in governments, which rely on increasingly technical solutions no-one can hold accountable, or the private sector owning all the data and the capital — with control over public attitudes and debate which is all but imperceptible.

This is hardly a catastrophic dystopia, but rather a damp and weary farewell to democracy. The worst part is that if a less democratic system delivered more wealth, prosperity and stability — many people would be perfectly happy with it. But at that point, it might be very difficult to get back what we’ll have lost.”

[productivelyfe]

Taylor Swift

Greatest hope is: As I grow/change, my music will change as well. I love a great song, I don’t care what genre it is in.

Have a lot of epiphanies- this would be a good idea so I had epiphany I’d be a novelist. Career path.

Writing-writer 1st. Favorite things how you can convey a thought or story or completely describe a character or situation through words/right combination of words. The whole process of editing/re editing/rethinking/imagining/get these little mini epiphany ideas that come to you. You have to love it more than anything else and you have to love it for more than what the end result could be. Like you don’t make an album so that you could get a platinum record to hang on your wall and you don’t go on tour so that you can hang the sold out plaques in your bedding. It’s so many little stepping stones/so many people have this idea that it’s like you get discovered/then you get the record deal/then you record the song/then the song goes #1 and then, you know, and it’s like, it’s never like that. Very rarely is it like one thing leads to another which leads to another/another and result. It’s so many dead ends/switching directors and going back/replanning/rethinking/so many interviews/strategy meetings/management meetings/PR meetings and so many things that are outside of music that you have to…

Shows - might be the same looking crowd but there’s a different feeling behind them all. There’s magical shows that stand out, where you were on point, we were all in it, looking back those magical shows are what make you want to continue doing what you’re doing for the rest of your life.

Record everything right away.

When you’re trying to fit in with everyone sometimes you learn who you are/who you’re not.

I always thought I’d go to college but somethings happened and I ended up getting to pursue this crazy dream.

Still get nervous? - Just focus on being alright/rolling with it and realizing you play shows every night/this should be no different.

Song writing - So unpredictable/spontaneous, what’s gonna hit me first. Whether it’s a general thought, experience, just got in my head. You were Romeo you were throwing pebbles/the song expanded from there. THe fastest songs I write just happen in just a surge of idea/inspiration. Something I’m going through at the time. Hard to come up with metaphors of something I haven’t gone through or recently just gone through. Starts as idea/feeling/emotion.

Metaphor - something you’re going through but relate/connect it to something completely different.

4 or 5 lines “ooo, oooh that’s the one, yes!” Before I put it on record. Writing process never turned off.

Making record - Here, allow this into your life takes about 2-2 ½ years of writing. That way, know have best songs. Have 40-50 songs about 14-15 make it.

Obsessed with the latest songs I’ve written, but discovering old stuff possibly being good enough to put on the albums.

Very impatient if I don’t have song finished. I’ll obsess over it, won’t sleep at night, edit constantly. Conversations around me get ignored. Working on an idea but stop and can’t figure out where chorus is going if my hunch is right-bring it to writer I trust/admire. Best co/writers really great at giving advice.

Adapt to a million different places to write. Awakened by song ideas all the time. Wake up at 0400 with idea. Write wherever/whenever you can. Writing a story/characters/you can only write about a character if you know them, if you went there.

Go through emotional rollercoaster on stage, in songs fully feeling all of it. Completely feeling all sadness, anger, frustration and hurt, then crowd starts screaming/everything is right in the world.

Reach out 2 new people challenge yourself creatively/change up influences. Easy to remain the same. Be inspired by things you’ve never been inspired by before.

Think of topics you haven’t covered. New ways to present old emotions that everyone feels.

Throw shoulders back/be friendly.

Fans - Large group of people but expect individual contact. Look at each other something simple feel really connected to the fans. They get me, they show up. There for me/understand me.

Saying right thing at right moment shouldn’t change who you are based on the room you’re playing in.

Insert into online communities, be in on their wide jokes, talked to them, not just posting industry crap like ‘vote for me’ or ‘this is coming out.’

Love how the internet’s given people ability to express who they are, express sense of humor.

Being comfortable letting people know I’m awkward, not that cool, not edgy. Be self. Don’t try to be something you’re not.

I don’t think anyone has a solid stance on an way that they feel it’s like saying are you happy everyday?

Fame, paparazzi: Mental exercise, how many years did you want this, how many years did you dream of this, how many times did you say that when you got famous you’d walk up to people in restaurants/introduce yourself if they were trying to take a picture of you?

Used to say as little kid: If I ever got to do this I’d make the most of it/I’d try to do good things instead of doing weird things/get affected by it.

Age gracefully without anxiety - with time gain more wisdom/use it for good.

To people who are going to understand it/get it/say I feel that too. Reveal life/the emotions. To people who want to take you down/make fun of you.

Having fun. Discovering self.

Make the joke first/better. It’s not as funny when others. They’re the same kind of weird as me. I like to put time into it because it usually starts very different than the way it ends up.

Knew I had to change things up, knew I had to explore different things, go a completely different direction. Go for phone, journal. Write down as soon as you get in your head. “Running to airport bathroom to write on a paper towel.”

Dreamed high pitched “Stay.” All that was coming out of mouth in social humiliation dream. Went to study/wrote a song about it next day.

Very excitable. Get excited about things as they happen to me. Enjoy things when they’re happening to you. Enthusiasm protects from everything.

Create new challenges for self. New genre, new sound.

Try everything then you’ll notice you’ll naturally start to grow/write towards one style.

Following impulses, don’t want to predict where I’ll be. Implement as much spontaneity as you can if life is planned. (Tour a year from now).

This actually is really fun, so just try to enjoy it as much as possible. There’s nothing to stress about.

Stay vulnerable/open/true to emotions/what I’m feeling/how to translate that into song.

Song writers - feel the pain/feel it intensely but as a celebrity you’re supposed to put up wall/block it. So trying to navigate the mixed messages walking a tight rope.

Come from place of storytelling.

Don’t want people to tell me what I want to hear all the time, that doesn’t thrill/excite me at all. They’re all passionate about their own jobs, lives, own things. Keeps me realistic.

Stay realistic. Want to have normal mindset, attitude, priorities, friends-treat me normally, say somethings stupid, guilt trip, etc.

When I listen to album I think about moment that inspired the song, the time he first played it for me, when he went into studio/recorded it for me/all the different mixes he played forme. It’s most amazing thing to have all those memories with someone/then to have piece of art connected to it. It’s like a photo album.

Sometimes not able to calm down. But allow yourself to be okay with that. Feel insecure, overwhelmed, or sad, depressed then feel guilty for feeling those things so it compounds it. So = most amount of negative emotions you can possibly be feeling. Some of greatest lessons I’ve learned and some of best songs I’ve written have come from when I didn’t feel good. Allow brain to work through it on its own/sometimes write song about it/makes me feel better.

Don’t feel manipulated creatively so no regrets. Continue to fulfill that creative need or there’d be a void.

Like to let life happen rather than have a plan for it. If you have plans, you’ll force life to take that course/might not end up with right person/circumstance!

Cover - makes me feel happy

Body language - she’s turned away from me is that inviting?

Convincing members of team switch was a good idea.

Biggest struggle turned into the biggest triumph when it worked out.

You’re going to have thousands of decisions to make on daily basis that will end up depicting your image, sound, all the things that will shape you as a public image let those decisions be yours. You steer the ship creatively. You pick your battles-fighting the neon top, that’s not a hill I wanna die on.

If you win an award-isn’t that crazy?! How do you just sit there and be like “oh another grammy.”

Puts you at ease when you’re around her, everybody full of youthful spirit. Really inspiring.

Huge success: Never felt like a huge weight. Go back to that place where it feels balanced.